Slavery and the American Revolution

SLAVERY AND THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION


African Americans saw in the ideals of the American Revolution and the reality of war an opportunity to claim freedom.

1776: The slave population had grown to 500,000, about 1/5 of the new nation’s inhabitants.

Slaveowning and slave trading were accepted routines of colonial life.


Sometimes, the same issues of patriotic newspapers that published activities of the Sons of Liberty or arguments against the Stamp Act contained slave notices.

SLAVERY AND FREEDOM

SLAVERY AND FREEDOM

Slavery played a central role in the language of the Revolution.

Apart from liberty, it was the word most frequently invoked in the era’s legal and political literature.

18th century writers frequently juxtaposed freedom and slavery as “the extremes of happiness and misery in society.”

SLAVERY AND FREEDOM

Yet in the era’s debates over British rule, slavery was primarily a political category, shorthand for the denial of one’s personal and political rights by arbitrary government.

Those who lacked a voice in public affairs, declared a 1769 petition demanding an expansion of the right to vote in Britain, were “enslaved.”

SLAVERY AND FREEDOM

By the eve of independence, the contrast between GB, “a kingdom of slaves,” and America, a “country of free men,” had become a standard of the language of resistance.

Such language was employed without irony even in areas where nearly half the population were slaves.

1774: SC, writer declared was a “sacred land’ of freedom, where it was impossible to believe that “slavery shall soon be permitted to erect her throne.”

SLAVERY AND FREEDOM

Some colonial writers of the 1760s occasionally made a direct connection between slavery as a reality and slavery as a metaphor.

One such writer was James Otis, Jr., of MA.

JAMES OTIS JR.

Freedom must be universal.

“What man is or ever was born free if every man is not.”

African Americans were British subjects and deserving of all rights as British subjects.

He was hardly typical of patriot leaders. But the presence of hundreds of thousands of slaves powerfully affected the meaning of freedom for the leaders of the Revolution.

EDMUND BURKE: ENGLISH STATESMAN

Familiarity with slavery made colonial leaders unusually sensitive to threats to their own liberties.

Freedom was a privilege not a common right.

“… those who are free are by far the most proud and jealous of their freedom.”

DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON

On the other hand, many British observers could not resist pointing out the colonists’ apparent hypocrisy.

“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of slaves?”

OBSTACLES TO ABOLITION


At the time of the American Revolution, slavery was already an old institution.

It existed in every colony and formed the basis of the economy and social structure from Maryland southward.

At least 40% of Virginia’s population were slaves. The proportions were even higher in Georgia and South Carolina.

THOMAS JEFFERSON

TJ owned over 100 slaves when he wrote the Declaration of Independence.

Everything he cherished in life ultimately rested on slave labor.

OBTACLES TO ABOLITION

Some patriots argued that slavery for blacks made freedom possible for whites.

By eliminating the great bulk of the dependent poor from the political nation, it left the public arena to men of propertied independence.

Owning slaves offered a route to the economic autonomy widely deemed necessary for genuine freedom – a point driven home by a 1780 VA law that rewarded veterans of the W of I with 300 acres and a slave.


Even the Lockean vision of the political community as a group of individuals contracting together to secure their natural rights could be readily invoked to defend bondage.

Nothing was more essential, in this view, than the right of self-government and the protection of property against outside interference.

These principles suggested that for the government to seize property – including slave property – against the owner’s will would be an infringement on liberty.

If the government by the consent of the governed formed the essence of political freedom, then to require owners to give up their slave property would reduce them to slavery.

THE CAUSE OF GENERAL LIBERTY


By imparting so absolute a value to liberty and defining freedom as a universal entitlement rather than a set of rights specific to a particular place or people, the AR inevitably raised questions about the status of slavery in the new nation.

Before the AR there had been little public discussion of the institution, even though enlightened opinion had come to view slavery as morally wrong.


1688: A group of German Quakers issued a “protest” regarding the rights of blacks, regarding it unjust to have slaves.

1700: Samuel Sewall, a Boston merchant, published The Selling of Joseph, the first antislavery tract printed in America.

Sewall wrote that “all the sons of Adam” were entitled to “have equal right unto liberty.”


But it was during the revolutionary era that slavery for the first time became a focus of public debate.

Benjamin Rush (PA) in 1773 called upon “advocates for American liberty to “espouse the cause of … general liberty” and warned that slavery was one of those “national crimes” that one day would bring “national punishment.


TJ unsuccessfully tried to include criticisms of slavery in the D of I.

In private, he condemned slavery as a system that every day imposed on its victims “more misery, than ages of that which [colonists] rose in rebellion to oppose.”

IN QUEST OF FREEDOM

IN QUEST OF FREEDOM

The AR inspired widespread hopes that slavery could be removed from American life.

