On the complex interconnections between our founding documents and slavery.
To their credit, secondary school
history textbooks do, at least in my rapidly fading memories of them, often
include in the midst of their celebrations of the Constitution some mention of the
miserably cold 3/5ths compromise, the placating of the Southern states by
means of an explicit definition of a slave as 3/5ths of a person when it came
to determining population and so representation in the new Congress (and thus,
ironically but very definitely, our founding legal document’s equally clear
delineation of the absence of actual personhood, of any sense of belonging to
“We the people,” in this key American community and population). But I think it
would be even more beneficial for our national narratives of the Founders if we
paid a bit more attention to the much more subtle way in which slavery was
elided from the Declaration of Independence—Jefferson in his initial
draft included a full paragraph on the topic, making it one of the list of
wrongs that the King had foisted upon the colonies (“he has waged cruel war
against human nature itself,” the passage began); but the paragraph was entirely
excised by the Convention as a whole before the Declaration was published and
read throughout the colonies. The irony of slavery existing alongside the
self-evident truth that all men are created equal was, it would seem, a bit too
biting to the Signers to bear any overt examination.
Historians have rightly made a
great deal of this founding and abiding national irony, with Edmund
Morgan’s American Slavery, American
Freedom representing a particularly complex and rich engagement with
the theme. But much less well-known, and significantly more inspiring, is the
use to which a large number of contemporary African Americans put the founding
documents and their rhetoric. Within a year of the 1776 establishment of state
legislatures, one of their main points of business was responding to (or
ignoring, although even that is a response of course) the numerous petitions by
individual and groups of slaves, using the words and ideals of the Declaration
and other Revolutionary era narratives in direct support of their pleas for
freedom specifically and the abolition of slavery more generally. One such
slave, Quock
Walker, brought his case all the way to the Massachusetts Supreme Court,
and the 1781 ruling in his favor pretty much ended slavery in Massachusetts (it’s
easy to forget that just 80 years before the Civil War began slavery was still
a pretty significant part of life in Massachusetts and throughout New England).
The slaves and activists who
wrote a 1777 such petition made
the link between founding document and anti-slavery argument crystal clear: “Your
petitioners … cannot but express their astonishment,” they wrote, “that it has
never been considered that every principle from which America has acted in the
course of their unhappy difficulties with Great Britain pleads stronger than a
thousand arguments in favor of your petitioners.” Seventy years later, the
first women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls would produce a Declaration of Sentiments
and Resolutions that brilliantly adopted the Declaration’s language to
argue for gender equality; that convention and text are rightly famous, but
they, like Jefferson and his peers, comprised a highly educated and established
community of reformers, writers, and activists, making that much more clearly
impressive the similar efforts of these enslaved Americans three-quarters of a
century earlier.
Similarly, much has been written,
and justly so, about the striking accomplishments that are the Declaration and
the Constitution, about their place not only in our national narratives but in
reshaping world history. But it is petitions like these that are to my mind
truly our founding documents, that truly exemplify the spirit and community
from which America arose. We would do well to remember and celebrate them, and
especially their authors, on the 4th of July. Next Revolutionary
reality tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Other Revolutionary histories or stories you’d highlight?
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