Monday, July 4, 2011

Michele Bachmann and the Frozen Founders


Michele Bachmann's insistence that John Quincy Adams was one of the Founders produced a lot of sniggering last week.  As many people have pointed out, the younger Adams was all of eight years old when the Declaration was signed 235 years ago.

The George Stephanopoulus interview was not the first time.  Speaking in Iowa back in January, Bachmann said

we know there was slavery that was still tolerated when the nation began, we know that was an evil, and it was a scourge and a blot and a stain on our history. But we also know that the very founders who wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States. And I think it is high time we recognize the contribution of our forbearers [sic] who worked tirelessly, men like John Quincy Adams, who would not rest until slavery was extinguished in the country.
Whenever a political figure insists on defending such a self-evidently wrong statement, it makes me wonder what lies beneath it. This isn't just ignorance. There is an ideological imperative she's obeying.

First, let's give Bachmann her due. John Quincy Adams was indeed an opponent of slavery. The problem is that his truly "tireless" activity on the subject came during his post-presidential career in Congress in the 1830s and 1840s. He was a figure of the second generation of American political leadership, not the first.

The irony is that there are many examples of people during the founding generation working against slavery.  As Matt Yglesias has noted, actual Founders such as John Jay did fight slavery. The era of the revolution did see real progress on slavery--all of the northern states passed legislation for the gradual end to slavery within those states. So why not cite that actual history?

Because it is complicated, and Bachmann is looking for simplicity. To talk about the movement to end slavery in the northern states inevitably draws attention to the reality that the southern states not only did not follow, but over time grew more committed to maintaining slavery. The reason later generations had to work so "tirelessly" against slavery is that other Americans were working so tirelessly for it.

The reason the Founders did not end slavery in their new republic, one born with the phrase "all men are created equal," is that to insist on an end to slavery would have insured an end to the United States. As Robert Middlekauff writes in The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789, "white people in the North and South decided that for the time being at least the union that protected republican government was more important than a full-scale dedication to equality."

A truthful account of the Founders and slavery has to acknowledge this fact. They were something today's Tea Partiers say they abhor: compromisers. In the Constitutional Convention, they compromised on everything, most notably on slavery.

Another reason those later generations had to work so tirelessly to end slavery is that the Constitution so well ensconced slavery in the United States. Arguably the Constitution was the largest impediment to ending slavery. The abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison denounced the Constitution as a "covenant with death and an agreement with hell." He burned a copy of the Constitution in protest.

So to speak honestly and accurately of "the Founders" is to confront that messy reality.

Bachmann prefers her Founders simple, god-like, and unchanging. Since the Tea Party ideology deems the Constitution a sacred document, inspired by God (remember, it was Bachmann who enlisted the fraud David Barton to teach Constitution classes to Congress), those who wrote it must be responsible for all that is good. Thus she cannot be accurate. She cannot say some of the founders worked tirelessly against slavery while others defended it.

And since all good things must come from the Founders, she cannot note later Americans like Garrison who denounced the Constitution's compromises on slavery. No, abolition must trace back to "the Founders." All of them. She does not want real, fallible human beings. She wants icons, created in her own image and then frozen in time.

The alternative is simply not acceptable: she cannot admit that the Declaration, with its statement of great principles, was only imperfectly embodied in the Constitution. Because if we accept that the principles of the Founders expressed in the Declaration are renewed and reinterpreted by later generations, that the institutions we adopt to implement them change over time and are made "more perfect" in application, then the foundational idea of the Tea Party is nonsense.

Which, of course, it is. We cannot reflexively ask what "the Founders" would do or say, as if there is one objective answer to that question. The Declaration, whose adoption we celebrate today, is not only a gift to future generations. It is a burden. "The Founders" did not give us all the answers. They showed us the important questions, and challenged us to work out the answers for ourselves.

On this Independence Day, to truly honor their work, we should stop pretending we can lazily rely on them to tell us what to do, and instead take up the challenge of finding what it means in our times to strive for what "of Right ought to be."

Happy Fourth.

11 comments:

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  2. Thanks for the post. It's a full time job to keep up with the misinformed statements of the TP crowd but I'm glad you're doing it. I'm also pleased that you called out David Barton as the fraud that he is, with his made up history and questionable documents. He's misinformed a lot of people.

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  3. "The reason the Founders did not end slavery in their new republic, one born with the phrase "all men are created equal," is that to insist on an end to slavery would have insured an end to the United States. As Robert Middlekauff writes in The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789, "white people in the North and South decided that for the time being at least the union that protected republican government was more important than a full-scale dedication to equality."

