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The Founders’ Greatest Moral Contradiction: Liberty, Slavery, and the Cost of Compromise

Freedom’s First Contradiction

Is any movement, no matter how historically important or how much it ultimately improved the world, worth sacrificing human freedom and reducing people to property?

Many of the Founders of the United States faced this very question. Was the cause and its outcome more important than the morality of the actions required to achieve it?

While founding a country on the premise of freedom, they restricted that freedom to only a portion of the population. The proverbial can was kicked down the road for another eighty years, leaving one of the nation’s greatest moral contradictions for a future generation to resolve.

The Impossible Choice

We build statues to figures like Jefferson, Washington, and Adams? They had a choice of Liberty while keeping slavery; they chose that the country was more important. Maybe it was a necessity, economic reality, or both; would the country survive without compromise?

Why, then, did they not take the moral action individually? They could help found the nation, keep slavery out of its future, yet free their own slaves.

It should be noted that not all of the Founders owned slaves. Adams, Franklin, and Hamilton did not, viewing slavery as morally reprehensible and fundamentally at odds with the principles of a free nation. Yet two of the most recognizable Founders, Jefferson and Washington, owned plantations that relied on enslaved labor.

Here was the tradeoff as they saw it. The Founders were attempting to create something that had never existed before, what is still often referred to as the great experiment. They believed they had to weigh the long-term benefits of creating a constitutional republic based on laws and liberty against the immediate political reality that eliminating slavery might fracture the fragile union before it was ever born.

Ideals vs. Reality

The American Founders followed Enlightenment thought, from the writings of John Locke; the focus was on individual liberty and the protection of private property. Yet those same principles exposed a profound contradiction. Enslaved people were legally treated as property and, under the Constitution, were counted as three-fifths of a person for representation while remaining denied the very liberty the new nation claimed to cherish.

Today we often refer to the ultra-wealthy as the one percent, but the concentration of wealth and influence is hardly a modern phenomenon. Many of the large landowners who led the Revolution occupied a position not unlike an American aristocracy. Jefferson, for example, lived a far more aristocratic lifestyle than Adams. Viewed through this lens, the motivations and decisions of the Founders become more complicated than the simplified version many of us learned in school.

Washington spent much of his life heavily indebted to English merchants while trying to maintain his estate and social standing. Much of his wealth came through his marriage to Martha Custis, whose inheritance included extensive landholdings and enslaved people. However they may have defined liberty, economics remained inseparable from politics. They were unwilling to destroy their own financial standing if it also threatened the creation of the new republic. It inevitably raises questions about how far their commitment to self-determination actually extended.

Ideals Versus Actions

Washington freed the enslaved people he legally could only upon his death. Jefferson freed only a few members of the Hemings family during his lifetime. Burdened by debt, many of his remaining enslaved people were eventually sold at auction after his death. Their ideals, it seems, only extended so far.

By contrast, many of the northern Founders, including Adams, Franklin, and Hamilton, either opposed slavery outright or became active in abolition efforts. Even among the men who created the United States, there was no single moral consensus.

The promise of a free country for all did not apply equally to everyone. The Revolution was presented in a way to get everybody to join a struggle for liberty, but for many of its leaders that liberty primarily meant freedom from the authority of the British Crown rather than universal human freedom.

As the English writer Samuel Johnson famously observed in 1775:

“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

It remains one of the most devastating criticisms ever directed at the American Revolution.

Liberty for Whom?

For many among the colonial elite, the Revolution represented the opportunity to build a nation free from British taxation, royal authority, and political control while allowing economic growth on their own terms. It was unquestionably a fight for freedom, but not necessarily freedom for everyone.

Why, then, did Founders such as Adams not press harder to abolish slavery from the beginning? Adams understood that insisting on abolition during the Revolution could divide the colonies and doom independence before the nation was even born. Like many others, he believed securing independence had to come first. Many northerners also believed slavery would gradually disappear as individual states chose to emancipate enslaved people without a federal mandate.

History, however, rarely unfolds according to our hopes.

Dirty Hands and Political Morality

Political philosopher Michael Walzer described this dilemma as the “Problem of Dirty Hands.” In essence, it asks whether political leaders sometimes must choose actions they know are morally wrong because they believe those actions are necessary to achieve a greater good or prevent a greater catastrophe.

Years later, John Kennedy explored similar themes in Profiles in Courage, highlighting politicians whose ethical convictions damaged—or even ended—their political careers. While not the same argument, both raise the uncomfortable question of whether morality and successful political leadership always point in the same direction.

In the case of the Founders, the greater good, in their minds, was preserving slavery long enough to establish the nation despite the paradox that a country founded on liberty denied liberty to so many.

Even the French questioned this contradiction while supporting the American cause. Ironically, when France later sought liberty for itself, its own revolution descended into some very dark chapters.

Who Pays the Price?

This creates another interesting dilemma. The choice to delay what many already recognized as the morally correct course was not paid by those making the decision. As noted, some of the Founders personally benefited from slavery and the economy it supported.

The real cost would be paid by future generations who had no voice in the decision.

The Cost of Delay

Instead, eighty years passed. Adams and nearly all of the Founders were gone. Slavery became more deeply institutionalized, and the Southern economy grew increasingly dependent upon enslaved labor. The compromise that had once seemed temporary became permanent for generations, leaving an even greater moral and political crisis for people who had played no part in creating it.

The Question History Leaves Us

So what is the real question?

Do we give the Founders too much credit by remembering them as a single unified group when, morally, they were anything but?

Did they make the correct choice?

Had they refused to compromise and lost the Revolution, would history have produced a better outcome—or a far worse one? Would the United States as we know it ever have existed? Would Lincoln or Grant have ever emerged when they did?

Looking back on history and asking why is easy. Imagining what we would have done when faced with the same impossible choices is far more difficult.

The old saying, hindsight is 20/20, takes on real meaning when applied to history. The Founders had to make decisions based on what they knew, what they saw, and what they believed was possible, along with where they thought they could take the country once the biggest hurdle had been overcome. They did not have cell phones, text messages, the internet, or centuries of history to measure themselves against.

History is made from difficult choices in the moment; that is why we can choose whether to learn from it.

What would you have chosen?