On American History, Ron DeSantis Is Far Closer to the Truth Than Randi Weingarten

Randi Weingarten thinks she’s caught Ron DeSantis in a misdescription of American history:

But Weingarten is much more wrong here than is DeSantis. It is, indeed, an overstatement for DeSantis to claim that “no one had questioned” slavery in America before the Declaration of Independence. Some had, as the 1772 Somerset case showed. But it is not at all an overstatement to draw a direct link between the American Revolution and the explosion of abolitionist sentiment in America. Sure, the American Revolution was “about leaving Britain.” And yet, as Abraham Lincoln would put it decades later, Thomas Jefferson, “in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.” His decision to do so had profound consequences.

DeSantis, note, does not say that the American Revolution was fought over slavery. He says that the American Revolution “caused people to question slavery.” It did. As John Ferling notes in Whirlwind, the rhetoric of the Revolution mattered so much that, “within thirty years of Lexington and Concord, every northern state had acted to end slavery, either immediately or gradually.” Or, as DeSantis put it: once we had “decided as Americans that we are endowed by our creator with unalienable rights,” it became much more difficult to say “but not them.” The language of revolution, which had been in the air since 1774, helped along the language of abolition; and, in turn, the language of abolition helped along the language of revolution. The Anti-slavery Society was founded in Philadelphia in 1775. Vermont banned slavery in its Constitution in 1777. Pennsylvania banned slavery legislatively in 1780. And so on.

As for Weingarten’s own history? It doesn’t make much sense. She says “if America’s founders questioned slavery there would not have been the heinous ‘3/5 compromise’ in the US Constitution, which was drafted and enacted AFTER the American Revolution.” But, quite obviously, that compromise was the product of there being a large number of Americans who had “questioned slavery.” Between 1780 and 1784 — that’s after the Revolution had been declared — five of the thirteen states banned slavery. If they hadn’t, no apportionment compromise would have been necessary.

Would it have been better if the Constitution had banned slavery everywhere? Yes, it would. Was that on the table? Alas, it was not. The choice was the maintenance of slavery and the passage of a new constitution, or the maintenance of slavery and no new constitution. The drafters of that new constitution — who were divided on the question of slavery — chose the former, and, in so doing, improved upon the status quo. The clause abolishing the slave trade after 1808 (which was taken up by Congress at the first possible opportunity) made things better than they had been. James Madison’s decision to downplay any explicit references to slavery — Madison said, during the debates, that he “thought it wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men” — made things better than they had been. So, too, did the decision to abolish slavery in the Northwest Territory, which was made by the Congress of the Confederation while the Constitution Convention was in session. This, to borrow a phrase from Weingarten, is “basic history.”

I was tempted to conclude here by suggesting that the president of a teachers union should probably be less willing to embarrass herself in public in pursuit of transparently partisan aims. But . . . well, you know.