Celebrating 244 Years of the “1776 Project”
The publication of the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America revealed a document that was on the historical cutting edge of the development of liberal democracy on July 4, 1776. This American Declaration listed as royal usurpations many transgressions of the colonists’ rights as Englishmen. An English Declaration of Rights had been promulgated in 1689 in order to secure parliamentary preeminence over the English Crown (from 1707, the Crown of Great Britain). Thus, there was some correlation between the development of liberal democracy and of constitutional monarchy in the transatlantic world.
The newly emerging government of the United States of America was liberal, in that it presupposed basic individual rights inviolable by any government diktat. It was a democracy in that it took for granted the existence of a legislative body representative of the people, i.e., the citizens of the several states. Some analysts substitute “republicanism” for “democracy,” basing their terminology on the ancient Roman res publica rather than on the ancient Athenian demos. For many, however, “liberal republicanism” does not roll as trippingly from the tongue as does “liberal democracy.” Whichever term is chosen, what is meant is the diametric opposite of monarchy or autocracy.
The English Declaration had relied on the Lockean notion of natural and inalienable rights to “life, liberty, and property.” In an apparent effort to demonstrate his own authorial independence, Jefferson rendered this notion in the American Declaration as Creator-endowed and unalienable rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The subsequent attainment of a high degree of such happiness in the U.S.A. has warranted a wide-spread national pride in the American Declaration and other founding documents.
Long before July 4, 1776 the entire project of liberty in the new American colonies had gotten off to a rocky start in a long chain of events: Portuguese slave traders in what is now Angola provided slaves to a Portuguese ship bound for Mexican mines in the summer of 1619. English privateers captured the ship and its slaves, sailed to the vicinity of Jamestown, Virginia by the end of August 1619, and sold the slaves (the first of many) to English colonists for cultivating that new-fangled crop, tobacco. (Ironically, Jamestown was named for the dual monarch, James VI of Scotland and James I of England, who had in 1604 condemned tobacco smoking in his “A Counterblast[e] to Tobacco.”)
Twelve years after the American Declaration, the ninth state to ratify the new U.S. Constitution did so on June 21, 1788; promising a more felicitous route to future happiness and leading to Washington’s election as the first President later that year. In order to secure ratification, however, compromises adversely affecting “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” had to be adopted. For example, the existence of slavery was presupposed: Only 3/5 of the slave population counted as population for the purpose of apportioning federal representation and direct taxes. Moreover, no federal law abolishing the slave trade with other nations could take effect until January 1, 1808. Nevertheless, there was a determination among some of the Constitutional framers, dating from 1788, to find a way to stop the foreign slave trade in the United States. Remarkably, during this very same time period, there were similar concerns in London regarding the possibility of abolishing the British slave trade as well, as ably summarized in William Hague’s book: William Wilberforce, The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner, (Harcourt, 2007).
The British Parliamentarian, William Wilberforce (1759 - 1833), was an outstanding anti-slavery orator. Becoming a Member of Parliament at the precocious age of 21 in 1780, he had long, but unsuccessfully, proposed a humanitarian argument against the slave trade. In 1805 the abolitionist James Stephen wrote a book, The War in Disguise, that recommended a government policy that was at once anti-slave-trade and anti-Napoleon. Wilberforce saw in Stephen’s thesis a utilitarian argument that might actually succeed in Parliament (Hague, pp. 332-334): The Royal Navy should be authorized to interdict neutral shipping between France, Spain, and their colonies. This policy would have the ostensible goal of defeating Napoleon; but its greatest effects would be the resulting inability of France and Spain to use neutral ships for slave trading in their overseas colonies; near destruction of those colonies’ economies; and drastic reduction in the market for slaves in those ravaged colonies. Slave trading would no longer be profitable - - for ships from Great Britain or from any other country - - thereby eliminating the profit rationale for the slave trade. Under this policy, Parliament might as well draw the ultimate conclusion and abolish the British slave trade outright. Thus, patriotically anti-Napoleon policy implied the acceptability of an act abolishing the slave trade.
In the autumn of 1806 Napoleon defeated the Prussians at the Battle of Jena, making anti-Napoleon policy and its implied slave-trade abolition all the more necessary. A new British Parliament opened on December 15, 1806, passed the Slave-Trade Abolition Act early in 1807, and gained the King’s assent to this Act on March 24, 1807. The Act took effect on May 1, 1807 (Hague, pp. 348 - 356).
In December 1806 President Thomas Jefferson of the United States had attacked the “violations of human rights [that] have so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa.” A bill to outlaw the foreign slave trade passed both Houses of Congress early in 1807, was signed into law by the President on March 2, 1807, and took effect on January 1, 1808 (Hague, p. 350). Thus, the American Law was passed and signed twenty-two days before the analogous British Act; but the American Law took effect eight months after the British Act, because of a provision in the American Constitution.
One notes that it does not matter now if both or either or neither of the pair, Jefferson and Wilberforce, were themselves slave owners - - what they accomplished legislatively in abolishing the foreign slave trade on both sides of the Atlantic was truly monumental. Subsequently, in 1833 an Act of Parliament outlawed slavery throughout the entire British Empire. In the U.S. a Civil War with an estimated 620,000 military deaths was required before slavery could be abolished via the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865.
In stark contrast to the historical narrative just adumbrated, the so-called “1619 Project,” published on the New York Times’ website, does not indicate that much was accomplished against slavery in the Anglophone world of the nineteenth century. The 1619 Project focuses on the slave importation of 1619 and neglects the fact, as formulated by the historian Gordon Wood and quoted by the Wall Street Journal columnist Jason L. Riley, that slavery “had existed for thousands of years without criticism, but it’s the American Revolution that makes it a problem for the world. And the first real anti-slave movement takes place in North America. So this is what’s missed by these essays in the 1619 Project.” In response to the 1619 Project, Riley continues, “Robert Woodson, a black conservative and longtime community activist in Washington … held a press conference to announce his own ‘1776 Project,’ which is intended to counter what he called the ‘anti-American propaganda’ of the Times’s endeavor.” (See also the “1776 Project” page on the Heritage Foundation website.)
In summary, best wishes to all those celebrating the accomplishments of the authors of the American Declaration of Independence and other founding documents on this, the 244th anniversary of that Declaration.