On an early fall night in 1769, John Adams recorded in his diary a famous account of what had become a weekly ritual: “Supped with Mr. Otis, in company with Mr. Adams, Mr. William David and Mr. John Gill,” he wrote. “The evening was spent in preparing for the Next Days newspaper—a curious Employment. Cooking up Paragraphs, Articles, Occurrences, etc.—working the political Engine” (Adams, Diary 1:3523).
By 1769 these were men experienced in the shaping of public opinion across the American colonies by means subtle and outrageous. Certainly suspected Tory printers such as John Mein and James Rivington, the target of patriot mobs, could have attested to the role of intimidation. Despite such intimidation, the patriot propagandists succeeded in becoming the dominant voice less because of a campaign of terror than by their understanding of colonial communication in all its layers, contexts, and audiences. Sermons, broadsides, pamphlets, poetry, plays, almanacs, popular song, and, particularly, newspapers plucked at the themes of history, religion, philosophy, and prejudices of the colonial experience. The loyalists, even with their influence, could not match the propagandists’ breadth. Thomas Hutchinson, the royal governor of Massachusetts, responded to the attacks of the Boston Gazette by patronizing supporting newspapers, then established his own newspaper, the Censor (Lathem 10). But by 1771, to rely on a purely political organ was to send a ship to sea with a single sail. By contrast, the patriots caught the wind from many directions. Samuel Adams ingratiated the patriot message into the weave and woof of colonial life.
By the late sixties, Adams, his core of writers that included his closest ally, the young doctor Joseph Warren, and the minister of Boston’s Brattle Street Church, Samuel Cooper, along with the printing firm of Edes and Gill had made the Boston Gazette into the colonies’ premiere organ of propaganda. By the time of the Stamp Act, it not only cooked paragraphs, it invented and embroidered events, established heroes and villains, played on prejudices, and expanded the revolutionary tent by the language of hyperbole. Clearly recognizing the Gazette as the “instrument of raising that flame in America which has given so much trouble,” Massachusetts governor Frances Bernard sought to have Edes and Gill arrested and the paper closed (Frothingham, History 48). The patriot response was brazen. Adams’s second, Joseph Warren, charged the royal governor with “jesuitical insinuations” and “slanders” (BG 2/29/68). But even in face of new libels, Bernard was unable to raise support, either in the Massachusetts House of Representatives or in the grand jury. By 1770, the Gazette had friends in powerful places.
Bernard was eventually recalled to Great Britain. For the next half dozen years nothing restrained the Gazette, although complaints were plentiful. Richard Draper, the traditional publisher of the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston News-Letter, later an organ for the government, was compelled to take the unusual step of speaking in his own voice: “I can truly affirm… that the rudeness, Unfairness and Indelicacy of the writers on the Boston Gazette, have brought the Weekly publishers of this Town into great discredit” (BNL 3/26/72). A government spokesman fumed that the newspaper simply suppressed what it did not want to hear. “Is this Liberty! Does this agree with the principle of the Patriots, that the Press should be free as air?” Then, coopting the propagandists’ own metaphor, the writer concluded, “No, my countrymen, it is the highest degree of slavery” (BNL 8/9/72). But Peter Oliver, as a spokesman for the new governor, the native-born Thomas Hutchinson, eschewed high-flown metaphors. “We suffer the repetition in print of pretended grievances until it has become perfectly nauseous” (BNL 6/4/72).
Tolerance was clearly stretched, and for good reason. Bernard’s warnings to the British home office having been ignored, Adams and his circle transformed the Gazette from a local institution into an intercolony voice. By the early 1770s, the Boston Gazette had established the “Boston Massacre” and the “Boston Tea Party” as revolutionary events that represented all colonies. By that time, noticeably in operation was the decision that the only slavery that would receive attention in the Boston Gazette was the slavery of the American colonists to Great Britain. The frame of the Revolution vis-à-vis slavery was set.
The metaphor of slavery, as other slogans and metaphors of the American Revolution, may be studied by the same scholarly paradigm that undergirds the modern-day study of slogans (Stewart, Smith, and Denton). As in modern slogans, slogans of the Revolution benefited from their initial ambiguity that allowed for individual interpretation. A slogan has been compared to a bridge that allows consumers to take positions anywhere along its span until the target audience agrees on the “new and fixed meaning” (Duncan 8). Connected to vigilance and virtue, the metaphor of slavery could be understood by a New England farmer and his wife far from the centers of political discourse in ways that were embedded in their own history. Slavery as a symbol of degradation at the hands of the British would find no argument at a southern gathering. It is argued here that slavery became a metaphor of such strength because embodied with the political meanings of the word were the day-today understandings of the institution and of black colonists in particular. Colonial racial attitudes, I suggest, provided a baseline of common understandings for white Americans by giving example to the metaphor. It is to ignore the history of the colonies’ racial relations to separate the metaphor from its racial moorings, and it is to ignore the radicals’ sophistication to believe the metaphor could be used unknowingly as a revolutionary banner without call to its multiple layers.
For the initial colonial writers and speakers who took to the metaphor so readily, however, the phrase was anchored in its long-recognized political venue. If colonists did not vigorously oppose the American Act of 1764 authorizing the sending of British military forces to the American colonies, Colonel Eliphalet Dyer of Windham, Connecticut, predicted, “they may for the future, bid Farewell to Freedom and Liberty, burn their Charters, and make the best of Thraldom and Slavery” (CC 9/16/65). When the language was taken up by the Boston minister Jonathan Mayhew’s attack on the Stamp Act, it took on gendered connotations. Liberty was about to depart and leave in “her” place “that ugly Hag Slavery, the formed child of Satan” (Akers, Called 215). Representing the many less-powerful pulpits that took the language to heart, the congregational minister Joseph Emerson called the repeal of the act “a deliverance from slavery;—nothing less than from vile, ignominious slavery” (Baldwin 97). The town fathers of Newburyport, like those of other communities, found the language of slavery most appropriate for its formal resolution to the Massachusetts General Court. “That a People should be taxed at the Will of another, whether one man or many, without their own Consent is Rank Slavery” (Labaree 18). Philadelphia’s William Smith told the Continental Congress that “the skins of wild beasts [are] a more honorable covering than all the silken vestments slavery can bestow” (VG-Pickney 6/15/75).
