Independence Day requires us to have Juneteenth, our Black Emancipation Day | Opinion

By John Farmer, Jr.

Some months ago, a book was sent to me at the Eagleton Institute by one of our alumnae, who graduated 50 years ago from Rutgers. In a rather sheepish cover letter, he confided that he had checked the book out from Eagleton’s and had come across it while cleaning out his bookshelves. After writing a short note back that all would be forgiven for his extremely overdue return in exchange for a donation of $50,000 (I hope he can take a joke), I picked up the book and began to read.

The book is a biography, published in 1940 by Rutgers Professor Robert Thompson, of Colonel James Neilson, a member of one of New Jersey’s illustrious family dynasties, who lived from the dawn of American independence to its near-death in the Civil War, from 1784-1862.

It is hard to overstate the contributions of the Neilson family to Rutgers University, the City of New Brunswick, and indeed to the nation. The Declaration of Independence was read for only the third time in public on July 9, 1776 by Colonel John Neilson (father of the book’s subject) who stood on a table outside the Whitehall Tavern on Albany Street in New Brunswick. The British were within months of capturing New Brunswick; the price of supporting the Declaration’s principles could well have been Colonel Neilson’s life. His commitment to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is justly commemorated by a statue in downtown New Brunswick.

Succeeding generations of the Neilson family carried on this tradition of civic-mindedness. The family donated much of the land that comprises Rutgers University, including the College Avenue, Bush, and Douglass College campuses. They have also been celebrated for their progressive values in championing women’s education and their commitment to New Brunswick with streets, dining halls, and dorms named in their honor. What Professor Thompson wrote of Colonel John Neilson is an apt summary of the family’s legacy: “As churchman, merchant, soldier, citizen and father, Colonel John Neilson symbolized the best in the America of his era.”

Indeed, the book is dedicated to the memory of James Neilson (1844-1937), “worthy keeper of a fine tradition,” who bequeathed the last piece of the Neilson legacy, Wood Lawn mansion, to Rutgers upon his death. The Eagleton Institute of Politics, where I work, does its work studying and defending democracy in that mansion, which dates to 1830, within a decade of when the Neilsons began freeing their slaves.

Their slaves. It is no surprise, I suppose, to learn that like many of the founding families, the Neilson family owned and trafficked in slaves. It is another thing entirely, however, to get a glimpse into the daily reality. The biography does not shrink from mentioning the family’s involvement with slavery; neither does that involvement affect the biographer’s glowing appraisal.

In 1813, for example, Colonel James Neilson had to handle the implications of his wife’s inheritance of property in Mississippi, including 42 slaves. He hired a representative in Mississippi, who recommended against hiring the slaves out to work on local plantations, noting that “hired hands are generally worked very severely and badly fed and clad.” Selling them was a bad alternative, according to the representative, because the War of 1812 made the market in New Orleans apprehensive about a British invasion “and as the white population are apprehensive, that, in that event, their slaves will rebel.”

Like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, the Neilson family is one of New Jersey’s illustrious family dynasties. James and his wife inherited 42 slaves in 1813. There was no discussion of freeing them. Instead, James Neilson rented a farm with an overseer who was “pretty tight with the negroes and works the horses severely.”

If freeing them was an option, it is not reflected in the correspondence. Instead, the legatees rented land for three years and put the slaves to work growing cotton and corn. Unsatisfied with the work of the first overseer they had hired, who was “trifling and not well-calculated to manage” slaves, the Mississippi representative hired another, who was “very attentive and a man of good judgment in planting. The only complaint (if a complaint it may be called) is that he is pretty tight with the negroes and works the horses severely. I have, however, requested him not to be too severe with the hands and he has moderated his severity … .”

There, in that harrowing description, is a snapshot of the daily casual brutality of the era. The humanity of the enslaved, if recognized at all, is sublimated to their value as economic units. Business inventories reproduced in the biography list slaves along with livestock and crop amounts as elements of value, nothing more. Cruelty is recounted as an instrument of production.

