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The study of history is an ongoing conversation between past and present from which we all have much to learn.
Lincoln’s reading of history led him to a dramatically different conclusion, namely that many of the founders sought to limit slavery’s expansion, a view he presented in its fullest form in his Cooper Union Address (1860). He discovered that twenty-one of the thirty-nine signers of the Constitution were on record for banning or restricting slavery in the territories. Both Washington and Jefferson, as well as sixteen signers, endorsed the Northwest Ordinance, which prohibited slavery north of the Ohio River. Jefferson had even wanted to ban slavery in all the new territories.
By definition, all efforts to harvest the accumulated wisdom of the past must begin from a location in the present, so the questions posed of the past are inevitably shaped either consciously or unconsciously by the historical context in which they are asked.
“History is always unfinished in the sense that the future always uses the past in new ways.” In fact, the past is not history, but a much vaster region of the dead, gone, unknowable, or forgotten. History is what we choose to remember, and we have no alternative but to do our choosing now.
We inhabit a backlash moment in American history of uncertain duration. Our creedal convictions as Americans, all of which have their origin in the founding era, are bumping up against four unforeseen and unprecedented obstacles: the emergence of a truly multiracial society; the inherent inequalities of a globalized economy; the sclerotic blockages of an aging political architecture; and the impossible obligations facing any world power once the moral certainties provided by the Cold War vanished. These obstacles became more difficult to negotiate in 2016, when the most inexperienced,
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While the cautionary lesson Jefferson drew from this episode proved enduring, it is noteworthy that his first act on the political stage in Virginia was a futile effort to make the emancipation of slaves easier. This was not the behavior of a typical Virginia slave owner.7
“The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in these colonies where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state. But previous to the enfranchisement of the slaves we already have, it is necessary to exclude all further importations from Africa. Yet our repeated attempts to effect this by prohibition…have been hitherto defeated by his majesty’s negative.” Exactly where this out-of-the-blue statement about abolishing both the slave trade and slavery itself came from was not explained.
Apart from his way with words, what Adams and everyone else noticed about Summary View was its novel argument that Parliament not only lacked the authority to tax the colonies, but also could not legislate for them at all, a significant shift in the American position on British policy that was just then becoming viable.
Enlightened thinkers emphasized the environmental causes of racial differences, thereby connecting the inferior condition of enslaved blacks to slavery rather than their African origins.
But a close reading of the Jefferson-Madison correspondence throughout the decade, much of which was conducted in code, reveals not a single occasion when either of them blurted out the otherwise unspoken truth, namely that their doctrinal hostility toward federal power was merely a mask to conceal their implicit defense of slavery.
apparently never crossed his mind that the colonists had not been represented in Parliament as they now were in Congress, or that the Constitution had given the federal government enumerated powers over the states.)
From 1820 onward, Jefferson became indistinguishable from most ardent proslavery advocates in using his states’ rights philosophy to construct a firewall designed to block any and all restrictions on slavery.
A younger Jefferson had insisted that the central principles of the American Revolution were inherently incompatible with slavery. The aging patriarch now argued that “the spirit of ’76” precluded any attempt by the federal government to end slavery. It was a sad and pathetic spectacle, for he was linking his revolutionary legacy to the most reactionary segment of southern political culture and, in the end, to the destruction of the republic he had helped to create.
Lafayette was at pains to remind Jefferson of their common presumption as young revolutionaries that slavery would die an early death in the emerging American republic.
The key ingredient in the Jeffersonian narrative was the insistence that any emancipation scheme must include a viable plan for expatriation, a condition that defied resolution but for that very reason conveniently provided Jefferson with a foolproof rationale for inaction.
His fear of racial amalgamation after slavery ended, it turned out, proved stronger than his conviction that “all men are created equal.”
More broadly, even before his story ended so sadly, all our expectations for a visionary Jefferson, defending the principles he so lyrically declared in 1776 against the most obvious exception to his own founding creed, have been shattered beyond recognition. The arc of his career as a critic of slavery is all downward after 1785; the dominant direction is retreat; the final destination is a Virginia-writ-large version of America already auditioning for its role as a keystone in the Confederate States of America. Jefferson seems destined to disappoint all but his most ardent disciples.
Jefferson’s insistence on the inherent inferiority of blacks was an extreme position within the spectrum of racial thinking at the time, but his inability to imagine a biracial society after emancipation was broadly shared by the most prominent founders, and almost all the plans for gradual emancipation at the national level included schemes for sending the freed slaves elsewhere.
In her appendix to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), for example, Harriet Beecher Stowe described Liberia as the preferred location for ex-slaves.
Each lurch forward along the arc of racial equality, in fact, has generated a backward surge that exposes residual prejudices called to the surface of American life from some deep pool of racial resentment that was always there and, if Jefferson was right, always will be. Instead of an upward arc, then, the dominant racial pattern since the end of slavery has been a cycle in which progress actually generates resistance to its continuation.
