Original subtitles

It is one of the most vexing questions of the revolutionary era, why so many of

our great founders were simultaneously slavers.

How can people who spoke words like all men are created equal still hold

hundreds of thousands of people in bondage?

All men are created equal. What does Thomas Jefferson really mean by it?

Most people of this generation understood that this was contradictory.

So the truth is that among the major southern founders, most of them are

owners. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Patrick Henry,

George Mason, on and on and on.

So there is a contradiction.

This fundamental.

between liberty and slavery.

America's founding fathers championed the causes of both liberty and slavery

during their lifetimes.

But to better understand this paradox we first need to travel back in time to

examine why so many people were willing to come to America.

Part of our tradition in this country that is really historically quite

is that people come to the colonies seeking greater freedom.

The great European immigration had to do with religious freedom, it had to do

with economic freedom, it had to do with economic opportunity.

It felt to them like the land of promise.

You hear the concept of God, gold, and glory.

People that in England would never, never have been landowners were becoming

landowners in the New World.

And they had that first beginnings of the American dream.

Their general perspective on coming to the colonies varied based on where they

were going.

If you're talking Virginia, it's a company that founds Virginia, and

looking for that gold that the Spanish had found in Latin America, and that

eventually turns out to be tobacco.

If you're talking New England colonies, you're talking the Puritans, and they're

coming because they're being religiously persecuted in England.

The religious situation in Europe was very difficult.

There was a lot of refugees coming out of Europe because of the conflicts

associated with the Reformation, which began in the 1510s in Germany with

Luther. This ends up driving a lot of the colonists to America.

You have people who have suffered under the wars of religion that took place in

the 17...

And they're trying to find a space where they can practice their faith without

that kind of danger.

But you also then had the problem of the state -approved church and then the

quote -unquote nonconformist. There were all kinds of persecutions at various

levels. Their preachers were not allowed to preach because they were not state

approved. It was called the Great Ejection, where they were ejected from

pulpits and from their livelihoods. And their congregations, in some cases, were

not allowed to assemble.

But, I mean, it went beyond that. In the space of just a couple of days,

hundreds of ministers in Scotland lost their life. There were cases of them

being drowned and of them being burned.

The Puritans left England beginning in 1630 in giant numbers. The pilgrims had

come before them ten years earlier in a ship. They came in fleets. One

Englishman talked about standing at the dock and seeing these fleets of ships

leaving for the New World with the Puritans aboard and saying, it appears

all of England is emptying itself.

John Windsor was the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and in a

famous address that he gave, on the boat coming over from England to

Massachusetts. He refers to the idea that the Massachusetts colony, and of

course later on this was applied to America more generally, that the colony

would be a city on a hill.

They said the eyes of all people are upon us.

They're watching what we're doing.

And people in England, people in Europe, know that we are going with these great

ambitions to set up a colony in the way that God has called us to do.

And they will be ready to mock us if we fail in this great calling.

And so he was calling, I think, the colonists of Massachusetts, at least, to

great kind of moral accountability.

A hundred years before the founders, John Winthrop and Christianity were

a profound influence on early American culture.

But if this is true, how did an institution like slavery ever get a

America?

Enflame it as an institution as old as civilization itself.

You can find it in the Bible. You can find it in ancient African society.

You can find it in Asian society, Greek, Roman society.

It's not seriously questioned until the last 250 years of human history.

And if you think about that timeline, you're looking at 10 ,000 years, and you

have just this little tiny sliver of time that it's suddenly unconscionable.

Once you got into America, slavery is different than it is in any other part

the world.

We call it chattel slavery.

It is based off of race, skin color.

What's so unusual about the transatlantic slave trade is the racial

It's the only time in the history of slavery that slaves have been defined in

terms of racial construction.

If you look in the Roman period, for example, you have great diversity of

origins among slaves.

From the 16th century on, slavery is increasingly associated with Africans.

And that's very unusual in human history.

The Atlantic slave trade is really very misunderstood.

Slaves were basically captured in African wars by other Africans, or were

captured explicitly for the slave trade by African merchants on the coast.

who went to the interior, who then marched their charges, most of whom were

to the coast, and then these African merchants sold them to European flavors.

The first Africans that are brought in on record are 1619 or when 20 people

brought in. They are brought in indentured. Indentured servants are

work for a time period, and then they're given their freedom.

Indentured servitude began because there was a system in place in England. You

had the serfs, you had the fives, the upper class were certainly owning the

farms.

Indentured servants signed a very large contract. It was torn in half.

They kept half.

The person they were working for kept half.

And when you finish your servitude, you put that contract back together, and

that's how you got out of your servitude.

In that document, you would receive a plot of land.

And so you know from the beginning there's an end point.

With enslavement, there is no end point. You're going to be an enslaved person

of color. Your kid's going to be enslaved.

Their kids are going to be enslaved.

There's not an end point.

Over a period of time, those who wanted to come to the New World under the

indentured servant process pretty much came.

And it became harder and harder to find folks that were willing to come over or

wanting to come over.

And so that left somewhat of a vacuum of a labor supply for the New World.

Slavery is an institution that develops over time in the colonies. The first law

in Virginia is created in 1660 that changes indentured servitude to slavery.

Over a period of 350 years, we've got fairly good data on the distribution

of enslaved peoples.

as they arrive in the Americas. 45 % went to Brazil. About another 40 % went

islands in the Caribbean.

And another 10 or 11 % arrive in what's called the Spanish Circle Caribbean.

That means that 3 % of the total slave trade terminated in

North America, on the North American mainland.

We know slave ships were horrible experiences for enslaved people.

You would have someone laying on top of you. Where you went to the bathroom is

where you sat.

If someone got sick next to you, you would most likely get sick also.

There's cases where whole boats would catch pink eye. There was no cure,

obviously, so you would go blind.

So slave ship captains would line those enslaved people up and throw them

overboard. There was rumors that sharks would follow behind these boats on a

daily basis because there was a meal always waiting for them. But yet we gave

them names like the grace of God, good intent.

There were probably four Africans carried across the Atlantic for every

European before 1820.