Political writers, however, found the metaphor of slavery of most use. A Boston Gazette writer had used the word literally in the 1754 controversy when he charged the opposition considered the “lower sort of People are but a Degree above Slavery” (BG 12/31/54). But a decade later, Otis, even in the pamphlet that drew attention to real American slavery, also used the word as metaphor. The American colonists likely would remain loyal to the king unless the terms were ones of “absolute slavery” (Otis 2). John Dickinson, owner of the largest number of slaves in Philadelphia, used the analogy without self-consciousness in 1768 when he sent to Otis for use in the Boston Gazette the lyrics of what would become the “Liberty Song.” “In freedom we’re born, and in freedom we’ll live; Not as slaves, but us freemen our money we’ll give” (Silverman 114). Adams’s acolyte, Joseph Warren, reflected the theme: “Awake! Awake! my countrymen.” Warren wrote in his first published letter to the press in 1765, “Defeat the designs of those who would enslave us and our posterity. Nothing is wanting but your own resolution” (BG 10/7/65). Adams utilized the rhetoric perhaps most of all. As “Candidus,” Adams equated the struggle against the Stamp Act as a successful struggle “against that slavery with which they were threatened” (BG 9/9/71). As “Candidus” again, he argued that if the British constitution could not protect property, men bound by it “are slaves not free men” (BG 1/20/72). As Valerius Poplicola, again on the subject of taxes, he asked, “Is it not High Time for the People of this Country explicitly to declare, whether they will be Freeman or Slaves?” The administration of justice without involvement of the people could not form an idea of slavery “more complete, more miserable, more disgraceful” (BG 10/5/72).
To the eminent revolutionary scholar Bernard Bailyn, such widespread use indicated that “slavery” was not a rhetorical device but rather represented a commonly understood political concept. Use of the word should not be viewed as hyperbole or indeed even a connection to the existence of real slavery, Bailyn has argued in his classic work, but as reference to the loss of political rights that colonists believed would result with the lapse of constant vigilance. The use of “slavery” in this political context referenced the loss of political rights as demonstrated by the history of Russians, Danes, Turks, and Poles and the “condition that followed the loss of freedom, when corruption, classically, had destroyed the desire and capacity of these people to retain their independence” (Bailyn, Ideological 233–34).
But what is interesting about the colonial use of the phrase as a political metaphor is that by the time of the revolutionary decades, the metaphor was out of favor with British political writers. Although the British had most to do with the introduction of the metaphor as a political concept, British political writers almost never used the language at the time when it was in the very ether of the American colonial world. The slavery metaphor was not used by either the British administration’s organ, the London Gazette, or by the Whig opposition paper, the London Chronicle (Holmberg 100). Nor was it a phrase found in the North Briton, despite the newspaper’s, ongoing implication that Stuart ascendancy was paramount to giving over the nation to the control of Rome. The American propagandists took many lessons from the North Briton, but the language of slavery was not one of them. At a time when British political organs, including the North Briton, seldom used the analogy, the word “slavery,” even without the associated words of “tyranny” and “oppression,” was in the lower half of the most used political words from 1765 to 1776 in the Boston Gazette (ranking thirty-second out of a list of fifty). It reached highs of usage in 1767, 1772, and 1776, each time almost quadrupling its frequency of use from 1765 (Holmberg 98, 104).
American writers, much less propagandists, were not adverse to taking arguments from a previous time and putting them in the revolutionary context, witness the frequent American republication of the British Cato’s Letters, the more than a hundred essays by political writers John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon originally appearing in British newspapers in the 1720s. For Americans to reach back for the metaphor of slavery suggests that the language of slavery brought to the political meaning a colonial context beyond hyperbole. In a colonial world that daily saw the existence of the institution, it is difficult to see how the use of the language of slavery could not but bring to the political metaphor common beliefs about the people who occupied that status. If the Danes, Poles, and Turks had lost their freedom because of lack of vigilance and the practice of the necessary virtue, the implication for the enslaved Africans of the American colonies was that they bore responsibility for their own enslavement, and on the same basis—an inability to maintain the necessary qualities of vigilance and virtue. These were perceptions that Adams and his cadre of writers knit into the propaganda of the American Revolution for dispersal across the American colonies.
For Bostonians, the wages of ignoring the twin commandments of vigilance and virtue were close at hand. In the 1760s Boston, with a population of about fifteen to sixteen thousand (Bridenbaugh, Cities 216), was the third largest city in the American colonies, behind Philadelphia and New York. The black population had been highest in the 1750s, at about fifteen hundred, then began a decline as the revolutionary era approached so that by 1776 Suffolk County contained fewer than seven hundred black inhabitants clustered around Boston, which included a small free black community of perhaps no more than fifty (Levesque 33). Most New England black colonists served as household servants, often living with the families they served, like Sully, the lifelong slave of Sam Adams and his family. However, because of some residential clustering on the North and West ends of the city, African traditions persisted and black leadership was given an opportunity to develop (Piersen, Black Yankees 18).
Black colonists in Massachusetts, slave and free, had a legal status that included legal counsel, trial by jury, and the right to testify in court, this last point making it possible for the testimony of three blacks at the trial of the British soldiers after the Boston Massacre. Slaves were not automatically found guilty of crimes of which they had been accused (NEWJ 2/24/35) and even in capital offenses extenuating circumstances could be considered for blacks as well as whites (Twombly and Moore 233). Moreover, New Englanders often chose to call their slaves “servants”—a tacit distancing from acceptance of their real status. “Servants” were permitted membership in the white-dominated churches, permitted baptism, freedom of movement, and a degree of education that was unheard of in other colonies. Further, in the world of work, blacks and slaves demonstrated a range of skills, as attested by slave advertising.
Boston was also home to a circle of antislavery activists, black and white, who made consistent attempts in the years before the Revolution to end slavery in the province. Slavery was abolished in Massachusetts before the turn of the century, although in a confused way (Zilversmit 114–15). And, finally, in a world where slaves and slave owners shared close quarters and often worked side by side, affection from both sides may not have been unknown (Piersen, Black Yankees 146). Compared to the slavery of the West Indies and other parts of the American colonies, Massachusetts’ slavery has been considered a mild institution (Greene, Colonial New England).
The underside to Massachusetts’s mild institution was the connection of blacks and slaves to conspiracy, immoderate behavior, and violence and an assumption of black limitations premised on those beliefs. Samuel Sewall’s famous 1700 attack on slavery in The Selling of Joseph came at a time when the colony was passing increasingly stringent laws affecting blacks and slaves— establishing curfews, regulating manumissions, demanding public service from blacks and overseeing their private life (Ames and Goodell 1:535, 578, 606–7). Sewall himself saw no place for the black in white society. “Few can endure to hear of a Negro’s being made free; and indeed they can seldom use their Freedom well” (Diary 90).
