4.3 America Was Founded On Two Rivers part 3

During the War of 1812 Britain offered freedom, land, and relocation to slaves who escaped to British lines and took arms against the colonists. Armed by the British, over 4,000 former slaves, the Black Redcoats, fought with the Corps of Colonial Marines. They raided along the Chesapeake Bay, fought in the Battle of Bladensburg, and burned Washington.

Seeing the American flag still waving over Fort McHenry after a night of British bombardment, Francis Scott Key wrote his poem. In 1933, set to a British tune the poem became the U.S. national anthem.

Patriots considered liberation from Britain a good, but freedom for slaves an abomination. Key, like other slave owners, felt outraged and betrayed by the British offer and slaves’ fighting for freedom. The offer was especially galling because Britain did not free its hundreds of thousand of slaves at home or in the Caribbean until the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. Key immortalized his hatred of rebellious slaves in the third stanza of his poem:

Their blood has wash’d out their foul footstep’s pollution.

No refuge could save the hireling and slave

From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,

And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave

O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Sixty-eight years after the Civil War ended slavery, 119 years after the bombardment of Fort MeHenry, Francis Scott Key’s screed against people seeking individual freedom became enshrined in our national Anthem. Defending the Patriots as prisoners of their time is a failed apologia. It’s there a century later. Arguments over property rights, states’ rights, the natural inferiority God gave blacks simply rephrase the Great Chain of Being dogma.

The 1776 Project’s reactionary apologia praises the Patriots for creating a new form of government, while excusing those inspired thinkers as prisoners of their time for enshrining slavery and disenfranchising women. No. The Heritage Foundation’s 1776 Project ignores the Confederation Period, the five to eight years between the end of the Revolutionary War and the ratification of the Constitution. Six of the thirteen colonies banned slavery before the Constitution was drafted. If the Heritage Foundation authors did not know that, they are incompetent to write political history. If they knew it “The 1776 Project” is a purposeful lie.

We must stop justifying the Founders’ actions and accept that they deliberately reserved all rights for white men. Slavery contradicted the Enlightenment ideas they used to justify the Revolutionary War. They knew six states had banned slavery. They knew it discredited their work because they lacked the integrity to write “slavery”, using “held in service or labor” instead. Slavery is in the Constitution, because nearly half of the signers profited from the slaves they owned. Further, they forced Northern States’ to compromise and protect slavery. The Northern States had larger white populations, their slaves were already being freed. Southern states had small white populations and a slavery dependent economy. If all white (male) votes counted equally, Northerners could vote out slavery. To preserve slavery Southerners forced the 3/5ths compromise that gave them disproportionate representation in Congress (the Electoral College).

The Founders were not prisoners of the moment. Despite Northern colonies ending slavery, none of those Colonies refused to sign or submit the Constitution to their states for ratification. The Patriots created exactly what they intended to create.

The Confederation Period was a loose alliance between the states to govern national and international issues beyond the abilities of individual states to handle. One uniting fear was that Britain could attack individual states and easily defeat them. There were trade problems between states and concerns about private international alliances. Religious intolerance was another problem. Most states had state religions that restricted rights and differed state to state. Punishments for religious violations varier but included restricting voting rights, taxes, right to hold office, possibly being executed.

To reduce these problems Federalists such as Alexander Hamilton and James Madison favored a strong federal government. They focused on the many national concerns that individual states could not fund or organize on their own. To Federalist the government needed authority that exceeded state’s rights. This conservative river was a hard sell. 

Anti-Federalist, such as Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson, feared that a strong central government would trample states’ and individuals’ rights. Fearing abuse similar to Britain’s monarchy they believed the government that governed least, governed best.

In 1786 Daniel Shay, a captain in the Revolutionary War, became the Confederation Period stress test. Following the Revolutionary War Massachusetts was burdened with massive war debts that hurt trade. Hard currency (gold and silver) was in short supply and the population divided between wealthy merchants, who needed hard currency for trade, and subsistence farmers relying on a barter economy. As the hard currency taxes increased, the cash poor famers had their land seized. Along with losing home and livelihood, the farmers lost their right to vote.

After repeatedly pleading with the Massachusetts government, fellow farmers organized a rebellion. Around 4,000 “Regulators” joined the rebellion, closing courthouses to stop foreclosures. While not outright “war”, there was violence: tar and feathers, riding people out of town on rails, threats. This was the same violence the Patriots used against Loyalist before and during the Revolutionary War.

The rebellion ended with a defeat at the Springfield Armory without serious threat to the government, but it threatened the Confederation. A principle concern was that the Regulators were making the same appeals for individual freedom that Thomas Paine had used to incite the American Revolution. Massachusetts officials were forced to argue that the acts they used to achieve independence were illegitimate now that they were in power. Where taxation without representation had been a rallying cry, it became their policy. This is where Jefferson in Paris mentioned the importance of occasional rebellions being useful in the defense of individual freedom. The Constitution disagreed.

Next: The battle for a Bill of Rights.