Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (92 page)

Above all, the South now needed to justify slavery. If the institution was not going to disappear after all but was to continue, then it had to be
defended. At the outset of the Revolution, many Southern leaders like Patrick Henry had proclaimed that slavery was an evil but had thrown up their hands about what to do about it. “I will not, I cannot justify it,” Henry had said. But if slavery could not be eradicated, at least, he said, “let us treat the unhappy Victims with lenity, it is the furthest advance we can make towards Justice” and “a debt we owe to the purity of our Religion.”
⁶⁸
Here were the seeds of the idea of Christian and patriarchal stewardship that eventually became a major justification of the institution.

Other Southerners now began suggesting a more insidious apology for slavery—based on the presumed racial inferiority of the blacks. Somehow, it was insinuated, if the Africans were not and could never be equal to whites, then their subjugation made sense; slavery became a means of civilizing them. Of course, the eighteenth century scarcely had a modern notion of race, that is, a biologically based distinction that separated one people from another. Belief in Genesis and God’s creation of a single species of human beings made any suggestion of fundamental natural differences among humans difficult to sustain. Although eighteenth-century thinkers obviously recognized that people differed from one another, most of them explained these differences by the workings of the environment or climate.

Now, however, some began to suggest that the characteristics of the African slaves might be innate and that in some basic sense they were designed for slavery. Although Jefferson was a committed environmentalist, in his
Notes on the State of Virginia
he had, nevertheless, intimated that the various characteristics of the blacks that he outlined—their tolerance of heat, their need for less sleep, their sexual ardor, their lack of imagination and artistic ability, and their musical talent—were inherent and not learned. He believed that the blacks’ deficiencies were innate, because when they mixed their blood with whites’, they improved “in body and mind,” which “proves that their inferiority is not the effect merely of their condition of life.” Still, Jefferson knew he was treading on precarious ground, where his “conclusion would degrade a whole race of men from the rank in the scale of beings which their Creator may perhaps have given them.” Hence he advanced his conclusion “as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in endowments both of body and mind.”
⁶⁹

Unfortunately, said Jefferson, these natural differences were “a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.” The only solution he could conceive of was to remove the freed blacks “beyond the reach of mixture.” Although Jefferson had no apprehensions about mingling white blood with that of the Indian, he never ceased expressing his “great aversion” to racial mixing between blacks and whites. He could never really imagine freed blacks living in a white man’s America, and thus he wanted all blacks sent to the West Indies, or Africa, or anywhere as long as it was out of the country. Whites and blacks had to remain “as distinct as nature has made them.” Someday, he told Governor James Monroe of Virginia in 1801, the United States will “cover the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, & by similar laws; nor can we contemplate with satisfaction either blot or mixture on the surface.” By 1814 he was still repeating the same theme: the blacks’ “amalgamation with the other color,” he said, “produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character can innocently consent.”
⁷⁰

By the early nineteenth century others picked up Jefferson’s suspicions of racial differences and expanded them. Scientists such as Charles Caldwell and Samuel Latham Mitchill raised doubts about climatic and environmental explanations for the differences between blacks and whites without explicitly repudiating the unitary creation of Genesis. Other scientists began laying the groundwork for the emergence of anthropological studies that would form the foundation for the pro-slavery arguments of the antebellum period. The slaves had no inherent capacity for freedom, it was said, and thus the slaveholders had a Christian and patriarchal responsibility to hold them in bondage and look after them. As one historian has concluded, blacks “had never before been so clearly defined as different and inferior, nor had their place in society ever before been so coherently and systematically deduced from those differences.” And it was not just the black slaves who were victimized by this racist thinking; it was free blacks as well.
⁷¹

The Revolution had unleashed anti-slavery sentiments throughout much of the country, but its emphasis on equal citizenship and equal rights presented increasing difficulties for the anti-slavery movement. Anyone who talked about emancipating the black slaves was confronted
with the problem of what to do with the freedmen. Jefferson had warned that the two peoples could not live side by side as equal citizens. “Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained”—all this plus the inherent differences, he said, “will produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.”
⁷²

Even the most devoted abolitionists were anxious about what to do with the freedmen. With the increasing emphasis on black inferiority, expatriation of the blacks to some place outside of the United States became the only viable alternative to slavery. Even someone as sophisticated as Madison clung to the idea of colonizing blacks to some place outside of the country, although with decreasing confidence. He had promoted the idea ever since 1789, when he first suggested that an asylum “might prove a great encouragement to manumission in the southern parts of the U.S. and even afford the best hope yet presented of an end to slavery.”
⁷³
Although removal of blacks became increasingly unlikely after 1806, talk of it continued and led eventually to the formation of the American Colonization Society in 1816–1817. This idea that hundreds of thousands of African Americans might be resettled elsewhere was another one of the many illusions that this Founding generation of Americans entertained.