Slaves themselves appreciated that by defining of freedom as a universal right, the leaders of the AR had devised a weapon that could be used against their own bondage.

IN QUEST OF FREEDOM

The language of liberty echoed in slave communities North and South.

Slaves used the patriotic language for their own purposes.

African Americans demanded that the leaders of the AR live up to their self-proclaimed creed.

IN QUEST OF FREEDOM

1766: White Charlestonians had been shocked when their opposition to the Stamp Act inspired a group of blacks to parade around the city crying “Liberty.”

1775: The Provincial Congress of SC felt compelled to investigate the “high notions of liberty” the struggle against GB has inspired among the slaves.

IN QUEST OF FREEDOM

The first concrete steps toward emancipation in revolutionary America were “freedom petitions” arguments for liberty presented to English courts and colonial legislatures in the early 1770s by enslaved African Americans.

These petitions contained the language and philosophy of the AR.

Some slaves sued in court for being “illegally detained in slavery.”

IN QUEST OF FREEDOM

The turmoil of war offered avenues to freedom.

Many slaves ran away and tried to pass as freeborn.

The number of fugitive slave ads in colonial newspapers rose dramatically in the 1770s and 1780s.

IN QUEST OF FREEDOM

Lemuel Hayes, a black member of the MA., militia and later a celebrated minister, in 1776, urged that Americans “extend” their conception of freedom.

If liberty were truly “an innate principle” for all mankind, even an African had as equally good right to his liberty in common with Englishmen.”

IN QUEST OF FREEDOM

Blacks sought to make white America understand slavery as a concrete reality – the denial of all essential elements of freedom – not merely as a metaphor for the loss of political self-determination.

1773: A group of N.E., slaves, petitioning for freedom, exclaimed: “We have no property! We have no wives! No children! We have no city! No country.”

IN QUEST OF FREEDOM

Most slaves of the revolutionary era were only one or two generations removed from Africa.

They did not need the ideology of the Revolution to persuade them that freedom was a birthright – the experiences of their parents and grandparents suggested as much.

IN QUEST OF FREEDOM

Phillis Wheatley was a slave in Boston in 1761.

She learned to read and write and published her first poem in N.E., newspapers in 1765, when she was about 12 years old.

1783: My love of freedom” arose from the “cruel fate” of being “snatch’d from Africa’s shore.”

IN QUEST OF FREEDOM

The fact that a volume of her poems had to be printed with a testimonial from prominent citizens, including John Hancock, affirming that she was the author, illustrates that many whites found it difficult to accept the idea of black’s intellectual ability.

IN QUEST OF FREEDOM

Yet by invoking the Revolution’s ideology of liberty to demand their own rights and by defining freedom as a universal entitlement, blacks demonstrated how American they had become, even as they sought to redefine what American freedom in fact represented.

FIGHTING FOR LIBERTY


At the war’s outset, GW had refused to accept black recruits.

But he changed his mind after Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation of 1775 which offered freedom to slaves who joined the British cause.


Some 5,000 blacks enlisted in state militias and the Continental Army and Navy.

Since individuals drafted were allowed to provide a substitute, slaves suddenly gained considerable bargaining power.

Many acquired their freedom by agreeing to serve in place of an owner or his son.

1778: Rhode Island formed a black regiment and promised freedom to slaves who enlisted.

Blacks who fought under Washington did so in racially integrated companies.

Except for South Carolina and Georgia, the southern colonies also enrolled blacks and slaves to fight. They were not explicitly promised freedom, but many received it individually after the war.


1783: The Va., state legislature emancipated slaves who had “contributed towards the establishment of American liberty and independence” by serving in the army.


But fighting for the British offered more opportunities for liberty.

In Virginia, 800 or more slaves had escaped their owners to join Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment.

Washington saw 17 of his slaves flee to the British.

Nearly 100,000 slaves, including one-quarter of all slaves in South Carolina and one-third in Georgia, deserted their owners and fled to the British.

Some 20,000 accompanied the British out of the country – to Canada, Europe, Africa, or in some cases re-enslavement in the West Indies – when the war ended.

THE FIRST EMANCIPATION


For a brief moment the AR appeared to threaten the continued existence of slavery.

During the W of I nearly every state prohibited or discouraged the further importation of slaves from Africa.

The war left much of the South in ruins. 1780s: A considerable number of slaveowners,

especially in VA and MD, voluntarily emancipated their slaves.

Further south, however, emancipation never got underway.


1777-1804: every state north of MD., took steps toward emancipation, the first time in recorded history that legislative power had been invoked to eradicate slavery.

But even here, where slavery was peripheral to the economy, the method of abolition reflected how property rights impeded emancipation.


Generally, abolition laws did not free living slaves.

Instead they provided for the liberty of any child born in the future to a slave mother, but only after he or she had served the mother’s master until adulthood as compensation for the owner’s future economic loss.

