As God Himself hath set them over you here in the nature of his stewards or overseers, He expects you will do everything for them, as you do for Himself: That you must be obedient and subject to them in all things, and do whatever they order you to do.
—THOMAS BACON
“SERMON TO NEGRO SLAVES” (1743)
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.
—THOMAS JEFFERSON
DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE (1776)
How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty
from the drivers of Negroes?
—SAMUEL JOHNSON (1775)
* Who Brought Slavery to America?
* What's the Difference Between a Servant and a Slave?
* What Was the Triangle Trade?
* What Was the Middle Passage?
* What Was the Stono Rebellion?
* If Jefferson Believed What He Wrote, Why Did He Keep Slaves?
* What Did the Constitution Say About Slavery?
Early in April 1865 Charles Coffin, a correspondent for the Boston Journal, witnessed an extraordinary occurrence. Having reported on the Civil War from the earliest days, he had observed many significant events, from the First Battle of Bull Run four years earlier through Grant's final campaign in Virginia in 1865. Now he was present at the capture of Richmond and the arrival of President Abraham Lincoln in the fallen Confederate capital. Coffin recounted:
No carriage was to be had, so the President, leading his son, walked to General Weitzels' headquarters—Jeff Davis's mansion…. The walk was long and the President halted a moment to rest.
“May de good Lord bless you, President Linkum!” said an old Negro, removing his hat and bowing, with tears of joy rolling down his cheeks.
The President removed his own hat and bowed in silence. It was a bow which upset the forms, laws, customs, and ceremonies of centuries of slavery.
So ended the Civil War. Of course, it would be a few more days before Robert E. Lee's final surrender at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865. And months more of dislocation, followed by years of bitter Reconstruction and decades of hatefulness between victor and vanquished. But in this brief moment, in the crumbling, burning remnants of the Confederate capital, the heart and symbol of the ruined Confederate Cause, the war came to a close. Hundreds of thousands were dead. A large part of the country was in ruins, smoldering. A deep sense of regional mistrust and racial hatred would sunder America for decades. But here, as the tall, somber president bowed to a former slave, the war was crystalized in an eternal moment of reconciliation: the doomed Lincoln, symbol of the Union, worn down by the years and the losses, slow to name slavery as the enemy but indomitable in his will to ultimately destroy it, and an aged slave, bent by years of relentless labor, glorying in the first flush of freedom.
“We have the wolf by the ears,” an aging Thomas Jefferson had written to a friend forty-five years earlier. “And we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and selfpreservation in the other.” Jefferson's “wolf” was, of course, slavery. And this big, bad wolf had been banging at America's door almost since the arrival of the English in America. It huffed and puffed and nearly blew the house down.
The United States was born out of a revolutionary idea that Jefferson (1743-1826) expressed eloquently in his Declaration of Independence: All men are created equal and are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These notions, along with the very radical statement that governments could rule only by the consent of the governed, formed the basis of the Great American Contradiction: How could a nation so constituted, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal and supposedly founded on the cornerstone of “liberty for all,” maintain a system that enslaved other human beings? It was this contradiction—this Great Divide—that eventually split the country in two.
Only about one quarter of the people in the slave states kept slaves. And of the five and a half million whites living in the slave states in 1860, only forty-six thousand held more than twenty slaves. But to understand fully the Civil War, this Great Divide—this American Contradiction—must be understood. Its roots were deep, planted about the same time that the first English colonists were learning how to plant tobacco in Virginia.
Who Brought Slavery to America?
George Washington did it. Patrick “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” Henry did it. Thomas “All Men Are Created Equal” Jefferson did it. George Mason, who wrote the Virginia Declaration of Rights, on which the American Bill of Rights was based, was against it but did it anyway. Even good old Benjamin Franklin did it. In fact, many of America's Founding Fathers did it. They bought, kept, bred, and sold human beings.
