If the 1860 US presidential election was legally and constitutionally sound, then how could the southern states justify secession?

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DC diary: A visit to Monticello

The mansion at Monticello is a beautiful building. As you walk through the building with a guide, you hear the same thing over again: “Jefferson wanted only the best.” The building today is stuffed with paintings, furniture, china, clocks, most of them reproductions of what we know Jefferson had in his house in his time.

The mansion is enormous, by the standards of revolutionary America. George Mason's Dunston mansion has 11 rooms, and Mason was one of the wealthiest men in Virginia. Jefferson's Monticello has 21, plus a cellar where slaves worked to prepare meals and put them on dumbwaiters. Jefferson loved to entertain the many visitors who flocked to get a glimpse of the great man or partake of his conversation. Mason rarely entertained. Visitors rarely sought out the man who refused to sign the Constitution.

Mason and Jefferson have several marked similarities. Primarily, Mason wrote the Declaration of Rights included in the Constitution of Virginia in May, 1776, while Jefferson wrote the declaration of independence in June of the same year.

From George Mason's Virginia Declaration of Rights, drafted around May 20, 1776:

“...That all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights...; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”

More famously, from Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, begun on June 11, 1776:

“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.”

None of the ideas, or even the words, in Jefferson's Declaration are original; he leaned heavily on the Declaration authored by Mason.

Mason was the older of the two. He held properties along the Potomac, much more accessible to transportation along the river. Jefferson built Monticello on top of a hill in a remote area of Virginia, which had been the very edge of civilization at the time of Jefferson's birth. Importing luxury goods to Dunston was relatively cheap compared to the cost of shipping them to Charlottesville, then transporting them to the top of a mountain.

Despite these difficulties and expenses, Jefferson persisted for 40 years in spending his fortune on a large, impressive mansion. Among his extravagances were a large dome over the fourth story of his house; rooms designed in irregular shapes, such as octagons; a vast cellar complex with kitchens, storerooms, and living quarters for slaves; and experimental contraptions like dumbwaiters and a threshing machine for wheat. He always used the finest materials for construction of his house, despite the ever-mounting cost and its concommittant debt.

Jefferson considered himself a farmer and foresaw the US as a nation of farmers. But Jefferson was not a profitable farmer. He continually experimented with new crops instead of concentrating on crops that were proven money-makers. He also experimented with a threshing machine that had no remarkable value. This threshing machine may have been a proof that automation has no value when labor is cheap.

Jefferson used his enslaved work force to raise money in two ways. He forced young boys to work in the nail factory, making a product that could be sold in the market; and he mortgaged his slaves as you would mortgage a house or a farm. The nail-making business was profitable for awhile, although the boys had to be whipped to keep them at their task. Eventually, manufactured nails became available and hand-made nails became obsolete.

The mortgaging of human chattel continued, however, permitting Jefferson to continue making elaborate and expensive additions to Monticello. He appeared to be copying the European nobility by creating an elaborate palace for himself. Jefferson visited Europe while he was a minister to France from 1785-1789. There he became enamored of the homes and palaces of the aristocracy. He designed Monticello and buildings at the University of Virginia according to the theories of Palatino. Jefferson's infatuation with architecture bankrupted him. On his death, he had built a fine mansion, but owed $100,000, a debt which his heirs had to repay by selling slaves into the cotton plantations.

We should always remind ourselves that great architecture is expensive and must be paid by someone. The Romans used slave labor to build their temples and aqueducts. The grandeur of Versailles bankrupted France and led indirectly to the French Revolution. Jefferson's home was built by slave labor and led to the eviction of his slaves from their homes and their subjection to backbreaking labor in the cotton fields of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.

Our Decrepit Constitution: Slavery by Another Name

During the last days of the Civil War, Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment. This amendment freed all the slaves in perpetuity, including those not yet freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. The Fourteenth (1868) and Fifteenth (1870) Amendments followed within a short while.

The Constitution was not strong enough by itself to protect the newly minted rights of freedmen. The government posted federal troops in the states of the former Confederacy to enforce the law. Freedmen--former slaves--voted in elections for the first time. African-Americans were elected to state offices, helped by laws that made former Confederate office holders ineligible to run.

