Equality and Slavery
“Convince me that one man may rightfully make another man his slave, and I will no longer subscribe to the Declaration of Independence.”
—WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON, 1854
In 1856, Abraham Lincoln told a gathering of Chicago Republicans that the American system of government rested on public opinion, and public opinion “always has a ‘central idea,’ from which all its minor thoughts radiate.” For Lincoln, America’s central idea was, and always had been, the equality of mankind. Seven years later, at Gettysburg, he reminded those assembled that America’s founding fathers had created a new nation “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”1
Lincoln took his idea of equality from the Declaration of Independence. Like Jefferson, Lincoln meant something precise by it: that all men have equal rights—humans are not divided by nature into masters and servants—and that no man has a natural claim to rule others without their consent. As Jefferson put it late in his life, men are not born with saddles on their backs, nor are others born booted and spurred to ride them. Now, it is true that some men and women do saddle and ride horses (and sometimes with boots and spurs), but the differences between people and horses are differences of kind and not of degree. Likewise, that people leash and then walk dogs bespeaks the natural differences between people and dogs. Neither horses nor dogs suffer an injustice by virtue of being tamed and domesticated. America’s revolutionary generation believed that the law of nature permits ruler–ruled relationships between different species, but it is forbidden among men.2 This is why the Second Continental Congress affirmed unequivocally in its 1775 Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms that reason teaches the absurdity of the idea that some men could “hold an absolute property in, and an unbounded power over others.” Expressing the spirit of American liberty, the Congress resolved “to die freemen rather than to live slaves.”3
The revolutionaries’ understanding of equality led them to adopt a particular view of government, the sole purpose of which was to protect the equal rights of all citizens in the community. But the revolutionary generation also knew that the protection of equal rights leads to unequal results. In the tenth essay of The Federalist, James Madison summed up the revolutionary generation’s view of justice and government when he argued that the “rights of property originate” in the “diversity in the faculties of men” and that the “first object of government” is the equal protection of the unequal faculties of acquiring property.4 To that end, American revolutionaries were proponents of the rule of law, which meant that laws must be applied equally to all individuals in society. An individual’s unequal social status as determined by birth, wealth, intelligence, or even moral virtue provided no greater or lesser claim to the equal protection of the laws. The founders believed that the proper function of government was to ensure that the playing field was level and not artificially tilted to aid or hinder particular individuals or groups.
This was the central teaching of the American Revolution, but it is subject to an all-too-obvious question: How could a nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal tolerate the existence of chattel slavery? The Declaration of Independence states clearly and unequivocally, “all men are created equal”; it does not say that some men are created equal, or that all white men, or all Englishmen, or all Americans, or all Christians are created equal.5 And yet the author of the Declaration and more than half of its signers were slaveholders. What are the implications of that fact for the Declaration’s simple words? Does the fact that Jefferson and so many of the founders held other human beings in bondage change or diminish the truth status of the Declaration’s first self-evident truth?
AMERICAN SLAVERY, AMERICAN FREEDOM
The full meaning of equality in the Declaration of Independence is best seen by examining it relative to the long-standing existence of chattel slavery in America. Ideals must not be confused with reality, particularly given the fact that Jefferson and his revolutionary colleagues expected their principles to be put into practice. Slavery had of course existed in one form or another as a worldwide phenomenon for several millennia, and it was introduced to Britain’s American colonies in the first half of the seventeenth century. Dutch traders brought the first shipment of African slaves (seized from a Spanish slave ship) to Jamestown, in the Virginia colony, in 1619. The practice was subsequently institutionalized in colonial American law, beginning in the 1640s through various court decisions that legalized ownership of persons. The great turning point in the history of slavery came in 1680 when the Virginia legislature passed the first slave code, which declared that slaves—and the children of slave women—would serve for life, as would their children and their children’s children.6
American-style slavery denoted a legal and social relationship between a master and a slave wherein the master owned the body and labor of the slave as chattel property. According to the abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass, a “master is one … who claims and exercises a right of property in the person of a fellow man.” Sanctioned by law, the institution of chattel slavery “gives the master absolute power over the slave.” The master may, Douglass explained, “work him, flog him, hire him out, sell him, and, in certain contingencies, kill him, with perfect impunity.” For all intents and purposes, the “slave is a human being, divested of all rights.” As such, the slave
has no wife, no children, no country, and no home. He can own nothing, possess nothing, acquire nothing, but what must belong to another…. He toils that another may reap the fruit; he is industrious that another may live in idleness; he eats unbolted meal, that another may eat the bread of fine flour; he labors in chains at home, under a burning sun and a biting lash, that another may ride in ease and splendor abroad; he lives in ignorance, that another may be educated; he is abused, that another may be exalted.7
With the possible exception of the Quakers, few Americans (or anyone anywhere else for that matter) before the 1760s seriously questioned the moral status of slavery. It was a worldwide institution almost as old as the family itself, and, though distasteful to many and immoral to some, was regarded by most as a necessary evil.
In order to understand the full context of slavery and its existence in the colonies, it is also important to note that chattel slavery was only the most brutal institution of a brutal age. Some of the inequalities and degradations of Old Europe’s ancien régime were replicated in colonial America. Day-to-day life for ordinary people in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Anglo-American society could be described as, to quote Thomas Hobbes, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” In a monarchical society defined by inequality, statuses, and rank orders of dependency and unfreedom, slavery was distinguished by being only the most degraded status. Voluntary and involuntary servitude came in many forms and degrees in this unenlightened age. Though not enslaved as chattel, many eighteenth-century Anglo-American whites were hardly free, being kept in various states of dependency as indentured servants. The difference in social standing and quality of life between a white indentured servant and a black house slave in the northern colonies during the colonial period was one of degree rather than kind, although the moral and legal differences were differences of kind. Still, equality, rights, and freedom were not, in the centuries leading up to the Revolution, the norm. This is why so many colonial Americans unthinkingly took slavery for granted in the decades leading up to the 1760s and 1770s, or were not as repulsed by it as we are today.8
By the 1770s, the institution of slavery was well established in the British (and French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch) Americas, where it had existed for more than a century and a half and had planted deep roots in the economy, social structure, and law. It was legally practiced in every Anglo-American colony; in the thirteen colonies there were approximately half a million slaves, one-fifth of the total American population. Plantation owners in the South held most of the enslaved population (Virginia alone held 200,000), but there were also substantial numbers of slaves held in northern states such as New York, New Jersey, and Rhode Island. The slave trade with Africa carried on unabated throughout the colonial period. Slavery was, whether or not all Americans were willing to admit it, a national institution woven into the social fabric of everyday life.9 On a more personal level, many leading revolutionaries—including George Washington, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, and James Madison—owned slaves. (It should also be noted that many American revolutionaries did not own slaves, including John Adams, Samuel Adams, James Wilson, and Alexander Hamilton.)