When the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia in 1787 to debate the great issues facing a struggling, infant nation, seventeen of these Founding Fathers collectively held about fourteen hundred slaves. George Mason, John Rutledge, and George Washington were three of the largest slaveholders in America. Most of Washington's slaves actually belonged to his wife, Martha Custis Washington; they had belonged to her first husband. This is the part of Washington's story that gets left out when children learn the tale of the cherry tree. The moral subtext: Telling lies is wrong; keeping people in chains isn't so bad.
Slavery was as American as apple pie. It was a well-established American institution in the thirteen original colonies long before Washington, Patrick Henry, Franklin, and Jefferson were born, but it threatened to tip the great American ship of state from the republic's very beginnings. Both Washington and Jefferson expressed deep reservations about the practice of slavery and its future in America. Nevertheless, neither of them fretted sufficiently about human bondage on their plantations to do much about it. Granted, Washington freed his slaves in his will. Jefferson, who seems to have been brilliant about everything but his finances, couldn't afford that luxury for most of his slaves. He had to rely on the kindness of creditors to let five of his favored slaves have their freedom.
Of course, America had no monopoly on slavery. The institution was as old as civilization itself. Throughout human history, slavery has taken on many guises, and few civilizations have been built without some form of servitude. In his prize-winning book, Freedom, Orlando Patterson wrote, “Slaveholding and trading existed among the earliest and most primitive of peoples. The archaeological evidence reveals that slaves were among the first items of trade within, and between, the primitive Germans and Celts, and the institution was an established part of life, though never of major significance, in primitive China, Japan and the prehistoric Near East.”
It is impossible to think of such major ancient civilizations as Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, or the Aztecs without acknowledging the role of slavery. Occasionally, slavery took on a variety of slightly more humane forms. In some societies, for instance, slaves could serve in armies, buy their freedom, or even rise to positions of rank and power. Remember the biblical story of Joseph and the pharaoh? Sold as a slave into Egypt, Joseph demonstrated his wisdom to save the country from famine and rose to become an adviser to the Egyptian court. But for the most part, slavery always meant a short life of brute labor or an existence of household servitude passed on to succeeding generations. The monuments of the great civilizations—from the Egyptian Pyramids to the Roman roads and Jefferson's prized Virginia estate, Monticello—were all constructed with slave labor.
But what made Anglo-American slavery so uniquely perverse was the institutionalization, or grotesque efficiency, of the African slave trade. Involving vast numbers of people and contradicting America's founding ideals so obviously, African slavery became America's “peculiar institution.”
The history of Africans in America doesn't begin, however, with slave auctions in the British colonies. The first black men came to the Americas along with the earliest wave of Spaniard conquistadors who followed Columbus in the 1500s. These early European explorers included black natives of Spain and Portugal such as Pedro Alonso Niño, a navigator on Columbus's first voyage. Black men served with Cortés in Mexico and with Balboa at the discovery of the Pacific. And several Iberian blacks were prominent in the exploration of what is now the southwestern United States, including most notably Estebanico, who spent eight years wandering in what is now Mexico and New Mexico before being killed in a battle with Zuñi Indians. This history, long overlooked, is somewhat sketchy.
Better documented but still overlooked is the fact that the first “cargo” of twenty Africans to land in the future United States of America arrived at Jamestown, Virginia—known to generations of American schoolchildren as the first permanent English settlement in America—aboard a Dutch man-of-war in August 1619. These African captives had been taken off a Spanish slave ship en route to Spain's colonies by a polyglot group of pirates who preyed on Spanish slave and treasure ships. This moment escaped generations of history books. Of course, those same books hailed the glorious consequences of the opening of the House of Burgesses in Jamestown. Sure. It was the first legislative assembly in America. But a nasty little secret was that in the very same month those gentlemen planters met to begin inventing American democracy, they were laying the foundation for American slavery.