The freedom and justice promised by the Fourteenth Amendment was short-lived. The Ku Klux Klan began intimidating and murdering Republicans and African-Americans in 1868. The Klan murdered Republican organizer George Ashburn in Columbus, Georgia, on March 28, 1868. The Klan published a pamphlet intended to slander Ashburn and intimidate anyone who might try to take his place as an organizer. The pamphlet charged that Ashburn was living with an African-American woman and described the place of assassination as a brothel.¹

Nine men, described as prominent citizens, were arrested and brought to trial before a military tribunal. Before they could be tried, the Georgia legislature accepted the Fourteenth Amendment, which was the condition set for reentering the union. The military government was dissolved and the prisoners released. No one was ever tried for Ashburn's murder.

A group of African-American Republicans marched from Albany to Camilla to attend a political rally in September, 1868. White southerners ambushed them in Camilla's Courthouse Square, killing 12 and wounding many others. The white men kept on attacking the group as they retreated along the road back to Albany. Other similar massacres occurred in South Carolina and Alabama.

Some political leaders were intimidated or imprisoned. T. G. Campbell described how he argued before the Georgia Legislature that he and other freedmen should be allowed to speak. While he was speaking, the white legislators put their hands on the butts of their pistols and made threatening gestures at him. Campbell gave up after eight days of argument. Later he took office as justice of the peace and organized a group of 300 African-American horsemen to protect himself from the Klan.

Campbell could perhaps protect himself from violence within the enclave of freedmen he organized along the Georgia coast, but he could not protect himself from miscarriage of justice perpetrated by his white enemies. Campbell was charged with malfeasance in office and brought before a local judge. He was convicted and immediately jailed. Campbell spent the next year and a half being shuffled from jail to jail. His wife tirelessly worked to free him, but nothing she did was of any use. Judges avoided him. New trials were arranged, but with each new trial came demands for new documentation that had to be found and delivered to the court.

Finally, Campbell's wife secured an order from the U.S. Attorney General that the case be moved to a federal court. Campbell believed that he was about to be cleared, but his lawyer failed to file the proper papers and his case was dismissed. After the dismissal in federal court, Campbell was sent to a prison camp where the prisoners were worked from dawn to dusk and beaten if they fell behind the other workers. This system of forced convict labor replaced slavery to a certain degree. Campbell's wife interceded for him with the camp overseer and succeeded in getting him a job more suited to his age. He was sixty-three when he entered the camp in 1876.²

Following the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, Congress passed several Civil Rights Bills to protect the civil rights created in the amendments. The Supreme Court set about methodically destroying these rights in a series of decisions that ran counter to the spirit and the letter of the amendments.

In Blyew v. United States (1871), the Court ruled that the Civil Rights Act (1866) did not affect the witnesses in a case. The Bill specifically states that all persons born in the United States are citizens and that citizens have a right to give evidence in court cases. In Blyew, two African-Americans were denied the right to testify by Kentucky state law. The Court construed the Civil Rights Act to apply only to principals in court cases, not witnesses, despite the clear intent of the law, and affirmed the ruling of the Appellate Court. In this case, the principal, a blind, 75-year-old African-American woman, was the murder victim. Since she was dead, the Court ruled, the federal court had no jurisdiction in the case.

In United States v. Cruikshank (1876), the Supreme Court ruled that the Enforcement Act of 1870 was only binding on state actions, not individuals. Using this logic, the Court overturned the convictions of two white men who had joined the Colfax Massacre in Louisiana, when over 100 blacks were murdered by a white militia. The Congress had intended this Act specifically to address the actions of the Ku Klux Klan, so the Court ruled exactly counter to the purpose of the Act. The Court's action left the freedmen in the south at the mercy of the Klan and numerous other private militias. Their action returned African-Americans to their pre-War status, when an African-American could be raped, murdered, or tortured by a white with impunity.

In the Civil Rights Cases (1880), the Supreme Court ruled likewise that the Fourteenth Amendment did not apply to private citizens, like railroads, hotels, and the operators of public amusements. These individuals, said the Court, had the right to choose the people they wanted to associate with, regardless of what the Fourteenth Amendment said. Justice Harlan, the sole dissenting voice in these five decisions, reminded the Court that private railroads were by law public highways, that innkeepers had long been held to be public servants of a sort, and that public amusements are maintained under a license coming from the public. No state, said Harlan, nor any corporation or individual acting under state authority for the public good, can discriminate against freemen or citizens. These rulings put an end to efforts by Congress to ensure civil rights for African-Americans and ushered in an era of segregation and second-class citizenships.

