America's Black History

Reconciling patriotism with slavery's legacy.

Mark Goldblatt from the April 2002 issue

Jefferson's Pillow: The Founding Fathers and the Dilemma of Black Patriotism, by Roger Wilkins, Boston: Beacon Press, 163 pages, $23

When President Clinton called for a national dialogue on race in 1997, he probably imagined a conversation much like the one Roger Wilkins conducts with himself in his new book, Jefferson's Pillow: The Founding Fathers and the Dilemma of Black Patriotism. Wilkins, a black journalist, activist, and professor of history at George Mason University, sums up the dilemma of his subtitle thus: "Can I embrace founders who may have 'owned' some of my ancestors?" The Founders with whom he principally concerns himself are George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Mason.

Wilkins' focus on these four Virginians might seem idiosyncratic -- why not, say, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, or Alexander Hamilton? But the choice turns out to be highly personal, given Wilkins' family history: "We know from family lore and from the appearance of a number of my ancestors that white eighteenth-century slave owners -- probably Englishmen -- had, at some time in the past, injected themselves into the bloodstreams of the Virginia people I can identify as my great-grandparents."

Casting himself as a black Everyman, Wilkins recounts his struggle to reconcile his admiration for the achievements of the Founding Fathers and his revulsion at their moral failings with regard to slaveholding. More generally, his memoir asks whether African Americans can maintain that admiration in the face of the revulsion. Given the history of slavery, is black patriotism possible?

The most compelling sections of Wilkins' book are those in which his own grievances against the colonial leaders breathe life into what amounts to a textbook history of the Revolutionary Era. The portraits he constructs of the four principals are fair-minded and surprisingly thorough for such a brief work. But the portraits are also, invariably, indictments.

Wilkins makes clear, with excerpts from their personal correspondence and formal declarations, that the Founding Fathers recognized full well that slavery was a moral abomination. Indeed, he notes, "They fought off the mightiest military power then on earth with the cry 'We will not be slaves!'" This is as bitter as irony gets. And the challenge that throbs beneath every page of Wilkins' book is both desperate and ultimately unanswerable: How could you?

To be sure, slave owners were accustomed to lives literally "cushioned by slavery." (The book's title, Jefferson's Pillow, refers to Jefferson's earliest memory of being carried around on a pillow by a slave.) More insidiously, however, the possession of slaves furnished the generation of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Mason with a twisted justification for their peerage with the English ruling class -- a justification rooted in the philosophy of John Locke.

It was Locke who had argued that the equality of men derived from their natural endowments of life, liberty, and property. "[Locke's] linkage of property with full citizenship," Wilkins writes, "was enormously useful to the slave-owning founders, in that it provided a powerful theoretical rationale for the distinction between masters and slaves." Since slaves were an especially visible form of property, the possession of which testified to a certain level of wealth and prestige, slave owners in America were able to insist upon their parity with the landed gentry of England. "Feeling slighted by their English 'equals,'" Wilkins argues, the Americans "depended on their 'bond-men and bond-women' both to enable them to live in style and to validate their social status."

The paradox, and for Wilkins it's a ghastly one, is that the egalitarian sentiment among the colonial leaders seems to have been genuine. He cites an address by Washington to a Jewish congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1790: "For happily the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support."

Wilkins rightly refers to the speech as "one of the most remarkable statements about human decency ever uttered by an American president." But how can a black man acknowledge the generosity and compassion of Washington's words without that acknowledgment being undercut by the knowledge that the man who spoke them was a lifelong slaveholder? Renouncing the greatness of Washington, for Wilkins, amounts to denying the mandates of his own intellect.

But celebrating the greatness of Washington amounts to denying the mandates of his own conscience. Black patriotism, therefore, is less a welling up of feelings than an ebb and flow, less King Henry V lifting up a bloody sword than Hamlet lifting up Yorick's skull.

The closest Wilkins comes to solving the "dilemma" of black patriotism is his acknowledgment that the Founding Fathers were, in the end, bound by the moral and intellectual conventions of the age in which they lived: "However great their gifts and however hard they worked, it was not possible for them to lift themselves out of their time and culture, and it is in that context that they must be judged."

Judged by their time, they were no worse than many and better than most. But this is an unsatisfactory measure because these were great men -- which returns us to Wilkins' initial outrage. Predictably, there is a problem with repetition in Jefferson's Pillow. Even as Wilkins lauds the aspirations embodied in the words and deeds of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Mason, he's setting them up: Achievement is followed by indictment, followed by achievement, followed by indictment, on and on.

His rationale for this exercise is to correct the mythologizing that colors our notions of the past. "The founding slave owners were more than good men; they were great men," he writes. "But when myth presents them as secular saints, and when an attempt is made to whitewash their ownership of slaves and the deep legacy of racism that they helped to institutionalize, the impulse to pull them and the works of their whole generation off their pedestals becomes exceedingly strong."

But the "myth" against which Wilkins directs his efforts is a straw man, and has been for decades, if not centuries. It's fair to say that on some level each generation of Americans recognized the limits of the Founders as men. Even as they have been mythologized by the many, they have been demythologized by at least a few. In a contemporary context, the heroic gloss of the Founding Fathers began to wear away in the late 1960s, and it has been further eroded by the curricula of victimology now rampant on campuses across the United States. Consider the case of Jefferson's sexual liaison with his slave Sally Hemings -- a charge that dogged the third president even in his own lifetime. DNA evidence gathered from Jefferson's and Hemings' descendants has established, in Wilkins' words, a "strong circumstantial probability" that Jefferson fathered at least one of Hemings' children.