The comments on this article suggest that people today don’t understand what History is all about.
My reading of Jefferson and slavery goes kind of like this. Jefferson was a slaveholding landowner, born into the institution as a member of the gentry of Virginia. His wealth was tied up primarily in slaves, land, and his home. The wealth he had was generated primarily by his slaves.
Jefferson, a man of the Enlightenment, knew that slavery was wrong. The fact that he knew it pervades his writings on the subject. His statement that “all men [were] created equal” in the Declaration was furiously argued by other Southern gentry who claimed that Jefferson was out to destroy their “peculiar institution” — even as Jefferson himself had resolved to free his own slaves at his death. (The man was an idealist, but he wasn’t stupid; the movie 1776 contains the delicious line attributed to Edward Randolph, that for Jefferson to free his slaves would be the ruination of his personal economy. Which was why Jefferson, perhaps paradoxically to some, kept his slaves. He knew that Monticello would have been bankrupt within the year otherwise.)
As President, he did not argue the Constitutional end of the slave trade in 1808. Not that there was much he could have done to enforce it (what Navy would he have sent? He wasn’t a Navy man by any stretch of the imagination, as he would prove to the nation’s detriment in his second term), but by that time the British had come out against the slave trade as well, enacting their Slave Trade Act in 1807 and creating the West Africa Squadron the next year to enforce that Act, as any reader of the Aubrey-Maturin series is fully aware.
In the end, he did not in fact free all of his slaves; the bulk of them appear to have been sold off to satisfy his creditors. Jefferson, like many of the Virginia gentry, was pretty much perpetually in debt, as I suggested above when I explained where his wealth was tied up.
But the bottom line kind of goes like this. It is ridiculous to judge Jefferson based on 21st Century ethics and morality. To truly understand the man, we must observe him in his 18th and 19th Century milleu, during a time when many both North and South did in fact believe that black slaves were property and saw nothing wrong with enslaving them. The commenters on the article at Volokh want to play a game of alternate history wherein the Declaration of Independence should have abolished slavery at the outset. Unfortunately for them, the key players in the drama that was the Declaration were not about to permit such a thing to happen; anyone who researches the Founders is going to be forced to the conclusion that the document was a massive compromise, foreshadowing the next eighty years of compromise between North and South regarding the extension of slavery into the new territories and states.
If we are going to play games with alternate history, consider an alternate history where the Declaration fails to be adopted and British control of North America continues after a short rebellion is put down. Does William Wilberforce still stand up in Parliament and force through his Slave Trade Act in 1807? Does the Royal Navy start its actions against slave traders in 1808? How does that then affect the “triangular trade” from New England of “Molasses to Rum to Slaves”?
My guess is that slavery as an institution in the South is done and gone by the 1870’s or 1880’s at the latest, regardless of whether or not Jefferson pens those immortal words and whether or not they are adopted. In point of fact I believe that would have been the case even without the Civil War to hurry things along. That tends to jibe with the Cliometricians’ view of the slave economy and how it wasn’t sustainable once the Industrial Revolution truly took hold. The cotton gin and other modern farming tools and methods would have obsoleted the slave within less than a generation.
To claim that Jefferson was an evil man or a hypocrite because he didn’t free all of his slaves at the moment the Declaration of Independence was signed is to not understand how closely the institution of slavery was bound up into the economies of the Southern states at that time. Whether he was fooling himself or not isn’t the issue. You must walk in the man’s shoes in order to understand his seeming ambivalence on the issue. And very few if any of the progressives who would undermine the ideals of the Declaration and the Constitution by trying to interpret Jefferson and the other Founders and Framers with a 21st Century “sensibility” are willing to walk in those shoes.
Likewise there are those who fail to understand the Constitution’s counting of slaves as “partials”. The ignorant believe the South did not want to count the slaves and compromised at the 3/5 person figure. In reality it was the Northern states who wanted slaves not counted at all, fearing the South would exert too much control in the House of Representatives. The Northern sates were not against slavery, they were against counting slaves as people.
Most of the “west” (Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin) were dead set against freeing the slaves at the time of the Civil War. A few Illinois regiments went home after the Emancipation Proclamation. The laborers and small farmers feared the influx of “cheap labor” that would follow the freeing of the slaves. The abolition movement was largely confined to the Northeast.
We don’t teach history in school anymore. We teach the Ken Burns version. Hell, Kentucky voted overwhelmingly to remain in the Union, and as many of 1/3 of North Carolinians were Unionists. They elected a pro Union Governor in 1862!
http://homepages.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~ncuv/kinston1.htm
You reminded me of another point I was going to make. The first commenter to the Volokh article states, “[T]he fall of slavery … was only possible because of the courage of thousands of slaves and ex-slaves who took up arms against their masters during the Civil War….”
And I call bullshit on that romantic idiocy. First of all, there weren’t that many slaves who took up arms against their masters. Indeed, quite a few of them stuck around the farm and rather stunned Union troops during the invasions by telling them they thought they’d just as well stay with the Massa. Slaves also served as Confederate janissaries in many cases. (That same page also offers support of my first statement in this paragraph: “Noted Civil War historian/Author William C. Davis writes about the forgotten black Confederates: ‘One of the lost chapters of Civil War history has been the passive and even active support that many southern blacks, free and slave, gave to the Confederacy. “Forgotten Confederates” illuminates the overlooked facet of this seemingly contradictory behavior by a group of African Americans who appear to have thought of themselves as Southerners first and blacks second. Neither Confederate history, nor black studies, can afford to ignore it.'”)
Second, the war was won ultimately because the Union pressed the issue to the point that the South simply collapsed. As we both know, it was because Lincoln finally found the General who could do the arithmetic. As long as Grant had more troops and more potential reinforcements than did Lee, the end of the war was pretty much foreordained.
There’s also that famous Lincoln quote from the letter he sent to Horace Greeley in 1862:
“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. . . . I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.”
Will the progs be calling Lincoln a hypocrite, next? His thinking seems to parallel that of Jefferson, if you ask me…
There is a great deal of scholarly work that indicates the Emancipation Proclamation was more a gambit to force Britain’s hand and keep her out of the war. There is no way any European country could afford to publically support the CS after Lincoln freed the slaves (and only in belligerent states BTW).
I think Lincoln’s position was very similar to Jefferson’s.
As to the comment about slaves winning the war — like I said, we now teach Ken Burns history. Look at the battle for Fort Wagoner depicted in “Glory”. The filmmakers neglect to point out there were several Union attacks before the 54th Mass. made their assault. Lots of white soldiers died before the 54th even made an attempt.
The comments to the original article are truly ignorant. It is a reflection of the state of historicla learning tha tgoes on in today’s schools. You said it clearly in your post.
Like it or not, slaves were the tractors and combines of the day. They were a tremendous investment. Expecting a slaveholder to give up his “property”was unthinkable, it would have ruined a great number of people financially. It would be the same as expecting a business owner to give away his machinery, or a farmer his farm equipment.
I know we are talking about humans, but you canno tunderestimate the econimic side of the question. You are right when you state the advances in technology and the industrial revolution would have ended slavery on its own. A machine is chaeper to operate than a slave. despite Uncle Tom’s cabin, mos tslave owners fed and clothed their investments. Again, we have to leave the human side out of it.