Opinion The history of American liberty – and its hypocrisy

Jefferson was not alone. Nineteen of the 75 delegates at the Philadelphia convention which drafted the American Constitution in 1787 owned slaves. Included among them was George Washington, a heroic and towering figure in American history, who led American forces to victory against Britain. His teeth had rotted and been replaced by dentures made of ivory and nine teeth “pulled from the mouths of his slaves”. From 1760, at least 47 of his slaves ran away from his estate, in search of liberty. During the American war of independence, the colonial governor of Virginia announced that he would offer freedom to any slave who joined British troops against the American rebellion. Harry Washington, one of George Washington’s slaves, joined the Red Coats.

The US Constitution swept slavery under the carpet. According to the “Connecticut Compromise” struck by its draftsmen, each state in America got one representative in the House of Representatives (the lower house of Congress) for every 30,000 people in its population. This formula threw up a problem: Would slaves be counted as part of a state’s population? This question was resolved by concluding that a slave would be considered only three-fifths of a person for determining a state’s seats in the House of Representatives. So, ironically, though the Declaration of Independence had said that all men were created equal, the Constitution only recognised a slave as a fraction of a person.

The three-fifths formula had been devised by James Madison, a brilliant scholar and fourth president of the US, in 1783. Madison, a slave owner from the southern state of Virginia, was a member of the “American Colonisation Society”, which aimed to send ex-slaves back to Africa, rather than recognise them as full citizens of the US. Madison’s notes taken at the Philadelphia convention were published after his death in 1840. They remain, to this day, the most exhaustive record of the debates at the constitutional convention (the delegates at the convention were bound by a 50-year oath of secrecy). Though George Washington wrote in his will that all his 123 slaves should be set free after he and his wife died, Madison failed to do so.

As a result of the three-fifths compromise, Southern slave states got far greater representation in Congress than free states. For instance, though Virginia had a smaller population than Massachusetts, it got five more seats in Congress than Massachusetts on account of its population of 3,00,000 slaves. It was no small coincidence that in 32 of the first 36 years of the republic, the US president was a slave-owning Virginian (with John Adams being the only exception).

It was against this backdrop that Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the US in 1861, after which Southern states seceded from the union. The civil war which broke out thereafter claimed 7,50,000 American lives over whether slavery should continue to exist as an institution in the US. In 1863, the year in which Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves, he delivered his famous Gettysburg Address. It was in this unusually short, three-minute speech that Lincoln described democracy famously as “government of the people, by the people, for the people”.

Lincoln was assassinated shortly after the South surrendered in April 1865. His successor, vice president Andrew Johnson, tried to keep things as they were. Southern states enacted “black codes” – laws that meant to continue slavery in altered form. The Ku Klux Klan was inaugurated soon thereafter. Consisting of Southern Confederate veterans, Klan members wore white robes to look like the ghosts of the Confederate dead and lynched Southern blacks. Southern states enacted a series of “Jim Crow” laws segregating blacks from whites “in every conceivable public space”. There were separate railroad cars for blacks, separate bibles for black witnesses, even separate swings in playgrounds for black children. In Birmingham, Alabama, it was a crime for a black child to play checkers with a white child at a public park.

There is much else in this book apart from slavery that makes for fascinating reading: How three clerks saved the “original parchment Constitution of the United States” by stuffing it into a linen sack during the war of 1812. How Justice Wilson, a US Supreme Court justice, was thrown into a debtors’ prison because he owed $2,00,000 to Pierce Butler, a South Carolina delegate to the constitutional convention. How Congressmen in antebellum America repeatedly got into brawls and fistfights. How a German cartographer living in northern France gave America its name. How Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds radio broadcast (1938), in which he narrated a fictional story of a Martian attack on Earth, caused a panic in America as it was taken seriously by many listeners. Or, how numerous presidents used chicanery to win elections. For example, in 1840, President William Henry Harrison’s campaign biographer portrayed him as a humble farmer though he was “staggeringly wealthy”.

Reading Lapore’s engrossing book, the words of the American poet Archibald MacLeish come to mind: “Democracy is never a thing done”, it is “always something that a nation must be doing”.

The writer is an advocate at the Bombay High Court