Founding Brothers (16 page)

Finally, the census of 1790 provided unmistakable evidence that those
antislavery advocates who believed that the future was on their side were
deluding themselves. For the total slave population was now approaching
700,000, up from about 500,000 in the year of the Declaration of Independence.
Despite the temporary end of the slave trade during the war, and despite the
steady march of abolition in the North, the slave population in the South was
growing exponentially at the same exploding rate as the American population as
a whole, which meant it was doubling every twenty to twenty-five years. Given
the political realities that defined the parameters of any comprehensive
program for emancipation—namely, compensation for owners, relocation of
freed slaves, and implementation over a sufficient time span to permit economic
and social adjustments—the larger the enslaved population grew, the more
financially and politically impractical any emancipation scheme became. (One
interpretation of the Deep South’s argument of 1790 was that, at least
from their perspective, the numbers already made such a decision impossible.)
The census of 1790 revealed that the window of opportunity to end slavery was
not opening, but closing. For not only were the numbers becoming wholly
unmanageable, but the further one got from 1776, the lower the revolutionary
fires burned and the less imperative the logic of the revolutionary ideology
seemed. What one historian has called “the perishability of revolutionary
time” meant that the political will to act was also racing against the
clock. In effect, the fading revolutionary ideology and the growing racial
demography were converging to close off the political options. With all the
advantage of hindsight, a persuasive case can be made that the Quaker
petitioners were calling for decisive action against slavery at the last
possible moment, if indeed there was such a moment, when gradual emancipation
had any meaningful prospect for success.
³⁶

T
HE CHIEF
strength of the proslavery
argument that emerged from the Deep South delegation in the congressional
debate of March 16–17 was its relentless focus on the impractical
dimensions of all plans for abolition. In effect, their arguments exposed the
two major weaknesses of the antislavery side: First, those ardent ideologues
who believed that slavery would die a natural death after the Revolution were
naïve utopians proven wrong by the stubborn realities reflected in the
census of 1790; second, the gradual emancipation plans implemented in the
northern states were inoperative models for the nation as a whole, because the
northern states contained only about 10 percent of the slave population; for
all those states from Maryland south, the cost of compensation and the
logistical difficulties attendant upon the relocation of the freed slaves were
simply insurmountable; the numbers, quite simply, did not work.

How
correct were these conclusions? From a strictly historical perspective, we can
never know the answer to that question. Since no one from the North or the
Upper South rose to answer the delegation from the Deep South, and since no
national plan for gradual emancipation ever came before the Congress for
serious consideration, we are left with a great silence, which itself becomes
the principal piece of historical evidence to interpret. And the two
overlapping interpretations that then present themselves with irresistible
logic are quite clear: First, the arguments of the Deep South were unanswerable
because there was sufficient truth in the fatalistic diagnosis to persuade
other members of the House that the slavery problem was intractable; and
second, whatever shred of possibility still existed to take concerted action
against slavery was overwhelmed by the secessionist threat from South Carolina
and Georgia, since there could be no national solution to the slavery problem
if there were no nation at hand to implement a solution. Perhaps, as some
historians have argued, South Carolina and Georgia were bluffing. But the most
salient historical fact cannot be avoided: No one stepped forward to call their
bluff.

Though we might wish otherwise, the history of what might have
been is usually not really history at all, mixing together as it does the messy
tangle of past experience with the clairvoyant certainty of our present
preferences. That said, even though no formal proposal for a gradual
emancipation program came before the Congress in 1790, all the elements for
such a program were present in the debates. Moreover, in March of 1790, while
the congressional debate was raging, a prominent Virginian by the name of
Fernando Fairfax drafted a “Plan for Liberating the Negroes within the
United States,” which was subsequently published in Philadelphia the
following December. Fairfax’s plan fleshed out the sketchy outline that
Jefferson had provided in
Notes on the State of Virginia
. Another
Virginian, St. George Tucker, developed an even fuller version of the same
scheme six years later. In short, the historical record itself, and not just
our own omniscient imaginations, provides the requisite evidence from which we
can reconstruct the response to the proslavery argument. In so doing, we are
not just engaging in wishful thinking, are not attempting to rewrite history
along more attractive lines, but rather trying to assess the historical
viability of a national emancipation policy in 1790. What chance, if any,
existed at that propitious moment to put slavery on the road to
extinction?
³⁷

All the
plans for gradual emancipation assumed that slavery was a moral and economic
problem that demanded a political solution. All also assumed that the solution
needed to combine speed and slowness, meaning that the plan needed to be put
into action quickly, before the burgeoning slave population rendered it
irrelevant, but implemented gradually, so the costs could be absorbed more
easily. Everyone advocating gradual emancipation also made two additional
assumptions: First, that slave owners would be compensated, the funds coming
from some combination of a national tax and from revenues generated by the sale
of western lands; second, that the bulk of the freed slaves would be
transported elsewhere, the Fairfax plan favoring an American colony in Africa
on the British model of Sierra Leone, others proposing what might be called a
“homelands” location in some unspecified region of the American
West, and still others preferring a Caribbean destination.

