TThis July 4, as the clock ticks down to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 2026, the United States once again faces a sobering question: Why did the nation’s founders, supposedly enlightened demigods, perpetuate the horror and hypocrisy of slavery rather than banish it altogether?
Many theories have been advanced. Some historians attribute the Founders’ failure to implement a federal plan of emancipation to entrenched white supremacy. Others lay the blame on a transatlantic economic system that simultaneously enriched white planters in the South and merchants in the North through profits from the slave trade and labor. As horrific as these crimes against humanity were, the Founders simply could not shake their addiction to the lucrative status quo.
These social and economic interpretations of the Founding Fathers’ grotesque inaction on slavery are certainly correct. But they overlook another essential explanatory model: the survivalist interpretation, according to which the Founding Fathers perpetuated slavery because, without it, the young country would have split into separate confederacies and killed each other in civil wars. According to this model, it was a matter of white self-preservation versus African-American freedom.
In the 1770s and 1780s, the Founders feared a three-stage chain reaction that would begin with the secession of one or more states from the Union. When such a disunion occurred, they were convinced that the United States would split into two separate confederacies, either Northern and Southern, or New England, Central, and Southern.
It was this second stage—disunion—that presented an epic nightmare to the Founders, because, in their view, dissolution into separate confederacies would quickly precipitate civil wars over trade, the undivided war debt, financial accounting between states and the federal government, disputed state boundaries, and the rich bounty of the western territory claimed by Anglo-Americans across the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River.
The Founders knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they had to “unite or die.” George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and others felt the weapons of disunion and civil war pointed at their backs in every decision they made in the 1770s and 1780s, including those regarding slavery and the slave trade.
If a coalition of Northern leaders who supported abolitionism had demanded an end to the slave trade or even a gradual plan of emancipation, some, if not all, Southern states would have seceded from the Union, setting off a deadly three-stage chain reaction: disunion, the formation of separate confederacies, and, in short order, bloody civil wars.
South Carolina statesman Thomas Lynch laid bare the risk of secession over slavery as early as July 1776, promising on the floor of Independence Hall that any attempt by Northerners to politically define enslaved people as human beings, rather than property, would result in their withdrawal from the Union.
“If there is a debate over whether their slaves are their property,” Lynch said, “the Confederacy ends.”
A year earlier, delegates had deliberated on the violent dynamics of disunity as they debated how to counter coercive laws passed by the British Parliament in response to the Boston Tea Party.
One delegate to Congress, Pennsylvanian Joseph Galloway, warned his fellow Americans that the 13 colonies would have a hard time uniting if they seceded from the British Empire and that as a result they would soon fall into two subcategories of geographical civil war: territorial, frontier, and boundary wars between the individual colonies, and finally, at some point, a bloody conflagration between North and South.
Galloway did not specify what would trigger the North-South civil war, but he predicted that when it did break out, the vulnerable agricultural South would suffer a crushing loss.
“The Northern Colonies, accustomed to military discipline and difficulties,” Galloway predicted in 1775, “will, in all probability, be the first to enter the list of military controversies; and, like the Saxons and Danes of the North, will spread devastation and chaos in the Southern Colonies, who, weakened by want of discipline, and having a dangerous enemy in their own bowels, will, after undergoing all the horrors of a civil war, yield to superior force and submit to the will of the conquerors.”
This “dangerous enemy within” was, of course, the half-million slaves living in the Southern colonies, ready to lead a revolution against their feudal lords. Clearly, as the Pennsylvanian indicated, enslaved black Americans would rise up for their own freedom in such a war, joining the Northerners in their conquest.
During the debates over the Articles of Confederation, John Witherspoon, president of the university later renamed Princeton, made a similar argument in response to proposals by some delegates to abandon a tight, perpetual constitutional union in favor of a looser association of states that would last only until the end of the war. Witherspoon called the idea “madness.”
They must unite in an indissoluble government, Witherspoon warned in a speech on July 30, because otherwise the Revolutionary War would be “only a prelude to a struggle of a more terrible nature, and indeed much more properly a civil war, than that which is now often called that name.”
Why, Witherspoon wondered, should the citizens of the American states spend their mutual money and blood to gain independence from the British “with the certainty, as soon as peace should be established with them, of a more lasting war, a more unnatural, more bloody and much more desperate war, between the colonies themselves?”
John Dickinson, another Pennsylvania delegate, also spoke of the violent consequences of disunion, predicting that an American Civil War would likely break out within two or three decades of independence, when New England would break away to form its own confederacy. Shortly thereafter, New Englanders would invade New York to secure control of the Hudson River, sparking a civil war of incalculable consequences. Dickinson foresaw this scenario in what he called the “Doomsday Book of America,” calling it “dreadful” to contemplate.
Years later, James Madison, tacitly acknowledging that the American Union was a forced marriage, explained why the framers of the Constitution did not immediately abolish the slave trade. Had they imposed such a plan, he said, South Carolina and Georgia would have seceded from the Union.
Learn more: July 17, 1776 was a forced marriage
“Great as the evil is,” Madison continued, referring to the slave trade, “a dismemberment of the Union would be worse.”
So if the survivalist interpretation of the Founders’ policy decisions is correct, where are we today in our historical understanding of why they turned a blind eye to one of the greatest crimes against humanity ever committed?
The Founders did this partly because they lived in a culture of pervasive white supremacy and partly because they were inextricably tied to an economic system that exploited slavery and the slave trade for economic gain and profit.
But, as the study of history often shows, the situation is more complex. American political leaders faced a difficult choice in the 1770s and 1780s, and thereafter up until the outbreak of the Civil War. They could either implement a program to end slavery or they could free themselves from civil wars.
The Founders did virtually nothing at the federal level to save African Americans from the despotism of slavery because, fearing for their lives, they put their own safety and preservation first. It was a serious devilish bargain, with far-reaching and tragic consequences for the Revolutionary era and the future of the nation.
