Yet to deny that a liberty-seeking people largely denied freedom and equality to the enslaved is to deny a self-evident truth. Mindless celebration of the American past is just that — mindless. But so is reflexive condemnation. The messy, difficult, unavoidable truth of the American story is that it is fundamentally a human one. Imperfect, selfish, greedy, cruel — and sometimes noble. One might wish the nation’s story were simple. But that wish is in vain.
A key lesson from Larson’s narrative is that ages past were not benighted by a lack of knowledge of the immorality of race-based slavery. To me, Larson’s unemotional account of the Republic’s beginnings confirms a tragic truth: that influential white Americans knew — and understood — that slavery was wrong and liberty was precious, but chose not to act according to that knowledge and that understanding.
And it was a choice: one made for convenience. Slavery and racism were not externally imposed forces that lay beyond human control. They were, rather, economic, political and cultural constructs that served the purposes of the powerful — in this case, white people — and because of this, they stood for centuries.
“Our forefathers came over here for liberty,” John Adams argued in 1765. “Providence never designed us for negroes, I know, for if it wou’d have given us black hides, and thick lips, and flat noses, and short woolly hair, which it han’t done, and therefore never intended us for slaves.” And yet in the same era Benjamin Rush could write: “Where is the difference between the British Senator who attempts to enslave his fellow subjects in America, by imposing Taxes upon them contrary to Law and Justice; and the American Patriot who reduces his African Brethren to Slavery, contrary to Justice and Humanity?” How, the Quaker Richard Wells asked in 1774, can Americans “reconcile the exercise of SLAVERY with our professions of freedom?”
The answer is painful, but must be stated plainly: Americans reconciled the gap between the ideal and the real, profession and practice, by blaming the Old World for imposing what was called a “necessary evil,” by crafting racist lies about Black inferiority, and by manipulating Scripture to find biblical sanction for slavery. “Race,” Larson observes, “offered a way for them to enslave others without the fear of becoming enslaved themselves.”
Does this make the national experiment irredeemable? Are the shadows of our failures so dark and so long that no light can emanate from our past? In Larson’s terms, does our inheritance of slavery overwhelm our legacy of liberty?
The centuries since America’s founding suggest the answer is a qualified no. The antislavery tradition in the country — one older than even the Revolutionary vernacular of liberty — offers a positive moral and political example of how a people can move from error to truth. For all the Constitution’s compromises with slaveholders, James Madison noted that the document did not explicitly recognize “property in man,” thus giving the antislavery project room to maneuver and to grow. Such was Frederick Douglass’s view when he insisted that the Constitution was a “glorious Liberty document.”
In a 1791 letter to Thomas Jefferson, who had written of Black inferiority in his “Notes on the State of Virginia,” the free Black man and almanac author Benjamin Banneker argued for the natural extension of Jefferson’s own assertions in the Declaration of Independence to all human beings. “However variable we may be in Society or religion,” Banneker wrote, “however diversified in Situation or colour, we are all of the Same Family.” That is a truth we, too, must hold to be self-evident, even if our forebears chose not to do so.
Neither as rigorously argued as Sean Wilentz’s “No Property in Man” nor as original as Manisha Sinha’s “The Slave’s Cause,” Larson’s sober new book nevertheless repays reading, for it has a good deal to teach those who want to see the American story in overly simplistic terms. Which means someone should send several copies to Tallahassee — with express shipping
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