The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding, by Joseph Ellis (Knopf, 227 pp., $31)

“I have the sweet consolation to reflect, that I never owned a slave,” John Adams told a correspondent in 1813, his paternal Quincy people, for five generations, never owning slaves either. When he was a child his mother’s father may have had an African slave but, as Adams recalled, “this old creature treated me with so much kindness that I loved him almost as well as any of the family.” Nevertheless, regarding what he sensibly characterized as “the most difficult and intricate problem the US have to resolve,” Adams had no illusions. “Liberty diffuses her blessings to every class of men,” he believed, but he was not certain when it would be extended “to the poor African, the victim of hard impenetrable avarice.” As he saw it, “Justice to the Negroes would require that they should not be abandoned by their Masters and turned loose upon a World in which they have no Capacity to procure even a subsistence.” Other considerations would also require tackling: “What would become of the old? the young? the infirm?” Here, a good deal of intricacy would be inescapable. Then, too, for Adams, there was another thing to consider: “Justice to the World . . . would forbid that such Numbers should be turned out to live by Violence or Theft or fraud.” For the hardheaded realist in Adams, “no better Expedient . . . [would] be found than to prohibit the Importation of new Negroes, and Soften the Severity of the Condition of the old ones as much as possible, until the increasing Population of the Country shall have multiplied the Whites to such a Superiority of Numbers, that the Blacks may be liberated by Degrees.”

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What Adams did not admit here is that the only way that this superiority could be attained was by dispossessing Native Americans of their lands.

Here, then, are the two evils arising from the very liberty for which the founding of America had been fought, and Joseph Ellis confronts both in his latest book, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding. With the American semi-quincentennial looming next summer in a nation deeply polarized over not just politics but history, the book is a welcome reassessment from Ellis, a distinguished historian and author of several deservedly best-selling examinations of the Founding era. Appropriately enough, early on he refers to Patrick Henry, whose immortal cry of “Give me liberty or give me death” so epitomized the revolutionary generation. When Henry received a letter from the most eloquent of abolitionists, Anthony Benezet, urging him, as Ellis says, “to recognize that, as one of Virginia’s most stalwart patriots, he was accusing Great Britain of the very atrocity he was committing as a slave-owner,” Henry admitted that “I am drawn along by the General inconvenience of living without them, but I will not, I cannot justify it.” As Ellis writes, Henry “was not living a lie so much as a contradiction, and though he did not like to acknowledge that fact, once he had done so, he would continue to live the contradiction rather than live without his slaves.” This, of course, was also true of the slave-owning George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. Their hearts might have been sworn to liberty, but their purses—let alone their prejudices—would not let them even entertain abolition. As Jefferson aptly put it: “Justice is in one scale and self-preservation in another.”

Jefferson went to his grave claiming that since “the light of science” would eventually end slavery, slaveowners could conscionably defer emancipation indefinitely. Yet when Monticello was sold six months after his death, “130 valuable Negroes” were sold to the highest bidder—something he had vowed never to let happen. “It was a tragedy for all concerned,” Ellis confirms. “Slave families were broken up and dispersed throughout Virginia and ‘down the river’ to the brutal cotton fields of Mississippi and Louisiana. Jefferson’s surviving daughter and eleven children were made wards of the state.” Sustaining what Ellis calls Jefferson’s “beguiling delusions” exacted a terrible toll.

While some historians might reproduce the exchange between Benezet and Henry merely to deplore the Founders’ hypocrisy, Ellis recognizes that compromise—and not altogether ignoble compromise—played a part in the Founders’ decision making. As an example, he offers Benjamin Franklin’s conduct at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Franklin was urged to push for slavery’s abolition but refused. Why? “Franklin’s central point was that everyone needed to adjust their expectations, that neither political perfection nor moral purity was ever in the cards at the Constitutional Convention.” Compromise, “on the most controversial issues, slavery most of all, was both unavoidable and inevitable.” The country could hardly have a national government without the South, and, as Ellis reminds his readers, Southerners would naturally require that “some measure of protection” be extended “to their enslaved workforce.”

The moral, however, that Ellis draws from this unenviable dilemma has nothing of the pharisaical sanctimony that debases too much of our historical writing. “The presumption that slavery could be kept off the agenda had always been a delusion,” he admits. Certainly, Franklin admitted as much by telling the Convention that he consented to the Constitution “with all its Faults” precisely for the sake of the all-important national government. “The moral argument against any compromise at all,” Ellis maintains, “was just as delusional as the belief that the slavery issue could be finessed.” For this contention Ellis draws on no less an authority than Gouverneur Morris, the most adamant of abolitionists, who confessed that, “In adopting a republican form of government, I not only took it as a man does a wife, for better or worse, but what few men do with their wives, I took it knowing all the bad qualities.”

