Too Big to Fail, So Blame the Critics—Early Republic Style

It's well known that when Thomas Jefferson wrote his one book, Notes on the State of Virginia, he wrapped a downgrading of Africans in a long chapter on new world species. Race becomes second, if not first, nature in America: the passage is routinely quoted to reveal the heart of darkness in Jefferson's vision. We no longer maintain, as an earlier generation of scholars from Daniel Boorstin to John Chester Miller did, that Jefferson was engaging in what he called a "a speculation only" and wrote with less certainly about racial inequality than he did about slavery's injustice.

But one way of interpreting why he went to such speculative lengths—and indeed, seems to build the entire structure of the Notes around what he admits is a speculation—is that he knew that slavery, as opposed to race, could not be considered anything less than politics, especially in the wake of a precedent-breaking (if not radical) revolution. His strictures against slavery appear later as the bulk of a brief chapter on "manners" and the culmination of an account of "the laws," where he inflates his own legislative committee's prior attempt to constitutionalize Virginia slavery out of existence.

Maybe he was disingenuous. Maybe he had the international rather than the local audience in mind. And it is even possible that the extremity of Jefferson's racism was a compensation for his attempt at antislavery politics (rather than, as we now tend to imagine, the other way around). Either way, there is something to be explained in Jefferson's antislavery words.

George Van Cleve does not seem to think so. Unlike many of the major works in the field, from Winthrop Jordan and David Brion Davis to James Oakes and Lacy K. Ford, he isn't much interested in antislavery or proslavery ideas at all.¹ His politics of slavery occurs at the juncture of statute law, constitution making, and national politics—and is decidedly Machiavellian in its workings. The result is likely to be taken as an authoritative demonstration of the proslavery nature of the new nation in general and of the Constitution in particular. Despite Gordon S. Wood's repeated insistence that recent historiography overstates the importance of slavery, the time seems ripe for such a detailed demonstration.² One suspects that this work will receive closer attention than its nearest predecessor, Donald L. Robinson's sweeping, nuanced, yet neglected Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 1765-1820 (1971). But there are real costs to Van Cleve's particular mode of putting proslavery politics at the center.

Van Cleve calls for the field to move beyond debating whether slavery was or was not central "to analyze precisely what effects it had" (p. 6). The Revolutionary era "strengthened slavery as a political institution," and the results were not "paradoxical" at all, he writes in a rare—and for that reason striking—criticism of David Brion Davis' work emphasizing the contrast between rising antislavery ideas and seemingly less tractable economic and political realities. Perhaps the most original part of the book extends Van Cleve's findings from his 2006 article on the Somerset case.³ Somerset culminated an imperialization of the law of slavery and was resisted for that reason in the colonies, though the colonial response was not all of one piece. "Americans were divided over slavery"; but the decision, perhaps influenced by Somerset (Van Cleve doesn't say), of the mainland Southern colonies to join in declaring independence meant that the Revolution "fundamentally changed the balance of power" in favor of the new slave states, whose wealth and population meant that they determined the new, post-independence politics of slavery (pp. 40, 45). As a result, the Articles of Confederation gave unprecedented protection to slavery, carefully protecting states' power over slaves, including fugitives. Indeed, the Articles' emphasis on states' autonomy, a "polar opposite of parliamentary supremacy," included...