By the time the English arrived in America, African slavery was well established in Europe. As a sideline to the more famous voyages of discovery he sponsored, Prince Henry, lionized as “the Navigator,” led Portugal in opening the African slave trade in 1444 with the blessing of Pope Nicholas V. Quick to recognize a profitable venture and desperate for labor in its mines and plantations in the New World, Spain joined in and dominated the African slave trade for almost a hundred years. Gradually, other European trading nations saw the profits to be made from this “black ivory.” For about fifty years, the Dutch dominated the trade until they were supplanted by the English, who got an exclusive right to supply slaves—the Asiento—to Spain's colonies in 1713.
PRELUDE TO THE CIVIL WAR: 1619-1787
1619
August Twenty Africans, carried on a Dutch ship, are brought to Jamestown, Virginia, to be sold as indentured servants, not slaves, a fine distinction that probably escaped their notice.
1652
May Rhode Island outlaws slavery. The first colony to do so, it was founded by religious leader Roger Williams (1603-1683) on the grounds of religious freedom, the separation of church and state, and the compensation of the Indians for their lands. But slavery, because it was so profitable, was later permitted, and Newport became a major slave trading port.
The Netherlands permits African slaves to be brought into New Netherlands, its American colony, which later became New York. The Dutch colony enacts laws governing the treatment of slaves, who may only be whipped with the permission of the colonial authorities.
1664
Maryland is the first colony to mandate the lifelong servitude of black slaves. Previously, under English law, slaves who became Christians and met other requirements were granted their freedom.
1667
The House of Burgesses in Virginia passes a law stating that Christian conversion does not bring about freedom from slavery. This law encourages slave owners to convert their slaves to Christianity without fear of losing them. In 1670 a countermeasure is passed which allows freedom for those blacks who were Christians before arriving in the colony. This law is a reaction to the moral issue raised by slavery. In 1671 Maryland reacts by declaring the conversion of slaves at any time as irrelevant to their servitude. And in 1682 Virginia repeals its 1670 conversion law, which had limited the importation of slaves.
1672
The English Royal Africa Company is granted a monopoly on the English slave trade which lasts until 1696. After that date, extensive slave trading is initiated by merchants in the New England colonies.
1688
The Germantown Protest, the first organized demonstration in opposition to slavery and the slave trade, is made by a group of Quakers in Germantown, Pennsylvania.
1700
In Boston, Samuel Sewall (1652-1730) publishes The Selling of Joseph, one of America's first antislavery tracts. One of the judges at the Salem witchcraft trials in 1692, Sewall was the only one to later publicly admit his mistake in condemning nineteen people to death.
Virginia rules that slaves are “real estate,” restricts the travel of slaves, and calls for strict penalties for miscegenation (marriage or sexual relations between races).
New York enacts a death penalty for runaway slaves caught forty miles north of Albany.
Massachusetts declares marriage between blacks and whites illegal.
1713
A British firm, the South Sea Company, is granted the Asiento, the exclusive right to import black slaves into Spain's American colonies.
1725
The black slave population in the colonies is estimated at seventy-five thousand.
In Williamsburg, Virginia, black slaves are granted the right to organize a separate Baptist church.
1733
Georgia is chartered, the last of the thirteen original colonies. Under the terms of the charter, the importation of slaves is forbidden, but this prohibition is repealed in 1749.
1739
September A violent slave insurrection takes place in Stono, South Carolina. The slaves kill thirty whites; forty-four blacks die in the aftermath.
1741
March Following a series of crimes and fires in New York, rumors of a black plot to seize power spread through the city. In the hysteria, more than a hundred blacks and poor whites are convicted of conspiracy. Four whites and eighteen blacks are hanged, thirteen blacks are burned alive, and another seventy blacks are banished from the colony.
1754
Quaker clergyman John Woolman (1720-1772), preaching against the evils of slavery, publishes his sermons under the title Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes. He publishes a second volume in 1762. Woolman is instrumental in persuading American Quakers to oppose slaveholding.
