long but fascinating look at Jefferson

The Negro President

By Garry Wills

New York Review of Books
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16740

Volume 50, Number 17 � November 6, 2003

I have admired Jefferson all my life,
and still do. His labors to guarantee freedom of
religion would in themselves be enough to insure his
place in my private pantheon. But there is much else I
revere in him. A quarter of a century ago, I published
a book praising him as an Enlightenment philosopher. A
year ago, I published a book praising him as an artist.
Along the way I have written articles that looked at
different aspects of his life.[1] But I have only now
devoted an entire book to one deadly part of his legacy
--the protection and extension of slavery through the
three-fifths clause in the Constitution.[2]

This book depends on the general and growing labor of
modern historians to grasp the pervasiveness of
slavery's effects on our early history. I don't mean to
join an unfortunate recent trend toward Jefferson-
bashing. I disagree with those who would diminish his
great achievement, the Declaration of Independence.[3]
Or those who call him more a friend to despotism than
to freedom.[4] Or those who would reduce his whole life
to an affair with a slave. My Jefferson is a giant, but
a giant trammeled in a net, and obliged (he thought) to
keep repairing and strengthening the coils of that net.

One of the most important elements in this self-
imprisoning purchase upon power was the three-fifths
clause of the Constitution, which provided that each
slave would count for three fifths of a person in
determining the numbers of citizens in each state and
therefore the numbers of both the congressional
representatives and the electoral votes to which each
state was entitled. It was with the help of that clause
that Jefferson won the presidential election in 1800.

My recognizing that fact does not mean that I would
prefer that John Adams had won. Like Henry Adams, I
think Jefferson was a better president than either of
Adams's forebears.[5] Jefferson had a national vision
that the Federalists lacked. In one of the many ironies
studied by Henry Adams, the states'-rights school
imposed a national system on this continent. The
Southern regionalists realized, as the Northern ones
never did, that they had to recruit other sections of
the country to the protection of their own turf. The
South tended its stake in slavery when it looked west;
but at least it did look west, and created a
continental system in the process, while the
Federalists were more concerned with purifying
themselves at home. The Federalists, by righteously
defining themselves as the party of the few, guaranteed
their own demise.

Yet this does not make the Republicans of the time
"pure" democrats. They blended a paradoxical and
insidious populism with approval of the right to hold
slaves. Though everyone recognizes that Jefferson
depended on slaves for his economic existence, fewer
reflect that he depended on them for his political
existence. Yet the latter was the all-important
guardian of the former. Like other Southerners,
Jefferson felt he had to take every political step he
could to prevent challenges to the slave system. That
is why Southerners made sure that slavery was embedded
in the very legislative process of the nation, as it
was created by the Constitution--they made the three-
fifths "representation" of slaves in the national
legislature a nonnegotiable condition for their joining
the Union. This had nothing to do with the approval of
slavery itself--only with the political use of slavery
to fend off challenges to the Southern economic base.
One could feel revulsion against slavery as an
institution, yet expend great energy in buttressing
it--George Washington freed his own slaves at his wife's
death, but labored mightily to place the national
capital in slave territory, where it would be populated
with slaves and slave-trading marts.

Here I neglect Jefferson's many other claims on our
admiration and gratitude--material I shall be returning
to in my next book--to concentrate solely on his role as
the protector and extender of the slave system.

That system ruled the South. It cowed and silenced the
North. There was no large-scale political career open
to the Southerners who refused to defend it.[6] That is
the tragedy of Jefferson and of the nation. We may
admit that he was trapped in the system--which is all
the more reason for deploring the trap.

1. Jefferson's Election

"The election of Mr. Jefferson to the presidency was,
upon sectional feelings, the triumph of the South over
the North--of the slave representation over the purely
free." --John Quincy Adams

What did Thomas Jefferson's Federalist critics mean,
after 1800, when they called him the "Negro President"?
A person first encountering the term might, in the not-
too-distant past, have thought it referred to
Jefferson's private life at Monticello. In those
hagiographical days, calling him a "Negro president"
might have been interpreted to mean that he was a pro-
Negro president, an ami des noirs who sympathized with
the plight of slaves, though he could not do much about
it.[7] That was the line I heard when I first visited
Monticello more than forty years ago. More recently
still, the term might be taken to mean that he loved
his own slave Sally Hemings, or exploited her, or both.
But those first calling him the Negro President were
not prying into his private life. They were challenging
his public boast that the election of 1800 was a
"second revolution" based on the votes of a popular
majority. It was no such thing, they argued. In number
of actual votes cast, John Adams was reelected. The
second revolution never occurred.

