“Right is of no Sex – Truth is of no Color – God is the Father of us all, and all we are Brethren.” – The motto of the North Star [antislavery newspaper founded in 1847 by Frederick Douglass].
American abolitionists were not just trying to rid the United States of the wickedness of slavery, they were trying to change the course of all of human history. The following are facts about slavery every American should know. This is in no way meant to diminish its evil. Its purpose is to give Americans a greater understanding of how slavery came to be in the United States and to learn about those who struggled to end it.
The history of slavery on earth is, unfortunately, a vast discussion. Going back about 5,000 years from ancient Mesopotamia to today, humans enslaved other humans. This crossed all races and creeds. Slavery existed on every continent except Antarctica. Human life has never been as cherished as it should be. Without proper respect for human life, great evil follows.
Slavery in the New World began much earlier than the existence of the United States. The Spanish enslaved Taino natives in Puerto Rico by 1500. Spain brought the first African slaves to Puerto Rico in 1513. Portugal also brought African slaves to the New World almost 100 years before the early Jamestown settlement in Virginia. As European powers fought for control over the New World among themselves, they brought slavery with them.
Slavery in the United States began during the Atlantic slave trade that lasted over 300 years. According to Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., between 1525 and 1866, 12.5 million Africans were taken to the New World by ship. 10.7 million survived what became known as the “Middle Passage,” a voyage that lasted from three weeks to three months in cruel and inhumane conditions as men, women, and children were packed into ships in chains to endure the hazards of the open ocean. Of those 10.7 million, about 388,000 were sent directly to North America. For comparison purposes, 4.86 million went to Brazil alone.
Like every world power of the time, slavery was a normal part of the British Empire. It was British law that governed all its American colonies. As Stanford economist and author Thomas Sowell states, “Although slavery was a worldwide institution for thousands of years, nowhere in the world was slavery a controversial issue prior to the 18th century.” This in no way absolves American slaveholders of all moral culpability for slavery, but it should provide a better reality of the world America’s Founding Fathers found themselves in 1776. One where slavery was part of the entirety of the Western hemisphere and likely the entire world.
Founding Fathers on Slavery
It has become common for contemporary Americans to want to discredit everything accomplished by the founding generation because of the existence of slavery. This is a mistake. Consequential Founding Fathers did not defend slavery. They were not in a position to abruptly end it either. To do so would have meant losing the Southern states due to the economic realities such an act would create.
The founding generation set out to limit slavery where they could, to stop the slave trade or importation of slaves from Africa, and to put a system in place that allowed slavery to be eradicated over time. Compromises were made to secure the unification of the fragile American states. As scholar Harry Jaffa puts it, “If they [Founding Fathers] had attempted to secure all the rights of all men, they would have ended in no rights secured for any men.”
Thomas Jefferson is usually at the forefront of criticism. When Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence in 1776 that “all men are created equal,” he included in the original list of grievances against King George III a provision that the British king suppressed efforts to prohibit “this execrable commerce.” This was a reference to slavery. When this was presented to the full delegation, it was struck in the final draft.
Jefferson, a Virginian, was a slaveholder. He inherited his first slave at age 14. Under Virginia law, inherited or “dowry slaves” could not be freed. Jefferson could have very easily been a defender of slavery like others at the time. He was not. Writing to the Virginia delegation to the Continental Congress in 1774 Jefferson wrote, “The rights of human nature are deeply wounded by this infamous practice. The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state.” Among other laws he supported to limit the expansion of slavery throughout his career, Jefferson proposed legislation to emancipate slaves in Virginia. This was ultimately defeated.
Thomas Jefferson also receives criticism for not freeing his slaves upon his death and for fathering at least one, and perhaps all six children, of his slave Sally Hemings. While it can fairly be asserted that Jefferson did not do all he could to free his slaves, Virginia law at the time either outright prohibited or made much more difficult the freeing of slaves for anyone in debt. Jefferson’s spending habits put him in debt for most of his adult life, including at his death.
While it is likely true that Jefferson is the father of at least one of Sally Hemings’ children, it is important to note this has never been conclusively shown. DNA testing of Hemings’ descendants revealed only “Jefferson DNA,” meaning DNA through the Jefferson family male line of descendants. Thomas Jefferson lived with or near other male relatives, including brothers and nephews, who could have been the father. Without more definitive testing, some mystery remains.
Late in his life, an old and ailing Jefferson had an opportunity to have his slaves freed from money given by his friend and Revolutionary War hero, Thaddeus Kosciuszko. However, Jefferson did not take the necessary legal steps to make this a reality. As a result, most of Jefferson’s slaves were sold at auction after his death.
George Washington, a Virginian, was also a slaveholder. Like Jefferson, he too inherited slaves but at the even younger age of 11. Under the same Virginia laws, he was prohibited from freeing his slaves while alive. Washington spoke out against slavery his whole life. “There is not a man alive who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it [slavery].”, Washington wrote to Robert Morris in April of 1786. Washington freed most of his slaves that he was legally able to upon his death in 1799. All were freed after the death of Martha Washington in 1802.
