In the prerevolutionary period, neither Joseph Crukshank nor Isaac Collins, the two Quaker publishers who had printed most of the antislavery pamphlets, published newspapers. There was no Quaker newspaper publisher in any of the colonies until Collins was pressured into publishing a New Jersey patriot paper in 1775 (Hixson). It was in the cities of Connecticut that newspaper discussion of slavery occurred most frequently. Indeed, three of the four Connecticut newspapers gave more space to the dialogue, on a more frequent basis, than the rest of the colonies put together.
How to account for the Connecticut record? Most evident was the role of New Divinity pastors in Connecticut in the stronghold of the sternest Congregationalism with a tradition of public discussion of theological issues. Connecticut also had six thousand black inhabitants in this period, the largest number in the Northeast (McManis 69n). None of these factors may have made a difference in the public discourse had it not been for the role of the Green family of newspaper publishers.
The Connecticut Greens were descendants of Bartholomew Green (Morse), the Massachusetts printer who had published Samuel Sewall’s famous antislavery tract The Selling of Joseph. By the 1770s, Connecticut’s newspapers were dominated by the sons of New London’s Timothy Green, the longtime printer of the city’s paper and deacon of the Congregational Church. The Green family’s devotion to Congregationalism undoubtedly played a role in their openness to the slavery debate.
The fourth Connecticut newspaper, the Norwich Packet, did not have Green connections and, indeed, its founders were clearly Tory sympathizers (Morse). Norwich still had a Green influence, thanks to a Green-financed printing house, run by a Green brother-in-law, Judah P. Spooner, and publisher of antislavery tracts.
Despite the generations of Green printers, the Greens were not in the mode of the classic colonial press whose primary obligation was to provide a conduit for whatever arrived on the doorstep. When Thomas Green initiated the Connecticut Courant, his opening statement illustrated a view of the newspaper in a larger role: “Was it not the Press, we should be left almost intirely ignorant of all those noble Sentiments which the Antients were endow’ed with” (CC 10/29/64). As the patriot noose grew tighter on newspapers seeking to convey a body of information beyond the patriot sphere, Timothy Green of New London published a letter attacking the “tyranny of patriotism.” Directed at the pressures put on the colonial press by the Sons of Liberty, the letter charged: “Bad as our present Ministers are universally presented by the News Papers, they still allow us some degree of freedom; they suffer us to think, to talk, and to write as we please, but the Patriots allows us no such indulgence; Unless we think, talk, and write as they would have us, we are Traitors to the State” (NLG 1/24/72). The paper changed its name in 1773, but the free-speech tone remained: “Some of our readers may perhaps think it amiss that we inserted a tory piece in our last,” he wrote in the unusual practice of writing in his own voice, “but as this was done with a View to serve the cause of Liberty by affording a fair opportunity for exposing the Errors of these ill-natured Men and Pests of Society… Where there can be no Contradictions there can be Argument” (CG-NL 8/12/74).
Nonetheless, none of the Connecticut newspapers can be said to have taken an antislavery stance, for proslavery discussion was well represented in the debate. During this period, the Connecticut Greens also carried periodic news of blacks and slaves in their newspapers that were as negative as any that appeared in the colonial press.
Colonial essay writers were discursive by nature. This was nowhere more true than in the Connecticut slavery essays, in which one essay could account for half a dozen insertions, providing as much discussion as could be found in many pamphlets. One essay ran for three parts in the Connecticut Journal and was concluded in three more parts in the Connecticut Courant. A single debate appeared in half a dozen lengthy insertions that began in the fall of 1773 and did not conclude until the following September. During the same period, Timothy Green’s Connecticut Gazette was publishing essays on both sides of the subject by writers who identified themselves by an alphabet of initials—“O.S.T.” and “Q.X.Z.”
The essays reflect the moral and philosophical arguments of the pamphlet press, including thousands of words combating the Old Testament biblical arguments posed by proslavery advocates. To a modern perspective, it is difficult to see how the recitation of the familiar arguments could have ignited any sparks, although the Baldwin-Edwards series is credited as having a role in the passage of Connecticut’s 1774 antislavery legislation. Still, the proslavery “Philemon” admitted: “I well know how lightly people in general read newspaper controversies,” he began as a way of introduction to the familiar story of God’s curse on Ham (CJ 2/11/74).
