23 23It appears that Mr. Henry is not at bottom a friend.
WHEN THE SOUTH CAROLINA House of Representatives met to ratify the successfully negotiated Constitution in January 1788, former South Carolina governor Rawlins Lowndes congratulated Charles Cotesworth Pinckney by unleashing a blast of anti-Northern bitterness.
“Negroes were our wealth, our only natural resource,” Lowndes said, “yet behold how our kind friends in the North were determined soon to tie up our hands, and drain us of what we had,” with palpable sarcasm on the word “friends.”
“We are at a loss, for some time,” Pinckney responded, “for a rule to ascertain the proportionate wealth of the states. At last we thought that the productive labor of the inhabitants was the best rule for ascertaining their wealth.”1 Pinckney struck the already familiar tone of intra-sectional rivalry as he continued:
your delegates had to contend with the religious and political prejudices of the Eastern and Middle States, and with the interested and inconsistent opinion of Virginia, who was warmly opposed to our importing more slaves.
I am of the same opinion now as I was two years ago … that, while there remained one acre of swampland uncleared of South Carolina, I would raise my voice against restricting the importation of negroes. I am … thoroughly convinced … that the nature of our climate, and the flat, swampy situation of our country, obliges us to cultivate our lands with negroes, and that without them South Carolina would soon be a desert waste. (emphasis added)
Yet, Pinckney insisted, there was a reason for South Carolina to have negotiated over this issue and to have joined the newly constituted republic: facing potential or actual threats from the English, the Spanish, the Native Americans, the free blacks of Florida, and its own captive labor force, South Carolina needed the other states to defend it.
We are so weak that by ourselves we could not form an union strong enough for the purpose of effectually protecting each other. Without union with the other States, South Carolina must soon fall. Is there any one among us so much a Quixotte as to suppose that this State could long maintain her independence if she stood alone, or was only connected with the Southern States? I scarcely believe there is … By this settlement we have secured an unlimited importation of negroes for twenty years. Nor is it declared that the importation shall be then stopped; it may be continued. We have a security that the general government can never emancipate them, for no such authority is granted; and it is admitted, on all hands, that the general government has no powers but what are expressly granted by the Constitution, and that all rights not expressed were reserved by the several states. We have obtained a right to recover our slaves in whatever part of America they may take refuge, which is a right we had not before. In short, considering all circumstances, we have made the best terms for the security of this species of property it was in our power to make. We would have made better if we could; but, on the whole, I do not think them bad.2
The two points had been made, yet again: one, without enslaved black labor, South Carolina would be desperately poor; two, without a defensive alliance, South Carolina could not survive. It was equally true in Georgia; as George Washington wrote in a letter of January 17, 1788: “if a weak state [Georgia], with powerful tribes of Indians in its rear and the Spaniards on its flank, do not incline to embrace a strong general government, there must, I should think, be either wickedness or insanity in their conduct.”3
The word “slave” may have been silent in the Constitution, but not in the nationwide ratification debate. It required considerable persuasion to sell the ratification of the Constitution up North in the face of increasing antislavery sentiment. The provision for possibly ending the African slave trade after twenty years had to be touted as a step toward ending slavery, which it was not.
There was no debate in South Carolina as to whether the Constitution gave sufficient protection to slavery: it did. South Carolina had gotten what it wanted, and ratified the Constitution easily, despite protests from upcountry farmers who saw themselves as self-sufficient. David Waldstreicher writes that “strikingly few people” in the Lowcountry “criticized the Constitution for being insufficiently pro-slavery…. The relative absence of debate on the topic in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia speaks volumes…. The only reason North Carolina did not ratify was because slavery-dominated districts did not outnumber those where small farmers predominated.”4
The South Carolina Assembly voted in 1786 to move the capital to an upcountry site and to name it Columbia. It ratified a carefully drafted state constitution in 1790 that, like Britain, required property-holding and tax-paying in order to be able to exercise the voting franchise, with higher property-holding requirements for important officeholders. In effect, this excluded non-slaveholders from government. These requirements were partly expressed as a number of “negroes,” so that a state representative was expected to “be legally seized and possessed in his own right of a settled freehold estate of five hundred acres of land and ten negroes, or of a real estate of the value of one hundred and fifty pounds sterling, clear of debt.” The governor was required to have an estate of fifteen hundred pounds sterling.5 From then until after the end of slavery, South Carolina’s governor, US senators, and congressmen would not be chosen by popular vote but by the assembly, which was utterly dominated by planters; nor did the people at large have a vote in the presidential election.
