By Charles
C. W. Cooke
Wednesday,
September 28, 2022
Randi
Weingarten thinks
she’s caught Ron DeSantis in a misdescription of American history.
But
Weingarten is much more wrong here than is DeSantis. It is, indeed, an
overstatement for DeSantis to claim that “no one had questioned” slavery in
America before the Declaration of Independence. Some had, as the 1772 Somerset
case showed. But it is not at all an overstatement to draw a
direct link between the American Revolution and the explosion of abolitionist
sentiment in America. The American Revolution was, indeed, “about leaving
Britain.” And yet, as Abraham Lincoln would put it decades later, Thomas Jefferson,
“in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single
people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely
revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all
times.” His decision to do so had profound consequences.
DeSantis,
note, does not say that the American Revolution was fought over slavery. He
says that the American Revolution “caused people to question slavery.” It did. As John Ferling notes in Whirlwind, the rhetoric of the Revolution
mattered so much that, “within thirty years of Lexington and Concord, every
northern state had acted to end slavery, either immediately or gradually.” Or,
as DeSantis put it: once we had “decided as Americans that we are endowed by
our creator with unalienable rights,” it became much more difficult to say “but
not them.” The language of revolution, which had been in the air
since 1774, helped along the language of abolition; and, in turn, the language
of abolition helped along the language of revolution. The Anti-slavery Society
was founded in Philadelphia in 1775. Vermont banned slavery in its Constitution
in 1777. Pennsylvania banned slavery legislatively in 1780. And so on.
As for
Weingarten’s own history? It doesn’t make much sense. She says “if America’s
founders questioned slavery there would not have been the heinous ‘3/5
compromise’ in the US Constitution, which was drafted and enacted AFTER the
American Revolution.” But, quite obviously, that compromise was the product of
there being a large number of Americans who had “questioned slavery.” Between 1780
and 1784 — that’s after the Revolution had been declared, obviously — five of
the thirteen states banned slavery. If they hadn’t, no apportionment compromise
would have been necessary.
Would it
have been better if the Constitution had banned slavery everywhere? Yes, it
would. Was that on the table? Alas, it was not. The choice was the maintenance
of slavery and the passage of a new constitution, or the maintenance of slavery
and no new constitution. The drafters of that new constitution — who were divided
on the question of slavery — chose the former, and, in so doing, improved upon
the status quo. The clause abolishing the slave trade after 1808 (which was
taken up by Congress at the first possible opportunity) made things better than
they had been. James Madison’s decision to downplay any explicit references to
slavery — Madison said, during the debates, that he “thought it wrong to admit
in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men” — made things
better than they had been. So, too, did the decision to abolish slavery in the
Northwest Territory, which was made by the Congress of the
Confederation while the Constitution Convention was in session. This, to
borrow a phrase from Weingarten, is “basic history.”
I was
tempted to conclude here by suggesting that the president of a teachers union
should probably be less willing to embarrass herself in public in pursuit of
transparently partisan aims. But . . . well, you know.
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