Recent Supreme Court decisions have eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965. At the very core of the Court’s thinking is that ours is a post-racial society; and that the vestiges of over 400 combined years of African slavery, domestic terrorism epitomized by lynching, Jim Crow segregation, and continuing rampant racial discrimination in housing, education, and employment are no longer part of the world we live in. The Court’s thinking dismisses the very real numbers that punctuate the economic disparities between whites and Blacks:
Unless you believe that these economic differences are the result of white people working harder and/or white people being smarter—and we have a name for those who hold this view—the only conclusion to be drawn is that Lady Liberty has put her thumb on the scale in favor of white people. Of course, this is exactly what she has done, long before she graced the panoramic vista of New York Harbor.
The progressive Center for American Progress identifies the manner in which the imposition of past abuses explains the racial inequalities that have rippled forward to influence our society. “From slavery to Jim Crow,” reads their comprehensive report, “from redlining to school segregation, and from mass incarceration to environmental racism, policies have consistently impeded or inhibited African Americans from having access to opportunities to realize the American dream.”**
I think of all this now not only because I pay attention to the news, but because I have just finished reading The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding (2025) by renowned American historian Joseph J. Ellis. Amazingly, the attitude toward racial inequality expressed by the Supreme Court seems to share a great deal in common with the attitudes held by the Founding Fathers of the United States. Unfortunately, the behavior the Court now emulates is the manner in which the Founders tolerated slavery and also the removal of Indigenous people from their land; both overt acts that grievously undermined the values enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the price paid defending them on the battlefield. As Ellis documents thoroughly, these men we celebrate were coarsely aware of their own hypocrisy. And, now that I write that, I wonder if the Roberts’ Court has the same degree of awareness of the enduring American hypocrisy that they perpetuate.
Either way, Joseph Ellis’ Great Contradiction reminds us all that, as we rightly prepare to celebrate the semiquincentennial of our nation’s birth, it is proper that we use the occasion to clarify what it is we wish to honor; a task requiring attention to the contradiction between the histories we often tell ourselves and that part of the American Revolutionary era in need of some more scrutiny.
The images we have used to conjure our understanding of the founding era come to us almost exclusively from what men and women put to canvas. Paintings are the only images we have of the founding era and they overwhelmingly celebrate and elevate these men as demigods. Had the technology been available, we might see that these men were mere mortals whose attitudes about race belie the noble experiment for which they are justly celebrated.
Of course, we can also create “images” of our own by reading what the people of this era put to paper; something Ellis does in a chapter titled “Unpainted Pictures.” With an historical record which tended to celebrate without criticism, Ellis “paints” a few of the less glamorous moments of the late eighteenth century. Suffice to say that many of these conjured images are not pretty. Ellis writes, and I concur, that the best way to understand the founding era is to consider that the dearth of physical images from the founding may have contributed to our ability to understand its complexities, particularly in regards to race. This is also why, I believe, modern movies that have attempted to fill in this historical void serve history well; although many of these films have been met with controversy, especially from the conservative right who, I would suggest, wish to ignore the nation’s warts in deference to their politically hegemonic aspirations.
To Ellis’ larger point, we shouldn’t be shocked to discover that the Founders had keen ideas about race; most of which would be viewed as absolutely reprehensible today. Indeed, the document we will celebrate in a few months was signed by 56 men, 41 of whom were slave-owners. And 25 of 55 who signed the US Constitution, many of the same men, were also slave-owners.***
Joseph Ellis cites British “literary lion” Samuel Johnson who took blunt measure of America’s hypocrisy: “Why is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of slaves?”
Little noted in popular celebrations of the era is that the humanity-crushing reality of slavery haunted many of these men and they ardently attempted to establish legacies that side-stepped their roles as slave masters. This was no easy task because, in the end, the hard truth is that the enslaved they possessed represented the wealth, not only of the individual planters – so well represented at the debates over independence and the framing of the Constitution – but the wealth of the South and thus, the entire country.
With money driving our founding moments, much of the hypocrisy of this entire generation can be epitomized by the often-economically strapped Thomas Jefferson. He, of course, crafted the lofty aspirational words of the Declaration of Independence. He also had a serious romantic relationship with the enslaved Sally Hemmings; undeniable evidence that Jefferson was fully aware of the potential of his slaves. So, whatever may have personally troubled Jefferson and the others over owning slaves – and Ellis does great work in helping the reader understand this – their views of slavery were formed less by the conscience and more by the pocketbook. As Ellis bluntly announces, “Moral blindness made eminent economic sense.”
Another tactic deployed to deflect from confronting slavery and putting it on a path to eventual abolition, as the British had already done, was to ask, “What is to be done with the slaves when freed?” Some suggestions to this dilemma included removing former slaves to isolated territories or even returning them to Africa; although the vast majority of these nearly one million enslaved knew very little of Africa. The impracticality of removal created a convenient justification for slavery as if the slave-owner were to proclaim, “Well suh, I would shully prefer to liberate these hahd working souls, but whatever shall be done with them after that?”
Ellis offers evidence that a large free Black population would not be received well in white America. “A county-by-county referendum,” Ellis writes, “revealed that an overwhelming majority of the white population in Virginia objected to any plan for ending slavery that did not include a provision for removing the freed slaves from the state.”
And, the idea that former slaves would live side-by-side in a bi-racial society after abolition was repugnant to, not only the vast majority in the South, but in the North as well. Evidence of this reality played out later during Jim Crow segregation where thousands of African Americans were lynched – meaning millions of African Americans were terrorized – often for the “crime” of engaging with white women.
