Response 7

“The third charge against the House of Representative sis that it will be taken from that class of citizens which will have least sympathy with the mass of the people, and be most likely to aim at an ambitious sacrifice of the many to the aggrandizement of the few. Of all the objections which have been framed against the federal Constitution, this is perhaps the most extraordinary. Whilst the objection itself is leveled against a pretended oligarchy, the principle of it strikes at the very root of republican government.”

This is drawn from James Madison’s Federalist paper No. 57: The alleged tendency of the new plan to elevate the few at the expense of the many considered in connection with representation. Although slavery is not included in Madison’s paper and was probably disregarded as being related to this issue, I find it to be intriguingly relevant.

As we have discussed on more than one occasion in class, slavery was an essential contribution to the foundation of this nation. Slavery provided Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and others the resources they needed in order to form a new government and found a country. Slavery provided the Founding Fathers with money. Due to slavery, the Founding Fathers were able to refrain from work and still have production for income. They were not required to harvest their own crops; they had slaves to do that job. The Founding Fathers escaped the need to sell their produce; they had slaves to do it for them. The money that was gained through this process was able to contribute to extensive libraries, which were rare and exquisite in that day. Few people had access to leather bound books, let alone shelves full of them. But for Thomas Jefferson, this was his lifestyle.

Another resource provided to them, time. Since the Founding Fathers bypassed the obligation to work, they had ample time at hand for leisure activities. These activities, for most, included hours and hours of reading each day. The Founding Fathers were able to study forms of government from antiquity. They had the opportunity to feast on books about governments in order to critcize the best and the worst. This ability was essential to the success of the foundation, for it allowed a protracted political debate, it enabled the education of existing options, it facilitated the governmental foundation.

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As Dr. H so eloquently summarizes it, "The system they ended up destroying was the system that allowed them to destroy it."