The Constitution owed its existence to two Virginians: Washington, who chaired the convention and lent his prestige to it, and Madison, the principal drafter. But even so, Virginia, less in need of defense from invasion than South Carolina, was less eager to ratify. There was extensive sentiment in Virginia that the proposed Constitution gave too much power to a federal government. With eight states having ratified the Constitution out of nine needed, Virginia was widely seen as the swing state for ratification (though as it played out, New Hampshire became the ninth to ratify), and it was sharply divided.
The opposition was led by Patrick Henry and George Mason. Henry had declined appointment to the Constitutional Convention, worrying James Madison, who with characteristic precision correctly predicted what Henry would do: “Besides the loss of his services on that theater [of the Constitutional Convention], there is a danger I fear that this step has proceeded from a wish to leave his conduct unfettered on another theatre where the result of the Convention will receive its destiny from his omnipotence.”6 Mason, however, had participated in the Constitutional Convention but did not like the result.
Henry saw Virginia as a “country” that would lose her sovereignty by demotion to membership in a “general” government. “What is become of your country?” he asked rhetorically. “The Virginian government is but a name.” He warned that if you “give up your rights to the general government,” then that government would have the terrible power to end slavery.7 Sounding the tocsin of sectional antagonism, he warned that the Constitution would put slaveowners at risk for losing their property. “Among ten thousand powers which they may assume,” thundered Henry (imagine exclamation points), “they [the general government] may, if we be engaged in war, liberate every one of your slaves if they please. And this must and will be done by men, a majority of whom have not a common interest with you. They will therefore have no feeling for your interests.”8
Patrick Henry believed that the Articles of Confederation were adequate. An isolated provincial by then at the age of fifty-one, he was out of touch with the world beyond Richmond. James Madison, whom Henry directly confronted in the ratification debate, knew the complexities of American politics at that moment as well as anyone alive, and he knew the Articles of Confederation weren’t working. Much of the country was in a state of near anarchy, with no visible control at any higher level than the local. A pro-Constitution essay in the Winchester, Virginia, Gazette of January 18, 1788, said plainly, “At the American Revolution there was not only an end to the power of the crown, but a total dissolution of government.”9 The South Carolinians, who were in favor of a national government that would defend them from external attack even as they demanded protection for slavery, were in much better contact with the real world of commerce than Patrick Henry. In a sense, Henry was arguing for imposing the decentralization of Chesapeake society on the nation.
The Constitution and Patrick Henry were on a collision course as regards rhetoric as well. The Constitution was everything Henry wasn’t: concise and restrained. Henry’s style was to sweep the listener away with cathartic discourse, the opposite of Madison’s neoclassical rationality. The clash between Henry and Madison in the Virginia House of Delegates wasn’t a fair fight, oratorically speaking. Madison was small, analytical, and a mumbler—“Mr. Madison added other remarks which could not be heard” is one of many such notations in the debate minutes—while Henry was an expansive, emotional orator who filled in the silences about slavery in Madison’s document.
Henry, who literally talked for days, warned on June 17, 1788, in the Virginia Convention that had been called to debate ratification, that a national Congress could do the most horrifying thing possible: free Virginia’s slaves. The Constitution did not give Congress the power of emancipation, but Congress could, in the reporter’s paraphrase of Henry, “lay such heavy taxes on slaves, as would amount to emancipation; and then the Southern States would be the only sufferers…. He considered the clause which had been adduced by the Gentleman as a security for this property, as no security at all. It was no more than this—That a run-away negro could be taken up in Maryland or New-York. This could not prevent Congress from interfering with that property by laying a grievous and enormous tax on it, so as to compel owners to emancipate their slaves rather than pay the tax.”10
In case of war, Henry warned on June 24, “may Congress not say, that every black man must fight?—Did we not see a little of this last war? … acts of Assembly passed, that every slave who would go to the army should be free.” Then he looked into the abyss. “May they [Congress] not pronounce all slaves free?”11 He continued: “The majority of Congress is to the north, and the slaves are to the south. In this situation, I see a great deal of the property of the people of Virginia in jeopardy, and their peace and tranquility gone away.”12 That the “property of the people of Virginia” consisted of other people of Virginia does not seem to have bothered Henry.
