Prior to the Civil War, John Randolph, a Southerner, taunted: ‘Northern gentlemen think to govern us by our black slaves; but let me tell them, we intend to govern them by their white slaves.’ Senator James Hammond of South Carolina expounded his doctrine of the economic class system: In all social systems there must be a class to do the mean duties, to perform the drudgery of life … Such a class you must have or you would not have that other class which leads to progress, refinement and civilization… we call them slaves. We are old fash­ioned at the South yet; it is a word discarded not by ears polite; I will not characterize that class at the North by that term; but you have it; it is there; it is everywhere; it is eternal…. The difference between us is that our slaves are hired for life and well compensated; there is no starvation, no begging, no want of employment among our people, and not too much employment either. Yours are hired by the day, not cared for, and scantily compensated, which may be proved in the most deplorable manner, at any hour in any street of your large towns … Our slaves do not vote. We give them no political power. Yours do vote and being the majority, they are the depositories of all your political power. If they knew the tremendous secret that the ballot box is stronger than an army with bayonets, and could combine, where would you be? Your society would be reconstructed, your government reconstructed, your property divided.

Representative Charles Pinckney of South Carolina, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in 1787, claimed that he had been responsible for the section on the rights and duties of citizens. He explained to Congress in 1821 what he had in mind regarding civil rights for blacks: ‘I perfectly knew that there did not then exist such a thing in the Union as a black or colored citizen, nor could I then have conceived it possible such a thing could ever have existed in it; nor notwithstanding all that is said on the subject, do I now believe one does exist in it.’ He further charged that the Northern states were seeking to rid themselves of the black population by treating them on every occasion with the most marked contempt and denying them their civil rights. Roger Taney, Andrew Jackson’s attorney general, gave his opinion regarding Negroes’ constitutional rights in 1831: The framers of the Constitution had not regarded Negroes as citizens, and the present condition of that race warranted no change in their legal status. The African race in the United States even when free are everywhere a degraded class, and exercise no political influence. The privileges they are allowed to enjoy, are accorded to them as a matter of kindness and benevolence rather than of right … And where they are nominally admitted by law to the privileges of citizen­ship, they have no effectual power to defend them and are permitted to be citizens by the sufferance of the white popula­tion and hold whatever rights they enjoy at their mercy. Negroes were thus a separate and degraded people and each state could grant or withhold such privileges as it deemed proper and expedient.

The daughter of Jefferson sold for a slave! The child of a freeman for dollars and francs! The roar of applause, when your orators rave, Is lost in the sound of her chain, as it clanks. [Peterson, ‘Jeffersonian Image’] In 1802, James T. Callender attacked Thomas Jefferson in the columns of the Richmond Recorder for keeping a slave concubine named Sally Hemings and fathering children by her. Sally was  described as unusually pretty and ‘mighty near white.’  When Jefferson, a widower, was United States Minister in France, the teenaged Sally was sent to join him there, ostensibly to serve as maid to Jefferson’s daughter Polly. Sally eventually had five children. The eldest had features that were ‘said to bear a striking resemblance to those of the president himself’.  Another son, Madison Hemings, was named after Jefferson’s closest colleague and ‘learned to be a great fiddler.’2                 To provide further credibility to this story, historians have noted that the Hemings family received favored treatment at Jefferson’s hands and in his will three of them were given their freedom.(DNA studies done in 1998 seemed to have removed all reasonable doubt that he was their father.)

George Washington was not only a planter. He also had one of the largest estates in the Commonwealth of Virginia and owned slaves all his life. An inventory at the time of his death would show that he possessed 124 Negroes in his own right, another 153 dower Negroes belonging to Martha Custis Washington, and he had leased an additional forty from a Mrs. French.  After all, Washington lived in a Virginia where slaves were bred to sell to other colonies. Thus in 1772, Washington ordered ‘musty’ flour from wheat raised on his estates to be sold in Jamaica and the proceeds spent on Negroes, provided the ‘choice ones’ could be had for 40 pounds sterling or less. The requirements were straightforward enough: Let there be two‑thirds of them males, the other third females. The former not exceeding (at any rate) 20 years of age, the latter 16. All of them to be straight‑limbed and in every respect strong and likely, with good teeth and good countenances, to be sufficiently provided with clothes. Like other Virginia slaveholders, Washington made no provision to educate his Negroes, but as a matter of course encouraged their promiscuity.  He however urged his manager to be ‘particularly attentive to my negroes in their sickness’ and complained that overseers, as a general rule, ‘view the poor creatures in scarcely any other light than they do a draught horse or ox, neglecting them as much when they are unable to work instead of comforting and nursing them when they lie on a sick bed.’