    A truthful account of the Founders and slavery has to acknowledge this fact. They were something today's Tea Partiers say they abhor: compromisers. In the Constitutional Convention, they compromised on everything, most notably on slavery"

    This is simply untrue in all aspects. Almost half of the signers had owned slaves at some point in their lives. The idea that there was some big debate about slavery is from the movie "1776". Nothing of that drama occured in real life. The abolition movement really began with the Quakers, but would not take shape for decades to come outside that organization. Even the two Quaker Signers were at one time slave holders though George Clymer had probably gotten rid of his before 1776. Pennsylvania's Quaker dominated Assembly passed a gradual emancipation bill in 1780 but that did not totally eliminate legal slavery in the state until the 1840's, gradual indeed!

    Furthermore, the reason the clause by Jefferson was deleted was most probably because it was wildly innaccurate, not because of a big debate. Jefferson inheirited slaves from his father who owned them before King George was born. The charge that Northern slave trading interests caused the deletion was made by Jefferson later in life probably to assuage his own conscience. Ten of the first 12 presidents were slave holders.

    It's nothing more than an attempt at soothing our consciences to pretend that there was a non-existent freedom movement among the Founding Fathers.

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  4. Great post. I'm a Christian but I find the myth of US as the Promised Land, we as the Chosen People, and the Constitution as a sacred document alarming. For one thing, it justifies vanquishing all the "heathen." The religious right needs to read the Federalist Papers AND re-read their Bibles.

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  5. Thanks for the comments.

    John, I did not contend there was "big debate about slavery" in the Continental Congress or the Constitutional convention, so I'm not sure what you are objecting to here. There were debates in the latter, of course, on how to count slaves for representation, the slave trade, and the fugitive slave clause. Not on abolition, no. But I did not say there was such a debate, merely that slavery was supported, not challenged, in the Constitution because, as Middlekauff puts it, "white people in the North and South decided that for the time being at least the union that protected republican government was more important than a full-scale dedication to equality."

    He is clearly saying that whites did not care enough about slavery to end it nationally, which I believe is your point as well.

    I simply noted the plain historical fact that what came to be known as the "free states" eventually became free states because they passed laws during and immediately after the Revolutionary War. Those states passed laws that led to the end of slavery--almost always, as you correctly point out, by gradual means that took far too long (and once again demonstrate the compromise mentality of those leaders).

    But there *were* Americans during the revolutionary era who saw slavery as something to be done away with. To deny that is to be as ideological as Bachmann is being. The term "freedom movement" is yours and I have no problem with your declaring it non-existent.

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  6. Then apparently we are in agreement.

    It is one of the great lies or innaccuracies of American history that any discussion on the abolition of slavery in the states ever took place in the Continental Congress, even over Jefferson's clause. In that regard, 1776 is an entertaining film, but bad history.

    As you know but most do not, The Continental Congress was not a national legislature in any sense, but a loose union of independent states, to the extent that delegates would not have contemplated the power to take any such action.

    I probably misjudged your use of the term compromise, since there was no representative group pushing for the abolition of slavery at that time which needed to be acconomodated

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  7. I wouldn't say it was particularly complicated, or that the founding fathers were especially compromising. The defenders of slavery were adamant, and the opponents of slavery compromised. That's a pretty simple story.

    Before the Civil War the story was much the same. Breckenridge only won a few states outright, but in the other states the adamant secessionists bullied and intimidated the unionists.

    Same for the imposition of white supremacy. The supremacists terrorized everyone else.

    And the same for the Republicans in Congress today. The Democrats control the Presidency and the Senate, but they're cringing before the more determined Republicans.

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  8. Thanks for the post!

    There has been and will always be a tension between the realities of our founding and canon (plural) that are convenient for particular political agendas.

    As with the Council of Nicea (325 AD), politicians and others who (attempt to) shape-shift the historical record more than likely are aware of Reality, but choose to ignore truths and adjust timetables to shape a more convenient "history..."

    The best we can to is preserve a richly documented, widely distributed account (in geography and media) that will survive their vandalism...

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  9. Mark and John, is it fair to say that slavery was discussed in the First or Second Congress, when the seat of national government was still in New York, and Ben Franklin lent his support and passion to the abolitionists? Was it poss. at that time that Madison and others made a deliberate decision not to confront an issue they thought would split the nascent republic?

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  10. John Emerson: There were, however, people pushing to ban the slave trade in the Constitution, and that led to the compromise to prevent it for 20 years but not thereafter. And of course there was the compromise over representation, which put slaveowners in the uncomfortable position of arguing that their "property" should be considered persons.

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  11. bitwacker: I love the idea of historical vandalism. It's apt.

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