If real votes alone had been counted, Adams would have
been returned to office. But, of course, the "vote" did
not depend solely on voters. Though Jefferson,
admittedly, received eight more votes than Adams in the
Electoral College, at least twelve of his votes were
not based on the citizenry that could express its will
but on the blacks owned by Southern masters.[8] A
bargain had been struck at the Constitutional
Convention--one of the famous compromises on which the
document was formed, this one intended to secure
ratification in the South. The negotiated agreement, as
I have said, decreed that each slave held in the United
States would count as three fifths of a person in
setting the members of the Electoral College.

It galled the Federalists that Jefferson hailed his
1800 victory as a triumph of democracy and majority
rule when, as the newspaper Mercury and New-England
Palladium of Boston said (January 20, 1801), he had
made his "ride into the TEMPLE OF LIBERTY, on the
shoulders of slaves." He was president only because of
"somber" or "sable" nonvotes, and the Columbian
Centinel noted (December 24, 1800) that the half-
million slaves affecting the outcome had no more will
in the matter than "New England horses, hogs, and
oxen."[9] Timothy Pickering, the former secretary of
state under Washington and Adams, coined the term
"Negro President" and made it current among his
Federalist allies--along with references to Negro
electors, Negro vote, and Negro congress- men.[10]
Senator William Plumer of New Hampshire wrote that "the
negro votes made Mr Jefferson president."[11] He felt
that "negro Electors exceed those of four states, &
their representative are equal to those of six
states."[12]

Even four years before the 1800 election, New
Englanders had feared that Jefferson might win on his
first try for the presidency, but only because of the
"Negro electors." Connecticut leader Oliver Wolcott
said then that the country would not submit to election
"by a Negro representation only," and papers in his
state predicted that such an event might prompt the
North to secede from the Union.[13] When their fears
were confirmed by the outcome in 1800, Pickering faced
the 1804 contest with a dread premonition:

Without a separation, can those [New England] states
ever rid themselves of Negro Presidents and Negro
Congresses, and regain their just weight in the
political balance? At this moment, the slaves of the
middle and southern states have fifteen representatives
in Congress, and they will appoint that number of
electors of the next president and vice president; and
the number of slaves is continuously increasing.[14]
The Federalists predicted that this Negro
"representation" would grow year by year so long as the
federal ratio was retained. This prospect is what they
meant by "the slave power." They did not mean the power
that plantation owners exerted over their black slaves,
or the power slaves might someday use in retaliation.
They meant the power that slave states wielded over
nonslave states. The Federalists said that the
plantation men were their masters. As William Plumer
wrote in a public appeal to his New Hampshire
constituents:

Every five of the Negro slaves are accounted equal to
three of you.... Those slaves have no voice in the
elections; they are mere property; yet a planter
possessing a hundred of them may be considered as
having sixty votes, while one of you who has equal or
greater property is confined to a single vote.

Though the election of 1800 is one of the most
thoroughly studied events in our history, few
treatments of it even mention the fact that Jefferson
won it by the slave count. It is called the first
modern election, because political parties contested
it. People debate whether it earns Jefferson's own
title for it, the "second revolution." But Jefferson's
ascendancy is most frequently hailed as a triumph for
the stability of the young constitutional system, since
the incumbent was ousted without violence: "Above all,
the election demonstrated that control of the vast
political power of the national government could pass
peacefully from one political party to another."[15]

The election is studied, as well, because it was the
first to be deflected to the House of Representatives
for decision, since the two Republican candidates,
Jefferson and Burr, received a tie vote in the
Electoral College. That vote led to one of the earliest
constitutional readjustments after the adoption of the
Bill of Rights--the Twelfth Amendment, which established
a separate vote for the vice- presidency. The election
can also be treated as a clash between the
personalities of Jefferson and Burr, or between
Jefferson and Adams. These are all interesting aspects
of the event. But they are not enough, in themselves,
to explain the odd neglect of the fact that this was an
election where the federal ratio made the margin of
difference.

Two historians have written books on the election of
1800 without a single reference to the votes given
Jefferson by the slave bonus.[16] A fine symposium on
the election, rated in its own pages as "the best new
scholarship on the politics of 1800," has in its
sixteen major essays only three glancing mentions of
the federal ratio.[17] Respected biographers of the
principals in the affair--Adams, Jefferson, and
Burr--also fail to mention the boost given Jefferson by
the three-fifths clause, or they refer to it
peripherally, as if it were unimportant.[18] To judge
by the mass of things written on the election,
Jefferson's debt to the federal ratio must be one of
the great nonevents of our past.

