The Myth Of The American Paradox Analysis

Nathan Wilson: Paper Option #2: The Myth of the American Paradox

Through their actions, the colonists established the United States of America, a new country of great promise but with blatant contradiction. This is perhaps no more obvious than the relationship between the Republican ideas of freedom and the country’s use of slavery. How could such an institution exist within a nation that its founders decreed free from oppression and where all men were created equal? Some historians classify this as the American paradox and four of them, F. Nwabueze Okoye, William Cohen, Edmund S. Morgan, and William W. Freehling, try to explain it in their respective articles. However, this label is a mischaracterization as the Republican ideas of freedom
One reason is that if the revolution had been fought for the end of chattel slavery, it is unlikely any slaveholders would have supported the continental army. As Freehling argues about some of the founding fathers, “On the one hand they were restrained by their overriding interest in creating the Union, . . . On the other hand, they embraced a revolutionary ideology that made emancipation inescapable” (Freehling, pg. 84). Nonetheless, the necessity for revolutionary allies meant that the founders and later framers of the Constitution had to make compromises to appeal to the slave south. Another factor that pushed for these concessions was the white solidarity that the colonists built by highlighting the differences between political and chattel slavery. Okoye correctly articulates this by saying, “The unpalatable truth is that the Patriots made their pitch for social equality with Britons by stressing the ignominious distinctions that existed between white and black Americans” (Okoye, pg.
The racial tension between the two groups would have made coexistence difficult if not impossible. Why would free-blacks want to live next to those that had oppressed them? Believing this to be the case, some founders like Thomas Jefferson thought that the only means to achieve emancipation was through colonization. Cohen’s articulates Jefferson’s views when he states, “It would be impossible "to retain and incorporate the blacks into the State," . . . [Jefferson] argued because white prejudice and black memories of past wrongs would lead to disorder” (Cohen, pg.