It is a tragic irony that American revolutionaries—including, if not most especially, those who owned slaves—understood as well as anyone that slavery was an ugly, degrading, and brutal institution wherever it had been practiced. They hated and condemned it as immoral and anathema to the principles and institutions of a free society. Not a single revolutionary leader ever publicly praised slavery as a positive good. Benjamin Franklin, speaking as president of the Pennsylvania Society of Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, described slavery as “an atrocious debasement of human nature.” George Washington, a slaveholder, told a friend, “There is not a man living, who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of [slavery].” At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, James Madison told his colleagues, “We have seen the mere distinction of color made in the most enlightened period of time, a ground of the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man.” And John Adams told a correspondent in 1819 that he had held “the practice of slavery in abhorrence” through his entire life.10
America’s leading revolutionaries and founding fathers knew that American-style slavery was a vicious institution defined by arbitrary power and tyranny. It was clearly anathema to all of their declared moral principles, and yet more than half of the signers of the Declaration were slave owners. That the principal author of the Declaration held men, women, and children in bondage raises the charge of hypocrisy to the highest level. Should Jefferson’s declaration to the world that all men are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights be taken seriously? More to the point, did the Declaration’s equality principle apply only to whites?11 And if the Declaration applied only to whites, then was it not, by definition, a racist document? How could American revolutionaries tolerate, sanction, or participate in such a noxious institution as chattel slavery? Was the American Revolution a revolution for slavery? Why was it not ended immediately? Finally, were American revolutionaries little more than rank hypocrites?
These are difficult, even painful, questions. To answer them honestly and accurately, however, we must resist our contemporary inclination to assume as fact that America’s revolutionary founders were imprisoned by the biases of their own time even as we condemn them for holding those biases. Such an approach prevents us from truly understanding and accurately judging their ideas and actions. Those ideas and actions should first be understood and judged by the founders’ own perspective and standards before we apply our own standards to past thought and action. Instead, the method employed here is simple without being simpleminded: to examine the ideas, decisions, and actions of America’s revolutionary generation on the founders’ own terms, as they understood themselves. Then and only then can the question of slavery in light of the Declaration be understood—and judged—in the proper historical and philosophical light.12
SLAVERY AND AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARIES
Given the fact of slavery in colonial America, what did America’s revolutionary generation think about it? During the 1760s and 1770s, colonial Americans argued nonstop in their pamphlets, newspapers, and sermons that taxation without representation was a form of tyranny and slavery. It was the most rhetorically powerful argument in their intellectual arsenal. Almost immediately, some Americans understood—though some evaded it—that this argument with the British, and the moral principles it invoked, also applied to the institution of American chattel slavery. With time, more and more Americans confronted the contradiction between their ideals and their institutions. Some sought to change their institutions, and several decades later some sought to change their ideals. Consider the views of five American revolutionaries—James Otis, Benjamin Rush, Richard Wells, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Jefferson—on the question of slavery, which offer a representative range of American opinions.
James Otis was one of the first American colonists to connect the philosophic dots between their Lockean philosophy of equality and freedom and their inherited institutions. In his influential 1764 pamphlet on The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved, Otis argued that all American colonists “white or black” are freeborn “by the law of nature.” There is no right by nature, according to Otis, “to enslave a man because he is black.” Race, and all of the physiological features that go with it, provide no grounds or “logical inference in favor of slavery.” Indeed, the slave trade and the practice of slavery represented “the most shocking violation of the law of nature.” It therefore followed from the law of nature, he continued, that all men, “black and white, born here are freeborn British subjects”; that they are “entitled to all the essential civil rights of such is a truth not only manifest from the provincial charters, from the principles of the common law, and acts of Parliament, but from the British constitution, which was re-established at the Revolution [of 1688] with a professed design to secure the liberties of all the subjects to all generations.” Otis then issued an ominous warning to his countrymen: it is a certain truth, he argued, “that those who every day barter away other men’s liberty will soon care little for their own.”13 One might quibble with Otis’s assessment of the legal status of enslaved blacks in the American colonies, but his moral principles were consistent and clear.
In his 1773 pamphlet An Address to the Inhabitants of the British Settlements in America, on the Slavery of the Negroes in America, Benjamin Rush denounced “Slave-keeping” as an unmitigated “evil.” Addressing the claim that blacks were intellectually and morally inferior to whites, Rush described “all the vices which are charged upon the Negroes” as “the genuine offspring of slavery, and serve as an argument to prove that they were not intended for it.” Slavery was “so foreign to the human mind,” he continued, that the “moral faculties, as well as those of the understanding are debased, and rendered torpid by it.” Rush called upon his fellow citizens in Philadelphia to end the slave trade as quickly as possible by “petitioning the king and parliament” through their legislatures and by shunning their countrymen who continued to “engage in the slave trade.” Moreover, he favored gradual emancipation laws and extending to freed slaves “all the privileges of free-born British subjects.” He also encouraged his fellow Pennsylvanians to support the education of both extant and freed slaves in “the principles of virtue and religion.” He hoped they would be taught to “read, and write,” and then instructed “in some business” so that they might “be able to maintain themselves.” For him the prospect of abolition and emancipation was tied directly to the moral and social ideals unleashed by the revolution in thinking that was then occurring in America:
Ye men of Sense and Virtue—Ye Advocates for American Liberty, rouse up and espouse the cause of Humanity and general Liberty. Bear a testimony against a vice which degrades human nature, and dissolves that universal tie of benevolence which should connect all the children of men together in one great Family.—The plant of liberty is of so tender a Nature, that it cannot thrive long in the nieghbourhood of slavery. Remember the eyes of all Europe are fixed upon you, to preserve an asylum for freedom in this country, after the last pillars of it are fallen in every other quarter of the Globe.14
The following year Richard Wells, a Philadelphia Quaker, published a devastating critique of American slavery. In his 1774 pamphlet A Few Political Reflections, Wells excoriated his countrymen for their complicity in slavery and called on them to examine their “own conduct” relative to the peculiar institution. He asked the question that some were asking but too many were evading: “whether we can reconcile the exercise of SLAVERY with our professions of freedom, ‘founded on the law of God and nature, and the common rights of mankind.’” The Americans could hardly object to British violations of their colonial rights, he declared, if “every colony on the continent is deeply involved in the inconsistent practice of keeping their fellow creatures in perpetual bondage.” Borrowing the logic and argument of Lord Mansfield’s famous 1772 decision in the Somerset case in England, Wells declared that “ALL the inhabitants of America [including slaves] are entitled to the privileges of the inhabitants of Great-Britain.” Wells supported this position by paraphrasing a famous line from Mansfield’s judgment in which the British jurist said “the instant a slave sets his foot in England he claims the protection of the laws, and puts his master at defiance.” By extension, given the fact that the Americans were claiming that British rights extend to America, the same principle relative to slaves in England must apply to slaves in America. By Mansfield’s judgment in Somerset, the common law does not recognize chattel slavery. As a result, unless a slaveholder could provide a “personal contract” between him and his slave, no common-law court in America could in good conscience support the perpetuation of slavery in the colonies.15 Again, as with Otis, Wells’s invocation and understanding of English common law did not win the day in most American colonies.16
Many American revolutionaries such as Otis, Rush, and Wells were unalterably opposed to slavery and understood the hypocrisy of owning slaves while accusing their British opponents of attempting to enslave them. A particularly tortured and complicated view of American slavery can be seen in the opinions of Patrick Henry, who was one of America’s most eloquent spokesmen for freedom and also a slave owner. It was Henry, after all, who ended his famous 1775 speech at Saint John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia, with these memorably fiery words: “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death.”17 Slavery was a central trope for this freedom fighter in his battle against British imperial officials. Indeed, there was no greater evil for Henry, which is why he was tortured by his own collusion with the institution.