Yet for Federalists the slave count was not a
subsidiary concern; it was at the very core of
sectional division in the country. Josiah Quincy, who
became the president of Harvard, always maintained that
"the slave representation is the cause of all the
difficulties we labor under."[19] Fisher Ames called it
a flaw in the Constitution that "instead of
apportioning, disproportions representatives to numbers
[of citizen]."[20] For such men, the ratio was even
more pernicious in its consequences than the clauses in
the Constitution that recognized the legitimacy of the
slave trade for the next twenty years (Article I,
Section 9) or that imposed a fugitive slave law on the
states (Article IV, Section 2). The federal ratio
undermined the very possibility of debating or changing
the status of slaves--as the gag rule of 1840 would
demonstrate. It gave a key electoral tool for
maintaining slavery against a majority of white
opinion. The federal ratio was such an irritant to the
Federalist mind that one of them saw Jefferson's
children by Sally Hemings as swelling the ratio. Five
children by her would give him three extra votes.

Great men can never lack supporters Who manufacture
their own voters[21] 2. The Reach of the Three-Fifths
Clause

Why is the impact of the federal ratio so little known?
The first reaction of people when told about its role
in Jefferson's election is to ask why they never heard
of it before. There are a number of explanations for
this, all contained within the fact that through much
of our history Americans have shied away from slavery
as too divisive or hot an issue, leading to a great
national amnesia about its impact and reach. More
particularly, the force of the three-fifths clause is
neglected because it "only" affected one presidential
election, Jefferson's--though the historian Paul
Finkelman suggests that it may have deprived John
Quincy Adams of a clear majority in the contested
election of 1824. The federal ratio is neglected, as
well, because dire predictions of Southern majorities
in the Congress never came true, even with the benefit
of the slave count, since immigration was heavier in
the North during the early nineteenth century.

But the power of the South was not measured solely in
terms of an overall majority. On crucial matters, when
several factions were contending, the federal ratio
gave the South in Congress a voting majority. Without
the federal ratio as the deciding factor in House
votes, slavery would have been excluded from Missouri;
Andrew Jackson's policy of removing Indians from
territories they occupied in several states would have
failed; the 1840 gag rule, protecting slavery in the
District of Columbia, would not have been imposed; the
Wilmot Proviso would have banned slavery from
territories won from Mexico. Moreover, the Kansas and
Nebraska bill outlawing slavery in Nebraska territory
and allowing it in Kansas would have failed. Other
votes were close enough to give opposition to the South
a better chance, if the federal ratio had not been
counted into the calculations from the outset.
Elections to key congressional posts were affected
continually by the federal ratio, with the result that
Southerners held "the Speaker's office for 79 percent
of the time [before 1824], Ways and Means for 92
percent."

The historian Leonard Richards shows another pervasive
influence of the three-fifths clause. Even when it did
not affect the outcome of congressional votes, it
dominated Democratic caucus and convention votes, since
the South had a larger majority there than in the
larger body. This meant that it guaranteed presidential
nominations that would be friendly to the slave
interest. When control of the caucus seemed to be
slipping from Southern hands, a two-thirds requirement
for nominating candidates gave them the power to veto
men unacceptable to them. The federal ratio was,
therefore, just the starting point for seizing and
solidifying positions of influence in the government.
It was a force supplemented by other maneuvers. It gave
the South a permanent head start for all its political
activities:

The slave states always had one-third more seats in
Congress than their free population warranted --forty-
seven seats instead of thirty-three in 1793, seventy-
six instead of fifty-nine in 1812, and ninety-eight
instead of seventy-three in 1833.... The Deep South
also imported more slaves from Africa in the twenty
years from 1788 to 1808 [the year the international
slave trade was legally banned] than in any other
twenty-year period...the three fifths rule would also
play a decisive role in every political caucus and
every political convention. The federal ratio, and its
ripple of side effects, had a great deal to do with the
fact that for over half a century, right up to the
Civil War, the management of government was
disproportionately controlled by the South:

In the sixty-two years between Washington's election
and the Compromise of 1850, for example, slaveholders
controlled the presidency for fifty years, the
Speaker's chair for forty-one years, and the
chairmanship of House Ways and Means [the most
important committee] for forty-two years. The only men
to be reelected president --Washington, Jefferson,
Madison, Monroe, and Jackson--were all slaveholders. The
men who sat in the Speaker's chair the longest-- Henry
Clay, Andrew Stevenson, and Nathaniel Macon--were
slaveholders. Eighteen out of thirty-one Supreme Court
justices were slaveholders. Of the justices making a
majority in the Dred Scott decision, a majority were
slaveholders. The lower courts, too, were stocked with
proslavery men. Jefferson came into office complaining
about a federal judiciary unbalanced in favor of
Federalists; but that balance shifted to the other
extreme over the next decades.[22]

