Black in America. Christina Jackson
Constitution. Supporters of slavery, often slaveholders in Southern states, wanted slaves to be counted as part of the United States population for purposes of taxation and representation. Opponents of slavery, often Northern delegates, only wanted to count the free population, including free Blacks and indentured servants, discounting slaves as property, not people. Historians John Hope Franklin and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham recount the tensions among delegates at the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, with competing interests as follows:
Most of the Northern delegates could regard slaves in no light except as property and thus not entitled to any representation. However, delegates from Georgia and South Carolina – states where the majority of people were slaves and the free White people a distinct minority – vigorously demanded that slaves be counted equally with Whites when it came to apportioning congressional seats and electoral votes. Gouverneur Morris declared that the people of his state, Pennsylvania, would revolt against being placed on an equal footing with slaves, while Rufus King of Massachusetts flayed slavery in a fiery speech and condemned any proposal that would recognize it in the Constitution. (2011:100)
It was against this backdrop that the now notorious “three-fifths” compromise was forged; it read: “Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other persons.”1 Counting slaves equally alongside the free population would have given the South much greater political power due to the size of the enslaved Black population. But how to count slaves for the purpose of taxation and representation was not the only issue pertaining to slavery facing the framers of the Constitution. A pressing question was what to do about the slave trade itself?
In 1787, several Northern states had already banned the importation of new slaves, but the Southern states that allowed it, Georgia as well as South and North Carolina, were adamant in their resistance to outlawing the slave trade. Despite the loud objections to slavery and the rising abolitionist movement, slavery was too important to the fledgling American nation to be abolished or the slave trade prohibited at that time. Instead the framers of the Constitution compromised again, granting Congress the right to ban the slave trade but not for 20 years. American participation in the transatlantic slave trade officially ended on January 1, 1808. Yet slave trading persisted illicitly for many years thereafter.
America grappled with its egalitarian ideals, as belief in them required contortions and racial exceptions. The rise of democracy, in the late eighteenth century, and the associated belief that “all men are created equal” was at odds with American economic dependence on slavery and Black subjugation. While the “threefifths” compromise solved the dual problems of representation and taxation, it only implicitly addressed the moral conundrum equating Blacks with property not persons. Slavery remained a scourge on the national conscience. Plantation owners, for their part, did not let the questions about the morality of slavery dissuade from their pursuit of economic profit. Wary of reductions in their labor pool, due to the prohibition of importing slaves, slave owners marshalled Black women’s reproduction to stabilize their labor force. Legal scholar Adrienne Davis explains the importance of Black women’s childbearing to the slave economy, arguing: “[It] created economic value independent of the physical, productive labor they [Black women] performed. Southern legal rules harnessed Black reproductive capacity for market purposes, extracting from it the profits one might expect from a factory or livestock … In its centrality to the political economy, enslaved women’s reproduction was arguably the most valuable labor performed in the entire economy” (2002:109). Black women’s designation as property and their reproduction as profit led to particularly cruel forms of exploitation as slave owners desired to extract maximum value from Black women as laborers while ensuring the viability of their progeny (Roberts 1997).
Historian George Fredrickson in his classic book, Racism: A Short History, argues that, while Blacks were always perceived as racially other, the ideology of racism as a fulsome defense of slavery did not emerge until later:
In the United States racism as an ideology of inherent Black inferiority emerged into the clear light of day in reaction to the rise of northern abolitionism in the 1830s – as a response to the radical demands for emancipation at a time when the federal government was committed to the protection of slavery. Defenders of Black servitude needed a justification of the institution that was consistent with the decline of social deference and the extension of suffrage rights to White males, a democratization process that took place in the South as well as the North. They found it in theories that made White domination and Black subservience seem natural and unavoidable. (Fredrickson 2002:79)
Racism played a key role in managing the dissonance between American inalienable rights and Black slavery, ideologically justifying the differential treatment of Black slaves. Indeed, James Henry Hammond, a Democrat from South Carolina, in a speech before the US Senate on March 4, 1858, declared:
In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement…. Fortunately for the South, she found a race adapted to that purpose to her hand. A race inferior to her own, but eminently qualified in temper, in vigor, in docility, in capacity to stand the climate, to answer all her purposes. We use them for our purpose, and call them slaves…. We do not think that Whites should be slaves either by law or necessity. Our slaves are Black, of another and inferior race. The status in which we have placed them is an elevation. They are elevated from the condition in which God first created them, by being made our slaves. (Hammond 1866:318)
The fight for the abolition of slavery in essence birthed the Black problem. As long as Blacks coexisted alongside Whites in a position of dehumanized servitude and did not demand full inclusion into American society, they were not innately a problem. The problem was when they resisted their social conditions, which resulted in the brutal stamping-out of slave rebellions, severe punishment of runaway slaves, and the prohibition of slave literacy. The ideology of racism was intended to quiet the advocates of abolition, justifying slavery as an institution, all in service of maintaining the existing social order of White superiority.
The 1857 Dred Scott v. J-Sanford case codified what was commonplace at the time: Blacks were not American citizens because “the Black man has no rights that the White man is bound to respect” (Davis 2002:106). Even Abraham Lincoln, the “great” emancipator, said, in September 1858:
There is a physical difference between the White and Black races which I believe forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And in as much as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as such as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the White race. (Lincoln and Douglas 1894:164)
Sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois (1935) argues in Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880 that Black resistance, via increased rebellion and organizing, forced social change. Slaves were unwilling to accept the social order as it was and their upheaval of the Southern establishment through persistent strikes led Lincoln to free them. Most historians argue that slavery was abolished in order to preserve the Union from Southern secession (Fredrickson 2002). In either case, abolition and legal equality for Blacks, guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, required a radical readjustment of the American racial order. Blacks forced this readjustment with increasing resilience during Reconstruction, but racial progress was short-lived. In Opportunity Denied: Limiting Black Women to Devalued Work, sociologist Enobong Hannah Branch argues:
The abolition of slavery freed Blacks from their designation as property, but they remained ideologically and, consequently, socially bound by conceptions of inferiority. Racism, once invoked, became valued in and of itself and it was an inescapable consequence that Whites would insist on maintaining a racist order predicated on denying the equality of Blacks. After the slaves were emancipated,