Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas recently introduced a bill to prevent federal dollars from being used to teach the New York Times’s 1619 Project in schools. In a subsequent interview, Cotton sought to clarify the nature of our country’s founding but instead made something of a concession to the inaccurate notions of history within that project.
“As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction.” His characterization may be considered approximately true — but only if a number of important qualifications are made first.
The proper response to the claim that slavery was the basis of our founding is: “Okay, what do you mean by that?” The 1619 Project posits that its protection and propagation motivated every event, every letter of every founding document. It actually suggests that our revolution itself was conducted in order to preserve slavery — an utter historical falsehood.
“Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery,” wrote Nikole Hannah-Jones, who incredibly won a Pulitzer Prize for this project. “By 1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere. In London, there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade. This would have upended the economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South.”
Leslie Harris, a professor of history at Northwestern University and infinitely more qualified than I to rule on such matters, is just one of several historians to debunk this idea. “Although slavery was certainly an issue in the American Revolution, the protection of slavery was not one of the main reasons the 13 Colonies went to war,” she wrote in March. Harris actually was contacted by the New York Times and asked to fact-check the revolutionary claim. She disputed a similar version of the claim, but this error still made it to publication.
The Revolutionary War is one act in the series of our founding. The war aside, Cotton’s characterization suggests that important founders ultimately treated slavery with an enlightened shrug or, even worse, as “necessary” in the sense that it was good — that it brought about prosperity or order or whatever else. Referring to “the founders” in this way is often quite hazy. It’s certainly hazy here. To be specific, let us consider Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, chief authors of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, respectively. No list of founders can exclude them.
“Evil” is certainly how Jefferson and Madison thought of slavery. The section from Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia is well-known: “For if a slave can have a country in this world, it must be any other in preference to that in which he is born to live and labor for another. … And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are a gift of God?”
So yes, despite owning slaves, he recognized that slavery trampled upon the founding spirit. It was in conflict with what he had written and so evil that Jefferson followed those lines with: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”
Madison, who also owned slaves, was similarly forthright. He “thought it wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men.” As with Jefferson, one could certainly fault him for owning slaves despite this and for failing to do more. Still, he was not blind to the evil, and thanks in part to his stand, an enumerated right to own slaves does not stain the Constitution. He also looked forward to the end of the slave trade, which the Constitution would allow starting in 1808. As he wrote in Federalist No. 42:
The international slave trade was abolished on Jan. 1, 1808, the first day that the Constitution would allow, and Jefferson was the president who signed the bill. That did not end slavery, of course, but based on his comments, Madison held forth hope that this would be the first step toward its extinction.
Suggestions that slavery was necessary in their eyes are even more dubious. Necessary to what end? Yes, perhaps in the sense that it was necessary in order to negotiate a Constitution with states that were heavily dependent on slave labor. Those states wouldn’t have joined the union otherwise. But that does not make slavery the impetus for founding the entire union. Summaries of convention debates suggest that slavery’s allowance was largely made with hesitation but made nevertheless in order to get what they convened for: a founding document.
Hugh Williamson (admittedly not a notable founder) expressed that “in opinion & practice he was against slavery; but thought it more in favor of humanity, from a view of all circumstances, to let in S. C. & Georgia on those terms, than to exclude them from the Union.” Others made similar cases. This was the genesis of the Three-Fifths Compromise, which limited the power of slave states by blunting the effect of counting all their slaves toward representation.
Such concessions may make the founders moral cowards, but they don’t make slavery the basis of our nation’s founding. Slavery as “necessary,” meaning as a precondition to a functioning republic, is not an argument you will find if you take the time to look at the history.
Moreover, it is noteworthy that the founders consciously avoided any mentions of “slavery” by name in the Constitution or of assurances for the protection of slaves as property. It discusses “persons” instead. As David Azerrad of the Heritage Foundation has written, “Although these circumlocutions may not have done much to improve the lot of slaves, they are important, as they denied constitutional legitimacy to the institution of slavery.”
Alexander Hamilton made a similar point in Federalist No. 54, suggesting that the constitutional framework was all there for reinforcement whenever the slave-holding states were ready to embrace abolition: “And it is admitted, that if the laws were to restore the rights which have been taken away, the negroes could no longer be refused an equal share of representation with the other inhabitants.”
These are all important distinctions to understand in order to rebut the notion that slavery was the reason for the American founding. The founders, whom we are currently challenged to justify memorializing in stone, got quite a lot right. As for Cotton’s line, these distinctions are important for similar reasons. Slavery hardly seems like a basis for union or for republicanism — and it wasn’t. Jefferson and Madison took strong moral exceptions to slavery, and Jefferson at least agonized over his own hypocrisy. They did recognize their nation’s sins even in real-time, though quite unfortunately, they left it the next generation to start atoning for them.
