Allow me to add to my earlier statement...the FF were absolutely racist.
Thomas Jefferson’s views were typical of his generation. Despite what he wrote in the Declaration, he did not think Blacks were equal to Whites, noting that “in general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection.”
[4] He hoped slavery would be abolished some day, but “when freed, he [the Negro] is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture.”
[5] Jefferson also expected whites eventually to displace all of the Indians of the New World. The United States, he wrote, was to be “the nest from which all America, North and South, is to be peopled,”
[6] and the hemisphere was to be entirely European: “… nor can we contemplate with satisfaction either blot or mixture on that surface.”
[7] [...]
James Madison agreed with Jefferson that the only solution to the race problem was to free the slaves and expel them: “To be consistent with existing and probably unalterable prejudices in the U.S. freed blacks ought to be permanently removed beyond the region occupied by or allotted to a White population.”
[9] He proposed that the federal government buy up the entire slave population and transport it overseas. After two terms in office, he served as chief executive of the American Colonization Society, which was established to repatriate Blacks.
[10]
Benjamin Franklin wrote little about race, but had a sense of racial loyalty that was typical of his time:
[T]he Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably [sic] very small… . I could wish their Numbers were increased…. But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.
Franklin therefore opposed bringing more Blacks to the United States
[11]:
[W]hy increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America?"
John Dickinson was a Delaware delegate to the constitutional convention and wrote so effectively in favor of independence that he is known as the “Penman of the Revolution.” As was common in his time, he believed that homogeneity, not diversity, was the new republic’s greatest strength
[12]:
Where was there ever a confederacy of republics united as these states are…or, in which the people were so drawn together by religion, blood, language, manners, and customs?
Dickinson’s views were echoed in the second of
The Federalist Papers, in which John Jay gave thanks that “Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people,”
[13]
a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs."
Alexander Hamilton was suspicious even of European immigrants, writing that “the influx of foreigners must, therefore, tend to produce a heterogeneous compound; to change and corrupt the national spirit; to complicate and confound public opinion; to introduce foreign propensities.”
[15] John Quincy Adams explained to a German nobleman that if Europeans were to immigrate, “they must cast off the European skin, never to resume it.”
[16] Neither man would have countenanced immigration of non-Whites.
Blacks, even if free, could not be citizens of the United States until ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868. The question of their citizenship arose during the Missouri crisis of 1820 to 1821. The Missouri constitution barred the immigration of Blacks, and some northern critics said that to prevent Blacks who were citizens of other states from moving to Missouri deprived them of protection under the privileges and immunities clause of the Constitution. The author of that clause, Charles Pinckney of South Carolina, was still alive, and denied that he, or any other Framer, intended the clause to apply to Blacks: “I perfectly knew that there did not then exist such a thing in the Union as a black or colored citizen, nor could I then have conceived it possible such a thing could have ever existed in it.”
[17]
