The Peculiar Institution, pt. 14

Hey everyone. Alright, so we’re back on track. You’ve been waiting longer than usual for this installment, so I won’t delay with an intro, except to say: If you’re an unpaid subscriber, why not support the Martyr Made Podcast by becoming a paid subscriber? It’s just $5 p/month or $50 p/year, and you’ll get access to tons of exclusive content. OK, here we go.

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In the late 18th century, with storm clouds of the American Revolution gathering on the horizon, opposition to slavery was disorganized and scattered, but voices were growing louder and more assertive. Outright abolitionism was still a step too far even for most radicals, but the moral problem of a people fighting for their liberty while holding half a million slaves in subjugation was becoming an unavoidable contradiction. The problem was not confined to salons in the Northern cities, either. Revulsion for slavery was felt even in the South, and even among many slaveholders themselves. It is easy to dismiss them as mere hypocrites, but these men had to deal with practical problems flowing from what, to us, with benefit of hindsight and far from the consequences of any decision, are uncompromising moral declarations. These were not men who could easily violate their principles without suffering the full psychological consequences, and they genuinely struggled when their principles seemed to contradict each other.

Thomas Jefferson was 21-years-old when he inherited a 5,000-acre plantation and 52 slaves, a bequest which affirmed him as a one of Virginia’s planter elite. Jefferson never freed his slaves during his life, even though he exhibited, from an early age, a dislike for the institution and an ardent desire to see it ended in the country he helped found. As a young lawyer, he argued in court that a mixed-race grandson of a white woman and a black slave to be considered free, and based his argument on the principle that slavery itself was an unnatural violation of a man’s liberty. The judge didn’t know what to make of the young Jefferson’s strange assertions, and dismissed them without a thought. Jefferson himself, presumably, concluded his day’s work defending the natural right of human liberty by going home and issuing instructions to his own slaves. It’s tempting to see Jefferson and those of a similar disposition - and there were many, many others like him - as mere hypocrites, but they were not hypocrites. Or, at least, to the extent that they were hypocrites, they knew it, and struggled with it, and that, if it does not fully exonerate them from the charge of hypocrisy, at least reduces it from a felony to a misdemeanor.

Every schoolchild knows that Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, but fewer know that he didn’t particularly want the job. Virginia, his home state, the largest and wealthiest of the 13 colonies, was beginning work on its own constitution, and Jefferson had drafted a version that would have provided for the gradual abolition of slavery in the new state. He preferred to stay and fight his battle in Virginia, but of course he was eventually prevailed upon by the Continental Congress to take up the responsibility of writing America’s first statement to the world as a newborn nation. Despite his initial ambivalence, the tone of the document he wrote leaves no room to doubt that Jefferson knew the historical importance of what he was being asked to do.

The Declaration of Independence essentially consists of a list of grievances that serve to explain to the people and government of Britain, to the rest of the world, to Americans and their posterity, why America’s ruling class found it necessary to turn traitor against the crown. The opening paragraph admits that observers of the event were right to have questions, and that it was only right that the rebels should justify themselves before all men of goodwill. Truth be told, many of the charges brought against the king were exaggerated half-truths, something which even many American readers of the Declaration knew at the time. But if the document was scoffed at as a list of scurrilous accusations by many in London, Jefferson knew that the great majority of the Declaration’s readership had yet to even be born. He was not taking the king to court, he was planting a flag on his lawn.

Jefferson was no doubt aware of the need to avoid controversy among the states if they were to maintain a common front against the redcoats who’d soon be marching toward their towns and cities, but at a certain point, he could contain himself no longer. He wrote:

(The king) has waged war against human nature itself, violating the most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people, who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither, this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain, determined to keep open the market where MEN could be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting these very people to rise in arms among us and to purchase that liberty of which he has denied, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

The English king and Jefferson’s slaves might have shared a hearty laugh if they’d ever been in the same room together, but Jefferson wasn’t joking. They wouldn’t have gotten a chance to read it anyway, since it was among the first passages the Continental Congress crossed out when they took their hatchet to the Declaration. Jefferson’s searing criticism of slavery offended not only his fellow Southern delegates, but those from the Northern states as well - the slave trade was managed by companies in the North, and profits generated by the slave system capitalized Northern banks. The Congress was also aware that it was simply bad propaganda. Already, Samuel Johnson’s rhetorical attack on the American independence movement had included the cutting line: “How is it we hear the greatest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?” The Founders were painfully aware of the need to justify their treason to contemporary and future generations, and the hypocrisy was just too much.

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Jefferson wasn’t alone among slaveholding Founding Fathers who were deeply ambivalent about slavery. George Washington, whose austere temperament could not have been more different from the idealistic Jefferson, was another. Idealism is an unaffordable luxury for military leaders, at least insofar as it lords over the practical demands of circumstance. Washington initially supported a measure raised by South Carolina to bar free blacks from enlisting in his army, but when it was clear, already in December 1775, that it would be difficult to find enough free whites to fill the ranks in the coming year, he reversed position.

It was around the same time that Washington had a famous exchange with a slave woman named Phyllis Wheatley. Wheatley was seven-years-old when she’d been brought to America aboard a slave ship in 1761. She was purchased by a tailor to be his wife’s personal attendant, but it soon became clear to both master and mistress that the girl was something of an intellectual prodigy. They taught her to read and write, and by her early teens she already had command of Latin. At fourteen, she began writing poetry, and even published a book of poems in London. One day in December 1775, George Washington found a letter on his desk. It was a poetic tribute to him by Phyllis Wheatley, and Washington, who was a widely-read and well-educated man, immediately recognized that the verses had not been penned by a random amateur.

I want to quote his response in full: