The “Three-Fifths Clause” — The Founders Plant the Seed for the Ultimate Abolition

The infamous “three-fifths clause” in the U.S. Constitution has been debated and misunderstood for decades and even centuries. Was this notorious bit of text a victory for the abolitionists or for the slave owners? Or was it, as it is often labeled, a compromise? Passion swirls around these questions.

The roots of this phrase and its insertion into the Constitution antedate the Constitutional Convention of 1787. By the 1640s, at the latest, there was already an energetic abolitionist movement in North America. By 1652, the Rhode Island legislative body eliminated slavery in that colony. By the time of the American Revolution, more than a century later, a majority of the residents in the majority of the thirteen colonies — soon to become the thirteen states — opposed slavery.

Yet another question arises: if abolitionism was a majority view, how did the minority — those who sought to maintain slavery — so effectively contend for so evil an institution? The answer is multipartite. Among the factors which allowed slavery to persist were: Slave-owners were often wealthy, and wealth can lead to disproportionate political influence; slave owners fiercely clung to their ideology; slave owners were, or became, adept at using the political and governmental systems.

Abolitionists, in the early decades of the movement, were loath to use violence in pressing their case.

The Revolutionary War had ended several years before the Constitutional Convention. The United States functioned during those years under the Articles of Confederation. That short-lived system of government had various flaws which caused the call for a convention which would, in turn, compose a revision of those articles, or, as it turned out, an entirely new constitutional document.

In those years between the end of the war and the Constitutional Convention, the tensions between the abolitionists and the slaveholders continued to simmer. In the treaty which ended the war, there was a clause which prevented the British from “causing any Destruction, or carrying away any Negroes or other Property of the American inhabitants.” A dispute arose about how to interpret this provision of the treaty. The abolitionists understood it to mean that the British were not to abduct or kidnap the “Negroes.” The slaveholders understood it to mean that any slaves who had run away from their owners and sought refuge behind the British lines, during the Revolutionary War, must be returned to their (former) owners.

In the course of the debate about the interpretation of this phrase in the treaty, Alexander Hamilton wrote:

In the interpretation of Treaties things odious or immoral are not to be presumed. The abandonment of negroes, who had been induced to quit their Masters on the faith of Official proclamations promising them liberty, to fall again under the yoke of their masters and into slavery is as odious and immoral a thing as can be conceived. It is odious not only as it imposes an act of perfidy on one of the contracting parties; but as it tends to bring back to servitude men once made free. The general interests of humanity conspire with the obligations which Great Britain had contracted towards the Negroes to repel this construction of the Treaty if another can be found.

Hamilton, taking the side of the majority, opposed anything, any text, or any interpretation of a text, which would transfer people from a state of freedom to a state of servitude. Hamilton, embracing the popular understanding that the purpose of a government is to protect the lives, freedoms, and properties of its subjects, understood them in that order: life, freedom, property. The only reason to impose any limitation on the principle of property rights is for the higher purpose of preserving life and freedom. Slavery was a violation of freedom, and so the freedom of the potential slave outweighed the property rights of the would-be slaveholder.

Alexander Hamilton was a powerful champion of property rights, but, as historian Ron Chernow writes, the principle of liberty was one of two things that, in Hamilton’s mind, justified any limitation on property rights — the other being the preservation of life:

This fierce defender of private property — this man for whom contracts were to be sacred covenants — expressly denied the sanctity of any agreement that stripped people of their freedom.

Rachel, Hamilton’s mother, had inherited slaves. She did not seek them out. As a child, he was often in the company of these slaves, who did not work for Rachel. They were employed elsewhere, as she hired them out for various tasks. Hamilton got to know these slaves, and was shaped in his thinking by his mother’s humane treatment of them. “This early exposure to the humanity of the slaves may have made a lasting impression on Hamilton, who would be conspicuous,” writes Chernow, “for his fierce abolitionism.”

It is no surprise that Hamilton joined the New York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves, known by the shorter name of the “New York Manumission Society.” Not only was he a member of the society, but held a leadership position, and possibly was part of authoring some of the unsigned pamphlets issued by the society.

In February 1786, the society “lobbied the state legislature to halt the export of slaves from New York.”

That March, Hamilton’s name appeared on a petition that called upon the state legislature to end the New York slave trade and that deplored the plight of blacks exported “like cattle and other articles of commerce to the West Indies and the southern states.” The petition demanded the termination of a practice “so repugnant to humanity and so inconsistent with the liberality and justice which should distinguish a free and enlightened people.”

It is well-established, then, both that Hamilton was a dependable abolitionist, and that a majority of Americans, both before and after the Revolution, were abolitionists and had been for decades part of a significant abolitionist movement. All of this was the case prior to the beginning of the Constitutional Convention.

The question reappears: how did the “three-fifths clause” come about, and whom did it benefit? Describing the Constitutional Convention, James Madison wrote:

The States were divided into different interests not by their difference of size, but by other circumstances; the most material of which resulted partly from climate, but principally from their having or not having slaves. These two causes concurred in forming the great division of interests in the States. It did not lie between the large and small States: it lay between the northern and southern, and if any defensive power were necessary, it ought to be mutually given to these two interests.

The minority was so rigid in its defense of slavery that it was willing to destroy the new nation rather than risk the possibility of abolition. Perhaps they reasoned that, either as thirteen estranged states, or as again British colonies, they could retain slavery, even if it be at the cost of sacrificing all that had been gained in the Revolution. Ron Chernow explains:

As Madison conceded, the specter of slavery haunted the convention.

Chernow continues:

For many southerners, the slavery issue allowed no room for concessions, and they supported the Virginia Plan in exchange for protecting their peculiar institution. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina stated baldly, “South Carolina and Georgia cannot do without slaves.” The issue was so explosive that the word slavery did not appear in the Constitution, replaced by the euphemism of people “held to service or labor.”

On other issues, the citizens of the new nation disagreed, and yet could find compromises: taxation, legislation, foreign policy, etc. But the question of slavery proved intractable. Neither the abolitionists nor the slaveholders would compromise — until the Constitutional Convention. The debate as to whether or in which ratio slaves would be calculated into congressional representation that, according to some sources, it lasted four-and-a-half days.

At this point in time the “three-fifths clause” began to emerge — but how? The issue at hand was congressional representation. The number of representatives in the lower chamber — i.e., the House of Representatives — would be determined by the population of a state: but how to count that population? The slaveholders wanted the slaves to be counted, because in this way, the slaveholding states would have greater representation in Congress, and could thereby block the abolition of slavery. The desire of the slave-owning states to have slaves counted among the population, for the purposes of congressional representation, in no way acknowledged the humanity of the slaves: on the contrary, it was designed to ensure the perpetuation of the institution of slavery.

The abolitionist states, on the other hand, desired that the slaves not be counted among the population for the purposes of congressional representation, because the slaves would, as long as they remained slaves, never vote, and never enjoy the freedom of voicing their political opinions. The abolitionists, then, wanted to deny the enumeration of slaves, not in order to deny their humanity, but rather to ensure that the slaveholding states didn’t obtain an artificially large representation in Congress; lacking the numerical advantage, the slaveholding states would not be able to encourage the continuation of the institution of slavery into the future.

The abolitionist majority found itself outmaneuvered by the slaveholding minority. Yet, because they abolitionists refused to allow the slaveholders to obtain a perversely large congressional representation, they planted the seeds for the ultimate abolition of slavery: The “three-fifths compromise” created a sort of instability within the constitutional system, which ensured that the question of slavery and of its abolition would remain present in the minds of the body politic.

Unable to achieve the abolition of slavery at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, the abolitionists assured the eventual abolition of slavery by building the paradox into the Constitution. The question of abolitionism was hardwired into the Constitution: as a question, not a statement — a question, because of the “three-fifths clause” which was neither a “one” nor a “zero” but an unsettling in-between sum which created a disequilibrium in the in the infant republic.

Alexander Hamilton was both a passionate abolitionist and a passionate advocate for a strong union among the thirteen states. He was confounded and perplexed.

Not only abolitionism, but also immigration, moved Hamilton, as Ron Chernow writes:

On August 6, the Philadelphia convention reconvened to begin the arduous task of refining the Constitution. Hamilton, back by August 13, dove into a debate that passionately engaged him: immigration. He opposed any attempt to restrict membership in Congress to native-born Americans or to stipulate a residency period before immigrants could qualify for it.

It was a few days later that the convention produced the “three-fifths compromise.” Hamilton was away from Philadelphia and away from the convention for several days at that time.

Hamilton’s upset over this tolerance of slavery may have been deeper than we know. There has always been some mystery as to his whereabouts after his August 13 statement on immigration. In fact, he had returned to New York for a meeting of the Manumission Society. Hamilton may have apprised members of the impending decision on slavery in Philadelphia, because they delivered a petition to the convention to “promote the attainment of the objects of this society.” After the slavery compromise in Philadelphia, Hamilton stepped up his involvement in the Manumission Society. The following year, even while pouring out fifty-one Federalist essays, serving in Congress, and campaigning to ratify the Constitution, he attended a meeting of the society that again protested the export of slaves from New York State and the “outrages committed in digging up and taking away the dead bodies of Negroes buried in the city.” Later in the year, Hamilton was appointed one of four counselors of the Manumission Society.

Yet Hamilton would ultimately embrace and defend the “three-fifths clause,” because it created an instability which ensured that the question of abolitionism would ultimately be addressed.

From the abolitionist point of view, the three-fifths clause politically destabilized the institution of slavery, ensuring that it would not enjoy a comfortable place in the republic, but rather always come to attention to be questioned and re-examined.

Slaveholding states wondered how their human property would be counted for congressional-apportionment purposes. Northern states finally agreed that five slaves would be counted as equivalent to three free whites, the infamous “federal ratio” that survived for another eighty years. The formula richly rewarded the southern states, artificially inflating their House seats and electoral votes and helping to explain why four of the first five presidents hailed from Virginia. This gross inequity was to play no small part in the eventual triumph of Jeffersonian Republicans over Hamiltonian Federalists. In exchange, southern states agreed that the importation of slaves might cease after 1808, feeding an illusory hope that slavery might someday just fade away. Without the federal ratio, Hamilton glumly concluded, “no union could possibly have been formed.” Indeed, the whole superstructure erected in Philadelphia rested on that unstable, undemocratic foundation.

The very irrationality of the “three-fifths clause” ensured that the topic of slavery would not go away. The clause presented a deliberately absurd concept. Its absurdity demanded correction.

The slaveholders could not defend it: if the slaves were three-fifths of a human being, why didn’t they get three-fifths of a vote? or have three-fifths of the rights of a citizen?

The Constitution’s built-in disequilibrium soon had the desired effect of making abolitionism an unavoidable topic. By 1790, “Slavery was gradually fading away in many parts of the” country, and in that year, several Quaker lobbying groups asked Congress to introduce and consider bills which would end the slave trade and even end slavery itself.

