Confederate "Heritage" Month 2009, April 13: The "diffusionist" theory of ending slavery

James Madison: hoped that diffusion of the institution of slavery would lead to its abolition

Lacy Ford in "Reconfiguring the Old South: 'Solving' the Problem of Slavery, 1787–1838" The Journal of American History June 2008 gives a good description of the "diffusionist" theory of how slavery could end, an understanding that contributed to the seeming paradox that anti-slavery whites could also be very anti-black at the same time:

As policy ideas, diffusion and colonization gained new salience after the closing of the foreign slave trade in 1808 and remained at the core of the thinking of upper South whites interested in reducing the influence of slavery on the region until well into the 1830s and beyond.

Many upper South politicians had long advocated "diffusion," the idea that as slavery expanded geographically the institution weakened because it was spread more thinly across a larger area. Diffusionists advanced the seemingly anomalous argument that while slavery remained an evil, its consequences proved less deleterious when it was allowed to expand (and hence was diluted) and more harmful when it was confined (and hence was concentrated). The diffusion argument appeared as early as the 1798 congressional debate over the expansion of slavery into the Mississippi Territory. At that time, the Virginian John Nicholas, who termed slavery a "misfortune," argued against excluding slavery from the southwest territory on the grounds that allowing slavery to expand westward would "spread the blacks over a larger space, so that in time it might be safe to carry into effect the plan which certain philanthropists have so much at heart [emancipation]." Nicholas's fellow Virginian and Jeffersonian William Branch Giles agreed that diffusion diluted the evils of slavery. Many of slavery's harsher aspects, Giles contended, resulted from slaves being "crowded together" in only a few states. Thus Giles concluded that diffusion of the slave population across space would yield an "amelioration" in the overall condition of slaves by "spreading them over a large surface of country." John Breckinridge of Kentucky echoed these sentiments a few years later in discussions of slavery in the Louisiana territory. "I wish our negroes were scattered more equally not only through the United States but through our territories," the Bluegrass State senator observed. Breckinridge worried that "our slaves at the South will produce another St. Domingo," and he argued that diffusion would "disperse and weaken the race - free the southern states from a part of its black population, and of its danger." Another persuasive argument for diffusion emanated from Louisiana itself in 1804, where Sheriff Lewis Kerr of New Orleans opposed the territory's involvement in the foreign slave trade because "a considerable share" of slaves imported would come "from the french islands" and "consist principally of such negroes as cannot be retained there with safety to their owners or the public peace." Participation in the domestic slave trade, however, would allow white Louisianians "to draw off the slaves now in the eastern states, and thereby at least extenuate the general evil" of slavery while providing Louisiana with "a race of servants already acquainted with our habits and attached to our country." In such arguments, proponents of diffusion openly conceded the perennial threat of insurrection but seized on proposals to spread the slave population over a larger area as a way to reduce the danger.

This notion proved to be an illusion. The mainstream political fight over slavery actually shaped up as a battle to prevent the spread of slavery. This notion of diffusion was based in large part on the experience of Northern states that abolished slavery voluntarily. As slaveowners and their human property moved South and as the white population increased through normal growth and by immigration, the proportion of slaves and blacks decreased in the population. As the institution "diffused", it seemed to gradually disappear.

The case for beneficent diffusion, however, gained its greatest prominence when Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and other leading Virginia politicians endorsed the idea during the Missouri crisis of 1820–1821. Two Virginia congressmen, Philip P. Barbour and the future president John Tyler, spoke energetically on behalf of diffusion during the Missouri debates. Barbour argued that the "condition of slaves would be greatly improved by their being spread over a greater surface" because diminishing the density of the slave population lessened fears of insurrection and encouraged slaveholders to adopt less draconian regimens of slave control. Tyler agreed that diffusion not only enriched slave sellers but also served to "ameliorate the condition of the black man." From retirement, Jefferson declared that the "diffusion" of slaves "over a greater surface would make them individually happier." The former president argued that diffusion would "proportionally facilitate the accomplishment of their [slaves'] emancipation by dividing the burthen on a greater number of coadjutors." In Jefferson's view, the spread of slaves across a broad southern space would promote eventual emancipation by thinning the concentration of slaves and by dispersing the financial sacrifice and social risks involved. Once the foreign slave trade closed in 1808, James Madison agreed with Jefferson that "an uncontrouled dispersion of slaves now in the U.S. was not only best for the nation, but most favorable to slaves, both as to their prospects for emancipation, and as to their condition in the meantime." With the importation of African slaves finally prohibited, Madison reasoned, "a diffusion of those in the Country, tends at once to meliorate the actual condition [of the slaves], and to facilitate their eventual emancipation." As Jefferson and Madison saw it, diffusion left whites in slaveholding areas safer and slaves both better treated and easier to free. [my emphasis]

This also provides important perspective on the disturbance that Jefferson felt over the Missouri Compromise. Abolishing slavery was a key goal for him. But even though he and Madison had been instrumental in having slavery excluded from the Northwest Territory in the previous century, he thought that the Missouri Compromise approach of banning territorial slavery above a certain line and permitting it below was not the most promising approach to securing the eventual abolition of slavery. As Ford puts it:

While public arguments for diffusion focused on how expansion would benefit slaves by improving their treatment, living conditions, and prospects for future emancipation, the policy of diffusion also served the financial interests of the upper South's slaveholders. By encouraging the westward expansion of slavery, diffusion ensured a market for the "surplus" slaves from old tobacco states. It offered upper South slave owners a means of both divesting themselves of expensive and redundant labor and recouping the capital they had invested in slaves. Moreover, by creating additional slaveholding states, the expansion of slavery helped protect, at least for a time, the political clout of slaveholding states in Congress.

Diffusion represented a thoroughly Jeffersonian remedy for the problem of slavery in the early republic. It purchased security for the expansive republican vision of the Jeffersonians at the expense of ideological purity. Just as the movement of the white population into the Louisiana Purchase supposedly nurtured American liberty by expanding possibilities for yeoman independence (not to mention planter acquisitiveness), although acquiring the territory irritated Jefferson's constitutional scruples, diffusion allegedly reduced the danger of insurrection and promoted humane treatment by sending slaves to new territories even as it broadened the geographical reach of an institution Jefferson yearned to banish from the Republic. Through diffusion, slaveholders in the upper South collectively, like the Sage of Monticello individually, could advocate the eventual end of slavery while insisting that any steps toward that end, however tentative, be taken under the direction of slaveholders, almost entirely in their self-interest, and at their preferred pace.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2009, slavery, thomas jefferson