COMMENTARY: There is no dispute: The United States of America, as envisioned by our founders, began in 1776.
Many political and social progressives long to redefine America as beginning not in 1776, which is really and literally when the very name “United States of America” began, but in 1619, before Plymouth Rock and before the arrival of John Winthrop and Arbella on our shores. They want to define the nation instead by slavery and racism. So much so that The New York Times’ 1619 Project dates the United States that way, defining the country’s beginnings to 1619, with the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Virginia that year.
Americans should look back on their founding as founded on the principles of 1776—that singularly great achievement for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that was the Declaration of Independence. It is the heart of America. These were principles for all mankind, though indeed it would take decades to fully implement them for all Americans, both black and white. Their complete achievement would lead to civil war.
The mob today targets statues of everyone from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to (interestingly) Union generals like Ulysses S. Grant, who defeated the Confederacy before fighting the KKK, and even Abraham Lincoln and (most bizarrely all) of Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist. Very often the mob deals with bad history, targeting real saints who tried to protect the natives from persecution, such as St. Junípera Serra, whose statues are being torn down across California. Here is a saint – canonized by Pope Francis – who has been cancelled. And St. Junípero is far from alone, with the likes of St. Louis IX., and even the Blessed Virgin Mary on target. And don’t even get me started on Christopher Columbus.
But let’s not argue with this historical fact: The United States of America, as envisioned by our founders, began in 1776.
What about those same founders and the undeniable evil of slavery? Well, that’s a topic that’s really much more worrisome and complicated.
A full accounting must first acknowledge what America’s founding fathers said and did about slavery. Consider these testimonials:
“Slavery is such a cruel degradation of human nature,” said Benjamin Franklin in a November 1789 speech demanding its “eradication.”
Franklin’s closest ally at the founding was John Adams. “Therefore every measure of prudence should be considered for the final complete extermination of slavery from the United States,” he urged in a letter dated June 8, 1819. “All my life I have held the practice of slavery . . . in abhorrence.”
That’s how the founders felt. In fact, probably all the most influential founders felt this way. Professor Thomas West put it categorically: “Every leading Founder admitted that slavery was wrong.” He noted that “even those who defended slavery knew full well that blacks were human beings. Few argued that slavery was right in principle. Each of the leading Founders admitted their wrongdoing.”
Indeed, as Alexander Hamilton said, blacks were “men, according to the laws of God and nature.” Notwithstanding that “the laws of certain States . . . grant property in the service of negroes as personal property.” The law might say one thing, but it did not replace the eternal reality of the laws of nature and the natural God – i.e. natural law and biblical law.
But what about people like George Washington, our nation’s first president, who owned slaves? Well, he knew it was wrong too.
In a letter to Robert Morris dated April 12, 1786, Washington said of slavery, “There is no man living who more earnestly desires than I to see the adoption of a plan for its abolition.”
In a letter to Lawrence Lewis dated August 4, 1797, he affirmed: “I desire from my soul that the Legislature of this State will see the policy of gradually abolishing slavery.”
And yet, to maintain his farm and property, Washington relied on a mass of 316 slaves, 143 of which he owned outright. Washington did not keep slaves because he thought it right for one man to own another, but because he viewed them as a necessary evil to maintain his farm. It could not exist without them. Was Washington self-serving? Yes, definitely. And he knew it.
The situation was tearing not only Washington’s wallet but also his conscience. He knew that slavery was wrong, but like many of the founders who owned slaves (including Thomas Jefferson), he felt that he personally could not financially extricate himself from the situation. Obviously, he could not accept the catastrophic financial cost of their release. The devil had him by the tail.
As Thomas Jefferson said, “We hold a wolf by the ears and we can neither hold him nor let him go safely. Justice is on one scale, and self-preservation is on the other.” And yet, said Jefferson, “Nothing is more certain written in the book of destiny than that these men shall be free.” The key – the overwhelming task – was how to do it, especially peacefully. That was the problem. And to be sure, it would never happen peacefully.
It would take Abraham Lincoln—and an actual Civil War—to fully extend that principle of equality to every single American, including black Americans. It could not be extended in 1776, not least because the entire southern states would have refused to accede to the very American republic that was imagined at that time. The founders would find themselves in a civil war with each other in July 1776 rather than a united revolution to free themselves from the British. The abolition of slavery in 1776 was not possible. The very principles that were launched in 1776 and enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the later Constitution and Bill of Rights would never start from a standstill.
The abolition of slavery in America, as in any country, would not happen overnight. It took a lot of time and pain. This was evil, and eradicating evil would not be easy. In America, this required bloodshed on a level (civil war) unprecedented in its history. No other war, including World War I and World War II combined, has seen the loss of so many American lives. America would suffer terribly for its original sin.
How should we view it as American Catholics? Fortunately, our Church had a completely different position on slavery.
The Catholic Church condemned slavery long before America’s founding fathers. In fact, the condemnation of the Church predates not only 1776 or 1619, but even before Columbus discovered the New World in 1492 – we can point to papal statements going back to 1435.
From the very beginning, the Church not only condemned all slavery of all people everywhere, but never hesitated to call out specifically slavery against blacks, first in the Canary Islands (1435) and then later in Africa as the practice was established there by colonial conquerors in the mid-1500s. -them. For example, there was a declaration of the Church in January 1435, Sicut Dudum, subtitled, “Against the Enslavement of the Black Natives of the Canary Islands.” Regarding the activities in the Canaries, Pope Eugene IV stated: “They took away the natives’ property or left it for their own use, and subjected some of the inhabitants of the said islands to eternal slavery, sold them to other persons, and committed various other illegal and evil acts against them.” .”
Therefore, the Church set “to reprove every sinner for his sin” and encouraged “everyone, temporal princes, lords, captains, men-at-arms, barons, soldiers, nobles, communities and all others of every kind among the Christian faithful of any state, degree or condition, that they themselves give up the aforementioned acts, force those who are subject to them to give them up, and rigorously restrain them.” Unwilling to tolerate any pretense or excuses, the Pope ordered action immediately, with a specific time frame. Under threat of excommunication, he ordered those responsible: “If this is not done after 15 days, they incur the penalty of excommunication by the act itself.”
This was in 1435, some 400 years before America and Western European nations like Britain abolished slavery. And it was hardly the only example from the Church.
In June 1537, Pope Paul III. in his Bull Sublimis Deus forbade the enslavement of “all other people that Christians may later discover”. Whether black or white or something in between, Indian or non-Indian, native or non-native, European or non-European, Christian or non-Christian, they must not be deprived of liberty or property, he said.
Many more papal pronouncements like these followed in the coming centuries. As to why America didn’t follow these statements – well, for one thing, America wasn’t a nation until 1776. And besides, America’s founders weren’t Catholic.
Looking back at the Church so early, as well as America in the 19th century, perhaps the most amazing thing we can say about the Church and America and slavery is that they were farsighted and noble in opposing and ultimately trying to abolish the practice – a practice that existed all over the world thousands of years.
And yet that laudable reality seems to be lost on the modern mind, or at least resisted by those with an ideological agenda to recast America and its founding as something it was not—as something utterly sinister and misbegotten.
To be sure, there is an obvious ugliness in America’s historical record with race. This was indeed a nation where slavery was legal from its founding in 1776 until the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865. Slavery is actually America’s original sin, although it is not native to America alone. As for America’s founders, they were torn about slavery and how to end it. That lack of clarity rent the nation, splitting it almost permanently a century later. Fortunately, great men like Abraham Lincoln found a way to hold the nation together and end the horror of slavery, ensuring that this nation, conceived in freedom, did not disappear from the face of the earth.