In 1787, there had seemed to be every chance that the institution of slavery would die a quiet, natural death. Some of the abolitionists hoped that it would simply fade away. Eli Whitney ensured that it wouldn’t. His mechanical cotton gin changed the economics of cotton and of the South. His invention transformed the combination of slave labor and cotton-based agriculture from marginally profitable to massively so. The cotton gin, invented in 1793 and patented in 1794, reframed the economics of slavery, and thereby reframed the debate about abolitionism.

When slavery suddenly became much more profitable, slaveholders suddenly became much more stubborn in their defense of slavery.

At the same time, slaveholders simultaneously increased in their political influence, because of their increasing wealth, and yet were clearly a numerical minority. With the cotton gin, the owners of large plantations and large numbers of slaves became a clearly-defined economic elite. The majority of the citizens of each state were, however, not slaveholders, and economically disadvantaged in competition with the few but powerful slave-owners.

This was a setback for the abolitionists, who had seemed on the verge of legislative breakthrough.

Historians properly do not engage in speculation about counterfactual scenarios. It is a known pattern that legislative initiatives, if they fail to succeed on the first try, are often reintroduced in Congress every few years. In this pattern, bills often gain additional support each time they are reintroduced, and many bills eventually pass in this way.

Had not Eli Whitney’s cotton gin appeared suddenly and spread rapidly, it is reasonable to wonder whether the Quakers might have reintroduced their bill from 1790 into congress repeatedly at intervals a few years later, gradually gaining support, and eventually passing. Did the cotton gin end the chance of peaceful legislative abolition of slavery?

In any case, the next steps in the narrative are well-known: Andrew Jackson founded the modern Democratic Party in 1828 to protect the institution of slavery, the Republican Party was founded in 1854 as an abolitionist party, and the Civil War resulted.

“The so-called three-fifths clause was an attempt to” undermine the institution of slavery, as historian Ben Shapiro writes. It nearly succeeded in 1790. The Quaker-sponsored bill is evidence. By steps, it did succeed: in 1854 and 1863.

The whole question of popular apportionment rested on whether to count slaves as full people for purposes of representation. To do so would have put the slaveholding south at a significant advantage: they would have counted slaves in their population, not allowed them to vote, then used their increased representation in order to re-enshrine slavery. As James Madison noted, the delegates from South Carolina fought for blacks to be counted as whole people so as to include them “in the rule of representation, equally with the Whites.” The three-fifths compromise was designed to curb the South’s expansionist tendencies with regard to slavery by preventing them from stacking the electoral deck. The Constitution also allowed slave importation to continue until 1808 — but Congress moved in 1807 to end it there.

While the slaveholders had long used violence to assert their claims, the abolitionists had been hesitant to do so. John Brown’s famous raid in 1859 changed that. The long-simmering passions of the abolitionists were about to appear, triggered by the secession of several states.

Then, of course, the United States fought a great and massive Civil War to free the slaves, in which over 620,000 Americans died, nearly half the total number of Americans to die in all wars combined. The economy of the United States was not built on slavery — in fact, the South’s economic power was dismal compared to that of the north, which is why the north was able to overcome the south during the Civil War.

The abolitionist states — those which had a Republican Party majority — were superior in economic power, in technology, and in devotion to the cause of abolitionism. The slaveholding states, where the Democrat Party had the majority, were economically and technologically inferior, and with only lukewarm devotion to the task of defending slavery. While the slave-owners were committed to preserving slavery because it brought them financial gain, they were numerically a small minority even in the slaveholding states. By contrast, the vast majority of the residents of the slaveholding states did not own slaves and did not directly benefit financially from the institution of slavery: indeed, there is a plausible argument that slavery was an economic harm to the non-slaveholding residents of the Confederate States. To be sure, there is also a hypothesis that while they did not benefit directly, they might have gotten some small indirect economic benefit from the institution of slavery. Yet whatever little gain they might thus have gotten, it was more than outweighed by the harm done to them.

In any case, the “three-fifths clause” was not a supportive foundation for slavery, but rather an intentionally wobbly base, on which it precariously sat, and from which it inevitably fell — according to the plan of the founders.

Was the American Revolution Really a Revolution, or Was It Merely an Independence Movement?

Generations of students have learned about the Revolutionary War and the American Revolution. Yet often the word ‘Revolution’ remains unexamined. What is a revolution, and which events in history are appropriately so called?

History books contain the Russian Revolution, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and several others.

Until the reader has a relatively clear definition for this word, it is a muddy affair to determine when and where to apply it. This is seen, e.g., in discussions of whether or not the events from the early to the late 18th century constitute the American Revolution, or whether those events were merely an independence movement.

On the one hand, the argument goes, the American Revolution did not effect a significant change in culture or society. In government, it made changes in the legislative, judicial, and executive branches, which could be described as tweaks or adjustment, but not a revolution. This line of argumentation concludes that movement, which culminated in the beginning of the war in 1775, the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1777, the signing in 1783 of a treaty to end the war, and the composition, ratification, and implementation of the Constitution, was not a revolution.

To be sure, there is some truth in the above-outlined reasoning. But there is a different way to conceptualize the situation.

A counterargument happily cedes the point that society and culture didn’t change significantly during the American Revolution. For more than a century, the residents of the thirteen colonies had already been creating their own culture and society, different from that of England.

The counterargument recognizes that the American Revolution was primarily a political and economic change. In that way, it can be arguably labeled as a true revolution.

Prior to 1776, governments around the world drew their legitimacy — or their alleged legitimacy — from the principle of hereditary dynasticism. The king of England had the right to rule because he’d inherited it from his parents. The same was true of the king of France, the king of Spain, etc.

Prior to the American Revolution, the right to rule was the property of one family: the royal family. This principle was the foundation for the governments of most of the world’s states.

