Legacy of the Founding Presidents

For the purposes of this essay and in recognition of the formative roles they played in American history, let’s call the first five Presidents of the United States the Founding Presidents: George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe. It may surprise some that John Adams was the only Founding President who never owned human beings. The other four owned slaves before, during, and after they served as President. Of the four, only Washington set his slaves free upon his death, or slightly thereafter in accordance with his will.

It is safe to say that the Founding Presidents personally regarded the “peculiar” institution of slavery as troubling for moral and political reasons. But Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe are thought of by many today as hypocrites because they worshiped at the altar of liberty and equality while owning black people and never publicly acknowledged the humanity of blacks or the immoral contradictions of slavery in a country dedicated to freedom. Although they recognized the conflicts generated by white ownership of black slaves with respect to public/political rights expressed in the Declaration of Independence (“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”), they purposely turned their backs on resolving those conflicts. So much for self-evident truths and the courage of their convictions.

For four of the five Founding Presidents the public rights of all to liberty were trumped by individual white property rights, wealth, self-interest, and status. Because the very existence of their world and their personal fortunes depended on enslaving blacks, they elevated money over morality. In contrast to the actions of those four Founding Presidents, John Adams, John Hancock, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Rush, and Aaron Burr were politically very active in creating the new nation, never owned slaves, and opposed slavery.

Monroe, Jefferson, and Madison even favored an “out of sight out of mind” approach of ridding the nation of its moral-political problem through endorsing the shipping of emancipated slaves to Africa. In other words, they wanted emancipation to equal deportation. They most likely missed the irony of “repatriating” people to areas they had never been since by that time all or almost all blacks, slave or free, had been born in America and knew next to nothing about Africa. Those three Presidents may also have missed the hypocrisy of deporting blacks who were legally free while they personally owned slaves.

Today, Americans are faced with a perplexing dilemma. How do we celebrate the many contributions of our Founding Presidents in creating the country in which we now live and fail to acknowledge that their hypocrisy and morally flawed judgment led to enormous social costs, including 625,000 Civil War deaths and the many hundreds of thousand blacks who died enslaved?

Contrary to what some historians today propose in their attempts to gild the Founding Presidents’ reputations, it wasn't enough for them to believe in private that slavery was intrinsically evil. Jefferson, Monroe, and Madison proved thought itself is ineffective by continuing to own slaves until they died and by refusing to free them in their wills. What those Founding Presidents did was to enforce the principle that property rights and self-interest were far more important than morality and human rights. To paraphrase Mathew 7:16: You shall know them by their actions.