That gives you some idea of the scale of the operation.

Just about any port that sent voyagers on long -distance ventures around the

Atlantic world had a stake in the transatlantic slave trade.

In the 1700s, Charleston was a major port of entry for enslaved Africans.

Upwards of 40 % of the Africans who came into America came in through the

port of Charleston.

If you're doing rice in South Carolina, people of African descent brought the

technology, the hydrology, all of the skills to do the rice industry came out

Africa. Rice, sugar.

It was grown in all parts of Africa.

When you go into the low country and you see those rice fields, Drayton

Plantation in Charleston, South Carolina, and others, you have to flood

land, un -flood the land. There's canal systems that go through these rice

fields. Africans were very aware of how to do this, and Europeans knew that, and

they were going in to get those people.

In slavery, they had what they referred to as field hands and house hands.

My understanding, what was told to me, is that my ancestors were the house

hands. And I always explain whenever I'm questioned, why do you involve yourself

with the place that was once a plantation that had your ancestors

That is a part of my history.

And to take that out, then I am disregarding my ancestors, and they have

too much in terms of...

blood, sweat, and tears to do that.

It's not a single choice. No decision maker says, let's establish chattel

slavery on the continent of North America.

It happens gradually, starting in the 17th century, and tobacco becomes a cash

crop in the Upper South.

A condition, an economic and racial and social condition gets created that's

there by the time you get to the middle of the 18th century.

When you see Drayton Hall, it's important to remember that this

established in 1738.

We think the house was completed by the early 1750s.

1738, George Washington was six years old.

Thomas Jefferson had not been born.

When you see a site like Drayton Hall, this in a way establishes the...

basis for plantations in which many of these founding fathers grow up.

By the mid -18th century, all of America's founding fathers had arrived

scene. But in critiquing their lives, How much consideration, if any, should

given to the slave culture into which the founders were born?

Slavery, even in the 18th century, was without a doubt the most important

institution in America.

It is the institution that shaped not only the Southern agrarian way, but also

the trade in the North. It is really what makes possible the optimism of

America.

Slave labor is essential to what was being produced in the American colonies

the time. Without slave labor, the economy falls.

It's almost like gasoline. If we lost gasoline as a fuel today, would our

economy stop?

Absolutely.

George Washington was born and always lived in a society, in a culture,

in a place.

where slavery was the norm.

Slaves had combed his hair. Slaves had dressed him. Slaves had put on his coats

in the morning and brought him his chocolate and his tea.

That was the life he lived in.

It was a common way of transferring assets from one generation to another to

give slaves, along with land. And Jefferson inherited some 50 slaves from

mother and father.

He also inherited notions of slavery as a despotic, cruel, ugly institution.

He referred to slavery as unremitting despotism and described a scene from his

childhood where he had seen a parent abusing a slave. He didn't say whipping,

but he said giving vent to passions against a slave. And he could see how

power of slavery turned slave masters into very, very cruel people.

There's some really interesting stories that James Madison Jr., the president,

is going to grow up with.

Probably the most affecting is that his grandfather, Ambrose Madison, who

started this plantation in 1723, was murdered by slaves. He was poisoned.

about how you might change your persona as a

master, right, if you knew that your grandfather was murdered just

20 years ago by the same slaves who are still living here.

Slavery had a very, very strong psychological component.

If you had a whole class of highly skilled artisans and household servants,

you did not want to beat those people to get them to work. You wanted them to

work willingly.

And Ben Franklin actually talked about this. He said that one of the most

important things that a slave actually owned was his goodwill, and he could

direct his goodwill where he pleased.

And if you could win the slave's goodwill by a few cheap favors and some

kindnesses, then you would get a lot more work out of him than if you abused

him. That brand of slavery existed alongside the crueler, whip -driven

slavery.

One of the things about the New World is this misconception that everyone had

enslaved people.

And that's simply not true.

The vast majority of people did not own enslaved people.

just like all the way up to the American Civil War.

And also, not everybody had these huge plantations where they had 100 enslaved

people. Most people had one enslaved person.

It was very rare that someone had over 20 enslaved people during the American

colonies. It did happen, but it was rare.

John Adams never had slaves. This is something that the family was very proud

of. He was a farmer.

At one point, he had 140 acres of land as a young lawyer before he went off to

the Continental Congress.

And he even writes about how he could have saved a lot of money if he had

slaves. But he wouldn't do that because he morally did not believe in slavery.

Sam and John Adams were both among the first American revolutionaries who

truly did understand the contradiction.

between Americans' commitment to liberty and the ownership of slaves.

Now, of course, it was much easier for the political leaders of Massachusetts,

where slaves constituted an infinitesimal part of the population,

it was for political leaders in Virginia or South Carolina to do so.

America's 18th century world was full of slavery, with many founders being slave

owners themselves.

So why is it that America's founding fathers are still considered such great

of liberty?

It was a unique time period in the formation of any nation that there were

many like -minded men willing to have these conversations about what does self

-governance mean, that were able to join forces and envision together.

a government that we now call the United States of America.

Their writings, their thoughts, their ideas impacted not only our nation, but

the whole world. The idea of democracy, the idea of people being free.

The liberty or death speech comes in March 1775.

The colonies are aware that likely within weeks they are going to be facing

invasion by the British.

to come and arrest the leaders of the resistance movement among the patriots.

Patrick Henry had been involved in the resistance movement for 10 years with

George Washington and, to a lesser extent, Jefferson and Madison.

And there was a motion in the convention to try one more time to petition the

king for political relief.

And so Henry took the floor of the convention and he says, look, I've been

involved in this movement now for a long time.

Now is the time for us to take courage and begin to prepare for war.

At the end of the speech, he says, I know not what course others may take,

as for me, give me liberty or give me death.

And I think that the delegates really knew that there was no other way than to

take up arms against the British.

He helped make what was begun as a conflict between political

leaders. in America and political leaders in Great Britain, a conflict

all of the American people.

The members of the Continental Congress, particularly those who promoted the

independence movement and signed the Declaration of Independence, understood

what could happen to them if they were captured and treated as traitors by the

British government, which was brawling and quartering. The victim, he would be

disemboweled very slowly.

one body part removed after another.