In 1776, for the first time in modern history — and for only one of a very few times in world history — a government was founded on the principles of liberty. The U.S. government was founded on ideas. Those ideas included things like majority rule, popular sovereignty (the idea that a government’s legitimacy arises from the consent of the people it governs), and freedoms of speech and religion. Among those ideas was the idea of limited government: that the citizens are justified in limiting a government’s power in order to protect their own freedom.

This counterargument, then, sees the American Revolution as truly revolutionary, because it instituted a form of government which was absolutely novel.

It will be left to the reader as an exercise to weigh the evidence for and against the above-outlined argument and counterargument.

Selling the Constitution: Alexander Hamilton Markets the New Government

Having achieved independence with the end of combat in 1781 and with the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, the United States established itself as sovereign, and organized itself under a document known as the Articles of Confederation. This document had been ratified by all thirteen states between December 1777 and March 1781.

This form of government quickly showed itself to be impractical and ineffective. Among other shortcomings, the Articles of Confederation left the national government too weak to enforce the Treaty of Paris, too weak to prevent the British government from dumping onto American shores boatloads of criminals, and too weak to prevent individual states from forming their own separate foreign policies, outside of the united policies, with regard to other nations. It was too weak to solve the economic crisis caused by the large amount of debt from the war; the ripple effects of the debt through the economy triggered Shays’ Rebellion, a movement which represented farmers who were losing land and property to debt collectors.

In early 1787, Congress called for a convention to revise the Articles of Confederation. That convention began in May and ended in September of that year.

The new text produced by the convention did a bit more than “revise” the Articles of Confederation, as historian Ron Chernow writes:

For all its gore and mayhem, the American Revolution had unified the thirteen states, binding them into a hopeful, if still restive, nation. The aftermath of the Constitutional Convention, by contrast, turned ugly and divisive, polarizing the populace. Four days after Hamilton affixed his signature to the Constitution, The Daily Advertiser gave New Yorkers their first glimpse of it, and many blanched in amazement. This charter went far beyond Congress’s instructions to rework the Articles of Confederation: it brought forth a brand-new government. The old confederation had simply gone up in smoke. Marinus Willett, once a stalwart of the Sons of Liberty and now New York’s sheriff, echoed the consternation among Governor Clinton’s entourage when he lambasted the new Constitution as “a monster with open mouth and monstrous teeth ready to devour all before it.”

The Americans, having only recently gained their freedom by fighting against a powerful central government, were sensitive to any plan of government which seemed to establish another powerful central government. Why had they rebelled against the King and Parliament of Britain, if they were simply proceeding to re-enslave themselves to the same type of tyranny?

Was this new Constitution, produced by the convention in Philadelphia, establishing an undemocratic absolutism over the Americans? Or was it really, as the delegates to that convention claimed, given power for the purpose of protecting American freedom?

Those who supported the new text were called Federalists, and those who opposed the ratification of it were called the Anti-Federalists.

There was a large segment of the American public which opposed the new Constitution. In order to persuade them to accept, and then support, this Constitution, carefully-worded justifications and explanations would be needed to gain the public’s approval. An important piece of this marketing effort, perhaps the decisive piece, was a writing project known as the The Federalist Papers.

This project consisted of a series of essays published over a period of months in various newspapers. There were a total of 85 essays, written by three authors: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. Hamilton wrote 51 of the essays, and organized the project. The first essay was released in October 1787, and the last one in August 1788. They were released together in book form in 1788.

Because Hamilton wrote a majority of the essays which together did a majority of the persuading, it is plausible to argue that he was the key factor in persuading the American public to cause their legislators to ratify the Constitution. If James Madison is often called the “Father of the Constitution” because he was influential in drafting the text, then perhaps Alexander Hamilton should be called the “Midwife of the Constitution” because he ushered it into the world.

The Federalist Papers seem to have effected a significant change in public opinion. Between December 1787 and May 1790, all thirteen states ratified the text.

In July 1788, New York became the eleventh state to ratify, and it was clear that it was only a matter of time until the Constitution would indeed be the operating system for a new government. The public, once largely skeptical, had in the meantime become enthusiastic about the Constitution, and about the man who sold it to the public, Alexander Hamilton.

Ron Chernow describes the celebration in New York City. People lauded Hamilton and cheered on the ratification of the Constitution:

The parade apotheosized the hero of the hour, the man who had snatched victory from the antifederalist majority. So exuberant was the lionization of Alexander Hamilton that admirers wanted to rechristen the city “Hamiltoniana.” It was one of the few times in his life that Hamilton basked in the warmth of public adulation. Sail makers waved a flag depicting a laurel-wreathed Hamilton bearing the Constitution while an allegorical figure representing Fame blew a trumpet in the air. This paled before the grandest tribute of all to Hamilton. Gliding down Broadway, pulled by ten horses, was a miniature frigate, twenty-seven feet long, baptized the “Federal Ship Hamilton.” The model ship rose above all other floats “with flowing sheets and full sails[,]... the canvas waves dashing against her sides” and concealing the carriage wheels moving the ship, noted one observer. The cart men fluttered banners that proclaimed, “Behold the federal ship of fame / The Hamilton we call her name; / To every craft she gives employ; / Sure cartmen have their share of joy.” When the Hamilton arrived near the Battery, it was received by congressmen standing outside Bayard’s Tavern. To represent the transition from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution, the ship changed pilots amid a deafening cannonade. The parade marked the zenith of the federalist alliance with city artisans. Hamilton had never courted the masses, and never again was he to enjoy their favor to this extent. Riding high on the crest of the new Constitution, Hamilton and the federalists held undisputed sway in the city.