Throughout the period, occasional pieces attempted to wrench the debate from the turgid theme of sin and guilt. In 1770 the poet and satirist Jonathan Trumbell included antislavery in his series of thirty-eight “Correspondent” essays that appeared in the Connecticut Journal and New-Haven Post Boy, an insertion that may have influenced later satirical work, such as Personal Slavery Established. Enslavement was the most charitable act in the world, Trumbell wrote. Such toil and pain, such disinterested benevolence, such trouble of conscience and fatigue of the body, all for the Christianization of the African! Indeed, why not enslave other groups, the numerous Turks and Papists for example, for similar charity? (CJ 7/6/70).
But, as in the pamphlet press, such attempts were swamped by the ongoing insistence that America was a guilty nation. “It is very evident, my dear countrymen,” began a typical essay, “that our ways do not please the Lord, and that He has been manifesting His displeasure against us in various ways” (CG-NL 9/9/74). A Norwich writer began: “Among all the wicked customers that are in the nation, none appear to bring down the just vengeance of Heaven more than that of enslaving the Africans” (CJ 1/21/74).
The opening newspaper essay—of five lengthy parts—was written by the New Divinity ministers, Ebenezer Baldwin and Jonathan Edwards Jr. The opening paragraphs called for the consistency that New Divinity demanded. Americans were calling for liberty while “reducing a large body of people to complete the perpetual slavery” (CJ 10/8/73). The Baldwin-Edwards series, however, shared a number of characteristics with the Quaker essayists, insisting the Old Testament was not an appropriate defense of slavery and finally dismissing the Old Testament argument with a tone of impatience: “The truth is that the scriptures were never designed to be a system of politics” (CJ 10/15/73). Instead, the two New Divinity adherents substituted the New Testament’s Golden Rule as part of a meld of religious and philosophical defenses that included natural rights, the hypocrisy of slave owners claiming to be saving the souls of their slaves, and the illogic of the just-war defense.
The series indicates how Congregational and Quaker thinking combined in antislavery thought, a major achievement for two sects that had a history of contention in Connecticut. The Sharp and Benezet influence is apparent in the parallel between West Indian and southern slavery, as it noted “the condition of the slaves in the southern colonies and the West-India islands, who are often most cruelly whipped and tortured… and sometimes killed at the pleasure of the masters” (CJ 12/24/73). One insertion also noted Scottish empiricist, Francis Hutcheson, whose System of Moral Philosophy had been quoted in Benezet’s 1767 essay (CJ 12/31/73). In political terms, the series also shared the Quaker antipatriot stance. If it is lawful for Americans to enslave Africans, “Why is it not as right for Great Britain, France or Spain to reduce us to the same state of slavery, to which we have reduced them?” (CJ 10/8/73).
An antipatriot stance was a characteristic of the next extensive series. Before the essay of Baldwin and Edwards had finished its run, the Greens had already begun the publication of the writer “Antidoulious.” The arguments of the essay, which stretched across two Connecticut newspapers and was referred to in a slavery essay in a third (CG 1/6/75), called upon emerging attitudes of sensibility. Africans were “a harmless, inoffensive people, but little disposed to engage in wars with one another” until enslaved by European greed. The tortures of the Middle Passage, “a floating dungeon,” and the barbarity of the auction block were established in terms of family separation: “Little children torn from the bosoms of their indulgent parents” (CC 10/3/74).
Having portrayed the sinfulness of the slave trade, “Antidoulious” sought expurgation. He found it in the Sons of Liberty. As British writers shifted guilt from Great Britain to the American colonies, this colonial writer moved blame from one American to another. The patriots must bear the responsibility for the continuance of slavery, he intimated, because they refused to acknowledge the colonial guilty past and, indeed, conducted themselves with a feckless audacity: “A Son of Liberty must blush to reflect that, in one breath he has been loudly exclaiming against the Tyranny of the British Parliament in but attempting to deprive him of his natural rights; while in the next he is exercising a far worse Tyranny over his Negro Slaves” (CJ 10/22/73).