Then his body would be cut in four pieces and his head would be mounted on

stake. They understood that could be their fate.

The founders gave us our independence.

They won a war against the most powerful military in the world.

The Founders gave us the ideals that defined and continue to define our

Those early years are a fragile time in American history. It wasn't a foregone

conclusion that the experiment in governance would succeed, that it would

ultimately lead to the United States of America that we have today.

Another question to pose is why these particular men who were slave owners and

not all the others who were slave owners who would become loyalists, why do

these particular men take the risks they do to try to establish this new

country? It's easy to understand why somebody would reject the revolution who

was in Washington's position.

He had a lot to lose.

He had a lot of property. He had a very high rank in society.

I mean, it's really extraordinary that they do what they do.

The more you study George Washington, the more you admire him. You discover

personal courage, his rectitude, his devotion to the country, his moral

and his incredible, firm sense of justice.

Jefferson said of Washington that his sense of justice was the most inflexible

that Jefferson had ever seen.

George Washington was a moral leader. He was a spiritual leader.

He accepted the leadership of the Continental Army and refused to be paid

his service. He felt that that was his obligation to his colony and eventually

his country to serve in such a capacity.

Jefferson would have to rank as one of the greatest intellects.

of all time in modern times.

So he had this power, he had this charisma that influences this moment.

He's the one who wrote the most famous words in American history, we hold these

truths to be self -evident, that are the core of the political catechism and

eventually become the basis for the 14th Amendment and for civil rights

legislation.

The list of John Adams' accomplishments in founding the United States are pretty

lengthy. If we look at that famous cast, he's not a soldier like George

Washington. He's not a writer and editor like Thomas Jefferson.

But John Adams is a talker. He can talk his way in and through most situations.

And it's for this reason that he's given diplomatic commission after commission.

John Adams had a role in the proceedings in writing the Declaration of

Independence and making that happen.

This was a huge feat for this body of men now to

write this document to the King of England and articulate all of the

the colonies were declaring independence.

And they had to get 13 separate colonies to agree.

on separation from Great Britain. All these different people who were coming

together for one reason, to declare independence.

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were two of the lead figures in that group, and

Benjamin Franklin.

And John Adams suggested that Thomas Jefferson have the assignment of writing

the Declaration of Independence.

The fact that Jefferson, with Adams' choice to write it, because he's a

Virginian and he's an excellent writer, and...

He can write it in less than 20 days.

It's impressive.

Ben Franklin is there for so many of the important moments of the American

founding. He's a diplomat, and he's, of course, there at the Constitutional

Convention.

Once Americans had declared their independence, he went back to France and

helped negotiate with the French government vitally important French

to the American military effort.

I think James Madison, being the father of the Constitution, he had to do not

only the intellectual work, he also knows that sometimes you do the best you

and you make compromises. We would not have the Constitution we have today if

hadn't been for someone who was both a romantic and a pragmatic.

When he is drafting the Bill of Rights, he's going to call for the freedom of

religion, followed by the freedom of speech, press, assembly, petition.

Well, there's a reason religion is first, because without the freedom to

believe, without the freedom to think, the rest of those rights really have no

meaning. So I kind of love the fact that our Bill of Rights starts with the

ability to think freely.

You have many great contributors to the democratic DNA of the country today. As

Benjamin Franklin was to Jefferson, so is Madison to Monroe, and all these...

links of friendship and shared institutions were this fabric that knit

together, that gave it strength, and I think this ability, the political will,

to pull off almost the impossible, which was the Declaration of Independence,

the Constitution, the Bill of Rights.

America's founding fathers expanded liberty in ways that the world had never

seen before.

So how is it possible that these men of liberty could also be deeply involved in

slavery?

You can't understand the founding fathers' notions of liberty without

that those definitions of liberty were shaped because every day they saw the

lack of liberty in the people they held in bondage.

When you look at the founding fathers, we can never take away what they set up

for our country.

But yet we should never forget that they held enslaved people and allowed for

this country in total to have 4 million enslaved people by the time of the

American Civil War, which we are all still benefiting from today because that

enslaved labor was worth about $80 to $90 billion in today's money.

We fought a war for freedom from England while holding another people group in

bondage. How do you justify that?

Without founding fathers, I would say they had slaves because it was property,

and property equals money.

All the American colonists, whether they owned slaves or not, were complicit in

it. Certainly Benjamin Franklin, who owned two slaves during his life, was

complicit because he advertised slaves regularly in the Pennsylvania Gazette

therefore made money over the sale of slaves.

There's a letter that Abigail Adams sends to John. It's March 1776. The

have just evacuated Boston.

And Abigail is concerned about the Virginia militia and how true they'll be

the Patriot cause.

And what Abigail says is, if they won't grant liberty within their own

households in the South, how will they promote it for all of us and create an

American republic?

One of the paradoxes of the Liberty of S speech is the fact that here is a

slaveholder speaking to other slaveholders about not only speaking

to other slaveholders, in the speech itself, using the language of slavery.

Henry, by all accounts, was...

physically dramatic in the closing phrases of the liberty or death speech

he talks about how the king and parliament are going to manacle the

colonies with chains of slavery.

And he's supposed to have put his arms out like this as though he were an

enslaved man and then dropped them as though the chains broke.

If parliament can do all these things, the ultimate...

situation is that it's going to force us into political slavery.

At the founding, at the moment of our birth as a nation, 20 % of the total

population in 1776 is African American.

And 90 % of them are residents south of the Potomac and are slaves.

George Washington came to believe that slavery was almost inevitable.

He regretted it.

He deeply regretted that that was how the South had developed.

But that was how the South had developed, and that was the basis for

Southern economy.

And the South had these large percentages, 50 % or more black enslaved

population. And he believed that if those people were freed abruptly, what

they do? Where would they go?

How would they act?

Given those constraints, he thought the South was trapped.

In his lifetime, Jefferson owned more than 600 slaves.

At any one time at Monticello, there were probably around 100 to 115

slaves. The top number of slaves was about 140.

