The Founding Father’s Paradoxical Conception of Liberty

From Article 1, Section 2 of the United States Constitution: 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 to 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]

Throughout America's existence men like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison have been glorified as demigods for their various roles in the country’s early history. Particularly, these men are praised for establishing the noble ideals of freedom, liberty, and equality as the philosophical foundation for the United States federal government. These are the same ideals that they supposedly enshrined through the Constitution. However, this overly romantic narrative of America’s founders, pervasive in the country’s popular historical consciousness, neglects to address the central contradiction of the United States founding: the fact that the rise of liberty and equality during the Revolutionary era was only possible through the perpetuation of slavery and white supremacy.

The contradictions in the Founding Fathers logic reveal themselves most clearly in the three-fifths compromise. Delegates at the Constitutional Convention including Jefferson, Madison, and Washington (all slave-owners themselves) created a government that gave disproportionate power to people who owned other people. The compromise stated that three-fifths of all slaves in any state would count towards “Representatives and direct Taxes.” This gave slaveholders a majority in the House of Representatives providing them extraordinary influence over some of the most important powers in American government. [2]  Slaveholders had the power to determine the entire federal tax system, mobilize the “Militia,” and control the electoral college where more Representatives means more votes in presidential elections. Thus with the adoption of the three-fifths compromise into the "Supreme Law of the Land," the exploitation of black life for the purpose of white political supremacy was established into the fabric of American society.

The three-fifths compromise  also reveals how the Constitution, and American society in general, is imbedded with the simultaneous and contradictory construction of freedom and un-freedom. To the founders, freedom was conditional. They envisioned a radical form of liberty, but it only legally applied to white people. At the same time white Americans were enjoying expansive liberties, Africans and their descendants, whose labor was the only thing keeping the United States economically afloat, were being defined as less than a person, LESS than the three-fifths of a person that the law implied; they were given absolutely no rights whatsoever.  

Unfortunately, for most of our nations history we have avoided criticizing the Founding Fathers out of reverence for their god-like status that is perpetuated in the collective American memory. In order to bridge the seemingly insurmountable differences in American society today we must address centuries of baggage, we must push to illuminate the Founding Fathers shortcomings just as much as we praise their genius, and we must continue the process of tearing down a national historical narrative that is rooted in white supremacy.

           

Word Count: 494

Pledged: Alex McTaggart

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[1]   S. Mintz & S. McNeil,  “Digital U.S. Constitution,” Digital History http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=3&psid=3948.( accessed Sep. 9^th)

[2]  David Walstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (NewYork: Hill and Wang, 2009.), 5.