One scholar of American proslavery thought points out that in the elaborate response to Sewall’s essay, the slave owner John Saffin articulated some twenty of the twenty-six arguments to be found in proslavery arguments before the Civil War (Tise 18). Notably, all these arguments were put aside for Saffin’s concluding poem that was anchored in perceived racial traits:
Cowardly and cruel are those Blacks Innate,
Prone to Revenge, Imp of inveterate hate.
He that exasperates them, soon espies
Mischief and Murder in their very eyes.
Libidinous, Deceitful, False and Rude
The Spume Issue of Ingratitude.
The Premises considere’d, all may tell,
Now near good Joseph they are Parallel
(Towner 47–48)
The “Imp” of the second line was a reference to the devil’s imp that was a part of Boston’s annual Pope’s Day parade celebrating, like Guy Fawkes Day in England, the discovery of the gunpowder plot in time to prevent the usurpation of Protestant rule. The imp was traditionally represented in blackface well into the late colonial period, as indicated by Pierre Du Simitiere’s sketch of the celebration in 1767 (Du Simitiere).
For some white Bostonians, perceptions of blacks and slaves were likely premised on work and personal relationships, religious conscience, and the Enlightenment legacy of a logical turn of mind. Nonetheless, there could be no escape from attitudes that regarded blacks and slaves as appropriate to a secondary position because of an innate nature that was libidinous, immoderate, and prone to crime. In a Puritan world where symbol was considered the godly mode of communication, the color of black was itself a symbol of evil.
Congregational ministers by no means invented that use or even used it any more than any other religious group, yet the use of the color black and its associated word of “darkness” carried particular strength given the congregational emphasis on rhetoric. The witchcraft hysteria produced claims that the devil was seen in the form of a “Blackman” (Twombly and Moore 225). Mather Byles of Boston’s Hollis Street Church reminded his congregation of William Bradford’s remark: “‘Alas, in this wild heart of mine, are the seeds of all these blackest Sins’” (Byles 14). Cotton Mather said atheism was to be hissed out of the world, unable to be supported by “even the darkest recesses of Africa itself” (Pearce 206). According to an execution sermon delivered in 1754, “As this Sin of murder is thus singularly foul and black in the Estate of God, so it is likewise in the Account of Man” (Horrid Nature). For Jonathan Edwards, color was another example of the way God communicated: “Sin and sorrow and death are all in Scripture represented by darkness of the color black” (Edwards 18). As Richard Slotkin points out, Puritans routinely used black and white to represent sin and salvation. “This conventional image of ‘whitening’ conversion and ‘blackening’ sin persisted in all its simplicity even after the heyday of Puritanism had passed” (Slotkin 9).
There was little in the public weal to contradict the perceptions that blackness was related to evil or its corollary that black colonists had a penchant for criminality. In the colonial newspapers, certainly, the only news of blacks or slaves came in reports of black violence. Slave advertising represented “runaway” slaves in terms of evil and good slaves in terms of obedience. It is not surprising that revolutionary antislavery writers such as Anthony Benezet emphasized the nature of African justice and equality and that slave petitions were routinely couched in the most inoffensive and pious language. Bostonians always had before them ongoing examples of black conspiracy and black crime in part because of the vigorous colonial press of the city, as many as four or five newspapers as the revolutionary era approached (Lathem 8–10). Meantime, black virtue was seldom acknowledged in the public prints, even in the limited spheres where it was allowed to exist.
The importance of eternal vigilance over external danger was promoted by what must have seemed regular appearances in the Boston press of the much-feared specter of black crime at home and abroad. The efficient system of exchange newspapers brought news of slave insurrections from the islands: the 1745 plot of Jamaican slaves (BEP 4/1/45); a slave rebellion in Curacao (BPB 8/13/50); another in Jamaica in 1760 (BEP 7/14/60; BNL 7/17/60). Similarly disturbing news was an ongoing theme from sister colonies. Bostonians could read of the 1712 New York slave revolt resulting in nineteen executions in which suspected perpetrators were burned alive, broken on the wheel, or hanged. The New York correspondent reported that it was “fear’d that most of the Negroes here (who were very numerous) knew of the Late Conspiracy to murder the Christians” (BNL 4/21/12). In 1730 Bostonians learned that South Carolinians had put down a suspected insurrection “by the Negroes, who had conspired to Rise and destroy us.” The published letter written by a South Carolinian could give Bostonians further reason to suspect black entertainments: “They soon made a great Body at the back of the Town and had a great Dance, and expected the Country Negroes to come & join them” (BNL 10/15/30; BG 10/19/30). The following month the Bostonians learned of conspiracy in Virginia where four slaves had been executed. Virginia’s governor placed the militia on active duty in order to inspect Norfolk’s slave quarters on a nightly basis (BG 12/7/30). New Jersey supplied news of a slave plot in 1734 (BNL 1/24/34). Thirty conspirators were arrested, some hanged, some whipped, and some mutilated. The following year the Boston press carried news of a South Carolina burglary ring conducted by slaves (BPB 7/21/35).
South Carolina, indeed, provided an ongoing example of a siege state. In 1739 “several Negroes” collaborated with two white men, a Spanish and Irishman, to kill a white man and injure three others (BNL 5/24/39). This was a prelude to what would be remembered as the Stono Rebellion in which rebelling slaves were finally defeated in a pitched battle (P. Wood 308–26). News of it likely came to Boston from several sources, but certainly by way of the ever-vigilant Boston News-Letter in an account in November (BNL 11/1/39). The next year dread news arrived of yet a “new Negro plot” (BNL 7/3/40; BPB 7/7/40; BEP 7/7/40). Before the year was out, the South Carolina city was devastated by fire blamed on slave arson, later said to be an accident (BNL 1/15/41; 4/30/41). In 1741, fire broke out again in South Carolina, and slave arson was again blamed. The Boston News-Letter provided an account: “By private letters from Charlestown South-Carolina we are inform’d that the Town is in much Confusion, not only on account of the insolence of the Spanish but also from Apprehensions of Domestick Treachery, the Town having been several times alarm’d by Fire which too visibly appears to be willfully occasion’d by their Blacks” (BNL 8/27/41). At least two executions ensued, a man and woman, although it was the male who was burned to death (BNL 9/24/41).