More than two centuries later, the questions posed by the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists remain. Is the Constitution a system which will maximize and protect individual freedom, political liberty, and economic liberty? Or is it an oppressive system which tyrannizes people by taxing them and regulating them? Of course, the Constitution as a system is only one part of the answer to those questions. The other part is the character of the people who serve in the various elected and appointed offices created by the Constitution, and the degree to which they act in accord with the text.

Segregation and “Jim Crow” Laws — The Results of Government

In the history of the United States, the bitter realities of segregation were both a harsh burden upon the victims and a result of government regulation left unchecked. Segregation was the result of legislation.

One example illustrates this principle. In the State of Kentucky, public schools were often, although not always, segregated in the late 1800s. Private schools had the opportunity to be integrated — including both secular institutions and parochial religious schools.

One private school in particular — Berea College — took advantage of that opportunity and functioned in a fully desegregated manner. In November 1903, a member of the Kentucky legislature, Carl Day, happened to be on the campus of Berea College. He witnessed firsthand how Black and White students socialized as equals.

Carl Day returned to the state legislature, conferred with his fellow members of the Democratic Party, and introduced a bill which would require all schools — public and private — to be segregated. The president of the Democratic Club, J.M. Early, gave speeches in favor of this proposed legislation.

Administrators, professors, and students from Berea College spoke in opposition to the bill, but to no avail.

In January 1904, Carl Day’s bill was passed by the legislature, and in March 1904, it was signed into law by Governor John Crepps Wickliffe Beckham. Governor Beckham was known as “J.C.W. Beckham” in many reports.

Left to their own devices, the people of Kentucky were content to have integrated institutions of higher learning. But the government imposed segregation. As historian Benjamin Shapiro writes:

Segregation was governmentally imposed, not socially imposed. The whole reason that government was necessary was so that those who would not abide by social racism were forced to do so. As black economist Walter Williams states, “whenever there is a law on the books, one’s immediate suspicion should be that the law is there because not everyone would behave according to the law’s specifications.”

Walter Williams goes on to identify parallels between “Jim Crow Laws” in the United States and “Apartheid” in South Africa. In both cases, society had no desire for complete and legally enforced segregation. In both cases, individuals in the private sector were willing to violate the government’s demands for segregation.

Racism requires the existence of government regulations in order to do its damage. Without such regulations, ordinary women and men are happy to do business with anyone of any race, if that person can strike a good deal. Walter Williams writes:

The bottom line is that racists cannot trust free markets to racially discriminate. Free markets, with their dispersion of power, have little respect for race. Racial solidarity could not prevent white South African businessmen from contravening laws that banned them from hiring blacks in jobs "reserved" for whites. In the U.S., Jim Crow laws were frequently ignored. In South Africa, the U.S. and elsewhere, the private desire for profits and other personal gain challenged racial loyalty. Racists need the force of government to have success.

After the “Reconstruction” Era began to wind down, around 1877, the Democratic Party in many of the states in the South were still bitterly angry that slavery had been abolished and that the Democratic Party had lost the war. Walter Williams explains that these states “enforced some form of segregation through what were known as Jim Crow laws.”

While American society was content to embrace integration and desegregation, historian Benjamin Shapiro explains that “segregation was imposed governmentally.”

The suffering imposed on African-American in South after the Civil War, up until the relief provided by the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the Civil Rights Act of 1960, was imposed not by American society, but rather by governments which had gained too much power over the daily lives of ordinary people.

Posing as Journalists, Soviet Agents Deliver China to Destruction: The Amerasia Case

One skill needed for successful covert operations is the ability to establish a good ‘front’ — a seemingly innocuous activity or organization, behind which an intelligence agency can assemble its destructive efforts. Such was the case of the magazine Amerasia, which managed to hide the workings of both Soviet agents and Maoist insurgents.

Aside from its obvious pro-communist prejudices, the periodical seemed to be an innocent enough collection of articles about the politics and policies of east Asia. In reality, however, the offices of the journal served as a junction for a network of spies. Once detected, the web of individuals and other ‘front’ organizations connected to Amerasia showed itself to be both large and significant.

As reported in the Taiwan Today newspaper, the unraveling of the magazine’s facade began when one of its articles contained text which could have only come from a confidential source:

The strange case of Amerasia, like many a fictional spy thriller, opened quite accidentally. One day in February, 1945, Kenneth E. Wells of the Office of Strategic Services picked up a recent issue of the magazine, dated January 26, and found himself quoted — but not cited. Wells was head of the Southern Asian Section of the research branch of the OSS. To his amazement he read, in an article entitled “The Case of Thailand,” the very language he had used in a highly classified memorandum describing the lack of harmony between British and American policies in that part of the world. The article contained, verbatim, whole paragraphs out of a secret OSS report prepared by Wells himself some months earlier. Obviously, the magazine writer must have had the document itself be­fore him as he wrote.

It was clear that secret government documents had been stolen and were in the hands of people who had no clearance to have them. Further, passages from those documents had been published. This was a crime, a breach of national security, and posed a danger to the lives of both Americans and Chinese.

