Confederate "Heritage" Month 2017, April 22: Missouri Compromise and the "free labor" antislavery narrative

I've referred several times in this month's series of posts to an article by Joshua Michael Zeitz, "The Missouri Compromise Reconsidered: Antislavery Rhetoric and the Emergence of the Free Labor Synthesis" Journal of the Early Republic 20:3 (Autumn 2000) because it gives such a lucid account of the complexity of racial attitudes among whites in America prior to the Civil War. And particularly to the phenomenon described by historians like William Freehling that white opposition to slavery could be and was combined with hostility toward black people.

As Zeitz writes, "Throughout the North, emancipated slaves seemed to confirm the commonly held supposition that African Americans were more often than not a public nuisance and, on occasion, an outright threat. Much of this prejudice stemmed from the public's inability or unwillingness to distinguish between slaves and freemen." Zeitz refers to it as "this increasingly instinctive association in the white mind" between slavery and presence of black people.

Zeitz catalogues in his article a grimly impressive list of discriminatory measures taken by Northerners against free blacks living among them: restrictions; degrading and hostile attitudes; violence, even "ethnic cleansing" in some areas: bans on blacks entering a state.

He places this within the context of Northern opposition to slavery often being combined with hostility to black people, even outright hatred.

He cites a public meeting in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1920 1820, the year of the Missouri Compromise, in which "leading Cincinnati citizens ... openly endorse[d] a doctrine of racial equality." And he describes the other side of Cincinnati racial attitudes:

Nine years later, Cincinnati mobs terrorized the city's black community with such ferocity that a large portion was persuaded to emigrate to Canada. Twelve years after that, the remaining African-American residents were so beleaguered by renewed violence that the men were disarmed and jailed for their own protection. While they waited helplessly behind bars, a white mob swept into black neighborhoods and turned on the women and children. As these episodes suggest, the history of race relations throughout the antebellum Midwest is generally one of recurrent violence.

There's no reason from Zeitz' account to assume that there was any overlap between individuals involved in the two incidents.

But it also illustrates how the real conflict between democracy and slavery kept playing itself out. They couldn't survive together in one country forever.

Zeitz' article also lets us know that what we today call "voter suppression" and related practices did not begin with white opposition to Reconstruction or to the Voting Rights Act of 1965:

New Jersey disenfranchised its black residents in 1807, Connecticut in 1814, Rhode Island in 1822, and Pennsylvania in 1837. In New York blacks were subject to a special property qualification that effectively excluded all but a scant few from the electoral process. According to Eugene Berwanger, African Americans in Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana did not cast their first legal ballots until after the Civil War. By 1840 approximately ninety-three percent of northern free blacks were denied the right to vote. In addition, Leon Litwack has found that "[b]y the 1830s, statute or custom placed Negro children in separate schools in nearly every Northern community." When in 1835 abolitionists reacted in typical fashion to this unfortunate circumstance by establishing an interracial academy in Cannan, New Hampshire, the town responded by literally ripping the building from its foundation and placing it in the village common with the help of a large army of men and oxen.

At the time of the Missouri Compromise, Zeitz sees what is known as the "free labor" narrative as gaining predominance among antislavery advocates, or hegemony, if we prefer to use a fashionable academic term, over the previously dominant abstractly moral narrative:

As white America systematically denied blacks the trappings and status of citizenship - as it came to identify the interests and inclinations of African Americans as antithetical to those of the American nation-antislavery activists found it possible to reconcile their advocacy of emancipation with the dominant protoracist tendencies of the broader culture. It became convenient and even ideologically consistent to isolate slavery, and its past and present victims, as injurious to the new dynamism and liberal social order that defined the antebellum North. If denunciations of the institution's violation of natural and religious law could coexist with a pervasive prejudicial disposition, so too could northerners conceive of their opposition to slavery as benevolent and morally grounded even while they shifted the focus of that opposition to broader social concerns. Slavery and slaves and freed slaves were newly recognized as the cause of southern depravity and impoverishment. In tum, the debate over slavery assumed new dimensions. No longer was the question a "moral" one in the strictest sense of the word. Instead, it became a vital point of contention in a broader struggle for the security of America's economic future and public character.

Not that the moral argument completely went away. But it was undergoing a transformation. In the free labor narrative, the morality stressed became one more oriented to the moral imperative to protect white citizens against the baleful effects of the Peculiar Institution.

Ironically, this version of the antislavery narrative stressing more the self-interests of whites in opposing slavery became a way for defenders of slavery to frame antislavery arguments as cynical political concoctions by Federalists and Northern Republicans. Thus, Zeitz writes, "It is not difficult to understand why commentators and observers from Thomas Jefferson to twentieth-century historians interpreted the northern antislavery forces in 1820 as primarily political and only secondarily inspired by 'moral' concerns."

But he also emphasizes, "Although there can be no doubt that baser political motives lay at the heart of some portion of the 1820 antislavery impulse, to so reduce frequent references to 'slave representation' ignores the legitimate moral indignation felt by so many northerners. It was a resentment with various roots. For some the issue was one of fairness." And democratic convictions played a real role in 1820 and afterwards. "Slavery was an affront to the revolutionary era value system northerners still held dear."

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2017, April 19: Missouri Compromise as a transition point in the pro- and antislavery narratives

Joshua Michael Zeitz in "The Missouri Compromise Reconsidered: Antislavery Rhetoric and the Emergence of the Free Labor Synthesis" Journal of the Early Republic 20:3 (Autumn, 2000) focuses on the Missouri Compromise as an historical marker of a shift in the rhetoric on both sides of the slavery issue:

In many ways, the Compromise of 1820 presents itself as a natural transition point between two very thematically and rhetorically divergent stages in the history of the antislavery movement. Arriving too late for the "Era of Good Feelings" but too early for the "Age of Jackson," the compromise found itself directly situated on the chronological divide between two distinct periods in American history-what historians normally term the "Early Republic" and "Antebellum America," respectively. Because the year 1820 and the Missouri Compromise fall awkwardly between temporal categories, they provide useful insights into the timing and nature of the critical transition between an antislavery language grounded in the culture of eighteenth-century republicanism to one founded on the principles of "free labor, free soil and free men."

Zeitz describes the emerging Free Labor narrative this way:

In the years following the War of 1812, increasingly divergent cultural patterns and disagreement over questions of political economy aroused a dormant sectionalism that had existed since the earliest days of confederation. This development in tum transformed the language and substance of the northern antislavery impulse. Grafted onto the familiar rhetoric of the revolutionary period - the easily identifiable "moral" strain of early abolitionism, as expressed in natural rights and religious terms - the new northern critique of southern society assumed moralistic undertones, even as it sterilized its opposition to human bondage. New focus was given to slavery's impact on the American nation as a whole. If the peculiar institution was objectionable in its violation of human rights, it was also invidious in its cultural consequences. Its victim was as much white America as the black slave. Using the Missouri Compromise debates as a historical lens, this interpretation is at once straightforward and paradoxical, as it portrays a political culture that was still surprisingly sympathetic to the natural and religious rights of black Americans, even as it incrementally placed them outside of its boundaries. [my emphasis]

What he describes here is a reminder that white antislavery advocates were acting from a variety of motives, without abandoning an outlook of white racial superiority. It was not only possible but very frequently the case that whites were antislavery without being anti-racist.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2017, April 18: Two results of the Missouri Compromise

Ethan Kytle's "The Contradiction at the Heart of American Democracy" (Reviews in American History 36:3; Sept 2008) is a review essay on Robert Pierce Forbes' The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath: Slavery and the Meaning of America (2007).

Quoting frequently from Forbes, Kytle emphasizes "that the story of American democracy cannot be told apart from the story of America slavery." Kytle discusses two key results of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which admitted Missouri as a slave state, Maine as a free state and banned slavery north of the 36°
30'parallel line. One risk that antislavery advocates worried about was the Compromise "'evasion' would lead inevitably to the conclusion that 'a free black is not a citizen' (p. 119)."

The latter response was prescient. For, as Forbes argues, the Missouri controversy had two critical legacies. One legacy was that the second compromise contained the seeds of destruction for the key antislavery measure - the 36°30' prohibition line - in the first. By providing a precedent for depriving blacks of citizenship rights, Clay's ambiguously worded bill laid the foundation for the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sanford decision. That decision, in turn, ruled that the 36° 30' prohibition line was unconstitutional.

The second legacy of the Missouri Compromise was convincing many Americans that slavery posed the gravest of dangers to the republic. And, in the decade following the Missouri Compromise, most American politicians took this lesson to heart, studiously avoiding the divisive issue. Thinking the slavery question too explosive, if not completely settled, northerners and southerners found themselves drawn into intersectional coalitions that tend to shock later observers. The People's Party of New York, which was led by James Tallmadge [the Congressman who set off the Missouri crisis by proposing to ban slavery there], for example, backed proslavery leader John C. Calhoun, while Georgian William Crawford received the endorsement of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison.

