The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

This chapter frames the institution of slavery within the broader context of the Atlantic Slave Trade, a four-century tragedy conducted by multiple European nations and the US. Between 1500 and 1800, five times as many Africans as Europeans were forcibly brought to the “New World.” While demographically, the majority of the 10.7 million enslaved Africans who landed in the “New World” were taken to South America and the Caribbean, roughly 4% (around 400,000) were brought directly to North America. By the American Revolution, 500,000 enslaved people constituted 20% of the colonial population, many of whom were second- or third-generation residents, and the African American population had become self-sustaining. Approximately 90% of the Black population lived south of the Chesapeake, from Maryland to Georgia.

For centuries, what the author calls the “Great Silence” prevailed, as the major voices of Western civilization accepted slavery without moral question. This silence was broken in the mid-18th century by two distinct groups: secular Enlightenment thinkers in Europe, known as philosophes, and, more influentially in the colonies, religious leaders. Quakers, led by orators like John Woolman and writer Anthony Benezet, and “New Light” revivalist preachers began to condemn slavery as a sin. The Quakers created the framework for the first antislavery movement in world history.

As the American Revolution put the issue on the political agenda, the debate shifted from the morality of slavery to the practical problem of what to do with the freed population. The core of the American dilemma was demographic: Unlike the European powers, whose enslaved populations were located overseas, the enslaved population in the British colonies lived on American soil. The prospect of emancipation forced white Americans to confront the question of creating a biracial society, an arrangement supported by only a tiny fraction of the white citizenry. This created a unique and intractable challenge for a new nation rhetorically committed to human equality.

The author argues against interpreting the American founding through two simplistic and opposing lenses: one that views the Founders as “demigods” and another that casts them as “despicable villains.” To understand them accurately, one must avoid “presentism”—the fallacy of judging the past by modern values. The founding era was a pre-democratic time, and the Founders themselves regarded the term “democracy” as an epithet associated with ignorant and easily deceived popular majorities. They believed in a republic guided by the long-term “public interest,” not popular opinion. Consequently, any progressive action on slavery or Indigenous removal would have had to come from the top down, as a sizable portion of the white population sought land occupied by Indigenous peoples, while an even larger proportion couldn’t imagine a post-emancipation society based on racial equality. Ellis also cautions against constructing a moralistic “might-have-been history” rather than understanding the Founders within the circumstances and assumptions of their time (19).

Historian David Brion Davis’s concept of “the perishability of revolutionary time” is introduced to explain that the window for acting on the Revolution’s egalitarian ideals was brief (19). The Founders, however, prioritized national unity above all else. They believed that a frontal assault on slavery would have shattered the fragile union, making it impossible to win the war against Britain or establish a stable, nation-sized republic. From their perspective, deferring the issue made the founding’s political achievements possible, while directly confronting slavery threatened them.

At a broader historical level, Ellis identifies what he calls the “backlash pattern,” a recurring theme in American history where every step toward racial equality is met with resistance from a significant portion of the white population. The author connects this historical pattern to the modern “Make America Great Again” movement (22).