While “Antidoulious” chose a far-ranging landscape for his antislavery argument, the terrain sketched out by “Philemon” was a land bounded by the Old Testament and ruled by a merciless God whose instrument, Noah, destined the black race to perpetual enslavement because of the disrespect given to him by his son, Ham. As “Philemon” described the event from the ninth chapter of Genesis: “Ham the father of Canaan, saw his father’s nakedness and… told it to his brethren without; thereby, in a public and open manner, disgracing his father.” Noah condemned Ham and his posterity to be “a servant of servants,” that is, a slave. Abraham subsequently prospered in the land of Egypt, presumably with God’s blessing, even surrounded with Ham’s slave posterity. Finally, “Philemon” asserted no servant race could still exist without defying natural law as it had been God’s decree that certain men be servants to others, but not necessarily because they were less talented. Indeed, he acknowledged talent was no observer of racial lines, but even possession of talent did not necessarily lead to social or political equality. It was God’s right to dispose of man any way He wanted without calling into question the moral perfectibility of His handiwork—an indication that Congregationalism could be used for either side of the slavery argument (CJ 1/7/74).
The antislavery “Philander” challenged the argument in excruciatingly thorough detail. Like other antislavery writers who answered the Old Testament arguments, “Philander” denied that what was permissible for Israelites was also right for all others and put his argument in a contemporary setting: “Because God had a right to set Sodom on fire and burn it to the dust; therefore I have a right to set on fire and burn down Boston or New York” (CJ 9/16/74).
The “Philander”/“Philemon” exchange may be the best example of the religious debate on the issue. Its length almost buried an extract from a letter written by Phillis Wheatley to the Native American Congregational minister, the Rev. Samson Occum, wondering, like others, at the absurdity of calling for freedom while denying it at home (CJ 4/1/74). But as the familiar Old Testament explorations came to a close in New Haven, the slavery dialogue had taken a new turn in Hartford.
Watson’s Connecticut Courant was the only newspaper to publish the Rush pamphlet. It appeared in five parts beginning March 3, 1773. While it was usual practice to publish essays in many parts, it was not usual to republish a pamphlet in newspaper form. If a publisher thought a pamphlet of interest, he would more likely have published it separately under his own imprint for profit. To republish the Rush pamphlet in the Courant, Watson, by then proprietor of the paper, must have viewed its assured dissemination in the newspaper as more important than its profit, as the introduction to the first insertion suggests: “As it seems to be the prevailing Opinion of Mankind at present in the American Colonies that the Slave Trade is unreasonable in itself and directly contrary to the Principles of Liberty and the Rights of Mankind, of the Violations of which the Americans justly complain, it is hoped the Re-publication of the Whole of said Pamphlet in this Paper will be acceptable to our Readers” (CC 3/30/73).
Up until the publication of the Rush pamphlet, the Courant had published no discussion of the slavery issue outside of its coverage of the Somerset decision. And after the Rush piece was concluded, silence descended until September of 1774, when the Courant published the final three parts of “Antidoulious,” an unusual step as already noted.
It was not until 1774 that the next extended discussion of slavery occurred. The Quaker influence was clear, but “Q.X.Z.” was one of the colonial writers to confront prejudice. If all mankind was not born equally free, he asked, how are we to tell who is to be the slave? Shall it be the British? “No; they are a noble, generous people, they excel in arts and manufacturers.” What about the French? “No; they are good warriors, an airy, polite people, they must not be slaves.” The Indians then. “No; if we enslave any of them the remainder will be an enraged enemy, continually on our borders.” The Africans? “Yes; they will do; they are black and ugly, and a wide Atlantick secures us against their resentments.” He predicted that in the end even color prejudice would not be enough for some. “One will say, I am white enough to be free, and another will say you are black enough to be a slave” (CG 1/21/74).
But once again an examination of prejudice was sidelined by calls for the expiation of guilt. “E.M.” passionately called for repentance for the “evil of our ways” (CG 8/4/74). A month later, another essayist insisted, “Those abominations which are the cause of God’s anger, must be sought out and done away” (CG 9/9/74). The guilt was set on the doorstep of the revolutionary movement by the essayist “Liberty.” He was moved to write because of a petition to the Sons of Liberty from a group of slaves who asked for consideration “whilst we are consulting, asserting and maintaining our natural rights. Like “Antidoulious,” the writer portrayed guilt as an appropriate impediment to the revolutionary movement. “Under such a load of guilt, how can you with any face contend for your own rights? How can you condemn a North, or a Bute, or the greatest parricide that ever disgraced the British court?” (CG 10/28/74).
