Bachmann and Du Bois

Michele Bachmann is being ridiculed for her suggestion earlier this year that the founding fathers of America had worked tirelessly to end slavery. “Now with respect, congressman,” George Stephanopoulos, one of the journalists who pressed her on this, told her on the air, “that’s just not true. Many of them, including Jefferson and Washington, were actually slave holders and slavery didn’t end until the Civil War.”

Well, Mrs. Bachmann could have handed Mr. Stephanopoulos a copy of W.E.B. Du Bois’s “The Suppression of the Slave Trade.” A copy of that classic study has been with your editor for much of his journalistic career. Du Bois, who ended up in the embrace of the communists, was no milquetoast. On the contrary, he was one of the most radical of the civil rights leaders in American history. Yet he penned a seminal book making it clear just how hard the Founders — not all of them, but many — did struggle to end slavery

It is such a fecund book that it’s hard to pick a spot to dip in. Early in it Du Bois notes that at “the outbreak of the Revolution six main reasons, some of which were old and of slow growth, others peculiar to the abnormal situation of that time, led to concerted action against the slave-trade.” He goes on to talk about economic failure in the Middle and Eastern colonies and the expectation that failure awaited slavery in the South.

Du Bois also wrote of how “the new philosophy of ‘Freedom’ and the ‘Rights of man,’ which formed the corner-stone of the Revolution, made the dullest realize that, at the very least, the slave-trade and a struggle for ‘liberty’ were not consistent.” He cites “the old fear of slave insurrections” gaining “new power from the imminence of war and from the well-founded fear that the British might incite servile uprisings.”

He reports that partisans of the slave system had a desire to “raise the value of their slaves by at least a temporary stoppage of the trade.” He touched on the ironical calculation of “slave-trading merchants” who, for their own commercial reasons, offered “little active opposition to a cessation of the trade for “a season.” Meantime, supporters of the revolution reckoned that the “best weapon to bring England to terms was the economic expedient of stopping all commercial intercourse with her.”

We tick off that list not to justify the slaveholding of a number of the Founders or to ameliorate any of the negative history — and there is plenty of it — but merely to illuminate that the struggle against slavery began early in America’s history. Du Bois has particularly brilliant chapter on the Federal Convention, at which the Constitution was written. Du Bois found that, as he put it, “[s]lavery occupied no prominent place in the Convention called to remedy the glaring defects” in the Articles of Confederation. But he goes on to sketch what tumult slavery did ignite.

The Founders compromises with the slave empire — such as prohibiting, in the Constitution itself, Congress from ending the slave trade earlier than 1808 — are as plain as they are shameful. All the more remarkable that the struggle over slavery erupted right in the First United States Congress, when an effort to tax the importation of slaves was proposed. It failed when, among other things, it was opposed not only by the pro-slavery faction but also by some of the anti-slavery figures, such as Roger Sherman of Connecticut, who said, according to one abridgement of the congressional debates, he could not “reconcile himself to the insertion of human beings as an article of duty, among goods, wares, and merchandise.”

Congress voted to prohibit outright the importation of slaves even before the deadline on which such importation could constitutionally take effect. It did so in 1807, passing “An Act to Prohibit the Importation of Slaves into any Port or Place Within the Jurisdiction of the United States, From and After the First Day of January, in the Year of our Lord One Thousand Eight Hundred and Eight.”

The Congress that passed it, the 10th, contained a number of the Founders, starting with Vice President Clinton, who had opposed ratification of the Constitution until the Bill of Rights was advanced. The Speaker, Joseph Bradley Varnum, had helped to defeat Shays’ Rebellion. At one point he advanced a proposed constitutional amendment to end slavery, which was passed and signed by a slave-owner, President Jefferson. In the event, slavery wasn’t ended by constitutional amendment until after the Civil War.

The point is simply that Mrs. Bachman was right not wrong when she spoke of how the Founding fathers had worked to end slavery. Many of them did, some passionately. That they failed in their time does not erase their struggle. So what is the attack on her comment all about? No doubt it reflects a fear, even a desperation, among the left in the face of a remarkably strong candidate who — as a tax lawyer and businesswoman who is mother of five and, with her husband, also raised 23 foster children — represents a sudden and unanticipated threat. To try to defeat her by suggesting that she was wrong about the Founders having struggled against slavery is a loser’s game.