Realpolitik and the Foundation of the United States

Niccolo Machiavelli, the father of Realpolitik

Realpolitik and the Foundation of the United States

William Whitten

Political philosopher, statesman and Secretary of the Florentine Republic, Niccolo Machiavelli (1469–1527), knew all about conspiracies of power, and he put his recommendations in his most famous book, The Prince. Here are a few of his maxims.

“No enterprise is more likely to succeed than one concealed from the enemy until it is ripe for execution.”~Niccolo Machiavelli, the father of Realpolitik

In Congress, July 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

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.

What isn’t widely known, is that Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, in an early version of the Declaration, drafted a 168-word passage that condemned slavery as one of the many evils foisted upon the colonies by the British crown. The passage was cut from the final wording.

So while Jefferson is credited with infusing the Declaration with Enlightenment-derived ideals of freedom and equality, the nation’s founding document—its moral mission statement—would remain forever silent on the issue of slavery. That omission would create a legacy of exclusion for people of African descent that engendered centuries of struggle over basic human and civil rights. In his initial draft, Jefferson blamed Britain’s King George for his role in creating and perpetuating the transatlantic slave trade—which he describes, in so many words, as a crime against humanity.

“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.”

Jefferson went on to call the institution of slavery “piratical warfare,” “execrable commerce” and an “assemblage of horrors.” He then criticized the crown for

“exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.”

Why the Declaration’s anti-slavery passage removed

The exact circumstances of the passage’s removal may never be known; the historical record doesn't include details of the debates undertaken by the Second Continental Congress. What is known is that the 33-year-old Jefferson, who composed the Declaration between June 11 and June 28, 1776, sent a rough draft to members of a pre-selected committee, including John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, for edits ahead of its presentation to Congress. Between July 1 and July 3, congressional delegates debated the document, during which time they excised Jefferson’s anti-slavery clause.

The removal was mostly fueled by political and economic expediencies. While the 13 colonies were already deeply divided on the issue of slavery, both the South and the North had financial stakes in perpetuating it. Southern plantations, a key engine of the colonial economy, needed free labor to produce tobacco, cotton and other cash crops for export back to Europe. Northern shipping merchants, who also played a role in that economy, remained dependent on the triangle trade between Europe, Africa and the Americas that included the traffic in enslaved Africans.

Decades later, in his autobiography, Jefferson primarily blamed two Southern states for the clause’s removal, while acknowledging the North’s role as well.

"The clause...reprobating the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in compliance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it. Our Northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under these censures; for tho' their people have very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.”

Many in Congress had a vested interest

To call slavery a “cruel war against human nature itself” may have accurately reflected the values of many of the founders, but it also underscored the paradox between what they said and what they did. Jefferson, after all, had been tasked with writing a document to reflect the interests of an assemblage of slave-owning colonies with a profound commercial interest in preserving the trade in human beings. One third of the Declaration’s signers were personally enslavers and even in the North, where abolition was more widely favored, states passed “gradual emancipation” laws designed to slowly phase out the practice.

Jefferson himself had a complicated relationship to the “peculiar institution.” Despite his philosophical abhorrence of slavery and his ongoing legislative efforts to abolish the practice, Jefferson over his lifetime enslaved more than 600 people—including his own children with his enslaved concubine Sally Hemings. On his death in 1826, Jefferson, long plagued with debt, chose to free five of the human beings he claimed as property in his lifetime.

Such conflicts didn’t go unnoticed. How was it possible, wrote British essayist Samuel Johnson at the start of the war, "that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?" American loyalist and former governor of Massachusetts Thomas Hutchinson echoed these sentiments in his “Strictures Upon the Declaration of the Congress at Philadelphia”:

“I could wish to ask the Delegates of Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, how their constituents justify the depriving more than a hundred thousand Africans of their rights to liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and in some degree to their lives, if these rights are so absolutely unalienable….”

The legacy of a foundational omission

The signers ultimately replaced the deleted clause with a passage highlighting King George’s incitement of “domestic insurrections among us,” for stirring up warfare between the colonists and Native tribes—leaving the original passage a footnote to what might have been.

Indeed, removing Jefferson's condemnation of slavery would prove the most significant deletion from the Declaration of Independence. The founders’ failure to directly address the question of slavery exposed the hollowness of the words “all men created equal.” Nonetheless, the underlying ideals of freedom and equality expressed in the document have inspired generations of Americans to struggle to obtain their inalienable rights.

Northwest Ordinance

The Northwest Ordinance, officially titled “An Ordinance for the Government of the Territory of the United States North West of the River Ohio,” was adopted by the Confederation Congress on July 13, 1787. Also known as the Ordinance of 1787, the Northwest Ordinance established a government for the Northwest Territory, outlined the process for admitting a new state to the Union, and guaranteed that newly created states would be equal to the original thirteen states. Considered one of the most important legislative acts of the Confederation Congress, the Northwest Ordinance also protected civil liberties and outlawed slavery in the new territories.

MY HERITAGE

Major Andrew Lockridge, Revolutionary War Hero Is my great-great-great grandfather.

Born in Augusta, Virginia, USA on 10 APR 1730 to James Lockridge and Isabella Kincaid. Major Andrew Lockridge married Jane (John, Christopher) Graham (Lockridge) and had 12 children. He passed away on 15 March 1791 in Staunton, Augusta County, Virginia, USA.

Major Andrew Lockridge found in U.S., Sons of the American Revolution Membership Applications, 1889-1970

I have been a patriot since the 6th grade when my teacher Mr. Kellogg taught the class about the Declaration of Independence. We spent a whole week on that subject exclusively. We had to memorize the text [sans the charges against King George] and stand and recite it before the whole classroom for a passing grade.

I recall walking home in the rain at the end of that week with my heart and soul aglow. “I’m free!” I said to myself in the profound excitement of understanding. The term ‘unalienable’ stuck in my mind like a holy mantra. I told my mom all about it when I got home that day. She smiled and said that’s nice, do you want a peanut butter and jelly sandwich? I nodded yes. I could tell she really didn’t get it. That was okay, because I did. And I knew my grandfather would get it when we took our trip back to Indiana the coming summer.

God Bless America!

Sources

https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/northwest-ordinance#:~:text=T

https://www.history.com/news/declaration-of-independence-deleted-anti-slavery-clause-jefferson