Richard H. Brown states flatly: "From the inauguration
of Washington until the Civil War, the South was in the
saddle of national politics. This is the central fact
in American political history to 1860."[23] Ten of the
pre-Civil War presidents were slave owners themselves,
and two of the postwar presidents had owned slaves
earlier-- Johnson and Grant. That means that over a
quarter of the presidents in our history were
slaveholders.[24] Even those who were not Southerners
had to temporize with the South. Northerners or
westerners like Van Buren, Tyler, Polk, Clay, and
Buchanan helped draft the gag laws protecting slavery
in the District. Tyler added a slave Texas, and Polk
waged the war for slave territory taken from Mexico. It
was a Northerner who constructed the North- South
alliance that protected slavery for decades. In the
words of Leonard Richards: "Many scholars have long
suspected that Van Buren and his colleagues purposely
fashioned the Jackson coalition so that it protected
slavery and southern interests." Buchanan worked behind
the scenes to keep Dred Scott a slave.[25] Even John
Quincy Adams had to settle for a Southern cabinet, led
by the slaveholding Clay, to deal with a Jacksonian
Congress.

Control of the presidency rested on the slave power's
deep roots in the patronage and court systems of the
Jeffersonian party. A survey of the highest federal
officeholders in this time showed that half of them
were Southerners, though the North had almost twice the
free population of the South.[26] Southerners held 57
percent of the high civil service posts under Adams, 56
percent under Jefferson, 57 percent under Jackson.[27]
And this imbalance was not merely a matter of quantity.
It had to do with quality as well, since the South
promoted strong, even extreme, proponents of slavery to
office while keeping critics of slavery, even of the
mildest sort, from among the Northerners winning
confirmation. In many ways, direct and indirect, this
reflected the advantage given by the federal ratio. In
1843, Adams told the House of Representatives, "Your
country is no longer a democracy, it is not even a
republic--it is a government of two or three thousand
holders of slaves, to the utter exclusion of the
remaining part."[28] An abolitionist would point out,
in the 1850s, that six slave states, taken together,
had a free population with 199 fewer people than
Pennsylvania alone--which meant that the people in those
states had twelve senators to the Pennsylvanians' two.

The importance of protecting the South's extra
congressional votes became clear as early as 1792, in
one of the first major battles under the Constitution,
provoking the first presidential veto in our history.
Initially, representation in the House had to be by
estimate, since there was no census to work from. But
when the first census was taken in 1790, Congress tried
to come up with truer figures. It first set the total
number of seats by dividing the aggregate population of
the nation by 30,000, the constitutional number for
each representative. Then it assigned seats for each
state proportionally, rounding figures for single seats
up or down to the nearest 30,000, and sent the bill to
Washington for his signature.

Jefferson saw that Congress's act would add six seats
to the North, and only two to the South--thus cutting
into the extra margin given by counting slaves. He
insisted that each state must be counted separately,
with no extra seats for any fraction above the 30,000
divisor. This left the total number of seats eight
fewer than the general population would warrant, but
removed the four new seats from the North. The
Virginians in the cabinet, Jefferson and Edmund
Randolph, working with Madison in the Congress, jointly
drafted Washington's veto, which Hamilton had urged the
President not to cast. When Washington objected to
Jefferson that his veto would appear like a sectional
move favoring the South, Jefferson said that the
soundness of his own argument should be relied on, not
the appearance of equity.[29]

The size of the slave representation was at issue in
each of Jefferson's expansions of what he called "the
empire of liberty"--the survey of the West, his purchase
of Louisiana, his attempt to add the Floridas and Cuba
to America, his support for slavery in Missouri and
beyond, even his panic over Burr's attempt to detach
part of the Southwest from the Union. In all these
matters, the importance of the federal ratio has been
overlooked, largely because historians have not
listened to the objections to it raised by Federalist
critics like Timothy Pickering. Each threatened new
addition to the plantation region became for them a
flash point in the concern over the federal ratio,
several times prompting moves to amend the Constitution
by its repeal.