The latter is another reminder of how the slavery issue mixed into partisan and intra-party conflicts in ways that seem bizarre, especially from today's perspective.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2017, April 16: Antislavery and "diffusion" (2)

This year, we've been looking at the Missouri Compromise of 1820 with particular reference to William Freehling's discussion of it in The Road to Disunion, Vol. 1: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854 (1990).

In both volumes of that work, Freehling gives a great deal of attention to the narratives on both sides of the slavery debate and how they evolved over time. He identifies the Missouri crisis as an important moment in that evolution. The traditional justification of slavery in the US had been a paternalist one, that slavery was lifting backward African peoples up to the level of white, European civilization. This was a view reinforced by Enlightenment assumptions about the superiority of that civilization and of linear historical progress.

The cruelty of the institution and the barbarity of the international slave trade that supplied it were daily and hourly refutations of the notion that it was in any way notable, humane or generous. But that's not to say that some substantial number of whites didn't believe it.

At the time of the Missouri Compromise, Freehling explains that a different proslavery narrative was current, if somewhat geographically confined:

The ensuing southern public debate [of ], mirroring southern congressional speeches, demonstrated a section set against both permanent slavery and outside impositions to end temporary slavery. Only in South Carolina - so often, only in South Carolina - did a southern leader advocate perpetual slavery. United States Senator William Smith, anticipating later proslavery polemics, called slavery universal throughout history, sanctioned by the Bible, honored by the Greeks, needed by infantile blacks, and exalted by the South into a patriarchal relationship between master and slave. "No class of laboring people in any country upon the globe," soared Smith, "are better clothed, better fed, or more cheerful, or labor less" than our indulged serviles.

After 1820, the "South Carolina" explanation became more common and then prominent, particularly in the Lower South states.

But in the Missouri controversy, Southerners faced a shift in the antislavery approach represented in New York Congressman James Tallmadge's proposals, which led them to embrace the "diffusion" argument previously used by opponents of slavery:

... the New Yorker's southern-style remedy [i.e., gradual emancipation] came accompanied with an anti-southern moral attack, an anti-southern bid for power, and the anti-southern idea that outsiders, not insiders, should decide slavery's fate. Tallmadge would furthermore abolish slavery not during the territorial phase of a region's development, as southern nonextensionists bad previously proposed, but during the statehood process. The shift in timing violated southern insistence that each state must decide for itself about slavery.

Southern attack on this Yankee poisoning of southern conceptions came accompanied with a crucial swerve in slaveholder thought. Speaker after southern speaker, in Congress and out, urged that spreading, not containing the institution would best create conditions for terminating bondage. This important so-called diffusion argument was not so much new as newly accepted. Land speculators, when seeking repeal of the Northwest Ordinance's ban on slavery extension, bad urged that diffusing blacks over midwestern areas would dilute southern racial anxieties and thus further racial reform. Most midwestern and southern proponents of the Northwest Ordinance had scoffed at this "liberalism."

But now they were ready to use it as a proslavery argument. One that became more cynical over time.

Gradual emancipation, which Freehling also calls Conditional Termination, was intimately connected with the diffusion argument.
And he explains that it was very much connected with the association of slavery with the presence of blacks: "The Conditional Termination mentality was a vision of getting blacks safely out, of whitening a world, of removing the race to other plains."

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2017, April 15: Antislavery and "diffusion" (1)

Continuing our discussion of William Freehling's discusion of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 with particular reference to William Freehling's discussion of it in The Road to Disunion, Vol. 1: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854 (1990), he gives a good explanation of the "diffusion" argument, which was associated with the antislavery advocates but also was used to argue against Congress restricting the spread of slavery to new states and territories.

The diffusion argument held that spreading slavery to more territories would not only weaken the institution of slavery. But also that such a diffusion was necessary to the eventual abolition of slavery. Spreading slavery is necessary to end it? Freehling asks, "Is posterity supposed to believe that Southerners believed this stuff? That expanding slavery could best end it?! That saving the institution in Missouri could best eliminate it elsewhere?! These propositions the more strain credulity because they functioned so self-servingly. What a wonderful way to feel good about a supposedly evil way to make profits: expand the profits and you will end the evil!"

And he answers, "The diffusion argument, for some Southerners all the time and for all Southerners some of the time, operated as just this kind of noxious sedative." Yet he adds, "But to dismiss diffusion as entirely cynical or self-serving is to miss a revelation of the southern mentality. From posterity's perspective, as from [New York Republican Congressman] James Tallmadge's, stopping slavery from expanding seems the path towards ending it, while allowing slavery to spread seems the trail towards saving the institution."

As Freehling details in that book, the abolition of slavery happened in northern states as the white population grew and the black slave population declined. That not only meant the reduction of the power of slaveowners in relation to competing interests, like white fears of competition from enslaved labor, concerns that slavery would undermine the (white men's) democracy, and even genuine moral and religious opposition to slavery.

Tallmadge in 1819 had offered two amendments to the statehood bill for Missouri to restrict slavery. And his proposals built on the experience of what was known as gradual emancipation in New York, in particular:

In 1817, the congressman had helped secure New York's final emancipation act, freeing all slaves ten years hence. In 1819, the Tallmadge Amendments proposed a more limited abolition, reserved exclusively for slaves thereafter born in Missouri. Tallmadge's proposed age for freeing post-nati[vity] slaves in Missouri, 25, was exactly what New York had enacted in 1799 for post-nati black females (New York post-nati males had been declared freed at 28). In 1819, Missouri had about the same small number of blacks, around 10,000, as did New York. Missouri's relatively low slave percentage, around 16%, was about the same as New York's in the colonial period. The proposed new state of Missouri, not very enslaved or very black or very far south, invited a Yankee attempt to nudge southern apologists away from procrastination.

James Tallmadge proposed Thomas Jefferson's sort of gingerly nudge. No black born before 1820 would be freed. No slave born after the law passed need be freed before 1844, or indeed ever. Nor need a large Missouri free black population ever exist. Black ratios were low, no slave could enter in the future, and blacks could be sold down river before emancipating birthdays, as had been done in Tallmadge's state. [my emphasis]

This is an important point in understanding the antebellum politics of slavery. The disappearance of slavery was associated in real history with a reduction in the relative presence of blacks. And, conversely, the presence of black people was associated with the presence of slavery. There were certainly irrational elements in that sensibility. But political opinions are not always driven by careful analysis of sociological data, to put it mildly. (Not to mention that sociology as such didn't even exist in 1820.)

It's also an important element in debunking neo-Confederate pseudohistory. One of the polemical arguments the pseudohistory makes is that the Civil War couldn't have been about ending slavery, because Yankee whites hated black people, too.

And it's true that most white Yankees had racist attitudes toward blacks, and in many cases it was virulent. That kind of hatred was on open display in violent protest and even murders against Abolitionists, and some Northern riots against free blacks. The most notorious of the latter was the anti-draft riot in New York in 1863 during the Civil War.

The implication of this argument is that white Americans in the antebellum period would only have opposed slavery if most of them embraced something that looked likely the Kennedy-Johnson liberal attitudes on race of the 1960s. That's a logical leap. But far more importantly, in the real history of the United States, hostility to slavery widely coexisted with hostility toward black people. The white Abolitionist John Brown's his egalitarian outlook on the full equality of whites and blacks was more of an outlier in the US of the 1850s than it was representative.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2017, April 13: Slavery vs. democracy (even for whites) in the Missouri crisis

In my last post in this series, I referred to the intriguing but challenging analysis of the evolution of the slavery issue by William Freehling in The Road to Disunion, Vol. 1: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854 (1990) with particular reference to the Missouri crisis of 1819-1820. And I mentioned how the three-fifths clause of the Constitution set up a situation which, over time, became more and more obviously a limitation of democracy for whites. And for the most part, American democracy then was restricted to adult white men. When the more radical democrats talked about defending needs of the common man, they mainly really did mean man.

What we now call the Missouri crisis is understood to have begun when the Missouri Territory, which had been part of the Louisiana Purchase, applied for admission to the Union as a state. New York Republican Congressman James Tallmadge, Jr. (1778–1853) introduced a bill to require the phased elimination of slavery in Missouri as a condition of admission as a state. On February 16 of that year, he declared in Congress (from Annals of Congress):

Sir, ... my purpose is fixed, it is interwoven with my existence, its durability is limited with my life, it is a great and glorious cause, setting bounds to a slavery the most cruel and debasing the world ever witnessed; it is the freedom of man; it is the cause of unredeemed aud unregenerated human beings.