Two years before he delivered his Richmond speech, he sent a letter to his friend Robert Pleasants in which he bared his soul on the question of chattel slavery. Henry was perplexed that Christianity “should encourage a Practice so totally repugnant to the first Impression of right & wrong.” He was even more stupefied that Europeans should have introduced this “Abominable Practice” into the Americas during the most enlightened period of human history, a time when the “Rights of Humanity are defined & understood with precision, in a Country above all others fond of Liberty.” But Henry’s moral principles did not match the reality of his life, and he knew it. In a moment of painful candor, he admitted to Pleasants that he owned other human beings and held them in perpetual bondage. The letter is brimming with regret and shame and guilt. Given his reputation as one of America’s leading proponents of liberty, he knew that the charge of hypocrisy stuck to him like no other: “Would anyone believe,” he exclaimed, “that I am Master of Slaves of my own purchase!” It was nothing but shameful weakness on his part, he admitted, that made giving up his slaves a “general inconvenience.” He could not “justify” his conduct, which he described as “culpable.” He lamented the fact that he could not conform his actions to the call of “Virtue” so as to “own the excellence & rectitude of her Precepts.”18
Fourteen years later, Henry’s shame and guilt had not abated. Indeed, it seems only to have intensified. Speaking at the Virginia Convention to ratify the proposed federal constitution, he told a room filled with many fellow slaveholders:
Slavery is detested—we feel its fatal effects——we deplore it with all the pity of humanity…. As much as I deplore slavery, I see that prudence forbids its abolition…. I repeat it again, that it would rejoice my very soul, that every one of my fellow beings was emancipated. As we ought with gratitude to admire that decree of Heaven, which has numbered us among the free, we ought to lament and deplore the necessity of holding our fellow-men in bondage. But is it practicable by any human means, to liberate them, without producing the most dreadful and ruinous consequences?19
Henry’s remarks are a symptom of a divided soul: on one hand, he seems full of guilt, remorse, and self-loathing, and on the other, he seems to be a steely-eyed pragmatist prepared to rationalize the existence of an institution that he hates but from which he benefited economically.
Finally, let us turn to Thomas Jefferson, to the man who wrote the most famous words in American history: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Jefferson’s libertarian creed has provided the highest moral ideal for Americans for over 225 years, but he was also a lifelong slaveholder, who did not free the vast majority of his slaves upon his death. When he declared to the world, “all men are created equal,” he owned over 150 slaves. How are Jefferson’s views on slavery to be understood and evaluated? Did he intend to include blacks when he spoke of the self-evident truth of equality and rights? Was he the ultimate hypocrite?20
Not surprisingly, the Virginian’s views on slavery were complicated. Jefferson’s first public statement on slavery was published in 1774, in A Summary View of the Rights of British-America, in which he denounced George III for vetoing American legislation attempting to end the African slave trade:
For the most trifling reasons, and sometimes for no conceivable reason at all, his majesty has rejected laws of the most salutary tendency. The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies, where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state. But previous to the enfranchisement of the slaves we have, it is necessary to exclude all further importations from Africa; yet our repeated attempts to effect this by prohibitions, and by imposing duties which might amount to a prohibition, have been hitherto defeated by his majesty’s negative: Thus preferring the immediate advantages of a few African corsairs to the lasting interests of the American states, and to the rights of human nature, deeply wounded by this infamous practice.21
Jefferson’s position in the Summary View is notable in two respects: first, his ultimate goal in ending the slave trade was the “abolition of domestic slavery” in America; and, second, he believed that slavery violated the “rights of human nature.” Two years later, Jefferson again attacked the king for his refusal to sanction the colonists’ attempt to abolish the African slave trade. In his original first draft of the Declaration, Jefferson wrote a stirring denunciation of slavery. The king of Britain has, Jefferson declared,
waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere…. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.22
Again, it is abundantly clear that Jefferson believed the slave trade and by extension slavery itself to be a “violation of human nature” and of “its most sacred rights of life and liberty.” For Jefferson and the revolutionary generation, the rights of nature are grounded on the fact of human equality (i.e., species equality), which means that no man is either a natural slave or the natural ruler of another. In sum, the charge that Jefferson did not think that Africans were equal in their rights relative to whites is false.
There is no reason to think that Jefferson did not believe what he wrote or that he was simply a hypocrite. In fact, Jefferson was committed to the antislavery cause in more than just speech. In 1779, he authored a bill for the Virginia House of Burgesses that provided for gradual emancipation in Virginia. Five years later, he proposed (unsuccessfully) a law that would have banned slavery from the entire western territory of the United States. Jefferson’s proposed law was later used as the basis of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which did in fact bar slavery from the newly formed territory between the Appalachians and the Mississippi. As president of the United States, he lent his public support in 1807 to ending the international slave trade. He implored Congress to “withdraw the citizens of the United States from all further participation in those violations of human rights which have been so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa, and which the morality, the reputation, and the best interests of our country, have long been eager to proscribe.”23
Given his very real antislavery views, why then did Jefferson not more forcefully support the total abolition of slavery or free his own slaves? There can be little doubt that Jefferson struggled throughout his life (as did Patrick Henry) with what might be called the postemancipation problem. Late in life, he summed up the dilemma in this way: “We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.” This was a real and meaningful issue for eighteenth-century Americans, and Jefferson meant self-preservation quite literally. He predicted that if the slaves were freed and lived in America, “deep-rooted prejudices entertained by the whites’ ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.”24 Jefferson and America’s revolutionary slaveholders were stuck on the horns of a genuine dilemma: on one hand, they knew slavery was morally wrong and they wished to abolish it; but on the other hand, they assumed that slave emancipation would have devastating effects on both whites and blacks in particular and for American society in general. They were damned if they did and damned if they didn’t. From Jefferson’s perspective, neither personal financial nor civilizational suicide was a viable option.