People neglect this aspect when discussing the way
Jefferson changed his stand on slavery in the
territories between 1784, when there was no three-
fifths representation, and 1820, when there was. Even
Jefferson's drive to open the University of Virginia as
soon as possible was meant to provide educated
defenders of the extension of slavery westward, to keep
good Southerners away from Harvard or Yale, where men
were taught "the sacred principle of our holy alliance
of 'restrictionism.'"[30] As David Brion Davis put it,
"When the chips were down, as in the Missouri crisis,
he threw his weight behind slavery's expansion."[31]

This had less to do with theories about slavery than
with the concrete advantage the three-fifths clause
gave to any added slave territory. Michael Zuckerman
attributes Jefferson's plantation imperialism to a more
or less subconscious "Negrophobia."[32] It is more
plausible, as well as more respectful, to see it as
based on a simple political and economic calculus. The
Constitution rewarded any new slave territories too
well for him to throw away this advantage given to
"agrarian virtue." Even an argument used against taking
the federal ratio too seriously shows how crucial it
was. We are told that the North almost always had a
majority of seats in Congress. But that just made the
South more anxious to gain the territory that would
make the federal ratio give them a majority--as it made
the North more wary of letting that happen.

3. What Was the Slave Power?

The fear of a "slave power" has been dismissed as
alarmist by those who think the term always refers to a
slave conspiracy. For a long time historians were
frightened off from references to a slave power by a
long and influential article written by Chauncey
Boucher in 1921. "In re That Aggressive
Slavocracy."[33] The key word in the defense of
Boucher's beloved South was "aggressive." Boucher said
that the South did not take unified and secret actions
to deprive Northerners of their liberties, as some
conspiratorialists had claimed. Its actions were
scattered, defensive, uncoordinated, and far from
secret. Boucher denied, in Russel Nye's words, that
there was "a secret and highly organized group with
conscious aims of imposing restrictions upon
traditional liberties."[34]

Some people did fear and denounce such a conspiracy.
The most famous of these was Abraham Lincoln, who, in
his "House Divided" speech, said that Stephen Douglas
and Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney had schemed with
Presidents Pierce and Buchanan to bring about a second
Dred Scott decision spreading slavery throughout the
Union.[35] One problem with the conspiracy view is that
different men identified different conspirators with
different secret aims. David Brion Davis tried to
overcome that problem by saying there was a "paranoid
style," rather than a unified thesis, behind charges of
a slave power conspiracy.[36] He was picking up on
Richard Hofstadter's concept of the paranoid style,
formulated to criticize those who believed there were
Communist conspirators in the federal government of the
1950s and 1960s. Davis explicitly compared conspiracy-
mindedness like Lincoln's with that of panicky modern
anti-Communists.[37]

One of the effects of this line of argument was to
continue to marginalize abolitionists, an effort at
which the South was very effective. William Lloyd
Garrison was the ur-conspiratorialist in this view. He
thought even the Constitution a plot against freedom
(the "covenant with death"). He went beyond a criticism
of the open concessions to Southern demands--on the
three-fifths clause, the slave trade, and fugitive
slaves--and found a proslavery slant throughout the
document. A claim that this was the conscious aim of
the framers cannot be sustained. But Paul Finkelman
shows that the South did find ways to use many clauses
of the Constitution, and many interpretations of it, to
protect its slave property.

The concept of "state sovereignty" was just one of
these tools. For Southerners "states' rights" meant
first and foremost the right to declare that their
slaveholding was no one else's business. Other
constitutional conveniences they enjoyed included the
bans on taxing exports or interstate taxes, which
favored the products of slave labor. Similarly, the
guarantee of states against domestic insurrection, and
the use of the militia for that purpose, put the
federal government on the slave owners' side if their
property should rebel. The "full faith and credit"
clause made other states recognize all the South's
legal provisions for slavery. And so on.

Southerners could not foresee all possible uses of
these clauses and provide for their inclusion with that
in mind, duping their Northern counterparts in order to
get the job done. But they were resourceful in turning
each clause to their advantage when the occasion for
doing so arose. That is what is really at issue. Most
people, when they referred to the slave power, were not
thinking of a conscious conspiracy with secret goals
and instruments. They were talking about the slave
interest, and the way that powerful interest prompted
people to defensive measures, whether short-term or
long- range. John Quincy Adams got it right. In 1820,
when he saw his own former vice-president, John
Calhoun, defending the extension of slavery into the
West, he wrote: "It is a contemplation not very
creditable to human nature that the cement of common
interest, produced by slavery, is strong and more solid
than that of unmingled freedom."[38] When I refer to
the slave power, I mean the political efforts exerted
to protect and expand slavery all the way up to the
Civil War. This took many forms, but almost all of them
depended in some way on the three-fifths clause, since
that permeated the process of representative
government. It was a potential factor in situations
long before it became actual--for instance, in the
maneuvering to add new slave territories. The series of
antebellum compromises aimed at holding the nation
together addressed the balance of power that would
result from adding or blocking states with the three-
fifths advantage.