In spite of the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln did not change his position that colonization of Negroes was the only solution to get rid of blacks. Addressing a Negro delegation in 1862, the president stressed the physical incompatibility of the two races and the fact that ‘on this broad continent, not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours.’ Inasmuch as Americans did not desire the further presence of the Negro population, Lincoln urged black men to look elsewhere: to Liberia, which had had a limited success, or preferably to Central America, where location, natural resources, and climate offered splendid opportunities. To follow through on his plan, Lincoln signed an agreement with Bernard Kock, a charlatan adventurer on 31 December 1862, providing for the settling of five thousand American Negroes on Cow Island at a cost to the government of $50 a head. Kock raised capital in New York for over four hundred Negroes to be shipped to Cow Island, where they were abandoned because of the greed and corruption of Kock and the Haitian officials. When reports of the fiasco filtered back to Washington, Lincoln issued a proclamation on 16 April 1863, canceling his contract with Kock.

Frederick Douglass summarized the black point of view that the Civil War was begun ‘in the interests of slavery on both sides. The South was fighting to take slavery out of the Union and the North was fighting to keep it in the Union; the South fighting to get it beyond the limits of the US Constitution and the North fighting for the old guarantees – both despising the Negro, both insulting the Negro.’ The limitations of Lincoln’s argument that ‘slavery is immoral’ were well known to the blacks. As Lincoln refused to advocate repeal of the fugitive slave law, Wendell Phillips went so far as to call him ‘the Slave Hound of Illinois.’ H. Ford Douglass, an Illinois Negro leader, recalled that Lincoln once refused to sign a legislative petition asking for repeal of the state law barring Negro testimony in cases involving whites. If blacks dared to send their children to Illinois schools, the Negro leader charged, ‘Abraham Lincoln would kick them out, in the name of Republicanism and anti-slavery!’ What Lincoln and the blacks knew was that he was the lesser evil and blacks had no better place to turn.

During the debate at the Constitutional Convention, over regulation of the importation of slaves, George Mason outlined the perils of slavery. Maryland and Virginia, he said, had already prohibited the importation of slaves expressly. North Carolina had done the same in substance. All this would be in vain if South Carolina and Georgia be at liberty to import. The western people are already calling out for slaves for their new lands and will fill that country with slaves if they can be got through South Carolina and Georgia. Slavery discourages arts and manufactures. The poor despise labor when performed by slaves. They prevent the immigration of whites, who really enrich and strengthen a country. They produce the most pernicious effect on manners. Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgment of heaven on a country. As nations cannot be rewarded or punished in the next world they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes and effects, providence punishes national sins by national calamities. He lamented that some of our eastern brethren had from a lust of gain embarked in this nefarious traffic. As to the states being in possession of the right to import, this was the case with many other rights now to be properly given up. He held it essential in every point of view that the general government should have power to prevent the increase of slavery.

In his private opinion the British government was the best in the world and that he doubted whether anything short of it would do in America. It was once thought that the power of Confederate Congress was amply sufficient to secure the end of their institution. The members most tenacious of republicanism, were loud in declaiming against the vices of democracy. This progress of the public mind led him to anticipate the praise bestowed by Mr. Neckar on the British Constitution, namely, that it is the only government in the world “which unites public strength with individual security.” In every community where industry is encouraged, there will be a division of it into the few and the many. Hence, separate interests will arise. There will be debtors and creditors, give all power to the many, they will oppress the few. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the upper class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the lower classes, and as they cannot receive any advantage by a change, they therefore will ever maintain good government. Can a democratic assembly, who annually revolve in the mass of the people, be supposed steadily to pursue the public good? Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy.

A slave, prized by his owner for intelligence, seized an axe and killed the overseer who was beating him. Prosecutor Henry Clay, the Secretary of State under John Quincy Adams, argued that a free man could have pleaded self defense but since the defendant was a slave, the act was murder. Clay secured a conviction and the slave was hanged. The Negro’s conduct at the trial however so impressed Clay that he resigned as prosecutor and ‘never failed to express his sorrow at the part he had played in this case.’ The Constitution of the United States made law and order the responsibility of individual states and most states adopted the Protestant slavery code to deal with the slaves. There were two sets of laws and courts: one for whites and another for blacks; Mulattos were defined as blacks. For blacks the slaveholders were the law and, indeed, God. The black man’s color was proof of his guilt. For whites the law was ‘presumed innocent unless found guilty,’ for blacks the law was ‘presumed guilty unless found innocent.’