Still, a nagging doubt remains about Jefferson’s view of equality and whether he thought the principle applied to African Americans. His views on race were complex and sometimes contradictory. Jefferson thought there were meaningful physiological, moral, and cultural differences (as did virtually all eighteenth-century Americans) between whites and blacks that were “fixed in nature.”25 He also thought those very same differences applied within racial groups. But he did not think such differences affected the moral and political implications of the Declaration’s equality principle. Slavery was a moral wrong, according to Jefferson, because it violated the equality principle and with it the corollary principle of individual rights. He viewed the relationship between “master and slave” as inherently immoral and corrupting. It promoted, he argued, “a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.” He was certain that slavery debased everything it touched, including the moral character of those who owned slaves. Possibly even referring to himself, Jefferson denounced those statesmen who, “permitting one half the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other, transform those into despots.” Slavery, he continued, turns men “into enemies” and it “destroys the morals of the one part, and the amor patriae of the other.” Jefferson’s soul was filled with contempt for the institution of slavery—a contempt that he no doubt felt for himself on some level. He clearly agonized over the glaring anomaly between his ideals and his chosen reality. In the end, though, he knew right from wrong—and he knew that he was wrong—and he knew that “God is just” and that “his justice cannot sleep forever.”26
America’s revolutionary founders recognized a spectrum of natural and conventional differences and inequalities among all men (white and black), none of which, they argued, had any bearing on the natural equal rights shared by all men. Racial differences and unequal intellectual or physical abilities do not, according to Jefferson, have any bearing on the equal right to freedom born to each individual by nature. He insisted that the natural and sometimes unequal differences between men are therefore “no measure of their rights.” The only morally and politically relevant truth, Jefferson declared in a pithy aphorism worth quoting again, is this: “Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others.”27 In the end, the revolutionaries’ idea of natural or species equality renders politically irrelevant natural inequalities and differences of intelligence, strength, speed, beauty, virtue, personality, and ambition. Their view of equality meant that each and every adult person, regardless of race, is naturally independent of all others and has a right to self-government.
Still, the Revolution’s ideals were too big for some of the men who held and proclaimed them to actually practice them.
THE PARADOX OF AMERICAN FREEDOM: CONTRADICTIONS, HYPOCRISY, AND GUILT
American revolutionaries understood better than modern scholars the degree to which their moral ideals conflicted with their actions relative to slavery. British Tories and American Loyalists savaged American Patriots mercilessly for their hypocrisy and seemingly faux cries of “tyranny” and “slavery” during the years of the imperial crisis. In his 1775 essay Taxation No Tyranny, Samuel Johnson brutally mocked the Americans for their posturing and famously asked, “how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” Johnson’s question left the Americans stammering for an answer. It haunted them for decades. It still does. A year later, Thomas Hutchinson, the self-exiled former governor of Massachusetts, taunted his fellow Americans from London for the mendacity and posturing of their Declaration of Independence, which announced to the world that all men are created equal at the same time, he wrote, that they deprived “more than an hundred thousand Africans of their rights to liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and in some degree to their lives.”28 The charge of hypocrisy, particularly from the hated Hutchinson, stung the Americans like no other. Indeed, with every passing year after 1776, the weight of guilt tugged at the conscience of revolutionary Americans—particularly slaveholders such as George Washington, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Jefferson—with increasing pressure.
As the political crisis with Great Britain mounted in the late 1760s and early 1770s, the status of slavery in the colonies raised difficult, even painful questions for American Patriots. The principal American argument against British imperial legislation was that it represented a form of tyranny. To be taxed without representation, they argued, was just the first step on the road to their eventual enslavement. Alexander Hamilton in A Full Vindication of the Measures of the Congress claimed that British parliamentarians and their Loyalist supporters in America were “enemies to the natural rights of mankind” as evidenced by their attempt to “enslave” the colonists. The Declaratory Act and its claim of absolute parliamentary sovereignty over the Americans was akin to “absolute slavery.” Hamilton went on to define the differences between freedom and slavery as they applied in the context of the imperial crisis.
The only distinction between freedom and slavery consists in this: In the former state, a man is governed by the laws to which he has given his consent, either in person or by his representative: in the latter, he is governed by the will of another. In the one case, his life and property are his own, in the other they depend upon the pleasure of his master. It is easy to discern which of these two states is preferable. No man in his senses can hesitate in choosing to be free rather than a slave.29
It did not take some American Patriots very long to see the contradiction between their protestations against imperial British legislation and the existence of domestic slavery in the colonies. Benjamin Rush, for instance, told a French correspondent, “it would be useless for us to denounce the servitude to which the Parliament of Great Britain wishes to reduce us, while we continue to keep our fellow creatures in slavery just because their color is different from ours.”30
In fact, the Revolution caused some Americans to launch a searching debate over the nature of slavery and freedom—a debate that lasted until the conclusion of the Civil War. Late colonial newspapers, pamphlets, and petitions launched the world’s first antislavery campaign condemning slavery as anathema to the moral philosophy of the revolutionary movement. In 1768, a correspondent to a Philadelphia newspaper minced no words in asking rhetorically, “How suits it with the glorious cause of Liberty to keep your fellow men in bondage, men equally the work of your great Creator, men formed for freedom as yourselves.”31 In 1773, a letter published in a Boston newspaper highlighted the contradiction between the revolutionaries’ antislavery rhetoric and the reality of slavery in the colonies: “It has long been a surprise to me and many others, that a people who profess to be so fond of freedom, and are taking every method to preserve the same themselves, and transmit it to their posterity, can see such numbers of their fellow men, made of the same blood, not only in bondage, but kept so even by them.” This anonymous writer then moved in for the final blow by asking: “Can such a conduct be reconcilable with the love of freedom?”32
A year later, John Allen in Salem, Massachusetts, mocked and denounced his fellow Americans for perpetuating or tolerating slavery:
Blush ye pretended votaries for freedom! ye trifling patriots! who are making a vain parade of being the advocates for the liberties of mankind, who are thus making a mockery of your profession, by trampling on the sacred natural rights and privileges of the Africans; for while you are fasting, praying, non-importing, non-exporting, remonstrating, resolving, and pleading for a restoration of your charter rights, you at the same time are continuing this lawless, cruel, inhuman, and abominable practice of enslaving your fellow-creatures, … a greater part of which I am sorry to say are dwellers in this American land of freedom!33
In 1775, Levi Hart denounced the African slave trade as a “flagrant violation of the law of nature, of the natural rights of mankind.” He further told his congregation in Farmington, Connecticut, that they must “wake up and put an effectual stop to the cruel business of stealing and selling our fellow men.” Otherwise, they had no moral claim to suggest that they were being enslaved by British legislation when in fact they were the true “tyrants” engaged in “inconsistence and self contradiction.” That same year, the residents of Darien, Georgia, in the heart of Georgia lowcountry slavery, declared their “disapprobation and abhorrence of the unnatural practice of Slavery in America, … a practice founded in injustice and cruelty, and highly dangerous to our liberties.” They denounced slavery as “debasing part of our fellow-creatures below men, and corrupting the virtue and morals of the rest.” Slavery, they continued, was “laying the basis of that liberty we content for … upon a very wrong foundation.” They concluded by resolving “at all times to use our utmost endeavours for the manumission of our Slaves in this Colony, upon the most safe and equitable footing for the masters and themselves.” The following year, in 1776, the Massachusetts state house of representatives formally resolved that chattel slavery is “utterly inconsistent with the avowed principles in which this and other states have carried on their struggle for liberty.” Likewise, John Jay, both a New York slaveholder and an abolitionist, did not shy away from the central issue: “That men should pray and fight for their own freedom and yet keep others in slavery is certainly acting a very inconsistent as well as unjust and perhaps impious part.”34 And on and on it went.
