Slavery and Freedom

Sources

“All Men Are Created Equal.” During the Revolutionary period Americans described their slavery under British rule and proclaimed their fight for liberty, equality, and natural rights. Samuel Johnson, the English author and critic, wondered: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” Americans in the Revolutionary period also questioned the hypocrisy of their devotion to liberty and their practice

of slavery. No group of people was more troubled by the existence of slavery or expected more from the American Revolution and its promise of liberty and equality than African Americans, some of whom earned their freedom fighting in the Revolutionary War. The Confederation Congress did forbid slavery in the Northwest Territory in 1787, but in the Constitutional Convention economic and political self-interest defeated antislavery sentiment. Delegates from South Carolina and Georgia, whose rice planters were increasing their slave holdings in order to make up for their wartime losses, were, as James Madison said, “inflexible on the point of the slaves.” In the interest of political union the delegates to the Constitutional Convention abandoned any effort to abolish slavery beyond ending the slave trade in 1808, and succeeding members of Congress were just as reluctant to deal with slavery. In January 1800 a group of “free men of color” from Philadelphia petitioned Congress to revise laws on the slave trade and adopt measures “as shall in due course emancipate the whole of their brethren.” Congressman George Thacher of Massachusetts condemned slavery as “a cancer of immense magnitude, that would sometime destroy the body politic, except a proper legislation should prevent the evil.” Thacher stood alone, however, and the House of Representatives voted 85-1 not to receive the petition because it asked Congress to legislate on subjects from which they were “precluded by the Constitution” and that had “a tendency to create disquiet and jealousy.”

AN AFRICAN AMERICAN PETITION

From 1789 to 1815 members of Congress were just as reluctant to abolish slavery as delegates to the Constitutional Convention had been. Still, free African Americans petitioned Congress to “hear their cause.” On 30 January 1797 Jacob Nicholson, Jupiter Nicholson, John Albert, and Thomas Pritchet of North Carolina asked for relief from a North Carolina law that authorized the seizure and sale into slavery of freed slaves:

We cannot claim the privilege of representation in your councils, yet we trust we may address you as fellow-men, who, under God … are entrusted with the distribution of justice, for the terror of evil-doers, the encouragement and protection of the innocent.… Therefore, we may hope for a share in your sympathetic attention while we represent that the unconstitutional bondage in which multitudes of our fellows in complexion are held, is to us sorrowful afflicting.…

Congressman James Madison of Virginia replied that the case had “no claim” on the attention of Congress:

“If they are free by the laws of North Carolina they ought to apply to those laws.… If they are slaves, the Constitution gives them no hopes of being heard here.”

By a vote of 50-33 the House of Representatives voted not to receive the first antislavery petition by African Americans.

Source: Debates in the Fourth Congress, in Annals of Congress (Washington, D.C.: Gale & Seaton, 1834–1856).

Emancipation and Discrimination. Beginning in the 1780s American discomfort over slavery resulted in a wave of antislavery activity on the state level. The Quakers, or Society of Friends, who had organized the first opposition to slavery in the mid eighteenth century, were the first to petition Congress to abolish the slave trade in February 1790. Secular antislavery societies were organized in both the North and the upper South (Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware), attacking slavery as morally degrading to both slave and master and economically inefficient. The declining demand for tobacco in the upper South beginning before the Revolutionary War and the economic depression caused by the war had resulted in a shift to less labor intensive crops and a surplus of slaves. The economic incentive to reduce the reliance on slavery, combined with the impact of evangelical Christianity, caused legislatures in the region to ease laws freeing slaves in the 1780s and 1790s. Between 1790 and 1810 the free black population as a percentage of the total African American population increased in Delaware from 30.5 percent to 75.9 percent, in Maryland from 7.2 percent to 23.3 percent, and in Virginia from 4.2 percent to 7.2 percent. In the North, Vermont forbade slavery in its constitution (1777); Pennsylvania passed a gradual emancipation law in 1780; and in 1783 the Massachusetts Supreme Court, responding to suits brought by African Americans, ruled that slavery violated the state constitution. By 1804 the other northern states had passed gradual emancipation laws. By 1810 nearly three-quarters of all northern African Americans were free, but freedom, whether in the North or South, did not bring equality. All the northern states except Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York denied the vote to freedmen. Free African Americans petitioned Congress and the state legislatures to abolish slavery and protect their rights, but their efforts were in vain. When the federal and state governments continued to ignore the twin problems of ending slavery and racial discrimination, emancipated blacks responded by establishing their own churches, schools, and social organizations to assist both the slave and free communities.

Persistence of Slavery. The brief flurry of antislavery activity subsided in the mid 1790s. The constitutional clause forbidding the slave trade after 1808, gradual emancipation laws, and statutes ending the brutal treatment of slaves allowed antislavery Americans to comfort themselves with the belief that they had laid the groundwork for the eventual extinction of slavery without confronting the issue of integrating free blacks into American society. In the South there were additional reasons to retreat from antislavery agitation. A successful slave rebellion in Saint Domingue in the 1790s culminated in the establishment of the black-ruled Republic of Haiti in 1804. Fear that the revolt in Saint Domingue would inspire a similar revolt among American slaves was at first founded on rumors of unrest and talk of rebellion among slaves. The rumors became reality in August 1800 with the discovery of a planned rebellion of slaves in Richmond, Virginia, led by Gabriel Prosser. The prospect of future slave revolts was also reinforced by the dramatic growth of the slave population, from 697, 897 in 1790 to 1, 191, 354 in 1810, with slaves constituting one-third of the population in the South. Southern legislatures responded by making it more difficult to free slaves, requiring free slaves to leave their respective states, tightening laws enforcing slavery, and restricting the freedom of free African Americans. The invention of the cotton gin in 1793, which separated cotton seeds from the fiber, made cotton the South’s most valuable crop and removed any economic incentive to abolish slavery. In fact, the westward expansion of the “Cotton Kingdom” from Georgia, South Carolina, and southeastern North Carolina into Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and other southwestern territories increased both the demand for and price of slave labor. The growth of the Cotton Kingdom after 1820 also increased southern demands that the federal government protect their “peculiar institution.”

Sources

Ira Berlin, “The Revolution in Black Life,” in The American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism, edited by Alfred E. Young (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1976), pp. 349–382;

Winthrop D. Jordan, The White Man’s Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974);

Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619–1877 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993).