Slavery and the American Revolution
"All men are born free and equal" - so what does that mean?
The state constitution of Massachusetts began (and still begins), "All men are born free and equal." John Adams wrote these words in 1779, during the American Revolution.
Like most of the Founding Fathers, you could say that he was heady with revolutionary rhetoric about liberty. But also like most of the Founding Fathers, he - and the people of Massachusetts, who adopted that constitution - took it seriously. The people had refused a previous draft constitution written by their legislature, insisting on a new special convention to write a constitution including a declaration of rights.
Two years later, a woman held in slavery in Berkshire County, Massachusetts - Mum Bett - sued, claiming that under the constitution, she too must be "free and equal". On this week in 1781, 22 August, the Massachusetts jury agreed and set her free.
That - Bett's1 lawsuit, and several similar suits by other slaves - was how slavery ended in Massachusetts. There never was any specific law abolishing slavery there (until the federal Thirteenth Amendment); it was ended because the Revolutionary claim of equality applied to slaves too.
But, sadly, not everywhere was Massachusetts.
"Would anyone believe I am master of slaves of my own purchase?" Patrick Henry, the Virginian patriot, cried out in 1773, two years before he would declare "Give me liberty or give me death." Henry, like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and many other slaveholding Patriots, saw the contradiction. He went so far as to anticipate our incredulity at how anyone could live out such a contradiction.
But, Henry, along with many others, did continue to hold slaves. Henry could only explain that "I am drawn along by the general inconvenience of living here without them. I will not, I cannot justify it."
Jefferson went even farther, writing in 1782, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just... The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us [to defend slavery]". He almost anticipates people like the New York Times' 1619 Project, which claimed that slavery was central to America and that it makes the United States fundamentally flawed.
But despite that, there is another thread more central to America: "the liberties of a nation," as Jefferson put it earlier in the same paragraph. America contained slavery, but America was explicitly founded on liberty - which was antithetical to slavery.
Slavery wasn't a new thing, or anything unique to America. Slavery had been practiced as far back as recorded history goes; what was new in America was that slavery was explicitly limited by race.
In Ancient Rome, anyone could fall into slavery by being captured in war, or by being sold for debt, or by being kidnapped (often as a child) and sold away from anywhere they'd be recognized. But in the Americas - throughout North and South America - white people could not be enslaved (though they could sell themselves as indentured servants); black people could be and usually were. This dated back to the very start of European settlement, when Columbus and his sailors started enslaving the local Indians.2
The United States wasn't unique in its slavery, nor the most brutal - death rates of slaves in the Caribbean were about a third higher than in the American South.
The difference was that the American Revolution was founded on the principle that (in Jefferson's own words) "all men are created equal." While Jefferson didn't fully put this principle into practice, he clearly stated it, in words that condemned slavery. In the United States, the nation was officially committed to rhetoric about liberty.
And in America, people noticed this hypocrisy. Some slaveholders did put it into practice and set their slaves free.
In Massachusetts, where Mum Bett lived, slavery was present but marginal - the 1754 colonial census counted only 2,700 adult slaves out of 190,000 people. In the South, it was much more common. The South wasn't yet based on slavery in the way it would be in the 1800's; George Washington's plantation was worked by roughly as many (white) indentured servants3 as (black) slaves. But, slavery was already an economic mainstay there.
The Southern colonies had quickly based themselves on large-scale plantation agriculture. Jefferson tried to explain it as "in a warm climate, no man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him." He probably wasn't wrong (especially considering the widespread tropical diseases), but he was neglecting the sheer scale of the farms. In Massachusetts, John Adams and his sons and some hired hands could run all their 200-acre Peacefield farm; in Virginia, Jefferson couldn't have hired enough freemen to run 5,000-acre Monticello even if he'd tried.
Jefferson's great-grandparents, in a Virginia much less populated, would have had an even harder time. Once the South had built its economy around large export-oriented plantation farms in the early- to mid-1600's, it was no wonder the planters felt the need to import forced labor (whether convicts or indentured servants or slaves) to farm it for them. It was no wonder the British upper class who profited from marketing plantation goods encouraged slavery. It was no wonder why the Revolutionary generation, in states already focused around that, felt chained by economic necessity even though they saw the moral need to abolish it.
