Abolition, Ethnic Cleansing, or Both? Antinomies of the U.S. Founders

Joel Wendland-Liu

The Patriots’ Dilemma:
White Abolitionism and Black Banishment
in the Founding of the United States of America
By Timothy Messer-Kruse
London, Pluto Press, 2024. $26.95 paperback.

THE PATRIOTS’ DILEMMA explores the contradictory attitudes of the U.S. founders toward slavery. Timothy Messer-Kruse’s new book argues that although many founders opposed slavery, their vision of a “white republic” inhibited their meager attempts to abolish it.

The racist idea of a whites-only country, which existed even before independence, aimed to create a society based on the elimination of Black and Indigenous people. This goal led them to develop harsh legal, political, and military methods to control enslaved people after 1781.

Messer-Kruse’s singular scholarly contribution is the exploration of what appears to be a colossal contradiction — between the founders’ claimed abhorrence of slavery, and their absolute refusal to share the newly formed polity with Black people as equals. This thesis centers the problem of racism as the primary conditioning factor shaping early American political thought and action.

By the 1780s, the founders had won their war of independence from the most formidable empire in the world. They had won the power to create a new country with new laws and a new economic system. They were at the peak of their creative capability.

So why didn’t they make a society without slavery? Or, following Messer-Kruse’s thought, why couldn’t they achieve their vision of a “white abolitionist” utopia free of both slavery and Black people?

Despite their talk of equality and independence, slavery continued. Messer-Kruse concludes that this contradiction at the heart of “white abolitionism” molded a political system that preserved racial slavery and subsequently denied full equality to emancipated Black people.

To support his argument Messer-Kruse tracks what he believes are the origins of this conundrum, from the late 1600s through the unfolding revolutionary crisis in the late 1700s and into the early years of the new republic.

In the colonial period, some writers, mainly Quakers, began to pair the notion of slavery’s moral penalties for white people with the impulse to continue the social subjugation of freed Black people. This pairing, the author argues, cultivated a white racial identity based on the urge to preserve their social dominance.

Such an obsession with white supremacy eventually conditioned the Euro-American self-conception of this country as a place exclusively for white people in its colonial and post-revolutionary iterations. The new country they envisaged would be based on white citizenship.

Navigating a Moral Conundrum

Messer-Kruse extensively documents how enslavers knew what they were doing was wrong, regularly bemoaning the moral degradation of those who oversaw the ownership of and trade in human beings. Along the way, anti-slavery writers and enslavers alike concocted numerous schemes to achieve their dreams of a racially pure white republic without enslaved (i.e. Black) people.

Messer-Kruse shows how colonial and early republican political elites created manumission schemes always designed with draconian measures to control the movements, labor and lives of emancipated Black people, envisioned elaborate mass deportation projects, and encouraged largely inadequate white immigration based on indenture.

In other words, “white abolitionism” emphasized the moral recovery of white people through the elimination of the slave system — and with it, all Black people.

In all the evidence Messer-Kruse assembles, he shows that the anti-slavery views that have been preserved in historical archives up to the second decade of the 1800s never countenanced abolition on terms anywhere remotely near a recognition of the total human worth of those who had been enslaved and who might be freed.

All agreed that continued subordination and subjugation of manumitted Black people was desirable and necessary. Such policies reflected the contradiction between their anti-slavery ideas and the racist, exclusive utopia they wanted to create.

Messer-Kruse cites the often-articulated aspiration for a white indentured labor force and occasional attempts by colonial governments to increase taxes on the importation of enslaved people as evidence for the persistence of “white abolitionism.”

The author further insists that this hostility to the slave system drove their radical break with the British empire. Still, their insistence on white supremacy only deepened the contradictions that propelled the country toward its eventual civil war.

Protecting Slavery in Practice?

Messer-Kruse’s extensive archival research challenges historians who downplay the founders’ racism and overemphasize their creation of a consistently improving democratic society that might eventually fulfill the original ideals of freedom and equality.

His book is less successful, however, in a second stated objective: countering newer historical scholarship (e.g. Gerald Horne, The Counterrevolution of 1776) arguing that a substantial portion of the founders fought the Revolutionary War to protect slavery from embryonic British abolitionism.