As we have
seen, the projected cost of compensation was a potent argument against gradual
emancipation, and the argument has been echoed in most scholarly treatments of
the topic ever since. Estimates vary according to the anticipated price for
each freed slave, which ranges between one hundred and two hundred dollars. The
higher figure produces a total cost of about $140 million to emancipate the
entire slave population in 1790. Since the federal budget that year was less
than $7 million, the critics seem to be right when they conclude that the costs
were not just daunting but also prohibitively expensive. The more one thought
about such numbers, in effect, the more one realized that further thought was
futile. There is some evidence that reasoning of just this sort was going on in
Jefferson’s mind at this time, changing him from an advocate of
emancipation to a silent and fatalistic procrastinator.
³⁸

The flaw in
such reasoning, however, would have been obvious to any accountant or
investment banker with a modicum of Hamiltonian wisdom. For the chief virtue of
a gradual approach was to extend the cost of compensation over several decades
so that the full bill never landed at one time or even on one generation. In
the scheme that St. George Tucker proposed, for example, purchases and payments
would continue for the next century, delaying the arrival of complete
emancipation, to be sure, but significantly reducing the impact of the current
costs by spreading them into the distant future. The salient question in 1790
was not the total cost but, with an amortized debt, the initial cost of
capitalizing a national fund (often called a “sinking fund”) for
such purposes. The total debt inherited from the states and the federal
government in 1790 was $77.1 million. A reasonable estimate of the additional
costs for capitalizing a gradual emancipation program would have increased the
national debt to about $125 million. While daunting, these numbers were not
fiscally impossible. And they became more palatable when folded into a total
debt package produced by a war for independence.
³⁹

The other
major impediment, equally daunting as the compensation problem at first glance,
even more so upon reflection, was the relocation of the freed slaves.
Historians have not studied the feasibility of this feature as much as the
compensation issue, preferring instead to focus on the racial prejudices that
required its inclusion, apparently fearing that their very analysis of the
problem might be construed as an endorsement of the racist and segregationist
attitudes prevalent at the time. Two unpalatable but undeniable historical
facts must be faced: First, that no emancipation plan without this feature
stood the slightest chance of success; and second, that no model of a genuinely
biracial society existed anywhere in the world at that time, nor had any
existed in recorded history.
⁴⁰

The gradual
emancipation schemes adopted in the northern states never needed to face this
question squarely, because the black population there remained relatively
small. South of the Potomac was a different matter altogether, since
approximately 90 percent of the total black population resided there. Any
national plan for gradual emancipation needed to transform this racial
demography by relocating at least a significant portion of that population
elsewhere. But where? The subsequent failure of the American Colonization
Society and the combination of logistical and economic difficulties in the
colony of Liberia exposed the impracticality of any mass migration back to
Africa. The more viable option was transportation to the unsettled lands of the
American West, along the lines of the Indian removal program adopted over forty
years later. In 1790, however, despite the presumptive dreams of a continental
empire, the Louisiana Purchase remained in the future and the vast
trans-Mississippi region continued under Spanish ownership. While the creation
of several black “homelands” or districts east of the Mississippi
was not beyond contemplation—it was mentioned in private correspondence
by a handful of antislavery advocates—it was just as difficult to
envision then as it is difficult to digest now.
⁴¹

More than
the question of compensation, then, the relocation problem was perilously close
to insoluble. To top it all off, and add yet another layer of armament to the
institution of slavery, any comprehensive plan for gradual emancipation could
only be launched at the national level under the auspices of a federal
government fully empowered to act on behalf of the long-term interests of the
nation as a whole. Much like Hamilton’s financial plan, any effective
emancipation initiative conjured up fears of the much-dreaded
“consolidation” that the Virginians, more than anyone else, found
so threatening. (Indeed, for at least some of the Virginians, the deepest dread
and greatest threat was that federal power would be used in precisely this
way.) All the constitutional arguments against the excessive exercise of
government power at the federal level then kicked in to make any effort to
shape public policy more problematic.

Any attempt to take decisive
action against slavery in 1790, given all these considerations, confronted
great, perhaps impossible, odds. The prospects for success were remote at best.
But then the prospects for victory against the most powerful army and navy in
the world had been remote in 1776, as had the likelihood that thirteen separate
and sovereign states would create a unified republican government in 1787.
Great leadership had emerged in each previous instance to transform the
improbable into the inevitable. Ending slavery was a challenge on the same
gigantic scale as these earlier achievements. Whether even a heroic level of
leadership stood any chance was uncertain because—and here was the
cruelest irony—the effort to make the Revolution truly complete seemed
diametrically opposed to remaining a united nation.

O
NE PERSON
stepped forward to answer the challenge,
unquestionably the oldest, probably the wisest, member of the revolutionary
generation. (In point of fact, he was actually a member of the preceding
generation, the grandfather among the fathers.) Benjamin Franklin was very old
and very ill in March of 1790. He had been a fixture on the American scene for
so long and had outlived so many contemporaries—he had once traded
anecdotes with Cotton Mather and was a contemporary of Jonathan
Edwards—that reports of his imminent departure lacked credibility; his
last act seemed destined to go on forever; he was an American immortal. If a
twentieth-century photographer had managed to commandeer a time machine and
travel back to record the historic scenes in the revolutionary era, Franklin
would have been present in almost every picture: in Philadelphia during the
Continental Congress and the signing of the Declaration of Independence; in
Paris to draft the wartime treaty with France and then almost single-handedly
(assist to John Adams) conclude the peace treaty with Great Britain; in
Philadelphia again for the Constitutional Convention and the signing of the
Constitution. Even without the benefit of photography, Franklin’s
image—with its bemused smile, its bespectacled but twinkling eyes, its
ever-bald head framed by gray hair flowing down to his shoulders—was more
famous and familiar to the world than the face of any other American of the
age.