TOn its Fourth of July, with the clock ticking down to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 2026, the United States once again faces a harrowing question: Why did the nation’s founders, supposedly enlightened demigods, perpetuate horror and hypocrisy? of slavery instead of banning it completely?
Many theories have been put forward. Some historians attribute the founders’ failure to enact any federal emancipation plan to entrenched white supremacy. Others blame a transatlantic economic system that simultaneously enriched white planters in the South and merchants in the North with the profits of trade and slave labor. No matter how heinous these crimes against humanity, the economic argument emphasizes, the founders simply could not break their addiction to the profitable status quo.
These social and economic interpretations of the founders’ grotesque inaction regarding slavery are certainly correct. But they ignore another vital explanatory model: the survivalist interpretation, according to which the founders perpetuated slavery because if they did not, the then-young country would have split into separate confederations and killed each other in civil wars. According to this model, it was a question of white self-preservation versus African-American freedom.
In the 1770s and 1780s, the Founding Fathers feared a three-step chain reaction that would begin with the secession of one or more states from the Union. When such disunion happened, they were confident that the U.S. would break up into separate confederations—or the North and South or New England, Central and South.
It was this second step – disunion – that constituted an epic nightmare for the founders because, in their view, dissolution into separate confederations would quickly precipitate civil wars over commerce, undivided war debts, state-federal financial accounting, disputed state borders, and the rich abundance of western territory claimed by Anglo-Americans through the Appalachian Mountains, extending to the Mississippi River.
The founders knew without a shadow of a doubt that they should “Join or Die.” George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and the rest felt the weapons of disunity and civil war aimed at their backs in every decision they made in the 1770s and 1780s, including those related to slavery and the slave trade.
If a coalition of abolitionist-minded Northern leaders had demanded an end to the slave trade or even a gradual plan for emancipation, some, if not all, of the Southern states would have seceded from the Union, setting off the deadly three-way chain reaction. stages: disunity, the formation of separate confederations and, before long, bloody civil wars.
Statesmen Thomas Lynch of South Carolina exposed the risk of secession over slavery as early as July 1776, promising on the Assembly floor in Independence Hall that any attempt by Northerners even to politically define enslaved people as human beings , instead of property, would cause their exit from the Union.
“If it is debated whether their slaves are their property,” Lynch stated“there is the end of the confederation”.
A year earlier, delegates deliberated on the violent dynamics of disunity while debating how to combat the Coercive Acts adopted by the British Parliament in response to the Boston Tea Party.
A delegate to Congress, Pennsylvanian Joseph Galloway, warned his fellow Americans that the 13 colonies would find it nearly impossible to unite if they separated from the British empire and, as a result, would soon fall into two subcategories of geographic civil war: land wars, borders and borders between individual colonies and, finally, at some point, a bloody conflagration between North and South.
Galloway did not say what would trigger the North-South civil war, but he predicted that when it arrived, the vulnerable agricultural South would suffer a crushing loss.
“The northern colonies, accustomed to military discipline and difficulties”, Galloway predicted in 1775, “he will, in all probability, be the first to enter the list of military controversy; and, like the Saxons and Danes of the north, bring devastation and destruction upon the south, which, weak from want of discipline, and having a dangerous enemy within its own bowels, must, after suffering all the horrors of a civil war, give way to the superior force and submit to the will of the conquerors.”
That “dangerous enemy within,” of course, was the half-million enslaved people living in the Southern colonies, poised for a revolution of their own against their feudal masters. Clearly, the Pennsylvanian was indicating, enslaved black Americans would rise up for their own freedom in such a war, joining northerners in conquest.
In the debates over the Articles of Confederation, New Jersey delegate John Witherspoon, president of the college later renamed Princeton, made a similar argument in response to proposals by some delegates to renounce a cohesive, perpetual constitutional union in favor of an association loose of the states that would last only until the end of the war. Witherspoon called the idea “craziness.”
They must unite in an indissoluble government, Witherspoon warned in a speech on July 30, because otherwise the War of Independence would be “only a prelude to a contest of a more terrible nature, and indeed much more properly a war.” civil”. war than that which now often goes by that name.”
Why, asked Witherspoon, should the citizens of the American states spend their mutual treasure and blood now seeking to obtain independence from the British “with a certainty, as soon as peace was made with them, of a longer lasting, more unnatural war, yet another war bloody and much more desperate among the colonies themselves?”
John Dickinson, another delegate from Pennsylvania, also spoke about the violent aftereffects of disunion, predicting that an American civil war would likely begin within two or three decades after independence, when New England seceded to form its own separate confederacy. Soon thereafter, New Englanders would invade New York to secure control of the Hudson River, triggering a civil war with unknowable consequences. Dickinson predicted this scenario in what he called “America’s Doomsday Book,” calling it “terrible” to contemplate.
Years later, James Madison, tacitly recognizing that the American Union was a forced marriage, explained why the framers did not immediately abolish the slave trade in the U.S. Constitution. Had they demanded such a plan, he said, South Carolina and Georgia would have seceded from the Union.
See more information: July 1776 was a forced marriage
“No matter how great the evil,” Madison continuousreferring to the slave trade, “the dismemberment of the union would be worse”.
So, if the survivalist interpretation of the founders’ political decision-making is correct, where do we stand today in our historical understanding of why they turned a blind eye to one of the greatest crimes against humanity ever committed?
The founders did this, on the one hand, because they lived in a culture of pervasive white supremacy and, on the other, because they were inextricably linked to an economic system that exploited slavery and the slave trade for economic gain and profit.
But as the study of history often reveals, the story is more complex. American political leaders faced a difficult choice in the 1770s and 1780s—and after that, until the outbreak of the Civil War. They could advance a program to end slavery or they could secure for themselves freedom from civil wars.
The founders did virtually nothing at the federal level to rescue African Americans from the despotism of slavery because, fearing for their lives, they put their own safety, security, and self-preservation first. It was a painful deal with the devil, with vast and tragic consequences for the revolutionary era and the future of the nation.
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
