The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

The Founders’ approach to slavery, as detailed in The Great Contradiction, was defined by repeated decisions to defer the issue when confronting it threatened political unity. Ellis argues that prominent members of the revolutionary generation treated slavery as a dangerously divisive issue whose resolution could threaten the unity required first to secure independence and later to sustain the new republic. This strategy of deferral reflected the belief that preserving sectional unity required accommodation with the enslaving states and repeatedly shaped national political decisions from the First Continental Congress through the Constitution and its aftermath.

This pattern of deferring the slavery question to preserve political unity emerged early in the revolutionary movement. To maintain what they called “The Cause,” the Continental Congress sought to prevent slavery from becoming a divisive political issue. In 1774, the First Continental Congress included enslaved Africans in its boycott of British imports and pledged to discontinue the trafficking of enslaved people. Ellis notes, however, that the surviving records do not reveal how the delegates reached this agreement. South Carolina was known to oppose restrictions on the trafficking of enslaved people, while rice, its principal export, was excluded from the boycott of American exports, suggesting that political accommodation may have helped preserve intercolonial unity. Two years later, Congress deleted Thomas Jefferson’s paragraph attacking slavery and the trafficking of enslaved people from the Declaration of Independence. Although Ellis identifies stylistic problems with the passage as one reason for its removal, its deletion also removed the divisive slavery question from the document at the moment when Congress was seeking agreement on independence. Together, these episodes illustrate an emerging pattern in which national leaders repeatedly avoided sustained confrontation with slavery when they believed it threatened political unity.

The Constitutional Convention of 1787 extended the pattern of deferral by accommodating slavery within the nation’s legal framework through a series of compromises. The Three-Fifths Clause, the Fugitive Slave Clause, and, most critically, the protection of the Atlantic Slave Trade until 1808 each accommodated slavery, although they emerged from different political negotiations. The Atlantic Slave Trade compromise most clearly reflected the priority placed on preserving sectional unity. As South Carolina delegates John Rutledge and Charles Pinckney made clear, their state would “never receive the plan if it prohibit[ed] the slave trade” (101). Enough delegates from the Northern states ultimately accepted the compromise to secure agreement on the Constitution, despite vocal opposition to slavery and the trafficking of enslaved people from several delegates. These constitutional accommodations allowed the new federal government to be established without resolving the conflict between slavery and the revolutionary principles of liberty and equality.

This strategy culminated in 1790, when the first federal Congress effectively closed the door on federal efforts to promote emancipation within the existing enslaving states. In response to abolitionist petitions from Quakers and the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, whose petition was signed by Benjamin Franklin, James Madison helped secure a congressional resolution declaring that Congress lacked authority to intervene in emancipation within the states. The final report declared that Congress had “no authority to interfere in the emancipation of slaves, or in Treatment of them within any of the states” (127). This decision transformed the earlier strategy of deferral into an enduring congressional precedent, removing emancipation within the existing states from the federal political agenda. For Ellis, the 1790 settlement demonstrates how preserving sectional unity repeatedly took precedence over confronting the unresolved conflict between slavery and the revolutionary commitment to liberty.