1775
Black patriots fight in all the early battles of the Revolution including Lexington, Concord, Fort Ticonderoga, and Bunker (Breed's) Hill. However, the Continental Congress, with George Washington's consent, bars slaves and free blacks from the Continental Army. Only when the deposed royal governor of Virginia promises freedom to male slaves who join the British army does Washington reverse his orders and authorize the enlistment of free blacks. Eventually, an estimated five thousand blacks are involved in many of the Revolution's major engagements.
1776
July Thomas Jefferson drafts the Declaration of Independence. Included is a charge that King George III is responsible for the slave trade and has prevented the colonists from outlawing it. This passage is deleted by Congress at the request of Southerners who keep slaves and with the support of Northerners involved in the slave trade.
1777
July Although not yet a state, Vermont abolishes slavery. It will be the first free state when it enters the Union.
1780
The Pennsylvania legislature mandates gradual abolition within the state.
1781
March 1 First proposed in 1776, the Articles of Confederation is ratified by all thirteen states; it calls for a central government subordinate to the states. Previously, the nation was a league of sovereign states, each with a single vote. Congress, made up of delegates chosen by the states, is given certain limited powers, and the states are not bound to carry out any congressional measures.
1783
The Supreme Court of Massachusetts abolishes slavery.
In Virginia, black slaves who served in the Continental Army are granted their freedom by the House of Burgesses.
By year's end the importation of African slaves is banned by all the northern states.
1787
July Still operating under the Articles of Confederation, Congress passes the Northwest Ordinance, establishing a government in the area bounded by the Great Lakes on the north, the Ohio River on the south; and the Mississippi River on the west. This ordinance calls for the creation of new states on an equal level with the original states. Under Jefferson's plan, there will be freedom of religion, the right to public education, and a ban on slavery in these new states.
August In Philadelphia, the form of the new U.S. Constitution is debated. The delegates compromise on three areas concerning slavery:
* Slavery or the slave trade cannot be restricted by law for twenty years.
* Slavery can be taxed.
* Slaves will be counted at three fifths of their total population for the purpose of determining representation in the House of Representatives.
What's the Difference Between a Servant and a Slave?
In 1619 indentured servitude was a widely accepted European tradition. Essentially, it was a contract between a worker and a merchant or farmer. In colonial America, the servant agreed to work for some period of time in exchange for passage to America. In many cases, the agreement was one-sided: convicts, people kidnapped from the street, and young children “apprenticed” to masters by their parents all ended up in America as indentured servants. The word indenture comes from the contract between servant and master. The contract was actually torn in two, with each party holding one half. At the end of the term of servitude, the contract would be pieced back together at the indentations. After earning their freedom, the former servants were usually given a piece of land and a small payment.
This arrangement was sanitized in the history books of a generation ago as a tidy system of labor with clean-cut servants happily fulfilling their contracts and gradually working their way toward freedom and a piece of the American dream. The reality was rudely different. Freedom, first of all, demanded survival. And servitude did not generally lend itself to a long career. During the seventeenth century, up to half the servants in the Chesapeake colonies may have died before being freed, usually of disease. Servants often had their terms of indenture arbitrarily extended, sometimes in punishment for sins real or imagined. Often it was the simple whim of a master who knew the law and how to read. Most indentured servants were young and illiterate. Of course, it was harder for women than men: indenture for a young woman often meant sexual servitude as well as long hours and no pay.
But the American colonies were fairly well built on this system, and it took care of colonial labor needs for most of the seventeenth century, when the opportunity to get out of Europe seemed like a good idea if you were poor. In the 1700s, however, the situation changed. Improved economies and political stability in Europe gradually reduced the number of white Europeans who were willing to sell themselves to a master in exchange for passage and a chance for a new life in the New World. As slavery displaced servitude, the number of slaves being imported grew rapidly.
