Examining America's Christian Racist Roots

OF THE FIRST FIFTEEN AMERICAN PRESIDENTS, ten were slave owners. Of the first thirty five Supreme Court justices, nineteen owned slaves. Slavery first reared its ugly head at Jamestown, Virginia, a mere twelve years after Europeans founded the town. At one time all thirteen original colonies permitted slavery. The northern colonies prohibited it first for purely economic reasons; it was insufficiently profitable in an economy without large agricultural plantations, and manufacturing could get labor abundantly, cheaply, from among the free white population. Slavery is condoned in the Christian bible, a fact which provided a convenient justification for American Christian plantation owners. Enslavement, the reasoning went, inherently improved the lives of the enslaved by bringing them into the Christian faith. Jefferson wanted to include in the Declaration a passage condemning the peculiar institution and promising to eradicate it; he was outvoted, and settled for a provision blaming it all on the English king. In the creation of the federal constitution, slavery presented the most prickly problem. The southern slave owning states would not join the union without guarantees that it would be allowed to endure, and ocne they joined, if anyone or anything threatened their right to own people, they would not remain joined. Thus did the enslaved become, according to federal law, three fifths of a human being, which they remain today, though no longer enslaved. The framers were as unwilling to use the word 'slave" in their masterpiece as they were to use the word "God". Hamilton later said that God was excluded from the constitution because its framers forgot to include it. More seriously, the authors were keenly aware of the schizophrenic relationship between slavery and the minded principles of democratically based liberty. Jefferson, who did not believe in the Christian God, was fearful that god would punish the nation, sooner, or later, for slavery, and he often wrote that all must eventually be free, but preferably after being shipped back to Africa. When one of Madison's slaves ran away and was recaptured, the constitution's principle author wrote: "I cannot punish him...for merely coveting the liberty...we have so often and so loudly proclaimed to be the right...of every human being." Instead, he sold the man. Washington freed his slaves in his will, Jefferson did not, other than a select few, but he treated them well. Madison told people he wanted to avoid depending on slave labor for his personal profit, but never did. That is our inheritance, our legacy, our burden of history. It perhaps becomes apparent why we today debate whether the United States is a racist country, and a christian country. The answers would seem to be "yes", and "no".