S
UDDENLY, THE COUNTRY
became obsessed with racial distinctions and the problem of freed blacks. Even in the North the liberal atmosphere of the immediate post-Revolutionary years evaporated, and whites began to react against the increasing numbers of freed blacks. Even an otherwise Northern liberal clergyman refused to marry mixed-race couples, fearing that such “mixtures” would eventually create “a particoloured race” in the city of Philadelphia. In 1804 and 1807 Ohio required blacks entering the state to post a five-hundred-dollar bond guaranteeing their good behavior and to produce court certificates proving they were free. Officials from Pennsylvania, the earlier heart of abolitionism, worried about the implications of all the freed Southern slaves migrating to their state. “When they arrive,” declared a Philadelphian in 1805, “they almost generally abandon themselves to all manners of debauchery and dissipation, to the great annoyance of our citizens.” In that same year, 1805, a crowd of whites chased a group of assembled blacks from the Fourth of July celebration in Philadelphia, thus ending what had always been a
biracial commemoration in the City of Brotherly Love. Although Massachusetts had been quick to free its slaves, the state now passed laws prohibiting interracial marriages and expelling all blacks who were not citizens of one state or another.
⁷⁴

In New York in the second decade of the nineteenth century the Republican-dominated legislature took away the franchise of free blacks who had long possessed it, partly because they were black and partly because they had tended to vote for Federalists. The New York Federalists naturally had favored property qualifications for voting and did not oppose voting by blacks who could meet the property qualification. By contrast, the Republicans favored equal rights and universal manhood suffrage, but precisely for that reason could not tolerate blacks voting as equals with whites. At the same time as the New York Jeffersonian Republicans were denying the franchise to longtime black voters, they promoted illegal voting by Irish immigrants who were not yet citizens, knowing that such recent immigrants would vote for the Democratic-Republicans. Such were the strange and perverse consequences of republican equality and democracy.
⁷⁵

Whites in the North began copying the South in separating the races in ways they had not done earlier. Free blacks were confined to distinct neighborhoods and to separate sections of theaters, circuses, churches, and other places. Most Americans, both Northerners and Southerners, were coming to think of the United States as “a white man’s country.”

Yet could the states of the young Republic hang together suspended between slavery and freedom? That was the worrying question that tainted all the exuberance and optimism of early nineteenth-century Americans.

15
The Rising Glory of America

Despite Jefferson’s valiant efforts to justify American genius, by the second decade of the nineteenth century many thought that the Europeans’ jibes about America being a cultural wasteland might have been only too accurate after all. Where were the great writers, the great painters, the great playwrights? Despite the high hopes of the 1790s and the promise of being the most enlightened nation in the world, America seemed incapable of artistically creating anything that captured the attention of Europe. “Who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue?” sneered the British critic Sydney Smith in 1820. Looking back, Ralph Waldo Emerson agreed that the country had failed to fulfill its earlier artistic promise. He thought his father’s generation had contributed little or nothing to American culture, certainly not in Massachusetts. “From 1790 to 1820,” he said, “there was not a book, a speech, a conversation, or a thought in the State.”
¹

Subsequent generations of Americans have tried to explain what had happened. The new nation, they said, was too provincial and too dependent on European and English forms and styles to create a distinctive American culture. Americans in the early Republic, they contended, were too unwilling to exploit their indigenous materials, and too timid to create a genuine native culture; instead, in the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, they had to wait for Emerson’s “American Scholar” address to declare their cultural independence from the Old World.

Yet this conventional view that Americans in the first generation of the early Republic were too provincial and imitative of Europe, echoed by many modern generations of scholars, misunderstands the cultural aims of the American Revolutionaries. The Revolutionary leaders never intended to create an original and peculiar indigenous culture. Despite
all their talk of American exceptionalism and American virtue in contrast with European corruption, they were seeking not to cut themselves off from Europe’s cultural heritage but to embrace it and in fact to fulfill it. It is a mistake to view America’s post-Revolutionary emulation of Europe as a legacy of helpless dependence passed on from colonial days. Americans imitated European styles and forms not because in their naïveté they could do nothing else but because they wanted to. Their participation in European or English culture in the early years of the new Republic was intentional, undertaken with confidence and without apology. Their revolution was very much an international affair, an attempt to fulfill the cosmopolitan dreams of the Enlightenment.

Indeed, the Revolutionary generation was as cosmopolitan as any in American history. The Revolutionaries were patriots, to be sure, but they were not obsessed, as were some later generations, with separating America from the broad course of Western civilization. The Revolutionary leaders saw themselves as part of an international intellectual community, “the republic of letters.” “Why may not a Republic of Letters be realized in America as well as a Republican Government?” demanded Jeremy Belknap in 1780. “Why may there not be a Congress of Philosophers as well as of Statesmen?” America ought to “shine as Mistress of the Sciences, as well as the Asylum of Liberty.”
²

Not only was the republic of letters based solely on merit, it transcended national boundaries as well. The American Revolution may have divided the British Empire, said Benjamin Rush, but it “made no breach in the republic of letters.” Despite the war, Americans were eager to install British scientists in the American Philosophical Society. “Science and literature are of no party nor nation,” said John Adams. When Benjamin Franklin was minister to France during the Revolutionary War, he issued a document to the English explorer Captain James Cook protecting him from American depredations at sea during his voyage of 1779. Franklin told all American ship commanders that they must regard all English scientists not as enemies but “as common friends of Mankind.” When an American captain seized a British ship with some thirty volumes of medical lecture notes, Washington sent them back to England, saying that the United States did not make war on science. Jefferson justified sending some seeds to a French agricultural society in violation of his own embargo on the grounds that “these societies are always at peace, however the nations may be at war. Like the republic of letters, they form
a great fraternity spreading over all the earth, and their correspondence is not interrupted by any civilization.”
³