Lies the government told you (3 page)

During his presidency (1789 to 1797), Washington lived at the President’s House in Philadelphia. In 1780, Pennsylvania had passed “An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery,” which prohibited nonresidents from holding slaves in the state longer than six months. In an attempt to circumvent this law, Washington and his wife, Martha Dandridge Custis Washington, neither a permanent resident of Pennsylvania, rotated their slaves in and out of Pennsylvania so that none of them established continuous residency for six months. This practice violated the Pennsylvania Act, but the Washingtons were never prosecuted under it.

During the Revolutionary War, however, Washington’s attitude toward African-Americans was markedly different. Washington recruited free blacks into the Continental Army, and by the time of the Battle of Yorktown, African-Americans constituted 25 percent of the Army.
³¹
By 1786, Washington promised never to buy another slave. By the time of his death, Washington found slavery morally wrong, and freed his slaves in his will, upon the death of his wife, Martha.
³²
He even expressed a desire to have his freed slaves educated.
³³

Like Jefferson, however, Washington, did not seek to abolish slavery swiftly, or with any type of urgency. Despite not purchasing a slave after 1786, and eventually freeing his slaves, Washington believed slavery would be abolished by “slow, sure and imperceptible degrees.”
³⁴

A Less Perfect Union

The Founding Fathers overtly defended slavery and racism in the United States Constitution. Protecting the institution of slavery was necessary to gain the South’s support for a new, centralized federal government. It is important to realize that our Constitution legitimized the ownership of some human beings by other human beings. This was, of course, directly opposed to the Natural Law values of the Declaration of Independence, which asserted that the rights of “all Men” come from our “Creator” and are thus “unalienable,” absent due process. The Constitution contained express provisions recognizing slavery’s existence, protecting it as a legal institution, and insulating it from regulation or interference by the federal government.

Three provisions of the Constitution implicitly recognize the existence of slavery: the Fugitive Slave Clause (Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3), the Importation Clause (Article I, Section 9, Clause 1), and the Three-Fifths Clause (Article I, Section 2, Clause 3). The Fugitive Slave Clause provides that “[n]o Person held to Service of Labour in one State” shall be discharged from such labor if he or she escapes into another State. This clause essentially required the States to return fugitive slaves who escaped into their territory. The courts interpreted this clause as providing slaveholders with a right to their slave property that no state where slavery was prohibited could qualify, control, or undo.

The Importation Clause in the Constitution forbade Congress from outlawing the “importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper” until 1808. This clause permitted the international slave trade until at least 1808. The United States discontinued the international slave trade in that year when President Jefferson signed legislation prohibiting it.

The “Three-Fifths Compromise” was the clearest example of the delegates who wrote the Constitution abandoning ethical and moral standards, and even core values, in order to construct a new federal government. The Northerners wanted apportionment for the House of Representatives
to be based solely on the population of free persons living in each state, whereas the Southerners wanted their slaves to count as whole persons, thus increasing Southern representation in Congress. The infamous and despicable Three-Fifths Clause emerged from the debate. It provides that apportionment be determined by the “whole number of free Persons” in each state, minus the number of “Indians not taxed,” plus “three fifths of all other Persons.” Therefore, the Constitution counted slaves (“other Persons”) only as 60 percent of free, white persons.

In Their Defense . . .

Regardless of their faults, many of the Founding Fathers did
not
own slaves and recognized slavery’s inherent immorality. Benjamin Franklin, for example, called slavery “a source of serious evils” and “an atrocious debasement of human nature.”
³⁵
In 1774, two years
before
signing the Declaration of Independence, Franklin and his fellow Founding Father, Benjamin Rush, formed the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting Abolition of Slavery.
³⁶
John Jay, an author of
The Federalist Papers
and President of a comparable society in New York, as well as the first Chief Justice of the United States, declared that “[t]he honour of the states, as well as justice and humanity . . . loudly call upon them to emancipate these unhappy people. To contend for our own liberty, and to deny that blessing to others, involves an inconsistency not to be excused.”
³⁷

James Madison owned slaves, yet deemed slavery “the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man.”
³⁸
Madison noted that the delegates to the Constitutional Convention “thought it wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men.”
³⁹
In
The Federalist, No. 54
, Madison stated that “we must deny the fact, that slaves are considered merely as property, and in no respect whatever persons.”
⁴⁰

The Founders seemed to believe that slavery would meet its natural demise in the United States. At the Constitutional Convention, a Connecticut delegate, Roger Sherman, stated, “The abolition of slavery seemed to be going on in the United States. . . . The good sense of the several states would probably by degrees complete it.”
⁴¹
George Washington, in a draft of his first inaugural address, expressed the desire for the country to “reverse the absurd position that the many were made for the few.”
⁴²
Just before his death, Thomas Jefferson, referring to slavery, asserted that “[a]ll eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man.”
⁴³

The prominent abolitionist Frederick Douglass actually believed that the Constitution created an “anti-slavery government.”
⁴⁴
In 1864, Douglass wrote, “It was purposely so framed as to give no claim, no sanction to the claim, of property in man. If in its origin slavery had any relation to the government, it was only as the scaffolding to the magnificent structure, to be removed as soon as the building was completed.”
⁴⁵
Technically speaking, Douglass was absolutely right. The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution states that “[n]either slavery nor involuntary servitude . . . shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction,” yet none of the original text was in any way altered.

