Progressive Book Review: Slave Nation: How Slavery United and Colonies & Sparked the American Revolution

By Alfred W. Blumrosen & Ruth G. Blumrosen (2005 Barnes and Noble Books)

"I would never have drawn my sword in the cause of America, if I could have conceieved that thereby I was founding a land of slavery."

- Marquis De Lafayette, French nobelman who served as Washington's aide during the revolutionary war

If you have ever wondered how today's neo conservative political "experts" can, with straight faces, wrap themselves around the stars and stripes while vigorously denouncing attempts to set a fair minimum wage and adopt health care benefits for the poor, promoting "free trade" measures that create effective slave labor pools for U.S. industry, and raising the cudgel for immoral and illegal wars of imperial conquest, this book might answer some questions for you. Slave Nation recounts historic events that suggest America was designed from its inception to be the land of the greed, and the home of the slave.

The Bulmrosens, former lawyers for the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice, present a well-documented analysis of the origins of the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution this country was founded upon.

Slave Nation postulates that it was not the stamp tax, nor was it the tea tax, nor was it any other direct imposition of obligation upon the American colonies that prompted revolutionary talk on this continent. Instead, it was a British judicial decision published on June 22, 1772. An American slave named Sommerset, who had accompanied his master on a trip to London, decided to remain free in England rather than return to slavery in America. A British High Court justice decided that since slavery was no longer recognized as a lawful institution in England, Sommerset was free once he set foot in that country and thus the law could not be invoked by his former slave holder to enforce Sommerset's return.

The Sommerset decision sent a shock wave throughout the colonies, and particularly in Virginia, the founding colony and home of America's most wealthy and powerful colonists, who ultimately were the architects of the republic. While the colonists did protest against imposts levied to defray expenses for the British army's protection of the colonists from demise at the hands of native Americans, it was not until the Sommerset decision that our founding fathers found it appropriate to seriously consider revolution and independence.

The founding fathers - the majority of whom were either slave-holders, lawyers, or both - argued to one another that the Sommerset decision, combined with the Declaratory Act (British Parliament's pronouncement that enactments of British law were enforceable in the colonies) spelled a future where the British would attempt to formally outlaw the institution of slavery in American. Much like the Southern Confederates who seceded in 1860/1861 on the basis of what the newly elected Radical Republican Abraham Lincoln might do concerning their peculiar institution, the framers of our constitution apparently saw ominous handwriting on the wall. It seems that "preventative war" was not an original idea of George W. Bush after all.

The Blumrosens meticulously analyze the debates surrounding the creation of our founding documents, including inspecting drafts leading to the final versions. They demonstrate how Thomas Jefferson, who was a master wordsmith, was brought in to revise George Mason's original wording of the Declaration of Independence. Mason's "All men are born equally free and independent" had to be changed to "All men were created equal" in order to subtlely convert freedom from being a god-given right at birth into an entitlement in which the nobility had a say. The Constitution made provision for the return of runaway slaves from non-slave states back to slaveholders specifically to prevent some wayward judge from pronouncing a Sommerset-like decision.

Slave Nation establishes that even our Constitution's "concession" that the African slave trade shall become unlawful by the year 1808, the Virginians proposed that bit of legerdemain for greedy ends. The Virginians, whose tobacco crop did not result in significant numbers of deaths in the fields, had a surplus of slaves, unlike the more southern states - South Carolina and Georgia - whose rice and sugar crops required mosquito infested swamp work in intolerable temperatures resulting the widespread death to slaves. Thus, Virginians foresaw Virginia profiting by breeding slaves for sale to supply the constant demand for them in the more southern states; at a nifty profit, of course. Banning the introduction of new slaves from Africa would effectively establish a monopoly for the Virginians.

The Blumrosens do a yeoman-like job of shattering myths that are carefully inoculated into American psyches from the earliest days of grade school. Yet, toward the end of the book they begin constructing a defense for Thomas Jefferson. They read into Jefferson's lawyerly drafts attempts to leave the door open to abolish slavery somewhere in the unspecified future. If Jefferson - whose wealth was obtained by marrying a woman with nearly two-hundred slaves, and who never had the courage or compassion to free them (including the one who fathered his illegitimate child, as confirmed by recent DNA tests) - had not lived lavishly on the sweat and blood of slavery until his dying day, and had his Constitution not resulted in the imprisonment, torture, pre-mature deaths, and degredation of generations of human beings, I might be inclined to grant some credibility on the authors' efforts to read some glimmer of humanity into his words.

On the other hand, I can understand the authors' attempts to conjure up some sign of goodness in the hearts of these slave masters. After all, if one were to publicly aver that the USA was founded by a privileged group of slave-holding, tax evading shysters revolting against any imposition of responsibility or check upon their rapacious practices, he/she would certainly be labeled a revolutionary. And we all know the reaction that might incite in the modern day slave masters who brought us the Patriot Act.

Notwithstanding the Blumrosens' last minute attempt at apologia, in the final analysis, Slave Nation is a must read for any serious seeker of truth or proponent of social justice.