The Peculiar Institution, pt. 15

Within just a few years of the Americans victory in the war of independence, it had become clear to many that the structure of government under the Articles of Confederation was proving woefully insufficient for the new nation. Designed to accommodate the diversity of states’ interests and their jealous claims to sovereignty, the Articles required total consensus for virtually every action taken by the federal government, a feature which, in practice, simply meant that the federal government could do almost nothing at all. An overbearing central government was the great enemy the Revolution was meant to overcome, and the extreme limitation on federal power suited some just fine. Others, though, including George Washington and his circle of followers, saw the need for a stronger executive and broader powers to respond to emergencies, promote economic cooperation, and face the circling European powers whose designs on the North American continent had not yet been abandoned. The economic chaos of the 1780s led to calls for reform. Finally, after a citizens’ rebellion under Daniel Shays exposed the inability of the federal government to perform even so basic a function as financing a militia to put down an armed revolt, a convention was called in Philadelphia to work out a new constitution.

The debate over slavery at the Constitutional Convention was muted. We’ll discuss it more in a future essay on the rivalry between New England and Virginia, and the bitter North-South sectionalism that led to the Civil War. It’s worth remembering that in the year 1700, there were virtually no intellectual, moral, or political arguments against slavery being made anywhere in the world. By 1787, when the Founders met in Philadelphia to design the American government, objections to slavery, if not exactly commonplace, were heard often enough, but these voices were still a dissident minority. The second reason slavery was a relatively minor issue at the Constitutional Convention was that it was a simple fact that any attempt to make abolition a condition of joining the Union would only mean that there would be no Union at all. The thinking, even among anti-slavery advocates, was that a strong union must be the first priority, and controversies such as the one over slavery would be the business of the new government to resolve. In other words, there was almost no constituency for abolition, and even the small band of moralizers who spoke against slavery understood that dumping a reform of such unprecedented scope and uncertain outcome on the new government would doom it to a quick death. The largest and most immovable obstacle to abolition was the array of powerful interests lined up against it. Virginia was the largest and most populous state at the time, and tobacco, rice, and indigo produced by slaves in the Southern states was almost important to the economic prosperity of the North as it was in the South. The ships that transported slave-grown products to market in Europe and the West Indies were most owned by Northern firms, and the profits of Southern planters were a chief source of capitalization for Northern banks.

Concessions were made to Southern states that left them with the impression that the institution of slavery would be protected from interference from the federal government. This was not to say that all Southerners ruled out the possibility of abolition at some point in the future; in fact, many Southerners, including many slave-owning planters, knew that the institution was becoming a moral anachronism in the countries whose respect they most craved, and that abolition must come eventually. But the questions of how, when, and if abolition would be carried out must be answered by each Southern state, and not by a distant federal government under the influence of New England radicals who knew of slavery only from their newspapers, and would have no part in dealing with the aftermath of emancipation. What would become of the freed slaves? Were they to be cast into the wilderness like the Indians? Or would they be kept within the polity as second-class resident aliens? Perhaps they could be resettled in the West (which was not yet controlled by the United States), or on open land in the Caribbean or West Africa? Or, would there be calls to make them full citizens of the United States, thereby making them the voting majority in many Southern counties overnight, and according them the full panoply of rights claimed by other Americans? Needless to say, the idea of being outnumbered 5-to-1 for miles around by a former slave population now availing itself of the right to bear arms was not one that even the most compassionate and morally sensitive Southerners were eager to entertain.

The pro-slavery interests did make one key concession regarding the importation of new slaves into the US. The status quo would prevail for twenty years after the ratification of the Constitution, giving those with a stake in the slave trade (shipping companies, planters, brokers and merchants, etc) time to adjust, but in 1808 the slave trade would be outlawed for all time. It seemed like a relatively minor concession at the time. Almost all slaves in the United States were concentrated along the coast in Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. These states had most of the slaves they needed, and future demand could be easily met by natural population increase - an achievement unique to the slave population of the continental US. Unstable commodity prices made the purchase of slaves an uncertain investment, and the Founders had reasons to be confident that the question would shrink in importance and over time answer itself. For all these reasons, a future ban on the importation of slaves encountered a surprising lack of resistance, given the ferocity with which every inch of ground was contested in the approaching North-South sectional conflict.

Thus, the Constitution was framed, and the new Union was born, with the belief that the problem of slavery would shrink in importance until its ardent defenders dwindled to the point that an amicable solution could be found. Little did the Founders know that before the ink of their ratifying signatures even had a chance to dry, two events would take place that would entrench slavery more deeply than ever before. We’ll cover the first in this essay, and the second in the next installment.