There could be no escape from the hysteria occasioned by New York’s “Negro plot” in 1741 (T. Davis). Eleven blacks were burned at the stake in the episode, covered in all its grisly detail, rumor, and related incident by the Boston press (BNL 4/9; 5/7; 6/4; 6/18; 7/2; 7/16; 7/23; 8/6; 8/27; 9/3; 10/8/41). And, as in the past, news of slave plots in one colony attuned other colonists to suspect their own servants. In the same year as the New York plot, the Boston press carried the account of two New Jersey blacks convicted of setting fire to a barn and burned alive as punishment (BNL 5/17; BEP 7/6/41). Some years later, Bostonian readers learned of similar executions of two other New Jersey slaves after shooting their mistress (BEP 7/9/50).
The memory of the two New York conspiracies was slow to die. In 1755, Bostonians were informed of the New York “Act to Regulate the Militia,” less an act of regulation than one of carte blanche permission to murder, permitting militia members who came across a slave one mile or more from home “to shoot or otherwise destroy such Slave or Slaves, without being impeached, censured, or persecuted for same.” It was, the Boston Evening-Post introduction noted, “the most severe that we have seen before” (BEP 3/10/55).
In 1767, a plot of Virginia slaves resulted in the death of several overseers, news of it again reaching Boston (BG 1/11/68).
There were in these years persistent and ongoing reports of slave conspiracy and arson from other colonies, reported so thoroughly in the Boston press that present-day historians have heavily relied on their accounts to reconstruct the events.
News from other colonies could only intensify understandings of similar kinds of activities in Boston and other Massachusetts towns during the same years. From 1721 to 1723 a series of suspicious fires believed to have been set by slaves wracked Boston and New Haven. Cotton Mather feared the opening salvo of the “laying of the Town to Ashes” (Mather 2:687). In 1723, after a spring and summer of arson, a Boston slave was tried, found guilty of arson, and put to death. The Boston News-Letter provided frequent accounts from April to November (BNL 4/4; 5/2; 5/9; 7/4; 8/8; 10/10; 11/14/23), which, thanks to the exchange system that brought news to Boston, also spread news of Boston’s troubles to other parts of the colonies.
The fires moved Boston’s town council to instigate controls. A list of regulations known as the “Boston Articles” severely restricted slave and free black activity under penalty of sale to the West Indies. A gathering of more than two slaves who were not on the business of their masters ran the risk of the lash for the offenders. A black or slave did not have to be in a group to be regarded uneasily, however. Across the river, Charlestown’s city’s selectmen ordered Robin, a free Negro, to leave town because he seemed suspicious (Frothingham, History 250). In 1728, Boston blacks, mulattos, and Indians were forbidden to carry canes or sticks lest they be used as weapons (Winsor 2:485). But legislation did not stop a Salem slave from attempting to burn his master’s house in 1730 (AWM 8/27/30). In 1735 arson was put aside in favor of a more deadly method. A Boston family was murdered when the family cook laced chocolate with arsenic, an event that resulted in a further call for restrictive legislation (BPB 8/4/35; NEJ 9/2/35).
Racial tensions were rising in Boston, a result of both local activities and news from South Carolina and New York. A Boston writer urged local masters to take a firm hand with their servants. “The Great Disorders committed by Negroes, who are permitted by their imprudent Masters, &c. to be out late at Night has determined several sober and substantial Housekeepers to walk about the Town in the sore part of the Night… and it is hoped that all lovers of Peace and good Order will join their endeavors for preventing the like Disorders for the future” (BEP 7/14/40). In 1741, when fear was in full throat from the news emanating from New York, a Roxbury mob laid their hands on a slave suspected of stealing money, strapped him to a tree where he was “whip’d in order to bring him to confess the Fact after which he was taken down and lying some Time upon the Grass was carried into his Masters House but died soon after” (BNL 7/23/41). Yet such lessons seemed to go unheeded. In 1745, Bostonians learned of a slave’s ax murder of his master (BEP 9/16/45). The Boston response to a 1747 riot against impressment was to insert Boston’s black population alongside “foreign seamen, servants… and other persons of mean and vile condition,” and the instigation of a new slave curfew (BEP 11/20/47).
But curfews offered little protection when conspiracy was within Boston’s own bosom, or nearly so, across the river in Charlestown, in the house of the prominent John Codman. A male slave, Mark, was accused of securing the arsenic that was administered over time by a female house slave, a result of which was that Codman’s “lower Parts turned as black as a Coal.” Mark was hanged on Cambridge Road; Phyliss, perhaps strangled first, was burned at the stake ten yards from the Charlestown gallows. The third slave, Phoebe, who had revealed the plan, escaped execution and was sold to the West Indies, a dubious reward for loyalty (BEP 7/7/55; Goodell).
The executions and banishment could only linger in the memory of both the city of Boston and the sister village of Charlestown. As described in the Boston Evening-Post, “After execution, the body of Mark was brought down to Charlestown Common, and hanged in chains on a gibbet erected there for the purpose” (BEP 9/22/55). When the executions were described to him, Westborough’s minister Ebenezer Parkman recoiled: “A frightfull Spectacle!” But he still saw the event as a generalized warning of what awaited in eternal life, not an episode connected to enslavement. “May all hear and fear! especially to be punish’d Eternally in the Flames of Hell. May my own Soul be suitably affected with the Thought!” (Parkman 295). The event also gave birth to both an execution sermon and a fourteen-stanza popular broadside that united sin, crime, and color in a trinity of its own: “Their crimes appear as black as Hell justly so indeed / And for a greater, I am sure / there’s none can this exceed” (A Few Lines).
Significantly, long after Mark’s body had rotted in its chains, the gibbet remained in place for the next twenty years (Frothingham, History 264), not just providing a warning to the pious but reminding servants of their duty and, to Charlestown and Boston’s white population, providing the reminder that treachery could simmer just below the surface.
Before the year was out, two Boston papers, including the Boston Gazette, and Country Journal, in business since April, reported another murder by a slave in which the slave owner’s child was taken from his bed and thrown into the well “where it perished” (BG 8/11/55; BEP 8/11/55). In 1760 yet another Boston slave was arrested after setting fire to her master’s barn and house. It was, she admitted, an act of revenge (BEP 1/28/60). In colonial society, fire, needing no cohorts, was the great equalizer. Certainly, nowhere in the public realm was the view represented that slave “treachery” was a predictable response to involuntary servitude.