Sir, if a dissolution of the Union must take place, let it be so! If civil war, which gentlemen so much threaten, must come, I can only
say, let it come! My hold on life is probably as frail as that of any man who now hears me; but, while that hold lasts, it shall be devoted to the service of my country - to the freedom of man. If blood is necessary to extinguish any fire which I have assisted to kindle, I can assure gentlemen, while I regret the necessity, I shall not forbear to contribute my mite. Sir, the violence to which gentlemen have resorted on this subject will not move my purpose, nor drive me from my place, I have the fortune and the honor to stand here as the representative of freemen, who possess intelligence to know their rights, who have the spirit to maintain them. Whatever might be my own private sentiments on this subject, standing here as the representative of others, no choice is left me. l know the will of my constituents, and, regardless of consequences, I will avow it; as their representative, I will proclaim their hatred to slavery in every shape; as their representative, here will I hold my stand, until this floor, with the Constitution of my country which supports it, shall sink beneath me. [my emphasis]

Freehling explains the sectional resentment of Yankee critics of slavery in this way:

Another southern state, Yankees argued, meant more illegitimate political power for the South, more slaveholding Presidents, more northern politicians relegated to undeservedly inferior positions. The North was not yet ready to slice the three-fifths clause from an otherwise healthy Constitution. The better remedy earlier seemed to be containment of the disease. James Tallmadge would slowly eliminate a new state's slaves and thus prevent the three-fifths clause from swelling the Slavepower. This proposal showed no concern for blacks. Instead, for the first of many times, Northerners demanded their own liberation from slaveholders' unrepublican rule. [my emphasis]

The view of slavery as a limit to or diminution of (white) democracy combined with the changing understanding of slavery in free and slave states and with the lessons that critics of slavery drew from the experience of abolishing slavery in Northern states to produce a strange result, in which opposition to slavery was often merged with hostility and active hatred toward blacks. Freehling's reference to Tallmadge's proposal "showed no concern for blacks" in his Missouri proposal is probably too harsh a judgment. But it references how the abolitionist viewpoint at that time was heavily influenced by the belief that "diffusion" of the slaves over a broader territory was key to the ultimate abolition of slavery. These are issues we'll examine further in following posts.

Freehling also quotes New York Sen. Rufus King (1755–1827), who had been the Federalist Party's last Presidential candidate in 1816, on the Missouri controversy:

Proponents of Tallmadge's Amendments admitted that they sought only white men's egalitarianism. I have no business with slavery as a social system over blacks, Rufus King declared. I oppose slavery's expansion because it bears upon whites' "great political interests." The three-fifths clause would rob Northerners of all "political power or influence in the Union. The slave region will parcel out the great offices, will determine all questions," and will forever "remain our Masters."

That reference to Southern slaveowners acting as masters to white citizens of the North was an expression of the deep and ultimately irreconcilable contradiction of democracy and republican principles, on the one hand, and slavery, on the other.

And that difference also manifested itself felt in practical politics, both as Federalists vs. Republicans, as North/South differences within the Democratic Party and later as differences within the Whig Party, as well as various factional manifestations along the way. Only with the formation of the Republican Party in 1854 was there a major party committed to antislavery principles. And its position was to contain slavery, as Tallmadge attempted to do with the admission of Missouri, not to abolish it within states where it existed.

Another prominent New York Republican Congressman who co-sponsored the Tallmadge Amendment was John Taylor (1784–1854), who would later become Speaker of the House. William Johnson ("Prelude to the Missouri Compromise" Arkansas Historical Quarterly 2:1 (Spring 1965), described Taylor's approach in an attempt to extend the proposed antislavery provision from the incoming state of Missouri to the Arkansas Territory, as well:

Now, in 1819, along with his colleague Tallmadge and the other restrictionists, Taylor was attempting to exclude the institution of slavery from all United States territory west of the Mississippi, except for Louisiana which had already entered the Union as a Slave State. He had good reason to be confident of success since many of the Southerners conceded that Congress had full constitutional authority to legislate concerning slavery in a Territory, although they insisted that no such right existed in the case of a State. If Taylor could only maintain the Northern majority achieved by the restrictionists in the vote on Missouri, the task would be accomplished.

An admiring biographical article from 1920 gushed, "During the Missouri controversy [Taylor] had had no equal in boldness, persistency, or vigilance." (D. S. Alexander, "John W. Taylor" Quarterly Journal of the New York State Historical Association 1:2; Jan 1920)

Here I want to call particular attention to the fact that slavery had now become a partisan club in conventional politics. Freehling:

Southerners answered that jealous Rufus Kings and James Tallmadges sought the White House, not equality for whites. That cynicism both shrewdly diagnosed and partially ignored northern malaise. Yankees assuredly resented Virginians' power. But Northerners' sorest point was that the Slavepower's unequal ascendency defied the new egalitarian wisdom. If black slaves were allowed to spread, areas of white men's egalitarianism would further shrink: that was the political fire ignited in the North. [my emphasis]

Political motives on major issues are typically overdetermined. The fact that a moral issue became useful in partisan disputes doesn't mean that there is no moral issue involved. That antislavery politicians focused on the cost of slavery to free whites doesn't mean that their attacks on slavery were a matter of indifference to black slaves and their future. Freehling usefully calls attention to the partisan incentives for politicians on both sides of the slavery issue:

Of the 18 Yankees who either voted the South's way [on the Missouri Compromise] or (as helpfully) voted not at all, only one was a Federalist. The 17 northern Republicans who leaned southwards talked publicly of saving the Union. They also feared privately that a Rufus King triumph on Missouri might revitalize the Federalist Party. Their attitudes, partisan and nonpartisan, prefigured the opportunity the minority South would seize again and again to control the North-dominated House of Representatives in pre-Civil War crises. In the Missouri Controversy, as later, the minority South could secure no concessions on slavery from northern nationalists, Federalist or Whig. But appeals to Union and party could attract some saving Yankee states' righters, Jeffersonian or Jacksonian.

In the Missouri Controversy, as later, the South needed only a few Yankee allies because the Slavepower possessed extra House power. The three-fifths clause, the most important reason why the James Tallmadges fought the enslavement of Missouri, ultimately defeated the Tallmadge Amendments. In a House apportioned sheerly on white numbers, the South would have had 17 fewer members in 1820. The Slavepower needed almost all those 17 boosts in power to defeat Tallmadge by three votes. [my emphasis]

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2017, April 12: Missouri Compromise and the three-fifths clause

Returning to William Freehling's 1990 The Road to Disunion, Vol. 1: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854, he explains some critical ways in which the Missouri Compromise marked a new stage in the argument over slavery, a stage that differed notably from previous such controversies. And it framed later controversies over slavery, including the annexation of Texas and Texas statehood, until the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 exploded the Missouri Compromise's pact that slavery would not be allowed in new states above the 36°30' parallel.

One key element of the situation in 1920 was the growing northern concern about the disproportionate representation of slave state whites due to the infamous "three-fifths clause" of the Constitution of 1789. That was part of another famous Compromise. I'll let the reliably stodgy Britannica Online explain, from the article Constitution of the United States (internal links omitted):

The Constitution was the product of political compromise after long and often rancorous debates over issues such as states’ rights, representation, and slavery. Delegates from small and large states disagreed over whether the number of representatives in the new federal legislature should be the same for each state — as was the case under the Articles of Confederation — or different depending on a state’s population. In addition, some delegates from Northern states sought to abolish slavery or, failing that, to make representation dependent on the size of a state’s free population. At the same time, some Southern delegates threatened to abandon the convention if their demands to keep slavery and the slave trade legal and to count slaves for representation purposes were not met. Eventually the framers resolved their disputes by adopting a proposal put forward by the Connecticut delegation. The Great Compromise, as it came to be known, created a bicameral legislature with a Senate, in which all states would be equally represented, and a House of Representatives, in which representation would be apportioned on the basis of a state’s free population plus three-fifths of its slave population. (The inclusion of the slave population was known separately as the three-fifths compromise.) [my emphasis in bold]

This created a bonus number of Congressional Representatives for slave states. As Sanford Levinson comments, "That compromise gave slave-owning states a bonus in the House of Representation and the Electoral College by counting slaves among those 'represented,' even though this was obviously a complete fiction." (Three-Fifths Compromise Was an Understandable Deal on Slavery New York Times 07/01/2015)

As always, it's important to keep in mind the extent as well as the limits of what American democracy was at this time. When the Constitution was written, the Framers were setting up a government for a democracy of white men, whose ability to vote could be and was subject to property requirements if states and localities so decided. Neither black men nor women or Native Americans were considered to eligible to vote by right.

Judith Wellman in The Road to Seneca Falls (2004) notes that New Jersey's 1776 constitution had extended the vote to women and blacks, subject to age and property requirements. "In 1807, however, the legislature used the occasion of widespread fraud in one local election to exclude women from voting. At the same time, they virtually eliminated property qualifications for adult white males." A great example in which an important step of progress (eliminating property qualifications) came joined at the hip with a huge step backward for the rights of women. It's also a reminder that real mischief can be done in the name of combating "voter fraud."