Messer-Kruse cites colonial protests against British shipping that legally imported and regulated enslaved people, insisting that these protests primarily expressed anti-slavery politics. Despite the book’s impressive compilation of archival evidence, more careful analysis and interpretation reveal critical limits on the author’s conclusions.

For example, Messer-Kruse fuses most criticisms of the slave system or the slave trade with abolitionist thought, generalizing these thought patterns to the founders as a whole. In contrast, historian Kris Manjapra in his book Black Ghost of Empire offers more precise delineations between “abolitionism” and manumission laws and practices.

Manumission (individual granting of freedom) was categorically distinct from abolition because it was rooted in the idea of the persistence of white power (a point that converges with Messer-Kruse’s reading of anti-slavery thought).

In addition to continued political and economic subordination, colonial and post-revolutionary anti-slavery writers premised manumission on the notion that freed people owed reparations to former enslavers to be paid through racialized labor schemes of super-exploitation or cash payouts.

The manumission schemes that became U.S., British, and French policies in the 19th century had been first outlined in the 17th century. Many such schemes entailed Black repayment to white enslavers. The anti-slavery Quaker (and slaveholder) George Fox, for example, in 1676 argued that emancipation should be based on enslaved people repaying masters for their “investment.”

Messer-Kruse includes Fox’s ideas as evidence for the “religious foundations” of “white abolitionism” and white racial identity, but makes little of the repayment scheme or the naming of enslavement as an “investment.” Such approaches to manumission might be called reverse reparations — the absolute negation of the terms on which, Manjapra argues, abolition is defined as possible.

In contrast to such “manumission” policies, Manjapra argues that abolition distinctly refers to the immediate freeing of enslaved people and recognizing their rights to self-determination, compensation, and reparative justice for what had been stolen. The difference is critical because it deliberately acknowledges how racial slavery, after formal emancipation, had been materially extended intentionally through manumission practices.

Without immediate reparative justice, the injustice linked to the racist dehumanization of Black people persisted. Anti-slavery and anti-slave trade ideas cultivated and debated by the most powerful plantation-owning and incipient capitalist Euro-Americans, as Messer-Kruse shows, never encompassed Manjapra’s definition of abolition. Thus, what appears to Messer-Kruse as “the patriots’ dilemma” may have been more logically consistent than at first glance.

A Closer Look

Here a more careful reading of Messer-Kruse’s evidence is necessary. Many of the archival documents he explores provide direct proof of another aspect of the problem he has failed to explore.

For example, additional scrutiny of one of a few Black-authored statements included in the book elicits a richer explanation. A 1773 statement by enslaved people in Massachusetts made the case for a limited form of abolition (using Manjapra’s definition). The petition sought immediate legal freedom and the right to return to Africa, setting aside what they saw as their rightful claim to what “belongs to us for past services.”

Instead of paying white masters for their freedom, enshrined in the manumission schemes before and after the Revolution, these petitioners imply they were due compensation for “past services.” Instead of payment, however, they agreed to surrender that just claim in exchange for immediate freedom and the right to leave the country.

Further, Messer-Kruse focuses on the “patriots’ dilemma” exclusively in terms of race and politics, but overlooks the economic aspects which are equally important. Racial slavery, after all, was a system of labor in a plantation economy that was appended to developing capitalism within a world imperialist system.

Ownership of human bodies, which had become identified exclusively with Black people by the latter half of the seventeenth century, was also a form of capital upon which planters’ wealth was based. Dispensing with this seemingly obvious cause of the “dilemma” obstructs acquiring more complete answers to the book’s questions.

Historians have shown that the plantation-colonial system, based on enslaved labor and racialized capital, functioned to support capitalist development — through its division of labor, myriad consumer market needs, and capacity to produce the means of production on a self-regulating and autonomous basis — within the home country, not in the colony.

In Europe’s American colonies, this division was the source of most conflicts between plantation owners and the metropole. It typically was expressed as disagreements about control of economic policy, according to Eric Williams in Capitalism and Slavery. British plantation owners, for example, frequently fought over taxes and pricing schemes controlled by London.

London wanted low prices on plantation goods; planters wanted high prices. This included the slave trade itself: Higher prices on enslaved people meant a more substantial capital base (a higher asset value) and higher prices on the goods they made — anathema to most London capitalists, who wanted the lowest possible price on imported plantation goods.