A short period of quiet came after the turmoil of the Codman affair. Then in 1763, a sixteen-year-old Boston slave was executed for the murder of a white girl. This gave birth to both broadsides and a sermon printed by the Boston Gazette’s Edes and Gill (Bristol). Five years later, in 1768, when the revolutionary era well commenced, the slave Arthur was executed for the rape of a white woman in nearby Worcester. Occurring during the turmoil of the British occupation of Boston, the execution of Arthur was the subject of a popular broadside and a published execution sermon (Arthur). Here was yet another platform that increased awareness of black crime and used black crime as the warning traditionally accompanying Puritan sermonizing (Slotkin 31). The warnings were several, including notice to all members of a subservient class not to push boundaries; to masters, to expect no better if they did not discipline their servants; and a call to all for white vigilance.
Despite Boston’s relatively small black population, there could be no escape from an awareness of black crime, unpredictable as the periodic outbreaks of smallpox that struck the city. Further, the fear of black crime worsened with the suspicion, as in the New York plot, that blacks might align themselves with colony enemies. The fear of black violence conspiring with the white enemies of the Bay colony was a theme that traveled from Catholic plots to a fear that the French would use black slaves along with Indians in the French and Indian War, and culminated in the fear that the British would arm slaves in the American Revolution.
As the metaphor of slavery had as a backdrop examples of black crime and conspiracy, it also represented the political understandings of slavery in the classic terms of vigilance and virtue. As we know, from the time of the arrival of Africans on Virginia shores, white colonial Americans had established a cluster of characteristics for black colonists (Jordan 1–43). In addition, New Englanders had their own set of perceptions forged from their history and illustrated by a tendency to twin concepts, conspiracy and crime, that is, crime as a result of conspiracy; virtue and vigilance, one not existing without the other. The metaphor of slavery served as a meeting place, a common ground of participation where definitions could be proffered, bartered, and sometimes even exchanged.
Not surprisingly, the foremost progenitor of the metaphor of slavery as well as the foremost expositor of notions of vigilance and virtue was Sam Adams. In public and private spheres, from his first contribution to the Independent Advertiser and running through his private correspondence, Adams’s views on the necessity of virtue and vigilance were an unchanging theme for forty years. Influenced by the Great Awakening in the 1740s, the importance of virtue was immovably in place by the revolutionary decades. “We may look up to Armies for our Defence, but Virtue is our best Security. It is not possible that any State should long remain free, where Virtue is not supremely honored,” he wrote to James Warren (S. Adams 3:325). “We shall succeed if we are virtuous,” he assured a member of the Continental Congress. “It is the Disgrace of human Nature that in most Countries the People are so debauched, as to be utterly unable to defend or enjoy their Liberty” (S. Adams 3:403). By 1782, his views were rigid: Men “will be free no longer than while they remain virtuous,” adding ominously, “Sydney tells us, there are times when people are not worth saving; meaning when they have lost their virtue” (W. Wells 3:114).
Adams’s public writings and those of his fellow Gazette propagandists echoed the emphasis on vigilance and virtue and the implication that slavery could only result for those who did not abide by their strictures. A “Candidus” article began, “I Believe that no people ever get groaned under the heavy yoke of slavery, but when they deserv’d it. This may be called a severe censure upon by far the greatest part of the nations in the world who are involv’d in the misery of servitude: But however they may be thought by some to deserve commiseration, the censure is just” (BG 10/14/71). In the classic understanding of virtue to which educated American colonists subscribed, virtue was best exercised in the civic realm by responding to the call of leadership. But virtue became democratized fairly early in the colonial experience when good habits became part of the understanding of virtuous behavior. Virtue thus defined made it possible for all colonists to be virtuous, even if they were not called to leadership. It is not surprising that the Bostonian-by-birth, Benjamin Franklin, and his writing partner, Joseph Breintnall, chose to use virtue in this sense in one of “The Busy-Body” essays, for here was virtue that was as practical as it was accessible. As Franklin wrote, a man who had “learnt to govern his Passions, in spite of Temptation, to be just in his Dealings, to be Temperate in his Pleasures, to support himself with Fortitude under his Misfortunes, to behave with Prudence in all Affairs and in every Circumstance of Life” was of “much more real Advantage to him… than to be a Master of all the Arts and Sciences in the World beside.” In this sense, “Virtue alone is sufficient to make a Man Great, Glorious and Happy” (AWM 2/18/29). Franklin’s subsequent pursuit of virtue, as we know from his Autobiography, was by way of thirteen steps, beginning with temperance and concluding with humility. Despite Franklin’s substantial move into public life during this part of his career, he does not include civic duty as one of the elucidated virtues.
As the revolutionary decade approached, the notion of virtue, either as a male prerogative of civic leadership or as appropriate and useful behavior, was further mitigated by the role of women. As a counterpart to Britannia, American radicals put forward a female heroic figure, Columbia, arrayed with shield, spear, and helmet. In actual fact, patriots saw the role for women in revolutionary activity less as heroic than as one constructed on the idea of virtue as housewifely expertise: women could be helpful to the cause by spinning and weaving and in the rejection of tea and luxury items. Thus, in 1772, it was not out of place for the colonies’ fiercest and most radical printers to publish the British cookbook, Frugal Housewife, or Complete Woman Cook. To fit in with the patriot call as well as to be in line with the new understandings of women’s roles, the founder of what would become the Daughters of Liberty, Esther Reed, couched her call for women’s participation in nonimportation in the approved domestic idiom: “Who amongst us, will not renounce with the highest pleasure, those vain ornaments?” ([Reed]; M. Norton 178–80). Interestingly, a much more dramatic call from the Daughters of Liberty, beginning, “That woman is born a free and independent Being; that it is her undoubted Right and Constitutional Privilege firmly to reject all Attempts to abridge that liberty” (BPB 10/18/73), found no patriot publisher but appeared instead in the Tory Boston Post-Boy.
The patriot call for women’s involvement along lines of domestic virtue was not a patriot invention as much as a patriot framing of a male colonial preoccupation. It was not to encourage nonimportation or demonstrate patriot virtue for the same Boston Post-Boy earlier to have published a recipe for “The Good Wife” (BPB 8/20/70). In 1771, another delineator of the good wife insisted on “no Learning; no Learning” (Hutchins). As David Copeland chronicles, the colonial press had long provided a barrage of advice in which virtuous women were defined as women who served the interests of home and husband (Copeland 152).