Jefferson, in his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, blamed King George for slavery and the slave trade. He wasn't all wrong; at several points the Virginia colonial legislature had tried to ban importing new slaves out of fear of slave revolts. But, the royal government had vetoed the bans because they'd decrease tobacco production.
Yet, Jefferson could have freed his own slaves - but he didn't. Some Patriots, impelled by the cause of liberty, did; others (like Washington) freed their slaves in their wills as a way of paying partial service to liberty without disturbing themselves. But many (like Jefferson and Henry) didn't even do that. And when the royal veto was removed, Virginia wasn't ready to abolish slavery then either.
The Patriots weren't the only ones to notice this hypocrisy.
In 1775, as the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord and the Second Continental Congress assembled, slavery was legal, in some form or another, essentially throughout the world (except for England itself). But, no other nation had been founded on the stirring logic and rhetoric of liberty and of universal rights that American Patriots were founding their new nation on.
Many people - both there and elsewhere - saw that slavery was inconsistent with this. English writer Samuel Johnson quipped, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?"
Of course, the British military commanders noticed this and tried to use it against America. Lord Dunmore, royal governor of Virginia, was the first: on 7 November 1775, he offered freedom to all Patriot-owned "indented servants, negroes, or others" who'd join the British Army. Between 800 and 2,000 people took him up on this offer, but - faced with poor supplies and a smallpox outbreak - they made little impact on the war.
In 1779, General Sir Henry Clinton issued another proclamation offering freedom to Patriot-owned slaves, this time without requiring they join the army. Many more accepted. The last British commander in America, Sir Guy Carlton, held to this promise. Despite the Treaty of Paris saying that slaves were to be returned, he insisted that returning slaves who'd been promised their freedom would be a "dishonourable violation of the public faith." In 1783, three thousand freed slaves sailed out of New York City together with the last British troops leaving the United States.
But also, many black people joined the Patriots in the fight for liberty, confident that liberty would extend to them too.
In 1774, when the Massachusetts Provincial Congress readied the militia for war, the militia made no distinctions between black and white people. Not everyone was happy with this - the Committee of Safety considered banning slaves (though not free black people) from the army just after Lexington and Concord - but they didn't even do that but referred the matter to the next Provincial Congress.
George Washington preempted that before the Provincial Congress could act. When he took command of the army, he - being a slaveholder from Virginia - promptly ordered that no "negro" be allowed in the Continental Army. Yet, his orders were never fully enforced. By fall 1777, one British prisoner held in Massachusetts wrote "You do not see a regiment in which there is not a large number of blacks".
Many slaveholders, impelled by their zeal for liberty, emancipated their own slaves themselves. Many of the northern states abolished slavery there. We've seen Massachusetts; Vermont also abolished slavery in 1777 and Pennsylvania in 1780. In 1783-1784, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut started to gradually abolish slavery; in 1787, Congress forbade it in the Northwest Territory (between the Ohio, Mississippi, and Great Lakes). As Jefferson wrote in 1783, "I think a change already perceptible, since the origin of the present revolution."
Pennsylvania was extremely clear in the preamble to its abolition act:
We conceive that it is our duty, and we rejoice that it is in our power to extend a portion of that freedom to others, which hath been extended to us... Weaned by a long course of experience from those narrower prejudices and partialities we had imbibed, we find our hearts enlarged with kindness and benevolence towards men of all conditions and nations.
Even though this wasn't perfect, it was still a very good thing. Yet the southern states didn't do it. Nowhere south of the Potomac was there even any plausible legislative proposal to abolish slavery.
Yet still, probably most Virginian planters hoped for eventual emancipation, and some - including but not only Thomas Jefferson - drew up plans for it. In Jefferson's plan, presented in 1783, all children born after 1800 would've been born free - putting any change a safe seventeen years into the future. Yet even then, he (like many other Virginians) hoped for the free black people to be deported, and to be "a free and independant people" [sic] in some unspecified other place, because otherwise "deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made" would bring about "convulsions, which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race."4
Later on, some planters started a version of Jefferson's colonization proposal in Africa. The new nation of Liberia struggled with constant "convulsions" of its own, both in building a nation and in relations between American-Liberians and the native African people. What was more, the cost of bringing African-Americans to Liberia was prohibitive5 - by 1843, less than five thousand people had emigrated there, out of 2.9 million African-Americans in the United States.
