Are the concessions made by the Founding Fathers morally reprehensible?

Great Debates
1

I’m going to try my best not to poison the well and make sure to keep a pretty open mind, but the thoughts of the new Steve McQueen movie, “12 Years a Slave”, haunt my actions today.

I just watched the movie last night and I keep feeling worse and worse about the feeling that the Founding Fathers allowed the amoral, inhuman practice of human slavery continue under their watch. I know they were conflicted about their feelings about the institution and if they tackled slavery at such an early period in the nation’s history, it might spell disaster for the nation…but still…

I don’t know. I just want to open the floor for the conversation.

2

On balance, no. If there’d been no compromise, the result would be no United States. Slaves in slave-states would still be enslaved, just under a different federal regime. The option to prohibit importation of slaves after 1808 would not exist, meaning there’d be more slaves, and each would be worth less and thus more expendible.

Nitpick: “immoral”, not “amoral”.

3

It was morally very problematic. Washington and Jefferson (and many others) were certainly hypocrites to talk about the rights of freedom and liberty while still owning slaves.

But most people, back then, supported and did many morally problematic things. A small number rose above it to some extent, and that was commendable. From my understanding, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams strongly opposed slavery later in their lives. It’s worth discussing if they did everything they could to oppose it.

Basically, through most of human history, most people did and supported monstrous things. Only in the very recent history has human rights even been a subject of discussion. And it shows how important education and the general feelings of society are to human rights- I have little doubt that if Jefferson and Washington were raised today, they would not be racists at all.

4

I can understand what you’re saying and that’s what I tried to already mention in the OP…but if you realize the horrors of slavery and want to get rid of it, if you want to strive towards a democratic ideal where all men truly are equal, isn’t it morally reprehensible to still profit from slavery’s maintenance on your own plantation?

5

Of course it was reprehensible. But what can we do about it now, even though we agree with that judgment? Didn’t Abraham Lincoln think the Civil War was a judgment on the country–the whole country–for allowing slavery to exist? The bloody war was fought & slavery ended.

Of course, civil rights–not just for the descendants of those slaves–is an ongoing cause. Better to move forward than to waste time heaping abuse on the dead. Especially if we’re doing so just to feel smug about our modern perfection…

6

Certainly, the Founding Fathers who personally owned slaves have no excuse for that conduct. I was referring only to the political compromises, items in the Constitution that protected slavery. The political compromise is defensible, in my view, since there was no alternative in which all slaves would have been freed. The personal choice to own slaves was not defensible, even if some were freed by some Founding Fathers.

7

I’m not saying that we should feel smug in our modern (im)perfection, but lets not sit here and forget a large, large portion of the population still feels that these Founding Fathers are the cornerstone of morality in the United States. It’s important to consider the internal fights and struggles the Founding Fathers had when the supreme, basic law of the United States is often a very strict interpretation of words they wrote back when the Constitution was ratified.

Plus, you can still make the argument that they did the best for their time.

8

History is made by people, and people tend to have huge blind spots where it comes to their own failings. I am certain that Washington and Jefferson considered themselves to be good and responsible slave-owners, who treated their chattel with all the respect they could.

This makes a person wonder what future generations will find “morally reprehensible” that we see as business as usual today.

9

I have a tiny worry that this will be killing animals for food and other uses. But it’s not a big enough worry to prevent me from enjoying that wonderful, wonderful beef.

10

I don’t think you can make that argument for Washington and Jefferson, at least. Franklin and Adams did better.

11

John & Abigail Adams were pretty anti-slavery even then at the founding of the country. Franklin was already sympathetic to ending slavery but considered it secondary to freeing the colonies. He had to practically sit on Adams at times to get things done to forge the new nation.

Jefferson was a severe hypocrite. He freed only a few of his slaves.

By his death Washington had freed most of his salves and in his will every one of his slaves were to be freed when Martha pass away. Which was quite enlightened for the time for a large slave holder. He also kept slavery out of several new territories.

If I am not mistaken, Franklin had slaves early in his life, never more than a few but he was a slave holder. Around 1787 Ben Franklin became the President of the largest abolitionist group in the US. It was largely just him lending his name and prestige to the group but it was very important.

The Adams family really stood out as extremely principled in so many ways. They not only never owned slaves but employed free-man African Americans at fair wages for the time. Samuel Adams, John’s cousin, from what I recall, received a slave as a gift/inheritance and freed her immediately. If I recall correctly, an excellent act by one of our founders.

Most of the Founding Fathers that were Quakers were against slavery as I recall.

Thomas Paine, John Jay and Alexander Hamilton were all non-slave holders (by 1775 at least) that I believe all were in favor of discontinuing the practice but AFAIK all but Freedom from King George above Freeing the slaves.

12

Yes, it was immoral. Both because slavery is as evil as you get, and because of the massively destructive long term effects their kicking the problem down the road would have.

Not tackling the issue led to a bigger disaster: the Civil War, and the lingering effects of slavery and the war that linger to this day. They just let the problem get bigger and nastier and more intractable.

