Vindicating the Founders: Understanding Slavery
Bottom Line: Thomas G. West counters critics of the American Founders’ thoughts and actions regarding slavery, arguing that they understood that the moral truth that all human beings were created equal applied to blacks just as it did to whites. They took actions to limit slavery’s reach in local government and in state and federal constitutions. A combination of selfishness, moral utopianism, and the difficult political and moral issues associated with the existing culture caused the institution to survive until the conclusion of the Civil War.
Professor Thomas G. West argues that the consensus opinion of historians and scholars today on the American Founding and slavery is wrong. He maintains that two popular claims – that the Founders didn’t include blacks when they declared that all men are created equal in the Declaration of Independence and that they were hypocrites who worked to perpetuate slavery – are categorially false.
The Founders saw blacks as fellow human beings with natural rights that should be respected, despite the presence of the evil institution of slavery. The logic of the Founders’ appeal to equality in declaring independence from the British fueled their drive to begin putting slavery on the road to its ultimate demise. States such as Vermont amended their constitutions to outlaw slavery, while Massachusetts and New York ended slavery through the courts and actions of local governments. Other states, such as Rhode Island and Connecticut, passed gradual abolition laws. Although no southern state outlawed slavery, citizens in the South shared broad agreement that slavery was wrong and established societies for abolition in some states. Furthermore, southern courts until the 1840s generally acknowledged that slavery was unjust in principle.
West notes that though the Constitution never mentions slavery, three constitutional clauses protect it as an existing institution. He argues that the Constitution’s compromises with slavery were necessary because prudence dictated that it was more important to establish a union on just principles than to let the South form its own country, where slavery would have been free to thrive indefinitely.
West argues that slavery’s demise was delayed for decades for various reasons. These include selfishness, the grave moral dilemma in which immediate abolition would have affected the country, questions over citizenship and moral character – which slavery degraded – and a utopian faith in moral progress. All helped postpone slavery’s termination until the conclusion of the Civil War.
Read the full essay here.
