I have written a good deal about slavery, slaveholders, and the Founders (see for example my book SLAVERY AND THE FOUNDERS:  RACE AND LIBERTY IN THE AGE OF JEFFERSON). I am responding to this comment (intentionally left below) and a subsequent comment about Madison would have been a Nazi.  Given Madison's generally views on politics, is it far more like Madison would have been an anti-Nazi like Willi Brandt and Konrad Adenauer.  It is hard enough to understand American slavery and the founders without trying to compare them to people who lived 100+ years later in a different country under very different circumstances. I don't think such name called or analogies help us understand much of anything.  

So, let's get to the question:  How can you be a "good slaveowner."  The question is always interesting, because many who write about slavery write about "bad" slaveowners * the ones who raped their slaves, brutally beat their slaves, or broke up families willy nilly.  

Jefferson, for example, sold close to 100 slaves in just the 1790s to pay his bills but never once considered living a less lavish lifestyle, importing less wine from France, or not signing for the debts of his friends and neighbors.  He died deeply in debt, but lived a wonderful life, finananced by the bodies of his slaves.  At his death families were broken up and sold off to pay his debts.  Tragically, for example, he freed his blacksmith, Joe Fossett, and in his will said Fossett could live in the house he had always lived in with his family.  But, TJ did not free Fossett's wife and children, who were sold off to at least four different purchasers and he spent the rest of his life trying to buy back his family, with only limited success.  Jefferson also sold slaves as punishment * cross TJ and you are banished from family, friends, cousins, everyone and everything you have ever known for the rest of your life.  Pretty harsh.

Madison refused to sell slaves (unlike Jefferson) and lived a modest lifestyle.  In the end he was overrun by slaves because he had mre than his small landholdings would support. He then carefully sold them to neighbors who promised to keep the families together (whether they did or not is another question).  There is no indication that Madison was a harsh man, that he regularly had sex with his female slaves (no Sally Hemings at Montpellier).  Think of Mary Chesnut's comments in her diary about slave masters and slave women (and young girls).  There is none of that in Madison's record. 

So he did not hold his own children in slavery or sell them, or in the case of Jefferson, held the half-brothers and sisters of his wife (since Sally and her syblings and Martha Wales Jefferson shared the same father).  Nor did Madison beat his slaves (or have them beaten), torture them, kill them (think of Jefferson's two nephews who killed a young boy by chopping him up with an axe while he was still alive).  No one reported the Madison's slaves were ill-clad or ill-fed or running naked.  

Now, does this take the moral onus of slaveowning off of him. Hardly.  He knew better. He could have freed some or all of them; he could have sent them to Liberia at his death or to Pennsylvania or Ohio.  He could have done what his secretary, Edward Coles did, and take his slave to a free territory or state and emancipation them.  Or, like John Randolph, send them to a free state; or like Washington, free them at his death.  

As slaveowner go, Madison was surely better than most. If you had to choose a master, you would doubtless prefer Madison to his neighbor Jefferson.  But, if you were lucky you would have had Washington and been emanciapted at the death of your owner, or better yet, Madison's secretary Edward Coles, who freed his slaves while he was till young.

Slavery was praciced by almost all peoples at all times.  It was only at the time of the American Revoution that significant numbers of people * not just religious people * began to see it as we do today *- as barbaric and uncivilized. THus, it was practiced by people all over world who were both civilized and cultured.  Had Madison's own slaves been of the right social class in ancient Rome or Carthage, or most of Africa in the 17th and 18th centuries, they too would have been slaveowners.  

This issue for Americans is that we, as a nation, claimed to know better.  We did not assert "inequality" as most other in the world did, but claimed to believe in both equality and liberty.  Madision knew slavery was wrong, as did Jefferson and the other slaveholding leaders of the nation.  This creates huge dilemmas for all of us who take human rights seriously and yet venerate the democratic institutions the Founders created.  The institution thus remains at the center and the core of the American experience, and I believe, at the root of many our nation's on-going problems.  

Paul Finkelman

Paul Finkelman
President William McKinley Distinguished Professor of Law
     and Public Policy
Albany Law School
80 New Scotland Avenue
Albany, New York   12208-3494

518-445-3386 
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>>> [log in to unmask] 6/11/2007 12:33:52 PM >>>
How could Madison have been a "good slaveowner."
He owned other human beings as his own property. That not only degraded 
those human beings to the level of farm animals, it shows that he had no 
morals, no character. That was uncivilized, barbaric behaviour.
Paul