intellectual disapproval of slavery; many claimed to feel as enslaved by the institution as those held in actual bondage. Jefferson’s repugnance is well known, and so too Madison’s; even when they advocated the spread of slavery, it was, they claimed, because “diffusion” of the institution would expedite its demise. Adams, meanwhile, favored abolition, and his eldest son, John Quincy, would lead the abolitionist cause in Congress. John Jay was the first president of the New York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves; Hamilton was the second. Hamilton advocated abolition on utilitarian grounds; he believed slavery was unproductive. Franklin urged the same result for reasons that were both scientific—the master-slave hierarchy had no empirical basis—and moral. Washington, meanwhile, found it difficult even to acknowledge the matter. In a 1794 letter to Alexander Spotswood, Washington wrote:
With respect to the other species of property, concerning which you ask my opinion, I shall frankly declare to you that I do not like to even think, much less talk of it. However, as you have put the question I shall, in a few words, give you my ideas of it. Were it not then, that I am principled agt. selling negroes, as you would do cattle in the market, I would not, in twelve months from this date, be possessed of one, as a slave. I shall be happily mistaken, if they are not found to be a very troublesome species of property ‘ere many years pass over our heads; (but this by the bye).
Three years later, Washington would write from Mount Vernon that “I wish from my soul that the Legislature of this State could see the policy of a gradual Abolition of Slavery; It would prevt. much future mischief.”
It now seems clear that the founding generation responded to slavery’s paradox largely by postponing the day of reckoning. Most believed, with Washington, that slavery would bring only “mischief”; most hoped, as he did, that the institution would be abolished. They lacked, for the most part, the courage to realize their convictions; but they believed, probably genuinely, that it was only a matter of time. The contradictions would then be resolved by the simple passing of years; their inaction was justified, in their minds, by the obvious inevitability of slavery’s demise.
But the years of the new century passed, and slavery did not die. Paradox, instead, begat paradox: new orders, and new contradictions, emerged. American women of the early nineteenth century had access to only a few low-paying jobs; if they were married, they generally could not contract, and could not control their wages. Most women were forced to labor at home, freeing their male counterparts both to pursue wage labor and to assume civic responsibilities. Thus, as Eric Foner writes, the “vaunted independence of the yeoman depended in considerable measure on the labor of women”; “free labor,” he continues, “embodied a contradiction akin in some ways to slavery’s . . . free labor for some rested on dependent labor for others.”
Still, the defining political issue of the nineteenth century was slavery. The South’s peculiar institution was not simply fading away; it became, on the contrary, even more firmly entrenched. The westward expansion, the invention of the cotton gin, and the development of new international markets for cotton all combined to make the institution not just peculiar, but vital.13
As slavery grew stronger, so too did the passions aroused by it. On the one side, the abolitionist effort intensified: its supporters grew in numbers, their condemnations of slavery grew harsher, and their strategies to secure its abolition grew bolder. Rifts developed within their ranks, at first between those who continued to advocate a gradual manumission and those who had grown tired of waiting and demanded instead slavery’s immediate demise. Later, the schism shifted terrain, and it called into question—sharply and directly—the “spirit of the nation,” the character of the United States Constitution.
William Lloyd Garrison pronounced the Constitution “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.” For him, the document was beyond redemption; only a radical reconstitution could eliminate the taint of slavery bequeathed by the founders. Other abolitionists were less harsh; they thought the founders guilty only of a resolute neutrality. Salmon Chase, later appointed chief justice of the Supreme Court by Abraham Lincoln, wrote to Joshua Giddings that “The Constitution must be vindicated from the reproach of sanctioning the doctrine of property in men.” Chase compiled a comprehensive collection of the antislavery statements of the framers; “The Constitution,” he concluded, “found slavery and left it a state institution.” Still others were outright hopeful. Frederick Douglass had been a dedicated Garrisonian, but he found Garrison’s views on the Constitution increasingly self-defeating. Douglass chose—as he insisted all open-minded people could—to see more good in the document than evil: “interpreted as it ought to be interpreted,” he proclaimed, “the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.”14
Yet another schism lingered beneath the surface, one that in some ways went to the very heart of the abolitionist effort. It required clarification of the moral and political objections to slavery, and forced a choice among conceptual priorities, between, in simplest terms, liberty and equality.
The early crusade against slavery was substantially rooted in religious evangelicalism, and it was a remarkably egalitarian one. The evangelical message was derived from the Puritan and Anglican traditions, but, significantly, it departed from those traditions in rejecting their conventional orders—of faith, of knowledge, and of humanity. In the evangelical worldview, faith and truth were to be realized, and they were to be realized universally and without qualification. “The offer of salvation to all,” Donald Matthews writes, “meant the essential humanity of all.” The message, then, was essentially egalitarian; abolitionism was simply the secular outgrowth of the evangelical commitment to the equality, under God, of all human beings. It is not clear that evangelical practice ever completely transcended the racial order of its day; but it offered real hope. As Mathews puts it, “When black people spoke in evangelical meetings they were in practice rather than principle expressing an essential democracy of experience among people who believed that in worship God revealed His presence.” The full promise of equality, and its genuine meaning, were thus to be realized through the “theoretically merciless scrutiny” of evangelical thought.
But as the nineteenth century progressed, this egalitarian evangelicalism gradually yielded to a different temperament. In the South, the antislavery effort became “futile within the churches and dangerous in the world,” and the effort consequently shifted from abolition to religious witness through the “Christianizing” of slaves and of slavery. The positive effects were not insignificant—the peculiar institution did apparently become a less harsh one in the antebellum era—but the new paternalism left very much in place the old order. In the North, meanwhile, the Second Great Awakening gave a distinctively Calvinist tone to evangelical abolition: individualist in its orientation and essentially liberal in its commitments, this Yankee evangelicalism easily merged with the utilitarian challenges to slavery. The result, according to historian Louis S. Gerteis, was that by the 1830s, “the moral sentiments of antislavery reform advanced the utilitarian ethic of liberal capitalism.”15
The change was apparent in the dispute among abolitionists over the growing labor movement. The workingmen’s movements of the nineteenth century broadly targeted social and economic inequality; they sought, not unlike the early evangelicals, a revival of genuine republican values. Most labor reformers were unhesitatingly opposed to slavery, but abolitionists did not necessarily return their support. Some abolitionists—Wendell Phillips, for example, and Nathaniel P. Rogers—did join labor reformers in urging cooperation as an antidote to unfair competition. But most did not see abolition as an egalitarian or communitarian struggle. They instead followed economist Theodore Sedgwick in opposing slavery on utilitarian grounds: slavery was wrong because it frustrated human progress by denying individual liberty. Most agreed with Sedgwick that society could not be equal because nature was not equal: government was obliged only to leave men equally free—“there shall be no institutions by law that shall make men unequal.”
Abolitionism became essentially individualistic, meritocratic, and remarkably tolerant of social inequality. Thus in 1831, Garrison’s Liberator would chide labor reformers: “Poverty,” the title of his article proclaimed, “Is Not Slavery.” Poverty, Garrison explained to his readers, simply resulted from the natural differences among men; echoing Madison,