In part because the great influx of European migrants occurred in the nineteenth century, modern-day blacks can collectively trace their origins further back in American history than whites.
But there was also a dark side to the Great Migration that became increasingly visible in the middle decades of the twentieth century. The inner cities of urban America became black ghettos after middle-class blacks and whites escaped to the suburbs, leaving a black underclass trapped within racially segregated spaces whose borders were defined by restrictive white covenants and redlining realtors. The result was Jim Crow with a northern accent, a new kind of structural racism immune to conventional civil rights legislation, and a de facto brand of segregation that produced a class division
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As Du Bois was the first to recognize, once the opportunity to redistribute the wealth of the white planter class was missed during Reconstruction, economic inequality became a permanently embedded feature in America’s racial equation that reinforced and verified long-standing presumptions of racial inferiority.
Richard Russell, the segregationist senator from Georgia, warned President Lyndon Johnson that if he signed the Voting Rights Act, the Democratic Party would lose the South for the next thirty years, which turned out to be a conservative estimate. Johnson declared that the moral principle at stake was worth the political sacrifice, arguably an act of presidential leadership without parallel in the twentieth century. Most of the southern states soon made the transition from Democrat to Republican and from overt to covert forms of racial discrimination.
King understood the civil rights movement as a chapter in an ongoing national story in which the latent energies of the American Revolution kept radiating out their full implications until they enveloped all people regardless of creed, color, or gender. Within this narrative, all explicit expressions of racial prejudice were placed on the permanent defensive, outspoken advocates of white supremacy were now relegated to the political fringes, and America’s racial conversation for the first time spoke with a discernibly liberal accent. The new narrative featured the upside of the Jeffersonian
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The optimistic title of Booker T. Washington’s classic memoir, Up from Slavery (1901), remained a fond hope a full century after slavery ended, and once the opportunity to redistribute the estates of the planter class was missed during First Reconstruction, the prospects for economic reparations disappeared forever. It was one thing to acknowledge the rights to vote and to sit together on a bus, quite another to share resources; and lacking that radical commitment, the legal and political rights bestowed during Second Reconstruction rested atop an apparently permanent black underclass whose
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Indeed, by the last decade of the twentieth century, it was misleading to speak of black Americans as a homogeneous whole. There were middle-class and working-class blacks who stood to benefit from the opportunities created during Second Reconstruction; then there was the black underclass, trapped in urban ghettos of forced confinement where gangs, guns, and drugs defined a social agenda in a nightmare version of the American Dream.
The distinguishing feature of post–civil rights racism is its covert character, indeed its ability to pose as something else.
For blacks this meant recognizing that America was their proper homeland, occupied by their ancestors the year before English Puritans landed at Plymouth Rock, and therefore all separatist visions along the lines of those espoused by Marcus Garvey or the Nation of Islam were delusions: “Negroes are Americans and their destiny is the country’s destiny,” Baldwin declared. “They have no other experience besides their experience on this continent and it is an experience which cannot be rejected.” For good measure, he added that “the black man” was “as American as the Americans who despise him, the
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We should expect a major backlash to wash over us as we approach the middle of this century. For a truly historic change is already baked into the demographic profile of the United States, a change that can be predicted with as much scientific certainty as warming in the atmosphere. In or about 2045, the white population will become a statistical minority. Because whites will continue to hold the balance of power politically and economically, ample opportunities will present themselves for demagogues to stoke fears of a looming apocalypse. Indeed, voices in this vein are already audible in
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The multiracial future that Jefferson always feared, then, is already visible on the horizon. The positive way to put it is that covert racism is likely to surge primarily because racial interaction will be increasing, and “the arc of the moral universe” will be moving upward another increment. The historical way to put it is that every expansion in the meaning of “We the people” has been a struggle, residual prejudices may disappear but never die, and the ongoing battle for racial equality remains the longest, most challenging struggle in American history.
“We are beginning to forget that the patriots of former days were men like ourselves…and we are almost irresistibly led to ascribe to them in our imaginations certain gigantic proportions and superhuman qualities, without reflecting that this at once robs their character of consistency and their virtues of all merit.”
The clear implication of his presidency, at least as Adams saw it, was that leadership necessarily entailed not listening to the voice of “the people” when it ran counter to the abiding interest of “the public,” which the president had a moral obligation to defend even more forcefully when it was unpopular.
“No Romance could be more amusing,” he chided Jefferson, than his belief that the United States would prove the exception to the dominant pattern of economic inequality throughout recorded history, as if human nature itself had been magically transformed in the migration from Europe to America. “After all,” he observed, “as long as Property exists, it will accumulate in Individuals and Families….I repeat, so long as the Idea and existence of PROPERTY is admitted and established in Society, accumulations of it will be made, the Snow ball will grow as it rolls.”
