Blind Spots
On November 30, 1782, American and British representatives gathered in Paris to negotiate the final terms of the peace treaty ending the American Revolution. They were interrupted by Henry Laurens, a South Carolinian planter. Laurens urged them to be sure to guarantee the return to slavery of any who had escaped from their owners during the war to join the British war effort and were now in British protective custody, largely in New York where the British army was still present in force.
John Adams, one of the American negotiators, described in his diary what followed:
“We all agreed. Mr. Oswald [the lead British negotiator] consented . . . [The treaty] signed, sealed, and delivered, we all went to . . . dine with Dr. Franklin.”
I don’t know how much time transpired between Laurens’ appearance and the concluding dinner. Nor do I know how much debate took place over the planter’s request, or how heated it was. But still the diary entry troubles me. It reads as if the decision to return thousands of former slaves to servitude was just a loose end that needed to be tied up to finalize negotiations. Equally disturbing, “[w]e all agreed [to the re-enslavement],” is listed alongside, “we all went to dine,” as if the two decisions shared the same level of significance.
Most disturbing to me is that John Adams wrote these words, for he had risked everything by signing a declaration asserting that “all men are created equal,” and now he was acting as if he didn’t believe that assertion.
As it turned out, despite George Washington’s protests and threats (“I will take any measures which may be deemed expedient, to prevent the future carrying away of any Negroes”), the British Commander in New York, Sir Guy Carlton, refused to uphold the negotiators’ stipulation and permitted all the former slaves in his custody to leave New York as free people and go “to any part of the world they thought proper.”
Still, Adams’ account troubles me. Why did he agree to Laurens’ request? It cannot be that he was simply a “man of his times” who didn’t see the hypocrisy of asserting human freedom while returning people to bondage. He himself never owned slaves and had two years earlier been the primary author of the Massachusetts State Constitution which exerted such a powerful influence on State Supreme Court cases that slavery was abolished there in 1783.
I suspect that Adams simply chose on this occasion to look the other way, much as he would at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, when, for the sake of establishing the American government, he put the issue of slavery on the back burner. In this case, if appeasing slave owners back home was the price to be paid for hastening the formal end to the bloody hostility of the American Revolution, then so be it.
Would I have acted differently from Adams on that occasion? Would I have reflected differently in my diary? I don’t know.
Here is one thing I do know, and it tends to mute my criticism, even if it doesn’t silence it entirely. Adams’ public spiritedness dwarfs mine.
John Adams had sacrificed an enormous amount for a cause far greater than himself. The dilemma he faced in November 1782, like so many he faced in life, had nothing to do with his personal well-being. It was over two public goods: should he delay the formal conclusion to a bloody war or should he preserve the emancipation of formerly enslaved people.
So many of my preoccupations, by contrast, are merely private.
If the value of my stock portfolio is rising, then I am content and apt to give little thought to those fellow Americans who cannot afford to buy stocks in the first place. If my real estate is accruing value, I am at peace and tend not to think of the millions who own no real estate and, given present trends, are not likely ever to own any.
If my salary (or, in my case, my retirement income) is keeping pace with inflation, then I am apt not to think all that much about those whose salary or retirement income is not. If my children and grandchildren are adequately fed, clothed, and educated, then I tend not to think about the inadequate provision for other children and grandchildren in America, much less those in other parts of the world.
Ages ago the prophet Jeremiah decried those who soothed their consciences, “saying, ‘Peace! Peace!’ when there is no peace.” Peace has little value if it is only mine.
[I am indebted to journalist Andrew Lawler, writing in The Atlantic (November 2025) for some of the details in this post]
In reading another excellent post by you, I am reminded of the Jungian's understanding that each of us has a shadow side, a part of our psyche which is often not examined and healthily integrated in our personality functioning. Perhaps this contributes to blind spots as does the neuroscience research that suggests our brains often exclude data that contradicts our beliefs and biases.
I think the profound paradigm shift that Christ invites us to make is to examine our own inconsistencies, profound bias, and mixed motives in what we do and then do at least two things: move to a position of humility about what we think and believe and to not be so quick to judge the other, blind to our own imperfections.
You invite us to this kind of examination as you rightly identify the tendency to ignore our neighbor's plight when those of us who are privileged can afford to live quite nicely.
Wonderful article. There are so many blind spots we all have.
But, maybe to give Adams even a bit more “benefit of the doubt”, I would contend that sometimes we have to play the “long game” to get things done. And maybe an individual diary entry need not reflect the whole game every time. (Similar to how we need not read every biblical truth into every verse.)
I recently read “Fears of a Setting Sun” which talked about how the founders - for the most part - were concerned as they neared the end of their lives that the Union would not hold. And the thing they were worried would tear the union apart was slavery. By the time they passed, the US had banned importing slaves (1808) and their shared belief seemed to be that if they allowed slavery to spread, it would die out under its own weight, as there would be too few slaves in any given area to do all the work. (Super weird, I know, but not illogical).
Wilberforce spent decades using clever parliamentary maneuvers and seemingly innocuous “anti-France” legislation to first gut, and ultimately strike the death blow to the British slave trade.
Lincoln declared martial law in Maryland, suspended habeus corpus, and detained pro-secession legislators during a critical secession vote in order to guarantee Washington was not surrounded. Then, he curiously used the Emancipation Proclamation to only free the slaves in states that had seceded, so as to not disrupt the Union and ironically resulting in Northern and Border states holding people in slavery the longest.
The point being that in a fallen world, sometimes we have to keep the long game in mind and not let the “perfect” become the enemy of the “good”. Every seemingly “radical” and “quantum” move in social progress (apart from Christ, but even he mercifully sent John the Baptist before him to prepare the way) is actually a breakout of 1,000 small steps taken by those who at the time may be accused of compromising, but who are actually advancing the cause. (“As innocent as lambs, but clever as serpents.”) Maybe Adams was in that place also.
Unfortunately, the spirit of our age seems to be too focused on insisting on the “perfect” of our side’s view that we can’t make any progress.
Kind of your point, huh? :-)