It’s been five years since the New York Times published the 1619 Project, which among other things brought mainstream attention to the protracted debate over the meaning of the American Revolution. Many fans of the 1619 Project have accepted its characterization of the nation’s founders as defenders of slavery. Conservatives, with the support of several well-respected liberal historians, have fired back that patriot leaders hated slavery and did their best to set it on a path to extinction. Both characterizations are wrong.
Fueling our ongoing inability to agree on the founders’ relationship to slavery is our stubborn insistence on stuffing them into our own moral categories. Since the days of William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and John Brown, history has been written as though slavery were an issue that cleaved the public into just two camps: those who wished to end it and those who worked to preserve it. Those who expressed a hatred of slavery have been deemed “abolitionists,” and those who at least tolerated it are denounced as being “pro-slavery.” But while such a division of political life may hold for the fiercely polarized decades leading up to the Civil War, it is dangerously misleading to apply to the time when Americans fought for independence and struggled to design a workable national government. In that chaotic time, disgust and hatred for slavery could coexist with a belief that the safest and surest way to extinguish human bondage was to uphold it while gradually strangling it with restrictive laws.
Many founders did express their hope that slavery would be abolished, while simultaneously exerting themselves to defend it. Thomas Jefferson frequently expressed his hatred of slavery while using his presidential powers to protect it. George Washington seemed sincere when he wrote in 1786 that “there is not a man living, who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it," while trying to force the British to return thousands of fugitives from slavery to the retributions of their former masters. There is no reason to question John Adams when he remarked in an 1819 letter, “I have, through my whole life, held the practice of slavery in … abhorrence” — or his sincerity in negotiating the Treaty of Paris, which protected enslavers. James Madison didn’t sign the newspaper article he wrote in 1788 that called slavery a “barbarism of modern policy” and noted his hope for the “happy” day when it would end, but that does not mean he was lying. Nor was Madison a hypocrite when, after the Battle of Yorktown, he hunted down escapees from slavery.
Many of those who highlight the founders’ antislavery stances assume that their positions were rooted either in a moral aversion to the practice of slavery. But when we closely analyze the ways in which political and social elites expressed their hatred of slavery, what emerges is not a position rooted in benevolence for the enslaved. Rather, they reveal a deep anxiety about how slavery undermined America’s hard-won revolutionary principles, corrupted fragile American institutions, and threatened the nation’s future prosperity. Black Americans were not the only ones who fought slavery out of their own self-interest.
Even self-identified abolitionists were more self-serving than is often recognized. The most influential 18th-century Quaker abolitionist, Anthony Benezet, blasted the slave trade but also wrote that the “worst Effects [of slavery] naturally flow to the Religion and Morals of the People where it prevails”; here he was speaking of white people. Warner Mifflin, another leading Quaker abolitionist, confided to his friend John Dickinson, author of the famous pro-independence articles Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, “however people may think I favour black people I think I am more in the white interest than the other when laboring to have them freed from oppression, which if rightly done is certainly in my view of more advantage to the master than slave.”
White Americans had many reasons to believe slavery threatened their own interests. Most obviously, white Americans had long understood that slavery was the primary reason the black population grew steadily. It wasn’t until the 1730s, after a century of forced importations of enslaved people, that African American populations grew by natural increase. This fact did not dislodge the deep association of the growth of black communities with the slave trade. William Byrd of Virginia, a rich enslaver himself, complained in 1736 that “They import so many Negros hither, that I fear this Colony will some time or other be confirmed by the Name of New Guinea. I am sensible of many bad consequences of multiplying these Ethiopians amongst us.” Patriot leader Nathaniel Appleton echoed these fears a generation later in advocating for an end to the slave trade. “Without all doubt,” Appleton argued in 1767, “it will be thought necessary immediately to prohibit any future importation of slaves, which, as Dr. Franklin says, has already blackened half America.”
Ben Franklin had indeed advocated reining in slavery, theorizing that a growing population of slaves would sap white Americans’ spirit of industry and leave them “enfeebled.” Franklin observed in 1751 that in families who worked slaves, “the white Children become proud, disgusted with Labour, and being educated in Idleness.” Just as threatening was the well-known effect that slavery restricted “the number of poor Europeans who would choose to immigrate to the American colonies.” By the time independence was won and patriots were busy erecting the basic structures of government, they were well aware of the contradictions between slavery and the ideals they were advocating. James Madison spoke for many frustrated patriots when he scrawled in his notebook while sweltering through the summer of constitution-writing in 1787, “Where slavery exists, the republican theory becomes … fallacious.”
Eighteenth-century Americans were also aware of the routine violence required to keep masses of people in bondage, and understood that it fed the fires of rebellion. In 1772, Lord Dunmore, governor of Virginia, forwarded to London a draft law passed by the House of Burgesses that attempted to impose prohibitive duties on the importation of enslaved people. Dunmore noted that the rising black population was requiring extraordinary efforts to keep a restive people in chains. Only by “unremitted observance of their conduct, a rigorous exertion of the Laws relating to them, and the most examplary punishment of all the refractory (a lamentable necessity for a Country to be under) they might so far Suceed as ever to prevent any insurrection from being Contrived among them.” White Americans had come to fear black people less for what they thought those people naturally were (this would come a generation later) than for what white people’s own actions had made of them — enemies. Either way, it was slavery that had brought and grown a presence in their midst that they could never trust or put out of mind.
