If the Founders had “eradicate[d] slavery at the nation’s founding” the new nation would would have been much smaller

Alan Jacobs: 

In Rochester, New York, on July 4, 1852, [Frederick] Douglass gave a speech called “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” and it is as fine an example of reckoning wisely with a troubling past as I have ever read. He begins by acknowledging that the Founders “were great men,” though he immediately goes on to say, “The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration.” Yes: Douglass is compelled to view them in a critical light, because their failure to eradicate slavery at the nation’s founding led to his own enslavement, led to his being beaten and abused and denied every human right, forced him to live in bondage and in fear until he could at long last make his escape. Nevertheless, “for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.”

What, for Douglass, made the Founders worthy of honor? Well, “they loved their country better than their own private interests,” which is good; though they were “peace men,” “they preferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage,” which is very good, and indeed true of Douglass himself; and “with them, nothing was ‘settled’ that was not right,” which is excellent. Perhaps best of all, “with them, justice, liberty and humanity were ‘final’; not slavery and oppression.” Therefore, “you may well cherish the memory of such men. They were great in their day and generation.”

In their day and generation. But what they achieved, though astonishing in its time, can no longer be deemed adequate. Indeed, it never could have been so deemed, because they did not live up to the principles they so powerfully celebrated. They announced a “final”—that is, an absolute, a nonnegotiable—commitment to justice, liberty, and humanity, but even those who did not own slaves themselves negotiated away the rights of Black people. And so Douglass must say these blunt words: “This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”

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I have quoted Lincoln’s observation that the Constitution could not have been ratified if it had an anti-slavery provision, because the states which became the Confederacy would have voted against it.

There was a second choice Lincoln did not mention in the passage cited. Divide the nation into the states which ratified an anti-slavery Constitution, and see the other former colonies proceed independently.

The southern colonies would eventually have ended slavery, and would not have felt that emancipation had been imposed on them against their will.

The United States would not have had a permanent backward, benighted, resentful, reactionary region as it has now; and probably would not have had the worst healthcare and highest prison population of modern industrialized nations.

It would also be smaller. Would the expansion of the Louisiana Purchase have taken place? The expansion to the Pacific, and taking large parts of Mexico such as the Southwest and California?

With a much diminished United States, what would have been the outcome of the two World Wars?