Generational Trauma
The gap between our founders and their successors
This is the second in a series reflecting on the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States.
There were less than eighty five years between the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the firing by Confederates on Fort Sumter. When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, there were still a few centenarian Black Americans alive who were born into slavery. Ruby Bridges, who courageously attended a whites-only school, is only seventy one years old today. When we treat history as distant from our times, it can feel that progress was always predestined, but that feeling of inevitability erases the struggle and setbacks to hold our country to the ideals laid out in our founding document. America is closer to realizing Jefferson’s declaration that “all men are created equal” in 2026 than we were in 1776, but each generation over the past two hundred and fifty years has had to choose whether to make that happen.
In 1790, there were roughly 694,000 enslaved people in the United States. When Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1793, the profitability of the cotton industry exploded. The Southern economy had been on the decline for decades and Northern anti-slavery sentiments had made significant strides. With the cotton gin, plantation owners could now make more money than ever before and they needed more enslaved people. Southern politicians could not afford to be caught waxing poetically about universal rights when the financial status of themselves and their constituents was bound to slavery. They needed more enslaved people to work the fields and a government that would not just compromise but be complicit in slavery.
The Founding Fathers had a diverse set of views on slavery. They ranged from passionate abolitionists like John Adams to strong defenders of the institution such as John Rutledge. Of all the founders, Thomas Jefferson’s position of contradiction in that he was philosophically opposed to slavery yet owned human beings, is one of the better examples of the prevailing narrative of the Founders around slavery. Jefferson advocated for the inclusion of an attack on slavery in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence. He attacked slavery as a “hideous blot” and “fateful stain” on our nation. In spite of these moral arguments, he was an active participant in the institution of chattel slavery; buying, trading, selling and enslaving personally over six hundred human beings, including four of his own children and their mother, throughout his life.
Despite their all too common paradoxical views on slavery, the founding generation took steps to absolve America of its original sin. Between the 1770s and 1804, all Northern states had taken steps to abolish slavery. The Northwest Ordinance, passed in 1787 by the Congress of the Confederation, banned slavery in the modern day Midwestern states. Article 1 Section 9 of the Constitution laid the groundwork for the ending of the importation of enslaved people in 1808. As the founding generation’s hair greyed and many passed away, the institution of slavery had been weakened. Yet because they would not strike at the very heart of its wickedness due to their complicity in the horrors of slavery, the hope for abolition would be gone for generations.
If Jefferson’s hypocrisy is emblematic of much of the founding generation, John C. Calhoun’s devotion to slavery is representative of the regression on slavery in the second and third generation of Americans. Calhoun, who held positions in government ranging from vice president in two administrations to serving as a senator from South Carolina, called slavery a “positive good.” He policed the floor of the U.S. Senate to prevent any arguments over slavery being morally wrong and helped to shift political arguments away from ceding any ground to the anti-slavery movement. His commitment to slavery was so devout that as Andrew Jackson’s vice president, he betrayed his own Commander in Chief during the Nullification Crisis over the Tariffs of 1832 to support the rights of states to nullify federal laws as he knew the supremacy of federal law meant that a future federal government could one day end slavery. Jackson, reflecting on how close the country had come to civil war because of people like Calhoun in the 1830s, reflected: “The tariff was only a pretext, and disunion and Southern confederacy the real object. The next pretext will be the negro, or slavery question.”
Through the compromises of 1820 and 1850, slavery continued to expand in the Southern region of the country. Southern states were singularly devoted to the preservation of slavery at any and all costs. New territories, like Kansas and Nebraska, were dominated by terrorist attacks, rigged elections, and rival gangs vying to secure more land for slavery. Fugitive slave laws allowed the incursion of the institution’s brutality into the North while many Northern businesses remained reliant on making their money through partnerships with the South. By the time of the Dred Scott decision in 1857, with over four million Black people enslaved, the “hideous blot” of slavery as described by Jefferson had come to cover the entire nation.
In the midst of the debate over the Missouri Compromise in 1820, Jefferson in the twilight of his life reflected in a letter: “I regret that I am now to die in the belief, that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776, to acquire self-government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be, that I live not to weep over it.” Jefferson was disillusioned by the encroachment of slavery into nearly every facet of American life, yet he somehow lacked the introspection to realize that as the most important member of the founding generation with the exception of George Washington, he could have done much more to prevent this issue by the time of his death. The very letters he wrote bemoaning slavery were drafted in a home worked and maintained by enslaved people.
When the founding generation curbed but did not end slavery, their descendants only expanded the practice. When we do not seize the moment, the chance to make a difference will not often come again until it is too late. Our original sin, as we devolved into civil war, appeared to be a mortal sin. Passing on the opportunity to ensure that our founding creed that “All men are created equal” would be fully realized within a few years of independence, America only moved further away from our ideals for generations.