Early in his national career, Abraham Lincoln argued that the founding fathers, understanding slavery was wrong but finding its eradication a practical impossibility at the establishment of the national government, “hedged and hemmed it in to the narrowest limits of necessity.” The word “slavery” was not even allowed in the Constitution, Lincoln told his audience of Nebraska-Kansas Act opponents, in order to indicate that “the cutting may begin at the end of a given time” (Donald 176).
The antislavery legislation that began to occur even before independence was won upholds the traditional view that the Revolution included the tacit promise that a new nation could be expected to move vigorously to eliminate the institution. Even Massachusetts, so resistant to antislavery legislation in the revolutionary decade, adopted a constitution in 1780 that was viewed as inimical to slavery; certainly court cases substantially, if not conclusively, halted the institution; and by the decade’s end, unequivocal legislation was in place.
Lincoln did not credit propaganda as the lever that made such a promise, but it nevertheless could be argued that the Revolution’s propaganda, by substantially remaining silent on the issue of slavery, did not alienate southern support and made a national independence movement possible. At the same time, the silence neither quelled nor censored local antislavery discussion. And, most important, silence further helped cement the promise by eschewing the temptation of making proslavery a unifying theme—certainly a strategy that would have gone a long way to break the southern tie to Great Britain.
Although antislavery was not a national standard at independence, neither was the perpetuation of the institution. Silence, it might be argued, was the only amenable choice that gave antislavery a chance. Any other position contained the seeds of dooming a national movement, and perhaps putting in the place of the present United States a North America composed of two or more nations based on attitudes toward race. In short, if this argument were framed as one of the debate questions that the colonial Harvard graduates so favored, it might be: Resolved: by avoiding the issue of slavery, the propagandists of the American Revolution made a unified revolution possible, and allowed for the development of a movement that sought full rights for all.
Another alternative is to consider that the American Revolution may have failed to materialize at all if the slavery issue was fully debated. In that case, American slavery would have been abolished by British imperial action, possibly avoiding the Civil War. But only Great Britain’s own caution on the subject can be blamed for not winning the war by this means. Up until Burke’s 1775 parliamentary call for the emancipation of American slaves—although a predictable failure—only Lord Dunmore chose to address the issue of American slavery directly. Instead, the British relied on innuendo, which in the end served to weaken the antislavery cause in the American colonies without strengthening the British hand.
Such speculations aside, what may be concluded is that the role of the antislavery movement in the American Revolution encouraged the continuance of antislavery voices along familiar lines. New Divinity as a religious movement did not last into the new century, but the style and passion of its antislavery arguments were carried forward by the nineteenth-century abolitionists. The reverberations of Jonathan Edwards and Samuel Hopkins were clearly to be heard in the sound and fury of the William Lloyd Garrison wing of the abolitionist movement and in the Radical Republicanism of Charles Sumner. By the same token, the American Revolution strengthened the resolve of the Quaker campaign against slavery, and the Quaker argument of sensibility would be carried forward by Theodore Parker, Lydia Marie Child, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.
But it might be considered that the rhetoric that continued to accompany the abolition movement into the new century was not any more suited to the nation than it had been to a revolutionary generation. The promise of Paine, Rush, Appleton, and Swan, who had begun to address slavery outside of moral outrage, was never fulfilled in the construction of an antebellum rhetoric that still sought to persuade by empathetic feeling and godly retribution. Antislavery would continue to be couched in terms that were not so relevant to white Americans concerned with competition from black labor or who feared social disorder, the loss of racial identity, status, or other perceived advantages. Abolition, in fact, became so removed from the general American agenda that even the word “abolitionist” came to represent an abjured, radical fringe.
The adoption of the colonization schemes, that is, the consensual removal of black Americans to the African continent, by men such as Lincoln speaks to the vacuum that occurred when antislavery adherents, before and after the Revolution, failed to put the issue on the mainstream agenda in ways that directly addressed the role of the freed slave in ordinary society. Such argument needed time for development. Because of the patriot silence on the issue, Rush, Paine, and Sarter never had the opportunity to develop the cohesive discussion that might have given the tacit promise a national springboard after the Revolution. Patriot silence on the issue stilled the development of a public discourse that explored alternative arguments so that, lacking other discussion, colonization, embedded in failure, came to fill the gap.
Among the alternative arguments stilled by the early patriot curtain of silence were those expressed by the voices of the oppressed, both slave and free. Widespread distribution of the Massachusetts petitions for freedom, the essay by Caesar Sarter, the argument offered by Adam, the actions of Prince Hall, and the poetry of Phillis Wheatley would have offered counters to the role of myth, symbol, and difference and may have influenced the essays employed by the white antislavery adherents. But into the antebellum period, the black voices most heard were, like Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, those that found expression in narrative forms that had been long set in place by Quaker and Congregational antislavery adherents. Despite their considerable commitment and public voice, less destined for stardom on the antebellum trail were the members of the black middle class, whose contributions included the representation of African Americans in a world that was not only outside of slavery but also outside myth and symbol and the Quaker and Calvinist framings of white conscience. The voices of Philadelphia’s James Forten family, for example, were the minority voices in the antislavery campaign of traditional Quaker and Calvinist arguments made on public platforms, in antislavery newspapers, and in the millions of pamphlets that came from abolitionist presses in the 1830s and 1840s. The antislavery arguments of the antebellum period largely worked the familiar fields of sentiment, sensibility, and white conscience, all of doubtful significance in permanently shifting white attitudes toward black Americans.
Indeed, at the turn of millennium, more than two hundred years after the American Revolution, what is striking is that the white attitudes toward black Americans do not seem so far removed from the attitudes promulgated by the metaphor of slavery in the American Revolution. Inner cities have been given over to black inhabitants thought to have no possibility of change. Politicians hesitate at strengthening, and more likely seek to weaken, the national social services network lest it be considered as assisting the black poor, who are widely seen by many white Americans as responsible for, and thus deserving of, the poverty in which they exist. Political campaigns have only to press a code word or two for familiar racial attitudes to flood into white consciousness.
As a country that always has some level of dislocation somewhere, shared emotion about race provides the comfort of solidarity as much today as it did in revolutionary times, and perhaps on the same basis—the perceived lack of solutions to old problems. Encouraged by the American media industry and its love of broad representation over factual differentiation, the use of shared emotion as a substitute for democratic participation, and the easy understanding that comes by thinking in opposites, particular ways of thinking are now embedded American characteristics for all groups and impinge upon the perceptions of race in America from many sides. Still missing is a constructive public discourse that explores and builds on the basis of exchange; instead, we are encouraged to leave in place a mode of expression that is the most characterized by its opposition to another position.
Oppositional thinking is useful for propagandistic purposes, but the danger, of course, is that its flames will continue to burn after the cause is done. Beliefs promulgated as propagandistic messages may later be difficult to dislodge, associated as they are with the satisfying emotions of rightness, solidarity, and purpose. It is no wonder that jingoism is the easiest theme to revive. Moreover, the propaganda associated with national purpose can become fixed by the firmament of success as much as by the simmering resentments that accompany an unsuccessful coup.
John Adams noted approvingly that Otis and Adams were “politick” in their use of public festival. But the propagandists of the American Revolution set in place a system of codes that utilized complicated white fears about black colonial Americans. We may appreciate that the propagandists never completely shut down antislavery discussion; nonetheless, the failure of the revolutionaries to address the issue of black Americans in a new nation served to leave intact an underworld of beliefs that could only shape the course of the republic.