West's Founding, III: Against Criticisms

West is aware of the need for someone writing today to defend the Founding against claims that it extended its allegedly universal claims only to white men, and only in defense of their power. He attempts this in Part I, Chapter 3.

First, he distinguishes between rights and power. "The language of the founding documents did not exclude either blacks or women from equal natural rights," he says, then quoting Congress' 1774 declaration, a 1776 address to foreigners fighting for the British that appealed to their notion of natural rights, Georgia's revolutionary 1776 constitution, and another 1777 affirmation by Congress. (62-3) If West is right about what was meant by equality -- that all are rightly born free of masters -- then the fact that political power was not distributed equally was not what the Founders intended by 'equality.' They had hoped (as per the last section) to enshrine political power among the especially virtuous, not all people equally. The rights of all to be free of slavery, though, were recognized as universal.

Of course that leaves the actual fact of slavery. West cites the 1780 Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery (Pennsylvania), which states that there is a "duty" to "release them from thralldom" because though "the inhabitants of the several parts of the earth were distinguished by a difference in feature or complexion.... it is sufficient to know that all are the work of the Almighty hand." (63) He also cites in the same place the abolition law in Rhode Island, and the fact that the Revolution was in fact accompanied by an intense period of manumission: "By 1810, more than a hundred thousand slaves had been freed." (ibid.)

As for those who kept slaves in spite of the Revolution, West has several citations from them in which they acknowledge the injustice of it. (65) Jefferson, he suggests, regarded it as both an intolerable injustice and yet a necessity because there was no practical way to release slaves without tempting a mass murder similar to the one that occurred in Haiti. (41) The fact that a hundred thousand slaves were indeed released without a mass slaughter is evidence against Jefferson's position, but the fact of Haiti's 1791 revolution and massacre gives evidence that Jefferson was not completely out to sea on this possibility. Jefferson knew and admitted that he knew that what he was doing was a violation of natural law and therefore a monumental injustice. The Founding was tainted by bad practices, but it was not unable to see the injustices being committed among its members.

Furthering this discussion, West cites pro-slavery Senator John C. Calhoun in a few places where Calhoun is condemning the Founders for being too devoted to this whole equality notion. Rather than the Founding principles being easily transferrable to the Confederacy, as is sometimes suggested, the Confederacy and its predecessors needed to reject the Founding explicitly. (64, 75)

On women and Native Americans, West has different arguments but claims that both were considered equals in the "natural law" sense he is framing as fundamental. Women are equals in that sense, he writes, but considered themselves to have a different role in society than the exercise of political power (a complimentarian view still defended by some communities, e.g., the Amish and some Orthodox Jews). He quotes Abigail Adams, certainly no shrinking violet, on this score, and a number of her contemporaries. (66-7)

Native Americans were not considered racially different at the time of the Founding, West says, only culturally so. He cites in support Patrick Griffin, who "argues that white settlers 'did not vie Indians as an alien race and did not refer to Indians by their physical features." (71) This may have some weight, because in the Colonial and Revolutionary period intermarriage was quite commonplace on the frontier. It is clear that a racism that embraced Native Americans arose later, of course, just as it is clear that the 1915 era KKK disliked Jews as well as Blacks even though Jews seem to have been regarded as equals in Antebellum Savannah (where they fought in duels against Christian gentlemen, the fullest proof that they were regarded as equals who must be answered even at risk of one's life). 

What the Founders looked down upon about the Native Americans was their way of life, which they regarded as "savage." We know this because they say so, for example in the Declaration of Independence. In fairness, West says, just as the Declaration says the Native Americans did "often fight by means of indiscriminate and merciless killing of all ages, sexes, and conditions," and the British really did use them as irregulars on the frontier. (71) That did not remove their equality under natural law, but it did mean that they were criticized as barbarous and dangerous.

Maybe that's true. Certainly the record of interactions there involves a mixture of ruthless war and negotiated peace (the latter of which infamously often ends up being betrayed and treaties broken). There is intermarriage, there is cohabitation, there are frequently people of mixed heritage who seemed to be accepted without prejudice in the early era. I don't know that it's right, but it isn't completely out of order with what I know of the time and place.

West buys some trouble for himself in trying to rope in a discussion about relative intelligence for different peoples, citing Charles Murray et al. His claim is that the Founders would not have accepted that a difference in relative intelligence justified a reduction in rights, or an inequality in the natural law sense he has been defending. He might have been wiser to have avoided bringing what is really a historical debate about what the Founders thought into a contentious present day debate about whether race is in any sense 'real.'

That said, West has good citations in support of this position to Jefferson ("whatever may be the degree of talent [of blacks] it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others") Benjamin Franklin (who remarked after a visit to a school for black children, "Their apprehension seems as quick, their memory as strong, and their docility in every respect equal to that of white children"), and Alexander Hamilton ("their natural faculties are probably as good as ours... The contempt we have been taught to entertain for the blacks, makes us fancy many things that are founded neither in reason nor experience"). (69)

Likewise, he has Declaration signatory Benjamin Rush condemning the principle that intelligence ought to give power over others. "But supposing our author had proved the Africans to be inferior...: will his cause derive any strength from it? Would it avail a man to plead in a court of justice that he defrauded his neighbor, because he was inferior to him in genius or knowledge?" (70) That implies that Rush was not convinced of the proof, but also that he thought the proof was irrelevant to the question of rights. 

West is trying to put a lot in this short section, which has to carry the weight of defending the Founding against a set of vicious attacks as well as a large number of misunderstandings (if West is right) by major historians and scholars. It is clear that he has found and marshalled at least a lawyerly defense, which should give us reasonable doubt about the condemnations to which the Founders are often subject. Whether it proves his case requires longer reflection and further study.