The need for immediate action was obvious, as Taiwan Today explains:

Wells properly called the matter to the attention of Archibald Van Beuren, OSS security chief, who was sufficiently alarmed to fly to New York on February 28. There he instructed his director of investigation, Frank Brooks Bielaski, to find out how and why the document had gotten out of OSS files. Bielaski was given a list of the names of some 30 persons to whom copies had been sent. Most of them were in the OSS, but a few were in the Department of State, and at least one in both Army and Navy Intelligence. Copies had gone also to a half-dozen Foreign Service officers on duty in the Far East. With secretaries and assistants counted, perhaps 100 employees of the United States Government had access to the OSS report on Thailand. Biela­ski’s task was to locate the leak. Figuring that it would take 10 men to maintain a close watch on each person in Washington, Bielaski estimated that he would need at least 1,000 OSS agents for the job. Such a force was not available. It was decided, therefore, to make a preliminary investigation of the magazine itself. An agent was sent to the New York Public Library to analyze past issues of Amerasia, and its editorial offices at 225 Fifth Avenue were put under round-the-clock surveillance. Bielaski himself made some inquiries re­garding the staff of the magazine.

Already early in the case, a number of OSS agents were involved: Kenneth E. Wells, Archibald Van Beuren, and Frank Brooks Bielaski. Soon more OSS operatives would be part of the events, as well as FBI agents and eventually investigators acting on behalf of the U.S. Congress.

The cast of characters on the other side would grow as well. What began as a question about a small and even obscure little publication would turn into a catalogue of many of the most dangerous Soviet agents of the era.

The Soviet Socialists understood that the future success or failure of Mao’s insurgents would not only shape the history of China, but also the history of the United States. In turn, America’s policies toward China would nudge Mao’s terrorists in one direction or the other: toward success or toward failure. The Amerasia case uncovered one of Stalin’s key weapons in this struggle: Soviet agents acting covertly — as “moles” — inside the U.S. government. Those who shaped America’s policies toward China were acting, not on reliable information provided by honest civil servants, but rather on fabrications and opinions provided by Soviet espionage agents planted within the U.S. State Department.

Even as the battles of WW2 still raged, the Soviets were planning the postwar destruction of the Chinese government and the creation of Mao’s Marxist dictatorship.

OSS agents investigating Amerasia found not only that the publication’s staff had obtained stolen documents, but that many of the magazine’s writers were actually Soviet agents, part of a larger network which led to still more Soviet agents in the government and in other organizations, as Time magazine reports:

Chunky, spectacled Frank Bielaski, an ex-Wall Street broker turned Government secret agent, had handled many cases for OSS during the war. One midnight, tracing down the document quoted in Amerasia, Bielaski and four aides let themselves into a dark, empty building at 225 Fifth Avenue. They took an elevator to the eleventh floor and there, by what Bielaski later called “deceit and subterfuge,” entered Amerasia’s office. Once inside, they began a careful inspection. They found one room fitted out with photocopy equipment, a desk in another room spread with copies of Government documents. Behind a door were a bellows-type suitcase and two briefcases packed with other papers — altogether close to 300 originals and copies of documents stolen from the Offices of Naval Intelligence and Censorship, G2, OSS, State Department and British Intelligence. A few of them were marked “Top Secret” and “Secret”; all of them were labeled for official scrutiny only.

Clearly, there were moles at work inside the State Department. In addition to Amerasia, secrets were being passed on to the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), a policy think-tank, and to the IPR’s publications. The IPR’s main publication was a periodical titled Pacific Affairs.

The Soviet Socialist espionage network inside the United States did more than steal secret documents. It was also active in shaping America’s policies. Individuals working the State Department who were associated with the IPR wrote briefings for decision-makers in the U.S. government.

The Soviets, who sought the ultimate destruction of the United States, were shaping the decisions by which America was to defend itself against the Soviets. The USSR had managed to subvert the American system against itself.

The OSS gained physical evidence which revealed how widespread the Soviet infiltration was, as Time magazine reports:

The raiders picked up a dozen documents to show the kind of material they had found, and left. A few hours later Bielaski laid his report and the documents before officials in Washington.

Amerasia was co-edited and co-founded by Philip Jaffe. Jaffe was connected to a number of known Soviet spies, including Earl Browder, Owen Lattimore, and John Stewart Service. Each of these was connected to still others. In the end, a dizzyingly large network of Soviet operatives were related directly or indirectly to the Amerasia case.

Ultimately, some of these were tried in court and jailed. Others were rendered useless to the Soviets because their identities had been revealed. But some of them also managed to slip away and continue their espionage activity.

The case expanded from the OSS to the FBI, and then culminated in legal actions, as Time magazine explains:

The case was assigned to the FBI. For almost three months FBI agents kept Jaffe and his office under surveillance. Other agents tailed Jaffe on frequent trips to Washington where he met assorted small-bore Government officials. By late May, James Mclnerney, first assistant to Tom Clark, who was in charge of criminal prosecution for the Justice Department, was ready to collar the crowd, start prosecutions for espionage.

All of this would be mere historical trivia, except for the fact that Mao’s terrorists ultimately destroyed both China’s government and much of Chinese society. Mao’s victory is due, in part or in whole, to less-than-energetic American support for Chiang Kai-shek. Had Chiang been able to defend China against Mao, and had Mao’s communist dictatorship not been able to oppress China for several decades, then millions of Chinese would not have been murdered by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Not only would millions of Chinese lives have been saved, but also lives in Korea and Vietnam, including American lives.

Why did America fail to stoutly oppose Mao’s genocidal takeover of China? In part because the network of individuals who were associated with Amerasia had persuaded U.S. policy makers that Mao was benign and that Chiang Kai-shek was useless. Acting on disinformation — a step worse than misinformation — U.S. policy makers were lulled into letting Mao have China. Philip Jaffe’s network of Soviet spies is directly and indirectly responsible for the deaths of millions of human beings.

