The Black History of the White House (8 page)

Worried that the Articles of Confederation were proving inadequate to the task of unifying the new nation, in 1787 James Madison and other reformers called together a Constitutional Convention to amend the Articles. Instead, the fifty-five white men who gathered ended up replacing the Articles with the document that has served as the fundamental instrument defining U.S. federalism, its branches of government, its principles, and the relationship between the federal government and the states.

Under the Articles, the thirteen states functioned as independent entities with only a modicum of authority and respect vested in a central government. Inefficiency and dysfunctionality had led to a growing number of uprisings and class conflicts, most notably Shays' Rebellion—an armed uprising of Revolutionary War veterans, indebted farmers and others who rebelled against high taxes (“rates”), foreclosures, and their loss of their land and livestock. The rebellion started in western Massachusetts on August 29, 1786, and began to spread throughout the state. After months of escalating confrontation, the revolt was finally suppressed in early 1787 by an army funded by a group of men from Boston. In the end, more than 1,000 people were arrested, some of whom were later executed.
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Shays' Rebellion sent a powerful message to the wealthy that a stronger national government was needed to hold the country together and protect their interests.
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The U.S. Constitution put meat on the skeleton of America's infant democracy. It identified and clarified the responsibilities of the different branches of government and their relationship to the states. It made concrete the principles of balance of power and separation of power, both necessary for a system of checks and balances. It (eventually) spelled out a set of rights that few other nations in the world at that time had even considered. It advocated the rule of law and a justice system that would be fair and transparent. It expressed itself as a social contract between the governing and the governed, a principle that would mark democracies in the centuries that would follow. More than any other document, it sought to proclaim to the United States and the world that a genuine new nation was being born in which they would govern themselves by truly democratic principles.

Unfortunately, as with the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution blatantly neglected to erase the scar of racism from the face of American democracy. Written by wealthy white men, the new Constitution guaranteed them rights it denied to women, enslaved people, and the country's original inhabitants, the indigenous communities. The language of ambiguity would once again triumph as concessions to slaveholders won the day in three key sections of the Constitution. The document reduced blacks, for the purpose of allocating congressional representation, to less than full personhood (Article 1, Section 2); sanctioned the slave trade for another twenty years (Article 1, Section 9); and nationalized slavery with the fugitive slave provision (Article 4, Section 2)—all without once mentioning the words “slave” or “slavery.” As the critic Luther Martin noted at the time, “They anxiously sought to avoid the admission of expressions which might be odious in the ears of Americans, although they were
willing to admit into their system those things which the expressions signified.”
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Beyond the well-known sections mentioned above, in at least six other sections of the Constitution slavery is protected or referenced. In two other sections, Article 1, Section 8 and Article 4, Section 4, the Constitution asserts the responsibility of the federal government to assist the states in the suppression of “insurrections” and “domestic violence.” While these clauses could be interpreted to address class-based uprisings such as that led by Shays and others in Massachusetts only months before the Constitutional Convention, the framers clearly had race-based slave revolts in mind, if not as the central focus. Article 1, Section 2, and Article 1, Section 9, also referred to the apportionment of taxes that took into account the enslaved population. Finally, Article 5 states that Article 1, Section 9, Clauses 1 and 4, referring to the slave trade and direct taxes respectively, were made unamendable.
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As Richard Beeman states in
Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution
, his brilliant treatise tracing the debates and arguments that ultimately produced the Constitution, “There are no moral heroes to be found in the story of slavery and the making of the American Constitution.”
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In the compromise reached over the issue of allocation of representation in Congress, the Convention delegates agreed that each state would have an equal number of Senators—two—in the U.S. Senate and would have proportional representation in the U.S. House of Representatives based on each state's population. Southern states, for obvious reasons, wanted to include those held in slavery as part of their population figure. Northern states strenuously objected, principally to protect their own power, not to challenge the dehumanized status of those enslaved. Northerners contended that, given that blacks were property, the Southerners might as well include their cows and horses.
The debate was vigorous and lasted for days. The compromised reached by the Convention, perhaps unique in the history of such events, was cloaked in evasive language. Article 1, Section 2.3, stated:

Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may include within this Union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other persons.

The phrase “all other persons” referenced the nearly 700,000 blacks who were held in slavery throughout the country. While the section did not exclude “free” blacks from being counted as whole persons, the objective of racial exclusion was unambiguous. Madison, one of the mediators of the debate, argued defensively in Federalist Paper No. 54 that Southern states would be constrained by the dual pressure of wanting high numbers for representation purposes and low numbers for tax purposes.
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He missed the obvious fact that the increased number of representatives gained by the South as a result of the clause would affect decisions on tax policies in ways beneficial to the South.

