Give me slaves or give me death!

 

 James Madison, oil painting by Asher B. Durand, 1833. The New-York Historical Society.

 

JEFFREY SAINT CLAIR>

+ Dr. Samuel Johnson, a fierce abolitionist, on the hypocrisy of the American revolutionaries: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” (1775, Taxation No Tyranny)

+ Consider the father of the country, who owned 100 enslaved people and kept buying them into his dotage to work at his new distillery. When George Washington inspected enslaved Africans to purchase–often right off the docks to avoid bidding wars at auction–he looked for females who were “fat and lusty.”

+ James Madison Sr., the father of the diminutive Jimmy (he maxxed out at 5’4”), was a Virginia planter and judge who once sentenced to death an enslaved boy who had swiped 25 cents’ worth of goods from a warehouse. Judge Madison sent his precious son off to college with his own personal slave, Sawney. Jimmy, the man who would become the principal architect of the US Constitution and author of the Bill of Rights, didn’t attend either of the preeminent southern universities of the time, UVa or William and Mary, but Princeton, the favored Ivy League school of the southern gentry. The southern boys felt at home up there in Yankee New Jersey, in large measure because the president of the college during the Revolutionary period was John Witherspoon, himself a slave-owner.

+ I’ve always been a little dubious about Patrick Henry’s made-for-meme cry of “Give me liberty or give me death!” After all, when Henry read the Constitution, he said that he “smelled a rat” because the document failed to include, in the historian Sean Wilentz’s words, “any categorical guarantee to the slaveholders of their rights to property in man.” Still, as cagily drafted as it was, the Constitution had enough “subcategorical guarantees” to keep the peculiar institution thriving for the next 70 years, as the enslaved population in the Deep South swelled. In 1790, the enslaved population of the US was around 695,000. By 1860, the population had exploded to more than 4 million, most in the cotton states of South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana.

COUNTERPUNCH