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397 notes prologue 1. For a discussion of the founders’ dilemma in reconciling the early republic’s ideals with its treatment of persons of color, see, for example, Ellis, Founding Brothers, pp. 81–119. “The largest unmentioned and presumably excluded constituency was the black population, about 90 percent of which was enslaved. [From the beginning of our nation, 10 percent of blacks were free individuals.] [President] Washington said nothing whatsoever about slavery in his Farewell Address, sustaining the silence that the Congress had adopted as the official posture early in his presidency.” Ibid., p. 157. The final draft of the U.S. Constitution avoids explicit mention of slavery. “It would, James Madison said, be wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men.” Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy, p. 34. “Silence, of course, can speak volumes, and in Washington’s case, the unspoken message was that a moratorium had been declared on this most controversial topic, which more than any other issue possessed the potential to destroy the fragile union that [the President] saw as his life’s work and chief political legacy. Since the primary purpose of the Farewell Address was to affirm that legacy and further the promotion of his national vision, the last thing Washington wanted to mention was the one subject that presented the most palpable threat to the entire enterprise. Like Madison in 1790, he wanted slavery off the American political agenda. Unlike Madison, however, and unlike most of his fellow Virginians, including Jefferson, there is reason to believe that President George Washington thought this extension on slavery as a political problem should lapse in 1808, when the Constitution permitted the slave trade to end.” Ellis, Founding Brothers , pp. 157–58. 2. At our breakfast table, the Coleman family talked about “The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table” and other writings of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., the father of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (who spent three years after graduating from Harvard College fighting in the Civil War and was then an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme 09-0488-1 notes.indd 397 9/9/10 8:30 PM 398 / Notes to Pages xiv–9 Court). I had assumed that the Holmeses, father and son, not only were antislavery but were in favor of the integration of people of color into American life.Thus it was a great shock when I learned that Dr. Holmes, while dean of Harvard Medical School, had expelled three colored medical students because the white-student majority in 1850 had signed a petition stating that “we cannot consent to be identified as fellow students with blacks, whose company we would not keep in the streets, and whose society as associates we would not tolerate in our houses” and that “we feel our grievances to be but the beginning of an evil, which, if not checked will increase, and that this number of respectable white students will, in future, be in inverse ratio to that of blacks.” Quoted in Menand, The Metaphysical Club, p. 8. When I started college at the University of Pennsylvania (in January 1938), I knew that a number of distinguished white Boston intellectuals, such as William James and Theodore Parker, believed “in the natural inferiority of Black people” and that Louis Agassiz, the “man for whom the Lawrence Scientific School [at Harvard] was created,” taught the inferiority of people of color. Quoted ibid., pp. 87, 97. Also see Josiah C. Nott, Two Lectures on the Natural History of the Caucasian and Negro Races (Mobile: Dade and Thompson, 1844), pp. 23–24. More troubling is the case of Samuel Gridley Howe, physician, philanthropist, and abolitionist, who was married to the author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and had been appointed by President Lincoln in 1863 to head the American Freedmen ’s Inquiry Commission, which was charged with formulating policies for dealing with a large freed black population. Howe accepted “as scientific” the erroneous racial myths (the inherent biological inferiority of blacks) set forth by Nott, William James, Theodore Parker, and Agassiz, which “helped sustain a hundred years of segregation.” Quoted in Menand, The Metaphysical Club, p. 116. 3. Marshall, An Autobiographical Sketch, p. 3. 4. See chronology in this volume. Also see Kluger, Simple Justice, pp. 292–93, 321, 399, 553, 555, 601, 624, 638–39, 643, 722–23, 726, 776; and DeFrank, Write It When I’m Gone, pp. 49, 92, 207. chapter two 1. John Marshall...