When the newspaper published the act that prohibited the importation of slaves (CG 11/24/74), opposition voices were again engaged. One essayist made a direct reference to the Sons of Liberty, suggesting the call to liberty was hypocrisy. If New Englanders wished to remain free, they must be ruled by “men of virtue, such as are for universal liberty” (CG 12/2/74).
A second insertion called for a limited emancipation but marked a new direction for discussion. Although the writer argued Africans had a right to sell their captives, he nonetheless urged the legislature to consider emancipation as long as freed slaves would not become a community burden “whenever by their folly or otherwise they are disabled from supporting themselves” (CG 12/23/74). Following Connecticut’s prohibition on the importation of slaves, the writer was less concerned with the morality of slave keeping as with the practical concerns of emancipation, assumed to be on the horizon.
The potential charge to the public that would be caused by the emancipation of slaves was also the concern of the final essayist of 1774. Expressing sympathy for the slave, the contributor could only find three choices existing if slaves were freed—that they be returned to Africa, settled elsewhere, or given permission “to run at Large among us.” None was feasible, particularly the last. “They would be greatly exposed to strong Temptations to Idleness, Debauchery, Stealing, and many other Vices very Pernicious to public Order and Safety.” The writer only favored emancipation if former slaves could be removed from white society. Otherwise many of them would become “a pest to civil society, and an insupportable Charge to the public” (CG 12/30/74).
Early in 1775 the debate moved again into practical concerns in which the writer argued that if slaves appeared unprepared for freedom, it was because the condition of slavery promoted certain characteristics. “The native spark of ambition which inkindles and rises to a flame in the breast of a freeman, withers and expires in the breast of a slave; and leaves as a substitute, a sullen melancholy, lost to all the noble excitement which spring from a laudable ambition” (CG 3/17/75). That brought on a final two-part essay response that antislavery persuasion was not at the expense of the political maneuvering. “It is a fact well known, that there was an agreement entered into among a considerable number of persons in divers towns, not to vote for any man in any office whatever, who kept a negro servant.” The writer called for antislavery advocates to cease their “intermeddling, not only in politics but in families, and making servants uneasy” (CG 3/17/75).
Besides giving us a glimpse of the machinations that went on behind the discussions of slavery, this essay brought to the surface the long-held colonial attitude that emancipation would lead to social disorder. The writer allowed he favored ending the slave trade, but that would not solve the problem of what to do with the slaves already here. Since it was impractical to return them to Africa, no alternative existed except continued enslavement. Education was not likely to change the character of bondsmen. Indeed, “there is a much great probability that the negroes, if released, would grow worse” (CG 2/24/75). At any rate, it was felt that the question of slavery must not be allowed to take precedence over other, pressing matters, and it was on this note that the debate ended.
The thousands of words given over to discussion of the slavery issue in the Green-dominated papers was in contrast to the Norwich Packet. There was not one word of debate of the slavery issue in the three years of the newspaper’s existence and, outside of the Lord Dunmore coverage, bare mention of blacks or slaves at all. Connecticut’s 1774 prohibition of the importation of slaves passed without notice. It appears that the slavery discussion was kept out of the Packet by editorial decision. At a time when the Connecticut Gazette was still running extensive discussions, the Packet published what is perhaps the clearest statement of editorial stance on the slavery issue that appeared anywhere in the colonial press: “The Printers hereof present their Compliments to the two African Advocates [possibly Moses Brown and Samuel Hopkins] who have lately honoured them with very polite epistles, and request that these HEROES would excuse their declining to enter a Contest with them whom they consider insolent, stupid, and extremely insignificant” (NP 2/16/75).
The inhospitable context of the newspaper indicates a previous insertion having to do with a townsman’s emancipation of his slaves “from a laudable sense of freedom” was intended sarcastically (NP 12/15/74). There was no attempt at irony in a subsequent item that warned that a free Negro had been arrested in Massachusetts in what Boston colonists believed was his role in a plot “to destroy the White People” (NP 3/9/75). Whether these views on blacks and slaves were connected to a patriot stance is not clear because of the paper’s muddy political history. But when one of its publishers announced the dissolution of the original partnership in 1776, he identified his paper as one that had been “friendly to Liberty” and pledged to continue the policy (NP 5/13/76).
