By David K. Shipler
A paragraph
denouncing slavery, written by a slaveowner, was deleted from the final version
of the Declaration of Independence. Yet the remaining language contained a
soaring promise that abolitionists put to instant use in their cause. Therein
lies the great contradiction of the United States, a nation inspired by ideals
and twisted by practice.
There is no
way to cleanse American history, not honestly. It is torn between morality and
reality, a place where fine myths and base cruelty coexist. We see that every
day as the country becomes unwelcoming to outsiders, more hostile toward its
poor, and willfully blind to racial injustice.
Myths are useful, though; they set
high standards and can drive self-correction if—a big if—the problematic past
is faced squarely and not sanitized as the Trump Republicans are attempting.
Societies that rely on fictions rarely do well.
The United
States has endured a multiple personality for all of its 250 years, beginning
with its origin story of liberty alongside the enslavement of Black Africans
and the slaughters of Native Americans. Both are elements of national character.
And both shaped the Declaration of Independence, so erasing one side of the
story or the other falsifies patriotism. Genuine American patriotism lies in what
is precious about America: the freedom to embrace disturbing truths, a love for
the din of competing ideas.
In the fall of 1775 and the spring
of 1776, five men formed a drafting committee to compose the ringing document
we Americans now celebrate.
One of those, Benjamin Franklin, owned
several enslaved workers and had profited
from advertisements in his newspaper by slaveowners seeking to sell their
“property” or to capture runaways. He later became an avid abolitionist.
Another, Robert Livingston, used slave labor
on his New York estate.
Slavery was opposed by two members of the
committee, Roger Sherman of Connecticut and John Adams of Massachusetts. But
the fifth, Thomas Jefferson, embodied the cross-currents of his society,
holding transcendent ideas larger than he was. He owned hundreds in bondage at
Monticello, his Virginia plantation, but excoriated slavery in the draft of the
Declaration:
He [King George III]
has waged a cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred
rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never
offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another
hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This
piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare
of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where
MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing
every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.
Jefferson’s paragraph was to occupy
a prominent place in the Declaration’s litany of indictments against the King.
Yet the drafters ran into trouble as they sought unanimity in the 56-member
Continental Congress, about one-third of whom were slaveowners. Slavery was
still legal in all 13 colonies. The paragraph did not survive, much to the
chagrin of Jefferson, who continued to include it in copies he sent with
correspondence.
What survived, as is well known, is
the famous sentence, with an anti-slavery nuance insisted upon by Adams: “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.”
Life, liberty and property had been
listed as natural rights back in 1689 by the English philosopher John Locke. But
Adams rejected “property” as connoting an acceptance of slavery, according to
historian Danielle Allen, and “happiness” was substituted. “Pushing the word ‘property’
out, replacing it with ‘happiness,’ was an abolitionist moment in the Declaration,”
she said. “Indeed,
the abolitionists used it immediately, in Boston, to submit a petition using
that language for an end of slavery in Massachusetts.” (Before the end of the
Revolutionary War, Adams wrote the abolition of slavery into the Massachusetts state
constitution. Franklin got slavery outlawed in Pennsylvania.)
The Declaration’s soaring promise
featured in a stirring
1776 sermon by Lemuel Haynes, the first ordained Black minister in the US,
who argued that the natural rights applied to all, that “an African, or, in
other terms, that a Negro . . . has an undeniable right to his Liberty:
Consequently, the practise of Slave-keeping, which so much abounds in this Land
is illicit.”
He continued: “Those privileges
that are granted to us By the Divine Being, no one has the Least right to take
them from us without our consen[t]; and there is Not the Least precept, or
practise, in the Sacred Scriptures, that constitutes a Black man a Slave, any
more than a white one.
“Therefore is it not hygh time to
undo these heavy Burdens, and Let the Oppressed go free? And while you manifest
such a noble and magnanimous Spirit, to maintain inviobly your own Natural
rights, and militate so much against Despotism, as it hath respect unto
yourselves, you do not assume the Same usurpations, and are no Less tyrannic.
Pray let there be a congruity amidst you Conduct, Least you fall amongst that
Class the inspir’d pen-man Speaks of. Rom. 2.21 and on. thou therefore
which teacheth another, teachest thou not thy Self?”
Slavery did not end with the Declaration’s
fine sentiments, obviously. It actually spread and deepened its economic roots.
And the strands of our varied histories are still entangled. According to my
family lore, which is partially documented, three of my ancestors fought in the
Revolution, one on my father’s side at Bunker Hill, and two on my mother’s side
in Pennsylvania. But I have also wondered whether any of my ancestors were
slaveowners. Some lived in Maryland and Virginia before the Civil War, so
perhaps. I am not sure.
Jefferson
once called slavery America’s “one fatal stain.” A stain cannot be blithely
washed away.
“We
routinely return to Jefferson and his era in order to discover the glory of
America,” wrote
a Jefferson scholar, the late Charles A. Miller, in 1992. “We should also be
willing to return in order to find early evidence of our distress. . . . I
believe that Jefferson was firmly—centrally and emblematically—in the stream of
American anguish over slavery and race, and he knew it. I also believe that the
present, in altered form, is like Jefferson.”
