How to Judge the Founders Fairly Without Excusing Slavery or Erasing Them

There are two ways to get the Founders wrong, and they have more in common than their loudest defenders admit. One way is to carve them in marble, take away their flaws and ask the public to kneel. The other way is to find the flaw, announce that it is the only fact about the man, and take a rope to his statue. Both methods share a premise: that a person is either a saint or a villain, and that history is a sorting exercise. Both are lazy. Both spare you the trouble of thinking.

The honest alternative is harder, and I want to make the case for it as a structured argument. The claim is simple. Many of the Founders held human beings in bondage. The same men also wrote down the principles that, over the next eighty years, condemned and ended the institution. To judge them fairly, you must hold both of those facts in your head at the same time, without letting either one swallow the other. I will define my terms, number my premises, state the best objection in its strongest form, and then answer it.

Terms

Founders. The men and women who led the break with Britain and framed the Constitution, in particular the signers of the Declaration and the delegates at Philadelphia in 1787.

Hypocrisy. Professing a principle while acting against it. It is a fault in a person. The word is accurate about many Founders, and I will not run from it.

Presentism. Judging the past by standards no one then held. It is a fault in a historian. Some presentism is just ordinary moral clarity, though, and I will try to tell the two apart.

Erasure. Removing someone from public memory, whether by deleting them from the curriculum or pulling down their monuments, on the ground that their faults outweigh their contributions.

A note on facts and values. That Washington owned slaves is a fact. That slavery is a grave moral wrong is a value, and I stand on it. That the Founders' principles were true is a value claim too, and I will defend it. I will keep the two kinds of claim separate.

Premise one: many Founders held slaves, and that is not in dispute

Washington owned slaves; at the time of his death in 1799, 123 enslaved people at Mount Vernon were his own property, by the figure in the census he took that year, and many more belonged to the Custis estate, which came to him through his marriage. Jefferson held more than a hundred at Monticello at a time. Madison held slaves at Montpelier. Patrick Henry did too. Franklin owned slaves for years, and later turned against the institution. Some Founders did not own slaves, and John Adams is the best-known of them. But the plain count is that many of the men who signed the Declaration and framed the Constitution lived off the labor of people they owned.

A fair account does not soften this. Slavery was not a side issue to be mentioned in a footnote. It was a daily wrong done to real people with names and families, and the Founders who profited from it are accountable for it.

Premise two: those same men set down principles that condemned the institution

Start with the Declaration's own text: "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights." Jefferson's original draft went further and included a passage condemning the slave trade, which Congress struck. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, he wrote of slavery: "Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever."

That tells you something. The slaveholder who drafted the Declaration knew what it meant and was frightened by it. He did not write a convenient lie. He wrote a principle, and then lived in a way that principle condemned, which is exactly what hypocrisy is, and exactly why the principle could later be used against the practice.

Other Founders went further in action. In 1785 the New York Manumission Society was founded, with John Jay elected its first president and Alexander Hamilton among its early leaders. In 1787 Benjamin Franklin became president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, and in February 1790, near the end of his life, he signed a memorial from that society asking Congress to act against slavery and the slave trade. Washington wrote privately in 1786 that he wished to see a plan adopted for abolishing slavery by legislative means, and he never saw one.

Premise three: some of them acted, and the record of what they did matters

Words are cheap, and a fair judge asks what the men did. Several answers can be given.

Washington's will, written in July 1799, directed that the enslaved people he owned outright be freed after the death of his wife. He provided for the old and the sick to be cared for, and for the young to be taught to read and a trade. Martha Washington signed an order freeing them in December 1800, to take effect on January 1, 1801, more than a year after he died. It was an imperfect act: his freed workers were separated from family members who belonged to the Custis estate, and the will came at the end of his life, not the beginning. But it is a fact, and it is rare. Among the great Virginia slaveholders of his generation, he was unusual in freeing the people he owned.

