Joseph J. Ellis (18 page)

The full proslavery argument was now out in the open. If one looked forward from this dramatic moment, the speeches by Jackson and Smith became prophetic previews of coming attractions for the southern defense of slavery in the nineteenth century, a defense that would eventually lose on the battlefields of the Civil War. If one looked backward, nothing quite so defiant or systematic had ever been presented before. True enough, the constitutional arguments represented a consolidation of points made in Philadelphia in 1787 and then in several state ratifying conventions. But the brazen claim that slavery must be accepted unconditionally as a permanent feature of the national confederation was, if not wholly new, at least an interpretive clarification never made before in a national forum. And the racial argument, which added the specter of a racially mixed American society as a consequence of emancipation, gave a new dimension to the debate by attempting to transform the sectional disagreement between North and South into a national alliance of whites against blacks.
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The novelty of the arguments now pouring forth from the representatives of the Deep South must also be understood in context. The particulars were new, but the attitudes on which they rested were familiar. No responsible statesman in the revolutionary era had ever contemplated, much less endorsed, a biracial American society. In 1776, for example, when the Continental Congress had commissioned John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson to design a seal for the United States, they produced a national emblem depicting Americans of English, Scottish, Irish, French, German, and Dutch extraction. There were no Africans or Native Americans in the picture. The new proslavery argument, then, drew on assumptions about the white Anglo-Saxon character of the emerging American nation that were latent but long-standing. No explicit articulation of those assumptions had been necessary in a national forum before 1790, because no frontal assault on slavery had been made that required a direct or systematic response.

Those historians who claim that a distinctive racial ideology first came into existence at this time, describing it as a fresh “construction” or “invention” designed to frame the debate over slavery in a more effectively prejudicial way, have a point, or perhaps half a point, in the
sense that the challenge to slavery drove the racial (and racist) presumptions to the surface of the debate for the first time. But they had been lurking in the hearts and minds of the revolutionary generation all along. The ultimate legacy of the American Revolution on slavery was not an implicit compact that it be ended, or a gentlemen’s agreement between the two sections that it be tolerated, but rather a calculated obviousness that it not be talked about at all. Slavery was the unmentionable family secret, or the proverbial elephant in the middle of the room. What was truly new in the proslavery argument was not really the ideas or attitudes expressed, but the expression itself.
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There was yet another new ingredient about to enter the debate in 1790, though it too was more a matter of making visible and self-conscious what had previously hovered in some twilight zone of hazy and unspoken recognition. Perhaps the least controversial decision of the First Congress was passage of legislation that authorized the census of 1790, an essential item because accurate population figures were necessary to determine the size of state delegations in the House. The following information was being gathered, quite literally, while the debate over the Quaker petitions raged:

At the most obvious level, these numbers confirmed with enhanced precision the self-evident reality that slavery was a sectional phenomenon that was dying out in the North and flourishing in the South. The exceptions were New York and New Jersey, which, not incidentally, remained the only northern states to resist the passage of gradual emancipation laws. In general, then, there was a direct and nearly perfect correlation between demography and ideology—that is, between the ratio of blacks to whites in the population and the reluctance to consider abolition. When the proslavery advocates of the Deep South unveiled their racial argument—What will happen between the races after emancipation?—the census of 1790 allowed one to predict the response with near precision. Wherever the black population reached a threshold level, slavery remained the preferred means of assuring the segregation of the races.

The only possible exception to this rule was the Upper South, to include the states of Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina. There the slave populations were large, in Virginia very large indeed, but so were the populations of free blacks (“All Other Free Persons”). From a strictly demographic perspective, Virginia was almost as vulnerable to the specter of postemancipation racial fears as South Carolina, but the growing size of the free-black population accurately reflected the presence of multiple schemes for gradual emancipation within the planter class and the willingness of at least a few slave owners to act in accord with the undeniable logic of the American Revolution. The sheer size of Virginia’s total population, amplified by the daunting racial ratio, and then further amplified by the political prowess of its leadership at the national level, all combined to make it the key state. If any national plan for ending slavery was to succeed, Virginia needed to be in the vanguard.

Finally, the census of 1790 provided unmistakable evidence that those antislavery advocates who believed that the future was on their side were deluding themselves. For the total slave population was now approaching 700,000, up from about 500,000 in the year of the Declaration of Independence. Despite the temporary end of the slave trade during the war, and despite the steady march of abolition in the North, the slave population in the South was growing exponentially at the same exploding rate as the American population as a whole, which meant it was doubling every twenty to twenty-five years. Given the
political realities that defined the parameters of any comprehensive program for emancipation—namely, compensation for owners, relocation of freed slaves, and implementation over a sufficient time span to permit economic and social adjustments—the larger the enslaved population grew, the more financially and politically impractical any emancipation scheme became. (One interpretation of the Deep South’s argument of 1790 was that, at least from their perspective, the numbers already made such a decision impossible.) The census of 1790 revealed that the window of opportunity to end slavery was not opening, but closing. For not only were the numbers becoming wholly unmanageable, but the further one got from 1776, the lower the revolutionary fires burned and the less imperative the logic of the revolutionary ideology seemed. What one historian has called “the perishability of revolutionary time” meant that the political will to act was also racing against the clock. In effect, the fading revolutionary ideology and the growing racial demography were converging to close off the political options. With all the advantage of hindsight, a persuasive case can be made that the Quaker petitioners were calling for decisive action against slavery at the last possible moment, if indeed there was such a moment, when gradual emancipation had any meaningful prospect for success.
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T
HE CHIEF
strength of the proslavery argument that emerged from the Deep South delegation in the congressional debate of March 16–17 was its relentless focus on the impractical dimensions of all plans for abolition. In effect, their arguments exposed the two major weaknesses of the antislavery side: First, those ardent ideologues who believed that slavery would die a natural death after the Revolution were naïve utopians proven wrong by the stubborn realities reflected in the census of 1790; second, the gradual emancipation plans implemented in the northern states were inoperative models for the nation as a whole, because the northern states contained only about 10 percent of the slave population; for all those states from Maryland south, the cost of compensation and the logistical difficulties attendant upon the relocation of the freed slaves were simply insurmountable; the numbers, quite simply, did not work.

