Anti-Slavery Was Built Into the American Founding

Righteous indignation at the legacy of American slavery has inspired appropriate and serious moral conversation, but also severe historical inaccuracy and mob violence.

In his Jan. 22 Atlantic magazine article “A Matter of Facts,” Princeton scholar Sean Wilentz disputes The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, which claims slavery and racism were the foundations of U.S. history.

Wilentz clarifies that although the British monarchy ruled the American slave colonies, the colonists themselves had taken decisive steps to end the Atlantic slave trade from 1769 to 1774.

During that time, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Rhode Island either outlawed the trade or imposed prohibitive duties on it. Measures to abolish the trade also won approval in Massachusetts, Delaware, New York and Virginia, but were denied by English royal officials.

But as the speeches of Abraham Lincoln reveal, a proper understanding of the American Revolutionary period inspires a more nuanced respect for the record of the American founders on the slavery issue than what the 1619 Project suggests.

Claremont Scholar Harry V. Jaffa (“Crises of the House Divided”; “A New Birth of Freedom”) taught that in his debates, speeches and presidential leadership, Lincoln saw himself as the final Founding Father, dedicated to defending long-established anti-slavery laws and to extending the liberty and equality he found in the moral reasoning of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, which asserts: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Princeton professor James M. McPherson (“Battle Cry of Freedom”) documents that in the 1854 debates over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which sought slavery’s resurgence and extension, Lincoln presented the case that the American founders had opposed slavery.

First, he asserted, beyond the promise of the declaration, the U.S. Constitution never mentioned the words “slave” or “slavery.”

It is clear that anti-slavery political philosophy and law, built into America’s founding, along with the active efforts of abolitionist religious leaders, stood behind eventual legal emancipation of Southern slaves.

Next, the founders formally enacted the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, banning slavery from the vast Northwest Territory, enforced the prohibition of “importing” new slaves in 1807 — which the British brought to America in the first place — and passed the Missouri Compromise in 1820, which began the process of emancipation for existing slaves of a certain age. Before 1820, Northern states already had begun the process of emancipation.

Lincoln’s war against slavery began early. In 1838, a young Lincoln warned of ruling by “mob law” in his famous Lyceum address. In 1849, Lincoln formally proposed emancipation as an Illinois congressman. In his 1854 Peoria speech, Lincoln outlined American slavery as a cancer to be cut away as the slave states economically diversified.

Lincoln outlined the record of his heroes, the American founders, as he justified his anti-slavery appeal:

• • In 1794, laws prohibited an outgoing slave trade, preventing the sale of any slaves from the United States.

• • In 1798, laws prohibited any incoming slaves from Africa into the Mississippi Territory.

• • In 1800, laws prohibited American citizens from trading in slaves between foreign countries, i.e. from Africa to Brazil.

• • In 1803, laws prohibited intra-state slave trading.

• • In 1807, laws prohibited all African slave trading, with heavy penalties.

• • In 1820, laws declared slave trade as piracy, prohibiting it under penalty of death.

In Lincoln’s 1860 Cooper Union speech, he affirmed that a majority of the Constitutional framers voted to control slavery in the new territories to keep it from expanding, and that President George Washington had signed the legislation. Washington’s 1799 last will and testament called for the slaves he personally owned to be freed, although for some, this did not have an immediate effect.

Lincoln further revealed that Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, had argued in favor of emancipation in Virginia: “It is still in our power to direct the process of emancipation, and deportation, peaceably, and in such slow degrees, as that the evil will wear off … .”

Finally, on Sept. 22, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War, asserting that all slaves shall be free as of Jan. 1, 1863.

By Nov. 19, 1863, at the dedication ceremony of the Union cemetery at Gettysburg, Pa., Lincoln followed another two-hour speech with his own brief, moving Gettysburg Address, which needed fewer than 300 words to bring the promise of Philadelphia to the hallowed ground of the Civil War, extending liberty to every American:

“Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. … that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

In these speeches, however, Lincoln was well aware of the fact that the founders were imperfect men often living in imperfect times.

To achieve the unification necessary to ratify the U.S. Constitution, the founders allowed the institution of slavery to continue in the Southern states. In this compromise, many of the founders who recognized the incompatibility of slavery with the meaning of American independence were unwilling or unable to change or challenge the economic realities of their time immediately, hoping instead that slavery would disappear over time through the formal abolition of the slave trade.

Similarly, to avoid civil war and the violent battles to save the Union, which ultimately cost him his own life, Lincoln spoke of compromise with racial views that were not as evolved as those we have today. However, Lincoln sought to identify and disseminate the anti-slavery impulses built into America’s founding through his speeches. It is clear that anti-slavery political philosophy and law, built into America’s founding, along with the active efforts of abolitionist religious leaders, stood behind eventual legal emancipation of Southern slaves.

Slavery has been the norm of human history, including in Native American territories before the Europeans’ discovery of America. Only in recent centuries has slavery become no longer ubiquitous, thanks in part to the American idea that all humans are created equal in the image of God.

While Europeans brought chattel slavery to the American colonies, America’s visionary founders promised freedom to all Americans in 1776. Their descendants secured that promise in the Civil War. And we are the inheritors of that tradition. 

We should be proud of that.

Larry Greenfield is a fellow of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship & Political Philosophy.