When a Magazine Is More Than Simply a Magazine: Amerasia As a Front for Maoist-Stalinist Espionage

In June, 1950, Time magazine reported that Congress was examining a collection of classified government documents. These documents had been found, not securely stored under lock and key in a federal office, but rather in the offices of a magazine title Amerasia. The questions presented themselves: What information did these secret papers contain? How did they come to be in the offices of a quirky little periodical?

More questions were prompted by the fact that the FBI had discovered the trove of confidential documents in 1945, and yet the Congressional investigations into the matter were underway in 1950. Why the five-year delay into an incident which revealed a stunning breach of national security? Wouldn’t such a discovery demand quicker action?

The Time article reports:

In a Justice Department office last week, staffmen of a Senate subcommittee combed through three large boxes containing hundreds of documents seized five years ago in the Amerasia case. Around the boxes swirled a storm of argument. Republican Senators, none of whom had actually seen the contents, cried that the Administration had put the fix on the Amerasia case, and that a real probe of the case would prove it. From Iowa, where he was campaigning in a primary election, Bourke Hickenlooper charged that at least some of the documents were important U.S. wartime secrets. Didn’t one of them show the disposition in 1944 of U.S. submarines in the Pacific? Wasn’t one of them a highly confidential (“for eyes only”) message from Roosevelt to Chiang Kaishek? Said Hickenlooper: “I think that all Americans will be appalled when the whole truth becomes known.”

It seemed that the administration — in this case, the Truman administration — was dragging its feet. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) had confirmed Amerasia’s illegal possession of the papers in March 1945. Why would the government slow-walk a matter of national security?

Was Truman himself involved in deciding the pace at which the Amerasia case would be handled? Or were underlings making these choices without the president’s knowledge?

The Time article records the administration’s reaction to the congressional concerns:

Such talk, Administration sources replied, was hogwash; the documents were nothing much. Said Assistant Attorney General James M. Mclnerney: Hickenlooper is “100% wrong.”

While obfuscation about the processing of the case muddied the waters, the facts of the case were simple and clear. Someone had stolen classified documents from the OSS. Those documents were found in the offices of Amerasia. This was a crime. In the words of historian Stan Evans, it was “felonious.”

The case began in a straightforward way, as Time reports:

As thick as the argument was the smoke screen of confusion around the whole affair, which the Administration seemed determined to preserve at all costs. In 1945, Amerasia was a magazine (circ. about 2,000) devoted more or less openly to the Communist line and the Far East, and published sporadically in New York by one Philip Jaffe. The case began that February when the eyes of a Government official fell upon a surprising Amerasia article. It quoted at length and almost verbatim from a secret report which was supposed to be tucked safely away in the Office of Strategic Services’ file. The OSS immediately put a special investigator, Frank Brooks Bielaski, on Amerasia's pink and wispy trail.

As the initial investigation continued, it became clear that the case would involve much more than Philip Jaffe and his magazine.

Jaffe was part of a network of Soviet operatives and communist sympathizers. This network had connections to Moscow and to Mao’s rebels in China. Jaffe’s associates included a number of current and former highly-placed officials in various government offices. Was the administration anticipating embarrassment when it was revealed that the Soviet Socialists had developed a spy network inside significant branches of the U.S. government?

Jaffe’s associates constituted a list of known Soviet operatives, as historians Herbert Romerstsein and Stan Evans write:

The contents of a secret OSS memo had appeared, in some respects verbatim, in the pages of Amerasia — the obvious implication being that someone had been leaking official data to the journal. This led agents from OSS, and then the FBI, to conduct an in-depth probe of the magazine and its personnel, including dragnet coverage of the suspects and their contacts, plus entry into Amerasia’s New York offices to photograph papers being held there. In the course of this inquiry, the Bureau noted Jaffe’s multifarious dealings with Service, Roth, State Department official Emmanuel Larsen, and journalist Mark Gayn. Interspersed with these, Jaffe was also surveilled meeting with U.S. Communist Party chief Earl Browder, visiting Chinese Communist bigwig Tung Pi-wu, officials at the Soviet consulate in New York, and self-described Soviet espionage courier Joseph Bernstein.

John Stewart Service worked in the State Department’s foreign service organization. In addition to stealing classified documents and passing them to Jaffe and Gayn, Service had gerrymandered his internal reports about the China situation: these reports circulated within the State Department and influenced American policy-making. Under the influence of Service, American support for Chiang Kai-shek became less enthusiastic, and Mao’s communists benefitted.

Andrew Roth was a lieutenant in the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). He introduced Service to a group who were “avid supporters of the Communists at Yenan,” as Evans and Romerstein write.

Philip Jaffe was not only networked in this way with a constellation of Soviet operatives, but Amerasia was linked to other organizations which, like Amerasia, were fronts for Soviet intelligence agencies.

One such front organization was the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR). Allegedly a think-tank for discussing regional problems and writing policy recommendations, IPR staff and board members greatly overlapped with Amerasia’s staff and board members. Both the IPR and Amerasia were located in the same office building, as was another organization, the Committee for a Democratic Far Eastern Policy. This “committee” was also a facade behind which the Soviet Socialists could run a pro-Mao operation.

The IPR published its own magazine, Pacific Affairs. The list of authors who wrote for this magazine, and for other IPR publications, was nearly identical to the list of authors who wrote for Amerasia.

The network went still further: “Lauchlin Currie,” writes Stan Evans, was “an executive assistant to President Roosevelt in the early 1940s whose portfolio included policy toward China. Currie left the government in 1945.” When investigations of Amerasia and the IPR continued, Currie “would flee the country,” because he had a central organizational role in the IPR. “In trying to retrace the steps by which the U.S. government had been penetrated by Communists and Soviet agents,” congressional investigators “got on the trail of Currie and his multitude of contacts.”

