The Audacity of Hope

But only once has the conversation broken down completely, and that was over the one
subject the Founders refused to talk about.
The Declaration of Independence may have been, in the words of historian Joseph Ellis,
“a transformative moment in world history, when all laws and human relationships
dependent on coercion would be swept away forever.” But that spirit of liberty didn’t
extend, in the minds of the Founders, to the slaves who worked their fields, made their
beds, and nursed their children.
The Constitution’s exquisite machinery would secure the rights of citizens, those
deemed members of America’s political community. But it provided no protection to
those outside the constitutional circle—the Native American whose treaties proved
worthless before the court of the conqueror, or the black man Dred Scott, who would
walk into the Supreme Court a free man and leave a slave.
Democratic deliberation might have been sufficient to expand the franchise to white
men without property and eventually women; reason, argument, and American
pragmatism might have eased the economic growing pains of a great nation and helped
lessen religious and class tensions that would plague other nations. But deliberation
alone could not provide the slave his freedom or cleanse America of its original sin. In
the end, it was the sword that would sever his chains.
What does this say about our democracy? There’s a school of thought that sees the
Founding Fathers only as hypocrites and the Constitution only as a betrayal of the grand
ideals set forth by the Declaration of Independence; that agrees with early abolitionists
that the Great Compromise between North and South was a pact with the Devil. Others,
representing the safer, more conventional wisdom, will insist that all the constitutional
compromise on slavery—the omission of abolitionist sentiments from the original draft
of the Declaration, the Three-fifths Clause and the Fugitive Slave Clause and the
Importation Clause, the self-imposed gag rule that the Twenty-fourth Congress would
place on all debate regarding the issue of slavery, the very structure of federalism and
the Senate—was a necessary, if unfortunate, requirement for the formation of the
Union; that in their silence, the Founders only sought to postpone what they were
certain would be slavery’s ultimate demise; that this single lapse cannot detract from the
genius of the Constitution, which permitted the space for abolitionists to rally and the
debate to proceed, and provided the framework by which, after the Civil War had been
fought, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments could be passed, and the
Union finally perfected.
How can I, an American with the blood of Africa coursing through my veins, choose
sides in such a dispute? I can’t. I love America too much, am too invested in what this
country has become, too committed to its institutions, its beauty, and even its ugliness,
to focus entirely on the circumstances of its birth. But neither can I brush aside the
magnitude of the injustice done, or erase the ghosts of generations past, or ignore the
open wound, the aching spirit, that ails this country still.
The best I can do in the face of our history is remind myself that it has not always been
the pragmatist, the voice of reason, or the force of compromise, that has created the
conditions for liberty. The hard, cold facts remind me that it was unbending idealists
like William Lloyd Garrison who first sounded the clarion call for justice; that it was