Jefferson did far less. He freed a small number of people, mostly members of the Hemings family, and when he died in 1826, deeply in debt, more than a hundred enslaved men and women were sold at Monticello in 1827 to pay what he owed. That fact belongs in any honest account, and it is one reason his record is the hardest to defend.

At the national level, the Founders did two things that matter. In the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the Confederation Congress prohibited slavery in the territory north of the Ohio River, a story told in The Northwest Ordinance Banned Slavery From a Territory Bigger Than France. And in March 1807, Congress passed, and Jefferson signed, an act prohibiting the importation of enslaved people into the United States, effective on the first day of 1808. The Constitution's Article I, Section 9, had prevented Congress from ending the slave trade before 1808, and the act was passed in time to take effect on the earliest date the Constitution permitted. The Framers had set a clock, and the Congress of 1807 stopped it on the first day it could.

Premise four: the principles outlived the men and did the work

Here is the center of the argument. Principles, once written down, are public property. They belong to anyone who reads them, and the people who read the Declaration most carefully were often the ones the Founders had wronged.

Frederick Douglass, born into slavery in Maryland, took the Declaration as his text. So did Lincoln. In his speech at Springfield on June 26, 1857, answering the Dred Scott decision, Lincoln said that the Founders did not claim that all men were then actually enjoying equality. They meant to set up "a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even, though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere."

Read that again. It is the best answer anyone has given to the charge that the Declaration was a lie. Lincoln does not say the Founders were perfect. He says they set a standard that the nation could be held to, and that the standard was meant to be approached, not achieved on day one. The Gettysburg Address begins with it: "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." Four score and seven years before 1863 is 1776. Lincoln dated the nation by the proposition, not by the arrival of any ship.

Premise five: judging them takes two standards, and both are fair

Here is a method that avoids both marble and the rope.

The first standard is their own time's best. Were the Founders the best that could be expected for their age? Not in every case. Slavery was condemned in their own day by Quakers, who petitioned against it in Germantown in 1688, by the Massachusetts judge Samuel Sewall, who published an antislavery tract in 1700, and by the Pennsylvania abolitionists of the 1770s and 1780s. So the defense that "everybody believed it then" is false. Some did not, and they said so in public, and they knew what the Founders knew. The Founders' failure to act, when contemporaries urged them to, is a fair charge.

The second standard is our own moral clarity. By our standards, owning a human being is a monstrous wrong, and no historian should be shy about saying so. We are permitted to hold that view because the Founders' own principle gave it to us. That is not presentism. It is the Declaration being read honestly.

The method is to apply both: judge the man by what the best people of his age could see, and judge the act by what we know to be true. Then weigh. A man who owned slaves and wrote the principle that ended slavery, and who freed his slaves in his will, is a different case from one who owned slaves and defended the institution with every argument he had. Both are accountable. They are not the same.

The objection at its strongest

The best objection runs as follows. It was put memorably in 1775 by Samuel Johnson, an English critic of the American cause, who asked in a pamphlet: "how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" The objection says: your Founders talked about freedom while profiting from bondage. A principle that was never meant to apply to everyone is not a principle but a privilege. The sincerity of the Founders cannot be believed; the Declaration is a piece of propaganda by slaveholders against another form of rule they disliked. The ideals are poisoned at the source, and monuments to the authors are monuments to hypocrisy.

That is a serious objection, and Johnson's sneer has a real sting. Let me answer it in three points.

One. Hypocrisy does not make a principle false. Truth does not depend on the virtue of the speaker. A thief can say that stealing is wrong, and he is right. To say that an idea is void because its author failed to follow it is the old genetic fallacy: judging a claim by its source. The Declaration's claim about human equality is true or false on the merits. It happens to be true, as the Judeo-Christian tradition has taught for millennia, because human dignity comes from the Creator and not from the state.

