Patriots' Dilemma

Many accounts of the US founding hinge on a fundamental conflict between pro-slavery and anti-slavery interests. By 1776, influential American patriots widely acknowledged that slavery was morally wrong and incompatible with the republic's ideals. But a republic for whom? As Timothy Messer-Kruse argues, their real motivations have been misinterpreted for over 200 years. White abolitionists were primarily concerned with protecting and improving the white community - not the liberation of enslaved Black people. Their great conundrum was that slavery had to end because it created what they saw as a dangerous, disloyal, and dependent population. Still, it couldn't be abolished without endangering their (white) republic. Messer-Kruse reveals how the founders' solution was through schemes for former slaves' banishment to the western frontier or overseas, their legal removal from the category of "citizen," and methods of gradual emancipation that tightly policed African American communities. Urgent and controversial, The Patriots' Dilemma breaks through the long-running debate about whether the founders fought or defended slavery. Patriots embraced slavery for its economic and geopolitical power and because they no longer believed there were other ready options for building a white republic. Ultimately, efforts to ethnically cleanse the emerging US polity of Black people failed due to the resistance of the Black community itself.