The impact of this clause was multiple. In the first sense, it perpetuated the disenfranchisement of about 20 percent of the people who resided, worked, died, prayed, and lived in the thirteen colonies at the time. Enslaved blacks and non-taxed Indians—as well as the entire female population and non-property-owning white males—had no electoral or formal political voice in the birthing process of the nation, though all contributed greatly to the revolutionary cause.

Additionally, the three-fifths clause distorted the development of the political system at the national level for decades. The South benefited substantially from this compromise (see Table 1), which resulted in a disproportionately higher number of Southerners in the U.S. House of Representatives. Four states in the North—Connecticut, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Vermont—where the free black population was larger than the enslaved one, gained little. On the other hand, Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia reaped substantial advantage. Since many politicians used their experience serving in the U.S. House of Representatives to go on to become senators, it meant a disparate impact on the U.S. Senate, the chamber that confirms Supreme Court nominees and cabinet positions. Every nomination to and decision by the U.S. Supreme Court prior to the Civil War Court has to be seen in light of this context. Finally, up until the Civil War, the three-fifths clause also allowed for the South to accumulate a greater number of Electoral College votes, a factor in determining who would win control of the White House. Half of the first sixteen presidents came from the South, including Washington, Jefferson, and Madison.

The Constitution also guaranteed that the supply of enslaved individuals would continue after the Revolution. Article 1, Section 9, states:

The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.

Table 1
The South Benefits from the Three-Fifths Clause, 1790 U.S. Census

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States whose free blacks outnumbered those who were enslaved. Source: U.S. Census.

Parsing the language in the Constitution is crucial. Article 1, Section 9, states that Congress shall not prohibit the slave trade prior to 1808, but it does not mandate the abolition of slavery on or after that date. Instead of prohibiting human trafficking, breeding, and ownership, the Article's language in fact gave Southern whites the assurance that there would be nothing in the Constitution to prevent them from perpetuating these practices after 1808.

Despite moves across the colonies to ban or restrain the
slave trade, some Southern delegates to the Convention, in particular South Carolina's Charles Pinckney, argued against any move that would tax either the import or the export of slaves. These delegates were reproved by the aforementioned activist Luther Martin of Maryland, a slaveholder himself, who went on to become one of the most vocal advocates against slavery at the Constitutional Convention and later cofounded the Maryland Society for the Abolition of Slavery. Martin stated that the slave trade “was inconsistent with the principles of the revolution and [it was] dishonorable to the American character to have such a feature in the Constitution.”
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After the Convention, Martin addressed the Maryland legislature as it considered ratification of the Constitution saying, “It must appear to the world absurd and disgraceful, to the last degree, that we should except from the exercise of that power the only branch of commerce which is unjustifiable in its nature, and contrary to the rights of mankind; that on the contrary, we ought to prohibit expressly, in our Constitution, the further importation of slaves.”
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The Convention also used coded language to defend the slave trade in the Constitution. The enslaved are referred to as “such Persons,” and the trade is simply termed “importation.” No amount of word play, however, could hide the hideous fact that the framers of the U.S. Constitution were officially giving white people a free pass to enslave black people for at least another twenty years.

Placing a ban on the slave trade in the Constitution would have been important in spite of the efforts unfolding against the trade in the various states. Its critics argued that state legislative action could easily be reversed should the trade become profitable. Foreseen and unforeseen changes—such as the westward expansion of slavery or the invention of new technologies such as the cotton gin, which might make slavery economically viable
for decades to come—would sweep away state legislative bans overnight.
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Only by prohibiting the slave trade in the Constitution could the nation guarantee that short-term opportunities, even twenty years after the writing of the Constitution, would not override a long-term principle.

The third axis of slavery in the Constitution further nationalized the issue by forcing antislavery Northern states to return escaped slaves. This provision superseded the principle of states' rights that the South had so obsessively pursued. While leaders from the main slaveholding states and their Northern counterparts alike fought hard to place limits on the central government's power, when it came to the issue of slavery, the former sought to exploit the national authority and resources of the federal system as much as possible. If the slaveholding states could have the federal government protect their human property, which unlike their other property could and did escape captivity, then the slavery system was on much sounder footing. As we have seen, Article 4, Section 2, of the Constitution states,

No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, But shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.

Beeman notes sadly that not a single voice of opposition was raised to challenge this provision.
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Given the almost fetish-level priority the Founding Fathers gave to property rights, the return of lost (runaway) property must have seemed a natural right. Article 4, Section 2, was further bolstered by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, which was passed by Congress and signed by
President George Washington, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and the slave-catching profession.
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On to the White House

George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison would go on to become the nation's first four presidents. They represented the generation that came of age in the 1770s and 1780s, a time of rebellion, heady transition, and grand crisis. The past was unsustainable, the present was fluid, and the future unknown. The milieu of independent, property-owning white men generated revolutionary ideas that would forge the thirteen independent colonies into one more or less united nation.