Two. Hypocrisy is a charge that depends on the principle. The critic says the Founders betrayed their ideals. That sentence uses the ideals as the measure. If the Declaration were mere propaganda, there would be nothing to betray, and the hypocrisy charge would collapse. So the objector who calls the Founders hypocrites is, without noticing it, standing on the Founders' ground.

Three. The ideals were taken up by those who had the most right to them. Douglass, Lincoln and the abolitionists did not see the Declaration as a trick. They saw it as a promise, and they cashed it. The Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, the Fourteenth in 1868 with its guarantee of "the equal protection of the laws," and the Fifteenth in 1870 are the redemption of that promise. A document that produced those results was not a fraud. It was a down payment.

The statues in San Francisco

The practical test of this argument came in June 2020, when crowds in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco pulled down statues of Ulysses S. Grant and Francis Scott Key, along with one of the missionary Junípero Serra. The Grant statue is worth pausing on, because it shows how crude the sorting can get.

Grant is the man who, as the commanding general, won the Civil War for the Union. The record also says he had owned one man, William Jones, whom he freed in 1859. By any serious accounting, Grant belongs among the people who ended slavery. A crowd that tears down his statue to protest slavery is, to put it gently, mistaking the arsonist for the fire brigade.

Key is a more complicated case, and an honest account has to say so. Key owned slaves. As the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, he prosecuted an abolitionist in 1836. He also represented some enslaved people in suits for their freedom, and he wrote the verses that became the national anthem, a work discussed in The Star-Spangled Banner Read as a Document of Survival, All Four Stanzas. A fair view of Key includes all of those facts, and the debate about how to remember him is a legitimate one.

But notice the method. The statues were not removed by a vote, a hearing or a decision of the public authority that owned them. They were pulled down by a crowd. Whatever you think of a given monument, a self-governing people decides these things through law and public deliberation, with the possibility of contextualizing a monument, adding a plaque, moving it by lawful process or leaving it be. A mob is a poor historian, and an even poorer legislator.

What erasure costs

Suppose we apply the "any flaw voids the whole" rule consistently. We would remove Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Franklin. We would also lose the people who used the Founders' principles against them. Douglass quoted the Declaration, and in his Glasgow speech of 1860 he argued that the Constitution, read according to its principles, was an antislavery document. Lincoln's whole argument rested on it. If the document is nothing but fraud, they were fools. The erasure approach does not honor the victims of slavery. It deletes the intellectual tradition that freed them. It takes away the standard that makes the condemnation possible.

And it makes a poor lesson for the young. A child taught that the Founders were devils will not learn to read them. A child taught that they were gods will not learn to criticize them. A child taught that they were great and flawed, and that the flaw was real and the greatness was real, learns to think. That is education.

For more on these questions, read What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July and Why Douglass Kept the Constitution, George Washington Gave Up Power Twice and Changed What Leaders Could Be and Was America Founded in 1619 or 1776 and What the Historical Record Shows. For a story where a Founder showed courage against the crowd, see John Adams Defended the British Soldiers Who Fired in the Boston Massacre. The Founders page has the texts.

The case in brief

1. Many Founders owned human beings, and the fact is not softened by any context; the slaveholders among them are accountable for it.
2. The same men wrote the principles of equal creation and unalienable rights, and some acted on them, including Washington's will, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and the importation ban of 1807.
3. Lincoln's reading is the best: the Declaration set a standard to be approached, and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments are the nation approaching it.
4. The charge of hypocrisy uses the Founders' principle as its measure, so it cannot void the principle, and the answer to flawed heroes is honest judgment under two standards, not marble and not a rope.
5. Monuments should be argued over and decided by lawful, public process; the toppling of statues of Grant and Key in San Francisco in 2020 skipped that step.

What you can do: read Lincoln's 1857 speech on the Dred Scott decision and the Declaration side by side, then attend a meeting of your local historical or monuments board and ask how it decides what to keep and what to explain.