13

IIRC, at the time the Constitution was ratified, many people thought slavery would die out of its own accord, or could be phased out once the Constitution was ratified and the country was running smoothly. Then Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, which made slave-labor-based cotton plantations far more practical and profitable and gave the whole institution of slavery a new lease on life.

14

Practically, though, could they have created the United States while abolishing slavery? As I noted above, a slave held in a proto-CSA of slave states is actually worse off than one in the historical U.S., because there’d be no end to slave importation.

15

I have battled with this one since childhood. It is hard for me to see the founding fathers as evil yet it would be hard to deny the evil nature of slavery, they had to be aware it was immoral. My grandmother who was born in the south not too many years fater the civil war gave me some comprehension of how they may have viewed it. In my grandmothers mind she was not a racist, yet she felt blacks were of a different human species. She was adamant against blacks intermarrying with whites but was very much against predjudice in the work place or even racist type conversations if they reaked of hatred or disdain. Yet she was clearly a racist herself.

16

Say the Constitution was not ratified and America split into slave and free countries. Slaves escaping from the slave holding one might flee into the free one, but are you sure there wouldn’t have been a war about this anyway?

What this question demonstrates is that the founders were people doing the best they could given their environment, and not demigods writing perfect laws that some today seem to think they were.

17

Seems unlikely. The number of slaves escaping to the north would have been a relatively small trickle, and there’s no guarantee that the north would accept them.

Far more likely would be at least one war over western expansion. Probably more than one, particularly once they find gold in California.

18

You cannot change the world if you cannot let a man be between worlds. Would slavery had ended at all had some not bridged the gap between those for and those against slavery? Would it have, as mentioned above, made the US not form at all? Would it have been the US north and the CS south long before the Civil War?

For those of you saying that it led to the Civil War: Yes. But tensions over slavery ran hot in the post-revolutionary days, too. Wouldn’t it have been worse had the civil war been fought immediately after the Revolutionary War? It’s not like something was left simmering until it erupted into war. The war could have as easily erupted right after the Revolutionary War as it did during the Civil War.

The modern-day ideal of never being a hypocrite is nonsensical to who we are as human beings. All of us are hypocritical. All of us. And it usually happens as we change. One day you go “Gays are EVIL!” and stick up anti-Gay banners. The next day you go “They aren’t really.” Instant hypocrisy. But what’s better? Changing, even if slowly, for the better, or staying static in what is “bad”?

19

That’s not what hypocrisy means.

20

But who is “they”?

This is the problem with counterfactual, “what if?” history—it has to take into account too many variables.

Had the United States as we know it not come together, and had there been two separate nations (slave and free soil) instead, we can’t really know how the historical developments that we now call “westward expansion” would have played out.

Would Spain still have retroceded Louisiana to the French, if they weren’t worried about dealing with a single, expansionist United States? If they did, would the French have sold it to the free soil American nation, or to the slave American nation, or to no-one at all?

Would either the free soil nation or the slave nation have been as expansionist as the United States was in the era of James Polk? If they were, would either one have been belligerent enough and powerful enough to prod Mexico into a war, and defeat Mexico in order to take over the lands that Mexico ceded to the US under the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo? What would have happened in the tug-of-war over the Oregon Territory? Would there still have been a “Fifty-four forty or fight” campaign, in either American nation?

And all this doesn’t even take into account other questions of international relations. How, for example, would the two new nations have interacted with Britain? Would the emergence of King Cotton as an economic force in the slave region have led to an alliance with Britain, which purchased cotton for its textile mills? And would that alliance have led to hostilities or war with the free soil nation, with Britain taking the side of the slave nation? It’s pretty certain that the War of 1812 would not have happened, or at least not as we understand it.

Remember, too, that the north-south split was not as pronounced in 1789 as it would become later. The census of 1790 counted over 20,000 slaves in New York, over 10,000 in New Jersey, almost 3,000 in Connecticut, and almost 4,000 in Pennsylvania. The only state with no slaves at all was Massachusetts (Maine, counted separately in the census, was part of Massachusetts).

The gradual abolition clauses in states like New York reflected revolutionary-era concerns about the sanctity of property, and however immoral we find the idea of property in human beings, this was a live and important issues for the people of the time. Jefferson, in the section entitled “Manners” in his Notes on the State of Virginia, expressed the hope that emancipation would come, and that it would come with the agreement of slaveowners themselves.

I teach United States history to college students, and while i understand the inclination to make clear-cut moral judgments about historical figures like the framers of the Constitution, i think it’s historically more productive to understand them and their decisions, rather than simply debating whether or not those decisions were “morally reprehensible.”

In a similar vein, i think that asking “Was Abraham Lincoln a racist?” is an unproductive historical question. In my classes, we deal with Lincoln’s attitudes to racial differences, and to free soil and slavery, and other questions related to his policies before and during the Civil War. Those are all important issues, and are worth understanding. But questions like “Was Lincoln a racist?” obscure far more than they illuminate, in my opinion.