The current year is the 400th anniversary of the first documented arrival of Africans in Virginia. British colonists had purchased human lives a year before the Pilgrims arrived. The New York Times dates the founding of the United States to the Africans’ arrival.
Attributing American progress to forced labor is an apology, well-deserved, to the ancestors of African Americans whose contribution to the growth of the republic was overlooked by historians of an earlier time. It is also a cudgel against the traditional claims that the hard work, grit, determination, and bootstrap tugging performed by the nation’s European settlers were the keys to the republic’s achievements.
Slavery did not begin in Virginia nor did it begin in 1619. It is an ancient institution. If the achievements of a slaveholding society are held to be the fruits of labor stolen from persons held in servitude, that charge should not be restricted to the United States nor can it be limited to the period beginning in 1619. If the founding is dated to 1619 to buttress the claim that the enormous prosperity and progress achieved by the American republic should be credited to the individuals who were forced to provide their labor to the American enterprise, that judgment should be assessed against all slaveholding societies.
If slavery is the key to prosperity, then more slaves mean more wealth. It should follow that the relative prosperity of the other slave-importing nations in the Americas can be measured by the number of enslaved persons they held. During the period when Africa exported some ten million human beings to work without compensation in the western hemisphere, about 45% of those individuals went to Brazil. Another 45% went to the Caribbean. Some 5% were carried to Spanish colonies in North and South America. The remaining 5%, not quite 500,000 individuals, were taken to what is now the United States.
Cuba and Brazil each held far more persons in slavery than did the United States. Why did the United States become more prosperous than Brazil and the Caribbean nations?
Let’s not forget that this miserable commerce flowed in two directions. What about the nations of north Africa? Millions of Europeans were captured and held in slavery along the “Barbary Coast” into the 19th century. What do Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya have to show for the vast numbers of persons that were held as slaves in those countries?
Roman civilization lasted more than a millennium. Slaves may have constituted more than a third of the Roman population at times. Are Roman achievements in law, administration, architecture, construction, and literature to be attributed to the slaves who contributed massive amounts of labor without compensation? Athens relied on slave labor. So did China, the Caliphate, and the Moghuls. Shall we date their founding to the first arrival of enslaved persons? Shall we credit their achievements to the work of those unfortunates held in slavery?
Why is the claim that progress is the result of the forced labor of slaves aimed particularly at the United States? The charge stings only because the United States was founded on principles that are antithetical to slaveholding, racism, and racial or ethnic superiority. A nation based on racism and white supremacy would laugh at the accusation. We take the accusation seriously, even if we reject it, because it is a challenge to our founding principles. Those principles were published in 1776, the true year of the American founding.
Dating the American founding to 1619 lays the charge that slavery, subjugation, racism, and white supremacy are at the heart of the American enterprise. If you think the charge is fair, how do you account for the behavior of the English colonies at the moment when they declared their independence from Great Britain? Why did they base their declaration on the principle of universal human equality, contradicting the validity of the institution that the 1619 memorialists say is at the heart of the founding?
There are two easy answers, neither of them credible. One is that the framers were imprecise. They intended the inspiring statements in the Declaration to apply to the English subjects of the British crown living in the American colonies – or, slightly more generously, to the white residents of those colonies — but their meaning was misinterpreted by soft-hearted descendants who were mistaken when they thought that the words “all men are created equal” applied to all persons. [1] Careful drafting would have avoided the misunderstanding.
This view was adopted in the 1850s by numerous Democratic party politicians, Stephen A. Douglas prominent among them. It underlies the Dred Scott decision. It informs Howard Zinn’s critical view of American history. It fits the outlook of the 1619 memorialists. If the 1776 drafters were white supremacists, they could hardly have believed that the persons they held to involuntary service were their equals in natural rights. On this view, the only way to make sense of the Declaration is to believe that if the individuals who adopted it had thought longer about how the content of the Declaration could later be misinterpreted, they would have written it differently.
The problem with this interpretation, a fatal defect that Abraham Lincoln pointed out in his debates with Stephen A. Douglas, is that there is no record of anyone of any political persuasion holding this view prior to the middle 1850s. No commentary at the time the Declaration was issued supports the view, nor does anything in the decades that followed until slavery’s defenders found the words of the Declaration inconvenient. Until the 1850s, the widely adopted position among both the defenders of slavery and its critics was that the institution was an evil that was foisted on the colonies by Britain. As the idea developed in the 1850s in some quarters that slavery was a “positive good” – but, as Lincoln noted, a good thing that no one seems to want the good of for himself – the Declaration, still held in reverence by the populace, was a stumbling block. The position that the Declaration applies to some people only was manufactured to assist in a political debate. When the claim arises from time to time, as it is doing now, it is in service to winning an argument. It isn’t based in fact.
The second answer is that the founders were hypocrites. If they really believed what they published on July 4, 1776, why did they not act on their belief and abolish slavery? About a decade later, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant codified his “categorical imperative”: “Act only according that maxim which you can at the same time will to be a universal law.” Viewed that way, the American colonists were play-acting, preening before the mirror of history with no intention to carry into action the principles they stated so blithely in their Declaration. They did not act on the maxim they pretended to adopt. The conclusion must be that they didn’t believe in the maxim in the first place. They meant what they said, but they didn’t believe it.