It is interesting to note that William Lloyd Garrison, another great abolitionist and editor of
The Liberator
, a radical abolitionist newspaper, believed that the Constitution was actually a
pro-
slavery document. He called the Constitution a “pact with the devil.” Frederick Douglass
⁴⁶
had admired Garrison, but when Douglass, in 1851, stated his belief that the Constitution could be used to
fight
slavery, Garrison and Douglass engaged in a vicious debate in which they communicated through newspapers and letters.

Slavery was a tradition embedded in the culture of the South and played a key economic role there. Its economic importance was the key factor impeding abolition. Nevertheless, slavery is morally reprehensible, and completely indefensible,
⁴⁷
and the fact that many Americans, including the Founding Fathers, recognized that it was wrong, in a way makes us even more responsible for the crimes committed against the African-American race. Frederick Douglass may have been right when he said that the Constitution paved the road for abolition, but it took the United States nearly one hundred years to take serious action.

Preserving the Union

President Abraham Lincoln, known as the “Great Emancipator,” is widely regarded as a defender of black freedom who supported social equality of the races and led us into the American Civil War to free the slaves. According to Lincoln, “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.”
⁴⁸
Lincoln did, in fact, view slavery as an evil institution, but did not seek to abolish slavery because it was morally despicable. Rather, he only supported an end to slavery when he felt it became necessary to win the war.

Lincoln’s
first
action as President was to persuade the States to ratify a constitutional amendment that would have
legalized
and
preserved
the institution of slavery. The proposed amendment, “The Corwin Amendment,” stated the following: “No Amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of the State.” Slavery, to Lincoln, was a “domestic institution” under this Amendment. The Amendment, of course, was never formally adopted, as Southern legislatures were already prepared to secede from the Union to express their discontent with federal dominion over their interests.

Lincoln opposed slavery’s expansion into America’s new territories not based on any moral duty to uphold the Natural Law, or the need to right inherent wrongs. Instead, Lincoln simply wanted to keep African-Americans out of the West and keep the white and black races separate. In 1857, prior to becoming President, Lincoln expressed his opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which would have admitted Kansas into the Union as a slave state: “There is
a natural disgust
in the minds of nearly all white people to the idea of indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races . . .
A separation of the races is the only perfect preventive
of amalgamation, but as an immediate separation is impossible, the next best thing is to keep them apart where they are not already together”
⁴⁹
(emphases added). Lincoln went on to state that “if white and black people never get together in Kansas, they will never mix blood in Kansas.”
⁵⁰
Moreover, to alleviate racial tension in the United States, Lincoln favored the deportation of the African-American population to settlements in either Africa or Central America. According to Lincoln:

Racial separation must be effected by colonization of the country’s blacks to foreign land. The enterprise is a difficult one, but where there is a will there is a way . . . Let us be brought to believe it is morally right and, at the same time, favorable to, or, at least, not against, our interests, to transfer the African to his native clime, and we shall find a way to do it, however great the task may be.
⁵¹

When the South began seceding from the Union, Lincoln met with leaders from Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware, using slavery as a bargaining device. Lincoln promised that the federal government would not interfere with slavery in those states as long as they remained in the Union. Some border states, albeit temporarily, agreed to remain in the Union. Therefore, it is quite clear that Lincoln was willing to support the existence of slavery so long as his federal government stayed intact.

Lincoln was reluctant to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. He feared that it would conflict with his goal of “saving the Union,” or rather, expanding the size of the federal government. In fact, Lincoln actually issued a “Preliminary Proclamation” to the Confederacy on September 22nd 1862, warning the Confederate States that if they continued in rebellion, he would end slavery in the South on January 1st 1863 (the date on which the Emancipation Proclamation was issued).
Therefore, if the slave states had rejoined the Union, Lincoln would have
permitted them to keep their slaves
. After issuing the Proclamation, Lincoln declared:

My paramount objective in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union.
⁵²

Furthermore, Lincoln saw the Proclamation as a wartime measure to weaken the South, not as a step toward the abolition of involuntary servitude. If the slaves were freed, Lincoln believed that they would revolt against their masters and bolster the Union Army. Lincoln publicly announced that the Emancipation Proclamation was “sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution
upon military necessity
” (emphases added).

Moreover, the Emancipation Proclamation was rather limited in its scope, and had very little effect by itself. The Proclamation applied
only
in the Confederacy, and had no legal justification, as the Confederate states had already seceded. Even after the Proclamation, eight hundred thousand African-Americans were still enslaved in the border states of Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, Delaware, and West Virginia, as well as in the North, with the blessings of the Great Emancipator. In essence, the Proclamation supported slavery after its issuance.

The Union Army forced emancipated African-Americans to enter into yearly labor contracts with their masters to avoid “vagrancy” and “idleness.” Once they were under contract, the blacks were not allowed to leave their respective plantations without permission. This system of forced free labor spread throughout the parts of the South that were dominated by the American Army, and lasted until the end of the Civil War.

Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, therefore, achieved little in terms of African-American freedom. The federal government did not officially recognize emancipation until Congress enacted the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution on December 6th 1865. By that time, slavery had been abolished in Missouri, Maryland, Louisiana, and Arkansas; and Tennessee and Kentucky were both in the process of ending slavery.