Читать книгу The Smart Culture - Robert L. Hayman Jr. - Страница 15

Slavery was not originally a distinct problem, in part because it did not begin as a distinctive condition. The line between servant and slave was hazy in the early colonies; in fact, the defining features of slavery would be contested clear through Reconstruction. In addition, many of the legal disabilities imposed on colonial bondsmen in their various forms—on slaves and servants of African, European, or Native American descent—were suffered by many “free” peoples: Native Americans, propertyless men regardless of their origins, and women. For early colonial thinkers, then, the problem of slavery was really a problem of degree.

But by the time of the Constitutional Convention, slavery was sufficiently distinct in form and fact to pose a peculiar challenge to the new nation’s political principles. The gradual separation of slave from servant happened principally as a matter of historical accident, and so too did the gradual correlation of color and condition. But, accident or not, these happened all the same, and by 1787 there was no longer mistaking slavery with any other form of servitude. To be sure, oppression, subordination, and exclusion persisted to varying degrees for many groups. But if these hardships constituted a continuum for eighteenth-century Americans, chattel slavery marked its logical extreme. For the slave, as for no other group, the disabilities were both complete and perpetual: the slave had, by nature, no cognizable rights, and was, also by nature, in every sense the inferior of the citizen. Slavery had become the dichotomous referent for American liberty and equality; thus most historians agree with Edmund Morgan’s appraisal that the concurrent rise of liberty and equality, on the one hand, and the institution of African slavery, on the other, would become “the central paradox of American history.”⁶

But as Morgan and others have noted, the paradox is not mere coincidence: liberty and equality, as America’s founders came to conceive them, were in fact deeply dependent on slavery. Consider:

Slavery provided a frame of reference for the American conception of liberty and an omnipresent reminder of the horrors of lost freedom. The rhetoric of the American Revolution never really did match the reality: the revolt itself had not been a popular one (at most a third of Americans had sought independence, and most of those for economic reasons) and, with perhaps one significant exception, independence had generally failed to produce social change. But the promise of its principles—of liberty and equality—offered a unifying theme for a new people, and slavery offered the rhetorical counterpoint. At the convention, then, Luther Martin could protest the proposed congressional electoral schemes by insisting that the smaller states would be “enslaved,” while in a radically different context, Benjamin Franklin could caution against the perpetual “servitude” of legislators. It was a pattern that would persist for generations: each compromise of freedom was liable to be condemned as slavery. Interestingly, no class was more ready to level the charge than the slaveholders: they were ever vigilant against “enslavement” by the Federalists, abolitionists, or the North. Perhaps, as Morgan suggests, “Virginians may have had a special appreciation of the freedom dear to republicans, because they saw every day what life without it could be like.” In a certain sense, their commitment to liberty and freedom was there at the beginning, even if it once served different goals: the first Virginia colony—at Roanoake—was founded to liberate African and Indian slaves from the Spanish.⁷

Slavery became the litmus test of American liberty, which embraced, above all other rights, the right to own property, including slaves. The almost incomprehensible notion of “human property” filled the law of slavery with contradictions: the ascendant liberal conception of property held that it must be freely alienable, and it abhorred perpetuities, but the law of human property fully consigned labor—it was freely alienable only for those who sold themselves into bondage—and maintained those laborers in perpetual bondage. The contradictions, of course, were a matter of perspective: for the slaveholder, the law was merely vindicating the rights in this species of property, on terms roughly commensurate with others. Thus Locke, who denounced hereditary slavery, was cited to support the natural rights of slaveholders; and Montesquieu’s condemnation of slavery as “absolute power” was used to define the slaveholder’s rights. Ultimately, respect for these peculiar property rights became the test of liberty, as well as the precondition to union. Speaking at the Philadelphia convention, Pierce Butler of South Carolina insisted that “[t]he security the South” States want is that their negroes may not be taken from them, which some gentlemen within or without doors, have a very good mind to do.” And, according to Madison’s notes on the convention, General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney “reminded the Convention that if the Committee should fail to insert some security to the Southern States ag* an emancipation of slaves, and taxes on exports, he sh^dbe bound by duty to his State to vote ag^st their Report.” Pinckney, of course, did not have to make good on his threat.⁸

Slavery made possible the universal grant of liberty to freemen by removing from the body politic those groups—labor and the poor—that otherwise posed the chief threat to the political order. Federalists and Republicans shared a fear of the mob: the “faction” that most worried both groups was the democratic majority. But they fashioned quite different solutions. For the Federalists, the passions of the democratic masses needed to be filtered through a more-or-less representative elite—more representative for Madison even before his republican conversion, less representative for the likes of Adams and Hamilton. For the Republicans, the problem had been solved by slavery. The mostly white freedmen in the colonial South always seemed to be on the brink of rebellion: they were largely disempowered because they owned no property, and they were largely without property because of a very artificial land scarcity. Slavery eased the threat posed by the freedmen: with slavery, the number of indentured servants decreased and so too, then, the number of men turning free. Those who were free simply needed to be persuaded that they shared the interests of the master class, a cause advanced principally by the drawing of the color line. Of course, slaves posed their own threat of rebellion, but the conditions of bondage and the harshness of the reprisal (slaves who participated in insurrections faced grisly “exemplary deaths” by slow burning, dismemberment, or by being hanged in chains) tended to mitigate the threat. As a result, slaves proved less dangerous to the privileged class than did free or semifree labor, and the latter groups reaped some of the benefit. As Morgan concludes, “Aristocrats could more safely ensure personal equality in a slave society than in a free one. Slaves did not become leveling mobs.”⁹

