Charles C.W. Cooke:
The United States, Senator Bernie Sanders declared before a few thousand college students yesterday, was founded “from way back on racist principles.” “That,” he added, after briefly apologizing for bringing the topic up in the first instance, “is a fact — we have come a long way as a nation.”
The latter of these two asseverations is not in doubt. Time was when a black American would be beaten, broken, and even skinned alive on the flimsiest of pretexts, while his tormenters were let free without charge. Conservatives occasionally like to wonder aloud what might happen if this nation — or some part of it — were to be taken over by a monstrous and unflinching tyranny. They do not need to treat the question as a hypothetical: To read Ida B. Wells or Victoria Earle Matthews is to know the answer all too well. That Sanders should remind voters of this truth is admirable and necessary. That he should do so in the middle of an ideologically hostile crowd is even more so. One cannot enjoy redemption without guilt, and, on occasion at least, that guilt must be given a name. America has indeed “come a long way.”
It is unfortunate, however, that Sanders felt the need to attach his reminder to a dangerous falsehood. The American escutcheon is indeed sullied by original sin, but that sin is largely one of omission rather than commission. Flawed as it is, the United States was not founded on inadequate or abominable or “racist” principles, but upon extraordinary, revolutionary, and unusually virtuous propositions that, tragically, have all too often been ignored. As written, there is not a great deal wrong with the central tenets of the Declaration of Independence; rather, the disgraces that pepper the history books derive from the selective manner in which those tenets have been applied. If one is so minded, one can reasonably propose that Revolution-era America was chock-full of hypocrites, and that the lofty ideals to which the Founders paid eloquent lip service were routinely disregarded when deemed inconvenient. But to conclude that those ideals themselves are rotten is to commit an elemental reasoning error. As one would not examine an incident of marital infidelity and presume that the wedding vows must necessarily have been defective, one should not infer from the Founders’ betrayals that their essential precepts were in some way unsound. They weren’t. Man, as ever, is imperfect.
Likewise, one should refrain from blaming the founding generation for the perfidy of its heirs. In Philadelphia, the Constitution’s architects found themselves presented with two realistic choices. The first was to contrive a new Constitution and, alas, to tolerate the continuation of slavery. The second was to keep the existing Articles of Confederation, and, alas, to tolerate the continuation of slavery. Wisely, they chose the former path, conceding that abolition was impossible for now but electing to include within the charter a number of salutary measures intended to encourage its rescission. The Convention, James Madison confirmed during the debates, “thought it wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men.” In the end, though, he was left with little choice. The references are deliberately oblique: The existence of the institution is in places acknowledged; there are obvious attempts to mitigate its corrupting influence; and there is even a timetable for restriction. But there is no abolition, and a careful reader will notice the joints. It is of its era.
Does this make the document an inherently corrupted work, as Sanders implied? I think not, no. Indeed, if there is a related principle within its structure, it is that slavery — which had existed almost everywhere since time immemorial — would henceforth be limited. Frederick Douglass, a former slave whose relationship with the young American republic was as complicated as one might expect, eventually came to agree with this assessment. Distancing himself from the cynicism of William Lloyd Garrison and the American Anti-Slavery Society, Douglass concluded that the charter was unsullied. “In that instrument I hold, there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing,” he supposed in July of 1852. “But, interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway? Or is it in the temple? It is neither.” “Take the Constitution according to its plain reading,” he concluded. “And I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it. On the other hand, it will be found to contain principles and purposes, entirely hostile to the existence of slavery.”
That Douglass came to conclude that the Constitution contains no “sanction” of human bondage — and, indeed that by “plain reading,” it is “hostile” toward the practice — should not in truth be surprising. Because the revolution had been fought at the call of both libertarian and equalitarian rhetoric; because the Declaration of Independence contained a set of universal propositions; and because so many blacks had participated willingly in the fight for separation, a reconsideration of the status quo had been inevitable from the moment the British surrendered at Yorktown. “Within thirty years of Lexington and Concord, every northern state had acted to end slavery, either immediately or gradually,” the historian John Ferling records in Whirlwind. “Change was less spectacular in slavery’s heartland, the southern states. Nevertheless, throughout the Upper South, state laws were revised making it easier for slave owners to manumit their slaves, with the result that the free black population witnessed a dramatic growth.” By 1810, the future looked bright. In 1787, slavery had been outlawed in the Northwest territory. In 1808 — on the earliest date that the Constitution permitted Congress to act — the slave trade had been brought to a swift end. And, outside of a few recalcitrant pockets in the Deep South, it was broadly predicted that if the practice was firmly restricted to a small part of the country, it would soon die out completely.
