How slavery doomed limited government in America

A number of conservatives reacted to the project by branding it as anti-American. But I don’t think that’s fair, at least based on the lead essay I read from Nikole Hannah-Jones. In fact, her piece is quite the opposite. Sure, it chronicles the brutality of the institution of slavery and the century of oppression, institutionalized discrimination, and racist terrorism that followed. Yet the piece is ultimately about how she reconciles that history with her patriotism and comes to understand her own father’s love of a country that treated him so poorly. In her telling, black patriotism is rooted in appreciation for the contributions that their ancestors made to the nation even through exploitation and pain, especially in their valiant fights to make America more faithfully live up to its founding principles of liberty. This is something that can be seen in Frederick Douglass’ iconic The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro address, in which he shamed whites to confront the horrid contradiction between a celebration of the liberation of one segment of the population from tyranny even as millions of Americans were in bondage. More than a century later, Martin Luther King Jr. would famously convey his dream “that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.”

It’s important to acknowledge that the experience of American descendants of slaves is unique. That is, even when other immigrant groups have faced prejudice, at the end of the day, they all came here of their own volition. For descendants of slaves, knowing that your ancestors were stolen, sold, and transported here in chains and forced to perform hard labor in captivity is totally different. And of course, the persecution did not magically end at Appomattox.

As I noted on Twitter, I did take issue with Hannah-Jones for making this bold claim without adequately presenting supporting evidence: “[O]ne of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” (You can follow the replies to my Twitter thread on the subject for a bit more on this).

Also, a number of people have raised objections to another contribution to the series, which I have not yet read, about the connection between slavery and modern capitalism, which is based on historical studies that have been challenged by academics.

Whatever one’s sentiments about the Times project, however, I do think it is important to examine the implications of slavery that live with us until this day. One implication that I think of constantly is the extent to which the legacy of slavery effectively made it impossible to limit the size and scope of the federal government.

Philosophically, I am a believer in a central government of limited powers as enumerated in Article I, Section 8, of the U.S. Constitution. That is, in my ideal world, the central government would perform a narrow range of functions, such as defense, courts, creating a standard currency, while most everything else could be dealt with at the state and local levels. I’ve argued, in fact, that a central reason why the nation is so divided is that the states have ceded so much power to the federal government, not leaving much room for regional differences in policymaking. Thus, under the system we have today, decisions made in Washington have ramifications for every American in every state. Currently, Betsy DeVos can help steer educational policies in liberal states, and when Democrats are in power, conservative states have to worry what the administration has in store for them. It did not have to be this way. But slavery made it inevitable.

The combination of slavery and the Jim Crow era simultaneously tainted arguments in favor of federalism, convinced many Americans that states could not be trusted with retaining too much power, and set precedents that paved the way for government intervention in other areas.

From both the text of the U.S. Constitution and other founding documents, it’s pretty clear that there was a significant resistance to overly broad central authority, one that persisted for decades. But ultimately, there was no way that the evil of slavery would ever be ended without federal intervention.

Apologists for the Confederacy will often try to argue that the Civil War was actually about state sovereignty, not slavery. This has been a pernicious myth that’s been destructive to the cause of limited government.

It’s quite clear that Southerners rebelled to defend not only their right to own slaves, but also to expand slavery into other territories. It’s clear from the documentary evidence at the time that Southerners saw the war as being about preserving slavery. This was evident in the infamous “cornerstone” speech, in which the vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander H. Stephens, declared that slavery was “the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution” and said of the new Confederate government, “its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.”

This was also spelled out in declarations of secession in many states, most explicitly, Mississippi, whose declaration began: “In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course. Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world.”

However, other prominent Confederates were not so up front, and tried to frame their cause as rooted in a more principled interest in protecting state’s rights. As history was unkind to the institution of slavery, those seeking to defend the South latched on to this alternate theory as to the causes of the Civil War. This has done lasting damage to the limited government cause.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, there was no guarantee that blacks would support an expansive role for the federal government. Back in 1862, Frederick Douglass responded to the question of what should be done with emancipated slaves: “Our answer is, do nothing with them; mind your business, and let them mind theirs. Your doing with them is their greatest misfortune. They have been undone by your doings, and all they now ask, and really have need of at your hands, is just to let them alone. They suffer by every interference, and succeed best by being let alone.”

There were many reasons why, at the time, black citizens would have something to fear from a more restrictive government given their experience with the organs of state power being used to oppress them. Aside from the many more well known examples, in his opinion in McDonald v. Chicago, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote passionately about the racist origins of gun control laws, which were created by white Southern legislatures fearing slave rebellions.

But the experience in the era that followed the Civil War would challenge any limited government sentiments that freed blacks might have otherwise had.

In the 12 years of Reconstruction, freed blacks exercised their rights to vote and even sent black representatives to Congress. But those gains were secured by the presence of federal troops who defended blacks from white violence. After the federal government pulled out in 1877, it ushered in nearly a century of state imposed discrimination and enabled a campaign of terrorism that deprived blacks of basic rights that, on paper, the post-Civil War amendments were supposed to guarantee.

It would take more federal intervention in the 1960s to unravel the Jim Crow system, during which time Southerners and their supporters once again invoked states’ rights arguments that, if adopted, would in practice have perpetuated the oppression of blacks.

So, there is a multitiered way in which slavery and its aftermath obliterated the cause of limited government.

On one level, to this day, any arguments about states’ rights are inevitably tainted by their association with arguments made in support of Southerners who perpetuated slavery and then an elaborate system of racial oppression. Those who argue in favor of leaving more decisions up to the states are forced to grapple with the reality that for a majority of U.S. history, when states were left to their own devices, they denied liberty to millions of Americans — and changing things required federal intervention.

But on another level, expansions of federal power that were necessary to fight slavery and racial oppression created precedents that were then used to exert federal power in other areas: education, economic regulations, social welfare, and so on. The landmark Heart of Atlanta Motel Inc. v. United States case that upheld the Civil Rights Act of 1964 expanded the scope of the Commerce Clause, which has broad implications for federal regulatory authority.

The evils of slavery and the Jim Crow era, and their legacy, need to be studied and acknowledged in their own right. But if we’re going to have a broader discussion about the continued implications of slavery in 2019, then conservatives should recognize how its legacy has made the case for limited government significantly harder to make.