James Madison and slavery

During the Revolutionary War, Madison responded to a proposal of providing enslaved people to soldiers as a recruitment bonus by advocating enlisting African Americans in exchange for their freedom instead, writing, "would it not be as well to liberate and make soldiers at once of the blacks themselves as to make them instruments for enlisting white Soldiers? It would certainly be more consonant to the principles of liberty which ought never to be loss sight of in a contest for liberty."[2] At the Philadelphia Convention, Madison wrote "where slavery exists the republican Theory becomes still more fallacious."[2] He favored an immediate end to the importation of enslaved people, though the final document barred Congress from interfering with the international slave trade until 1808.[3]

Madison initially opposed the 20-year ban on ending the international slave trade. However, he eventually accepted it as a necessary compromise to get the South to ratify the constitution, later writing, "It ought to be considered as a great point gained in favor of humanity, that a period of twenty years may terminate forever, within these States, a traffic which has long and so loudly upbraided the barbarism of modern policy."[2] He also proposed that apportionment in the House of Representatives be allocated by the sum of each state's free and enslaved population, eventually leading to the adoption of the Three-fifths Compromise.[4] Madison supported the extension of slavery into the West during the Missouri crisis of 1819–1821.[5] Madison believed that formerly enslaved people were unlikely to successfully integrate into Southern society, and in the late 1780s, he became interested in the idea of African Americans establishing colonies in Africa.[6] Madison served as the president of the American Colonization Society, which founded the settlement of Liberia for former slaves.[7]

Although Madison had supported a republican form of government, he believed that slavery had caused the South to become aristocratic. Madison believed that enslaved people were human property, while he opposed slavery intellectually.[8] Along with his colonization plan for African American people, Madison believed that slavery would naturally diffuse with western expansion. His political views landed somewhere between Calhoun's separation nullification and Daniel Webster's nationalism consolidation. Madison was never able to reconcile his advocacy of republican government with his exclusion of enslaved people from the process of government and his lifelong reliance on the slave system.[9] Visitors to his plantation noted enslaved people were well housed and fed. According to Paul Jennings, one of Madison's younger slaves, Madison never lost his temper or had his enslaved laborers whipped, preferring to reprimand.[10] Madison never outwardly expressed the view that African Americans were inferior; he tended to express open-mindedness on the question of race.[11]

When Madison moved to Washington, D.C. in 1801, to serve as the secretary of state of President Jefferson, Madison brought enslaved people from Montpelier. He also hired out enslaved servants in Washington, D.C. but paid their masters money directly, rather than the people who did the work. During Madison's presidency, enslaved people at his White House included John Freeman, Jennings, Sukey, Joseph Bolden, Jim, and Abram.[12] Madison was referred to as a "garden-variety slaveholder" by historian Elizabeth Dowling Taylor. Madison withheld excessive cruelty to avoid criticism from peers and to curb revolts. Madison worked them from dawn to dusk, six days a week; they got Sundays off for rest.[12] By 1801, Madison's slave population at Montpelier was slightly over 100. During the 1820s and 1830s, Madison sold land and people to repay debts. In 1836, at the time of Madison's death, he owned 36 taxable enslaved people.[11] Madison did not free any of them either during his lifetime or in his will.[5][8]

Upon Madison's death, he left his remaining enslaved workers to his wife Dolley, asking her only to sell them with their consent. Dolley, however did not follow this prescription, selling the Montpelier plantation and many enslaved workers on it to pay off the Madisons' debts, including Jennings, whom she had planned to emancipate upon her death.[13] After Dolley's death, remaining enslaved people were given to her son, John Payne Todd, and were not granted emancipation until his death several years later.[14]