But it was also the case in 1789 that the Constitution envisaged a wider access to male suffrage and democratic control of government than European governments. This Getting the Vote website from the UK National Archives explains suffrage rights in Britain:

In early-19th-century Britain very few people had the right to vote. A survey conducted in 1780 revealed that the electorate in England and Wales consisted of just 214,000 people - less than 3% of the total population of approximately 8 million. In Scotland the electorate was even smaller: in 1831 a mere 4,500 men, out of a population of more than 2.6 million people, were entitled to vote in parliamentary elections. Large industrial cities like Leeds, Birmingham and Manchester did not have a single MP between them, whereas 'rotten boroughs' such as Dunwich in Suffolk (which had a population of 32 in 1831) were still sending two MPs to Westminster. The British electoral system was unrepresentative and outdated.

By 1820, the premium representations the slave states were getting from the three-fifths clause were looking more and more "unrepresentuive and outdated."

The Senate itself was set up to give each state equal representation, which gave power in the Senate to less populated states equal to that of the most populated ones. And still does, for that matter. In 2017, California with its population of 39 million has the same number of Senators as Wyoming has with its 586 thousand. An individual voter's vote in Wyoming counts for a lot more in the Senate than one in California.

Democratic trends in American history have ebbed and flowed. Often at the same time. But the trend toward more democracy and equality was there. And as time went on since the ratification of the Constitution, the slavery bonus in representation from the three-fifths clause was looking less and less democratic to the voters of the free states. Freehling describes the initial arrangement established by the Constitution as "aristocratic Union." He writes, "Both North and South had to give in a little if aristocratic Union was to begin. Hence the resulting compromise, with each white counting as one soul and each slave as three-fifths of a human when apportioning each state's share of House seats."

It would be misleading to think of the ruling elite of 1787 as an aristocracy like those of Europe in the sociological-economic sense. But if we take "aristocratic" as a description of style and attitude, it gives us a useful perspective. Freehling argues that initially, "The three-fifths clause only slightly boosted the Slavepower's power." But he also points out, "If no three-fifths clause had existed and House
apportionment had been based strictly on white numbers, [John] Adams would have likely squeaked by, 63-61" in the Presidential election of 1800. It's understandable that even a "slight" boost that could make the difference in a Presidential election would be cause for concerned by the disadvantaged parties.

But the time, they were a'changin':

The nineteenth-century change from elitist to egalitarian republican sensibilities·best explains why the first mainstream northern assault on the Slavepower came not after the American Revolution but 40 years later, during the transition from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Jackson. The three-fifths clause, which seemed republican according to aristocratic assumptions of the Age of the American Revolution, became anti-republican according to egalitarian assumptions of the Age of the Common Man. In state legislatures, city councils, and national presidential elections, leaders and followers insisted that the people, not the propertied, must rule. "The people" meant adult white males, ruling on a one-citizen, one-vote base. The three-fifths clause, awarding the Slavepower extra representatives for enslaved noncitizens, was the most anti-republican relic of a repudiated political outlook.

As we'll see in later posts, the rising hostility to slavery and the slave power in the free states was not exclusively, or even primarily, a matter of moral concern, though that concern was real for many whites, as well. But as we see in this look at the three-fifths clause, the existence of slavery was diminishing and inhibiting democracy among the white males who were its only full citizens at that time. And the contradiction between slavery and democracy became stronger and more evident as the years went on.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2017, April 11: Missouri crisis as a turning point

I've learned a lot about the evolution of the slavery issue in the US from the work of William Freehling, particularly in his two-volume The Road to Disunion. In the first volume, Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854 (1990), he writes about the Missouri crisis, which he here calls the Missouri Controversy:

According to the current conventional wisdom, the South gave up the attempt to abolish slavery after reformers' first real test. The Missouri Controversy of 1819-20 supposedly annihilated "Jeffersonian antislavery," with Thomas Jefferson himself slaying his offspring. Jefferson's 1820 letter after the Missouri Compromise to Congressman John Holmes is the supposed critical proof that the Sage of Monticello drew close to John C. Calhoun.

Jefferson's Holmes letter does reveal revised tactics. But this and other evidence hardly shows that southern apologists became warriors for slavery's perpetuation. Instead, the Missouri Controversy scared the Jeffersons towards new efforts to remove slaves from America.

I plan to discuss his analysis further in following posts.

But Freehling makes several points critical to understanding how the slavery issue played out in real time. The Missouri crisis was an inflection point in various ways. After that time, the typical justifications of slavery changed from the necessary evil kind of justification favored by Jefferson to the Calhounian defense of slavery as a good thing and the necessary foundation for white republican civilization. It also marked a turning point in which Northern Republicans and the remnants of the Federalist Party embraced emancipation as a partisan club to use against the southern Republicans and the Jacksonian Democrats north and south. And it marked a public outbreak of the real contradictions between democracy and slavery, and between democracy and the economic liberalism of the time. American slavery was a capitalist institution. And the defense of private property in the US of 1820 also meant the defense of private property in human flesh, which is what slavery was.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2017, April 10: Missouri crisis and the fraying of the Jeffersonian coalition

Padraig Riley in Slavery and the Democratic Conscience: Political Life in Jeffersonian America (2016) places the Missouri crisis in the context a developing feeling and political doctrine of antislavery American nationalism:

In the end, the Jeffersonian synthesis between northern freedom and southern power proved resilient in the face of sectional crisis. The Democratic-Republican coalition fractured in the 1820s, but it soon reformed in a new guise under the iconic leadership of Andrew Jackson. The Missouri Crisis indicated the potential influence of antislavery nationalism, but it also confirmed the ongoing political power of slaveholders in the American nation-state. Thus in some respects it was a crisis of meaning as much as a crisis of policy. As northerners and southerners fought over the expansion of slavery and the admission of Missouri, a more obscure conflict took place over the nature of the Jeffersonian coalition, and the legacy of past reconciliations between freedom and slavery. In attempting to articulate a foundational antislavery nationalism, northerners were struggling not only with slaveholders in the American Congress, but also with themselves. [my emphasis]

Riley also talks about how the Missouri crisis and the Compromise that resolved it reflected the fundamental contradiction between democracy and chattel slavery:

Traditionally seen as the opening act in the long antebellum conflict over slavery in the United States, the Missouri Crisis also marked the culmination of sectional conflict over slavery during the Jeffersonian era. For northern Republicans, the Crisis was a referendum on Jeffersonian democracy, as they found themselves confronting, with more clarity than ever before, some of the central dilemmas of their ideological and partisan past. How would they respond to the power of slaveholders in their political coalition, especially when it came to making national-level, democratic decisions about slavery? Would they defend universalist conceptions of citizenship and democracy on behalf of free African Americans or would they continue to draw racial lines around democratic freedom? Would they continue to tolerate southern bondage in defense of their own freedom?

Northern Republicans answered these questions ambivalently, leaving a complicated legacy for the antebellum period. Their resistance to slavery extension foreshadowed the moderate antislavery politics of a very different Republican party in the 1850s. Yet they retained many of the key symbols and concepts of Jeffersonian politics, and they rarely questioned the relationship between slavery and democracy that had allowed southern bondage to expand alongside northern freedom in the early republic. [my emphasis]

Riley also argues that Republicans, including Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, were mistaken in seeing Federalists and the specter of the Hartford Convention in the antislavery arguments over the Missouri crisis. He argues that the impulse came more from northern Republicans who were starting to put a higher priority on the democratic side of their political heritage than on the part that defended slavery. But Jefferson himself didn't seem to have made much distinction between the two. That is, he thought that at least some of the antislavery Republicans were closet Federalist. By the mid-20s, what is sometimes called the second American party system was developing, with sharp differences between the John Quincy Adams National Republicans and the Jacksonian Republicans, who took to calling themselves Democrats, the name the party still uses.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2017, April 9: Andrew Jackson and the Missouri Compromise

I'm out of step with current popular impressions of early US history in that I insist on validating the advancements in democracy and equality while recognizing that retrogression and restrictions on freedom were also taking place at the same time. American democracy in 2017 is vastly more inclusive than that of American democracy in 1820. We also just elected a xenophobic hyper-nationalist loon as President and made his party by far the dominant one at the national and state levels. It's hard to conceive a narrative of continual progress toward greater democracy, freedom and equality that doesn't also recognize that some things get better and some things get worse, and it's a very good thing if there is more of the former than the latter.