One of Ellis’ strongest points is that many slave-owners were deeply aware of the immorality of slavery. For instance, Thomas Jefferson’s early draft of the Declaration of Independence lambasted King George III for, among many other things, allowing the practice of slavery to flourish in the King’s American colonies:
“[The king] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation hither…”
While Jefferson certainly had, as Ellis writes, “the impulse to declare to the world that slavery was inherently incompatible with America’s founding principles,” the morally righteous passage failed to make the final cut. As slavery continued after independence, Jefferson took false comfort in his own obvious hypocrisy by being able to claim that he had at least, as Ellis writes, tried “to blame the whole problem on a discredited British king.”
In the conundrum that is the founding of our nation, Ellis notes that Jefferson actually did insert some anti-slavery language into the Declaration of Independence. Riffing off of John Locke’s natural rights of “life, liberty, and property,” Jefferson substituted “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” This was no small edit because with the removal of “property” from America’s founding document, “[Jefferson] deftly deprived slave-owners of the claim that owning slaves was a natural right protected by law.”
“On this score,” Ellis observes, “there can be little doubt that Jefferson knew what he was doing.” In other words, Jefferson knew that slavery was morally wrong.
Debates at the Constitutional Convention over continuing the trading of slaves from Africa made clear the misgivings many had about preserving slavery. Gouverneur Morris, a Pennsylvania delegate to the 1787 convention, as Ellis decries, “found it impossible to understand ‘the inhabitant of Georgia and South Carolina who goes to the coast of Africa, and in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity, tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest connections and damns them to the most cruel bondage.’”
George Mason, a Virginia delegate claimed that the slave trade was “inconsistent with values of the revolution and [it was] dishonorable to the American character to have such a feature in the Constitution.” Reading between the lines on this one reveals that Mason was calling for an eventual end to the slave trade from Africa, not slavery itself.
Mason’s pocketbook once again shaped his views. By 1787, the slave population of the US was increasing rapidly even without the importation of additional slaves from Africa so, as Mason seemed to oppose slavery, he actually had an economic interest in preventing the slave trade. The soil of much of Virginia’s Tidewater had been tapped out and, with less arable land, the state had an abundance of slaves. Minimizing the slave trade from Africa, therefore, would bolster the value of Virginia slaves who were in demand further south and west.
Ellis also offers some insight into the waning impact of the young nation’s largest state. “Virginia,” Ellis accuses, “was consciously choosing to continue its downward spiral as an economic and cultural backwater, where the planter class, like Jefferson, would die bankrupt, where the white working class refused to work, with the uplifting idea of a Virginia Dynasty just a bygone memory.” In classic Joseph Ellis style, the diminishing power of Virginia is shown to influence later events. “Looking forward,” Ellis adds, “one could safely predict that prominent leaders in Virginia would wrap themselves in the Confederate flag, embrace the myth of the ‘Lost Cause,’ vehemently oppose the civil rights movement, and derive their sense of significance by standing proudly on the wrong side of history.”
The ratified Constitution prevented Congress from limiting the slave trade for 20 years. While this appears to be a step towards the eventual abolition of slavery, the exact opposite is true. “Between 1788 and 1808,” Ellis writes, “more than two hundred thousand African slaves were imported to the United States.” This “demographic explosion… strengthened the political prowess of the slave South. Put differently, if there had ever been a chance to put slavery on the road to extinction south of the Potomac, the convention had just missed it.”
The second front in Joseph Ellis’ extraordinary book is the removal of Native Americans from their homes. While he admittedly gives this second American tragedy less attention, he does suggest that the Founding Fathers made some genuine effort to secure specific territory for Indians and they also attempted to respect the tribes as foreign nations. Unfortunately, the massive influx of white settlers following the American Revolution completely overwhelmed any attempt at treaty-making. The removal of Indians became almost inevitable after the Treaty of Paris, 1783 established the western boundary of the United States at the Mississippi River; well beyond the settled areas of the thirteen states.
“On the Indian side,” Ellis writes, “it never occurred to most tribal chiefs that the scratch of a pen in Paris had dispossessed them of lands they had controlled for centuries.”
There is much more in Ellis’ book that informs the honorable manner in which tribal chiefs organized and fought the diplomatic battles necessary to preserve their territory. In the end, the cascade of white settlers trumped whatever agreements had been negotiated.
While Ellis describes the institution and practices of American chattel slavery “the greatest failure of the revolutionary generation,” he adds that “the prevailing policy of the United States toward Native Americans was nothing less than a direct repudiation of the values embodied in the American Revolution.”
These are harsh words, but they are honest. In that, Joseph Ellis does not diminish what these men accomplished; he just brings them out of the Olympian sky, plants them squarely on earth with the rest of us, and then celebrates the grand experiment they put into motion.
Finally, Ellis closes his book with a few thoughts on the current volatile political situation by saying that, while writing The Great Contradiction, “it was impossible to ignore the persistent potency of the thinly disguised racial prejudice inherent in the slogan ‘Make America Great Again.’ We are currently living through [another white] backlash pattern that, at least as I see it, had its origins during the American founding.’”
As to the conservative super-majority of the current Supreme Court, I would not be surprised to discover that they take umbrage with Joseph Ellis’ book. However, due to this exceptional volume, I now see more clearly than ever how their racist decisions reflect the darkest aspects of America’s founding.
*https://www.lendingtree.com/debt-consolidation/black-and-white-disparities-study/
**https://www.americanprogress.org/article/systematic-inequality/