At the end of his life, Washington himself owned about 123 slaves. There

360 slaves in all at Mount Vernon.

Washington spying slaves.

He works them hard and he pursues them when they run away.

He doesn't question the institution in a moral way. At least there's no evidence

that he does before the revolution.

When he calls, finally, as president, to adopt a bill of rights, he

writes a collection of amendments he's willing to endorse and advocate to give

rights to free men.

He doesn't say to human beings. He doesn't say to all people. He talks

And so he envisioned a difference. He envisioned a class -structured, racially

divided society.

And he would think that taking away the right to own slaves would be

an act of tyranny.

We have to remember that the 18th century looks so different from our

world that it sometimes is difficult for us to comprehend their daily life.

Everybody existed in a hierarchical relationship of some kind.

There was husband -wife, parent -child, master -servant, master -slave.

And everybody identified themselves within these hierarchies. And this was

way the early modern world worked. And slavery was another unequal relationship

amongst many.

In that period, we can really begin to see...

A rather unsettling truth about slavery emerged, something that we don't really

quite grasp today, is that slaves were money. They were a form of cash, and you

could use them to pay off your debts, and you could use them to transfer

to family members.

When Jefferson wanted to raise cash to expand Monticello in the 1790s, he

mortgaged 150 of his slaves to a Dutch banking house and essentially took out

what we might think of as a slave equity loan.

The Dutch bankers opened a $2 ,000 line of credit for him in Philadelphia, and

that's what he used to rebuild Monticello.

In 1792, he drew up a profit and loss memo, and he wrote down a formula. He

said that the slave population increased at the rate of 4 % a year, and he

included that 4 % increase under the profit column in his memo.

It was a...

Really very cold calculation.

He was counting the babies, literally, and realizing that this increase in

population was increasing his capital assets.

And this was a view he continued to hold for his entire lifetime.

These men, in fact, became princes. And you need these

things, not humans, to follow without

any question.

And it supported a lifestyle of James Madison, of George Washington, and so

In the final years of the Revolutionary War, Jefferson began writing what would

become his only book, Notes on the State of Virginia. He wrote it in response to

questions from a Frenchman.

inquiring what this new nation would be like and what it consisted of. And

Jefferson, even though he hadn't been asked, wrote a long section about

slave law, and African Americans in general.

This was a period in which people like Jefferson were really trying to figure

out what race was, what kind of differences there actually existed

people. The notes on the state of Virginia is the product of him.

trying to figure out whether enslaved African Americans were naturally

or whether their centuries of enslavement had reduced them to this

inferior state.

First of all, we look like and smell like orangutans.

We can't think. We can't create.

We are human.

And we don't have the capacity to do anything but provide labor.

He said that they were wonderful singers, they understood music, but they

not write poetry, they could not put together a story, that their memories

defective, they couldn't remember things very long, which actually sort of

fitted them for slavery because, he said, their griefs are transient.

I mean, they forget from one week to the next what was done to them.

He kind of paints himself into this intellectual corner in which slavery

for blacks because they're sort of naturally slaves, that they can never be

citizens, they can never be free men in the same way as white men.

It's an old position. It's a position you might see in Aristotle, talking

some peoples are naturally slaves.

But he's doing it in what we would call kind of a pseudoscientific racism.

There are some interpretations that say that he...

developed that strong, very offensive language as a warning.

He knew people like himself were engaging in interracial sex with

women. And he really thought that this was going to ruin the homogenized

of the nation that he really held very dear.

Enslaved women were subject to unwanted sexual advances from masters,

and a lot of children were produced.

Through these liaisons, one way to maintain control over enslaved people is

not only use physical violence of whipping, but the sexual violence of

threatened rape.

Some passages were so offensive and so nasty as to sort of warn his

fellow planters that you're engaging in sex with an animal, so don't do it.

There is a certain hypocrisy in the center of Jefferson's life because One

the arguments he makes is that I cannot free the slaves because if we free them,

they will intermarry with whites. The word miscegenation doesn't exist yet,

that's what he's talking about.

And yet we now know, beyond any reasonable doubt, that he was himself

of at least four mixed -race children with Sally Hemings. So he was living a

and using that very lie as a reason to...

avoid any attempt to end slavery.

When Jefferson was writing about race and slavery in notes on the state of

Virginia, suddenly a different mood from the rest of the writing took him over,

and he had this nightmarish religious vision, and he suddenly said, I tremble

for my country when I reflect that God is just, and the Almighty has no

attribute that will take side with us, meaning us, the slaveholders.

He had a vision of the spirit of the slave rising from the dust and

engaged in an all -out race war against the masters. And that notion filled

him with horror.

as justification both for and against slavery.

Throughout the centuries, much has been made about the biblical story called the

Curse of Ham.

But what does the Bible really teach about chattel slavery?

The colonists in general lived in a very heavily religious atmosphere.

For instance, if they owned a book at all, it would be the Bible.

In New England, you see that literacy rates are very, very high as compared to

what you would see in Europe at the time. And that's because they were so

insistent that people needed to be able to read their Bibles.

And if you need to make a rigorous anti -slavery argument, it has

to be based on the Bible.

And wherever you look in the Bible, There's usually a level of

inference they have to go to. The golden rule, for instance, do unto others as

you would have them do unto you, is one of the most common arguments against

slavery. But the slaveholders would say, well, I treat my slaves well. That's

what the New Testament commands me to do.

If I was a slave, I would want a slave master who treats me well. And so I'm

fulfilling that obligation.

For them, I could see how they could look at the institution of slavery as an

opportunity to be stewards.

For the patriarch of a family, he is a steward of ultimately all that is God.

And that includes not only his family, but his slaves, yea, even his animals,

yea, even the creation.

If you try to think big picture of what the Bible has to say about slavery, what

was actually going on back then versus...

What we have in our minds in terms of race -based slavery, chattel slavery,

is not what's going on there.

The word, both Hebrew and Greek, the normal words used that are often

slave, you look in other translations and they have the word servant. What we

know is that it was never race -based. In most slavery, at least within

Israelite context, it was voluntary.