One of the great achievements of the slave power was to
use its political clout to silence opposition. William
Freehling calls this its blackmail power over the
Northern Democrats who needed the votes of the Southern
part of their coalition. The price of this bargain was
that slavery be ignored as an issue in the North. The
Democrats there were able to brand abolitionists as
"extremists," as disturbers of sectional harmony, as
enemies of immigrant laborers who did not want free
black competition. It was in the name of "law and
order," ironically, that prominent men encouraged the
mobs that beat or intimidated abolitionists.[39] The
result was that, even after the formal gag rules were
defeated in Congress, there was a gentleman's agreement
not to push the slavery issue in ways that would
embarrass the South. In 1858 Lincoln accurately
described the general attitude toward slavery:

You must not say anything about it in the free States,
because it is not here. You must not say anything about
it in the slave States, because it is there. You must
not say anything about it in the pulpit, because that
is religion and has nothing to do with it. You must not
say anything about it in politics, because that will
disturb the security of "my place." There is no place
to talk about it as being a wrong, although you say
yourself it is a wrong.[40] The liberal Boston
theologian and social reformer Theodore Parker might
have said, De te fabula narratur, "You're telling your
own story," since Lincoln prudently avoided all open
association with abolitionists like Parker. But Parker
agreed with Lincoln's description of the way the nation
was made almost mute on the subject of slavery:

It silences the great sects, Trinitarian, Unitarian,
Nullitarian: the chief ministers of this American
Church--threefold in denomination, one in nature--have
naught to say against Slavery. The Tract Society dare
not rebuke "the sum of all villainies," the Bible
Society has no "Word of God" for the slave, the
"revealed religion" is not revealed to him. Writers of
school-books "remember the hand that feeds them," and
venture no word against the national crime that
threatens to become also the national ruin... The
Democratic hands of America have sewed up her own mouth
with an iron thread.[41] Mark Twain looked back on the
Missouri of his mother's day:

She had never heard it [slavery] assailed in any pulpit
but had heard it defended and sanctified in a thousand;
her ears were familiar with Bible texts that approved
it but if there were any that disapproved it they had
not been quoted by her pastors; as far as her
experiences went, the wise and the good and the holy
were unanimous in the conviction that slavery was
right.[42] The national reticence continued long after
the Civil War. It skewed the historiography of
Reconstruction for decades. In the early twentieth
century, it whitewashed the South in popular culture
and at sites like Monticello and Mount Vernon. It
entertained the absurd notion that the Civil War was
not fought over slavery but over tariffs, or states'
rights, or federal usurpation. It encouraged Edmund
Wilson to romanticize the Ku Klux Klan[43] of the mid-
nineteenth century. In our time it has defended the
Confederate battle flag as untainted by slavery. And it
has kept the image of Jefferson relatively unclouded by
the things he did to promote and protect and expand the
slave power.

Notes [1] Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of
Independence (Doubleday, 1978); Mr. Jefferson's
University (National Geographic, 2002). Most (though
not all) of the articles appeared in The New York
Review: "Uncle Thomas's Cabin," April 18, 1974; "The
Strange Case of Jefferson's Subpoena," May 2, 1974;
"Jefferson's Jesus," November 24, 1983; "The Aesthete,"
August 12, 1993; and "Storm Over Jefferson," March 9,
2000.

[2] To be published in November as "Negro President":
Jefferson and the Slave Power (Houghton Mifflin).

[3] Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the
Declaration of Independence (Knopf, 1997).

[4] Conor Cruise O'Brien, The Long Affair: Thomas
Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785-1800
(University of Chicago Press, 1996).

[5] Recent readers of David McCullough's book, which
canonizes John Adams, should read the classic account
of Federalism's demise by Stanley Elkins and Eric
McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American
Republic, 1788-1800 (Oxford University Press, 1993).
Though their account of Federalism is sympathetic, they
come to judgments like this: "[Adams] thereupon gave
himself over to the torrent of rage whose after-
effects, by the end of the year 1800, were to leave the
ruins of Federalism in even smaller fragments than they
were in already."