Benjamin Franklin wore many hats. One that many Americans might not be aware of is that he was a slave owner. In 1751, he sold a slave couple he owned and had a few other slaves as personal servants at other times in his life. In some of his publications, he ran ads for the buying and selling of slaves, although he also included abolitionist articles as well.
As he grew older, Franklin made both an economic and moral case against slavery and advocated for its abolishment in no uncertain terms. This culminated near the end of his life when he formally petitioned the newly established Congress to free all slaves in 1790. “Mankind are all formed by the same Almighty Being, alike objects of his care, and equally designed for the enjoyment of happiness.”, he wrote. Liberty needed to be secured “without distinction of color.”
Here are a few more words on slavery from America’s Founding Fathers:
I believe a time will come when an oppo. will be offered to abolish this lamentable Evil. – Every thing we can do is to improve it, if it happens in our day, if not, let us transmit to our descendants together with our Slaves, a pity for their unhappy Lot, & an abhorrence for Slavery. – Patrick Henry in a letter written to Robert Pleasants, Jan 18, 1773.
Ye men of sense and virtue – Ye advocates for American Liberty, rouse up and espouse the cause of humanity and general liberty. Bear a testimony against a vice which degrades human nature, and dissolves that universal tie of benevolence which should connect all children of men together in one great family – The plant of liberty is of so tender a nature, that it cannot thrive long in the neighborhood of slavery. – Benjamin Rush (signer of the Declaration of Independence), 1773.
God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the Gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever. – Thomas Jefferson, regarding the issue of slavery, Notes on the State of Virginia, 18, 1781.
Slavery is such an atrocious debasement of human nature, that its very extirpation, if not performed with solicitous care, may sometimes open a source of serious evils. – Benjamin Franklin, An Address to the Public from the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, and the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, 1782.
Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgement of heaven upon a country. As nations cannot be rewarded or punished in the next world, they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes and effects, Providence punishes national sins, by national calamities. – George Mason, from the debates of Constitutional Convention, August 22, 1787.
The turpitude, the inhumanity, the cruelty, and the infamy of the African commerce in slaves have been so impressively represented to the public by the highest powers of eloquence that nothing that I can say would increase the just odium in which it is and ought to be held. Every measure of prudence, therefore, ought to be assumed for the eventual total extirpation of slavery from the United States. – John Adams, letter to Robert J. Evans, June 8, 1819.
The Constitution of the United States
When the delegates of the Constitution Convention gathered in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, they were not there to end slavery. Their purpose was to try and establish a functioning government that addressed the deficiencies of the Articles of Confederation that governed them at the time. Had they attempted an outright ban on slavery, it would have failed. The states may have fractured, and Southern states may have gone their own way, only bolstering slavery as an institution.
A very simple fact is often left out of discussions about the Constitution. Had the Framers’ desire to keep slavery in the United States been so deep, they would have made it an explicit part of the Constitution. They did not. The words “slave” and “slavery” do not appear in the document. As James Madison said of those at the Constitutional Convention, they “thought it wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men.”
What does appear in the Constitution is the “three-fifths compromise” language of Article I Section 2. When the Framers considered how to apportion representation for the House of Representatives, Southern states wanted slaves to count the same as all free persons. This would have given slave states more representatives and, thus, more power. To negate this, a compromise was reached to count slaves as three-fifths of a free person. Free blacks were fully counted.
The founding generation believed that eliminating the slave trade would diminish slavery’s influence and ultimately lead to its extinction. Under Article I Section 9, the slave trade was to be outlawed in twenty years at the federal level, although many states outlawed the slave trade well before this. On January 1, 1808, this prohibition became law nationwide. The United States missed being the first country to outlaw the international slave trade by a matter of weeks to Great Britain.
Article IV of the Constitution governs the interactions between states and between states and the federal government. Under Article IV Section 2, a person “held to Service or Labour in one State, under the laws thereof” who escapes into another state shall be returned to the person to whom the service or labor was due. This is a fugitive slave law and was made as a concession to Southern states near the end of the Convention. The phrase “under the laws thereof” was added to put the burden back on the states and not give any legitimacy to slavery as a matter of federal law.
The States
When Georgia was founded in 1732, slavery was banned. When it was taken over as a British colony in 1752, slavery was reinstituted. In 1774, Rhode Island passed legislation that all slaves imported thereafter should be freed. Massachusetts tried to abolish slavery multiple times before 1776, only to be rejected by the British. Massachusetts eventually succeeded in abolishing slavery by 1780. In 1777, what would become the state of Vermont forbade slavery in its territory. By 1804, all seven of the original Northern states had abolished slavery, mostly through gradual emancipation acts. The American states took the lead in abolishing slavery ahead of the rest of the world.
As stated by documentarian Ken Burns, slavery was “lagging” in the South at the time of the American founding. The plantation system brought to the region by European powers was losing economic viability. There were many voices in the South that called for slavery’s end and the institution was gradually being eradicated without legislation.
However, history took a different turn. A new invention, as well as an increased fight over states’ rights, kept slavery a part of the United States. As slavery grew, so too did a passionate abolitionist movement. Despite years of compromises and the hope of a negotiated end to slavery, the issue would ultimately be resolved through the bloodiest war in American history.
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