“Now, my Friend, who are the aristoi? Philosophy may Answer ‘The Wise and the Good.’ But the World, Mankind, have by their practice always preferred ‘the rich and beautiful and well born.’
“The best republics will be virtuous,” Adams acknowledged, “but we may hazard a conjecture that the virtues have been the effect of the well ordered constitution rather than the cause.”
“In every society known to man,” he claimed, “an aristocracy has risen up in the course of time, consisting of a few rich and honorable families who have united with each other against both the people and the first magistrate.” There were very few universal principles in the Adams political universe, but this was one of them. All societies eventually produced social and economic elites that, left unchecked, achieved political domination at the expense of everyone else. Although Jefferson probably did not remember it, Adams had alerted him to their differences on this score in December 1787:
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both men viewed the profits of bankers as inherently immoral, in part because they made huge amounts of money without doing any productive labor themselves, in part because they transferred wealth from the middling and poorer classes into the hands of the already rich.
Adams’s views anticipated the Federal Reserve Board of the Progressives and the banking regulations of the New Deal. This was all in keeping with his two rock-ribbed convictions: the new financial aristocracy, like all aristocracies throughout history, could not be killed but must be controlled; and the invisible hand of the marketplace required the visible hand of government to regulate its inevitable excesses.33
The incentive system of American democracy can survive the existence of a permanent underclass as long as it remains a statistical minority. But the erosion of the middle class is unacceptable and inexplicable because it destroys the functional faith that any hardworking citizen can expect to enjoy a fair share of the American pie. Larger pieces can go to a fortunate few, as long as the many get the bulk of the pie to slice up among themselves.
in the 1980s the federal government stopped doing what it had been doing for the preceding half century to offset the inherently unequal distribution of wealth by the free market. More specifically, the highest tax bracket was almost halved, from an average of 75 percent to 39 percent; the minimum wage remained fixed at levels set in the early 1970s; multiple loopholes in the tax code were added to protect high incomes and inherited wealth; the voiding of the Glass-Steagall Act (1933) in 1999 eliminated most federal regulations on investment banking; and the Citizens United decision (2010) by
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From either a historical or a philosophical perspective, the emergence in the 1980s of a New Right movement based on a demonic view of government seems strange. For it required a massive dose of amnesia to blot out the considerable benefits that had accrued to two generations of the American population over the preceding half century, and it required a radically revisionist view of American history to depict the Federal Reserve Board, Social Security, and Medicare as illegitimate aberrations that must somehow, like most of the twentieth century, be revoked. And as already mentioned, the timing
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The corporate constituency, an old Republican stalwart, was most crucial because of the nearly limitless resources it was prepared to provide for the antigovernment agenda. In one sense, nothing more profound was at work than the privileged class protecting its privileges. But as the number of millionaires and billionaires multiplied in the globalized economy, the amount of disposable wealth also increased exponentially and flowed disproportionately toward conservative causes as well as candidates.
Polls conducted in the early 1960s indicated that between 70 and 80 percent of the American population viewed the federal government favorably, answering yes to the question “Do you trust the government of the United States?” By the mid-1970s these numbers were almost exactly reversed and have remained overwhelmingly unfavorable ever since.
On the other hand, if you were corporate titans like the Koch brothers, who grew up in a family with close ties to the John Birch Society, you viewed FDR’s New Deal as a pale imitation of Stalin’s totalitarian gulag. The Gilded Age was the American Eden before the Fall. The death of America’s middle-class dream was only collateral damage in the war for the freedom of the fortunate few to pursue their happiness without government interference or regulation. In this extreme version of capitalist theology, any federally sponsored policy of income redistribution was heresy. The emergence of a
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Nothing less is at stake than the survival of the American Dream as embodied in a robust middle class that becomes the beneficiary, not the victim, of the new global economy. Without a role for government, the American Dream becomes a realistic prospect only for the favored few.
John Adams tried to tell us that outcome was virtually inevitable over two centuries ago. The two Republican presidents enshrined on Mount Rushmore, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, both insisted that the federal government was the ultimate arbiter of our common fate. Franklin Roosevelt, the greatest Democratic president, declared that the federal government was responsible for enforcing a social contract in which the right to pursue happiness included the right to a job. Something is not only missing but terribly wrong when these voices are absent from our national conversation. To
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In terms of the American Dialogue, the values of capitalism take precedence over the values of democracy and trump the right to pursue happiness for all but the favored few.
the states had refused to honor their tax obligations during the war and their pledge to fund veterans’ pensions after the war; they had refused to cooperate on internal improvements like roads and canals and had even imposed domestic tariffs on one another; they had encroached upon federal authority to sign separate treaties with various Indian tribes, essentially stealing Native American land; the Confederation Congress had failed to pass a 5 percent duty on imports, in effect deciding to renege on the $40 million foreign and domestic debt; and all debates about foreign policy were riddled
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Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them, like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched….We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors. Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816