Only New Jersey could challenge Connecticut for the breadth of the slavery debate. The New Jersey Gazette was established in 1777 by patriot pressure on the colony’s public printer, Quaker Isaac Collins, in exchange for exemption from military service for himself and his workmen. Collins was an intimate of George Dillwyn, whose pamphlet he had published, and his Quaker views toward slavery likely had been intensified during his apprenticeship in Virginia (Hixson 68–70). From early in 1780 into the next year, the Gazette reflected New Jersey’s active antislavery movement. Collins’s sympathies were clear, calling the abolition of slavery in Pennsylvania “an act of humanity, wisdom and justice” (NJG 2/13/80) and later publishing the Pennsylvania abolition bill (NJG 5/17/80). The pages of the Gazette nonetheless presented both views. John Cooper called for immediate emancipation (NJG 9/20/80), answered by “A Whig” who urged caution on the basis that former slaves were not prepared for the responsibilities of free men (NJG 10/4/80). A Cooper supporter thence took the “Whig” to task not only for his proslavery views but for the use of the name Whig, reserved as a designation, he charged, for someone who “Abhors the very idea of slavery” (NJG 11/7/80).
The most extreme of the proslavery views appeared in a new newspaper, the New Jersey Journal, established in 1779 by patriot pressure in the north-central part of the state. Faced with competition from New York papers, there were reasons for another patriot organ. The reasons for a new paper may also have included Collins’s discussion on slavery and suspicions aroused by his Quaker affiliation—although Collins had been dismissed from the Quaker meeting on the basis of his patriot newspapers, considered a tool of war (Hixson 80–84). In this new paper, the proslavery writer “Eliobo” put on the table such negative attitudes toward blacks and slaves (NJJ 11/29; 12/27/80) that it set off an exchange, including ridicule from the Presbyterian minister, the Reverend Jacob Green (NJJ 11/20; 12/27/80), in which, as described by Arthur Zilversmit, “succeeding letters becoming more vituperative” (145).
What can be concluded from New Jersey’s newspaper debate was the depths of proslavery attitudes that were not so different from those of southern planters or West Indian slaveholders. What can also be concluded is that arguments based on religion, national pride, or sentiment did not appear to sway New Jersey proslavery writers, whose major stated fear was economic loss (Zilversmit 146).
The practical concerns that were found in New Jersey and even in the Connecticut bastion of Congregationalism were not reflected in the hub of patriot activity. In Boston, the single newspaper that came closest to rivaling the Connecticut discussions of slavery in the 1770s and the New Jersey discussion in the 1780s was Thomas Fleet’s Boston Evening-Post, a series that turned on biblical approval (BEP 9/7; 9/21; 10/2; 10/12; 10/19; 10/26; 11/2; 11/30; 12/28/72). Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy published a similar series based on biblical approval appearing in the same year as the Somerset decision, although without mentioning it (MS 2/27; 10/1; 10/27/72). Outside of Boston, however, in another newspaper connected to Thomas, the slavery debate was framed in a startling new way,
Thomas founded the Essex Journal in Newburyport, Massachusetts, with Henry Walter Tinges, a former apprentice, who had also worked for the accused Tory sympathizer John Fleming (Thomas 179–89). The first edition, December 4, 1773, was distributed free in this bustling port town that had a fifty-year history of antislavery activity (Thomas 369; Coffin 241, 372). It was Newbury’s most famous son, Judge Samuel Sewall, who had written the early antislavery tract The Selling of Joseph. But what put Newbury in the center of antislavery activity just a month before the first edition of the new paper was the successful suit of a Newbury slave, Caesar, for his freedom. The jury not only granted the suit but awarded the plaintiff eighteen pounds in damages (Coffin 373).