These 18th-century ways of looking at slavery were accompanied by 18th-century views about black freedom, which, from the perspective of these white Americans, promised not the solution to their problems but rather their compounding. For them, slaves may have been a constant threat to white American communities, but free black people were potential rebels unleashed or even fifth-columnists aiding a foreign power. In rural New England, where enslaved people were rare by the time of the Revolution, few white Yankees could imagine extending equal political rights to free black men. Instead they “warned out” free black families from their towns, forcing them to migrate to the anonymity of larger cities. Even liberal Massachusetts, in the same year the U.S. Constitution was drafted, passed a law prohibiting any “African or Negroe” from entering the state and becoming a permanent resident unless they could present a certificate of citizenship issued by the secretary of State of which he was a citizen, a practical impossibility for even a free person of color.
Here was the patriots’ dilemma. They generally agreed that slavery stood in conflict with their shiny new revolutionary values and interests, but believed they could not end slavery without threatening them even more. This is why most 18th-century opponents of slavery also advocated some form of black banishment. Jefferson reworked Virginia’s legal code to steadily decrease the new state’s black population by making deportation a punishment for a long list of crimes. He floated various ideas to ship the remainder beyond the wild frontiers of the nation’s western borders. Madison was not shy to tell anyone who would listen that, as he wrote in an 1819 letter, “the freed blacks ought to be permanently removed beyond the region occupied by … a white population.” Eighteenth-century Northerners had an easier time designing laws to keep their states white — they merely had to agree to send any “escaped” slaves back to their home states, which they eagerly did at the first opportunity.
Patriotic dreams of a republican America, condemnations of slavery, and a desire to whiten the nation by expelling blacks were not separate ideas but rather different facets of the same mindset spied from different angles. All of these were manifestations of a complex of values, identities, and aspirations that informed the meaning of such key concepts as “independence,” “slavery,” “citizenship” and “liberty.” Some of the elements of this cultural complex were most powerfully formulated by those who first raised their voices in objection to slavery. Others were shaped and sharpened in the propaganda skirmishes provoked by each twist and turn of British policy. But by the eve of the war for independence, the idea that a free and republican American needed to be rid of both slavery and black people was rising toward its peak currency.
White Americans from that time forward fought not between conceptions of slavery and liberty, but over how to control or eliminate the black presence from white society. Because of the relatively small numbers of African Americans north of the Chesapeake, 18th-century Northerners could avoid this dilemma by expelling black people and prohibiting their immigration. They crafted emancipation policies that pushed freed people beyond their borders and left those that remained under strict surveillance and discipline. Many Southerners enjoyed no such advantages and felt forced to defend slavery as the best means of containment of the black threat, as outright banishment would either prove too expensive or compromise their dreams of a continental empire. Americans in positions of power in both regions, then, agreed that the descendants of Africans (and native peoples) had no place in this newly independent nation, other than as slaves or wards of white patrons.
Historical interpretations framing the founders as abolitionists have deep roots — as do those arguing the opposite. Proponents of the idea that Enlightenment philosophy propelled American institutions towards abolition can be traced at least back to Andrew Dickson White’s 1862 Atlantic Monthly essay, “Jefferson and Slavery.” At the same time, pro-slavery ideologues south of the Chesapeake proclaimed that the Confederacy upheld the original intentions of the founders. While this divide was papered over for a time during the early Cold War, as scholars closed ranks around a liberal consensus that largely ignored the history of African Americans, it was riven again by the cultural upheaval of the 1960s.
As civil rights campaigners, black power intellectuals, Second Wave feminists, and New Left radicals challenged comfortable verities of national character by unearthing buried voices, an old guard led by historians Bernard Bailyn, Edmund S. Morgan, and Winthrop Jordan revived the theory that the founders embodied antislavery values. Each of these scholars grounded their arguments in slightly different ways: Morgan focused on in puritan values, Jordan on natural rights philosophy, and Bailyn on the Declaration of Independence. Since then, the question of the founders’ motives has remained a catalyst for fierce academic debate about perspective, priorities, and memory.
Our impasse is a competition among heroes: Hamilton’s antislavery reputation has been bolstered by his ascent to Broadway, while that of Washington and Jefferson have tarnished as the stories of Sally Hemmings and Ona Judge have moved from the antiquarian to the mainstream. Timeworn debates over the role of slavery in the making of the Constitution have been refreshed with greater appreciation of how imperial rivalries over the Western frontier shaped the compromises made in Philadelphia, while at the same time Madison’s defenders have found new meaning in his refusal to recognize “property in man.” Historians’ interest in early abolitionists such as Warner Mifflin, Benjamin Lay, and Anthony Benezet, and in probing the limitations of emancipation, has never been greater.
Some attempts at synthesis have been made. Most notably, Robert G. Parkinson has bridged the patriots’ love of liberty and their reluctant embrace of slavery by tracing how the necessities of fighting a war with the world’s greatest empire and the welding of 13 diverse colonies into a confederation were leveraged by racist appeals to white unity. But Parkinson’s approach is ultimately incomplete because it fails to recognize much earlier precedents, or to explain why certain patterns of rhetoric, thought, and behavior continued once the revolutionary battle had been won.
In the end, we can’t easily embrace the founders as unsuccessful abolitionists, as conservatives may wish, nor can we simply paint them as architects of the slave nation America would become in the 19th century. They were neither ahead nor behind their time, but solidly of it. Such a recognition might us today with an unsatisfying lack of heroes and villains, but what it does give us is an abundance of real people who viewed their world through a foggy lens of race they themselves had fashioned.