Economics was another reason for the shift to a slave system. On the face of it, slavery seemed to be extremely cost effective. A slave is a slave is a slave. Forever. There was no promise of freedom and a piece of farmland at the end of the rainbow. The only alternatives were escape (unlikely), the granting of purchase of freedom (even more unlikely), or death (inevitable).
Colonial masters had also learned that white servants could easily escape and drift into anonymity. An experiment using Native Americans as slaves also failed. They too could escape easily and return to their people. The Europeans also learned that they died in fearful numbers, usually from diseases to which they had no immunities. But African slaves solved the problem perfectly. They were easily identifiable in a predominantly white society. They were along way from home. And they could neither speak nor read the language of their masters. More important still, slaves made more slaves. While the child of a servant was born free, a female slave's child was a slave, even if its father was also its master. An African slave woman who could be purchased and then bred was a valuable piece of property, just like any farm animal.
By the late 1600s, the southern plantation system was firmly established, and at the same time American slavery was cemented through a growing number of laws passed by colonial legislatures. The full legalization of slavery, restrictions on the emancipation of slaves, laws forbidding miscegenation, and strict regulations regarding escape all came in quick succession. All of these laws solidified slavery as a legal reign of terror. And the plantations' success in producing cash crops of tobacco, indigo, rice, and sugar for European markets pushed the need for additional slaves to do the labor-intensive work. In fact linked with imported slaves, the southern slave-breeding system was so successful that by the time Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, one in six Americans was a black slave! Eighty-four years later, at the beginning of the Civil War, there were nearly four million slaves in America, despite the legal end of the overseas slave trade in 1808.
But the simplistic economic argument for slavery ignored a more complex view of how economies work. In 1776, English philosopher Adam Smith (1723-1790) wrote The Wealth of Nations, considered the bible of capitalism. Smith argued that capital is best employed for the production and distribution of wealth when governments stay away from business or practice laissez-faire (French for “leave things alone”). Further, Smith believed that slaves were a drag on the economy because they tied up capital that could be more profitably invested elsewhere, a view that was widely accepted by merchants in the American North. In addition, Smith felt that the large plantation system was a wasteful use of land and that slaves cost more to maintain than free laborers.
Here was a real objection to slavery. Sure, it might be wrong. But far worse to the Puritans of New England, it was inefficient! No longer wed to the slave system, Northerners could invest their capital in the ships, factories, railroads, and canals—one reason for the North's Industrial Age, which created the wealth and jobs that lured millions of European working-class immigrants, primarily from Ireland and Germany, to the growing northeastern industrial centers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Adam Smith's ideas didn't have the same appeal in the booming slave economies, however. Holding to their faith in the seemingly obvious economic benefits of slavery, the slaveholders developed an elaborate set of defenses to justify their “peculiar institution.” In Europe, the “savagery” of Africans had been cited for centuries to justify slavery, and slaveholding Americans now parroted that excuse.
But the most fiercely held defense was one that people have been using for a long time to answer almost any question: the biblical justification. First, clergymen provided the white masters with references that seemed to sanction slavery—a perfectly acceptable practice in biblical times—and, more specifically, the enslaving of the black race. The critical passage was Genesis 9:25-27, in which Noah, upset over an indiscretion by his son Ham, cursed all of Ham's descendants for eternity, saying, “a slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers.” Ham fathered four sons, who gave rise to the southern tribes of the Earth, including the people of Africa.
Beyond that, a second theological argument claimed that slavery was actually a good thing. White masters converted their slaves to Christianity, bringing these “heathens” hope for salvation. One problem with this argument was that English law had provided that a slave who was baptized a Christian could become free. American slaveholders soon realized that saving souls meant losing bodies, so most colonies passed laws that said Christian baptism was no longer a pathway to freedom. For slaves, Christianity might put them on the stairway to heaven, but it didn't save them from hell on earth.
Civil War Voices
Maryland minister Thomas Bacon's “Sermon to Negro Slaves” (1743).