Slavery provided the economic security needed to permit liberty. It is easier to afford liberty in times of social peace and economic stability, and slavery helped ensure both conditions. In fact, slavery helped ensure American independence: the Revolution itself would not have been possible without the funding secured by tobacco exports, and production of that crop, of course, was in turn made possible by slavery. Fitting, then, that the Virginia Assembly voted in 1780 to reward Revolutionary soldiers with three hundred acres and a slave.¹⁰

Slavery provided the measure of relative liberty and equality among the white population. By the mid-eighteenth century, the plantation owner, the yeoman farmer, and even the white indentured servant had this in common: they were not slaves. They were, relatively, equal, and they were, as opposed to black Americans, all free; it was true in fact and theory. By the nineteenth century, John Calhoun could brag of slavery that it “was the best guarantee to equality among the whites,” and he was probably right. Congressman Henry Wise could insist, without any sense of irony, that “[t]he principle of slavery is a leveling principle; it is friendly to equality. Break down slavery and you would with the same blow break down the great democratic principle of equality among men.” As late as 1864, Congressman Aaron Harding would complain that radical Republicans “are making some progress in giving nominal freedom to the slaves, but equally as much in destroying the liberty of the white race.”

These various ironies did not go unnoticed. “It always seemed a most iniquitous scheme to me,” Abigail Adams wrote to her husband John, during the war for independence, “to fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.” And Lieutenant Enos Reeves left a slave auction in 1782 wondering, “Is this liberty?—Is this the land of liberty I’ve been fighting for these six years?”

Similar sentiments were also expressed at the Philadelphia convention. The slave trade provision of the Constitution, which precluded congressional action to abolish the slave trade until 1808, drew the harshest indictments. William Patterson of New Jersey protested against the “indirect encouragem^t of the slave trade; observing that Cong^s in their act relating to the change of the 8 art: of Confedⁿ had been ashamed to use the term ‘slaves’ & had substituted a description.” Luther Martin of Maryland concurred: “it was inconsistent with the principles of the revolution and dishonorable to the American character to have such a feature in the Constitution.” George Mason of Virginia maintained that “Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgment of heaven on a Country.” John Dickinson of Delaware “considered it as inadmissible on every principle of honor & safety that the importation of slaves should be authorised to the States by the Constitution.” And Madison insisted that “Twenty years will produce all the mischief that can be apprehended from the liberty to import slaves. So long a term will be more dishonorable to the National character than to say nothing about it in the Constitution.”

In the end, they followed Madison’s lead, at least in form. The slave trade provision remained, and so too did the fugitive slave clause, and so too the much-debated three-fifths clause, which enabled the southern states to count each slave as three-fifths of a person for purposes of the census. But the “National character” was not dishonored by the appearance of the terms “slave” or “slavery” anywhere in the federal charter.

The framers, it appears, did indeed take care that the Constitution should not appear to sanction the idea of “property in men.” There is good reason to believe that the framers anticipated that the institution was in decline, and that if the Constitution was merely silent on the matter, slavery would fade into the past. Thus, according to Madison’s notes, Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts “thought we had nothing to do with the conduct of the States as to Slaves, but ought to be careful not to give any sanction to it.” Roger Sherman of Connecticut “thought it best to leave the matter as we find it. He observed that the abolition of Slavery seemed to be going on in the United States & that the good sense of the several States would probably by degrees compleat it.” Sherman’s Connecticut colleague, Oliver Ellsworth, offered that “slavery in time will not be a speck in our Country. Provision is already made in Connecticut for abolishing it. And the abolition has already taken place in Massachusetts.” Ellsworth did, however, venture that “if it was to be considered in a moral light we ought to go farther and free those already in the Country.” But such appeals were growing wearisome for John Rutledge of South Carolina: “Religion & humanity had nothing to do with this question,” Rutledge insisted. “Interest alone is the governing principle with nations.”¹¹

Whether it was due to morality or self-interest, God or humanity, the effort to free the slaves had already begun. This, perhaps, was the one significant social change to follow the American Revolution. In 1777 Vermont declared slavery inconsistent with natural rights; within a generation, the rest of the North would follow. In 1780 abolitionists in Massachusetts failed in their efforts to ban slavery in that state’s constitution, but the following year, an African slave named Quock Walker argued that any construction of that constitution that authorized slavery was contrary to the law of God. In a fashion, Chief Justice William Cushing of the Massachusetts Supreme Court agreed: the institution of slavery was inconsistent with the constitutional proclamation that “all men are born free and equal.” The rest of New England abolished slavery, and Pennsylvania, long a home to the antislavery Quakers, did as well. New York adopted a plan of gradual manumission, and in 1804 New Jersey became the last state in the North to announce the institution’s demise.

There was also a change in the South. Before the Revolution, slaves were very much at the mercy of their masters: only pecuniary interest ensured their welfare. A 1723 Virginia law, for example, provided that slaves could be punished to the point of death, and any provocation would justify their killing; similarly, a North Carolina law adopted in 1774 punished the willful murder of a slave with just one year in prison. But after the Revolution, southern laws provided greater protection to slaves: by law, at least, they enjoyed the same protection from homicide as that extended to white southerners, with the exception-—not insignificant—of those deaths that were incident to “moderate correction.” As always, the reality did not necessarily match the ideal: “almost all homicides of slaves,” Thomas Morris reports, “from the colonial period to the end of slavery, ended in acquittals, or at most in verdicts of manslaughter, which meant that there had been some legal provocation from the slave.” Still, the implications were both obvious and widely accepted: slaves, like all people, had rights.¹² This, of course, only emphasized the contradictions.