The revolutionary logic of the Declaration’s self-evident truths began to seep into American thinking as the Patriots began to apply their moral principles to a myriad of domestic institutions, including if not most especially the institution of slavery. In 1776, the influential New England theologian Samuel Hopkins published A Dialogue Concerning the Slavery of Africans, which he dedicated to the members of the Continental Congress. His argument was clear and direct: slavery, he argued, “is wrong” and a “very great public sin,” and those who practice it are “worse than Egyptian taskmasters.” It was therefore the “duty and interest of the American states,” he wrote in the subtitle, “to emancipate all their African slaves.” It was not uncommon in the context of 1776, Hopkins argued, for America’s only true slaves to hear their masters talk about their “struggle for liberty” and the “aversion” they “have to slavery and how much liberty is prized.” What were America’s black slaves to think when they heard their white masters declare that “slavery is more to be dreaded than death” and that they “are resolved to live free or die”? Not surprisingly, then, America’s African slaves saw “themselves deprived of all liberty and property, and their children after them, to the latest posterity, subjected to the will of those who appear to have no feeling for their misery.” And not without a hint of irony did America’s enslaved “see the slavery the Americans dread as worse than death” to be actually “lighter than a feather,” when compared with “their heavy doom” and “the most abject slavery, and unutterable wretchedness to which they are subjected.” Hopkins captured the ultimate paradox of the Revolution when he claimed sarcastically that America’s domestic slaves “behold the sons of liberty, oppressing and tyrannizing over many thousands of poor blacks, who have as good a claim to liberty as themselves.” Not surprisingly, he continued, the slaves “are shocked with the glaring inconsistence,” and they “wonder” why their white masters “do not see it.”35
By the end of the Americans’ war for independence, equality, and freedom, David Cooper from New Jersey delivered a remarkable address To the Rulers of America on the Inconsistency of Their Conduct Respecting Slavery: Forming a Contrast Between the Encroachments of England on American Liberty, and American Injustice in Tolerating Slavery. Cooper’s strategy was as simple as it was effective: to remind American Patriots of the purposes and rhetoric of the Revolutionary cause. To that end, he quoted a series of passages from the most important documents of the Revolutionary era, including the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms, the Declaration and Resolves on Colonial Rights of the First Continental Congress, the Declaration of Independence, the Pennsylvania Declaration of Rights, and the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights. Regarding each Patriot statement denouncing the actions of the British Parliament and defending the colonists’ rights, Cooper reminded his audience that the same principles applied with equal—if not greater—force to the status of black slaves held in America.
Cooper’s stinging rebuke to his fellow Americans’ hypocrisy went directly to the heart of the issue. He implored them “to demonstrate to Europe, to the whole world, that America was in earnest, and meant what she said, when, with peculiar energy, and unanswerable reasoning, she plead the cause of human nature, and with undaunted firmness insisted, that all mankind came from the hand of their Creator equally free.” It was imperative that America not give anyone “an opportunity to charge her conduct with a contradiction to her solemn and often repeated declarations; or to say that her sons are not real friends to freedom; that they have been actuated in this awful contest by no higher motive than selfishness and interest.” The reasoning and principles of the Revolutionary cause must, by definition, he argued, “apply equally to Africans.” This is why throwing the words of the Declaration of Independence back into the faces of the Americans stung like no other charge: “IF these solemn truths, uttered at such an awful crisis, are self-evident: unless we can shew that the African race are not men, words can hardly express the amazement which naturally arises on reflecting, that the very people who make these pompous declarations are slave-holders, and, by their legislative conduct, tell us, that these blessings were only meant to be the rights of whitemen not of all men.” If the Declaration’s self-evident truth that “all men are created equal” was actually true and not a fiction, then it was a moral imperative for American slaveholders to cease and desist immediately from holding their fellow men as they do their “cattle.” The promise of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution, Cooper continued, was clear: “The disquisitions and reasonings of the present day on the rights of men, have opened the eyes of multitudes who clearly see, that, in advocating the rights of humanity, their slaves are equally included with themselves.” The time had therefore come for America’s Patriot leaders, Cooper concluded, to practice what they preached: “We expect, mankind expects, you to demonstrate your faith by your works; the sincerity of your words by your actions, in giving the power, with which you are invested, its utmost energy in promoting equal and impartial liberty to all whose lots are cast within the reach of its influence.”36
The great achievement of the American Revolution was to launch forces that would lead over time to the reconciliation of moral theory and moral practice. Still, the story of slaveholders fighting for freedom and equal rights was the central anomaly of the American Revolution and the new society it created.
Three years after Cooper’s broadside, the residents of Frederick and Hampshire counties in Virginia sent a petition to the Virginia legislature in which they reminded their elected officials of the meaning and implications of the Revolution: “That the Glorious and ever memorable Revolution can be Justified on no other Principles but what doth plead with greater Force for the emancipation of our Slaves in proportion as the oppression exercised over them exceeds the oppression formerly exercised by Great Britain over these States.”37
As the years passed, the psychic guilt brought on by the simultaneous existence of freedom and slavery in the same place intensified and would not go away—at least not for many individuals in the North. Indeed, the guilt only deepened and intensified. Benjamin Franklin, a man who rarely felt any guilt about his behavior, certainly felt it relative to slavery. In 1790, just before his death, Franklin authored a petition on behalf of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery that called for “the Restoration of liberty to those unhappy Men, who alone, in this land of Freedom, are degraded into perpetual Bondage, and who, amidst the general Joy of surrounding Freemen, are groaning in Servile Subjection.” The petition, written by a man who had once owned house slaves decades before, recognized that the moral principles of the Revolution, which provided a “just & accurate Conception of the true Principles of liberty,” had “spread through the land” and awakened Americans to the injustice of slavery and its glaring contradiction with the Declaration’s self-evident truths. The Pennsylvania Abolition Society sent its petition to the United States Congress, calling on the national government to “devise means for removing this Inconsistency from the Character of the American People.” Because of the Revolution and the moral principles on which it was fought, Franklin now saw all too clearly the crime of slavery and the necessity of emancipation not only to correct a profound injustice but also to save “the Character of the American People.” Franklin encouraged the federal government to use all powers necessary and proper at its disposal to “promote mercy and Justice towards this distressed Race,” and to discourage “every Species of Traffick in the Persons of our fellow men.”38 Emancipation was first and foremost about correcting a moral wrong, but it was also about saving America.
In 1794, Theodore Dwight of Connecticut bore witness to the painful hypocrisy of those who loved freedom and yet kept men in chains:
And if any thing can sound like a solecism in the ears of mankind, it will be this story—That in the United States of America, societies are formed for the promotion of freedom. Will not the enquiry instantly be made—“Are the United States of America not free? Possessed of the best country, the wisest government, and the most virtuous inhabitants, on the face of the earth; are they still enslaved?” No—America is not enslaved; she is free. Her country is still excellent, her government wise, and her inhabitants virtuous. But this reply must be mixed with one base ingredient. The slavery of negroes is still suffered to exist.
