Founding Brothers: Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

In February 1790, two Quaker delegations presented petitions to the House demanding that the federal government immediately abolish the slave trade. Many representatives found this “interruption” ludicrous, refusing to believe the government should take the question of abolition seriously. They dismissed the Quakers as anti-patriotic pacifists. In any case, the Constitution contained a stipulation preventing Congress from restricting the slave trade in any way until 1808. Nevertheless, certain congressmen expressed fears about the Quakers’ demand, suggesting that a desire for the total abolition of slavery would surely follow.

Madison reassured his colleagues, saying that the Quakers’ petition would be reviewed by the committee but only “as a matter of course.” He advised the best thing to do was stay calm and the whole matter would go away, as no congressman would seriously entertain the idea of restricting the slave trade. However, the next day the Pennsylvania Abolition Society sent yet another petition to Congress, this time advocating abolition. The petition argued that slavery violated the values of the American Revolution and challenged the constitutional ban on restricting the slave trade. It was signed by Benjamin Franklin.

Franklin’s support meant that Madison was wrong; the problem would not go away simply by ignoring it. Instead, the House spent four to six hours debating the petitions. Never before had this issue received such treatment on a national level; discussions of how slavery was to be handled usually occurred either in secret or within a firmly local context. Several congressmen insisted that the discussion was paving the way for civil war. Representatives from the Deep South implied that the Constitution prevented slavery from even being discussed in Congress, let alone altered or abolished.

The petitioners suggested that the Constitution limited Congress’ ability to end the slave trade, but not slavery itself. James Jackson of Georgia replied with a long “sermon” filled with religious justifications for slavery. Another Georgia congressman, William Loughton Smith, chimed in with a pro-slavery argument based on economics and white supremacy. He then emphasized that the Constitution forbade Congress from taking action to curtail slavery. Some northern representatives disagreed that the Bible or the Constitution supported slavery, while conceding that slavery could be “tolerated” for the moment because it certainly would eventually be abolished.

Elbridge Gerry, a representative from Massachusetts, expressed sympathy with slaveholders, whom he saw as having inherited the problem of slavery through no fault of their own. He suggested that the government could buy all living slaves, calculating that this would cost 10 million dollars (in reality, it would have cost significantly more). Instead of raising this money through taxes, he suggested it be obtained through the sale of western land.

Virginian representatives were divided on the matter. One warned that the government ought to begin curtailing slavery because if enslaved people knew Congress was refusing any thought of abolition, they would violently rebel. Madison, meanwhile, was adamant that Congress could not act before 1808 but that there was no problem in discussing the issue. In the end, those present voted 43 to 11 to forward the petitions to a committee. Most of the negative votes came from South Carolina and Georgia.

In hindsight, we know that the divide over slavery would not go away, but instead grow so significant that it eventually led to the Civil War. However, those living in 1790 did not know this, and thus based their decisions on the past, trying to figure out what the legacy of the Revolution meant in the context of slavery. The answer tended to change greatly depending on whether one considered 1776 or 1787 to be the most important founding moment in the history of the republic.

In Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration of Independence, he included a paragraph characterizing slavery as a way in which the evil English monarchy corrupted the innocent project of American settlers. This paragraph was deleted, but the final draft of the Declaration, with its profound statements about human equality and rights, arguably indicated that slavery could not last in the new nation. Indeed, the Declaration could be read as “an unambiguous tract for abolition.” During the Revolutionary War, several key figures made efforts to curtail the slave trade and begin freeing enslaved people. However, these gestures ultimately achieved little.

Right after the war, many northern states abolished slavery. Meanwhile, Jefferson laid out a plan in Notes on the State of Virginia for the gradual emancipation of enslaved people in his home state. He also proposed a bill in Congress prohibiting slavery in the western territories, but no one voted in favor of it. At times it seemed like slavery was on the decline, but in fact this was an illusion. Even if slavery contradicted the ideals of the Revolution, it was deeply enmeshed in the realty of America as a nation. Ideas themselves were not enough to fight it.

During the drafting of the Constitution, the problem of slavery became much more pronounced. Madison observed that the most severe division during this process was between slaveholding and non-slaveholding states. Many northerners demanded an immediate end to the slave trade and plan for gradual emancipation, arguing that slavery was evil and incompatible with the principles of the Revolution. Representatives from the Deep South, meanwhile, argued that slavery was essential to the survival of their states. They demanded support for the expansion of the slave trade and assurance that their “property” rights would not be put in jeopardy.

Both sides were somewhat disappointed by the final draft of the Constitution, which neither committed to emancipation nor explicitly supported slavery. The document was noncommittal when it came to slavery in order to ensure that it would be ratified. In July 1787, the Confederation Congress passed an act banning slavery in area north of the Ohio River, a move that, on the one hand, suggested slavery would be forbidden in new states, while also suggesting slavery would be allowed to proliferate in the southwestern territories.

The most significant compromise achieved by the Constitutional Convention, meanwhile, was a bargain in which New Englanders agreed to support the expansion of the slave trade for twenty years in exchange for making the federal regulation of commerce a majority, rather than supermajority (2/3) vote in Congress. Both sides assumed they had “won,” and conflicting opinions remained over whether the end of slavery was inevitable or unimaginable.