The appearance of the paper also coincided with the colony’s activity to prohibit the slave trade. By January 1774, a bill had passed both houses. Hutchinson’s refusal to sign it only renewed antislavery activity. In Newbury, Nathanial Niles took the antislavery message to the town’s North Church pulpit— “Let us either cease to enslave our fellow-men, else let us cease to complain of those who would enslave us” (Niles). Meantime, the fiery Benjamin Colman (not to be confused with the Boston minister), deacon of the Byfield Parish Church, found the new paper a hospitable place to continue his antislavery crusade. Colman called on readers to refrain from criticism of the British ministry until Americans had removed the yoke of bondage from “our brethren, the negroes” (EJ 6/20/74). Colman, indeed, took his own advice to look to one’s own house. In the 1780s the church was split when Colman charged his own pastor as a “thief” and slave keeper (Coffin 341–44; Sibley’s 10:56–58).
The Thomas-Tinges partnership failed, perhaps because Colman reflected an antislavery position that was out of step with patriot ideology. In the first appearance of the newspaper under the new partnership of Tinges and Ezra Lunt, a major antislavery essay was found front page. Since Lunt was not a printer but an investor—owner of a stagecoach line between Newburyport and Boston (BG 9/20/73)—the decision to print the essay seems to have belonged to Tinges. The essay that launched the partnership also broke new ground, having been written by a former slave, Caesar Sarter, perhaps, but not indisputably, the same individual whose freedom had been granted in 1773 (Coffin 339).
The essay has obvious Quaker influences, touching on the themes of African natural rights, African innocence, the irony of the patriot cause, and scripture. What made the Sarter essay memorable, however, was an egalitarian style that refused subservience. Traditionally, Quaker essays called upon white readers to think of themselves as slaves in order to understand the brutality of the system. Ignored in the rhetoric was a call to imagine the reverse—to picture the African in mainstream society in which the African is at home. One problem in the Quaker’s argument of the Golden Rule was that it never addressed the issue beyond emancipation, leaving that discussion open to essayists who could not imagine former bondsmen and women operating in any way other than as members of the lowest rung of society, even as free. When petitions appeared, their supplicating nature tended to reinforce the role of blacks, even free, as subservient.
In contrast, the assurance of Sarter’s style raised the concept of equality of black and white, even in the Quaker rhetorical frame. Sarter asked readers to put themselves in the place of stolen Africans, a usual Quaker device. “Suppose that you were trepanned away,” he asked, “the husband from the dear wife of his bosom—the wife from her affectionate husband—children from their fond parents—or parents from their tender and beloved offspring who, not an hour before, perhaps they were fondling in their arms and in whom they were promising themselves much future happiness?” (EJ 8/17/74).
What Sarter rejects is the Quaker language of horror, choosing instead the language of civilized society that assumes an equality of expectations and experience. In the same way as the Somerset coverage had noted two years before blacks “and their ladies” enjoying an evening out after the Somerset success, the way any English group might celebrate the success of a court battle, Sarter described Africans experiencing the slave block not in dramatic terms of rivulets of blood that Quaker writers often favored but in the genteel language of family separation that reflected common white perceptions about themselves. For white colonists concerned with emancipation as disorder, here was evidence that belied the newspapers’ emphasis on black crime.
The Sarter approach was seldom seen in the antislavery discussion of the time. But there was at least one other example of a former slave rejecting Quaker sensibility in favor of a political argument. In January of 1780, a Trenton doctor, David Cowell, inserted an advertisement in the New Jersey Gazette offering to sell or exchange an able-bodied Negro man. The man in question, Adam, replied in an essay to the Gazette charging that Cowell had signed a contract for his freedom, and calling for freedom, justice, and protection, “which I am entitled to by the laws of the state, although I am a Negro.” Cowell replied, although he had to take out an advertisement to do it, denying he had promised such freedom and blamed two white men for instigating trouble. Adam replied, again in the columns of the Gazette, in an onslaught charging an array of specific wrongs including an attack of Cowell’s ability as a surgeon. Cowell rallied to respond, again in terms of specificity. The argument went to the Supreme Court of New Jersey, which declared Adam to be Cowell’s property, but in 1783, a notice informed Gazette readers of Cowell’s death, and it is to be surmised that Adam found a way to maintain his freedom (White 117–19).
