(By Lee Habeeb and Vince Benedetto, Dec 30, 2025)
It was 1860 and America was at an inflection point. It
wasn't just slavery that was on trial: the Founding Fathers' vision itself was
up for grabs. A growing segment of America’s population—mostly in the South—was
convinced that the authors of the Constitution were fundamentally pro-slavery.
It’s a claim, ironically, that’s been repeated ad nauseum about our founders
for the past few decades in progressive academic circles, too, a claim that
runs throughout the most recent documentary by Ken Burns, The American
Revolution.
That's why it’s worth turning to Abraham Lincoln—a president
universally admired by historians, Burns included. What did the Great
Emancipator have to say about the matter when he was alive, and why did Burns
and his team leave his most famous address on the subject out of the
documentary?
In 1857, Lincoln tipped his hand on the subject of slavery
and the founders' intention in his condemnation of the Supreme Court’s Dred
Scott ruling. Far from being hypocrites, Lincoln believed they were
visionaries. "They did not mean to
assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality,
nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them," Lincoln
said. "In fact they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply
to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as
circumstances should permit."
Then came Lincoln’s 1860 Cooper Union Address in New York
City that propelled the little-known politician from Illinois to national
prominence. It was less a speech than a defense of our founders on the subject
of slavery and a constitutional argument for the use of federal power to
restrict slavery in the territories. He deployed a tool he’d used many times
before as one of America’s best trial lawyers: evidence.
Lincoln prepared for months, scouring Jonathan
Elliot's The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption
of the Federal Constitution and official records of Congress, too.
Like a detective, Lincoln followed the 39 founders' actions to determine
whether they’d acted to limit or abolish slavery or to contribute to its
preservation or expansion.
Lincoln began by transporting listeners to 1784. The issue
at hand was land in possession of the federal government known as the
Northwestern Territory. Four of the eventual signers of the Constitution were
present, and three voted to prohibit slavery in the new territory. In 1787, the issue reappeared. Two more of
the 39 signers of our future Constitution were present, and both voted to
prevent slavery in the Northwest Territory.
And in 1789, the very first federal Congress under the new
Constitution renewed the Northwest Ordinance, setting rules and rights for the
new territories. And again, banning slavery. Here is Lincoln once again. "The bill went through all its stages
without a word of opposition, and finally passed both branches without yeas and
nays, which is equivalent to a unanimous passage," he said. "In this
Congress there were sixteen of the thirty-nine fathers who framed the original
Constitution....George Washington, another of the "thirty-nine," was
then President of the United States, and, as such approved and signed the
bill."
By Lincoln's final calculations, 23 of the 39 signers of the
Constitution had a voting record on the issue of slavery. Of the 23, 21—91
percent—voted to prohibit or limit its expansion. Of the remaining 16 signers
with no record, Lincoln's research revealed strong anti-slavery sentiments. "If we should look into their acts and
declarations…, it would appear to us that on the direct question of federal
control of slavery in federal territories, the sixteen, if they had acted at
all, would probably have acted just as the twenty-three did," he said.
"Among that sixteen were several of the most noted anti-slavery men of
those times—as Dr. [Benjamin] Franklin, Alexander Hamilton and Gouverneur
Morris—while there was not one now known to have been otherwise, unless it may
be John Rutledge of South Carolina."
Lincoln demonstrated beyond any doubt that our founders
believed slavery was a moral wrong. "Neither
the word slave nor slavery is found in the Constitution, nor the word property
even, in any connection with language alluding to the things slave, or
slavery," he wrote. This was done
intentionally, he noted, to "exclude from the Constitution the idea that
there could be property in man."
Burns, an admirer of Lincoln, ignored Lincoln’s speech
in The American Revolution and downplayed the history-making
achievement of our founders when, in July of 1787, they outlawed slavery in
territory that nearly doubled the size of America and would become the free
states of Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin.
Burns instead closed out his documentary with these words by
historian Vincent Brown: “If we take the words of the Declaration of
Independence written by Thomas Jefferson, all men–let’s say men and women–are
created free and equal, Jefferson clearly didn’t take that seriously as a slave
holder, but I do.”
One man who has written about Jefferson and the founders
extensively is Dr. Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, who would surely
disagree with Brown. "The
astounding thing is not that some of our founders were slaveholders. There was
a lot of slavery back then, and for all recorded time,” Arnn noted in a speech
a decade ago. “The astounding thing—the miracle even, one might say—is that
these slaveholders founded a republic based on principles designed to abnegate
slavery."
The Burns documentary, brilliant in many parts, also did a
poor job of contextualizing slavery. Not mentioned was any note of the
trans-Saharan slave trade from the seventh to 20th centuries, when between 10
million and 18 million Africans were sold and transported, or other countries
that dominated the transatlantic slave trade (Brazil with nearly 6 million
slaves traded, Britain 3.2 million, France 1.4 million, Spain 1.1 million, the
Netherlands 550,000 and America 305,000).
"Very few Americans know that slavery was common
throughout the world as well as in Africa," said Sandra Greene, professor
of African history at Cornell and author of Slave Owners of West Africa.
"Slavery in the United States ended in 1865, but in West Africa it was not
legally ended until 1875, and then it stretched on unofficially until almost
World War I."
While 11 million to 12 million people are estimated to have
been exported as slaves from West Africa during the years of the slave trade,
millions more were kept in Africa, according to Greene. "It's not something that many West
African countries talk about," she said. "It's not exactly a proud
moment because everyone now realizes that slavery is not acceptable."
Burns also spent little to no time on the burgeoning
abolition movement around the world. "While
slavery is as old as humanity, abolitionism is a relatively recent
phenomenon," historian Katie Kelaidis wrote. "It's not difficult to
trace the explosion of the worldwide abolition movement to the decade the
Declaration of Independence was signed."
The study of American history should not whitewash the ills
of slavery and must include the impact of segregation and racism in American
life. Burns and his team did great work on both fronts and a terrific job
including Black and Native American voices into the rich narrative of our
nation. But misrepresenting our founders' intent on the subject of slavery–by
design or omission—is not just a sign of bad scholarship and bad history, it’s
an act of bad faith.
Lincoln’s own words make the definitive case of our
founders' intent on the subject of slavery. Burns ignored it, but Lincoln’s
Cooper Union Address lives on for all to see and read.
https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/cooper.htm
Vince Benedetto is the founder and president of the Bold
Gold Media Group. A graduate of the Air Force Academy, he is an avid historian
and head of the Churchill Society of Pennsylvania.