Virginia had the largest populations of both enslaved people and free black people in the country. It was the only southern state where there was a significant level of opposition to slavery and desire for emancipation. At the same time, many Virginians also did not want the federal government to have any control over slavery and its future in the state. The reality was that Virginians had intense economic investment in the continuation of slavery. They may have “talked northern,” but they “thought southern.”

On March 8 1790, the committee that had reviewed the petitions was ready to submit their report. Representatives from the Deep South objected to hearing the committee’s report before they even knew what it contained. Two such representatives, Loughton Smith and James Jackson, launched a tirade attacking the Quakers and defending slavery in strikingly explicit terms. Jackson denied that slavery was “a crime,” instead framing it as a “necessary evil.” He read passages from the Bible that sanctioned slavery, as well as quotes from Notes on the State of Virginia in which Jefferson declared that white and black people would not be able to live alongside one another as free citizens due to mutual resentment and hatred.

Jackson stoked fears about interracial marriage and asked where a population of freed black people could be forced to settle, arguing that neither locations in Africa nor the American West were plausible. The next day, Smith spoke for two hours, mostly repeating Jackson’s arguments. It was the first time that the proslavery argument had been explicitly articulated in Congress. Before this, slavery had been treated as the “unmentionable family secret” by the nation’s political leaders.

Another novel factor was the data gathered by the census of 1790, which confirmed that slavery was “flourishing” in the South while steeply declining in the North (with the exception of New York and New Jersey). Meanwhile, the Upper South (Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina) had large populations of both enslaved and free black people. Overall, the number of enslaved people in America was, like the settler population, increasing at a staggering rate. The sheer number of enslaved people meant that gradual emancipation was appearing less and less plausible, and 1790 may have been the last possible moment at which it could have taken place.

The most persuasive element of the proslavery argument was its focus on the practical difficulties of abolition. The threats of secession that came from South Carolina and Georgia convinced many of those who were otherwise sympathetic to abolition that it would tear the nation apart. In 1790, no one actually presented a plan for emancipation to Congress. Those who advocated gradual emancipation generally agreed that slaveholders would have to be compensated and that most of the freed population would have to be deported, either to African, the American West, or the Caribbean.

Because of this, gradual emancipation was thought to be a highly expensive endeavor, wildly exceeding the federal budget. On the other hand, a gradual emancipation scheme could theoretically mean that the costs of abolition was spread out over many years, rather than hitting the country in one go. Gradual emancipation may have been “daunting,” but it was not “fiscally impossible.” Yet the issue of relocation remained. Many historians do not discuss this in depth, instead focusing only on the racist ideology that convinced many at the time that relocation was necessary. Yet Ellis insists that without a relocation plan, no emancipation proposal would have had a chance of being passed.

In 1790, almost 90 percent of the black population of the US lived south of the Potomac. All of the possible resettlement locations (the West, the Caribbean, Africa) were difficult, and thus relocation was actually a bigger roadblock than compensation. It was extremely unlikely that an emancipation plan would have successfully passed in 1790. At the same time, the achievements of 1776 and 1787 seemed unlikely (even impossible) before they occurred. In both cases, extraordinary leadership was able to overcome these unlikely odds. Yet in 1790 such an act of leadership, while it would have properly fulfilled the values of the revolution, would have torn the country apart.

In March 1790, Benjamin Franklin was weak and unwell, though had lived so long that he seemed “immortal.” He had been present at every major event in the founding of the American republic. Franklin was a truly extraordinary person, in some ways akin to a god on earth, with an incredible knack for being in the right place (and on the right side) at the right time. In 1787, Franklin became president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, having decided to dedicate the final years of his life to abolition. (In the past he had owned a few house slaves and had not given much time to antislavery efforts.)

Franklin argued that slavery violated the ideals of the revolution, and wrote a scathing parody of Jackson’s proslavery speech. Some people reacted to Franklin’s arguments by accusing him of having a “senile” moment, while others suggested that Franklin was one of the few voices staying true to revolutionary principles. In hindsight, we can see that Franklin’s support for abolition was prophetic, anticipating the change in public opinion about slavery that would eventually take place. Yet in 1790, he stood out among the Founding Fathers, most of whom personally opposed slavery but failed to actively support abolition.

Madison’s position was representative of many other Virginians. He rejected any explicit proslavery stance and expressed a desire for slavery to end soon. However, he also claimed that he could not fully “embrace” abolition. He called slavery “evil” yet said it would be “improper” to introduce a plan for emancipation in Congress. Essentially, Madison did not have a position on slavery. His most explicit opinion was that the issue should be pushed to the side because it was so controversial and threatening to the republic.

While some northern representatives had initially been sympathetic to the Quaker petition, after a while they began claiming that the whole thing had grown out of control. Many sided with those from the Deep South who argued that the committee’s report should be tabled. However, Congress voted 29 to 25 to accept the report, which consisted of seven resolutions, each of which appeased a different party. While it included vague references to “justice” and “humanity,” overall the report confirmed that Congress was prohibited from curtailing slavery or setting up an emancipation plan until 1808.

Ultimately the report was reduced to only three resolutions, which focused on Congress’ inability to interfere with slavery. Washington expressed his relief, writing to a friend that the slavery issue “has at last [been] put to rest.” This set a precedent used by future proslavery advocates, who would defer to the 1790 decision even after it technically expired in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Perhaps 1790 would already have been too late to institute gradual emancipation. Yet it is beyond question that when Franklin died on April 17, 1790, the possibility of gradual emancipation died with him.