The way that Jesus responded to slavery is pretty much that it was just kind of

a fact of life.

And the fact that he doesn't come out and condemn it really doesn't mean that

condones it either.

Slave owners were very good at pulling passages out of the Bible that they used

to support the institution of slavery.

They would hold religious ceremonies where they say that enslaved people

to respect their master, and they would do this on a Sunday.

The curse of Ham as it was developed was supposedly a proof text whereby

Christians could live with chattel slavery.

In Genesis chapter 9, after Noah recovers from the flood, one of his

sees him when he is inebriated and dishonors his father.

The result of that is that there is this curse.

What's interesting, though, the curse isn't given to Ham.

explicitly, the curse is put upon one of his sons, Canaan, Noah's grandson.

And so it really should be called the curse of Canaan.

Some people have tried to say that this curse of Ham was really the curse of

having dark or black skin.

In colonial America, that very obscure reference to the curse of Ham was

easily picked up and used by...

many interpreters and many preachers to label blacks as inferior

in ways that legitimated the whole institution of slavery.

The problem with that is that there is absolutely nothing stated in the text

that has anything to do with race or skin color.

Biblically, you just can't make the connection. And there is not a Bible

you could find that would even try to make that connection.

Prior to the Revolution, nobody is saying that slavery is wrong. The only

who are saying things are people like the Quakers, who were considered a

strange. The Quakers were primarily considered strange because they were

pacifists, but the fact that they thought slavery was something that was

didn't help.

Quakers sent people to Williamsburg to lobby the legislature to try to take

actions against them. slavery, including to path laws to make it easier for

slaveholders to free their slaves.

Manumission is what that's called.

Henry received a letter from one of those Quakers, Robert Pleasence, who

along a book of essays about the wrongs of slavery.

And Henry thanked Pleasence in a letter in 1773.

Henry says, point blank, isn't this amazing in this time of strong feelings

about rights and liberties that I am a slave holder and that I hold slaves of

own purchase.

So he doesn't give himself the out that the Tidewater aristocrats, our family

has had them for generations.

And then he goes on to say that basically until we can figure out what

about slavery, the best thing we can do is treat them decently, make sure that

they're brought up in the church and what have you.

The Methodist church, John Wesley in particular, was very interested in

evangelizing slaves.

What I find interesting is that they were also evangelizing slave owners.

And in some cases, slaves became Christians before their owners.

So it was not only the slaves who were being evangelized, because sometimes God

brought them to himself before they brought the slave owner and used the

as an evangelistic vehicle.

The Declaration of Independence phrase, all men are created equal, is the most

important ideal that comes out of the American Revolution.

But in writing these famous words, did the founders really mean that all men

created equal?

And further, how is it that historians and scholars all have such different

opinions about exactly what that phrase means?

The Declaration of Independence is much more than a declaration of independence.

We actually declared our independence on July 2nd, 1776.

The Continental Congress put out a very short Declaration of Independence

saying, hereby resolved, these colonies are and ought to be free and independent

of Great Britain.

What happened on July 4th, we offered the world a justification for our

independence. We explained to a candid world why.

We deserve to be independent.

What's more, we did so by appealing to a set of universal principles, all men

are created equal, that we posited as the fundamental self -evident defining

truths that would guide this new nation.

Jefferson intentionally made the Declaration of Independence broad and

because we have to remember it's a political document.

It's being written to convince Americans that they should support independence,

which was not an easy decision.

And so Jefferson and his committee in the Continental Congress write the

Declaration in very broad, accessible, motivating terms.

When he wrote the Declaration and said all men are created equal, I firmly

believe, and other scholars do too, that he meant to include African Americans

in that statement.

And this was the young phase of Jefferson, the emancipator.

Early in his career, Jefferson was an avid opponent of slavery. And he did

introduce legislation, in the Virginia legislature at least, that would

help ban the slave trade. I think it's important to differentiate between the

slave trade and slavery.

But in Jefferson's mind, and in many of his colleagues' minds, the end of the

slave trade would help erode slavery and eventually... bring about emancipation.

All men created equal. When Jefferson wrote that, in my view, we have to take

that at face value because all men are created equal.

That includes black people.

I believe that they were talking about the same thing that scripture talks

about. We're all equally valuable in God's eyes.

Inherently valuable because we're created in his image.

Jefferson believed if he kept, and John Adams helped him work through this as

well, if they kept life, liberty, and property, which was the original intent

the inalienable rights, well, what was a property in that day? A slave.

So they then changed it to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

They felt they were doing two things at that moment.

One, they were not enshrining slavery, so it could be destroyed.

Secondly, they were planting a time bomb in the Declaration that would destroy

slavery because how in the world could you stand for equality and protection of

life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and keep a whole class of

slavery?

It's my thought that he meant to say and should have said, Even in reflection

now, all white men are created equal.

In fact, all white property -owning white men.

Clearly, all men were not equal, given by their maker inalienable rights. Well,

what rights? You own me, so I don't have any rights.

I wish that Thomas Jefferson and all of his fellow Americans believed

that that phrase, all men are created equal in the Declaration, was designed

the ultimate rationale for the elimination of slavery.

I think that's reading back in time our own values too far.

Thomas Jefferson, in drafting the preamble, was greatly influenced by his

Virginia colleague, Colonel George Mason, who just a week before In writing

Virginia Declaration of Rights, Mason wrote that all men are by nature equally

free and independent and have certain inherent rights. That is a less elegant

way of saying what Jefferson said.

That was the original draft of Mason's first article in the Virginia

of Rights.

His Virginia colleagues stood up.

and said, wait a minute, Colonel Mason, what about slaves?

Won't that encourage slaves to desert their masters?

So the Virginia Revolutionary Convention added a phrase

that all men are by nature equally free and independent when they enter

into a state of society.

So in other words, both the Virginians in late June of 1776 and

the Americans on July 4th of 1776 were taking a very

important, even radical step in asserting the equality, not of

all of mankind, alas, but of all American citizens.

And they were not.

prepared to embrace African -American slaves as American citizens

at that time.

