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.

* * * 

How Much Freedom Should We Trade For Our Security?

“By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well back, Winston was able to remain outside the range of the telescreen.” ~ George Orwell, 1984

Yesterday, while looking through some old files on my Mac I came across some quotes and thoughts that pertain to current events and the trade-offs we're making today in the name of National Security.  These bits and pieces must have been collected for the purpose of an article or essay I was attempting to assemble at the time.

“He that's secure is not safe.” ~ Benjamin Franklin

“Most people want security in this world, not liberty.” ~ H. L. Mencken

For the Founding Fathers freedom was a preeminent value because they had experienced the heavy weight of tyranny first-hand.  



the growing power of the State is biggest trend of 20th Century. (Paul Johnson)

complexity and immensity makes people small... technology of big government (Ellul)

Quote from Kafka: “We are shoved, pushed...”

Privacy as a Value

1984 ~ Work our way backward from this: Orwell’s “camera in every house” is definitely something we do not want. Bad.

But are surveillance cameras themselves evil?

(name deleted) tells of villain caught because of surveillance camera in store.

So somewhere in between is OK?

What is the issue?

“I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving.” ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

Life is not static. Cultures are not either We are moving through time.... across an ocean, from one harbor toward another.

Rainer Maria Rilke: from Notebooks of Malte Laurid Brigge “I am a beginner in my own circumstances.” p. 67

“For several decades political arrests were distinguished in our country precisely by the fact that people were arrested who were guilty of nothing and were therefore unprepared to put up any resistance whatsoever.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

“By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well back, Winston was able to remain outside the range of the telescreen.... He could be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his present position he could not be seen.” ~ George Orwell, 1984, p. 9

Thought Police

re-writing history

controlling memories

“Having just cast off an oppressive British monarchy in a bloody war for independence, many of the representatives of the 13 states attending the Constitutional Convention were reluctant to create what they feared would be an unrestrained centralized government. The authors of the Federalist Papers, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison, knew that without an intelligent and persuasive rationale for a federal constitution, the proposal would fail. To allay the fears of the representatives of the states, the authors laid out in extraordinary detail the central principles upon which a federal constitution would be based.” ~ essay on Zooba


Food for thought.

The American Experiment

Am reading a great book right now: Dinesh D'Souza's What's So Great About America. There are so many passages I'd like to reproduce here that I'd risk copyright infringement, so I'll try to be brief. This book comes with my highest recommendation.

D'Souza brings a uniquely personal perspective to his theme. He was a native of India, but became a U.S. citizen by choice in 1991.

America, he points out, is not a place. It is an idea. People come to America because of a dream.

I first became acquainted with this notion in a book by John Warwick Montgomery nearly thirty years ago. The Founding Fathers really did create something original in the American experiment. Democracy, science and capitalism have been woven together into a culture without peer in today's civilized (or uncivilized) worlds.

Another facet of our achievement is the notion that history is not a purposeless and meaningless sequence or random events. Americans dream of progress. If I don't make it, my kids can make it.

Certainly we see this played out in myriad ways in our various personal histories. I see it in my family, my wife's famly, my friends' families. D'Souza notes that one part of the American dreams is "that knowledge is cumulative and that its applications to human betterment are continuous and neverending, that the future is certain to better than the past."

Of course this Utopian dream is scoffed at by many cynics and critics of all stripes. Nevertheless, it was this conviction that brought our nation to world leadership, a role that we have a responsibility to not abdicate or feel ashamed of.

The remarkable thing about the American Ideal is that we did not force the world to desire it or adopt it. We did not use guns to win the minds and hearts of our foes.

In one story, D'Souza tells how the TV media attempted to make President Reagan look bad during the "Reagan Recession" by interview the unemployed persons who had been disenfranchised, who were not experiencing the American dream. The Soviet Union showed these documentaries behind the Iron Curtain with the aim of making capitalism look bad. But the footage had the opposite effect as the cameras revealed that even our poorest poor had TV sets and cars and three meals a day.

The ideas in this book are far more vast than these piecemeal scraps. Despite its depth, it is an easy read. Find the book. His reasoned defense of America is well worth your time.