The initial Spanish colonists to the New World brought with them a missionary zeal that was simultaneously being expressed in the home country in the expulsion of Jews and the Reconquista of Grenada, along with the massive persecution of Muslims and Jewish converts to Christianity. The first century of Spanish colonization brought the Spanish Inquisition and the zeal of the Counter-Reformation to the Americas. This resulted in a view of the native inhabitants as uncivilized heathens who needed to be converted or exterminated. The germs and viruses that the Europeans brought with them to the New World did more to achieve the latter than military force or religious inquisition. Portuguese, English and French colonists brought similar attitudes (and diseases) to their settlements in the New World. Russia was last to the colonizing game in North America, discovering Alaska and the Aleutians in 1741 and brought their own version of Christian civilization to the native peoples there, with broadly similar results.

The American democracy that emerged from the Revolution was a democracy founded on revolutionary principles that were understandably inspiring to many reformers and advocates of popular government and freedom in other parts of the world. The democratic republic of the United States was also a slaveowning republic and an expansionist nation. The expansion included the expansion of democracy and the expansion of slavery. And it was the expansion of a democracy largely restricted to white men.

With time, the real contradictions among democracy, westward expansion and slavery became increasingly obvious, resulting eventually in the Civil War. The Missouri crisis was a very obvious case in which westward expansion and slavery - more specifically, the struggle over the numerical balance in the Senate between slave and free states - were obviously in conflict. As Robert Remini in Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 1767-1821 (1977), "Andrew Jackson determined the course of American expansion. He was, in fact, the greatest expansionist of them all."

At the time of the Missouri crisis, Jackson was a general during the John Quincy Adams Monroe Administration. He had successfully seized Florida from Spanish control. In the Adams-onís Treaty of 1819, aka the Transcontinental Treaty, Spain agreed to sell Florida to the United States. Remini says Jackson's reacted to the Missouri Compromise "as southerner and slaveowner," concerned about its implications for the Union and for the Peculiar Institution (slavery). He quotes Jackson's undated reaction from that time:

The Misouri [sic] question so called, has agitated the public mind, and that I sincerely regret and never expected, but that now I see, will be the entering wedge to seperate the union. lt is even more wicked, it will excite those who is the subject of discussion to insurrection and masacre [sic]. lt is a question of political ascendency, and power, and the Eastern interests are determined to succeed regardless ofthe consequences, the constitution or our national happiness. They will find the southern and western states equally resolved to support their constitutional rights. I hope I may not live to see the evills [sic] that must grow out of this wicked design of demagogues, who talk about humanity, but whose sole object is self agrandisement regardless of the happiness of the nation.

We see reflected in that statement by Jackson the Republican views to which Jefferson also adhered. There is the fear of slave revolt or post-emancipation black revolution. There is the fear of destabilizing the Union, which Jackson seems to suspect is a continuation of the Federalist secessionist plotting around the Hartford Convention during the War of 1812. And he also views the antislavery agitation as a cynical political move by Federalists and Northern Democrats following in their wake. Remini comments, "As far as Jackson was concerned, 'national happiness' included slavery fdor the south and the west, whether the north liked it or not."

In the Nullification Controversy of 1832 when Jackson was President, he was forced to choose between the interest of democracy and Union, on the one hand, and aggressive defense of slavery, on the other. Jackson chose the country in that dispute.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2017, April 8: Jefferson, the Missouri Compromise and the evolution of the slavery issue

Stuart Leibiger looked at Jefferson's position from retirement in Monticello on the Missouri Compromise of 1820 in "Thomas Jefferson and the Missouri Crisis: An Alternative Interpretation" Journal of the Early Republic 17:1 (1997).

Leibiger's argument about correcting traditional interpretations of Jefferson's distress over events around the Missouri Compromise doesn't strike me as particularly notable, although it strikes me as obviously correct. He argues that he calculated his statements to political effect, which seems pretty obvious to me. He writes, "Dumas Malone's statement that 'there is no reason to believe that he ... tried to have any direct influence on the course of events in the crisis' seems too naive."

But that statement by Dumas, which is from the chapter on the Missouri Compromise in The Sage of Monticello (1981) from which I quoted in the last post in this series. It stuck out to me, because it seems inconsistent with the story Dumas is telling there. So whether Leibiger's argument about the nuances of conventional interpretations is something I'll gladly leave to the professional Jefferson scholars.

But I find Leibiger's concluding judgment to be a very useful perspetive:

Historians long have taken Jefferson's shrill rhetoric on the Missouri Crisis at face value, probably because it was so prophetic; but prophecy was never his intention. Jefferson and others used threats and bullying to coerce a compromise and preserve the Union. The strategy worked in the short term, but in the long run it led to southern proslavery intransigence and finally civil war. From Jefferson's perspective, issuing frightful warnings may have seemed like a sound approach to sectional bickering. During the revolutionary years, southern ultimatums had produced compromises for the Union, most notably at the 1787 Federal Convention. But in the 1820s and 1830s, many Americans began placing other priorities-including the morality of owning slaves - above constitutional unionism. Still unaware of these shifting sentiments, Jefferson employed familiar tactics that had worked in the eighteenth century. The gradual emergence of both "fire-eaters" in the South and abolitionists in the North guaranteed that his approach would backfire as passion and single-issue fanaticism replaced moderation and forbearance. Jefferson's close friend James Madison, who seemed to recognize the decline of Americans' compromising spirit and the rise of confrontational moral imperatives, wisely avoided repeating his predecessor's dire pronouncements. [my emphasis]

The politics of the slavery issue were changing in ways that Jefferson may well have misunderstood. He interpreted the antislavery proposal that initiated the Missouri crisis as a cynical political ploy on the behalf of monarchist-inclined Federalist types.

Politics is politics, so it would be truly remarkable if the antislavery advocates in Congress didn't pay attention to the effect of such proposals on their own political fortunes. But however cynical the individual politician using the issue, the issue wouldn't lend itself to cynical usage if there weren't some support among their public for it.

The institution of slavery and the attitudes of white supremacy were also evolving rapidly. At the beginning of the 19th century, the defenders of slavery typically justified the Peculiar Institution as a civilizing force, lifting the African slaves to a higher level of civilization. This ideology obviously had more than a little cynicism in it, too. William Freehling calls that the "necessary evil" defense of slavery. (The Road to Disunion, Vol. 2: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854-1861; 2007) Over time, that justification of slavery fell out of favor in the Lower South, although it continued to be used more often in the Upper South. The latter approach grew and intensified as slavery began to come under more intense challenge.

The new, activist Abolitionist movement and hardening Southern commitment to slavery were making the gradual abolition process no longer feasible in practice. In retrospect, the Missouri crisis symbolizes that shift in practical possibilities.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2017, April 7: Jefferson and the Missouri Compromise

The Missouri Compromise of 1820, was one of the events that we now recognize as one of the major events leading up to the Civil War. It involved a conflict over the extension of slavery, and pitted the free states against the slave states.

For a quick summary version of the Missouri Compromise, we'll turn again to he 1960 edition of The Beards' New Basic History of the United States by Charles, Mary and William Beard:

Under its power to make "all needful rules and regulations" respecting territory belonging to the United States, could Congress lawfully exclude slavery from such territory? That subject was not mentioned in the document, but it was squarely raised in 1818-20 during a dispute over the admission of Missouri to the Union as a slave state. By that time Northern states bad abolished slavery within their borders, or had provided for gradual abolition, and anti-slavery sentiment was growing insistent in the country.

Opposition to the admission of another slave state was outspoken in Congress and a deadlock occurred on the issue. After many angry words had been uttered, the standstill was broken by a compromise: Missouri was to be admitted with slavery, and the balance of political power maintained by the admission of Maine as a free state. In addition, as a part of the compromise, slavery was to be prohibited in the rest of the Louisiana Territory north of the line 36° 30'.

On the one side it was claimed that Congress bad no authority to prohibit slavery in this territory. On the other, attention was called to the fact that the Northwest Ordinance, adopted in 1787 and ratified by Congress in 1789, had excluded slavery from the Northwest Territory; so it was argued that Congress could lawfully do this under the Constitution.

Jefferson was no longer holding public office in 1820. But he continued to follow public events and communicate with political leaders. And he made a statement that became perhaps the most famous comment on the Missouri Compromise, as we see in this excerpt from the Britannica Online article on it (internal links omitted):

The territory of Missouri first applied for statehood in 1817, and by early 1819 Congress was considering enabling legislation that would authorize Missouri to frame a state constitution. When Rep. James Tallmadge of New York attempted to add an antislavery amendment to that legislation on February 13, 1819, however, there ensued an ugly and rancorous debate over slavery and the government’s right to restrict slavery. ...

