Sen. Tom Cotton made headlines this weekend because something he said about slavery is being misinterpreted — perhaps maliciously. He is being accused by some of defending the institution and its existence in America during the founding era, but he did nothing of the sort.
Cotton was speaking about his bill that would deny federal funds to schools that incorporate the New York Times’s 1619 Project, a series of historically inaccurate and dishonest essays about America’s founding, into their teaching curricula. He told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that it’s important to “study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise, we can’t understand our country.”
“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,” Cotton added.
This is largely true. Many of the Founding Fathers did in fact view slavery as a “necessary evil” — not because they wanted to keep slavery alive within the United States, not because it was “necessary” for the nation to function, but because there was no other way at the time to keep the Southern colonies within the Union.
If misinterpreted, Cotton’s choice of words might seem to legitimize the 1619 Project’s contention that slavery was paramount to the nation’s founding. But that’s not what he was trying to say. Slavery was a reality that the Founding Fathers needed to address. And they did — through various compromises with the Southern states in the hope that slavery was on the way out.
Even the Three-Fifths Compromise, which is typically seen as a constitutional tribute to slavery, is evidence that the founders were working to limit the power of slave owners, as Frederick Douglass himself pointed out.
Cotton’s framing was off, but his history is correct. The Founding Fathers, including some of the slave owners among them, had no love for slavery — even if they lacked the political will or the courage to get rid of it immediately. Perhaps this evinces a failure of character, one that wasn’t made right until Abraham Lincoln took seriously his oath to make America a more perfect union. But without the founders and the principles to which they clung, there would have been no Lincoln, no union, and perhaps no emancipation either.
That is the argument Cotton was trying to make. He was not defending slavery or the men who practiced it. He was defending the founders and the constitutional government they created. Anyone remotely familiar with this nation’s founding should do the same.