So, Jefferson's dreams of abolition were held back by fears rendering his plans impracticable. He fell into hypocrisy, knowing it was hypocrisy.
All in all, slavery was absolutely hypocritical amid a Revolution proclaiming "all men are created equal."
The Revolution started with a central call for communal liberty, in terms of self-government. That could absolutely co-exist with slavery, just like it did in the United States for almost a century afterwards: whatever Virginia was doing inside its own borders, it could be allowed to rule itself. What's more, Virginia could define its citizenship - its political community - as it pleased. If it said these people were not part of its community and should be forced to work, whether some people for a time of indentured servitude or some other (black) people for their whole lives, that was Virginia's prerogative.
However, the Revolution went farther. It didn't just found itself on the rights of English colonies; it invoked the fundamental rights of every man: "All men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with... liberty." This was written into the Declaration of Independence itself. This doctrine was poisonous to slavery. Slavery would fly in the face of this foundation.
But, that doesn't make the rhetoric a lie. Nor does it mean they didn't believe it. We have myriads of writings from Washington, Jefferson, and other Founding Fathers demonstrating how firmly they did believe in liberty... even though we also have their actions demonstrating how they had gaps in their commitment to it.
Jefferson (more loquacious than Washington) wrote repeatedly about how this was a hypocrisy. They absolutely should have done it. They knew freeing their slaves would, indeed, devastate their fortunes and risk their social standing. But they should have done it anyway, and they knew why they should have. As Patrick Henry put it, "However culpable my conduct, I will so far pay my devoir to virtue as to own the excellence and rectitude of her precepts and lament my want of conformity to them."
And as Henry said, to "own the excellence and rectitude" of liberty was a good thing, despite their hypocrisy. It brought about great good in itself: the Revolution. It did end slavery in many places. And even though the blessings of liberty were incomplete, exalting liberty kept highlighting the contradiction until finally slavery was ended and the peal of liberty rang from sea to shining sea.
I use her name at the time of the lawsuit; after her freedom, she took the name Elizabeth Freeman.
Slavery of American Indians ended in North America before the Revolution, largely because it was easier for Indian slaves to escape to local tribes than for black slaves to find a place to escape to.
Indentured servitude was similar to slavery for the term of servitude, but it was just for a fixed time - and even during that time, servants did keep some rights.
Notice that Jefferson’s fears were not completely imaginary - American history does show us “convulsions” for all these reasons. Still, emancipation was worth it. Fortunately, however, his fears were wildly exaggerated.
Because of the cost of emigration to Liberia, some other people (such as, briefly, Abraham Lincoln) proposed a settlement along the American western frontier. However, nothing came of this proposal before slavery was ended.
"in Virginia, Jefferson couldn't have hired enough freemen to run 5,000-acre Monticello even if he'd tried."
Side note: Tobacco plantations rarely had anywhere close to all of their land under cultivation at any one time; tobacco depletes soil really quickly, so planters would purchase a large amount of land, plant part of it in tobacco until the yields fell, start planting in another part of it, and repeat the process until they'd done it to all of their land, at which point they could either A. start over again at the first area and hope the soil had regenerated or B. buy another parcel of land and start over there. The resultant land-hunger was one of the drivers of westward expansion in the late 18th century.
Cotton production, by the way, did much the same thing to the soil, which helped drive westward expansion in the early- to mid-19th century, and was part of the reason why antislavery people thought that if they prevented slavery from expanding it would eventually die of its own accord.
"They knew freeing their slaves would, indeed, devastate their fortunes and risk their social standing. But they should have done it anyway, and they knew why they should have.
As Patrick Henry put it, "However culpable my conduct, I will so far pay my devoir to virtue as to own the excellence and rectitude of her precepts and lament my want of conformity to them." "
(Devoir: due act of civility or respect)
What's refreshing to read, is that hypocrisy then wasn't the supreme-and-avoidable sin that it's treated as now -- it was (apparently) seen as better to recognize what was right (though not live up to it) than to motivated-reason it away (or omit mention). Kudos to the founders for this.