The Black History of the White House (7 page)

On the hot evenings of July, as Thomas Jefferson sat down to pen the words of the document that would truly ignite the Revolutionary War and “dissolve the political bonds” that connected the thirteen rebelling colonies to England, he was surely stressed and perhaps hungry after the long, increasingly hectic and demanding days. As his thoughts swirled over what words to use, he faced two tasks: to mount an argument justifying the armed revolt against King George, and to articulate a vision of a new nation. That vision included a call for participatory democracy, justice, political rights, and full citizenship—all genuinely radical ideas at the time. In the background, careful not to disturb his master's state of concentration, Jefferson's slave Richard quietly brought him his nightly tea. Richard had been born into slavery, and Jefferson brought him along on many of his travels. Perhaps the evening tea is exactly what was needed to facilitate the flow of ideas and words that would become the Declaration of Independence. Perhaps the irony was not lost on either of the two men.
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Jefferson's famous opening to the Declaration reflected the highest aspirations of humanity, without even a hint of racial discord. The principles expressed and the language used to articulate them would resonate for centuries and become appropriated by the French Revolution and, paradoxically, the Vietnamese in their own struggle against French colonialism.
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As noted later, free and enslaved blacks would often quote from the Declaration to advance the antislavery struggle.

Jefferson wrote acutely: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed
by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

His literary skills were put to full use in creating a document that had to satisfy competing concerns (pro-slavery vs. antislavery), competing eras (the present vs. the future), and competing temperaments (deliberative vs. brash). His opening phrase, gendered language notwithstanding, was noncategorical. While it did not explicitly include blacks, neither did it explicitly exclude them. It also differed from Virginia's Declaration of Rights, written just one month earlier, in that Jefferson avoided the word “property” to forestall, unsuccessfully as it turned out, any future effort to rely on it as a justification for slavery.
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In an early draft of the Declaration, Jefferson included a rather long paragraph that is generally interpreted as antislavery. The rejected clause read:

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce; and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by
murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

According to Jefferson, the clause was rejected “in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it.”
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Jefferson also blamed his “northern brethren” who were complicit due to their own economic interests in the slave trade through shipping and other means. However, upon closer examination, the proposed clause actually criticized the slave trade—the capture, transportation, and sale of individuals into a life of enslavement—more so than slavery itself. After the sixteenth century, the latter could and did exist without the former. This was low-hanging fruit given that by 1776 nearly all of the colonies had abandoned, severely curtailed, or constrained the slave trade. Elite opposition to the slave trade was framed by interests that were more economic than moral. Blumrosen and Blumrosen contend that the Virginian's opposition to the slave trade dated back to at least 1772 in part due to a surplus of enslaved people caused by a shift in agriculture as a result of soil depletion from tobacco farming.
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As a consequence, according to historian Gary Wills, excess slaves were being sold for great profit to owners of lands where rice, indigo, and cotton farming were growing.
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Additionally, historian Egerton believes that Jefferson wished “to relieve his new country—and, more profoundly, himself—of the guilt of importing hundreds of thousands of Africans before taking up arms in the cause of liberty” and to blame England, which at the time had not outlawed the slave trade, for forcing otherwise innocent people into the horror of slavery.
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While clearly condemning the “execrable commerce,” it is notable that Jefferson never explicitly calls for the complete and immediate abolition of slavery. In fact, he raises the button-pushing issue of slave revolts (“exciting those very people to rise up in arms”) in order to mobilize wider support for the Declaration. White fear of slave rebellions was widespread in the colonies. It was rooted in the very real experiences of black uprisings and plots dating back to at least 1663 in Gloucester County, Virginia, where a group of black slaves and white servants was caught planning to achieve their freedom by overthrowing their masters. Scores of plots to revolt were organized in the colonies—including New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Jersey—in the period prior to the Revolutionary war.
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In
American Negro Slave Revolts
, Herbert Aptheker describes these revolts in detail, noting that fear of black rebellion was widespread among white enslavers and often spiked into collective panic. An early example of this occurred in South Carolina when it was discovered that fugitive slaves were actively aiding the Yamasee and Lower Creek Indians in their forays against whites in 1727 and 1728.
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Examples would multiply in the 1800s.