Currie was, for instance, closely linked with Owen Lattimore, and with diplomat John Stewart Service, arrested in the Amerasia case after sending back a stream of dispatches from China denouncing the anti-Communist leader Chiang Kai-shek. Currie was also extremely thick with John Carter Vincent, the State Department official who played a critical role in shaping U.S. Asia policy in the years before the Red conquest of China.

Owen Lattimore was yet one more link in the chain connecting Moscow, Mao, and the network which included Philip Jaffe and John Stewart Service. Lattimore had been an IPR employee and then a foreign policy advisor in the Roosevelt administration. Lauchlin Currie had recommended to Roosevelt that Lattimore be dispatched to China to advise Chiang Kai-shek.

It is worth noting that Lattimore and Currie were Soviet agents who had direct access to the President of the United States. They were not the only ones. Roosevelt relied on these men for advice, assuming that they were seeking what was best for the common Allied cause in WW2. Instead, these two, along with Alger Hiss and other known Soviet agents who met face-to-face with FDR, were advocating policies which would undermine the Allied cause and which would set up a postwar world framework favorable to the Soviets.

In the end, Amerasia was not simply a magazine discussing foreign policy and thereby exercising its first amendment rights. It was a front for Soviet and Maoist intelligence agencies. It was part of a network which influence American policy in China, which led ultimately to Mao’s seizure of power in 1949, and which is therefore at least partly responsible for the deaths of millions of human beings.

Proliferation: How One Person’s Actions Affects Millions

Technology — understood not merely as the latest iPhone or AI app, but rather in a more general way — has led to a situation in which one individual’s actions can affect, for good or for ill, the lives of millions. Such is the case of Alger Hiss.

Alger Hiss is one of the most destructive people of the twentieth century.

Born in the United States, in Maryland in 1904, Hiss came from a comfortable middle-class family. He was popular in high school, and succeeded academically, completing his undergraduate studies at Johns Hopkins University, and his graduate work at Harvard. Alger Hiss developed significant social connections, which turned into professional and political connections, during his time at Harvard.

In 1936, Hiss obtained a job within the State Department. Around the same time, he also became a spy for the Soviet Socialists. Although a paid employee of the USSR, Hiss did his espionage more as a passion than as a way to earn money: his desire was to destroy the United States as a constitutional democratic republic.

Alger Hiss was an agent for the organization which would become the KGB.

Eventually working his way up to the level of presidential advisor, Alger Hiss would have face-to-face meetings with President Roosevelt. As a Soviet agent, his task was twofold: first, to steal secrets from the United States government and send them to Moscow; second, to give misleading advice to President Roosevelt so that he would make decisions which favored the USSR and not the United States.

One of Joseph Stalin’s paid employees was giving advice to the president of the United States.

One of the Soviet agents to whom Alger Hiss reported eventually defected. Whittaker Chambers, a high-level insider in the Soviet Socialist espionage network, confessed to the U.S. authorities what he was doing. Chambers was not comfortable when he discovered the consequences of supplying the USSR with military intelligence.

As a result of Soviet spying in the United States, the Soviet Socialists obtained the technology to build their own atomic bombs. Emboldened by this technology, they increased their resolve to oppress the nations of eastern Europe. Millions of people in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and other nations died or lived in servitude because of the Soviet hegemony.

Further, the Soviet Socialists launched and maintained their military proxies in the Korean War and the Vietnam War. The Soviet espionage network inside the United States gave them the technology to start such efforts, and the intelligence to maintain them.

The roots of the Soviet spy network go back a decade earlier: In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Alger Hiss was assuring President Roosevelt that he could trust the promises of Joseph Stalin. Stalin pledged to allow free and fair elections in the nations of eastern Europe. Stalin broke these promises and ordered the Soviet Socialist army to invade these nations at the end of WW2. Alger Hiss was simultaneously sending U.S. military secrets to the Soviet intelligence headquarters in Moscow.

Historian Christina Shelton writes:

During the late 1940s, a high-level State Department official, Alger Hiss, was accused of spying for the Soviet Union by a senior editor of Time magazine, Whittaker Chambers, who previously had been a Soviet agent and Hiss’s “handler.” For two years, the political drama of congressional hearings and Hiss trials made headline news throughout the country. The case was particularly contentious, given Hiss’s prominence, the political climate of an incipient anti-Communist movement during the Truman administration, and, most importantly, because of the ideological rupture that unfolded. Battle lines were drawn between the right and the left that remain to this day. Hiss eventually was convicted of perjury related to espionage. The evidence that was crucial to the government’s case included stolen State Department classified documents, microfilms with classified material, and handwritten notes — all of which came to be known collectively as the “Pumpkin Papers” — that Hiss had turned over to Chambers for passage to Soviet military intelligence. Chambers had secreted them prior to his defection for his own future protection and then presented them shortly before the perjury trials began.

Some of the evidence which ultimately led to Hiss’s conviction was a set of documents which had been hidden inside a hollowed-out pumpkin: so they were called the “Pumpkin Papers.”

Hiss had given these documents to Whittaker Chambers when they were both working for the Soviet Socialists. When Chambers decided to stop supporting the USSR, he kept these documents and hid them. Later, when Chambers had to defend himself against Hiss’s attacks, Chambers produced the documents and showed them to U.S. intelligence officials.

When the evidence showed beyond doubt that Hiss had stolen U.S. information and attempted to send it to the USSR, it was clear that Hiss was guilty. Hiss had not only betrayed the United States, but he had willingly supported the Soviet Socialist efforts which caused millions of deaths in Korea, in Vietnam, and in eastern Europe.