Jefferson's phrase, all men are created equal, has really become a touchstone

for America. It is the language of nationhood, and it's a very fraught

phrase as well, because what it means to us is not what it meant to Jefferson.

When he wrote that phrase, he was actually asserting the right of British

America as being equal to Britain.

So while we think of it as individual equality, that idea really hadn't

when Jefferson was writing the Declaration of Independence.

That idea didn't emerge until the wake of the French Revolution, the idea of

individual equality.

Now, so when they're talking about human beings, or all men in this case,

they're talking about theoretical people that live in a state of nature.

They're not talking about sort of any individual in any real sense. They're

talking about rights that exist for individuals after governments are

They're talking about a philosophical world. This is a very common framework

that Jefferson is drawing on.

This is what John Locke uses when he's a philosopher, talking about the origins

of government. So this is a little bit of philosophy in the beginning.

In a state of nature, everyone was free and equal.

White, black, man, woman, child, Indian.

He certainly did not mean everybody was free in the here and now. If you look at

the next phrase in the Declaration of Independence, it talks about...

Forming a new government, forming a new civil society in which the men who made

the laws could do what they wanted.

The interesting thing is, when people read that document, immediately,

immediately they weren't thinking about philosophy.

They started thinking about themselves.

And so you see, in one of the great moments of the revolution, is that when

American patriot movement claims natural rights, as their justification for

rebellion, it opens up Pandora's box because now everybody can claim natural

rights in any time that they feel like their own rights are violated.

John Adams famously says, if we recourse to the state of nature, then everyone

will have a claim. Every man who is not worth a farthing, every boy of 12 years

old, and every woman will start claiming that they have a right as well. And so

that, I think, is what happens. And we see this immediately in Massachusetts.

There's enslaved people who start petitioning, saying, in your

says that all men are created equal.

Well, we're enslaved.

It doesn't seem to be fair, and so what happens? You end slavery in

Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, many northern states immediately, and

then you get gradual emancipation in some of the northern states as well over

the next generation, all based on this rhetoric that's unleashed unwittingly

in the Declaration of Independence.

And yet in the South...

They, in many ways, viewed it quite differently.

There had been a series of decisions issued in England, most famously the

Mansfield decision, where the judges in England began to turn the tide against

slavery. And those sorts of decisions frightened the slave owners of the

American South, particularly in South Carolina.

Their right to own slaves was one of their fundamental rights that England

threaten, and they fought a revolution to protect their right to own slaves.

was a tension that existed within the movement that could easily be covered by

simply saying, we're fighting for liberty, knowing that the liberty they

talking about might be very different.

The Constitutional Convention in 1787 in Philadelphia sought to unify the 13

colonies and was the catalyst for the U .S. Constitution.

However, in ratifying the Constitution, did the founders codify slavery and make

compromises they should not have made?

The question around the Constitution is really the question of what are the

issues that stood in the way?

of america coming together as a nation and i would argue the most important

issue was the issue of slavery the constitutional convention was convened

initially to amend the articles of confederation that just weren't working

had closed off shipping on the mississippi the brits were misbehaving

north the states were slapping tariffs on each other's imports the articles of

confederation were not working and that we needed a better government in 1787

about a fifth of the population

the entire country was in bondage.

And that was something that all of these men knew that they were going to have

to deal with somewhere down the road.

Slavery was front and center in the minds of all of the delegates in the

Constitutional Convention.

They knew how much was at stake.

Let's rule one thing out right at the beginning.

There was no way that the framers of the Constitution could have abolished

slavery in the Constitution.

If they had done that, we would have had basically two warring nations, the

slave -owning side and the non -slave -owning side.

James Madison records in his notes that he objected to having the Constitution

admit property in man.

So he understood that the Constitution, had to avoid mention of the word

slavery, at the same time that it protected slavery in very specific ways.

Many northern delegates were opposed to slavery.

Most of the delegates from the north had either freed their slaves themselves or

had never owned slaves.

Where from the south, everyone, every delegate from the south was a slave

Some of them were the largest slaveholders.

in America.

George Washington, of course, had vast numbers of slaves between the ones he

owned and the ones that were the property of his wife.

The people from the Carolinas, but they would be backed up by the ones from

Georgia. They made it clear that they would not vote for the Constitution in

Philadelphia or later ratify it if it didn't protect the institution of

against encroachment by the future national government.

We have to remember that slavery was legal in every single state at the time

the Constitutional Convention.

Northern states were complicit, particularly when it came to the

fugitive slaves. In Article 4, Section 2, the Constitution specifically states

that if a slave flees from one state to another, that he will not be freed.

by the laws of the state to which he flees, but instead will be delivered up

back to the master.

How do you treat the enslaved population?

Are they considered people when it comes to representation?

Are they considered property when it comes to taxation?

Ultimately, the South wanted the enslaved population to count in helping

have greater numbers of representatives in the House of Representatives.

Northerners did not want this to happen and said, well, if you're going to count

slaves as people for your purposes of representation, but you don't want to

claim them as people, then we want slaves counted as property when it comes

for taxation.

After debating it off and on all summer, they arrive at this fraction of

three -fifths.

Why not two -fifths? Why not 50 %? There was a precedent about three -fifths in

the Articles of Confederation, but it is a fundamentally confounding fraction.

But it was probably the only way that the movement to create a single nation

could have gone forward.

Had the framers been idealists who said we refuse to compromise, slavery is

wrong and therefore we will not sign off on any document that fails to abolish

it, then you would have had no constitution and no country and

of ever getting rid of slavery.

From a purely moral point of view, the abolitionists say it's not our business

to try to figure out what's politically possible. It's only our business to...

pronounce what is morally right and wrong.

There's no question that they had the moral high ground.

It's also no question that if they had their way, the Union would have been

destroyed.

While that compromise allowed the constitutional debates to move forward,

some ways it marked forever America's notion of inferiority of African

by saying that they could only be three -fifths of a person.

really was something that scarred America and scarred the African

psyche until very, very recently.

The other compromise that was made is the decision to allow the southern

to continue to import slaves from Africa for 20 years after the

Constitution is ratified.

There were only two states represented at the convention who insisted on

that. that they be allowed to continue importing slaves.