From the onset of slavery, rebellion was common and persistent. Blacks resisted being captured, resisted being transported, and resisted being enslaved. The history of slavery is the history of blacks rebelling against the violent nightmare white enslavers imposed upon them. “The first settlement within the present borders of the United States to contain Negro slaves,” writes Aptheker, “was the locale of the first slave revolt.”
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Even prior to the establishment of the thirteen British colonies, in 1526 there was a slave insurrection on what is now the coast of South Carolina in a colony controlled by the Spanish.
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The settlement consisted of approximately 600 people—500 Spanish and 100
black slaves. When disease ravaged the settlement, several slaves rebelled and fled to shelter with the nearby Indians. The 150 European settlers who survived illness abandoned their settlement for Haiti, leaving the “rebel Negroes with their Indian friends—as the first permanent inhabitants, other than Indians, in what was to be the United States.”
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In truth, slaves in America did not need external incitement from England or indigenous communities to rise up and strike for freedom. It was the homegrown horrors and atrocities of the U.S. slave system that generated hundreds of slave rebellions from the beginning of slavery to its very final moment.

In any case, the Declaration of Independence, unlike other documents from the revolutionary period, neither expressly sanctioned slavery nor clearly supported its abolition. A generous interpretation is that while permitting whites to continue to enslave blacks, it also foresaw and implied a slavery-free future. Drafted by the individual who would become the nation's third president, it set the template for the long trail of compromise, contradiction, and domination against which generations of blacks would have to struggle in order to achieve the same rights as the country's white founders.

The symbolic power of the Declaration relative to the presidency is perhaps nowhere more poignantly manifest than in the fact that three of the first five presidents died on the Fourth of July—Thomas Jefferson and John Adams on the fiftieth anniversary of the document in 1826 and James Monroe five years later in 1831.
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But from the historical perspective of blacks alive at that time until slavery's end, the Declaration symbolized the gross inequality of the new nation. Reflecting on the Declaration seventy-six years later, a time when slavery had still not been abolished, Frederick Douglass said, “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to
him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.”
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And to the slaveocracy, writes Aptheker, “the Declaration of Independence became but the mouthings of an irresponsible and dangerous fanatic, a ridiculous and high-sounding concoction of obvious absurdities.”
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The Articles of Confederation

I abhor slavery.
—Henry Laurens, President of the Continental Congress in 1777, during the debate and passage of the Articles of Confederation.
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The first effort to create a governing document that would unite the new states culminated in the Articles of Confederation. Written while Continental Congress members were trying desperately to avoid capture by the British, the document failed to establish the authority needed to administer a functional central government. Its weaknesses would ultimately lead to its demise, but its significance for our discussion is that it continued the pro-slavery tilt that had characterized the debates surrounding the Declaration of Independence. Not only did the Articles of Confederation sanction slavery, but they repudiated the
Somerset
decision and foreshadowed the Fugitive Slave Laws and Article 4, Section 2, of the Constitution, stipulating that the federal government had to provide for the return of blacks who had escaped from their owners.

Congress selected a slaveholding lawyer from Pennsylvania, John Dickinson, to draft the Articles. Only a week after the Declaration of Independence was issued, the rebel Congress began to debate Dickinson's draft. Dickinson conceived of a strong central government that would exercise a great deal of authority over the states. Southern leaders reacted immediately
and negatively. They believed that any document that did not clearly allow for states to continue the institution of slavery was a threat to their future. North Carolina's Thomas Burke argued for a clause stating “that in all things else each state would exercise all the rights and powers of sovereignty, uncontrolled.”
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The debate over the Articles lasted for more than a year. In November 1777, the Congress finally adopted a revised version, which it then sent to the states for ratification. The Southerners perpetuated slavery through two components in the Articles: First, through Article II: “Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled;” and second, through the inclusion of a rule that the Articles could only be amended by unanimous approval by all the states.

While the Articles, up to this point, sheltered the institution of slavery, the document did not address an equally important concern of slaveholders: the phenomenon of slaves freeing themselves by escaping to states where slavery was abolished or only meekly enforced. The
Somerset
nightmare, by which England potentially would free any slave that entered into it, loomed large. This concern was addressed in Article IV, which read as follows:

The better to secure and perpetuate mutual friendship and intercourse among the people of the different States in this Union, the free inhabitants of each of these States, paupers, vagabonds, and fugitives from justice excepted, shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several States . . . and shall enjoy therein all the privileges of trade and commerce, subject to the same duties, impositions,
and restrictions as the inhabitants thereof respectively, provided that such restrictions shall not extend so far as to prevent the removal of property imported into any State, to any other State, of which the owner is an inhabitant; provided also that no imposition, duties or restriction shall be laid by any State, on the property of the United States, or either of them.

In a pattern that would repeat itself for centuries, the South argued vigorously for state sovereignty, with particular interest in preventing other states from manifesting their opposition to white Southerners' racial practices. Thus the debate was never purely a philosophical one of states' rights vs. a strong central authority, but rather an ideological one of support or opposition to a particular type and structure of government that legitimated and enforced chattel slavery. In the final version of the Articles, there was no executive branch and no national judiciary, but a continuing concession to the South as its price for participation in the new nation.

“All Other Persons:” The U.S. Constitution and Racial Justice