Confederate "Heritage" Month 2019, April 16: Slavery and the American Revolution

Historian Sean Wilentz, who has what I take to be a nuanced and sophisticated view of early American and antebellum history, did a review essay last year on Harvard historian Jill Lepore's These Truths: A History of the United States (2018). (The American Revolutions New York Review of Books 11/08/2018)

I've been referring in the last few posts in this series to the conflicting trends we see in American history, such as that between democracy and white supremacy, or between the rule of law and authoritarianism. Wilentz describes three major narratives about slavery in the early decades of the United States as a country:

One well-established line of argument holds that the Revolution unleashed what Bernard Bailyn once called a “contagion of liberty” that eventually challenged the enormity of slavery. Another line is tougher on the Revolution’s hypocrisy, echoing Samuel Johnson’s famous jibe about hearing “the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes.” A still-darker argument asserts that slavery was a cornerstone of the Revolution’s republicanism - that slaveholding aristocratic rebels like Washington, Jefferson, and Madison could, as Edmund Morgan wrote, “more safely preach equality in a slave society than in a free one,” and that they accordingly promoted a racist republicanism that kept poorer whites contented by the fact that they were not black and not enslaved. [my emphasis]

All of those positions are based on real factors. I have a sentimental attachment to the “contagion of liberty” perspective. I try to maintain a critical perspective on my own outlook by paying attention to the Samuel Johnson take, which is based on the very obvious historical reality that slavery and white racism were deeply rooted in the early Republic. As one might guess from the name of this blog, I'm enough of a Hegelian to not be surprised at big contradictions in a country's historial process.

I pay attention to the third perspective. But it still looks to me like a basically reactionary position and ignores some important changes in the institution of slavery itself during the early years of the US, such as the invention of the cotton gin. I don't see how that view is compatable with things like the (pre-Constitution) Northwest Ordnance that banned slavery in northern territories. Or with the voluntary abolition of slavery in various northern states.

Wilentz writes that Jill Lapore "advances an emerging view among historians that there were two eighteenth-century revolutions in America, not one: the familiar successful rebellion against monarchical rule and a less remembered one to abolish slavery that would not succeed until 1865." I'm not sure if he means to differentiate that approach from the "contagion of liberty" outlook, because it seems to be consistent with that view. Also, since a large portion of the left and center-left seem to have written off much of early and antebellum American history as a long, dark night of slavery and reaction, I'm not sure that in popular understanding of history that the Civil War is "less remembered" that the Revolution. I would agree that the Civil War can and should be understood as a second revolution, although in very meaningful ways it was an extension of the first one. Which would be consistent with the "conagion of liberty" perspective, much less so with the slavery-as-a-cornerstone outlook.

Wilentz also makes this important observation about the evolution of the parties on the slavery issue. Note that the party he calls Republican in 1819-20, consistent with the contempory usage, was the Democratic-Republican Party founded by Thomas Jefferson, which was commonly referred to as the Republican Party until later in the 1820s, when it became known as the Democratic Party, of which today's Democratic Party is the same organization. The present-day Republican Party was founded in 1854 as an anti-slavery party.

Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans did not ... align as, respectively, antislavery and proslavery parties prior to the momentous crisis over the admission of Missouri as a slave state in 1819 and 1820; most congressmen in what John Quincy Adams called the “free party” were in fact northern Republicans. Adams, who was by then a Republican himself, did become increasingly opposed to slavery over the following decades, as Lepore relates, but partly on that account, he never “steered the erratic course of the Whig Party,” as the book contends. If he had, something like Lincoln’s Republican Party might have arisen two decades earlier than it did.

Much of Wilentz' essay is devoted to an evaluation of Lapore's analysis of the Populist tradition in US politics. He links that back to pre-Civil War days and the Calhounian trend that on which I've been focusing in several posts in this year's "Heritage" series:

Trump may perhaps reflect the worst in the long history that Lepore relates, but in more ways than she suggests, he also represents a sharp break, matched in our history only by Southern secession and the Civil War. Reclaiming America’s truths means, first and foremost, understanding the exact historic dimensions of the unprecedented crisis—a crisis that, beyond demagogy, lies, and phony populism, goes to the legitimacy of the constitutional order. [my emphasis]