The guilt did not abate as one moved southward. St. George Tucker, a professor of law at the College of William and Mary, in hindsight captured the moral dilemma and ultimate delinquency of the revolutionary generation’s confrontation with slavery when he wrote in 1796:
Whilst we adjured the God of Hosts to witness our resolution to live free, or die, and imprecated curses on their heads who refused to unite with us in establishing the empire of freedom; we were imposing upon our fellow men, who differ in complexion from us, a slavery, ten thousand times more cruel than the utmost extremity of those grievances and oppressions, of which we complained…. Such [is] that partial system of morality which confines rights and injuries, to particular complexions; such the effect of that self-love which justifies, or condemns, not according to principle, but to the agent…. Should we not have loosed their chains, and broken their fetters? Or if the difficulties and dangers of such an experiment prohibited the attempt during the convulsions of a revolution, is it not our duty to embrace the first moment of constitutional health and vigor, to effectuate so desirable an object, and to remove from us a stigma, with which our enemies will never fail to upbraid us, nor our consciences to reproach us?39
The ugly contradiction between the stated ideals of American revolutionaries and the brutal reality of slavery was, however, more easily denounced than overcome. A self-evident contradiction did not provide a self-evident solution to the problem.
THE CHALLENGE OF SLAVERY
Assuming for the moment that all of America’s founding revolutionaries were opposed to slavery in theory, the great challenge is to determine why they did not abolish it in practice. It was certainly easy for them to denounce slavery, and it is even easier for twenty-first-century Americans to denounce the revolutionary generation for not abolishing it. But to determine why they did not do so is a much more interesting and difficult project. To that end, our task is threefold: first, to examine how various American revolutionaries dealt with the problem of slavery; second, to present the actual steps they took—if any—toward achieving that goal; and, third, to understand the forces that made abolition problematic.
When it came to actually doing something about slavery, there was a range of views and practices as to what could or should be done given the moral, social, political, and economic context of the time. In the best cases, many revolutionaries—including Samuel Adams, John Adams, Thomas Paine, and Alexander Hamilton—never owned slaves and were unalterably opposed to the institution throughout the entirety of their lives. In a few cases, revolutionaries such as Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, and Benjamin Rush owned and then freed house slaves while also being vocal public critics of slavery and leaders in a burgeoning antislavery movement. In some cases, leading southern revolutionaries such as George Washington owned large plantations worked by slaves, but they also vehemently opposed slavery in private and manumitted their slaves after they died. In the worst cases, some leading revolutionaries—including George Mason, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison—were opposed to slavery in speech, embarrassed by the obvious contradiction between their professed ideals and their personal interests, and worked to end slavery in America by preventing its extension and supporting the colonization movement, but nevertheless enjoyed the convenience of having slaves, whom they did not free after they died, thereby giving their private moral sanction to slavery’s perpetuation. Finally, it should be noted that there were no proponents of slavery as a positive good during the period of the Revolution and founding. The intellectual case for slavery did not arise in America until the late 1830s, when the institution came under direct attack from northern abolitionists.40
There were a host of reasons why the revolutionary generation did not immediately abolish slavery. The majority of American revolutionaries believed (naively) that slavery was not an economically viable institution and that it would die a natural death over time, particularly with the end of America’s involvement with the slave trade in 1808. Speaking at the Constitutional Convention in August 1787, Connecticut’s Oliver Ellsworth spoke for many when he declared, “As population increases poor laborers will be so plenty as to render slaves useless. Slavery in time will not be a speck in our Country.”41 In the context of the time, slavery’s eventual demise seemed likely. No one during the Revolutionary era could have anticipated the invention of the cotton gin in 1793.
On a more somber note, some American revolutionaries chose not to manumit their slaves or to work to abolish slavery because they could not reconcile theory and practice in their private lives. They knew slavery was wrong, they wanted to abolish it, but for various personal reasons they chose to do nothing about it. Some felt a psychic attachment and loyalty to their slave-owning parents or to their parents’ way of life, and some even felt a perverse attachment and loyalty to their slaves. More commonly, most could not bear the prospect of financial ruin either for themselves or for their progeny. The obvious truth is that most had been corrupted by the lifestyle slavery afforded them. Simply put, they were either morally weak or morally bankrupt. Thomas Jefferson is the classic example of someone whose private life, tragically, was intertwined with, profited from, and ultimately was corrupted by slavery. Jefferson’s moral character was no match for his moral and political principles.42
In the end, however, one reason stands out above all others to explain why the revolutionary generation did not abolish slavery: the post-emancipation problem. Even the purest, nonslaveholding abolitionist stumbled over this hurdle. Many antislavery southerners such as James Madison were genuinely uncertain as to how they could abolish slavery without creating massive social dislocation or personal devastation for both blacks and whites. It is difficult for twenty-first-century students of the past to appreciate the enormous distance between the ideal of emancipation and the actual conditions required for its successful implementation. Various structural—moral, religious, social, economic, and political—impediments to change enfeebled what might have been a robust movement for emancipation.
Several probing questions highlight the challenge of the post-emancipation problem. How were southern slaveholders to end an institution that was so deeply woven into local economies? How and when were America’s slaves to be manumitted? Should slave owners be compensated, and by whom? What would emancipation mean in those areas of the Deep South where the slave population equaled or surpassed the free white population? Should freed slaves be integrated into white American society, or should they be repatriated to Africa or colonized in the trans-Appalachian West? Who would pay for colonization? And lurking behind all these questions was the prospect of a race war between freed slaves and the white population. These were serious questions for both slaveholders and nonslaveholders, and no one quite knew how to answer them. In light of these problems and challenges, what steps did American revolutionaries take to end slavery?
THE REVOLUTION TO END SLAVERY
The great story of the American Revolution is not that the founding generation failed to end slavery, but rather that it set in motion forces that would lead to the eventual abolition of America’s “peculiar institution.” The proper historical question to ask is, what effect did the logic of America’s revolutionary ideals have on the institution of slavery? What did American revolutionaries actually do about slavery in the light of their ideas about freedom and justice?
Without question, the most important step in abolishing slavery was taken on July 4, 1776, when the American people declared to the world as a self-evident truth, “all men are created equal.” America’s revolutionary constitution-makers then built their new governments to reflect this fundamental truth. The 1776 Virginia Bill of Rights likewise declared, “all men are by nature equally free and independent.” The declaration of rights attached to the 1776 Pennsylvania constitution announced, “all men are born free and equal.” The Massachusetts constitution of 1780 likewise proclaimed, “All men are born free and equal.” Identical language can be found in the revolutionary state constitutions of New York (1777), Vermont (1777), and New Hampshire (1784). That so many state constitutions and bills of rights would replicate the Declaration’s language of “all men” seems to make clear that America’s revolutionary founders meant the phrase literally and without qualification.
The Americans’ public declaration that all men are created equal and that each and every man is entitled by right to freedom represented the moment of America’s great moral awakening—the moment when the institution of slavery was put on notice and its abolition became a moral and political necessity. From this point forward, a new moral consciousness and conscience was born in Anglo-American culture. The Declaration’s moral principles established for the first time in American history a benchmark by which to judge and condemn a long-practiced social evil. Those principles represented a profound transformation in moral thought and action, a transformation that led a growing number of Americans to see slavery as a moral abomination. For the first time, some Americans began to see the incompatibility between human liberty and bondage, that liberty for one must mean liberty for all.
