The Black History of the White House Read Free Page A

of the nation itself. The establishment of a racial hierarchy was neither unconscious, secondary, an afterthought, nor even what many have called an unfortunate but necessary compromise. Rather than a compromise—implying that both sides gave up something fundamental—it was a surrender by Northern leaders, who set aside their publicly stated antislavery principles and dishonorably granted the South the legally protected business of human trafficking and enslavement of black people, some arguing that abolition was a battle to be fought another day.
    As discussed in greater detail in Chapter 1, Southern leaders joined the armed revolutionary movement not so much to fight British domination of the colonies as to protect themselves from the British Crown’s foreshadowed intent to liberate blacks from bondage. For the South, the nonnegotiable price of joining the armed revolt was the prolongation of white people’s power to buy, sell, breed, and enslave black people in the post-revolution nation.
    Perceiving this profound moral and political disjuncture, many free 6 and enslaved blacks joined the war on the side of the British. At the very center of this turbulent mix were the men who would become the first four presidents of the United States—George Washington (1789–1797), John Adams (1797–1801), Thomas Jefferson (1801–1809), and James Madison (1809–1817)—all of whom helped to define the duties, roles, responsibilities, and powers of the presidency itself. Their engagement with the moral and economic questions of slavery and race was complex, and their individual will, private interests, and political courage were as much an influence upon as influenced by social forces and the still gestating processes and structures of state authority. Ultimately, all would fail to rise above the popular racist views of their times and were unwilling and unable to advance egalitarian relations among races. As we will see in Chapters 3 and 4, their vacillations wouldonly postpone the nation’s inexorable drive toward civil war and further crises of legitimacy.
    Alternative voices, however, would be raised by blacks and others during the Revolutionary period and ever afterward. By all the means at black organizers’ disposal, from petitions and direct lobbying to local community organizing and national mass movements, presidents were challenged to live up to their oath of office and the promises of the nation’s founding documents. Despite these calls for justice and freedom, until the Civil War, president after president would ratify white people’s power to own and traffic blacks by signing laws such as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. James Buchanan (1857–1861), the last president before the Civil War, stated that slavery was “a great political and moral evil” but nonetheless (as president-elect) supported the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott vs. Sandford decision, which ruled that no person of African descent could become a citizen of the United States, that blacks had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and that the negro [ sic ] might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.” 7 As is discussed in Chapter 5, it would take a horrific civil war and a hesitating but ultimately reformist president to resolve the nation’s dilemma by illegalizing slavery.
    The reluctance of the pre–Civil War presidents to address and assist the abolition movement only fueled the surging black resistance and directed its outrage at the White House. During the Civil War there was a massive desertion of plantations and work sites by millions of enslaved people—what W. E. B. Du Bois termed a black general strike. Fearing that a Southern victory would maintain the slave system and hoping a Northern win would abolish it, African Americans joined the Southern guerrilla underground and Union Army and