[6] Paul Finkelman argues that Jefferson could have and
should have freed his slaves, since other Virginians
did. But the men he names either had no important
electoral career or--like Washington and John
Randolph--freed their slaves only after their death and
hid their intent to do so while in politics. See
Finkelman, Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty
in the Age of Jefferson (M.E. Sharpe, second edition,
2001), pp. 134-147.

[7] But in fact, Jefferson had declined, while in
Paris, an invitation to join the Soci�t� des Amis des
Noirs. See David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in
the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Cornell University
Press, 1975), p. 94.

[8] The number of extra votes given by the slave
population is variously computed, because raw
population numbers have to be rounded down to fit the
ratio of delegates to inhabitants (one to every thirty
thousand). The number of "slave voters" in 1800 has
been estimated as low as twelve and as high as sixteen
(William Plumer set the number at sixteen). Then, to
reach the number of these given to Jefferson, one must
subtract the black population in the few slave-state
districts--in states still voting by district rather
than general ticket --where Adams won. The most
respected figure currently given for 1800 is that of
William W. Freehling in The Road to Disunion:
Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854 (Oxford University
Press, 1990), p. 147--a book that generally uses census
statistics in a sophisticated way. Freehling sets the
number of "slave votes" at fourteen, of which Jefferson
received twelve. Leonard L. Richards sets the number
even higher: "In winning nationally by just eight
electoral votes, he [Jefferson] had the benefit of at
least thirteen of the fourteen slave seats; some
pundits thought he had all fourteen. In any event,
without the so-called slave seats, he would have lost
the election and John Adams would have served a second
term. Many historians, celebrating the virtues of the
master of Monticello, forget this fact. New England
Federalists never did." See Richards, The Slave Power
(Loui- siana State University Press, 2000), p. 42.

It is significant that Republicans did not try to
refute the Federalists' claim. For them, the only
numbers that mattered were the ones reached by
constitutional process--which undermines Jefferson's
boast that 1800 was a triumph of majority will. The
Democrats' attitude is summed up by Albert F. Simpson:
"The South was standing firmly on the Constitution; the
three-fifths rule being a part of that document; her
congressmen and leaders felt that it was not necessary
to defend it." See Simpson, "The Political Significance
of Slave Representation, 1787- 1821," The Journal of
Southern History, Vol. 71 (1941), p. 341.

[9] Simpson, "The Political Significance of Slave
Representation," p. 321, provides a fine survey of
Federalist denunciations of the role of the federal
ratio in Jefferson's election.

[10] In 1803, John Quincy Adams understood exactly what
was meant when conversing with a man who attacked "the
Negro vote" (Diary, 27.338).

[11] William Plumer to Edward Livermore, December 23,
1803, cited in Lynn W. Turner, William Plumer of New
Hampshire, 1759-1850 (University of North Carolina
Press, 1962), p. 137.

[12] William Plumer's Memorandum of Proceedings in the
United States Senate, 1803-1807, edited by Everett
Somerville Brown (Macmillan, 1923), p. 67.

[13] George Gibbs, Memoirs of the Administrations of
Washington and John Adams, Edited from the Papers of
Oliver Wolcott, Secretary of the Treasury, Vol. 1 (Van
Norden, 1846), p. 409.

[14] The Papers of Timothy Pickering, Vol. 14 in the
Massachusetts Historical Society, p. 101.

[15] Noble Cunningham, "Election of 1800," in The
Coming to Power: Critical Presidential Elections in
American History, edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
et al. (Chelsea House, 1972), p. 66. Cunningham does
not mention the slave count.

[16] Daniel Sisson, The American Revolution of 1800
(Knopf, 1974), and Bernard A. Weisberger, American
Afire: Jefferson, Adams, and the Revolutionary Election
of 1800 (Morrow, 2000).

[17] The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race and the
New Republic, edited by James Horn, Jan Ellen Lewis,
and Peter S. Onuf (University of Virginia Press, 2002),
p. xv. None of the references is made the basis of
discussion; though none of them, it should be said,
challenges Freehling's claim that Jefferson would have
lost without the slave count.

[18] Page Smith's two-volume biography John Adams
(Doubleday, 1962) does not mention the slave count, and
David McCullough's John Adams (Simon and Schuster,
2001) makes only a fleeting (one-sentence) reference to
it. Dumas Malone dealt with the election of 1800 in two
volumes of his six-volume biography of Jefferson
without mentioning the slave bonus in either one. In
Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty (Little, Brown,
1962), the only reference made to a vote margin is
this: "The margin of his party in the electoral vote
was small, but it was larger than that of the Federal-
ists in 1796." In Jefferson the President: First Term,
1801-1805 (Little, Brown, 1970), he castigates the
Federalists for lack of "proper sportsmanship" in not
"bowing to the obvious will of the American
electorate"--with no mention of the fact that the
electoral mandate depended on slaves, who had no will
in the matter. Mil-ton Lomask's two-volume biography,
Aaron Burr (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979) does not
refer to the slave margin.