South Carolina and Georgia.

The other state delegations were simply unwilling to look the South Carolina and

Georgia delegates in the eye and say, if you don't like the abolition of the

international slave trade, then walk.

Between 1788 and 1808, Nearly as many slaves

were imported into America from Africa as had been imported during all of the

decades before that, since the first importation of slaves in the early 17th

century. But then that brings us to the question, should they have compromised

on the issue of slavery?

And the answer to that question, unfortunately, is not a short answer.

As American slavery entered the 19th century, many founders began to support

repatriation to Africa movement.

However, could this plan really have been the solution?

to the slavery dilemma.

I think the problem wasn't essentially economic.

I think the problem was essentially racial.

Namely, even if you wanted to end slavery and were prepared to pay owners

it, at a certain point in time, by the time you get to 1800, there are about 1

million slaves.

The problem is when you free them, where do they go?

It's easy to end slavery in the North, and they do it state by state.

Every state has adopted legislation ending slavery or putting it on the road

extinction. And every state south of the Potomac where the population is much

more black is going to find it almost impossible to do that.

Here in the agrarian South, enslaved people were such a large proportion of

population that it scared, especially landholding whites.

to think of that population as still present yet free.

It's very important for us to realize that Jefferson did not envision a

nation. That's why he was such a proponent of colonization. He really

that in order to become a free people, they would have to return to what he

thought was their homeland in Africa.

Monroe was the governor of Virginia in 1800.

That was the year of one of America's most important slave rebellions, or at

least a planned rebellion, by a slave named Gabriel, owned by a man named

Prosser.

Monroe begins its correspondence with Jefferson, and this is with the Virginia

Assembly's support, about maybe colonizing or transporting some of the

rebels instead of executing them.

And as a result, President Jefferson...

begins negotiations with Britain to possibly send free American slaves to

Leone, which is a British colony on the western coast of Africa.

That's actually where black Americans who had joined the British during the

American Revolution and had been given their freedom by the British during the

war, they were afterwards sent to this colony, Sierra Leone.

Madison was one of the founding members of the American Colonization Society. It

started in 1816, and it was sort of a futile attempt at finding a solution

to slavery.

The idea was that they were going to take proceeds from land sold in the West

buy slaves from their owners and send them across the Atlantic to what we now

know as Liberia.

You had newly freed people of color who are saying, why should I go back to

Africa? I'm the third or fourth generation.

I've lived my entire life in the New World. Why should I want to go back to a

land that I know nothing about?

This provision did indicate the extent to which

America's founders were not prepared to live.

with freed African and African American slaves.

As American liberty entered the 19th century, Washington and Franklin had

away, and all the other founders were growing old.

But as history unfolded, Were the Founding Fathers leaving behind subtle

on how they really felt about the institution of slavery?

We have to remember that there are different founders with different ideas.

And certainly I think some of them did believe that slavery was on its way out

as an institution. And I think, honestly, many of the Virginians

This was largely because their plantations were slowing down. They were

to wheat as a crop. They had a reserve of labor. They couldn't use the slaves

that they had. So many believed that slavery was on its way out.

Benjamin Franklin came to realize...

Initially, through Quaker influence in Philadelphia, first of all, the slave

trade was an abomination.

And by the end of his life, his very long life, in the 1780s, he came to the

realization that we had to do something about slavery.

By 1785, Franklin had finally freed, not sold, freed the last

of his slaves.

And by 1787, he was president of the Pennsylvania Society.

for the abolition of slavery in that state.

In the first Congress, he submitted a resolution, along with a few other

Philadelphia anti -slavery people, calling for the first Congress to, one,

the slave trade, and secondly, to discuss ways to put slavery on the road

extinction, some gradual emancipation policy.

James Madison was the guy that deep -sixed the Franklin proposal in

and made a ruling essentially that the federal government could not rule on

slavery as it existed in the state south of the Potomac. They could rule on it

in the western territories, but not south of the Potomac.

The Virginia legislature passed in 1782 an extremely liberal manumission law

allowing slave owners to free slaves at will, whereas before that, slave owners

had to get special permission.

from the state legislature and prior to that from the royal government to free

slaves. So there was a real birth of liberalism in the Virginia legislature,

entirely controlled by slaveholders during the revolution.

Virginians, especially prominent Virginians like Jefferson and Madison,

up talking about slavery in a certain way that makes it seem like

they are fundamentally opposed to it.

They're really opposed to the slave trade.

But they want to have the high moral ground in this conversation, Jefferson

of all, especially, because it's really important to him. They learn to talk in

a way that is dominated by circumlocutions. It's a way of thinking

talking that allows them to coexist with slavery while convincing themselves

that they're opposed to it.

You see Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, James Madison all expressing moral

concerns about the institution of slavery.

And they do nothing about their own possessions in slaves.

They don't free them upon their death. They don't free them in their will. They

pass them on to their descendants.

James Madison came under tremendous pressure from his private secretary,

Coles, to free his slaves, and Madison didn't do it. Jefferson came under

pressure. There were lots of people in Virginia who were freeing slaves. I

we say that it was impossible, but it wasn't. Lots of people were doing it.

In Henry's case, Henry had 17 children and was proud of the fact that he was

able to give the boys stake of property, plantations. He was able to give all

the girls dowries.

And part of his wealth was these slaves that he owned. He did not free them at

the time of death. Indeed, his will stipulates which one went to his wife.

in a couple of cases, he gave slaves to others of his descendants.

Washington was most open to questioning ideas of slavery, probably during the

American Revolution when everything was in flux.

and when he was surrounded by young men like Lafayette and Alexander Hamilton

who were pushing him on this issue.

And by the mid -1780s, you're starting to get Washington writing things like,

one wants to end slavery more than I do, but it has to be done by legislation.

He sees it as a moral problem.

According to Washington's family, after the Revolution, he stopped taking

communion. So that's a big change.

according to them, in his life.

It's a big change that they saw.

The other big change that happens in the war is that he changes his mind about

slavery, and I think the two are very related.

He gets back from the war in December 1783, but he finds that everything in

Mount Vernon has sort of fallen apart while he's been gone for eight years.