In a construct that was not so different from the presentation of vice and virtue in a black framing, the emphasis on virtuous women was accompanied by suspicion that women might not be virtuous. Indeed, by Copeland’s count, the colonial press was much more likely to present women as “vicious” than otherwise. A vituperative essay in Philadelphia’s American Weekly Mercury concluded “the Modern Woman” was a woman of idleness (AWM 8/13/30). “The best of the sex are no better than Plagues,” another Philadelphia polemic concluded (PG 3/4/34). Philadelphia was fortunate that such polemics were regularly challenged by the city’s female poet and wit, Elizabeth Magawley. “As in your Sex there are several Classes of Men of Sense, Rakes, Fops, Coxcombs, and down-right Fools, so I hope, without straining your Complaisance, you will allow there are some Women of Sense comparatively” (AWM 1/5/30; Shields 92). But in the colonies overall there were few female voices to counter charges that women were playing cards instead of looking after their children (BG 12/8/35) or that women were murderers of children (NYG 4/8/65; CG 3/14/75; NLG 12/21/70); poisoners and betrayers of husbands (AWM 5/15/35; NYEP 3/12/50); and adulterers (VG-Rind 3/8/70).
Such suspicions were more likely to be displaced than allayed by the revolutionary emphasis on the virtuous woman. At a time when political writers called for the reluctant necessity of severing familial relationships across the sea, the emphasis increased on clearly defined family relationships at home. Despite the calls for domestic tranquility, however, the positions of woman and the home were undergoing change in the colonial period because of factors over which colonists themselves had little control. Demographic changes resulted in a surplus of unmarried women on the eve of the Revolution while economic dislocation increased the hardship of widows (Wilson 896, 400–402). Although women’s economic status was actually in decline, a male colonial sensibility that revolved on conspiracy could easily find support for suspicions that women might be as conspiratorial as other segments of the society. Hannah Snell served in His Majesty’s Army under the name James Gray and her sex was not detected even during a whipping because “her arms being drawn up, the protuberance of the breasts was inconsiderable, and they were hid by her standing close to the gate” (BNL 12/5/50). Like so much of life in the late colonial era, nothing was sure, even, in this case, gender.
Growing in fervor during a time of increasing uneasiness, the elevation of domesticity into higher and higher levels of virtue might be considered another face on the traditional understandings of women’s virtue in terms of sexual inviolability. The call to domestic virtue in tumultuous times gives some indication of the sexual tensions that were abroad in the colonial world, and the insistence on domestic virtue was one way to assert control over women in the name of patriotism. Not surprisingly, the colonial sensibility resonated to the British Whig piety campaigns. The North Briton’s efforts to unseat Lord Bute by intimations that he curried influence in the royal bedroom has already been mentioned. In 1772 another piety campaign focused on the king’s sister, Princess Caroline, at her marriage to a Danish prince, the references to loss of Danish liberty could not be avoided. In the summer of 1772, in thousands of words appearing in all colonial papers, none less than in the Boston Gazette, colonial readers followed the story of Princess Caroline’s affair with the Danish court physician, her subsequent betrayal by the Queen Mother, the ensuing trial, and the eventual deaths of the lovers. Colonial readers were presented a multichaptered story of aristocratic malevolence, cunning, and punishment for their sensual summer reading, down to the execution of the physician-lover, bloodily drawn and quartered.
What is noteworthy about the campaigns is that both turned on female sexual impropriety, considered powerful enough to have imperial consequences. Neither women, even Princess Caroline, engendered much sympathy when female virtue was the key to international stability. Closer to home, in Worcester, another sexual dalliance gave evidence to the danger posed by unbridled female sexuality. In 1778, Bathsheba Spooner was executed for complicity in the murder of her husband following an afternoon of sexual adventures with three British soldiers. In the Massachusetts tradition, the condemned soldiers were allowed to explain the circumstances of the crime in an execution broadside. Bathsheba Spooner’s public voice found barely a footnote: “Mrs. Spooner said nothing at the Gallows” (Lowance and Bumgardner 95).
Unlike later periods, it was a long-standing Boston practice to report news of rape, murder as a result of domestic violence, and occasional reports of prostitution and sodomy (BEP 11/12/50; BEP 8/18/35; BG 11/19/45; BEP 6/16/55; BEP 7/2/70). Nor were women immune from the Puritan tradition of public punishment despite later regret for the atrocities of the Salem witch trials. The Boston Evening-Post reported that four Portsmouth women had been fined for prostitution and then given ten stripes each on their bare backs (BEP 4/22/65). In 1770, another contributor reported, in the same amused tone that Henry Laurens would later assume at the idea of freedom for slaves, that four women in Boston had appeared before a judge on charges of fornication (BEP 7/2/70).
Meantime, giving credence to colonial fears, petitions for divorces increased in Massachusetts (Cott, “Divorce”), and premarital pregnancies rose — as high as 30 percent before and after the Revolution (Wilson 404). Franklin’s grisly 1765–66 etching of a dismembered Britannia (Magna Britannia) may have as much to do with a perceived need to maintain female purity at home as with opposition to the actions of imperial Great Britain abroad.
British satirists were quick to locate female sexuality as a nexus of colonial vulnerability. In a famous print published in the aftermath of the Boston Tea Party, Columbia was stripped of her armor in favor of the centuries-old idea of female vulnerability as sexual availability. Here, the female figure portraying America has been forced to the ground by British political figures, tea poured down her throat while the lascivious Lord Sandwich peers up her robes. The scurrility and offensiveness of the print did not stop Paul Revere copying it for the patriot Royal American Magazine. In the patriot setting, the prone Columbia connected sexual virtue to American virtue as a whole but could also suggest that colonists themselves, like Lord Sandwich, sought proof of female virtue even at the cost of female humiliation. The concept of American virtue as threatened sexual invasion would be highlighted during the occupation of Boston with patriot implications that the occupying soldiers were on the brink of ravishing young women. These various ideas of womanly virtue in the late colonial period set the stage for women’s later confinement to Republican motherhood, the completion of the desexualization of women begun by domestic virtue and the armor-clad Columbia.