In U.S. v. Harris (1883), the Supreme Court once again ruled that federal courts had no jurisdiction in cases of murder or assault. These cases were matters for the states. It did not matter that the persons assaulted were African-Americans and the assailants were a group of Ku Klux Klansmen. In Harris, the Klansmen dragged four African-Americans from their jail cells and beat them, one of them to death. Although Federal Law intended to stop such violations of African-American civil rights, as authorized under the Fourteenth Amendment, the law was unconstitutional because it usurped the rights of the states. Harris also ruled that the sheriff who had custody of the African-Americans who were beaten could not be held liable under federal law because he was liable only for his actions, not his inactions. Under this ruling, depriving a person of his life is not the same thing as depriving him of his Constitutional rights, and inaction is not a form of action.

Not until the 1960s did the Supreme Court repudiate the extreme racism inherent in all these rulings (and others besides). The Constitution failed to protect individuals from crimes committed against them, even when Congress explicitly created laws saying that it should.

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1 Radical rule : military outrage in Georgia: Arrest of Columbus prisoners (Louisville, Ky., 1868), http://books.google.com/books?id=QEwTAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA16&lpg=PA16&dq=george+ashburn+murder&source=bl&ots=u4jYy1SKzI&sig=csGygOILiQ6j5e-RfFFGKQ-9Ha0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=_Hh9UcibCpTG4APiooDgCg&ved=0CHoQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=george%20ashburn%20murder&f=false. Since this pamphlet declares in its preface that its intent is to convey the proper impression of military despotism to the northern mind, its content must be treated as completely unreliable.

2Campbell, T.G., Sufferings of the Rev. T. G. Campbell and his family, in Georgia (Washington, 1877), http://openlibrary.org/books/OL22894692M.

Gore Vidal's "Burr": Our Founding Felons

Gore Vidal recently passed away. A few days later, I found a used copy of Burr in a small bookstore in Alexandria and began reading this formidable work. Vidal's prose style is dense, his plot is confusing and circular. But the book is well worth reading for its realistic (as opposed to hagiographic) treatment of the founding fathers.

Writers often wish that their work will affect the lives of their readers. Vidal achieved this wish when Michele Bachmann converted to Republicanism during an abortive reading of Burr. She called the book snotty and accused Vidal of mocking the Founders. I found the book snarky but refreshingly honest.

Thomas Jefferson c. 1820

Vidal was not mocking the founders. He was telling the truth about them. He concentrated on their flaws instead of their achievements. Vidal pointed out that Washington was a mediocre general who spent most of the Revolutionary War retreating from the British. Washington won two minor battles on his own and only succeeded in defeating Cornwallis at Yorktown with the assistance of Lafayette and the French navy. Furthermore, Washington had his soldiers flogged and owed his fortune to the efforts of his slaves. Both of those acts would today be felonies.

Vidal spares most of his venom for Jefferson, however. Jefferson wrote the words, "All men are created equal", but owned more than 700 slaves over his lifetime. Historians have whitewashed his reputation by claiming he treated his slaves humanely, but this was not true. Jefferson used beatings of young boys to force them to do factory work. As late as 1950, school textbooks omitted this fact from his biography. Jefferson also hired slave hunters to bring back escaped slaves, sold young boys on the auction block, and had sexual relations with at least one female slave. Many of these actions would be considered felonies today.

Perhaps most damning, Vidal accuses Jefferson of hypocrisy, since he preached equality by did not practice it. Jefferson never freed a slave during his lifetime, instead requiring a slave to buy his freedom. When Count Kosciuszko bequeathed Jefferson a large sum of money to free many of his slaves, Jefferson refused the bequest. Jefferson did free a few of his slaves on his death, but neglected to free their families, which resulted in families being irrevocably separated.

George Washington during the Revolution

By contrast, Washington freed his slaves in his will and also provided money to assure they would have livelihoods. Washington thus answered Jefferson's rationalizations about freeing slaves, namely that they were racially inferior beings, incapable of existing in an integrated society. Washington didn't agree and proved Jefferson wrong with his actions.

Only in retrospect did the founders achieve godlike status. Only in the minds of current-day jurists and tea-partiers like Bachmann have they become infallible on matters of government. The worship of these men as deities is as ridiculous as it is pernicious. Vidal has done us all a favor by depicting them as mere mortals.

[This article is based in part on a Smithsonian article, "The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson" by Henry Wiencek.]