Among the regulations that Virginia put in place, for freeing a person's slaves.

You had to be able to continue to pay for the upkeep of anyone who was

considered elderly.

They also had to continue to support children up until the age of majority.

So this is a really substantial financial commitment, even after these

are freed, and he doesn't have the money at this point to free them.

He has to get back into working that plantation.

And since it came with a lot of slaves, it was those slaves that worked the

plantation.

And they were his capital.

He's trying to find a way to get out from under the system, but can't until

will, essentially, is the only measure he gets.

When he was dying on his deathbed, he asked that two wills, his two wills be

brought to him, and he decided which to keep and which to tear up.

And we don't know exactly what was in the other will, but he tore up one and

it tossed in the fire.

And he said, this is the will we're going with. And that was the will that

included freeing his slaves.

When George Washington wrote his will in the last summer of his life, he

specified that all of the slaves that he owned in his own right, roughly 123

people, were to be set free after the death of his wife, Martha.

Washington also called for the education of the young slaves and training of

everybody up to the age of 25 in a skill.

And he said no one should be exiled from the state. It was really a remarkable

document. Washington was saying everything that Jefferson would not

slaves were smart enough to read and write, that slaves were amenable to

training, that slaves had a right to live in this country.

that they had a right to live here as free people and that they should not be

exiled.

Washington was always a political actor.

His decision to free his slaves in his will is part of that leading by example.

It must have been something he thought about to a great extent.

Both Madison and Jefferson did eventually go broke due to their

than anything else.

They each owned these large plantations, and they each lived lifestyles that

were beyond their means.

As Madison is getting older, he always talks about slavery.

It's an issue he can't get away from. He is literally haunted by it. He just

can't find a solution for it.

And in fact, in his final advice to my country, which is published

he says, The advice nearest to my heart and deepest in my convictions is that

the Union of the States be cherished and perpetuated.

Let the open enemy to it be considered a Pandora with her box open, and let the

disguised one be as a serpent in the Garden of Eden.

I think it's pretty clear that the disguised serpent is slavery.

And he realizes by the 1830s that slavery is going to tear us apart, and

nothing he can do about it.

The story of America's founding fathers is replete with paradoxes, full of both

liberty and slavery.

But today in the 21st century, how should we view these men and their

It's very hard for a 21st century mind to get back into an 18th century

worldview. It is an interesting moment in...

In American and world history, it shouldn't just be seen as a simplistic

of hypocrisy that goes wrong.

There are these juvenile interpretations of the founders.

It's like a cartoon.

They're the greatest people in the history of the planet, and then you turn

They're the deadest, whitest males in American history.

Playing that kind of cartoon game, we should stop doing that. We should

with them as imperfect figures.

who we can learn from because of their imperfections as well as what they did

well.

There's a tendency within historic preservation to have what I would call

ancestor worship, and they become not real people. What's fascinating is that

you realize these were very human beings.

The fact of the matter, it wasn't just Thomas Jefferson or a South Carolina

slave owner.

It was virtually every white man and woman.

in America, North and South, who were not prepared to embrace Africans and

African Americans as fully equal.

It happens in the life of every Virginia politician is that if they took steps

to try to mitigate slavery, it would go up against a

kind of silent majority.

of public opinion, you can look at the lives of Henry, of Jefferson, of

countless Virginians who tried to do something about slavery and basically

out that it was politically suicide.

Americans of the Revolutionary Era really are the first people, because

of their articulation of these doctrines of liberty,

to be forced to come to terms with the contradiction between slavery

and their devotion to liberty and equality.

The American Revolution opened a window of opportunity for change in all ways.

Changes in class structure, changes in economic relations, changes in social

organizations, and changes in slavery.

In 1774, two years before the Declaration of Independence was written,

were no abolitionist societies in America.

And then these ideas are proclaimed, and these ideas take on a life of their

own. And you see the gradual abolition of slavery in the North, and eventually

the Civil War that Lincoln justifies by appealing to the principle of equality

at the heart of the Declaration of Independence.

Even though Jefferson...

could not bring himself to do the fully right thing. He articulated those

beliefs that have touched people's hearts through the ages that have led to

freedom for people around the world. And the process continues. The struggle

goes on. We're not there yet.

It's crucially important to help people understand that slavery is not a black

story. It's not a southern story.

that in some ways it's a quintessential American story. Without understanding

that, we as Americans don't know who we are.

I think the real question we ought to be asking today is, did the founders, in

their capacity as statesmen, did they push hard enough against Southern

interests to hem in slavery and put it on the path of extinction?

That, I think, is where the debate should be happening.

There's a certain amount of anger about my ancestors having been enslaved.

But in the meantime, I refuse to hold

any bitterness because it's like a burden.

You have to let go at some point.

For the revolutionary generation, slavery was wrong.

And ironically...

In making that judgment, they give us the standard against

which we measure their failure.

I like the fact that we're going in the direction of all men are created equal.

It's part of, I believe, why we were able to eventually abolish slavery in

America.

I don't like to think of them as villains or heroes. As an historian, I

to think of the founders as people who struggled with the world they inherited,

tried to imagine a world that they could create, did the best that they could to

do it, and failed really badly when it came to the question of slavery.

It's a word of caution to us that we need to be careful when we condemn

in the past for...

doing things that we consider to be horrible, we undoubtedly will be judged

the future in a way that we can't imagine now.

There are people who argue that it is somehow wrong to criticize the founders,

to recognize their humanity. It seems to me that that's fundamental danger,

because if we suppose that the only people who can lead us have to

be perfect.

There's nobody who answers to that description.

We claim that something is true and then we fall short of it ourselves.

That to me is the simplest explanation for why someone like Thomas Jefferson

could on the one hand believe slavery to be wrong and on the other hand himself

possess slaves.

He was a human being. He was made of the same crooked timber that all human

beings have been made since the dawn of time.

They started the conversation.

I mean, that's what I believe. That's what I abide by, that they started the

conversation about liberty, equality, justice, and freedom. They didn't end

conversation. They started it.

Thank you.