Shane White interprets the episode as a remarkable example of black challenge to white “monopoly of the printed word” (119). That view is supported when it is considered that Adam made his case without any reference to the antislavery arguments of the period. Instead, Adams’s argument, as Cowell’s response, was in the specificity of promises made and promises broken, a rare alternative to the religious rhetoric.
The voices of the enslaved were seldom heard in the colonial press, and that lack left the antislavery argument to till dusty soil. The tone of some essays suggested the writers themselves were tiring of restating arguments already well known. “We all know that they are purchased from their princes, who pretend to have a right to dispose of them,” according to a Salem writer, as if too obvious to repeat (EG 8/25/72).
Through it all, the dull and not-so-dull, the Boston Gazette chose to ignore the debate. Despite the considerable agitation for the abolition of the slave trade that came before Massachusetts’s legislators in 1767, 1771, 1773, 1774, and 1776, the patriot’s flag carrier remained silent. Other Boston newspapers, forced or otherwise, generally followed suit. One exception was Edward E. Powars and Nathaniel Willis’s Independent Chronicle, a latecomer to the Boston press community, which published a contribution from Roxbury’s New Divinity minister, William Gordon. Gordon, like Paine and Rush, made an effort to confront the question of physical difference: “Would it not be ridiculous, inconsistent and unjust, to exclude freemen from voting for representatives and senators, though otherwise qualified, because their skins are black, tawny or reddish? Why not disqualify for being long-nosed, short-faced, or higher or lower than five feet nine?” (IC 1/8/78).
The Chronicle also provided a glimpse of the debate in the state’s legislative convention of 1777–78 in which blacks, Indians, and mulattos were excluded from citizenship. In opposing the exclusion, Gordon pointed to political motivation: to grant citizenship to blacks would be to offend “the sister States,” a rare instance when that issue was discussed openly. The proposed constitution was defeated, perhaps in some small part because of Gordon’s attacks on the exclusionary clause, which, when coupled with a perceived insult to that most easily offended colonial gentlemen, Governor John Hancock, led to his dismissal as chaplain to both houses of the Massachusetts legislative (G. Moore 194). Later, Gordon was fired from his Roxbury pastorate, whereupon he returned to Great Britain in 1786 to write the History of the American Revolution and survive as best he could. Described by a nineteenth-century historian as possessing a “warmth of temper and lack of prudence” (Winsor 350), Gordon came to the American colonies in 1770 with an unfettered and uncompromising outlook on slavery that he was unable to integrate into the American cause. And even with his clear patriot sympathies, Gordon’s British birth, like that of Swan and Allen, likely did not serve to advance his theories on abolition.
On safer ground, the Chronicle limited other slavery debate to a pro-and-con versification war in early 1778 (IC 1/29; 2/19/78). It would not be surprising if these insertions had been prompted by the Chronicle’s secret partner, John Green, a member of the peripatetic printing family whose members carried the antislavery debate in Connecticut (Thomas 139).
The outbreak of war ended the partnership of Edes and Gill. Gill was imprisoned in 1775 while Edes moved the Gazette to Watertown and then back to Boston at the end of 1776. In 1776, Gill was also back in the newspaper business as the founder and proprietor of the Continental Journal, which published Gordon’s second essay on the proposed constitution (ConJ 4/9/79). Gill has always been regarded as the silent partner in the Edes and Gill relationship, apparently doing most of the day-to-day business, freeing Edes for his Loyall Nine activities. However, both in the fisticuffs incident with John Mein and in his imprisonment, Gill took on the lion’s share of the punishment. The publication of the unpopular Gordon in his new paper leads to speculation that Gill may have been finally challenging the patriot hegemony that had ruled the Boston Gazette for so many years.
Meantime, quite apart from the publication record of Boston newspapers, the question of the role of slaves in the Revolution was causing civil disorder in the city. A proposal to raise a detachment of blacks for military service resulted in a Congress Street riot led by the patriot incendiary, Isaac Sears. Sears’s connection to the riot suggests it was hardly spontaneous but likely a propaganda assurance to the “sister States” of Massachusetts’s political commitment to the continuance of black subservience.