Along with the established notion of emancipation based on compensation for the enslaver’s “investment,” an urge for favorable pricing schemes was a critical determinant of how American founders framed and understood their problem with racist slavery.

Thus, the “evils of the slave trade,” a point where anti-slavery and pro-slavery discourses pragmatically merged, often centered primarily on autonomous management of the supply of enslaved people into the plantation regime.

Major conflicts that spurred the 1770s revolutionary crisis focused on the slave trade’s regulation. Confrontations with British trade and military officials in various harbors occurred due to American resistance against British attempts to stop American slave-smuggling.

Landmark events that pushed the conflict to a no-turning-back, revolutionary condition, as Gerald Horne has shown in The Counter-Revolution of 1776, involved not just protests against the slave trade. Many such violent incidents rejected British repression of illegal smuggling, including, in some of the most inflammatory instances, British attempts to monopolize the thriving illegal American slave trade.

Contrary to Messer-Kruse’s emphasis on anti-slavery political action, supporters of American control of the slave trade were prominent drivers of violent conflict with British officials, after which independence seemed a logical next step.

Resolving the “Dilemma”

Thus, apart from the minority anti-slavery position, the primary objection to British rule in the 1770s was not slavery or the slave trade itself. Instead, it was a conflict over who would control the slave trade, the prices of enslaved labor, and the prices of the exported goods produced by enslaved labor in the plantation regime.

Consequently, when the revolutionary government gained control over its territory and laws, it imposed a slave trade ban that was delayed by two decades (until 1809), ensuring the creation of a well-supplied (and notoriously brutal) internal market that freed U.S. traders from being forced to contend with the dominant British navy.

A second significant conflict impacting the plantation-colonial system was the disagreement over who would determine the internal colonial development of capitalist relations of production. Finance capital quickly attached itself to the slave trade, and various debt and currency schemes ballooned, related to financing the purchase of racialized humans.

London’s regulations on exports and imports severely limited the autonomous ability of the colonies to make their own goods and to make the means of producing those goods, a determining feature of capitalism’s self-reproducing capacity. Colonial-sited merchants, finance capitalists, and industrialists sought opportunities for growth and expansion.

Messer-Kruse remarks little on these political-economic issues and their influence on the slavery debates.

One final point deserves attention. In marshaling the evidence that enslavers disliked slavery and sought an exclusively white domain, Messer-Kruse refers to repeated calls to encourage white migration to North America from Ireland, England and Scotland. Enslavers and anti-slavery writers contended that slavery’s brutal conditions discouraged such migration because potential European laborers did not want to be treated like slaves.

Messer-Kruse cites tax increases on the importation of enslaved people to show the depth of “white abolitionism.” He does not mention that colonists occasionally increased taxes on indentured servants. Also absent is a necessary discussion of the enthusiastic transition from white indenture to racialized slavery in the mid- and late-17th century in the plantation system. Both of these major trends complicate his assessment of the strength of anti-slavery sentiment.

Futile subsequent attempts to encourage white migration as a source of replacing enslaved labor were always designed as indentured servitude, contractually obligating labor service under conditions of super-exploitation. Consequently, despite their desires for an imaginary, racially pure colony or republic, planters took only those tangible actions that would fulfill the most urgent demand for the largest numbers of highly exploited laborers.

Despite their claims to desire a white work force, early republican founders found no satisfactory alternative to racial slavery. Accordingly, combined with their anti-Black racism, American enslavers clearly understood they had no substitute for the underlying capital value or labor value of enslaved humans. Thus, they caused slavery to persist.

Messer-Kruse’s most important contribution is that he shows how racism shaped the political choices of the founders.

They created a republic based on white power, property and citizenship, an idea they and their ancestors had cultivated for at least a century. This outcome rested on a logic of European racial supremacy that emerged sometime in the 17th century, and became entangled with even the most liberal or progressive of white-authored political theory.

His framing of the “dilemma” they faced over slavery, however, is partial at best. More fundamentally, the founders’ dilemma centered on how to create a racially pure white society that also preserved the relations of labor exploitation and capital accumulation that had given them so much wealth and power, in a world in which the non-white human majority was increasingly mingling with them as capitalist circuits of production globalized.

November-December 2024, ATC 233