Elimination of slavery

The argument

The United States' Declaration of Independence states "that all men are created equal." The men who founded the nation subscribed to the political philosophy of Liberalism, and that sentence committed them to a universal claim rather than a limited one. Many of these founding fathers owned slaves themselves, and the contradiction between the principle they had written down and the property they held was not a marginal inconsistency but a direct challenge to the philosophy itself. They began to see how the system of slavery could not exist within a liberal society: a doctrine whose starting point is the equality of persons cannot accommodate the ownership of persons without abandoning its own foundation. For many years this struggle culminated and turned into the abolitionist movement — an effort to eliminate slavery in its totality. The movement first began in Britain and was adopted in the United States by the 1830s. Its arguments were liberal arguments: abolitionists promoted the political philosophy of Liberalism and called for eliminating slavery to fulfill the promise of freeing all people, holding the founding principle to its plain meaning rather than to the compromises made around it. In the U.S., this culminated in the Civil War — a war over slavery. At the conclusion of the war, the United States passed the thirteenth amendment to its constitution, stating that "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude…shall exist within the United States." The pattern matters as much as the outcome. Slavery was not ended by an appeal from outside liberalism but by an appeal to it, with the philosophy's own universal premise supplying the standard by which the institution was condemned and finally abolished. While it took many years, Liberalism helped eliminate slavery, and that is counted among its benefits.

Context

The term Liberalism comes from the Latin word liber, meaning free. Liberalism was a political philosophy that many of the founding fathers of the United States of America adopted. Yet, most of them struggled with the doctrine's call for the freedom of all people. The abolitionist movement in the U.S. pushed Liberalism's call for the freedom of slaves.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Liberalism did not eliminate slavery. The author of the United States’ Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, owned slaves on his plantation at Monticello. While Jefferson espoused the political philosophy of Liberalism, he, and many other powerful politicians, viewed their slaves as property and not people. This was ingrained in the United States Supreme Court ruling on the case Dred Scott v. Sandford that declared slaves were protected property that the owner could use as they please – just like the rest of a person’s property. The abolitionist movement eliminated slavery, not the political philosophy of Liberalism. It took the likes of William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglas, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Brown to push liberals to eliminate slavery.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The declaration and the practice coexisted for generations. As the counter-argument notes, its own author held people in slavery at Monticello, and in Dred Scott the Supreme Court read the constitutional order as protecting slaves as property. That liberalism is incompatible with slavery is the thing to be shown, not something the founders' philosophy establishes on its own. [Rejecting P2] Abolitionists drew on several traditions at once, evangelical Christianity prominent among them, and the argument does not show that the liberal strand was the operative one. [Rejecting P3] The Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment establish that slavery ended, not what ended it. The counter-argument attributes the outcome to an abolitionist movement that had to push liberals into acting, which reverses the direction of influence the premise claims.