Michele Bachmann has interesting ideas about the Founders and slavery:
Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) had an interesting take this weekend on America's first European settlers, who she said "had different cultures, different backgrounds, different traditions."
"How unique in all of the world, that one nation that was the resting point from people groups all across the world," she said. "It didn't matter the color of their skin, it didn't matter their language, it didn't matter their economic status."
"Once you got here, we were all the same. Isn't that remarkable?" she asked.
Speaking at an Iowans For Tax Relief event, Bachmann (R-MN) also noted how slavery was a "scourge" on American history, but added that "we also know that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States."
I have neither the time nor inclination to mock everything in Bachmann's speech, so I'll just say this: Bachmann is indulging in the common right-wing urge to erase all ambiguity from the Founding Fathers. For a certain brand of right-winger, the Founders aren't just awesome dudes bound by the conventions or prejudices of their time. No, they were the epitome of human greatness, who transcended all prejudice, and also happened to share policy preferences with 21st-century American conservatives.
Here, in the real world, we know that -- as a group -- the Founders were mostly ambivalent about slavery. Of the 55 delegates to the 1787 constitutional convention, 12 owned or managed slave-operated plantations. James Madison owned slaves, as did Benjamin Franklin (who later freed them). Yes, some Founders were resolutely opposed to slavery -- Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, come to mind -- but others were either ambivalent or outright supportive (like John Rutledge of South Carolina and other Southern delegates).
Indeed, we laud George Washington and Thomas Jefferson for their private opposition to slavery, but they never challenged the system and took advantage of its benefits when it suited them. Jefferson owed his presidency to the three-fifths formula for slave representation, and in return, he extended slavery with the purchase of the Louisiana territories from France in 1803. In addition, he had far less than progressive thoughts on the humanity of blacks. Here he is in the Notes on the State of Virginia:
Those numberless afflictions, which render it doubtful whether heaven has given life to us in mercy or in wrath, are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them. In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection. To this must be ascribed their disposition to sleep when abstracted from their diversions, and unemployed in labour. An animal whose body is at rest, and who does not reflect, must be disposed to sleep, of course.
Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous. [Emphasis Mine]
And this is to say nothing about his willingness to go on about topics like the preference of black men for white women, which he compares to the preference of orangutans for black women. As for Washington? This anecdote stands out:
In 1784, five years before he became president of the United States, George Washington, 52, was nearly toothless. So he hired a dentist to transplant nine teeth into his jaw--having extracted them from the mouths of his slaves.
This is not to condemn the Founders are horrible, terrible human beings but to situate them as men of their time, filled with the prejudices of their class, and unwilling -- or unable -- to transcend them. If we're out to respect the Founding Fathers, then we should acknowledge their flaws and try to remember them as they lived, not as demigods in a morality play.
-- Jamelle Bouie
Update: I replaced the Bachmann video with something much funnier.