Although slavery had been a divisive issue in the United States for decades, never before had sectional antagonism been so overt and threatening as it was in the Missouri crisis. Thomas Jefferson described the fear it evoked as “like a firebell in the night.” Although the compromise measures appeared to settle the slavery-extension issue, John Quincy Adams noted in his diary, “Take it for granted that the present is a mere preamble—a title page to a great, tragic volume.” Sectional conflict would grow to the point of civil war after the Missouri Compromise was repealed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) and was declared unconstitutional in the Dred Scott decision of 1857. [my emphasis]

In 1820, the Union contained 22 states, equally divided between slave and free states. Missouri territory was part of the enormous Louisiana Purchase that Jefferson made from France in 1803. The Missouri Compromise, brokered by House Speaker Henry Clay (1757-1852). As noted above, the agreement involved:

• Admission of Missouri to the Union as a slave state
• Admission of Maine to the Union as a free state, preserving the 50-50 balance among slave and free states and therefore the balance of representation between the two in the US Senate.
• Exclusion of slavery from all parts of the Lousiana Territory north of the parallel 36° 30'

It was the later that particularly disturbed Jefferson, as Jonathan Earle explains by Jonathn Earle in "The Political Origins of the Civil War" OAH Magazine of History 25:2 (2011):

The debates and threats of disunion went to the core issue of the struggle for power in Congress between representatives of the northern and southern states and, related to that, the ability of Congress itself to decide the fate of the territories added to the United States. These were difficult issues to solve, and incidentally ones put off into the future by the founders. This is why the aging Thomas Jefferson confided to a correspondent his fears that the line created by the Compromise would endanger the future of the nation: "this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened me and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union ... a geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated."

There is nothing in that comment of Jefferson's that countenances the legitimacy of secession, for slavery or any other matter. Jefferson's seriousness about his consistent opposition to slavery has been brought into question, largely because his treatment of his own slaves. But he did oppose the institution of slavery as a matter of policy. And if his position on the Missouri Compromise represented any retreat from his antislavery policy position, he managed to keep it well concealed.

Dumas Malone devotes a chapter of the sixth and final volume of his Jefferson biography, The Sage of Monticello (1981) to Jefferson's reaction to the Missouri Compromise. He writes that the Burr conspiracy during Jefferson's Presidential Administration heavily influenced the former President's view of the context of the threat of disunion. In particular, Jefferson worried that the most likely scenario in which the Union would be split would be by secession of western states. Which is what Burr had tried to pull off.

A second important consideration is Jefferson's hostile view of the threat of states seceding was heavily influenced by his experience with the New England Federalist threats to secede in support of Britain in the War of 1812, a threat that was represented by the Hartford Convention of . A very much related consideration for him was that the Federalists still around in 1820 were supporting the effort to ban slavery in Missouri, which touched off the crisis resolved by the Missouri Compromise. In 1821, he wrote (letter to Henry Dearborn 08/17/1821):

I rejoice with you that at length a member of our Union. Whether the question it excited is dead, or only sleepeth, I do not know. I see only that it has given resurrection to the Hartford convention men. They have had the address, by playing on the honest feelings of our former friends, to seduce them from their kindred spirits, and to borrow regaining power under political distinctions, they have adroitly wriggled into its seat under the auspices of morality, and are again in the ascendency from which their sins had hurled them.
[my emphasis]

Jefferson is arguing that that Federalists and their political successors had used the Missouri crisis to recuperate their reputation and take votes from the Jefferson-Madison-Monroe Republicans by using the antislavery issue ("under the auspices of morality"). He clear assumption, emphasized by Malone, was that the concern over slavery expressed by the opponents of the Jeffersonians was political cynicism.

But a third reason was Jefferson shared with most pre-Civil War Abolitionists an unrealistic idea of what emancipation of the slaves would look like. More specifically, Jefferson - and Lincoln prior to the war - supported the program of sending freed slaves to Africa. This approach was never especially attractive to black Abolitionists like Frederick Douglass. Jefferson's assumption, as he expressed in letters around this time, was that if the free states forced emancipation onto the slave states, that it would result in something like a civil war of blacks against whites, with the latter being in deadly danger in that situation.

In this latter sense, Jefferson was taking a proslavery position, in the immediately practical context. He was likely assuming that the emancipation he hoped to see in Virginia and other Southern states would take place in a similar way to what had occurred in the free states of 1820: emancipation enacted by the states in a process which included a relative reduction in the number of black people present. But he also understood that the process he envisioned would require a mass emigration of blacks, which in reality would have had to have been a mass expulsion.

In the same letter in which his famous fireball in the night metaphor appeared, he wrote this (letter to John Holmes, 04/22/1820), "Of one thing I am certain, that as the passage of slaves from one State to another, would not make a slave of a single human being who
would not be so without it, so their diffusion over a greater surface would make them individually happier, and proportionally facilitate the accomplishment of their emancipation, by dividing the burthen [sic] on a greater number of coadjutors." Such a process of "diffusion" was what had occurred in the states which by 1820 had abolished slavery at the state level. It's worth noting here that the issue in the infamous Dred Scott decision in 1857 was whether taking a slave into a free state abolished the slave's legal state of servitude.

In that same letter, he used dignified language to express the terror whites in the slaveowning states feared from slave revolts, as well as from the abolition of slavery in a state in which "dispersion" or some other kind of mass exit of black people:

... there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this heaveymore than I would to relieve us from this heavy reproach [the insitution of slavery], in any practicable way. The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected; and gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be. But as it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation [i.e., of the white population in the slave states] in the other. [my emphasis]

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2009, April 4: Jefferson and the Union (2)

In my previous post in this series, I described the argument historian Brian Steele makes in "Thomas Jefferson, Coercion, and the Limits of Harmonious Union" Journal of Southern History Nov 2008, that Jefferson's attitude toward federal power does not support the Confederate/John C. Calhoun position of state secession or the nature of the federal Union.

What Steele does not do in the article is to explain the political context of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798-99, which are largely what secessionists seized upon to claim Jefferson in support of the theories they used to justify treason and rebellion in defense of their "sacred institutions of slavery and white supremacy".

He does mention near the end of his article:

If we look at Jefferson's political career as a whole, we see a kind of alternation between fear of the potentially negative consequences of centralized power, on the one hand, and a fear of national weakness and dissolution, on the other. During the Revolution, Jefferson joined other Americans in his resistance to arbitrary metropolitan authority. But during the Confederation period, Jefferson (along with many other leading figures) saw the greatest threat to American interests (and ultimately liberty) in the inability of Congress to compel member states to perform their obligations. During the 1790s, however, Jefferson understood the Federalists in charge of the national state to be exercising authority that was unauthorized by the original compact. The correction for this would be a restoration of the proper constitutional role of the state governments. During his presidency and the Republican ascendancy, though, Jefferson saw various threats to majority rule and to the legitimate powers granted to the national state posed by outlying states.

That description of Jefferson's position on the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions is inadequate to the point of being misleading.

The first government under the Constitution took office in 1789 with George Washington as President. Washington was re-elected in 1792 and established the long-standing precedent (now incorporated by Amendment into the Constitution) of Presidents serving no more than two terms by declining to stand for a third term. By the time of the 1796 elections, rudimentary forms of political parties had emerged, with John Adams being the head of the Federalists and Jefferson head of what was known as the Democratic-Republican Party.

The latter organization evolved into today's Democratic Party. But it can get confusing looking at early American history, because Jefferson's party was commonly called the Republican Party until the days of Andrew Jackson's Presidency, when it began to be called the Democratic Party, as it still is today. (It's pretty much only today's grammar-challenged Republicans have ever called it "the Democrat Party".) The Federalist Party more-or-less went out of existence after Madison's first term as President (1809-1813). Today's Republican Party came into existence in 1854.

John Adams' Federalist Party was on the whole more conservative than Adams himself, conservative. But Adams supported what was the first wave of nativist and anti-"radical" hysteria in the new nation's history - sadly, far from the last one. The bogeyman in this case was the French Revolution, which Christianists like Pat Robertson to this day still hold as a key turning point for the worse in world history. Under the pretext of preventing French subversion, the Adams administration persuaded Congress to pass the Alien and Sedition Acts allowing the President to imprison people on the basis of stating or publishing opinions the Federalists deemed to be subversive. In practice, enforcement of the law was directed almost exclusively at Republican (Jeffersonian) critics of the Adams administration, not at actual subversives. Jefferson himself as Secretary of State under the Washington administration had done more to counter actual French subversive actions (in what became known as the XYZ Affair) than the Adams administration ever did.

Jefferson biographer Dumas Malone gave a good summary of how this led to the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions in Thomas Jefferson: A Brief Biography (1933):

[Jefferson] had approved of the conduct of James Monroe as minister to France, which aroused much hostile Federalist comment, and believed that the bellicose spirit [against France] which swept the country after the publication of the "XYZ dispatches" was aggravated by the Hamiltonians [Federalists], with a view to advancing their own interests and embroiling the United States on the side of the British. He himself was sympathetic with Elbridge Gerry, the commissioner who proved more amenable than his colleagues to French influence, and suggested that Gerry publish an account of his experiences, but Jefferson had no enthusiasm for the existing order in France. He was glad to drop the disastrous French issue when, at the height of the war fever, the Federalists provided a better one by passing the Alien and Sedition Acts. Jefferson rightly regarded hysterical hostility to aliens, such as his friends C. F. Volney and Joseph Priestley, and attacks upon freedom of speech a menacing the ideals he most cherished. Since the Sedition Act was applied chiefly to Republican editors, partisan as well as philosophical motives were conjoined in his opposition to it.

