The Founders and Slavery: How Vivek Ramaswamy Could Have Defended Thomas Jefferson with Confidence
Former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy finally said something objectionable.
As usual, of course, he had the basics correct. But he erred on important points that too often bedevil even the most well-meaning commentators on history.
Appearing last week on the “Breakfast Club” podcast, Ramaswamy spent several minutes defending the Founding Fathers’ views and record on slavery.
Curiously, though, the former candidate focused on John Adams and John Quincy Adams.
This struck me as curious not because the two Adamses had lukewarm attitudes toward slavery — indeed, they hated the institution, as Ramaswamy explained — but because Ramaswamy himself spent so much of his campaign extolling the virtues of Thomas Jefferson and even drawing comparisons to the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence.
Thursday on X, the entrepreneur shared a clip of the podcast’s relevant segment and, in an accompanying post, amplified the error he made. With this error, he made an unnecessary and harmful concession to modern ignorance.
“It’s fashionable today to lazily point out that Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder, but very few Americans know that John Adams was an abolitionist who didn’t own slaves, or that his son John Quincy Adams returned to Congress after serving as president to continue the fight against slavery,” Ramaswamy posted.
“We’d do well to actually know our history rather than to foolishly criticize it. The conformists who parrot the party lines today are the ones who would’ve followed the pack as proud slaveholders 250 years ago,” he added.
It’s fashionable today to lazily point out that Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder, but very few Americans know that John Adams was an abolitionist who didn’t own slaves, or that his son John Quincy Adams returned to Congress after serving as president to continue the fight… pic.twitter.com/wenIuWJyJ7
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) January 25, 2024
While I would not call the Adamses “abolitionists” in the strictest sense, I have no quarrel with Ramaswamy’s basic claim. Jefferson did own slaves. Quincy Adams did bring glory to his post-presidential years by fighting slaveholders and their allies in Congress.
And today’s woke miscreants who “lazily” condemn their ancestors while ignoring their own authoritarian impulses would indeed have aligned with the tyrants of every age, including unapologetic slaveholders.
At the same time, however, Ramaswamy’s comment missed the most important point.
We cannot defend Jefferson by shifting focus to the Adamses. We can only defend Jefferson by defending Jefferson. And his legacy on slavery includes a great deal that we should defend with confidence.
In short, Jefferson did more to vanquish slavery in both ideological and practical terms than any man before Abraham Lincoln.
“The Consent of the Governed”
Some of Jefferson’s most powerful ideological challenges to slavery, of course, remain recognizable to honest modern audiences.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” Jefferson famously wrote in the Declaration of Independence.
“That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” he added.
Thus, Jefferson introduced into the American creed the doctrine that all legitimate government derives from consent. It followed, of course, that in relations between free and equal human beings who possess natural rights, consent alone may confer authority.
Now, consider one subtle and long-forgotten way in which Jefferson tried to turn this doctrine against the institution of slavery.
After writing the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson returned to Virginia and served in the new state legislature. There, he led a massive effort to revise Virginia’s colonial laws in conformity with the American Revolution’s republican principles.
On June 18, 1779, he presented “A Bill Concerning Slaves.”
This was, on balance, largely a milquetoast measure that he later described as “a mere digest of the existing laws.” It did not, for instance, go as far as Pennsylvania’s bill for gradual emancipation a year later.
Pay close attention, however, to some of Jefferson’s language.
“It shall not be lawful for any person to emancipate a slave but by deed executed, proved and recorded as is required by law … or by last will and testament, and with the free consent of such slave, expressed in presence of the court of the county wherein he resides,” Jefferson wrote.
Several years later, when the Virginia legislature adopted a bill authorizing individual emancipation, it excluded this passage, among others. A close look explains why.
In short, no slaveholding state could have admitted into law the phrase “free consent of such slave.” After all, the act of consent by definition removes the condition of slavery. Only free people may consent.