The principles enunciated in the Declaration of Independence represented a direct challenge to chattel slavery, and they inspired the creation of America’s first antislavery movement. In the thirty years after 1776, all of the northern states began the process of dismantling slavery.43 Vermont’s revolutionary state constitution of 1777 declared, “all men are born equally free and independent, and have certain natural, inherent and unalienable rights, amongst which are the enjoying and defending life and liberty; acquiring, possessing and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety,” and then proceeded to abolish slavery outright in these words:
No male person, born in this country, or brought from over sea, ought to be holden by law, to serve any person, as a servant, slave or apprentice, after he arrives to the age of twenty-one Years, nor female, in like manner, after she arrives to the age of eighteen years, unless they are bound by their own consent, after they arrive to such age, or bound by law, for the payment of debts, damages, fines, costs, or the like.44
In 1779, Pennsylvania passed a law to gradually emancipate all slaves in the state. Five years later, Connecticut passed its Gradual Abolition Act, which emancipated all those born into slavery after that year and once they had reached the age of twenty-five. Slavery was abolished in Massachusetts and New Hampshire through a series of court decisions in the 1780s, which held that their respective state bills of rights affirming “all men are born free and equal” made slavery unconstitutional. Rhode Island and Connecticut passed gradual abolition laws in 1783 and 1784. New York and New Jersey did the same in 1799 and 1804. By 1798 every state in the Union had outlawed the African slave trade, and by 1804 every northern state had committed itself to emancipating its slaves in one form or another.
Interestingly, in the first few years after 1776, there was a particularly strong antislavery movement in the South, which, for a time, had more antislavery societies than in the North. Some places in the South were even moved by revolutionary ideals to start manumitting slaves. The number of free blacks in Virginia, for instance, increased from 3,000 in 1780 to 13,000 by 1790. South Carolina’s Low Country slaveholders freed more slaves during the 1780s than they had during the previous three decades.45 Overall, by 1810, more than 100,000 slaves had been emancipated in the United States, either through court decisions, legislation, or acts of individual manumission.46 It was the largest emancipation of slaves in world history.
At the federal level, the Congress of the Confederation of the United States passed the Northwest Ordinance in 1787, which expressly forbade slavery in the newly organized territory between the western slope of the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River (i.e., the future states of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin). The following year, the newly ratified federal Constitution authorized Congress to end America’s involvement in the international slave trade in 1808.
In virtually all cases, those who worked to abolish slavery in the states and at the federal level did so based on the revolutionary principles of the Declaration of Independence. In the preamble to its Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery, the Pennsylvania legislature declared, “it is our duty … to extend a portion of that freedom to others, which hath been extended to us, and release them from that thralldom, to which we ourselves were tyrannically doomed.” In the best-known freedom case in Massachusetts, Commonwealth v. Jennison (1783), the state Supreme Judicial Court ruled in favor of freeing the slave Quock Walker. In his instructions to the jury, Chief Justice William Cushing held that the state constitution did, in fact, grant rights to all men that were incompatible with slavery:
It is true, without investigating the right of christians to hold Africans in perpetual servitude, that they had been considered by some of the Province laws as actually existing among us; but nowhere do we find it expressly established. It was a usage,—a usage which took its origins from the practice of some of the European nations and the regulations for the benefit of trade of the British government respecting its then colonies. But whatever usages formerly prevailed or slid in upon us by the example of others on the subject, they can no longer exist. Sentiments more favorable to the natural rights of mankind, and to that innate desire for liberty which heaven, without regard to complexion or shape, has planted in the human breast—have prevailed since the glorious struggle for our rights began. And these sentiments led the framers of our constitution of government—by which the people of this commonwealth have solemnly bound themselves to each other—to declare—that all men are born free and equal; and that every subject is entitled to liberty, and to have it guarded by the laws as well as his life and property. In short, without resorting to implication in constructing the constitution, slavery is in my judgment as effectively abolished as it can be by the granting of rights and privileges wholly incompatible and repugnant to its existence. The court are therefore fully of the opinion that perpetual servitude can no longer be tolerated in our government, and that liberty can only be forfeited by some criminal conduct or relinquished by personal consent or contract.
Cushing’s decision was explicitly based on the state constitution’s proposition—similar to the Declaration’s—that “all men are born free and equal.” Likewise, the Rhode Island law that abolished slavery, paraphrasing the Declaration of Independence, states:
Whereas all men are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and the holding mankind in a state of slavery, as private property, which has gradually obtained by unrestrained custom and the permission of the laws, is repugnant to this principle, and subversive of the happiness of mankind, the great end of all civil governments: Be it therefore enacted by this General Assembly … that no person or persons, whether Negroes, Mulattos or others, who shall be born within the limits of this State, on or after the first day of March, A.D. 1784, shall be deemed or considered as servants for life, or Slaves.47
But all of this is to view the antislavery movement from the perspective of freed whites. Possibly the greatest impact of the Revolution on the status of slavery in America was its effect on those who were actually held in bondage. The ideas and actions of American Patriots inspired some American slaves to fight for freedom and equality. The revolutionaries’ principles and rhetoric motivated many slaves to escape from their masters and to flee to the British army, which had offered them freedom in exchange for service. Interestingly, some liberated slaves actually enlisted to fight alongside their fellow Americans in order to gain their freedom. Alexander Hamilton argued that any enlisted slave should be given his “freedom with their muskets.”48
Public acceptance of slavery was also tarnished during the Revolutionary period whenever slaves petitioned state legislatures for their freedom, or used the legal system to launch lawsuits in state courts to secure their freedom.49 One such petition from slaves in Massachusetts used the same arguments that some of their white masters were using against Great Britain: “We have in common with all other men a natural right to our freedoms without Being depriv’d of them by our fellow men as we are freeborn Pepel and have never forfeited this Blessing by aney compact or agreement whatever.”50 A group of black freemen in New Hampshire employed the principle of natural rights to demand the abolition of slavery:
That the God of nature gave them life and freedom, upon the terms of the most perfect equality with other men; That freedom is an inherent right of the human species, not to be surrendered, but by consent, for the sake of social life; That private or public tyranny and slavery are alike detestable to minds conscious of the equal dignity of human nature; … they hold themselves in duty bound strenuously to exert every faculty of their minds to obtain that blessing of freedom, which they are justly entitled to from that donation of the beneficent Creator.51
Slaves did not suffer from false consciousness in thinking that the principles of the Declaration applied just as well to them as to white Americans.
The American Revolution was, from beginning to end, an antislavery revolution in the broadest sense—a revolution for equal rights and against arbitrary power. Slavery and arbitrary power come in many forms, and the principles of the Revolution, once unleashed, inspired Americans to ameliorate and abolish all forms of injustice, arbitrary power, tyranny, dependency, and slavery over time and wherever it existed in America. This was the promise of the Declaration of Independence.