His most notable contribution to the campaign of discussion consisted of the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798. (His authorship was not disclosed until years later.) The Virginia Resolutions, drawn by Madison, were similar in tenor though more moderate. The constitutional doctrines advanced by Jefferson - that the government of the United States originated in a compact, that acts of the federal government unauthorized by the delegated powers are void, and that a state has the right to judge of infractions of its powers and to determine the mode of redress - were much emphasized in later years. His dominant purpose, however, was to attack the offensive laws as an unconstitutional and unwarranted infringement upon individual freedom, a denial of rights that could not be alienated [i.e., set aside]. The language of what was in effect a party platform was in the nature of the case extravagant, but Jefferson and Madison had no intention of carrying matters to extremes. More important from the practical point of view than any promulgation of constitutional theory was the vindication of the right of public discussion and political opposition.

Another critical element of the historical situation at that time was that the Supreme Court's authority to be the final arbiter of Constitutional questions had not yet been established. This was the first national crisis in which the federal government set out to blatantly violate the rights of citizens that had been specified in the Bill of Rights. The national government under the Constitution wasn't even 10 years old at that point. Jefferson and Madison were dealing with a very concrete situation where essential personal freedoms of American citizens had to be defended. They considered the Alien and Sedition Acts to be an overt, clear and dangerous attempt by the Adams administration to violate basic rights guaranteed by the Constitution. And they were correct in thinking so. The Resolutions were the most effective means they found readily available to raise a protest against the unconstitutionality of the Alien and Sedition Acts.

In legal terms, that approach was made obsolete by the establishment of the Supreme Court's authority of judicial review in Constitutional questions starting with Marbury v. Madison in 1803.

In terms of judging Jefferson's political theory, the key point is the one Dumas Malone makes: "More important from the practical point of view than any promulgation of constitutional theory was the vindication of the right of public discussion and political opposition." The aim of both Jefferson and Madison in that case was to defend basic freedoms and the American Constitution. Defending slavery, the very opposite of freedom, or promoting the destruction of the Constitution and the Union was no part of their intention.

It's worth noting in this connection that James Madison later argued specifically against the attempt by John Calhoun to use the Virginian and Kentucky Resolutions as support for his own secessionist doctrine.

It was also part of Jefferson's democratic outlook that he viewed the states as bulwarks of liberty and counter-weights to any tendency of the federal government to overstep its bounds. That was true even in the context of the courts being the final arbiters of questions of constitutional law. And that remains part of the American federal system today, though in a very different context and with a much longer series of experiences and precedents that were available in Jefferson's lifetime.

Steele notes in his discussion of the Burr Conspiracy and resistance to the embargo on British trade during Jefferson's Presidency that Jefferson's faith in the states as bulwarks of freedom and defense of the Constitution was justified because the states were prepared to take actions in both cases that would have minimized the role the federal government would have had to play otherwise. But in both cases, defending democracy and the Constitution required opposing secessionists.

So even if one could correctly interpret Jefferson's support for the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions in 1798-99 as a recognition of a state's supposed right of nullification of any law they chose - an unjustified interpretation - his position as President toward the Burr Conspiracy and the resistance to the embargo would have to be regarded as a later and more significant stance in opposition to secession and to any theory of the Union that would justify it.

Jefferson's faith in the states a bulwarks of liberty and the federal Constitution very much shaped his response to the Compromise of 1820, aka, the Missouri Compromise, which did involve the question of the ability of the federal government to limit the spread of slavery. I discussed his position on the Missouri Compromise in a 04/01/09 post in that year's series of these posts, in which I also touch on the partisan context.

He was disturbed by the part of the Missouri Compromise that seemed to restrict states rights in states above the Missouri Compromise line. But, as Steele's article shows, Jefferson was no friend of secession. The Federalist Party had been widely discredited during the War of 1812 because of pro-British Federalists in New England, some of whom encouraged the idea of the New England states seceding from the Union. Jefferson's Republicans had been genuinely disgusted by this treasonous sentiment, and were also happy to take advantage of it politically.

To Jefferson, states rights provided support for democratic rights. He also believed that the states themselves would eventually abolish slavery. But he viewed that process in the context of a "diffusionist" theory of abolishing slavery in the US, a notion that I'll be discussing in a separate post this month. One might well argue that he had not fully worked out how the emerging trends in the slaveholders' ideas and goals would affect states rights and the future of the Union. But he clearly did not see his concerns over the Missouri Compromise as any kind of sympathy for secession. He memorably expressed his concerns on this matter in a letter to John Holmes, a Massachusetts state senator who had broken from the Federalist Party over their earlier disunionist sentiments, in which he clearly views the end of the Union as equivalent to rendering the sacrifices of the Revolutionary generation "useless" and "treason against the hopes of the world":

I regret that I am now to die in the belief, that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776, to acquire self-government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be, that I live not to weep over it. If they would but dispassionately weigh the blessings they will throw away, against an abstract principle more likely to be effected by union than by scission, they would pause before they would perpetrate this act of suicide on themselves, and of treason against the hopes of the world. To yourself, as the faithful advocate of the Union, I tender the offering of my high esteem and respect.

Jefferson was very much a major player in the formation and establishment of the early precedents of the Republic. His major political goals stand out clearly in his career: defense of the America from foreign enemies; democracy, freedom of speech and freedom of religion; support for the Constitution and the national government as guarantor of democracy, freedom and independence; and, opposition to slavery.

Counterfactual history is counterfactual and can't be argued with certainty. But it's unthinkable to me that Thomas Jefferson would have supported a secessionist rebellion against the Constitution and the democratic national government like that staged by the Confederacy in 1860-65. Unthinkable.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2009, missouri compromise, thomas jefferson, slavery

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2009, April 3: Jefferson and the Union (1)

I'm not quite as partisan in my views of Thomas Jefferson as I am about Andrew Jackson. But almost.

So I was interested to see this article by historian Brian Steele of the University of Alabama-Birmingham, "Thomas Jefferson, Coercion, and the Limits of Harmonious Union" Journal of Southern History Nov 2008. Steele looks at Jefferson's position on states rights and the nature of the American Union, particularly in light of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798-99. Those documents, which were joint products of Jefferson and James Madison, were later held up by secessionists as support for their own advocacy of treason.

Steele's conclusions are sound, though I was surprised at some of the trappings surrounding them:

This admittedly brief and tentative examination of Jefferson's response to several crises of union suggests that he was willing to enforce federal law in the face of opposition by state and local authorities, that he believed the Union was empowered to coerce a seceding state, and that he claimed executive prerogative in cases of national selfpreservation or even of national interest. This was hardly [President] James Buchanan's position in 1860 and appears much closer to Lincoln's. None of this is meant to imply that Jefferson and Lincoln embraced similar theories of union. They did not. It is meant to suggest that our reflexive assumption that Jefferson's approach to disunion would have approximated Buchanan's or even that of the fire-eaters [!?!] needs careful reconsideration. The argument here should not be misread as a contrary assertion that Jefferson would not have "gone with the Confederacy" but seen rather as a call for historians to reconsider our reflexive tendency to assume this counterfactual. [!!?!?!]

If we look at Jefferson's political career as a whole, we see a kind of alternation between fear of the potentially negative consequences of centralized power, on the one hand, and a fear of national weakness and dissolution, on the other. During the Revolution, Jefferson joined other Americans in his resistance to arbitrary metropolitan authority. But during the Confederation period, Jefferson (along with many other leading figures) saw the greatest threat to American interests (and ultimately liberty) in the inability of Congress to compel member states to perform their obligations. During the 1790s, however, Jefferson understood the Federalists in charge of the national state to be exercising authority that was unauthorized by the original compact. The correction for this would be a restoration of the proper constitutional role of the state governments. During his presidency and the Republican ascendancy, though, Jefferson saw various threats to majority rule and to the legitimate powers granted to the national state posed by outlying states. [my emphasis]

Steele is correct that Jefferson's view of federalism was not at all consistent with the arguments made by the Confederate secessionists, arguments of which the obnoxious slavery advocate John C. Calhoun was the godfather. At the same time, the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions did seem to argue that states had the right to declare federal laws invalid that clearly infringed on basic Constitutional liberties.

But, good grief! Whoever that knew anything about Thomas Jefferson's political career would assume that he would have supported the Confederacy's revolt to preserve slavery? Steele seems to assume that such is a common assumption among historians of the period. And I can't say with any authority that it's not. And, yes, we can't know what would have happened if he had lived at the time something happened that didn't happen when he was actually alive.