The old rhetorician knew when to deflate himself and jab his audience with something more vernacular. Though it does not appear in the official account of his speech, there is this tidbit in an 1850 account by Hugh Blair Grigsby, the nineteenth-century historian of the Virginia Convention and an influential thinker in secessionist circles:
On one of the occasions which the reporter passes over with some such remark as, “Here Mr. Henry declaimed with great pathos on the loss of our liberties,” I was told by a person on the floor of the Convention at the time, that … he suddenly broke out with the homely exclamation: “They’ll free your niggers!” The audience passed instantly from fear to wayward laughter; and my informant said that it was most ludicrous to see men who a moment before were half frightened to death, with a broad grin on their faces.13
Whatever the truth of this secondhand account, “They’ll free your niggers!” is indeed a homely summary of what Patrick Henry was saying, and at the very least, Grigsby’s quoting of it suggests the continuity that later slaveowners saw with Henry.
Ultimately, the opposition of Henry and Mason (along with Jefferson’s influence over Madison, exercised from Paris by letter) helped prompt the insertion of the Bill of Rights in 1789. It is in no small part to Henry’s resistance that the Constitution owes the Second Amendment in particular—the one that promises “the right to keep and bear arms” in order to have “a wellregulated militia”—and it too was, in part, about slavery, because in the South, the militia was understood to be identical with the slave patrols that were constantly on guard.
The Constitution gave Congress a measure of control over the militia, which Henry virulently opposed. He wanted assurances that Congress would not use that control to disarm the militia. The Constitution empowered Congress “to provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.” This mention of insurrections, while broadly phrased, was made at a time when slave rebellion and Native American uprising were an ever-present threat. Nor was the repelling of invasions by foreign armies something the undisciplined American militias were capable of doing, as would be demonstrated in the War of 1812.
The Second Amendment was intended in part to insure that Northerners could not interrupt or halt Southern repression of black people and Native Americans—though many, notably including Jefferson, incorrectly thought militias adequate for defending the country, too. The goal of slaveowners was to make the entire South a prison from which no enslaved person could escape; militias were the police force. What was intended by a militia, at least from the point of view of South Carolina, was expressed by Alexander Hewatt in 1779 and agrees with the functions enumerated in the Constitution:
As all white men in the province, of the military age, were soldiers as well as citizens, and trained in some measure to the use of arms, it was no difficult matter to complete the provincial regiment. Their names being registered in the list of militia on every emergency they were obliged to be ready for defence, not only against the incursions of Indians, but also against the insurrection of negroes.14
When the Bill of Rights was ratified two years later, it did not lay a hand on slavery, nor did it extend a hand to Americans enslaved at the time the United States was born. The Fifth Amendment provided that “no person” could be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” At that time, there were 694,280 legally enslaved people, who lived in a far more abject relationship to the people who were legally their owners than the colonists had to their king, and to whom the Fifth Amendment would not apply.
Southern slavery democratized the divine right of kings. No matter how poor a plantation owner might seem to a London merchant, on the grounds of his plantation he was the head of a royal family where his word was law. Every man of property was a little king, with the power to order sexual reproduction or summary execution. With their labor to provide his income and the collateral of their bodies to secure his credit, he could be free to ponder great things and spend his days in politics. The South’s down-home kings had the Constitution at their back, with a Bill of Rights that safeguarded their slave-patrolling militias from being disarmed by abolitionists up North who might at some future point take charge of the federal government, even though the South was disproportionately over-represented in Congress and in presidential elections.
The South got yet another benefit from the Constitution: Article 1, Section 8 contemplated (but did not mandate) the creation of a “District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States”—a neutral ground that would not be part of any state to house the federal capital. With so many Quakers in Pennsylvania, to say nothing of so many free people of color, and with Pennsylvania having passed the Gradual Abolition Act in 1780 (which granted birthright freedom to children born in Pennsylvania but did not affect those already enslaved), slaveholders did not consider Philadelphia a comfortable seat for a government that they expected to safeguard slavery. The Virginians knew where they wanted that federal district to be—right by where George Washington lived.
