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In Thursday’s reading, both Sean Wilentz, in The Rise of American Democracy, and David Brion Davis, in Inhuman Bondage, explore the discrepancy between what the ideals of the American Revolution represented and what actually occurred.
Wilentz’s argument centers on the difficulty of creating a common democracy in a country that consisted of such a varied people, geography, and economy. To simplify these complex divides, Wilentz’s considers the difference between what the city dwelling artisans and merchants considered “democracy” and what the rural yeomanry considered “democracy.” These key demographics, though internally, effectively summarize a key divide in the newborn nation based on dissimilar political conflicts. In the country, a population of mainly farmers expected their democracy to mirror the influence their land afforded them, while people in cities were happy to relegate power to an institution as long as it considered policies which encouraged economic independence and trade opportunities. As a result of this, a divided America emerged in which each state, based on its population’s identity, crafted its own political identity. The Articles of Confederation compounded such disunity because the weak government that they created failed to formalize a national identity. Spurred on by Shay’s Rebellion, American leaders called together a Constitutional Convention in 1787 in order to keep their democratic experiment alive.
Here, switching to Davis’ text concerning slavery helps capture the nuances of the regional divide that dominated the Convention. This divide was still rooted in the rural/city division, but, on a national stage, it took on the added scale of dividing the nation between North and South. The main discrepancy between the two, as we know, was slavery. As both Wilentz and Davis point out, by 1787, the North had exponentially reduced its slave population thanks to both economic and moral reasons. Even the Upper South was moving in a similar direction, but the Deep South was still deeply reliant on slavery. At the center of democracy is compromise, which, at the Constitutional Convention, manifested itself in the form of Northern “protection” of Southern slavery in order to protect unity. The concessions made to slave owners were large, including things like the 3/5 clause and the 20-year delay of the slave trades outlawing, yet necessary considering that “any attempt to free Southern slaves by law would lead to civil war” (Davis 155).