Abraham Lincoln’s rejoinder was that the accusation of hypocrisy “comes to nothing at all”. The principle of the equal natural rights of all persons is not a categorical imperative but rather the “standard maxim of free society”. It is the ultimate goal and purpose of government, to be advanced and, we can hope, ultimately achieved in the fullness of time. “They meant simply to declare the right so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.”
Think of the damage that has been done by individuals devoted to Kant’s Categorical Imperative when they gain power. German National Socialists rolled trains full of human beings into death camps. International Socialists in the Soviet Union, China, eastern Europe, southeast Asia, Cuba and the rest are responsible for some one hundred million deaths in the 20th century. All of them were acting to universalize the principle that motivated them, to act on the maxim – the elevation of a master race, the dictatorship of the world’s workers, take your pick, or add a different one – that they willed to make a universal law.
It doesn’t seem so bad, in contrast, to declare a self-evident truth that you plan to actualize and implement as circumstances allow. Nevertheless, a republic founded on the principle that all humans are equal in their inalienable natural rights held slaves. Many of the 56 members of the congress that issued the Declaration owned slaves. Indeed, the author of the instrument, the clearest and most elegant statement ever written on the subject of human equality, himself owned slaves. There is no getting around this central dilemma. Dating the founding to the first arrival of enslaved persons doesn’t do anything to confront it.
Harry Jaffa treats the Declaration as a syllogism. Its major premise – that all humans are equal in their natural rights – has a corollary: a government is legitimate only insofar as it protects the equal natural rights of the governed. The syllogism’s minor premise is the long bill of particulars accusing the British Crown of failing to protect the rights of the colonists. The conclusion is then inevitable. The colonists were not bound to obey the dictates of an illegitimate government and were for that reason free and independent of all allegiance to their former sovereign.
Yet, the major premise is stronger than it needs to be to carry the argument. The colonists would have had an unanswerable case even if they had argued from the weaker proposition that as the subjects of the British Crown, they were entitled to certain historical rights and privileges that adhere to all of their fellow-subjects, not by nature, but by virtue of the unique history that produced the British Constitution and established the rights of subjects of the British Crown.
There was precedent for a declaration based on the more modest premise. When some of the Dutch provinces declared their independence of the Spanish crown in 1581, they justified their action on the basis that the sovereign’s obligation was to protect his people and govern them to protect their “ancient customs and privileges”. They held that the right to replace a sovereign who governed as a tyrant derived from the “law of nature” but they did not claim that the rights that the sovereign was bound to protect were themselves derived from nature. It appears that members of the Continental Congress that adopted the Declaration – including the document’s author – were familiar with the Dutch precedent. Yet, the American Congress took the additional step nearly 200 years later to found a republic on the wider and deeper principle that a government is legitimate only if it governs with the consent of the governed for the purpose of protecting and preserving their natural rights.
Why would a Congress populated with intelligent men, well-read, with full knowledge of ancient and modern history, publish a document proclaiming to the world a principle that they were not observing in practice and that, if they truly were white supremacists, they didn’t believe? After all, the world was not holding its breath waiting for someone somewhere to proclaim that all persons are equal. The survival of the United States was going to depend on an alliance with the French monarchy, whose support was not contingent upon the new republic’s declaration of a revolutionary principle. There was nothing to be gained diplomatically by stating it. Nor would a society based on racism and white supremacy have bothered with that kind of justification for its actions. Nor would their descendants have volunteered in the hundreds of thousands in the 1860s to fight a war that ended slavery. Nor would they have gathered in Washington in 1963 to listen to Martin Luther King restate the principles of the Declaration, nor would they have provided a prominent place in the national pantheon to honor the author of that restatement, nor enacted legislation to reverse racial discrimination.
The parsimonious explanation is that the Declaration meant and means what it says, that the founding of the American republic dates to 1776 because that was when the founding principles were enshrined for all time. Surely Abraham Lincoln was right when he interpreted American history as the working out over a vast territory and hundreds of years as the attempt to actualize the standard maxim of free society. A year before he entered the contest for the presidency he wrote:
All honor to Jefferson–to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.
Those harbingers have re-appeared, holding the 1619 banner as they advance. The plan is to march the 1619 program into the American educational system, to remove the stumbling blocks by undermining them. Our founding propositions are being tested again. I think the undermining effort will fail eventually. I think Lincoln was right – the principle of the equal rights of all individuals will in time prove to be a rebuke to this attempt to replace it. But it’s always a close, near-run thing.
[1] I know that the word “men” is a show-stopper for some people. If it had that effect on you, I will point out for what it may be worth that at the time the Declaration was written and for more than 200 years afterward, the word “man” was commonly used as a synecdoche for “person” or “human” in the same way that “horse” “dog” or “bee” can refer to a member of the species without regard to sex.
The Passing Scene 