America's Yet Unbridged Divide

Colorado Tea Party Billboard

The election of President Barack Hussein Obama has cemented the fissure at the heart of American politics. It is a divide that ironically enough exists in the man himself. Part white, part black, like the antipathies made extant by his very name, Obama is the walking manifestation of the contradiction wrapped inside the enigma known as the U.S. of A.

Founded on the radical principle that "all men were created" the Founders promptly granted themselves the right to buy and sell others as chattel. Eighty years later the South would defend the practice by expounding states' rights yet at the outset it was the states themselves that often decided that owning other human beings ran against the Constitution. In fact, even earlier, in 1770, a colonial Massachusetts Superior Court found that slavery was unconstitutional on the basis of common law. In Georgia, the colony's governing trustees strictly prohibited the practice of slavery, declaring it to be not only immoral, but contrary to English law.

These early rulings were extraordinary when one stops to consider that in the mines and plantations across the 'New World' slavery was not only common practice but the backbone of Europe's economy. In fact were it not for the wealth of the plantation system, there might never have been an American Revolution.

"the vast sums pouring into France from Saint Domingue at exactly the same time made foreign aid to the New World a distinctly more attractive option than it would have been otherwise. The 1770s and 1780s were the richest decades Saint Domingue had ever seen. It goes without saying that the entire enterprise rested on the backs of the men and women whose labor powered it." --Ted Widmer

So why, if not the democratic conscience of the Founders, when it came to sanctioning slavery, was there an American exception? Simple: In order to manage the country's inherent contradiction the Right to Life, Liberty and Happiness was tacitly reserved for white skins. Despite the Massachusetts and Georgia court rulings, the Framers made sure that their "great Democracy" implicitly provided for slavery:

Article I, § 9 of the Constitution expressly states that "a tax or duty may be imposed on such importation not exceeding ten dollars for each person." Under Article IV, § 2, clause 3, the Fugitive Slave Clause, recognized the individual property rights of a slave owner in a slave, indicating a constitutional protection of slave property. Article IV therefore implicitly sanctioned the product that flowed from slave property, namely, slave labor.

John Locke himself, though he once eloquently deplored the practice, wrote Carolina's pro-slavery Constitution. And yet, through it all, the American people remained hopelessly divided. Aggrieved by their own frustrations, women understood that just as sexism justified their subordination, the pillar of slavery was America's racism. Conversely, when an angry mob killed the antislavery editor, Elijah Lovejoy, in Alton, Illinois, the North's poor were persuaded to join the abolitionists, not out of love for the African, but fearing the loss of their own liberties.

These historical contradictions persist, woven into our conceptions of the country itself. Which America one chooses to defend depends on whether a Constituted Right to Life, Liberty and Happiness was meant to extend equally from the days of George Washington to the contentious times of Barack Hussein Obama.