One of the last antislavery essays—before the Declaration of Independence—was written by another British immigrant, Thomas Paine, and, as the last piece of editorial matter before the advertising, was tucked onto page three of the Pennsylvania Journal. The newspaper was an odd venue considering the Journal did not print even an extract from the pamphlet written by Rush, who was a family friend of the publisher, and accepted the piece after it was rejected by Robert Aiken for the Pennsylvania Magazine (Woodward 61). The Journal was no hospitable context for antislavery discussion. Its publisher William Bradford was long an opponent of Quakers and Quaker positions; indeed, it was Bradford who commanded the military contingent that arrested Philadelphia’s Quaker leaders for exile to Virginia (Gilprin).
The Journal had published just one letter objecting to slavery prior to the Paine piece (PJ 9/24/74) and published a series of letters by a spokesman defending slavery during the debate on the proposed modification of Pennsylvania’s 1780 abolition bill (PJ 1/31; 2/5; 2/21/81). The response to these letters came not in the Pennsylvania Journal but in a new, politically active newspaper, Frances Bailey’s Freeman’s Journal, which also published a “postscript” from a black correspondent who argued for the retention of the original bill (FJ 6/13; 9/21/81).
Paine had not been long in the colonies when he wrote the essay, and his familiarity with the arguments indicated their British sources. Paine was master, however, in his grasp of colonial thought. After the traditional arguments, Paine moved the discussion into the realm of practical concerns, as if recognizing that it was not John Locke or biblical command that prevented most white colonists from moving vigorously on antislavery issues but the lack of solutions to perceived problems, such as the role of freed bondsmen in a new society. Paine’s proposal strikes no egalitarian chord, suggesting initial segregation until the former slaves believed they had a stake in the new nation. “Perhaps they might sometime form useful barrier settlements on the frontiers. Thus they become interested in the public welfare, and assist in promoting it” (PJ 3/8/75). However, Paine’s acknowledgment of the practical concerns of the colonists and his attempt to address those fears in ways that would be beneficial to the patriot cause suggest an awareness that continued ruminations would likely serve to maintain, not alter, positions. His attempt to connect the freedom of black Americans with the revolutionary movement came too late for impact on the Revolution’s ideology, however. The antislavery rhetoric was well established along tracks that carried into the antebellum era.
The newspaper essays calling for an end to slavery were dominated by issues from the pens of the British-influenced Quaker pamphlet writers. For Great Britain, the Somerset decision provided redemption. The guilt of the British nation for its role in establishing slavery in the world was shifted to American shoulders. The Quaker writers carried this British agenda to the Puritan soil of the colonies, where shame and guilt were not unknown. However, the descendants of the Puritans were now part of the revolutionary generation, a generation that emphasized American purity and European corruption. Colonial Americans refused to take on this British burden, put on them as if the British expected to extract a tithe from colonists to pay for British sinfulness, as surely as they taxed colonists to pay for British interests in European wars. Colonists refused to pay such debts and rejected them wholly, even their own legitimate part in them.
Although the religious arguments carried weight in certain colonies, the antislavery rhetoric of the New Divinity and other congregational ministers was best appreciated by a regional audience, and its regional nature must account for its failure to be reprinted in other areas of the colonies. When antislavery addressed secular concerns, as in the Rush pamphlet, dissemination increased. Further, the antislavery cause had no proponent who was as skilled in the manipulation of attitudes as Samuel Adams, nor did it boast any printer who could carry out the propagandistic mission as well as Benjamin Edes. Even the most sympathetic of printers, the Greens in Connecticut and Collins in New Jersey, were compelled to offer their columns to the opposite views. Meantime, antislavery patriot supporters who remained in good standing— Rush, Paine, and Appleton—were taken up by other aspects of the Revolution. The antislavery agitation that remained within the patriot fold was confined to calls for slave trade prohibitions. Quaker antislavery activists found themselves cornered into Toryism, an alienation that carried into the new nation. And all antislavery essayists, whether Tory or not, did their cause little good by taunting patriots for their lack of antislavery sentiment.
Thus, mired in arguments that often lacked intercolonial appeal, the antislavery essayists failed to make a place for the cause beyond the end of the slave trade. At the same time, the Somerset decision had indicated that it served the patriot cause to promote the fear that the British regarded colonists on the same level as slaves. It became an even more compelling fear when embodied by the decision of Virginia’s governor to set free the colony’s slaves on the proviso they would make war on their former owners.