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====== Second Continental Congress Slavery - Founding Viewpoint ======

The Founding Viewpoint holds that the [[second-continental-congress|Second Continental Congress]] and the founders who shaped it were not hypocrites on slavery but rather pragmatic statesmen who made a calculated, morally serious compromise - accepting slavery's temporary continuation in order to achieve independence and union, on the expectation that the institution would eventually die out. Advocates of this view argue that without that compromise, there would have been no United States at all, and therefore no constitutional framework within which abolition could later be achieved. This viewpoint is associated with traditional constitutional historians, many conservatives, and some classical liberals who emphasize the revolutionary achievement of the founding generation.

===== Core Arguments =====

**The Union required compromise.** Advocates contend that the southern colonies - particularly South Carolina and Georgia - would not have joined a unified independence movement if Congress had moved against slavery. Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and others understood that a fractured independence effort would likely fail, leaving all colonists subject to British rule. The compromise was not moral indifference but political calculation in service of a larger goal.

**The founders' own words condemn slavery.** Proponents of the Founding Viewpoint point to the fact that many delegates regarded slavery as a moral evil they were unable to immediately remedy. Thomas Jefferson's original draft of the Declaration of Independence contained a lengthy condemnation of the slave trade, blaming the British Crown for imposing it on the colonies. Though the passage was struck at the insistence of southern delegates and some northern merchants, its inclusion signals that antislavery sentiment was present and serious within the Congress itself.((Pauline Maier, //American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence//, Knopf, 1997, pp. 146-150.))

**"All men are created equal" was a genuine moral commitment.** Advocates argue that the Declaration's foundational claim was not empty rhetoric but a real philosophical assertion - one that, as Abraham Lincoln later argued, was intended to set a standard the nation would continually strive toward. The founders, on this reading, planted the seed of abolition even as they could not immediately harvest it.((Harry V. Jaffa, //A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War//, Rowman & Littlefield, 2000.))

**The Northwest Ordinance demonstrates antislavery intent.** The same Congress that operated under the Articles of Confederation, with heavy overlap in membership with the Continental Congress delegates, passed the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, prohibiting slavery in the territory north of the Ohio River. Proponents cite this as evidence that the founding generation was actively limiting slavery's geographic expansion, not merely ratifying its permanence.((Peter Onuf, //Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance//, Indiana University Press, 1987.))

**The Constitution included antislavery mechanisms.** The Founding Viewpoint emphasizes that the Constitution allowed Congress to ban the international slave trade after 1808 - which it did, effective January 1, 1808 - and that advocates argue the three-fifths clause reduced slaveholders' political power relative to what full counting of enslaved people would have granted them.

===== Historical Context =====

When the Second Continental Congress convened in May 1775, slavery was legal in all thirteen colonies, though its economic centrality varied enormously from New England to the Carolinas. The Congress operated by rough consensus; any proposal that drove the southern delegations out risked destroying the coalition before independence was declared.

The debate over Jefferson's anti-slave-trade passage in the Declaration is frequently cited by Founding Viewpoint advocates as a pivotal moment. John Adams recalled that South Carolina and Georgia flatly refused to accept the language, and that delegates from those colonies made clear they would not remain in a union that opened with a condemnation of the trade on which their economies depended. Congress deleted the passage. Advocates of the Founding Viewpoint treat this episode not as evidence of founders' indifference to slavery but as a demonstration of the impossible constraints under which they operated.

Quaker and early abolitionist petitions did reach the Congress, and some delegates - including Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin (in his final years), and Alexander Hamilton - were members of early abolition societies. The presence of organized antislavery sentiment within and adjacent to the founding circle is taken as further evidence that the compromise was reluctant, not enthusiastic.

===== Notable Proponents =====

**Abraham Lincoln** - Though not a founder, Lincoln is the most influential articulator of this view. His Cooper Union address (1860)((Abraham Lincoln, "Address at Cooper Institute," February 27, 1860, in //Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln//, vol. 3, ed. Roy P. Basler, Rutgers University Press, 1953.)) and his debates with Stephen Douglas argued at length that the founders opposed slavery's expansion and expected its eventual demise, and that the Declaration's equality principle was meant as a prospective moral standard.

**Harry V. Jaffa** - Political philosopher and Claremont McKenna professor whose //Crisis of the House Divided// (1959)((Harry V. Jaffa, //Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates//, University of Chicago Press, 1959.)) and //A New Birth of Freedom// (2000) ground the Founding Viewpoint in a Lincolnian reading of natural rights. Jaffa argues that the Declaration represents a genuine, universal moral commitment that slavery directly contradicted, and that the founders knew it.

**Thomas G. West** - Claremont scholar whose //Vindicating the Founders// (1997)((Thomas G. West, //Vindicating the Founders: Race, Sex, Class, and Justice in the Origins of America//, Rowman & Littlefield, 1997.)) defends the founding generation against charges of hypocrisy by situating their decisions within the political constraints of their era.

**Pauline Maier** - Harvard historian whose //American Scripture// documents the drafting of the Declaration and treats the founders as serious political actors whose antislavery instincts were real but politically circumscribed.

**Gordon Wood** - Pulitzer Prize-winning historian whose //The Radicalism of the American Revolution// (1992)((Gordon S. Wood, //The Radicalism of the American Revolution//, Knopf, 1992.)) argues that the Revolution genuinely disrupted and delegitimized hierarchical institutions, including slavery, setting in motion forces that would eventually end it.

===== Internal Debates =====

Within the Founding Viewpoint, there is disagreement about how much moral weight to assign individual founders versus the institutional framework they created.

Some advocates - particularly those in the Jaffa-Lincoln tradition - focus on the Declaration's natural rights philosophy as the essential founding document, treating the Constitution's compromises as regrettable but subordinate to the Declaration's principles. Others, more focused on constitutional structure, argue that the mechanisms the founders built (limits on the slave trade, the Northwest Ordinance, federal enumeration of powers) were the meaningful antislavery achievements, regardless of individual founders' private views.

There is also internal debate about Jefferson specifically. His ownership of enslaved people, his relationship with Sally Hemings, and his failure to free more than a handful of enslaved people at his death create tension with his authorship of the Declaration's equality language. Some Founding Viewpoint advocates address this by distinguishing Jefferson's personal failures from his political and philosophical contributions; others are more willing to criticize him while defending the founding framework as a whole.

A separate internal question concerns whether the compromise was genuinely temporary in the founders' minds or whether many of them had rationalized it as permanent. Advocates differ on how much self-deception was involved.

===== Related Pages =====

  * [[second-continental-congress|Second Continental Congress]]
  * [[second-continental-congress-history|Second Continental Congress - History]]
  * [[second-continental-congress-slavery-debate|Second Continental Congress Slavery - Debate]]
  * [[second-continental-congress-slavery-original-sin-viewpoint|Second Continental Congress Slavery - Original Sin Viewpoint]]
  * [[second-continental-congress-slavery-abolitionist-failure-viewpoint|Second Continental Congress Slavery - Abolitionist Failure Viewpoint]]
  * [[american-founding-historical-consensus|American Founding - Historical Consensus]]
  * [[declaration-of-independence-equality-clause-debate|Declaration of Independence Equality Clause - Debate]]
  * [[northwest-ordinance-history|Northwest Ordinance - History]]

===== Footnotes =====

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