Sunday Nights Radio returns with more on Jefferson, Patrick Henry and the fate slavery bound up with a Constitution that the Anti-Federalists claimed would end the liberties of the states and create consolidated power at odds with the Declaration of Independence.
Were they right?
Montecello: All of Jefferson’s Inventions Were Meant To Hide the Slaves
instead of asking why Jefferson would make things easier for the slaves he supposedly hated, we are to assume revolving doors, dumb waiters are just to hide the slaves from guests.
You Lay The Scourge of Slavery at the King’s Feet
What Was Removed From the First Draft
He has waged 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 & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
World of Slavery: No One Had Considered Yet That It Was Wrong
A notably wealthy Virginian owned dozens of slaves. Madison owned more than a hundred. Jefferson owned more than two hundred at the height of his holdings. Both Madison and Jefferson expressed considerable uneasiness about this. Hard though it is for us to believe now, they were born into a world in which essentially no one had ever said slavery was wrong. Yet they grew to think it was as other citizens of the transatlantic “republic of letters” did. Besides Jefferson’s cousin Randolph, George Washington freed his many slaves in his will. Large planters such as they were few and far between. Jefferson wrote that slavery was an evil that had to be, would be, abolished. He took substantial steps against it, as we will see. Yet he died enmeshed in slaveholding, and nearly all of his slaves were auctioned to satisfy his creditors. Madison’s story was similar.
At the Revolution’s start colonists began to take up in earnest the question of slavery’s future. Essentially unchallenged, if not unremarked, through world history, slavery came to seem a moral error among a few Anglophones late in the seventeenth century. Pennsylvania colonists organized the first abolition organization, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, in Philadelphia in 1775. They elected sometime governor Benjamin Franklin its president in 1785, then asked him to present its cause to the Philadelphia Convention that wrote the Constitution.
1769: Jefferson introduces bill to House of Burgesses in Virginia a Bill to allow slave owners to emancipate slaves
1778:
https://www.monticello.org/thomas-jefferson/jefferson-slavery/jefferson-s-attitudes-toward-slavery/
In 1778, he drafted a Virginia law that prohibited the importation of enslaved Africans. In 1784, he proposed an ordinance that would ban slavery in the Northwest territories. But Jefferson always maintained that the decision to emancipate slaves would have to be part of a democratic process; abolition would be stymied until slaveowners consented to free their human property together in a large-scale act of emancipation. To Jefferson, it was anti-democratic and contrary to the principles of the American Revolution for the federal government to enact abolition or for only a few planters to free their slaves.
Patrick Henry and Slaves
Patrick Henry: Founding Father, Slave Holder and Pioneer
Was also an extensive landowner who owned approximately 80 slaves throughout his life.
• Growing Opposition to Slavery: Despite being a slave owner, the source states that Henry became aware of the “wrongdoings within slavery” and began to push for its abolishment.
• Documented Dissent: His opposition is visible in various documents, including a January 18, 1773 letter to Robert Pleasants. In this letter, after acknowledging the receipt of a slave, Henry discusses his disagreements with the practice.
• Arguments Against Slavery: Henry argued against slavery on both religious and philosophical grounds.
He questioned how Christianity, which he believed “consists in softening the human heart,” could tolerate a practice “so totally repugnant” to it.
He stated that the abolishment of slavery was “the furthest advance we can make toward justice” and that the “purity of our religion…is at variance with that law which warrants slavery”.
He felt it was difficult to comprehend the continuation of slavery during an “enlightenment” period emphasizing human rights.
He is quoted saying slavery was “inconsistent with the Bible, and destructive to morality”.
He believed slavery contradicted the “ideals of liberty” becoming popular in America.
Henry was an outspoken opponent of slavery. He consistently delivered speeches, wrote letters, and was a prominent leader in advocating for its abolishment. Fellow Founding Fathers, including Thomas Jefferson, recognized and supported his efforts. Jefferson is quoted stating Henry was “even more determined in his opposition to slavery then the rest of us” and credited him with inspiring Virginians to take a “bold and decided stand”. Henry was also a leading participant in ending the slave trade between Africa and Virginia.
Patrick Henry: Anti-Federalist and Opposed To Constitution
https://vitaeducation.org/wp-content/uploads/Nature-and-Powers-of-the-Union.pdf
But, Sir, suspicion is a virtue, as long as its object is the preservation of the public good, and as long as it stays within proper bounds: Should it fall on me, I am contented: Conscious rectitude is a powerful consolation: I trust there are many who think my professions for the public good to be real. Let your suspicion look to both sides: There are many on the other side, who possibly may have been persuaded of the necessity of these measures, which I conceive to be dangerous to your liberty. Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force: Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined.
Slavery Was Also mentioned, as it was in the initial draft of the Declaration of Independence as an abomination, but now there were contradictions by all parties regarding slavery
• Henry used the clause allowing the importation of slaves for twenty years (Article 1, Section 9, Clause 1) as evidence that Congress could exercise powers by implication. He argued that if Congress did not possess the implied power to prohibit the African trade, the restriction itself would be unnecessary. This point countered the Federalist argument that powers not expressly delegated were retained by the states.
• He expressed fear for the security of the existing property in slaves held by citizens. Henry asked why the Constitution omitted a clause to explicitly secure this property.
• He apprehended that Congress, through its power to lay and collect taxes, could lay such heavy taxes on slaves as would amount to emancipation, causing the Southern States to be the sole sufferers. Although imposts and excises were to be uniform, this uniformity did not extend to general taxes.
• Henry specifically argued that while the census fixed the proportion of taxes for each state based on three-fifths of the slave population, Congress, in directing the mode of raising that proportion, could make slaves the sole object of taxation within a state, potentially leading to their annihilation as property.
• He dismissed the clause requiring persons held to service escaping into another state to be delivered up (Article 4, Section 2, Clause 3) as “no security at all” against Congress interfering with slave property through oppressive taxation. He stated this clause only meant that runaway slaves could be reclaimed in other states.
• Henry viewed the restrictions listed in Article 1, Section 9, including the temporary allowance of the slave trade, as a “feeble and few” “Bill of Rights”. He contrasted “securing the slave trade” as something proponents might consider a “capital object” with the fundamental rights he felt were unsecured. His opposition stemmed from the perceived lack of protection for crucial liberties, which he felt were not adequately addressed by the specific, limited restrictions in Section 9. He stated his mind would not be quieted until “something substantial come forth in the shape of a Bill of Rights” to secure rights like religion, liberty of the press, trial by jury, and protection from cruel punishments