The point I seek to make in this sketch is to propose that in this revolutionary cusp, the interpretations of American female virtue as sexual inviolability would inevitably cross with white perceptions of black sexuality. This intersection has been explored in a southern context in the colonial period (Clinton and Gillespie), but black and white sexuality was also a theme in the Massachusetts colony despite the colony’s relatively small black population. Massachusetts was one of two northern colonies (Pennsylvania was the other) to prohibit not only marriage but sexual intercourse between white and black (Ames and Goodell 1:578–59). At the proposal of the 1705 law, Samuel Sewall noted his consternation: “If it be pass’d, I fear twill be an Oppression provoking to God, and that which will promote Murders and other Abominations” (Sewall, Diary 179). Because of Sewall’s efforts, the final act permitted marriages between slaves amid the restrictions on black-and-white sexual liaisons. As Horton and Horton note, a 1761 act emphasized control over all “dissolute persons” (Ames and Goodell 4:462), including those whites who would consort with blacks (Horton and Horton, In Hope 49).
Massachusetts shared in the many-layered fears connected to miscegenation: the fear that whiteness would be subsumed; the belief that black men lusted for white women; and the suspicion, fueled by the white male belief that black men possessed larger penises, that white women might prefer black sexual partners (Jordan 152). Such themes are reflected in an item published by two Boston newspapers, which reported in a jocular tone, a New London, Connecticut, incident in which a white man, perceiving what he regarded as a rape in progress, pulled out a knife and “cut off all his [the attacker’s] unruly parts smack and smooth.” The account concluded, “We here relate as a caveat for all Negroes meddling for future with any white Woman least they fare with the like Treatment” (BNL 3/3/18; BEP 3/3/18). Nor could Bostonians, given the ongoing news they received of slave revolts, avoid the attached mythology that implied white women were spared death in order to provide for the later sexual pleasure of the insurrectionists (Jordan 153).
Notions of black sexuality as endangerment to white female virtue surfaced in 1763 with the execution of a sixteen-year-old slave for the murder of a white girl, prompting the merchant and radical leader James Bowdoin to sell one of his slaves to the West Indies, fearful of the white response to a slave engaged “in an amour with some of the white ladies in the Town” (Jordan 144). Four years later slave sexuality was again in Bostonian public consciousness when a Worcester slave, Arthur, was executed for the rape of a white woman on the heels of a much-reported remark by a British officer during the British occupation calling upon slaves to slit their masters’ throats.
The sermon that accompanied Arthur’s execution has prompted Daniel Williams to call Arthur “the first black rapist in American literature” (200). Execution sermons most often were reserved for crimes of murder; just 6 percent focused on rape (Slotkin 17), suggesting ambivalence about the crime itself. Although Massachusetts authorities were not loath to invoke the death penalty for various capital crimes, the crime of rape rarely received the death sentence (Powers 281). In the revolutionary crux of female virtue and black crime, however, such ambivalence disappeared. Encouraged by the execution of Arthur, rape became a symbolic crime against home, hearth, and society. Execution narratives emphasized perpetrators as increasingly unrepentant, degenerates in a downward spiral who sought to attack the family unit by the “theft” of women’s virtue and who were unable to leash carnal appetities. The crime and the personality of the perpetrator were interwoven, as if inevitable, given that perpetrators were outside civilized society. It is noteworthy that the next two accused rapists in Massachusetts after Arthur were Irish Catholic outsiders who shared a status that was little higher than black bondsmen and that translated into a similar narrative fate and hangman’s noose. By 1790, the popular narrative that accompanied the execution of the Philadelphia-born mulatto Joseph Mountains rejected even cursory repentance, suggesting the hardening of stereotypes. In 1796, the accused rapist Thomas Powers of Norwich, Connecticut, was similarly characterized as unrepentant in the several publications of the execution sermon that also prominently identified him as “a Negro” (Williams).
Like an unspoken Stuart bogey, the black presence hovered close behind any understanding of American virtue as sexual inviolability. Surely for “Eleutherina,” a rare female correspondent in the Boston Gazette, the metaphor of slavery included implications of miscegenation. “But our hearts are in anguish for our dear, dear posterity the offspring of our bowels,” she wrote in language that was not so far removed from the Quaker antislavery style. “Our children are human flesh, and English blood and English spirit… How can we endure the prospect that they shall be converted into beasts, driven, beaten, trampled on, by those who are no better that they” (BG 1/26/72).
Adams brought to the propaganda of the American Revolution definitions of virtue that represented both the classic understanding of virtue as the civic duty that maintained political freedom and the personal and social usefulness of virtue represented by appropriate and moral behavior, including sexual behavior. These understandings of virtue appeared not only in the front-page essays Adams and his colleagues supplied to the Boston Gazette but in the inside pages where propagandists found American behavioral virtue could be highlighted when contrasted with the lack of it in the British by way of the piety campaigns. But there was no impetus for Adams and his coterie to include black colonists as representatives of colonial virtue. Black colonists had long been denied access to Bostonian notions of virtue. In a broadside published about 1760 in connection with a Boston election-day festivity, black involvement is seen in terms of immoderate behavior while white companions are viewed as “trulls,” that is, prostitutes.
Long before Phoebus looks upon
The outskirts of the horizon.
The blacks their forces summon.
Tables & Benches, chair, & stools
Rum-bottles, Gingerbread & bowls
Are lug’d into the common.
Thither resorts motley crew.
Of whites & Blacks & Indians too
And trulls of every sort.
There all day long they sit & drink.
Swear, sing, play paupaw, dance and stink
There Baccus holds his court
(Piersen, Black Yankees 123–24)
Comic stereotypes that turned on immoderate behavior and sexual impropriety were also in place by the late 1760s. In the popular British play, The Padlock, which had some forty colonial American performances before 1774, the black character of Mungo performs in dialect and is the go-between that enables the female character to be freed from her chastity belt and to unite, presumably sexually, with her lover (Silverman 1976, 105). There was no missing the implication of the role of the black male, comic or not, in setting the stage for white female promiscuity. The play was well known enough, even in Boston, for “Mungo” to become a commonly understood character type and a name Boston radicals used in their campaigns against Frances Bernard. The Boston Gazette published a forty-five-stanza parody in which Bernard, in explaining his leave taking, refers to himself as “Mungo.”
My noble Master, Sirs! I tell you,
Conceives me such a clever Fellow.
As to command me to repair
To court—and bring my Budget there:
Where I sir Mungo Nettle’em, Bart,
By Lying, Pimping, Fraud and Art
(BG 7/3/69)
The British were no kinder, introducing a promiscuous black female comic character in a play during the occupation of Boston as a way of bringing attention to patriot hypocrisy (Silverman 292–94).