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One year after the new American Constitution was ratified, revolution broke out in France. Any hopes that it would follow the idealism and relatively civilized conduct of the American Revolution were dashed on the first night of the French Revolution. On July 14, 1789, a mob gathered around the Bastille, a prison for noble criminals and troublemakers. From a high window, they were harangued by Donatien Alphonse François, the psychotic and violent pervert better known as the Marquis de Sade. De Sade, scion of an ancient Provençal family, was a lifelong reprobate. A few months after his wedding in 1763, he was jailed for fifteen days after viciously torturing a prostitute. Five years later, he was sent back to prison after flogging another girl nearly to death. Offense followed offense, sentence followed sentence, and eventually, at the urging of de Sade’s own family, the French king ordered him confined indefinitely. In 1783, he was transferred to the Bastille, where he wrote sadomasochistic pornographic novels, and pamphlets extolling his decadent philosophy. In 1789, aware of the turmoil in Paris, de Sade began shouting at passersby from his cell window, falsely accusing the prison staff of barbaric abuses and calling on the people to attack the prison and free him. The Bastille had already been slated for demolition in 1788, a year before the mob took it upon itself to accelerate the process. The prison was garrisoned by a few invalid veterans and a small number of Swiss guards. When the mob gathered in 1789, the Bastille held only seven prisoners, and none had been jailed for political offenses. Four were in prison for forgery, two were insane and being kept for observation and care, and the seventh was de Sade.

The governor of the Bastille, a moderate liberal, invited representatives of the mob to dine with him and discuss their concerns. They agreed, but once the drawbridge was let down the armed mob invaded the prison grounds. The small guard surrendered without a shot fired, and the mob seized the governor for a few rounds of brutal torture. The governor begged his captors to finish him off, and they eventually obliged, calling on a young cook “who knew how to handle meat” to remove the governor’s head with a small kitchen knife. The head was paraded around in triumph into the late hours. Two of the invalid guards, men who’d been wounded in the service of France, were hanged, and three others were murdered and their bodies mutilated. Finally, one of the Swiss guards was seized and, apparently for fun and spite, the mob cut off both of his hands. De Sade was released, and took up a post as a leader of a Paris auxiliary police force charged with identifying and eliminating suspected counterrevolutionaries.

This is how the glorious French Revolution began, and it would only go downhill from there. The French had provided decisive assistance to the Americans during their War of Independence, and they expected the debt to be repaid with American support for their own Revolution. This view had its partisans, most notably Thomas Jefferson and his supporters, who idealized the French uprising and excused its excesses as royalist propaganda, but George Washington and the faction behind him were appalled by the cruel and chaotic bloodletting. Under the leadership of Washington and his Vice President, John Adams, who occupied the Presidency from 1789 to 1801, America kept its distance as the French Revolution matured into the The Terror, and finally succumbed to the dictatorship of Napoleon, who seized power in 1799 and put to rest any question of a people's revolution.

The effects of the Revolution were soon felt far away from Paris, in France’s overseas dominions. Saint-Domingue had been far and away France’s most valuable colony, producing half the world’s coffee, and exporting more sugar than Jamaica, Cuba, and Brazil - the most important sugar colonies of Britain, Spain, and Portugal, respectively - combined. Saint-Domingue was also an important export market for products from the United States, ranking second only to England for commodities like beef, grain, and lumber. Saint-Domingue was peopled by a handful royal officials, rich creole planters, middle-class merchants and craftsmen, as well as a population of free mulattos (people of mixed black and white ancestry) who were almost as numerous and prosperous as the whites. In fact, free mulattos owned about 100,000 of the 500,000 slaves on Saint-Domingue, and controlled most of the coffee plantations on the island.

Even in its heyday, Saint-Domingue had a nasty reputation for its brutal treatment of slaves. One man who spent half his life enslaved on Saint-Domingue later wrote:

Have they not hung up men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed them in mortars? Have they not forced them to eat shit? And, having flayed them with the lash, have they not cast them alive to be devoured by worms or anthills or lashed them on stakes in the swamps to be devoured by mosquitos? Have they not thrown them into boiling cauldrons of cane syrup? Have they not put men and women into barrels studded with spikes and rolled them down mountainsides into the abyss? Have they not consigned these miserable blacks to man-eating dogs until the latter, sated by human flesh, left the mangled victims to be finished off by bayonet and poniard?¹

Hundreds of slaves fled into the mountainous wilderness, forming maroon communities that sometimes lasted decades, raiding and carrying on guerilla war against the French settlements, while repulsing attempts by French troops to suppress them. Rebel leaders emerged among the maroons, whose exploits became legendary among enslaved blacks. One of the most dedicated and fearsome early leaders was the one-armed Francois Macandal, who gathered followers by preaching a bloody doctrine that would soon become the unofficial motto of the Haitian Revolution: Death to all whites.

When war broke out between France and Great Britain in 1793, the radical Jacobins, who’d recently seized control of the French National Assembly, issued an edict freeing all the slaves in French colonies. Historian Thomas Fleming points out, “The move was motivated only in part by a belief in universal liberty. The radicals also hoped to trigger slave revolts in Jamaica and other English colonies, and in the United States.” When news of the French emancipation proclamation reached Saint-Domingue, a civil war of extraordinary fury erupted. Royalist whites fought Jacobin whites, with mulattos and some blacks mixed in on both sides. A British army invaded French Saint-Domingue, adding to the confusions, as rebel slaves came down from their mountain redoubts to burn plantations and slaughter any whites and free mulattos they found.