During the First Congress, Second Session, of 1790, Pennsylvania Quakers presented petitions calling for the abolition of slavery, triggering a strongly worded rebuttal. Offended by the Quakers’ imputations, South Carolina representative William Smith responded to the petitions with an extended defense of his state. He asked rhetorically of the Quakers, “had any of them ever married a negro, or would any of them suffer their children to mix their blood with that of a black?” He then
read some extracts from Mr. Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia, proving that negroes were by nature an inferior race of beings; and that the whites would always feel a repugnance at mixing their blood with that of the blacks. Thus, he proceeded, that respectable author, who was desirous of countenancing emancipation, was, on consideration of the subject, induced candidly to allow that the difficulties appeared insurmountable.15
Jefferson in 1790 brokered a deal over dinner with Hamilton: Jefferson would get a Southern capital if Hamilton could begin his financial plan. As a result of the deal, Hamilton created the national debt and the Bank of the United States that issued bonds to back it, paid the veterans of the independence struggle what they were owed, and restored the United States’ international credit, while Jefferson set out to create the federal city.
The one-hundred-square-mile District of Columbia was created out of sixty-one square miles of Maryland land on the north side of the Potomac, where the capital was sited, together with thirty-nine square miles of Virginia land south of the Potomac, including the town of Alexandria, whose harbor was designated by Washington, Jefferson, and Monroe as the Potomac’s official port of entry in 1784. Building the new capital city of Washington out of swampland was good for business; it employed lots of slave labor, rented from Virginia and Maryland slaveowners. As construction began, the slave-selling business in Alexandria picked up from the federal stimulus.
Sixty years later, the Beaufort, South Carolina, arch-secessionist Robert Barnwell Rhett would call the Jefferson-Hamilton deal a “corrupt bargain” in which Jefferson sold out the South. For the political class of South Carolina, who saw themselves as rulers of a sovereign state, the creation of Washington City centralized power in the Chesapeake and legitimized a system of national debt, the payment of which, they believed, would be extorted from them in the form of tariffs. Indeed, the First Congress in 1789 passed a tariff that South Carolina and Georgia saw as a transfer of wealth from South to North, prompting Pierce Butler in 1790 to warn that, in William C. Davis’s paraphrase, “the doctrine of protective tariffs, if pursued, might one day destroy the Union.”16
During the thirty-one-month interval between the Constitution taking effect and the Bill of Rights taking effect, the French and Haitian Revolutions erupted. It was one long upheaval: American independence was a French-supported project that occurred in parallel with France’s revolution, though the American side erupted first. The two movements were inextricably tied together, with communication between the two and an overlapping cast of characters that included Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette.
In Europe, where American independence was seen primarily as a victory for France against England, the fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, was a far greater shock. Not only had the French monarch been powerful, but France was wealthy: the island colony of Saint-Domingue was the most profitable piece of ground on earth, contributing perhaps as much as 40 percent of France’s annual income with its products.17 In 1789 it supplied “about 60 percent of the coffee sold in the western world”; only Jamaica could compete with it as a producer of sugar; and it produced indigo, cotton, and tobacco. It was a high-volume consumer of kidnapped Africans; forty thousand arrived in 1789 alone, after a six-year period that had seen Saint-Domingue’s agricultural production double. As such, it generated a vast cash flow for the trans-African slave trade at its height. This capital “fertilized” the crops, as C. L. R. James put it: “though the bourgeoisie traded in other things than slaves, upon the success or failure of the traffic everything else depended.” The great revenues from Saint-Domingue created the prosperity that was the source of the power France projected internationally. But it was not royal power; the fortunes of the slave trade were made by the bourgeoisie.18
Some of the bourgeoisie of Saint-Domingue were free people of color, though they were discriminated against. Stewart King, who analyzed Domingan notarial records, estimates that as many as 30 percent of the slaves in Saint-Domingue were owned by free people of color, who were approximately half the free population.19 There were about thirty thousand whites and about thirty thousand free people of color in Saint-Domingue, and approximately half a million slaves, about two thirds of them African-born.20 No comparable-sized piece of ground in Africa had ever sustained such a population. They were angry, and among them they had a considerable body of military knowledge to draw on.
In the hodgepodge of African nations compacted together under the harsh discipline of the plantation, the Senegambians of Saint-Domingue, from an Islamized region, brought a concept of jihad. From farther south in Africa, the Fon-speakers from Ardra (in present-day Benin) followed traditional African practices and called their spirits foddun (from which, vodou), alongside representatives of other traditional African practices. From farther south yet, in West Central Africa, the most numerous group, the Bakongo, whose military techniques seem to have predominated, had been Catholicized, while continuing their traditional practices. The body of spiritual practices called vodou, which developed along with the Haitian nation, became an umbrella concept, an e pluribus unum of African religion that allowed for different traditions to continue within an overall framework of nanchons, or nations. Under this umbrella, the spirits multiplied.