How correct were these conclusions? From a strictly historical perspective,
we can never know the answer to that question. Since no one from the North or the Upper South rose to answer the delegation from the Deep South, and since no national plan for gradual emancipation ever came before the Congress for serious consideration, we are left with a great silence, which itself becomes the principal piece of historical evidence to interpret. And the two overlapping interpretations that then present themselves with irresistible logic are quite clear: First, the arguments of the Deep South were unanswerable because there was sufficient truth in the fatalistic diagnosis to persuade other members of the House that the slavery problem was intractable; and second, whatever shred of possibility still existed to take concerted action against slavery was overwhelmed by the secessionist threat from South Carolina and Georgia, since there could be no national solution to the slavery problem if there were no nation at hand to implement a solution. Perhaps, as some historians have argued, South Carolina and Georgia were bluffing. But the most salient historical fact cannot be avoided: No one stepped forward to call their bluff.

Though we might wish otherwise, the history of what might have been is usually not really history at all, mixing together as it does the messy tangle of past experience with the clairvoyant certainty of our present preferences. That said, even though no formal proposal for a gradual emancipation program came before the Congress in 1790, all the elements for such a program were present in the debates. Moreover, in March of 1790, while the congressional debate was raging, a prominent Virginian by the name of Fernando Fairfax drafted a “Plan for Liberating the Negroes within the United States,” which was subsequently published in Philadelphia the following December. Fairfax’s plan fleshed out the sketchy outline that Jefferson had provided in
Notes on the State of Virginia
. Another Virginian, St. George Tucker, developed an even fuller version of the same scheme six years later. In short, the historical record itself, and not just our own omniscient imaginations, provides the requisite evidence from which we can reconstruct the response to the proslavery argument. In so doing, we are not just engaging in wishful thinking, are not attempting to rewrite history along more attractive lines, but rather trying to assess the historical viability of a national emancipation policy in 1790. What chance, if any, existed at that propitious moment to put slavery on the road to extinction?
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All the plans for gradual emancipation assumed that slavery was a moral and economic problem that demanded a political solution. All also assumed that the solution needed to combine speed and slowness, meaning that the plan needed to be put into action quickly, before the burgeoning slave population rendered it irrelevant, but implemented gradually, so the costs could be absorbed more easily. Everyone advocating gradual emancipation also made two additional assumptions: First, that slave owners would be compensated, the funds coming from some combination of a national tax and from revenues generated by the sale of western lands; second, that the bulk of the freed slaves would be transported elsewhere, the Fairfax plan favoring an American colony in Africa on the British model of Sierra Leone, others proposing what might be called a “homelands” location in some unspecified region of the American West, and still others preferring a Caribbean destination.

As we have seen, the projected cost of compensation was a potent argument against gradual emancipation, and the argument has been echoed in most scholarly treatments of the topic ever since. Estimates vary according to the anticipated price for each freed slave, which ranges between one hundred and two hundred dollars. The higher figure produces a total cost of about $140 million to emancipate the entire slave population in 1790. Since the federal budget that year was less than $7 million, the critics seem to be right when they conclude that the costs were not just daunting but also prohibitively expensive. The more one thought about such numbers, in effect, the more one realized that further thought was futile. There is some evidence that reasoning of just this sort was going on in Jefferson’s mind at this time, changing him from an advocate of emancipation to a silent and fatalistic procrastinator.
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The flaw in such reasoning, however, would have been obvious to any accountant or investment banker with a modicum of Hamiltonian wisdom. For the chief virtue of a gradual approach was to extend the cost of compensation over several decades so that the full bill never landed at one time or even on one generation. In the scheme that St. George Tucker proposed, for example, purchases and payments would continue for the next century, delaying the arrival of complete emancipation, to be sure, but significantly reducing the impact of the current costs by spreading them into the distant future. The salient question in
1790 was not the total cost but, with an amortized debt, the initial cost of capitalizing a national fund (often called a “sinking fund”) for such purposes. The total debt inherited from the states and the federal government in 1790 was $77.1 million. A reasonable estimate of the additional costs for capitalizing a gradual emancipation program would have increased the national debt to about $125 million. While daunting, these numbers were not fiscally impossible. And they became more palatable when folded into a total debt package produced by a war for independence.
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