Rule 1: No conservative politician is allowed to say anything, however historical or academic, about race. If he touches on the subject, even tangentially, he will be howled down as a bigot.
Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton had evidently forgotten this law of politics when he declared, accurately enough, that the Founding Fathers had viewed slavery as a “necessary evil,” and note that, despite some reports, he was describing their views, not his own.
Cotton was, of course, offering a digest of different opinions. John Adams, that good-hearted and fair-minded child of New England Puritanism, was an uncomplicated abolitionist. So was Alexander Hamilton, whose upbringing in the West Indies had brought him face to face with the most horrific aspects of the practice. John Jay and Benjamin Franklin were slave owners who came around to abolitionism and, eventually, manumitted their slaves.
The Virginians were more conflicted. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison were products and beneficiaries of the plantation economy. The first president was gradually converted and freed his slaves in his will. The third and fourth presidents inveighed against slavery in theory but engaged in it in practice. Jefferson, whose gorgeous words often ran far ahead of his deeds, gave abolitionists some of their best lines. “The whole commerce between master and slave is the most unremitting despotism on the one part and degrading submissions on the other,” he wrote. Yet he was not prepared to take the financial hit of releasing his own human property.
Madison similarly thought that the institution debased everyone involved. Nonetheless, when he died, he bequeathed several living men and women to his wife with the instruction that she should not sell them against their will — an instruction she did not always obey.
All in all, a “necessary evil” is probably the best way to encapsulate the agonized, contradictory, self-reproaching, and occasionally hypocritical attitude of America’s patriarchs. Politics involves compromises, and they judged that a longer timescale for abolition was the price for carrying all 13 states into the new union. They tried to speed things up. Jefferson sought to ban slavery from the new territories that the United States was acquiring to the west, and he wanted the federal government to buy all slave children and train them in a craft. But one way or another, such schemes came to nothing.
The great hope of the Founders was that banning the importation of new slaves would cause the institution to wither away. But although the slave trade was indeed banned in 1807, slavery endured, creating a bitter disappointment among abolitionists that eventually led to the Civil War.
To our eyes, of course, any delay is unconscionable. We all prefer to think that, had we been around at the end of the 18th century, we would have pushed for immediate abolition. No doubt, some of us would have, but not necessarily those who place themselves most confidently in that category. To be mildly woke nowadays is, politically, the line of least resistance. It requires no courage and no independence of mind. The people who follow the political consensus of our age might not, had they lived in a different one, have shown the cussed, ornery persistence necessary to challenge entrenched assumptions.
One thing we can say, though, is that the Founders were closer to modern sensibilities than most people at that time. Slavery was accepted as a fact of life from Qing China to colonial Brazil, from the Kingdom of Kongo to sparse archipelagos of Polynesia. In some Arab and African lands, it was not formally abolished until the late 20th century. And even today, forced labor persists. The Global Slavery Index lists North Korea, Eritrea, Burundi, the Central African Republic, and Afghanistan as the Top 5 contemporary slave states.
None of this is to downplay the complicity of generations of Americans. It is simply a plea for context. When people say that we should study the history of the U.S., “warts and all,” they often want to look only at the warts. But the “and all” is an inspiring story of how a young country struggled to live up to the extraordinary ideals of its creators and, by and large, succeeded. There is a reason, as Jefferson had predicted, so many people cross the oceans to settle in the U.S. and so few make the return journey.
If slavery demeaned some people, then, by the same token, the battle to end it elevated and ennobled others. And the abolitionists, black and white, won, so creating the greatest republic in the world. How did Jeane Kirkpatrick put it? “Someday, Americans will have to face the truth about themselves — no matter how pleasant it is.”