In citing Morris, Ellis is faithful to the same difficulty and intricacy of which Adams wrote. He is also judicious enough to recognize that “the prominent founders were neither demigods nor devils . . . the moralistic agenda that some historians brandish so proudly is both fatally flawed and richly ironic, the former because might-have-been history is not really history at all, the latter because the egalitarian assumptions they celebrate all had their origin in the founding era they seek to demonize.” This has the irrefutability of both historical humility and common sense. As does this:

Slavery was the self-evident contradiction that must be lived with until the infant American republic survived infancy. From their perspective, deferring the slavery issue rendered the triumphs of the founding possible; confronting it frontally rendered them impossible. Those enamoured with the idea that justice delayed is justice denied might consider the alternative scenario provided by the French and Russian Revolutions, where justice imposed led to justice destroyed . . . If the founders had done what some of my colleagues have denounced them for not doing, the American republic we currently and proudly inhabit would never have come into existence.

In revisiting the difficult moral decisions that the Founders faced, Ellis captures one of the fundamental ironies inherent in the “great contradiction” of his subject. “The only way to end slavery at the founding was to create a federal government empowered to make domestic and foreign policy for the states. The only way to assure that a Constitution possessing such powers was ratified was to keep slavery off the agenda.”

Another irony, in a history teeming with ironies, is that it was the defeated British who kept their promise of freeing the slaves of New York who had fought on the side of the crown. Washington was always leery of emancipation imperiling national unity. In The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III, Andrew Roberts argues that, “Although in 1776 Washington had roused his soldiers with talk about fighting supposed ‘slavery’ in the political sense, when it came to actual slavery the King had a far better record than the rebel.” Ellis, in his biography of the first president, claims that Washington was always in favor of deferring emancipation “until he was assured that his own financial independence was secure.” After all, as Ellis says, “He had spent a lifetime acquiring an impressive estate, and he was extremely reluctant to give it up except on his terms.” Nevertheless, when those terms were met in his will, they were fulfilled. In freeing his slaves, Washington “accomplished something more glorious than any battlefield victory as a general or legislative act as a president,” Ron Chernow writes in his biography. “He did what no other founding father dared to do, although all proclaimed a theoretical revulsion at slavery. He brought the American experience that much closer to the ideals of the American Revolution and brought his own behavior in line with his troubled conscience.”

Joseph Ellis (Photo by Joanne Rathe/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

If Ellis justly sees extenuating political circumstances forcing the Founders to defer the slavery issue, he is adamant that “the inability to reach a just accommodation with Native Americans was the greatest failure of the revolutionary generation”—especially in light of Washington and Jefferson’s openness to solutions that might have protected Indian lands east of the Mississippi. Yet, for Ellis, blame cannot be levelled against Washington or Jefferson, or the whisky-loving Scottish–Muscogee Creek leader Alexander McGillivray, all of whom treated honorably. The real culprits for the breakdown of any just accommodation were “those white settlers streaming over the Appalachians into Indian Country, a relentless tide that swept all treaties, promises, excellent intentions, and moral considerations to the far banks of history.”

Human fallenness was also to blame, a culpability that Pelagian historians will never fathom. Samuel Johnson, who had a good word for neither the imperialists nor the colonists, knew that both misbehaved for the same reason: “Interest and pride harden the heart, and it is vain to dispute against avarice and power.” The great thing about the historian in Ellis is that while he acknowledges how sin bedeviled the Founders’ conduct with regard to slavery and the removal of Native Americans—sins of pride, sins of concupiscence, sins of greed—he does not allow such flaws, however grievous, to blot out the undeniable good accomplished by the Founders, whose deliberations gave rise to a United States that eventually “rescued Western civilization from the totalitarian despotism of Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union.” Though unconvinced of the bona fides of American exceptionalism, he is not blind to American goodness.

Nor does he lose sight of the deeply ironic fact that it was love of freedom that misled the founding generation to dispossess the Native Indians and abide what Pope Gregory XVI called the “desire of sordid gain” at the heart of the slave trade. Ever since the British victory in the Seven Years War (1756–63), Westminster had worked to bind the Americans to its imperial rule—what Franklin called “that noble China vase.” At first, the colonists were willing to comply but, as Ellis nicely puts it, in the wake of the Navigation Acts their solicitude for their own freedom became so fierce that they convinced themselves that “The entire white population was at risk of being relegated to a status previously associated only with the enslaved African.” Acquiescing in Westminster’s sovereignty, they came to believe, was to acquiesce in their own enslavement. This was a distorted perception, of course, but it was not plucked from the air. In claiming that the empire threatened their freedom so radically, the colonists were not so much exposing George III’s tyrannical designs—Roberts persuasively shows that he had no such designs—as the very freedom that they were brutally denying enslaved blacks. No irony could be more tragic than that.

In anticipation of America’s 250th birthday, Ellis’s book should be read by all who mean the future of the republic well. Its balance, lightly worn scholarship, and consistent fair mindedness are both salutary and necessary in our contentious times.

Top Photo: Patrick Henry during his “Give me liberty or give me death” speech (MPI / Archive Photos / Getty Images)