Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party (10 page)

The Founders chose a better option. They set a date a few years ahead for ending the slave trade—no more importation of slaves. They prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory (essentially the modern upper Midwest, including Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio).

Most important, they established a union on anti-slavery principles that nevertheless temporarily tolerated the practice of slavery. Nowhere in the Constitution is the term “slavery” used. Slaves are always described as “persons,” implying they have natural rights. The three-fifths clause, which some progressives have claimed shows the Founders’ low estimation of the worth of black life, was actually a measure to curb the voting power of the slave-owning states—it helped eventually to swing the balance of power to the free states.

The Founders believed that these measures would over time weaken slavery and cause it to die out. In this they were mistaken, because Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1793—which the Founders had no way to anticipate—revived the demand for slavery in the South.

Still, the Founders’ efforts did weaken slavery. Before 1776, slavery was legal in every state. Yet by 1804 every state north of Maryland had abolished slavery either outright or gradually. Slavery was no longer a national but a sectional institution, and one under moral and political siege.

The Republican abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who had once denounced the founding as a hideous compromise with slavery, came to understand the accomplishment of the framers. “Abolish slavery tomorrow,” he said, “and not a sentence or syllable of the Constitution needs to be altered.” Slavery, he concluded, was merely “scaffolding to the magnificent structure, to be removed as soon as the building was completed.”
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Douglass knew that it would take Republican efforts to do this and finally end slavery.

Anti-slavery activism, of course, preceded the Republican Party, although it finally found its most effective expression in that party. The earliest opponents of slavery in America were Christians, mostly Quakers and evangelical Christians. They took seriously the biblical idea that we are all equal in the eyes of God, and interpreted it to mean that no person has the right to rule another person without his consent.

Remarkably, Christians discovered political equality through a theological interpretation of the Bible. For them, human equality is based not on an equality of human characteristics or achievements but on how we are equally loved by God. Moreover, the argument against slavery and the argument for democracy both rested on the same foundation, a foundation based on human equality and individual consent.

The American Anti-Slavery Society was founded in 1833. A few years later, the Liberty Party was founded to pursue emancipation. In 1848, the Liberty Party, anti-slavery Whigs, and Democrats who opposed the extension of slavery merged to form the Free Soil Party. Abolitionism, which sought the immediate end of slavery, had been present since the founding but grew in political strength during the middle part of the nineteenth century.

With the passage of the Kansas Nebraska Act—repealing the Missouri Compromise which curtailed the spread of slavery beyond the designated 36-30 latitude—Free Soilers, former Whigs, and abolitionists joined together and created the Republican Party.

JUSTIFYING SLAVERY

These anti-slavery forces produced a massive national backlash in defense of slavery, not merely in the South but also in the North. Today it is difficult to meet anyone who defends slavery, and it is virtually inconceivable to imagine how slavery might be justified.

To get a flavor of how plantation owners justified it, consider this anecdote from Mary Boykin Chesnut’s diary about her husband James Chesnut, a Democratic senator from South Carolina. Asked if he ever had a problem with runaway slaves on his plantation, the doughty
Democrat quipped, “Never! It’s pretty hard work to keep me from running away from them!”
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We can see from this witticism Senator Chesnut’s assumption that he is doing the slaves a favor by housing, feeding, and taking care of them. In other words, they aren’t supporting him; he’s supporting them! He shouldn’t be grateful to them; they should be grateful to him! This is the “happy slave” idea, and many slave owners and southern Democrats believed it, so they could never understand the Republican contention that slaves might not want to be slaves, dismissing it as a form of outside “agitation.”

Historically the argument for slavery is one from necessity, and we find it in Aristotle. Aristotle insisted that some people are naturally inferior and incapable of governing themselves; such people are “natural slaves” and their enslavement is “natural slavery.” Yet Aristotle also recognized that many people were enslaved because they were captives who became the spoils of war. Slavery of this sort, Aristotle wrote, is “conventional slavery,” upheld not because it is right but because of custom or the way of the world.

One might expect Aristotle to say that while natural slavery may be justifiable, conventional slavery is not. Aristotle, however, defends both types of slavery. His reason is practical. In every society, he argues, there is a great deal of hard work to be done, and if there is going to be leisure and art and contemplation, then some people have to do the dirty work so that others are freed up to devote themselves to higher pursuits. Slavery is simply the price that humanity must pay in order to have civilization.

We can see that Aristotle’s justification for slavery is essentially identical to Hillary’s justification for illegal immigration: Who is going to serve us and do the dirty work if not “those people”? Aristotle’s argument hasn’t just reached Democrats today; it also inspired Democrats in the early to middle part of the nineteenth century.

Indeed, leading Democrats in the South picked up Aristotle’s defense of slavery. In his celebrated King Cotton speech to the Senate in 1858, Democratic senator James Hammond argued, “In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life.
Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization and refinement.” So far Hammond is completely in line with his Greek predecessor. We can also trace a very interesting line that goes from Hammond to Hillary.

Hammond, however, goes much further than Aristotle when he continues that slavery “is no evil. On the contrary, I believe it to be the greatest of all blessings.” Providence, he declares, has produced in the slave-owning South “the highest-toned, the purest, best organization of society that has ever existed on the face of the earth.”