The birth and growth of an American antislavery movement was not possible without a standard or benchmark by which to condemn a universal institution virtually as old as human civilization. That benchmark was the natural-rights philosophy articulated by the American Revolution and expressed in the Declaration of Independence. There could be no antislavery movement—then or now—without the universal principle of individual, natural rights. It was the lodestar of emancipation.
As the revolutionary movement proceeded in the years and then decades after 1764, as Americans talked with greater urgency of the natural rights of “man,” the American people came to better see and understand the meaning and full implications of the ideas they were espousing. It dawned on some almost immediately and others only later that their arguments for equal rights and against tyranny applied to their slaves as well. The philosophy at the heart of the Revolution was identical to the philosophy that called for the end of chattel slavery. Not surprisingly, Anthony Benezet, colonial America’s first great antislavery leader, identified the simple truth from which honest men could not escape: America’s black slaves were, morally speaking, “as free as we are by nature.”52 What cannot go on forever will not, and the logic of the Americans’ revolutionary principles led them inexorably to begin the process of ending chattel slavery in America. Many of the Americans who chose to recognize and live their lives by the moral principles that would one day be expressed in the Declaration of Independence were compelled to purge this monstrous inconsistency from their lives. They could no longer claim liberty for themselves and deny it to others. When in the course of their lives it became necessary to bridge the gulf between words and deed, they acted. This is why, starting in 1774, the Continental Congress called on the colonies to end their involvement in the international slave trade, which six northern states subsequently did. This was the first political act taken against slavery.53 A year later, Philadelphia Quakers organized the world’s first antislavery society, which was, interestingly, replicated in several southern states.
The revolution to end slavery in America was flawed from the outset because of various intractable problems, but we should never forget that it began with and was inspired by the logic of the Declaration’s self-evident truths.
In the end, how should American revolutionaries be evaluated on the slavery question? To judge and condemn them for having failed to abolish slavery is easy, but it is also to engage in historical anachronism and simple-minded presentism. Historical truth is far more complicated and requires a much more sophisticated analysis. America’s revolutionary founders took seriously the moral and political ideals enunciated in the Declaration of Independence, and they started the process of applying those ideals to their own lives and to their domestic institutions—a process that would take decades to complete. They saw the gaping chasm between their rhetoric and reality, principles and practices, ideas and institutions, and they sought to reduce if not one day to eliminate the contradiction. In other words, adherence to their expressed moral principles caused them to rethink the institution of slavery and to begin the process of eliminating it. John Jay of New York, a onetime slaveholder and one of the leading abolitionists of the founding period, captured the moral state of mind that developed in America in the years before and after 1776:
Prior to the great Revolution our people had been so long accustomed to the practice and convenience of having slaves, that very few among them even doubted the propriety and rectitude of it. Some liberal and conscientious men had indeed, by their conduct and writings, drawn the lawfulness of slavery into question…. Their doctrines prevailed by almost sensible degrees, and was like the little lump of leaven which was put into three measures of meal.54
Jay’s statement on the revolutionary affects and effects of the Revolution describes near perfectly the moment when the institution of slavery went from being seen as a necessary evil to simply evil. The road to emancipation was long and tortuous, but the journey began—symbolically at least—in 1776 and with the Declaration’s proclamation “that all men are created equal.”
The American Revolution did not and could not end slavery on its own, but the logic of its core moral principles did bring about its denouement. Something fundamental happened in the minds of Americans during the Revolutionary era. The natural-rights philosophy at the core of the Revolution burst forth into American society with consequences both intended and unintended. Thomas Jefferson and the signers of the Declaration of Independence planted a seed that would later grow and bloom into something much bigger. That germination gave rise to forces that would break down all kinds of cultural, political, and economic barriers and eventually destroy slavery.
The expression, acceptance, and institutionalization of the Declaration’s first two truths brought about a fundamental shift in American values. The Declaration’s revolutionary philosophy was the first cause and accelerant promoting the equal freedom of all men everywhere, and it provided a direct challenge to the institution of slavery. The antislavery and abolitionist movements drew their inspiration directly from the Declaration’s moral principles. A new nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal now had the moral principles and vocabulary necessary to undermine chattel slavery over time.
The moral ideals unleashed by the revolutionary generation forever changed the content of the American mind and with it America’s social reality. Jefferson in particular knew that the free society that was then being created in America would eventually spell the end of slavery.55 The only question was when and how. The forces of history are not predetermined and nothing about the future is inevitable, but with the publication of the Declaration of Independence a slow-burning civil war between freedom and slavery was ignited.
Almost all of America’s revolutionary leaders (including those who owned slaves) hated slavery, but they understood better than we can today the difficulties and challenges associated with ending it. The social, economic, and political obstacles to ending slavery were formidable. More importantly, we must remember that those who led the Revolution were men, not angels—men driven by a tangled maze of contradictory passions, opinions, and interests. Too many of them were unable to overcome the limitations of their own moral horizons, their financial interests, and their social habits. They saw the self-evident inconsistency between the Declaration’s professions of equality and liberty and the reality of slavery—and it tormented them. Their struggle was one of finding a way to abolish slavery without destroying the very nation they were striving to build. Still, such men can and should be judged morally in the light of those among their contemporaries who did own slaves at one time but eventually freed them and became leading proponents of the burgeoning antislavery movement.
By placing the equality principle and the doctrine of individual, unalienable rights at the very heart of America’s system of republican government, the revolutionary generation put slavery on notice. Abraham Lincoln, the greatest student of the Declaration, probably summed up most eloquently the relationship between the Declaration’s principles and the role they would play in the process of ending slavery. In responding to the claims of Roger B. Taney, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and Senator Stephen A. Douglas that the language of the Declaration “did not intend to include negroes,” Lincoln explained what he thought Jefferson and the signers of the Declaration meant when they declared all men to be created equal:
I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness, in what respects they did consider all men created equal—equal in “certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” This they said, and this meant. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.56
Many modern scholars reject Lincoln’s understanding of the Declaration of Independence. Ironically, they unwittingly follow the lead of Taney and Douglas (and John C. Calhoun) in arguing that the birth of the American republic sanctioned and institutionalized racism and slavery. If this is true, then Lincoln was clearly mistaken if not dishonest in claiming at Gettysburg, on November 19, 1863, that America was “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are equal.” But Lincoln was not wrong. He told the truth, and he was wise in ways unfamiliar to modern academics. He understood that the Declaration’s noble ideals were true, but he also knew that they might take decades to percolate down and through American society. He understood that the battle for the soul of America was then being waged over the meaning and implementation of a few simple words—“that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” In other words, he understood the proper relationship between theory and practice and how it is mediated by prudence.
As he stood on the blood-soaked fields of Gettysburg, Lincoln knew that tens of thousands of brave men had fought and died in order to fulfill the noble ideals and promise of the American Revolution and to help launch a “new birth of freedom” in America. Like the men who died at Gettysburg, Lincoln challenged the living to dedicate their lives “to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.” True equality—the equality of liberty—was and is a revolutionary ideal to which many Americans still aspire. If revolutionary Americans fell short in producing equal liberty for all, they left us with an ideal that still inspires and is still worth striving for.