I have always found the Christian notion of original sin more than a little obnoxious as a religious principle because it suggests that “God” burdened human beings with a stain that could never be washed away. It posits the human life as a constant struggle to overcome the stain by constant, disciplined, resolute practice to rise above the lowly position it puts us in at birth. But, the notion of original sin can work as a powerful metaphor, in the same way that a “Faustian Bargain” does. One does not make a deal with a real “devil” in a Faustian bargain, but one aligns oneself with dark and destructive forces in order to advance ones own self interest–a bargain that can have very negative consequences when the devil comes back to get his due in payment for the benefit bestowed.
I have been struggling to come to terms with the Trump phenomena, and it occurred to me that our nation was founded both with an original sin (committed by those who drafted the Constitution, not imposed by a “God”) and was, in a powerful sense a pact with the “devil” in that, in order to advance the interests of those who birthed the United States, the Founders crafted a nation that intended to advance the causes of human freedom and dignity, they had to include slavery in the pact–an “original sin”, or “bargain with the devil” that has indelibly stained the nation and curses it to this day.
There are dark places in the human Soul. Brutish competitiveness, violence, aggression, exploitation of others, and on and on. The struggle for all people is to exert the Will to overcoming and diminish the power of those basic, primitive instincts in order to live in some degree of peace and harmonious community with others. Institutions are created in order to reward and strengthen those “better angels of our nature” when they are properly crafted. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” (James Madison)
It is this scar that was carved into the body of the new Republic that today still cripples our national existence. It seems that a curse was inextricably woven into the very fabric of our being when the Founders embodied slavery into our Republic. An evil was seeded in the birth of our nation that we cannot escape nor completely erase, and that time after time raises its ugly head and threatens our very existence. The darker forces in our national character have their place firmly established given that the curse that gives them power is so central to our very nature as a Nation.
During the antebellum period in the US, there were two basic groups who came to blows over and over again around the issue of the place of slavery in our Republic. There is absolutely no doubt that even the Founders who owned slaves knew that it was a stain on the nation’s character. One only need to read Thomas Jefferson’s musings on the evils of the institution of slavery in his Notes on Virginia. [There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. the whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do. If a parent could find no motive either in his philanthropy or his self-love, for restraining the intemperance of passion towards his slave, it should always be a sufficient one that his child is present. But generally it is not sufficient. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.] The hypocrisy was so great that they dared not use the term “slavery” anywhere in the Constitution. Where it was addressed it was done so euphemistically. The 3/5 Compromise and Fugitive Slave provision termed slaves as “…those bound to a service for a term of years” and as “…a person held to a service or labor.” They provided for a ban on the importation of slaves 20 years after the Constitution came into effect, an obvious nod to the hope that in time, the institution would wither and die of its own inherently contradictory nature in a Democratic Republic.
But here is the problem–and I am wondering if the seed of our destruction as our nation is foretold in this basic institutional hypocrisy. The darkness and evil inherent in American slavery was written into its Founding document: The Constitution of the United States. We ceased to be a unified nation from 1861-1865 when the Southern States went to war to defend their right to their “peculiar institution.” And the greatest argument that they had was the “Virginia Dynasty”: 4 of the first 5 Presidents were all slave holding Virginians and Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. If slavery was good enough for them despite their occasional verbal and written critiques, it was good enough for the Republic expanding into new lands and the future. It is of critical importance to remember that the high dudgeon that the Southern slave states were in from the end of the Mexican-American War to secession in 1861 was over the fact that 2 of 3 soldiers who fought in the Mexican-American war were from Southern states, and after the war was won the North tried to prevent the South from expanding slavery into the Mexican Cession territory, depriving them of the spoils of what that they overwhelmingly fought for. And it is not hard to see that they had a pretty strong argument that that was patently unfair.
One very compelling way of looking at the Civil War, and it is my favored interpretation is that the war was the “devil coming back to get his due” over the Faustian Bargain of constructing a new nation dedicated to advancing the principles of human dignity and expanding the circle of human freedom with slavery woven into the compact. Perhaps that was the greatest reckoning for that hypocrisy; the earthquake followed by aftershocks. Lynchings, beatings, Separate but Equal, and the incalculable evil of sending generations of Black Americans to their graves unable to fully express their humanity and rise to the level commensurate to their merit as full human beings. And now Donald Trump–a despicable human being who embodies so much of what is dark and primitive in the human spirit at the helm of our country, giving voice to the dark underbelly that trace their origins to our original sin.