PA: Children born to slave mothers after the passage of the state’s Emancipation Act of 1780 had to serve the owner for 28 yrs.

Abolition in the North was a slow, drawn-out process.

For slaves alive when northern laws were passed, hopes for freedom rested on their ability to escape and the voluntary actions of their owners.


NYC: Where one-fifth of the white families owned at least one slave in 1790, recorded only 76 voluntary acts of emancipation between 1783-1800.

1790: The nation’s first census recorded 21,000 slaves still living in NY., and 11,000 in NJ.


As late as 1830: the national census revealed that there were still 3,500 slaves in the North.

The last slaves in CT., did not become free until 1848.

1860: 18 elderly slaves still resided in NJ.

FREE BLACK COMMUNITIES


The American Revolution had a contradictory impact on American slavery, and, therefore, on American freedom.

Gradual as it was, abolition of slavery in the North drew a line across the country, creating the dangerous division between free states and slave states.


Abolition in the North, voluntary emancipation in the South, and the escape of thousands from bondage created, for the first time in American history, a sizable free black population.

On the eve of independence, virtually every black person in America had been a slave.

Now, free black communities, with their own churches, schools, and leaders, came into existence.

They formed a standing challenge to the logic of slavery, a haven for fugitives, and a springboard for further efforts at abolition.


1776: Fewer than 10,000 free blacks in the US.

1810: Their numbers had grown to nearly 200,000, most of them living in MD., and VA.

In all states, except SC and GA., free black men who met taxpaying or property qualifications enjoyed the right to vote under new state constitutions.


As the wide-spread use of the term “ citizens of color” suggests, the first generation of free blacks, at least in the North, formed part of the political nation.

For many Americans, white as well as black, the existence of slavery would henceforth be recognized as a standing affront to the ideal of American freedom.


Nonetheless, the stark fact is slavery survived the War for Independence and thanks to natural increase of the slave population, continued to grow.

The census of 1790 revealed that the slave population had grown to 700,000 – 200,000 more than in 1776.

SLAVERY AND THE CONSTITUTION


The structure of govt., was not the only source of debate at the Constitutional Convention.

Madison recorded, “the institution of slavery and its implications” divided the delegates at many sessions.


Madison, like TJ a Virginian slaveholder who detested slavery, told the convention that the “distinction of color” had become the basis for “the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man.”

Yet he later assured the VA., ratifying convention that the Constitution offered slavery “better security than any that now exists.”


SC delegates came to the Convention determined to defend slavery.

They had a powerful impact on the final document.

They originated the fugitive slave clause, three-fifths compromise and the electoral college.

They threatened disunion if the Atlantic slave trade were prohibited immediately, as the NE states and Virginia, with its abundance of native-born slaves, demanded.


The words “slave” and “slavery” did not appear in the Constitution – a concession to the sensibilities of delegates who feared they would “contaminate the glorious fabric of liberty.”

The Constitution’s slavery clauses were compromises, efforts to find a middle ground between the institution’s defenders and critics.


Taken together, however, they embedded slavery more deeply than ever in American life.

**THE SLAVE TRADE CLAUSE: allowed the trade to continue until 1808.

– Jan. 1, 1808, Congress outlawed the slave trade.– Prior to this act South Carolina and Georgia had imported

100,000 more Africans. This represented nearly one-quarter of all slaves brought to mainland North America after 1700.


**THE FUGITIVE SLAVE CLAUSE:– Accorded slave laws “extraterritoriality” that is,

the condition of bondage remained attached to

a person even if he or she escaped to a state

where slavery had been abolished.

(Dred Scott)

-The new constitution required all states, North and South, to recognize and held police the institution of slavery.


**THE THREE-FIFTHS COMPROMISE: counted each slave as 3/5 a person for the purposes of determining a state’s level of taxation and representation.

Allowed the white South to exercise far greater power in national affairs than the size of its free population warranted.

It greatly enhanced the number of southern votes in the House of Representatives and therefore the Electoral College.

Of the first sixteen presidential elections, between 1788 and 1848, all but four {John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren and William Henry Harrison} placed a southern slaveholder in the White House.


Even the initial failure to include a Bill of Rights resulted, in part, from the presence of slavery.

Charles Pinckney, a SC delegate, declared that “such bills generally begin with declaring that all men are by nature born free,” a declaration that would come “with very bad grace, when a large part of our property consists in men who are actually born slaves.”


But buried in the Const., some slaveholders detected a potential threat.

Patrick Henry, who condemned slavery but feared abolition, worried that in time of war the new govt., might take steps to arm and liberate slaves.


“May Congress not say that every black man must fight. Did we not see a little of this in the last war.”

What Henry could not anticipate was that the war that eventually destroyed slavery would be launched in the South itself to protect the institution of slavery.

Slavery and the American Revolution

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