A related campaign had relevance for white perception of black modes of dress. British Whigs made it a point to ridicule those who tended toward any kind of high style, including overdone hairstyles, as posing as “macaroni” princes, or lower-level aristocracy. In its patriot incarnation, “macaroni” came to represent all aristocracy, British as much as French, and eventually the word came to serve as shorthand for loyalism, as in the patriot jingle, “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” The Yankee “dandy” who stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaroni both ridiculed British aristocracy and substituted Yankee down-to-earth humor in its place. By the early 1770s, references to macaroni were recognized parts of patriot speech. In a discussion of social norms that probably did his antislavery position little good, Benjamin Rush asked, “Where is the difference between an African prince, with his face daubed with Grease, and his Head adorned with a Feather; and a moderen [sic] Macaroni with his artificial Club of Hair daubed with Powder and Pomatum?” (Rush 30).
The campaign for plain dress was useful to the patriots in promoting the nonimportation agreements, but clearly, for Bostonians such as Samuel Adams, elaborate dress was a sign to be heeded. Elaborate dress signaled idolatry and the call to luxury but perhaps most of all, like the Stuart king supporters, told of treasonable hearts below the fine linen. As Piersen tells us, however, attempts at elaborate European dress were early characteristics of slaves brought from Africa, carrying forward an African tradition that emulated European clothing (Piersen, Black Yankees 101–2). Such traditions were not to be admired in Boston. Slaves in fine dress, or in imitation thereof, not only blurred class lines (as it would in artisan circles discussed later), but raised suspicions that slaves were not what they seemed. In 1721, James Franklin’s anti-Mather New England Courant provided an account of an elaborate black wedding in terms of its presumed intention to ridicule the government (NEC 25/12/21). One explanation for New England slave advertising that gave so much attention to the dress of slaves is to consider the New England suspicion that dress signaled intent.
Considered conspiratorial, violent, and promiscuous in dress and behavior, black colonists had few calls on understandings of virtue by white Boston standards except for those definitions that were most useful to white society. Fearful of black violence, colonial religious leadership inculcated virtue as an expression of approved behavior. Cotton Mather established a Society of Negroes in 1693 that included among its rules warnings against drunkenness, cursing, lying, stealing, and disobedience to masters. In the wake of suspected slave arson in 1723, Mather further inculcated virtue in a slave context, urging the emulation of the “Dutiful Behaviour of their Superiours” (Mather 2:689). Mather and other congregational ministers offered slave baptism and church membership. Franklin undoubtedly echoed the faith in the social values of religion for those “who have need of the Motives of Religion to restrain them from Vice, to support their Virtue, and retain them in the Practice of it till it becomes habitual” (Franklin, Papers 7:294–95).
Taken together, virtue for black colonists was not to quarrel with the status of enslavement, to avoid entertainments, and not to flaunt sexuality or dress. Black colonists could not participate in the classic sense of civic virtue, and, by the time the propagandists chose to use virtuous behavior as a way to question the British right to rule, the construction of virtue along lines of moral purity and moderation had eliminated most black colonists. Indeed, before the propagandists chose to find British virtue wanting when compared with their own, American colonists had imposed the same template on black inhabitants and come to a similar conclusion.
Black piety received rare acknowledgement in colonial America. Responding to a request of black colonists, George Whitefield preached to “a great number of negroes” (Winsor 1:509) in his first New England visit. But even in a religious setting, black gatherings were not encouraged. Indeed, Whitefield was later considered a cause of the 1741 New York plot because he actively sought black conversion (T. Davis 215). Black piety certainly found no home in the revolutionary press. Slave petitions to the Massachusetts legislative bodies, no matter how couched in pious and inoffensive language, were not published in Boston despite access to them by Samuel Adams and James Bowdoin.
There was no better example of congregational virtue than Phillis Wheatley, baptized in Boston’s Old South in 1771 and a writer of poetry celebrating her own salvation from “heathenism” as well as polemic verse on patriot matters. But whether pious or patriotic, Wheatley did not receive publication in Boston’s Whig press. Her most popular, and perhaps least controversial publication, was her elegy at the death of George Whitefield in 1770. As discussed in a later chapter, in Boston this was published by the definitely non-Whig press of Ezekiel Russell. It should be noted that the Whig press was not breaking precedence in refusing to find a place for her as a representative of either black or literary virtue. Wheatley’s predecessor, the Calvinist Jupiter Hammon, found few public venues for his work even when he preached continued subservience. Briton Hammon’s 1760 narrative, steeped in Indian captivity tradition rather than Quaker antislavery, found publication only in the loyalist shop of Green and Russell (Hammon). John Marrant’s 1785 narrative, also in the captivity mode, was published in London.
One Boston slave petition suggested the exhaustion of trying to maintain piety unrewarded. “Let their Behavior, be what they will, neither they, nor their children to all Generations, shall ever be able to do, or to possess and enjoy any Thing, no, not every Life Itself, but in a Manner as the Beasts that perish” (Appendix 10; Aptheker, And Why Not 6).
Finally, efforts of black colonists to prove virtuous behavior by service in the revolutionary war similarly failed. Black service to the Revolution, despite its use in New England, was generally ignored until brought to light by the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement (Nell). A researcher notes that the service of more than five hundred free black Haitians in making a patriot retreat possible during the 1779 Siege of Savannah received bare mention outside the Tory press and delayed its recognition by American historians (Rhodes).
What was the reason for the refusal of Adams and the revolutionary circle to allow black colonists to bear the mantle of virtue, even without an attachment to antislavery? One might consider the long history of denying virtue to black colonists, the prejudice to color, the need to bring the South to the cause, and even Adams’s own beliefs. But from a propagandistic viewpoint, the denial of virtue to a class of subservient people was to give example to the reality of a descent into “slavery.” From Puritan sermonizing to the use of boys in blackface as devil’s imps in Boston’s Pope Day parades, slavery as metaphor was the logical outcome of an ongoing colonial preoccupation with the use of blackness and darkness to represent betrayal and evil. A language that equated the color black with evil, the widespread acceptance of the institution in the North and South, the themes of virtue and vigilance that had no place for black piety, and the political understanding of the word “slavery” conspired to give the metaphor of slavery sufficient layers of meaning for attachment to a variety of colonial sensibilities. Once transposed into metaphor, slavery could serve to unite white colonists of whatever region under a banner of white exclusivity.