Piling on Jefferson

National Review, Dec 22, 2003 by Earl M. Maltz

"Negro President": Jefferson and the Slave Power, by Garry Wills (Houghton Mifflin, 274 pp., $25)

POOR Thomas Jefferson. After many years of unconditional love from scholars and the general public, the author of the Declaration of Independence now finds his reputation under attack from a number of quarters. The widespread interest in Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemings has cast a particularly harsh light on his attitude toward slavery. In this new book, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Garry Wills joins the chorus. While disclaiming any intention to engage in "Jefferson-bashing," he focuses on Jefferson's "role as a defender and extender of the slave system," and purports to give readers fresh insights into the influence of the "slave power" on Jefferson's election and policies. Wills describes Jefferson as "a giant, but a giant trammeled in a net, and obliged (he thought) to keep repairing and strengthening the coils of that net."

Throughout, Wills emphasizes what he sees as the overwhelming influence of the slave power and downplays the importance of congressional actions that limited slavery. For instance, he describes the Northwest Ordinance--despite its undoubted significance to the ultimate extinction of slavery in Illinois and Indiana--as a "pyrrhic" victory for antislavery forces because it did not result in the immediate disappearance of slavery from the area north of the Ohio River. This general perspective on the sectional conflict is already well represented by the Neoabolitionist school of Early American historians, and informs important works by scholars such as Paul Finkelman, Leonard Richards, Donald Robinson, and William Wiecek. Wills lacks the deep understanding of the issues that has made these authors' work indispensable; his book is therefore a major disappointment.

At times, "Negro President" fails to satisfy the most basic criterion for historical scholarship: simple accuracy. Of course, almost every historian makes silly mistakes on names, dates, and places; minor errors can be forgiven. In this book, however, some of the factual misstatements concern matters that are central to Wills's analysis. A particularly egregious example is the author's characterization of the voting record of Federalist Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts, whom he describes as the "anti-Jefferson." While acknowledging some of Pickering's shortcomings, Wills finds much to admire in what he sees as the man's consistent, steadfast opposition to slavery and the slave power. Wills explicitly contrasts Pickering's positions not only with those of Jefferson, but also with those of relatively timid Federalists such as John Quincy Adams. Indeed, the book is almost as much about Pickering as it is about Jefferson.

Unfortunately, Wills's portrayal of Pickering is based in part on misinformation. In 1804, when Congress was considering a measure to organize the Louisiana Purchase, Sen. James Hillhouse of Connecticut proposed to abolish slavery in all of the territory that had been acquired from France. The Hillhouse amendment provided senators with a rare opportunity to vote directly against the institution of slavery; not surprisingly, although the motion failed by a 17-11 vote, many Northern Federalists supported the amendment. Pickering, however, was not one of them: The Annals of Congress lists Pickering as voting against it. Wills never addresses this problem; instead, he portrays Pickering as a supporter of the Hillhouse proposal, explicitly relying on this "fact" to distinguish Pickering from Adams. Knowledgeable scholars are left to wonder about the source of Wills's information, while nonspecialists will simply be misled.

Even when he gets his basic facts straight, Wills produces analysis that is often at once pretentious and unsophisticated. His shortcomings are typified by the discussion of the 1800 election, in which Jefferson defeated John Adams. Wills begins by asserting that "if real votes alone had been counted, Adams would have been returned to office." The reference to "real votes" is itself somewhat misleading, suggesting that Jefferson and Adams were engaged in a contest in which ordinary citizens participated directly, and that Jefferson owed his victory to voter fraud. In fact, the actual votes that mattered were cast by electors chosen in each state separately. Moreover, in the election of 1800, the electors were selected by popular vote in only 5 of the 16 participating states. In the remaining eleven states, the electors were chosen by the state legislatures--a point that Wills himself later acknowledges in passing.

Against this background, Wills must be understood as making an inartful reference to the impact of slave ownership on the outcome of the vote in the Electoral College. His basic argument has four simple steps. First, the number of votes to which a state is entitled in the Electoral College is calculated by adding its number of seats in the House of Representatives to the number of senators to which it is entitled. Second, prior to the abolition of slavery, a state's representation in the House of Representatives was determined by adding the number of free inhabitants of the state to three-fifths the number of its slaves. Third, Jefferson was the beneficiary of the overwhelming majority of slave-state electoral votes. Fourth, if these electoral votes had not been counted, Adams would have won.