Hammond insists that slaves don’t have it too bad in being slaves. “Our slaves are hired for life,” he says, “and well compensated. There is no starvation, no begging, no want of employment.” Remarkably, Hammond goes on to add that free laborers who don’t have food, lodging or health care provided to them are worse off than slaves. He calls them a “hireling class,” that is “hired for the day” and “not cared for,” while slaves, he insists, are provided for in all their basic needs.
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Echoing Hammond, Democratic senator Albert Gallatin of Mississippi contended that slavery was “a great moral, social and political blessing—a blessing to the slave, and a blessing to the master.” According to Gallatin, slavery freed gentlemen to cultivate literature and the arts and devote themselves to public service in contrast to “vulgar, contemptible, counter-jumping” Yankees. At the same time, Gallatin said, slavery benefited the slaves because it took African savages and made them into useful workers, while also giving them lifelong protection and provision.
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We hear the same tune from another southern Democrat, the writer George Fitzhugh, who argued that “slavery is the natural and normal condition of society” while free labor was “abnormal and anomalous.” Fitzhugh didn’t just want slavery to continue; he wanted it to expand. The South would never have independence or equality, he wrote, until “our equal right to increase, expansion, and protection, is fully admitted and acted on.”

The founding doctrine of equality of rights, Fitzhugh insisted, was simply a mechanism for “giving license to the strong to oppress the
weak.” While “free laborers must at all times work or starve,” Fitzhugh wrote, “slaves are supported whether they work or not.” Slavery, Fitzhugh concluded, was an early form of social insurance; it may even be termed an embryonic form of socialism.
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Undoubtedly the most notorious defender of slavery was Democratic senator John C. Calhoun from South Carolina. Calhoun was an enthusiastic Andrew Jackson supporter, and in 1828 he became Jackson’s vice president, although the two men would subsequently have a falling out. Progressive historians like to portray Calhoun as a quintessential southerner, in order to italicize their North-South interpretation of the Civil War.

In reality, historian Clyde Wilson points out that Calhoun was controversial even in his home state; he was not a typical southerner. In fact, he may have been just as popular in the North as in the South. According to Wilson, “he had substantial support and admiration in many parts of the North, from Boston to New York to Philadelphia to Cincinnati to Detroit.”

SLAVERY AS A “POSITIVE GOOD”

Calhoun’s “positive good” defense of slavery is laid out in a series of his speeches before the U.S. Senate. In an 1837 speech, Calhoun argued, “There never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other.” Here is Calhoun contending that slavery is simply a response, one may say, to Aristotelian necessity.

But Calhoun went further, attacking the Declaration of Independence and thus separating himself from Jefferson. Calhoun attributed the assault on slavery as arising out of “great and dangerous errors that have their origin in the prevalent opinion that all men are free and equal. Nothing can be more unfounded and false.” Men are not equal, Calhoun emphasized, and therefore some are destined for freedom and others are marked for servitude.

Calhoun, like Hammond, contended that slaves were improved by slavery, making them not only better off than they were before, but also
happy. “Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually. It came among us in a low, degraded and savage condition, and in the course of a few generations it has grown up under the fostering care of our institutions, to its present comparatively civilized condition. This, with the rapid increase of numbers, is conclusive proof of the general happiness of the race, in spite of all the exaggerated tales to the contrary.”

Calhoun rhapsodized that “every plantation is a little community, with the master as its head, who concentrates in himself the united interests of capital and labor, of which he is the common representative.” In this benign environment, he insisted, the slaves could really thrive. For Calhoun slavery was a veritable “school of civilization,” although not a school from which the slaves were permitted to graduate.
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These arguments by southern Democrats appear to have vanished into the mist of history. They are rarely taught, scarcely read, and hardly remembered. Progressives don’t want us to remember them. Yet they are worth remembering for three separate reasons.

First, they are unique. Historian Eugene Genovese says that nowhere in the new world, outside the Democratic South, did anyone celebrate slavery as a good thing for the slave. In Brazil, for example, there was widespread slavery and, according to Genovese, “slavery was defended as economically necessary and traditionally sanctioned, but no one argued with any discernible conviction that it was a good thing in itself or the proper condition of the laboring classes.”
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Second, the pro-slavery philosophy of the southern Democrats shaped important events in American history. “The right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution.” This sentence is from the
Dred Scott
decision issued by a Supreme Court dominated by Jackson Democrats.
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The statement is a lie. Nowhere does the Constitution distinctly and expressly affirm slavery. This can easily be verified by reading the Constitution today.

Yet the statement does reflect the perverted Democratic interpretation of the Constitution promulgated by the pro-slavery Democratic
contingent. These are people who wanted to keep their slaves, and recover slaves who escaped to free states, and so they twisted the Constitution to achieve their self-serving objectives.

No wonder that President James Buchanan, a Democrat, hailed the Supreme Court’s decision. “The right has been established of every citizen to take his property of any kind, including slaves, into the common territories and to have it protected there. Neither Congress nor a territorial legislature nor any human power has any authority to annul or impair this vested right.”
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Ultimately the southern Democrats became so dug in with their “positive good” philosophy that they pressed for secession immediately upon Lincoln’s election. A less recalcitrant group might have stayed in the union; in this case slavery would likely have endured longer than it did. So the “positive good” philosophy was actually instrumental in instigating the Civil War and, against the wishes of its proponents, bringing about a quicker end to slavery than would otherwise have been the case.

Third and finally, the arguments of the southern Democrats are worth recalling because we will see Democrats make very similar arguments—actually, the same ones—once again during the New Deal. Only this time the master had a new name: the federal government, administered by progressives according to progressive principles. Incredibly those “positive good” arguments would be pitched in the 1930s and subsequently not to sympathetic whites but to blacks themselves.

COMPLICITY OF THE NORTHERN DEMOCRATS