But it still requires pretty much totally disregarding Jefferson's actual political career and picking and choosing an argument here and there as abstract justification for secession. To the extent Calhoun had any real talent as a political theorist, it was in his cleverness at spinning such arguments.

It's surprising to see Steele assuming that historians today would be inclined to adopt the Calhounian position on Jefferson's attitude toward states rights. Because Steele seems to understand that very well based on the evidence he adduces:

Nevertheless, the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions did not advocate - or even broach - secession, and there were substantial qualitative differences between them and the later claims made by some New England Federalists and South Carolina nullifiers, despite the claims to Jefferson's legacy made by the latter group in particular.

As Steele explains in his article, Jefferson understood the Union under a "compact theory" by which the states had entered together in a mutual agreement among themselves to have a shared national government.

But Jefferson never viewed the United States as 13 separate nations, even under the Articles of Confederacy. And he believed even under the Articles, in which the authority of the national government was much less clearly defined than under the Constitution, the national government had the right and necessity to compel cooperation on recalcitrant states who chose to violate the shared compact. He wrote in 1786, as Steele relates:

Whenever "two or more nations enter into a compact, it is not usual for them to say what shall be done to tbe party wbo infringes it. Decency forbids tbis. And it is as unnecessary as indecent, because tbe right of compulsion naturally results to tbe party injured by the breach." Accordingly, "When any one state in the American Union refuses obedience to the Confederation by which they bave bound themselves," he told Démeunier, "the rest have a natural right to compel them to obedience." The essential point, Jefferson told Edmund Randolph, was that the Congress did not lack the "coercive powers" most people imagined "to be wanting." On the contrary, the "law of nature" quite simply gave "one party to an agreement" the authority "to compel the otber to performance." [my emphasis]

In 1798 during the Adams administration when Jefferson was Vice President but under the Constitutional system at that time was the de facto opposition leader, he wrote to an advocate of North Carolina and Virginia seceeding from the Union, Steele quotes:

... if on a temporary superiority of the one party, the other is to resort to a scission of the union, no federal government can ever exist, if to rid ourselves of the present rule of Massachusets & Connecticut, we break the union, will the evil stop there? suppose the N. England states alone cut off, will our natures be changed? are we not men still to the South of that, & with all the passions of men? immediately we shall see a Pennsylvania & a Virginia party arise in the residuary confederacy, and the public mind will be distracted with the same party spirit, what a game too will the one party have in their hands by eternally threatening the other that unless they do so & so, they will join their Northern neighbors, if we reduce our Union to Virginia & N. Carolina, immediately the conflict will be established between the representatives of these two states, and they will end by breaking into their simple units. ... who can say what would be the evils of a scission and when & where they would end?

Steele mentions Andrew Jackson a couple of times, and those mentions are worth notice here. On the question of the limits of federal power, he writes:

Strict construction of a Jeffersonian variety did limit federal power, but it also realized the full scope of federal power within those limits strictly prescribed. This is why Jefferson and Andrew Jackson (and Madison for that matter) found it necessary to call for constitutional amendments for national programs of internal improvements, on the one hand, but remained unafraid to enforce the embargo on Britain or squash nullification, on the other. All were committed to states' rights, to strict construction, and to limited government, but they nevertheless vigorously enforced federal law and even expanded federal power in certain areas. It is too simplistic to call this range of views contradiction or hypocrisy. [emphasis]

He goes own to show that Jefferson's own positions in relation to events such as the Burr Conspiracy and the embargo against trade with Britain during his Presidency, and secessionist rumblings from reactionary New England Federalists in connection with the War of 1812, against Britain demonstrated his opposition to secessionist tendencies.

Jefferson saw the Constitution and the national government as being essential for the defense of political democracy and the personal liberties that are an inseparable part of democracy. In tomorrow's post, I'll discuss a bit more about how those views affected his stance in the concrete political situations he faced during his lifetime.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2009, missouri compromise, thomas jefferson, slavery

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 - April 1: The Missouri Compromise

The decade before the Civil War was a period of intense political battles - sometimes physical ones - over slavery. But even before then, controversies over slavery had produced repeated crises which led to a series of compromises between the free and slave states.

Northerners and abolitionists felt, with good reason, that the compromises were a series of surrenders to the "Slave Power", as the pro-slavery bloc of states became known. In the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the free states agreed to admit Missouri to the Union as a slave state. But the slave state representatives agreed to a North-South dividing line above which slavery would not be allowed in the territories to be organized there in the future.

One of the complications which was to make particular difficulties for abolitionist politics is that the opposition to admitting Missouri as a slave state was centered in the Federalist Party. The Federalists stood for a conservative approach to government. The Federalists stood for a conservative approach to government that favored the wealthy and the privileged, a role was soon enough adapted by John Quincy Adams and the "National Democrats".

The advocates of broader democracy, include the more radical democrats who would rally behind Andrew Jackson's fight against the "money power", were drawn to Jefferson's Republican Party. (Jefferson's Republicans became known as the Democrats during Jackson's Presidency; today's Republican Party began as a separate party in the 1850s.)

Jefferson's own opposition to slavery endured until the end of his life. But he had relied on the rights of the states at key points in his career, in fighting the Alien and Sedition Acts during the John Adams administration and in countering a plot by some "High Federalists" to prevent him from taking office after his election in 1800 as President. To Jefferson, states rights provided support for democratic rights.

So he was distur by the part of the Missouri Compromise that seemed to restrict states rights in states above the Missouri Compromise line. On the other hand, Jefferson was no friend of secession. The Federalist Party had been widely discredited during the War of 1812 because of pro-British Federalists in New England, some of whom encouraged the idea of the New England states seceeding from the Union. Jefferson's Republicans had been genuinely disgusted by this treasonou sentiment, and were also happy to take advantage of it politically.

Still, Jefferson realized that the complex set of forces at work in the Missouri crisis could eventually split the Union, which to him would have critically endangered the progress of democracy. "It is the most portentious [question] which ever yet threatened our Union. In the gloomiest moment of the revolutionary war I never had any apprehension equal to what I feel from this source," he wrote.

He expressed the intensity of his concern in a letter to John Holmes, a Massachusetts state senator who had broken from the Federalist Party over their disunionist sentiments:

I regret that I am now to die in the belief, that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776, to acquire self-government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be, that I live not to weep over it. If they would but dispassionately weigh the blessings they will throw away, against an abstract principle more likely to be effected by union than by scission, they would pause before they would perpetrate this act of suicide on themselves, and of treason against the hopes of the world. To yourself, as the faithful advocate of the Union, I tender the offering of my high esteem and respect.

At that point, the slave and free states were equal in representation in the US Senate. The Missouri Compromise admitted Maine as a fr ee state at the same time Missouri entered the Union as a slave state. This battle for one of the two sides to gain an advantage in Senate representation would be a central element in later such battles. The new states of California (free) and Texas (slave) which sought to enter the Union in the wake of the Mexican War would be key prizes in the disputes that led to the Compromise of 1850.

And with the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, the slave states and free states would fight a proxy war over the issue of slavery in the Kansas Territory. I'll be looking at that conflict in later posts this month.

But for now, I'll close this post by quoting John Quincy Adams, who was Secretary of State in the Monroe administration in 1920. Though his later Presidency would find him acting as the handmaiden of the "money power", his post-Presidential career as a Massachusetts Congressman would find him becoming an important anti-slavery advocate. Even at the time of the Missouri Compromise, Adams was realizing that the ultimate resolution of the slavery issue was inevitable. He wrote in his diary what he had learned about the Southerners who defended the Slave Power in this dispute:

The discussion of this Missouri question has betrayed the secret of their souls . . . they show at the bottom of their souls pride and vainglory in their condition of masterdom. . . . They look down upon the simplicity of a Yankee's manners, because he has no habits of overbearing like theirs and cannot treat Negroes like dogs.

Adams had also split with his father's Federalist Party over the issue of New England secession plotting during the War of 1812. But he clearly found the idea of the free states dissolving the Union to rid themselves of slavery to be a possibility:

I have favored this Missouri Compromise, believing it all that could be effected under the present Constitution, and from extreme unwillingness to put the Union at hazard. But perhaps it would have been a wiser as well as bolder course to have persisted in the restriction upon Missouri, till it should have terminated in a convention of the states to revise and amend the Constitution. This would have produced a new Union of thirteen or fourteen States unpolluted with slavery, with a great and glorious object to effect, namely, that of rallying to their standard the other States by the universal emancipation of their slaves. If the Union must be dissolved, slavery is precisely the question on which it ought to break.

His words proved to be prophetic. It was indeed the issue of slavery on which the Union broke.

An Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 postings is available.

Tags: confederate heritage month, missouri compromise, neo-confederates