I cannot reconcile this. I cannot reconcile the good deeds of the Neilsons, or for that matter the good deeds of the likes of Thomas Jefferson or George Washington or other founders, with their willingness to countenance enslavement with all of its inhumane, if not murderous, implications. Who were these people who could espouse such lofty principles while living a contradictory reality? I simply don’t know.

But this I know. Their history fractured us. Slaves’ families and their very identities were fractured. And so were the founders’ own identities and our nation’s ideals.

It is little wonder, then that Frederick Douglass, speaking on the Fifth of July in 1852 to the Rochester, New York Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, questioned why he was even invited:

“[W]hy am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. … Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. … This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty,” Douglass continued, “and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.”

Distilled to its essence, Douglass’s message was simple and stark: the ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence were mocked by the American reality made clear in the correspondence quoted above: Black lives simply didn’t matter, and haven’t for most of our history.

To be sure, progress in the nation’s treatment of African-Americans is undeniable. Slavery was ended by Civil War and by constitutional amendment. Citizenship was assured. The pernicious doctrine of “separate but equal” was eventually struck down by the Supreme Court. Voting rights were protected by law and discrimination in public accommodations was outlawed. A Black man was elected president of the United States.

It is also undeniable, however, that progress has been halting, if not begrudging, at best, frustrated by a persistent undercurrent of racism in both overt and subtle forms. The Jim Crow laws passed during Reconstruction denied Blacks fundamental rights and attributes of citizenship; the poll taxes and literacy tests required for access to the ballot worked hand in hand with policies designed to assure persistent poverty and illiteracy. Thousands were lynched, shot, tortured in the century preceding the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Few suspects were convicted by usually all-white juries. Police came to be seen as instruments of white oppression.

The GI Bill affording tremendous educational and other opportunities following World War II passed Congress only after Blacks were specifically excluded from it. Redlining housing practices channeled migrating Blacks into urban ghettos that exacerbated a racial wealth gap that persists to this day.

America’s elite institutions of higher education and finance began admitting a select few to the halls of privilege, but not in numbers sufficient to effect a cultural change in those institutions or to lift the Black community as a whole. As a result of last week’s Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, moreover, even that avenue of progress is challenged.

Despite our nation’s progress, in short, we have fallen short of achieving for Black Americans the rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” the Declaration of Independence held to be “self-evident” truths. Slavery was our nation’s original sin, a grave moral evil that haunted the founding families. As Thomas Jefferson admitted, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, and that His justice cannot sleep forever.” Slavery’s extirpation came close to requiring, in President Abraham Lincoln’s terms, that “every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.”

So what are we to make of all of this as we observe Independence Day?

To mean what it should, July Fourth needs Juneteenth, our Black Emancipation Day. Because of the hypocrisy present at our nation’s founding, history will judge the success of the American experiment in self-governance by how well it extends the principles of its founding to those who were specifically excluded at its founding and throughout most of its history.

Despite railing against the hypocrisy of the founders, Frederick Douglass did not dismiss their Declaration of Independence; to the contrary, he counseled that only by adhering to the principles espoused in the Declaration could the nation survive.

The Declaration, he said, is “the RING-BOLT to the chain of your nation’s destiny,” and urged Americans not to abandon those principles in the stormy times to come: “That bolt drawn, that chain broken, and all is lost. Cling to this day — cling to it, and to its principles, with the grasp of a storm-tossed mariner to a spar at midnight.”

He was right. We must continue to “hold these truths” hard against our hearts, not as self-evident or self-executing but as hard-won: on battlefields, at lunch counters and on buses, in courtrooms and bombed churches, in voting booths and universities, in the sacred and fraught places where American truths are reconciled with our contradictions.

John Farmer, Jr. was New Jersey’s Attorney General from 1999 – 2002. He has also served as senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission and as Dean of Rutgers School of Law–Newark. He is currently the director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University.

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