Skeletons in the Closet (Page 2)

This is why Jefferson's critics referred to him as the "Negro President"--because, they said, he had ridden into the White House on the backs of otherwise voiceless slaves whose sole raison d'être was to multiply their owners' political and economic clout. As one newspaper declared at the time, it was as if "New England horses, cows, and oxen" had been used to expand Adams's tally. Federalists were stunned, yet generations of historians, both liberal and conservative, have mobilized to cover up on Jefferson's behalf. Wills notes that two book-length accounts of the Revolution of 1800 by respected academic historians, one published by Knopf in 1974 and the other by Morrow in 2000, ignored the three-fifths clause altogether, as did Page Smith's two-volume 1962 biography of Adams and Dumas Malone's whopping six-volume biography of Jefferson, published between 1948 and 1981. David McCullough's discussion of the clause's role in his 2001 Adams biography is so fleeting that some readers may have missed it. "What was surprising" about the election of 1800, he writes, "was how well Adams had done.... he had, in fact, come very close to winning in the electoral count.... Also, were it not for the fact that in the South three-fifths of the slaves were counted in apportioning the electoral votes, Adams would have been reelected." His man was robbed, yet all McCullough can muster is a single sentence.

Wills is understandably obsessed with the three-fifths clause, which he sees as the basic motor force behind what abolitionists called "the slave power." Not only did it allow the slave states to capture the White House in 1800 but it allowed them to dominate the federal government as a whole right up to the Civil War. Thanks to the extra votes it provided, slaveowners succeeded in controlling the presidency for fifty of the sixty-two years between Washington's election and the Compromise of 1850, the chairmanship of the House Ways and Means Committee for forty-two of those years, and the Speaker's chair for forty-one. Eighteen out of thirty-one Supreme Court Justices during this period were slaveholders as well. Instead of empowering the people, the American Revolution wound up empowering a tiny slaveholding elite. While moving forward in some respects, America was hurtling backward in others, which explains the popular fury against Southern outrages that exploded across the North in 1860-61, igniting the Civil War.

But while the three-fifths clause deserves much of the blame, it doesn't deserve all of it. Other constitutional provisions were also important to the Southern cause--for example, the equal representation clause in Article I, which gives each state two seats in the Senate regardless of population, or the complicated amending machinery set forth in Article V. The first provided the South with the constitutional means to offset the power of an increasingly populous North. The second, by requiring approval by two-thirds of each house plus three-fourths of the states for any constitutional change, no matter how minor, enabled Southern states to see to it that any attempt at constitutional reform of slavery would never get off the ground. Individually, each of these provisions gave Jefferson and his fellow slaveowners a significant edge. But it was only collectively that they provided them with a stranglehold over national policy that was virtually unbreakable.

Wills's silence on these other aspects of the problem is curious. One reason may be that the three-fifths clause is safely in the past thanks to the Thirteenth Amendment, which, by abolishing slavery, rendered it null and void in 1865. But the others are not. The Senate, still organized on the basis of equal state representation, is as unrepresentative as ever (if not more so) thanks to a growing demographic gap between mega-states like California (population: 35.1 million) and micro-states like Wyoming (population: 499,000). By allowing thirteen states representing as little as 4.4 percent of the population to veto any and all efforts at constitutional reform, Article V is no less unfair and undemocratic. It is the survival of antiquated provisions like these that is so perplexing, which is perhaps why Wills prefers to stick to something a bit easier.

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