Mr. Dixon, in both a public note here on the list-serv, and in private
email, asks why I, as an historian, think that the history of the
entanglement of slavery and the Founding matters.  Why keep harping on this
issue?  Isn't this just a dead, historical issue of no relevance today?
Because this is a profound question, and a legitimate one, I am answering
it here, in the public forum.  It is my hope by doing so that we can direct
this conversation in a mutually enriching direction.

Let me begin at the most narrow, in rejecting a subtext which I think I
detect (but which may in fact not be either present or intended) in Mr.
Dixon's posts.  There, he has seemed to imply that the question of
Jefferson's ownership of slaves, and actions as a slave master, is simply
the obsession of "liberal" (in the sense of meaning that we today assign to
the word, and misuse it, in contemporary politics) academic historians.  I
would like to argue, however, that the issue of slary and the founding is
considerably broader than as a distorted "historical" past useful as an
antecedent to multiculturalism or affirmative action today or other
"liberal" programs today.  Rather, I want to suggest, the question of
slavery and its relation to the Founding of our country is of compelling
importance to anyone who is committed to either a republican or a liberal
(in the old sense of the word) public society.  In other words, it should
matter to just about any American citizen today, whatever their political
persuasion.

The issue is not simply that Jefferson owned slaves, or did not free his
slaves.  At a somewhat broader level, it is rather that Jefferson also, far
more than Henry or Washington, articulated with great eloquence and clarity
the moral reasons why a good republican citizen *should* free his slaves.
Jefferson understood that slavery was morally debilitating to both slave
and slaveowner, in such a fashion as to corrode the capacity of slave
owners to make sound public choices for the greater public good.  It also,
of course, corroded the capacity of slaves to participate in public life as
citizens, but that was for Jefferson, given his racism (and here I mean the
term literally and not pejoratively) a less important implication of his
argument.  Jefferson believed that the habits of mind and character that
one aquired in living one's life and making one's living mattered for the
larger health of public society.  Thus, slavery was a bad institution
because it created bad citizens, indeed, the worst kind of citizens--men
who were, in the conduct of their personal lives, habituated to tyranny.
As an historical issue (and the VA-HIST list serv exists in order to
discuss historical matters) that strikes me as important.

It is possible that Jefferson was simply a man of weak character--that is a
view I personally find persuasive.  But suppose he was not.  Given such an
interpretation of the man, his inability to confront his own behavior then
suggests the deep ambiguity of slavery as a way of life such that, even for
a man who analyzed its perniciousness with clarity, it appeal was so great
that he could not extricate himself from it.  To paraphrase Hayek and
Arendt, the road to serfdom is paved with banal choices, and it behooves
us, as people committed to the values of the founding, always to remember
that.  One of the reasons, I would submit, that we study history is for its
moral lessons in the present.  History illuminates the human condition, and
I think that is especially clear in the case of Jefferson.

Even the reading of Jefferson I offer above, however, is too narrow a
framing of the issue.  The matter is not simply an historical one.  Liberal
individualism, as numerous political theorists and constitutional
historians have demonstrated, carries within it the seeds of its
antithesis.  Orlando Patterson, in a profound explication of the meaning of
"freedom" within western civilization, argued that this value, one to which
our public life is rightly dedicated (one has only to think of Lincoln's
words at Gettysburg cemetary in November of 1863), is itself deeply
ambiguous.  As he famously, and I think correctly, argued, "freedom was
generated from the experience of slavery."  Freedom achieved its paramount
position as a core western value out of the experience of people "in their
roles as masters, slaves, and nonslaves."  If Patterson's insight is true,
then the study of slavery sheds deep insight on our most basic values as a
people today.  The study of Jefferson's role in slavery, and his response
to it, is then especially appropriate, because Jefferson was one of the
most articulate spokesmen for the values that we hold dear today that our
nation has ever produced.

Warm regards,
Kevin


--
Kevin R. Hardwick, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of History, MSC 2001
James Madison University
Harrisonburg VA 22807
Phone:  540/568-6306
Email:  [log in to unmask]

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