[19] Edmund Quincy, Life of Josiah Quincy (Ticknor and
Fields, 1856), pp. 308-316.

[20] Seth Ames, The Works of Fisher Ames, Vol. 1 (Da
Capo, 1969), p. 128.

[21] Thomas Green Fessenden, Democracy Unveiled, or
Tyranny Stripped of the Garb of Patriotism, by
"Christopher Caustic" (Boston, 1805), p. 107.

[22] Paul Finkelman, An Imperfect Union: Slavery,
Federalism, and Comity (University of North Carolina
Press, 1980), p. 239.

[23] Richard H. Brown, "The Missouri Crisis, Slavery,
and the Politics of Jacksonianism," The South Atlantic
Quarterly, Vol. 65 (1966), p. 55.

[24] The ten pre-war slaveholders were: Washington,
Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, Van Buren, William
Henry Harrison, Tyler, Polk, and Taylor. Buchanan, the
last president before the war, bought his brother-in-
law's slaves and made them indentured servants; but he
was served by the slaves of the plantation owner he
lived with for a decade, William Rufus King (see J.
Mills Thornton III, "King, William Rufus," American
National Biography, Oxford University Press, 1999).
Johnson once owned eight slaves, but had freed them all
by 1864. Grant briefly owned one slave, but his wife
owned four, and he used on his farm those owned by his
father and his father-in-law; see William S. McFeely,
Grant (Norton, 1981), pp. 62-63, 65, 69.

[25] Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case (Oxford
University Press, 1978), pp. 311-314.

[26] Philip H. Burch Jr., Elites in American History:
The Federalist Years to the Civil War (Holmes and
Meier, 1981), pp. 236-237.

[27] Sidney H. Aronson, Status and Kinship in the
Higher Civil Service (Harvard University Press, 1964),
p. 115.

[28] "Address of the Hon. J.Q. Adams to His
Constituents...at Dedham, October 21, 1843," Boston
Atlas, October 26, 1843. Josiah Quincy claimed that
even fewer large plantation owners set the national
agenda--only a thousand of them; see Quincy, Address
Illustrative of the Nature and Power of the Slave
States and the Duties of the Free States (Ticknor and
Fields, 1856), p. 25.

[29] Douglas Southall Freeman, George Washington, Vol.
6 (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1954), pp. 344ff.

[30] Jefferson to Joseph Cabell, January 31, 1821.

[31] Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of
Revolution, 1770-1823, p. 184.

[32] Michael Zuckerman, Almost Chosen People: Oblique
Biographies in the American Grain (University of
California Press, 1993), pp. 196 ff.

[33] The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. 7,
Nos. 1-2 (June-September 1921), pp. 13-80.

[34] Russel B. Nye, "The Slave Power Conspiracy:
1830-1860," Science and Society, 1946, p. 273.

[35] The pervasiveness of conspiratorial views, and the
place of Lincoln's thought in this context, are well
handled by David Zarefsky in Lincoln, Douglas, and
Slavery (University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp.
68-110.

[36] David Brion Davis, The Slave Power Conspiracy and
the Paranoid Style (Louisiana State University Press,
1969).

[37] David Brion Davis, The Fear of Conspiracy: Images
of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the
Pres-ent (Cornell University Press, 1971), pp. 104-105,
111-112. It is an embarrassment to the Hofstadter-Davis
thesis that, according to later findings, there were
some Communist conspirators in the federal government.

[38] Josiah Quincy, Memoir of the Life of John Quincy
Adams (Phillips, Sampson, 1858), p. 106.

[39] Leonard L. Richards, "Gentlemen of Property and
Standing": Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America
(Oxford University Press, 1970).

[40] Seventh Debate with Douglas, Abraham Lincoln:
Speeches and Writings, Vol. 1: 1832-1858 edited by Don
E. Fehrenbacher (Library of America, 1989), p. 809.

[41] Theodore Parker, Speech of January 29, 1858, in
The Collected Works of Theodore Parker, Vol. 6, edited
by Frances Power Cobbe (T�bner, 1863-1876), p. 302.

[42] The Autobiography of Mark Twain, edited by Charles
Neider (Harper and Row, 1959), p. 30.

[43] Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore (Oxford University
Press, 1962).

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