And this is what I ponder today: Does the fact that the foundation upon which our National Experiment was built was created with defective material doom us to ultimate failure? The Founders were very aware of the fact that Democracies through history had never proven sustainable–and did their fairly egregious hypocrisy determine for us that ours too would be short lived? Could it be that this Faustian Bargain created a nation whose life like that of the Replicants in BladeRunner were programmed with a fixed time to live?
In a letter to his good friend Joshua Speed in 1855 Abraham Lincoln wrote the following:
As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes”When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic].
woltjer4 
Totally agree that slavery is the US’ “original sin” and that it will take an act of supernatural mercy (aka God’s grace) to expunge it from our national psyche.
I would suggest 2 points of additional research that may help to clarify and actually to wrestle with this national blot:
1) what is the relationship between simple racism and slavery in the American mind? Are non-whites considered to be inferior naturally, because of their color and because of their different cultural practices? And so they are “natural” slaves or servants of the the white race? Years ago when I was a substitute teacher in a suburban Chicago elementary school district (not Evanston), I noticed an alarming tendency for brown immigrants to the US to think poorly of black Americans and to teach that thought to their children. I was a little shocked at the casual racism of those brown immigrant kids. Among the Founding Fathers, the brilliant, bi-racial Alexander Hamilton was considered an outlier either because he could out think most of the others or because of his mixed race. The races mixed quite easily in the Caribe, not so in the US.
2) How did the USA actually become a federal nation state, a Union, rather than a confederacy of individually sovereign states in the founding period 1776-1786? It seems as though the notion of a federal nation state was not truly accepted by a sizable minority, even a majority, of those inhabiting the young nation and growing nation. Your statements about the Southern states feeling cheated of their spoils of war after the Mexican-American War speaks to this lack of acceptance of the nation as 1 nation rather than a alliance of disparate regions. The destructive adherence to their “peculiar institution” as a rallying cry for revolt of several states who believed themselves to be sovereign speaks to that lack of acceptance. Did the South, led by those bipolar, schizoid, double talking and thinking Virginian planters, ever actually accept the idea that the Union rather than the individual state was the sovereign entity?
I await the history professor’s thoughts on both these avenues of research.
As to point 1, I would say that the racism that exists in America has its own peculiarities, not least that it is tied directly to skin color. And Jefferson and many of his generation believed in the racial inferiority of Black people. Read his Notes on the State of Virginia–his comments range from their unexpressive faces, limited emotional range, etc. A Black poet named Wheatley sent him some of her poetry to challenge his assumptions about Black inferiority and he judged it inferior to the poetry of White people. Hard to know if this was the result of him needing to feel this way because it made it easier for him to accept his own massive hypocrisy or if he truly believed it. I suspect the former. When we lived in South Carolina from 62-64 my father brought some native Nigerians to our house whose acquaintance he made through the military. They told him that they believed that American Blacks were inferior to Africans because they were the offspring of Blacks who basically were too ignorant to not get caught and sold into slavery. Important of course to remember that there were entire African tribes (The Efik Kingdom of Calabar) who’s economy was based on raiding other Black villages and selling their captives to White Slave traders.
2. We tried the Confederacy route (Articles of Confederation from 1776-1783 and it was a dismal failure. Fearing the over centralization of power foremost the Executive Branch was completely powerless. It could not even levy taxes to support the war for independence–Chernow’s book, Hamilton goes into this in great detail. George Washington spent a good deal of his own money supplying his soldiers because the central government had no power to tax and the state governments largely refused to. And, in an important sense, America really did not cement its status as a Federal system until after the Civil War. One linguistic change that occurred as a result of the war was that in the antebellum period, people would say, “The United States are…” After the Civil War it became standard to say, “The United States is…” The Supremacy Clause of the Constitution was supposed to establish Federal Supremacy, but the Southern states refused to accept it because of the fear that the the national government would try to end slavery. That is what the Nullification Crisis was about. South Carolina, under the leadership of John C Calhoun nullified the so-called “Tariff of Abominations” for the ulterior purpose of establishing the principle that states could nullify federal law which would make secession legal. He did not county on Andrew Jackson who recognized the ploy and had Congress pass the Force Bill which would have authorized Federal agents to go into South Carolina to force payment. Jackson recognized what Calhoun was up to, and though he had pro-slavery instincts believed absolutely in the supremacy of the Federal government. The South repealed the Nullification Bill, but then as a last gasp nullified the Force Bill which became moot anyway after they paid the tariffs. Remember too that just a few years ago there was an attempt on the part of some Southern politicians to challenge the legality of the 14th Amendment which Southern states were forced to sign when readmitted under Radical Republican control in the late 1860’s, early 1870’s. It brought the states under the umbrella of the Bill of Rights, which most people did not know did not apply to the States until after the 14th Amendment.