Another Explanation as to Why the Founding Fathers Didn't Deal with the Slavery Issue

Many of us, if not most, have spent a lifetime cobbling together personal views on various issues from personal to global. Personal examples include: what do I want to do with my life? How do I want to spend my time this coming weekend? How am I going to come up with money to fix the car or get a new one? 

Then there are the wider issues. What should we be doing about illegal immigration? How much money should our government spend on space exploration? 

On most issues, most of us probably have an answer in our heads that satisfies us for the moment, or at least until the notion is seriously challenged, because most matters have pro and con arguments to support or oppose them. Is Democracy the best kind of government? Until a few summers ago this was a settled question for me. I am less sure than I used to be.

Was Abraham Lincoln our greatest president? Has the American Experiment run its course? Does the Bible teach that people should submit to the governing authorities or is the State the enemy?

I share the above by way of introduction to a new thought. Why didn't the Founding Fathers do a better job of dealing with the problem of slavery?

How would you answer that? Do you have some kind of pat answer that you've accepted as the reason slavery was permitted to continue alongside the pronouncement in the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal"?

Somehow, the answer that I'd accepted some time back was that the most important issue in breaking free from England was to have a unified opposition amongst the Colonies. That is, I believed the Northern colonial territories were willing to put off the slavery question till a later date in order to address the pressing issue of the moment: Breaking from from England.

A NEW EXPLANATION

Ben Franklin

I'm currently reading a book called American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies in the Founding of the Republic, by Joseph J. Ellis. The subtitle pretty much spells out the author's intent here. Our history has been remarkable as regards its growth from backwoods colonialists to world power by just over 150 years, and dominant power by 200.

On the other hand, our track record with regard to this continent's native peoples, and with regard to the slavery issue, has been shamefully dreadful. (I think here, for example, of the black servicemen who defended our country in World War II, putting their lives on the line for freedom only to return to a Jim Crow South where they couldn't drink from "white" water fountains and had to sit in the back of the bus.)

How was England able to eliminate, without a Civil War, the institution of slavery in 1807? This seems remarkable to me. What took us so long?

Here's what Ellis explained. Keep in mind that a primary motivation for the Founding Fathers to break off from England was the odious experience of Centralized Power. As a result, when they wrote the Constitution, a primary aim was to restrict the powers of the Executive branch of government. 

Having thus set up a system where states had power to self-govern to the largest extent possible, it became increasingly problematic for the the Federal legislators and presidents to change the rules by which they governed. 

Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was noble, but did not have any teeth. If anything the Civil War's major achievement, apart from ending slavery, was to strengthen Federal power and transform the country into a single nation as opposed to being a collection of independent states.

Even so, the foundation of state independence still remains, as we've notably seen in the past year as governors respond in a variety of ways to the disruption of Covid-19.

Our past 100 years has seen a level of Federal consolidation unlike anything anticipated by the Founders. I'd be curious how they would have felt about the increasing quantity of legislation set in motion by Executive Orders in the last 20 years. 

All that aside, I look forward to reading Joseph Ellis' interpretation of this significant saga, the founding of our Republic.

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