IGNORANCE AND SLAVERY
The most important claim in the left’s critique of the American experience is that that experience was illegitimate from the outset because of slavery.
That so many Americans believe this tells us a great deal about our loss of historical knowledge and perspective (along with our ignorance about the practice of slavery here and elsewhere).
Slavery was not “original” to America, or even the Americas. It was practiced in the vast majority of societies around the world throughout time, including before 1776 (or 1619) by indigenous tribes in both North and South America. Many of the slave traders were Africans or Muslims and the practice continued in Africa, the Middle East and many other places long after it was abolished here.
The only thing that was different about slavery in America was that we were the only society to proclaim a set of political principles that directly contradicted it (leaving us vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy in a way others weren’t). It was only because American society was founded upon the principles of freedom and equality that slavery became so much more controversial and shameful here than elsewhere.
Slavery in one form or another was generally practiced without apology or qualms of conscience in other places because in no other places could be found anything resembling our experiment in self-government, equality and freedom.
Those who condemn the founders for not abolishing slavery when they had the opportunity also fail to realize that no such opportunity existed in 1787. The delegates from the Southern states would have adamantly resisted any effort to eradicate the practice at the constitutional convention, and if abolition had somehow made its way into the resulting Constitution, there wouldn’t have been the necessary votes for its ratification.
Had there been no Constitution, the Articles of Confederation would have remained in place, with a vastly greater deference to state authority that would have made it easier rather than more difficult to sustain slavery in the Southern states.
The founders were thus, in Abraham Lincoln’s words, forced to reluctantly tolerate slavery “out of necessity” because it was the price paid in return for the ratification of the document which would later contain a formal mechanism (the 13th Amendment) for its eventual abolition.
That some of the founders were slave owners and that the practice tragically persisted in America well into the next century (and necessitated the bloodiest war in our history to finally eradicate) doesn’t contradict the fact that establishing the concept of the free society wherein citizens enjoy unalienable rights was the single greatest contribution that they made to humanity, one that had barely existed, even in theory, before them.
Ideas indeed have consequences, and the most powerful political ideas in the history of human experience came out of 1776, and the most important of those was that freedom and all forms of servitude are incompatible.
We are thus left with the question of which is more important in our historical scale of moral assessments: that some of the founders were slave-owners or that the founding set in train a great historical process that led to the abolition of slavery itself.
When we tear down statues of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and James Madison because of their personal failings, as judged by the standards of our times rather than theirs, we only serve to undermine the legacy of democracy, equality and freedom they bequeathed us and which has proved so crucial to the spread of human rights (and the eradication of evils such as slavery).
And if we reject the liberal values of the American founding, what, precisely, do we replace them with?
Bradley R. Gitz lives and teaches in Batesville, Ark.