To mandate that a slaveholder may confer freedom only if the slave agrees to it might sound absurd. But one can imagine circumstances in which unscrupulous slaveholders tried to cut expenses by casting out the aged and infirm.
Still, the author of the Declaration of Independence knew what he was doing when he attached the word “consent” to the word “slave.” I do not think historians have paid enough attention to this subtle act of apparent attempted subversion on Jefferson’s part.
The Northwest Ordinance
Likewise, on a national level, Jefferson authored the 18th century’s most practical and sweeping restrictions on slavery.
On March 1, 1784, having returned to Congress, Jefferson drafted a report on the government of the western territories, which included land north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi River. Contemporaries called it the Northwest Territory.
The report established five major principles for “both the temporary and permanent governments” of future states.
“That after the year 1800 of the Christian [era], there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the said states, otherwise than in punishment of crimes, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted to have been personally guilty,” the fifth principle read.
Jefferson’s proposal for the gradual elimination of slavery from the Northwest Territory and its ultimate disappearance by 1800 failed in Congress by one vote. Two years later, that failure still stung him.
“The voice of a single individual … would have prevented this abominable crime from spreading itself over the new country. Thus we see the fate of millions unborn hanging on the tongue of one man, and heaven was silent in that awful moment!” he wrote in 1786.
One year later, Congress finally implemented a version of Jefferson’s proposal. The famed Northwest Ordinance actually hastened his timeline for freedom. But it came at a price.
“There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,” the Ordinance read.
However, it continued, “any person escaping into the same, from whom labor or service is lawfully claimed in any one of the original States, such fugitive may be lawfully reclaimed and conveyed to the person claiming his or her labor or service as aforesaid.”
Note the difference. The Northwest Ordinance linked the principle of freedom to the caveat that slaveholders may lawfully pursue escaped slaves. Jefferson’s 1784 proposal contained no such link.
This is how the fugitive slave provision came to appear in Article IV, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution. It gave rise to decades of legislation and jurisprudence involving the fugitive slave’s cruel and perpetual harassment.
And it occurred against Jefferson’s will.
“I Tremble for My Country”
Meanwhile, in “Notes on the State of Virginia” (1784) — the only book he ever wrote — Jefferson made his most powerful public statement on behalf of emancipation.
“Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever,” Jefferson wrote.
Then came a warning.
“That considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.”
In other sections of “Notes,” Jefferson made comments on differences in skin color for which posterity has rightly rebuked him.
The important question, however, is not how an 18th-century man came to hold 18th-century views on “race.” Woke hypocrites hold the same views on “racial” differences, and they — unlike Jefferson — have enough modern science to know better.
The important question is how a man of the 18th century, born into a slaveholding society and having inherited slaves himself, came to believe in the slave’s natural right to liberty.
Ramaswamy correctly cited John Adams as a fervent opponent of slavery. Adams, it turns out, gave his good friend Jefferson a brief review of the latter’s “Notes.”
“I think it will do its Author and his Country great Honour. The Passages upon Slavery, are worth Diamonds. They will have more effect than Volumes written by mere Philosophers,” Adams wrote in 1785.
Jefferson and the Great Emancipator
Last week, Ramaswamy and “The Breakfast Club” co-host “Charlamagne Tha God” exchanged views on how another great American regarded slavery.
“People like Abe Lincoln thought it was wrong, clearly,” the co-host said.
Indeed, the 16th president did view slavery as morally wrong. And he knew whom to thank for excluding slavery from the West.
In 1854, in one of the most important speeches he ever gave, Lincoln credited Jefferson, “the most distinguished politician of our history,” with the freedom principle of the Northwest Ordinance.
Lincoln, in other words, correctly traced to Jefferson the principle that kept slavery out of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Thus, one cannot extol the anti-slavery virtues of Adams and Lincoln without doing the same or more for Jefferson. Ramaswamy and others of like mind should defend our third president with confidence.
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