Suppose that you were people of some substance, and had something of your own in the world, would you not desire to keep what you had? And that no body should take it from you, without your own consent, or hurt any thing belonging to you? If, then, you love your neighbor as yourself, or would do by others as you could wish they would do by you, you will learn to be honest and just towards mankind, as well as to your masters and mistresses, and not steal, or take away any thing from any one, without his knowledge or consent: You will be careful not to hurt any thing belonging to a neighbour, or to do any harm to his goods, his cattle, or his plantation.
What Was the Triangle Trade?
The economic heart of the slave trade was a smooth system of supply and demand that came to be called the Triangle Trade. Here, the Anglo-American genius for commerce settled into a ghastly and murderous brand of efficiency. Operating under the flags of all nations, the slave ships left those pious ports of Protestant New England with cargoes of rum along with trinkets, guns, and iron bars, which were used as currency in Africa. In 1643 the first American slavers had exchanged shiploads of fish, lumber, and grain—the rich output of the then-prospering American colonies—for the prized sherry and Madeira wines from Spain and Portugal. But they also bought Spanish and Portuguese slaves.
Eventually these enterprising New Englanders realized that they could cut out the middleman and go directly to the source: Africa. On the first leg of the triangle, the rum, cotton, grain, and other raw materials and goods produced in the colonies went directly from New England to Africa in exchange for slaves. On the second and deadliest leg of the triangle, the captives were taken to the West Indies and sold to plantation owners. The slavers then returned to the American ports of Richmond, New York, Newport, and Boston, among others, on the final leg of the triangle, with sugar, molasses, large profits from the Caribbean islands, and “seasoned” slaves who had gone through a period of “breaking in” that lasted as long as three years. During this time newly arrived Africans were mixed in with veterans. The newcomer learned his work assignment and any tendencies to commit suicide or escape were dispelled. “Seasoning” doubled his value. The sugar and molasses were turned into New England rum, which, along with other colonial products, was sent to Europe and Africa in return for more slaves.
It wasn't always so geometrically perfect. Ships departed from the triangle route to trade with Europe. But this grim triangular web was the heart of the business. Determining the precise number of Africans who were caught in this deadly triangle is impossible. Various estimates in the past put the number of blacks taken from Africa as high as 24 million. More recent studies, such as Peter Kolchin's American Slavery (1993), suggest that 10 to 12 million Africans were actually transported to the Americas. By any measure it was an African Holocaust. And that estimate does not take into account the millions of Africans who did not survive capture or the transatlantic voyage. Taking the conservative estimate of 14 to 20 percent who died in transit—some ships actually lost half their human cargo to disease, starvation, and other grim fates—produces a range of at least another 4 or 5 million Africans who perished before reaching the American slave markets. The vast majority of the survivors ended up working in the Caribbean sugar fields or on Brazilian plantations, but somewhere between 600,000 and 700,000 Africans arrived in the colonies that would eventually become the United States. Not a single American colony—including Rhode Island, which had once forbidden slavery—was free of slaves. Astonishingly, these hundreds of thousands torn from their villages and homes survived degradation and deprivation to become the almost 4 million people held in slavery in 1860, at the eve of the Civil War. (Nothing a high birthrate and a lower mortality rate among American slaves than other slaves in the Americas, defenders of American slavery would point to this population increase as a sign that American slavery was humane and healthy for Africans. Historians disagree, pointing out that American crops were easier to work than the sugar crops of the Caribbean and Brazil, there were fewer deadly tropical diseases, and American slaves generally enjoyed a better diet than those in the Caribbean and South America.)
Civil War Voices
From “The Advantages of the African Trade” (1772), by Malachi Postlethwayt, a British economist.
The most approved Judges of the commercial Interests of these Kingdoms have ever been of Opinion, that our WestIndia and African Trades are the most nationally beneficial of any we carry on. It is also allowed on all Hands, that the Trade to Africa is the Branch which renders our American colonies and Plantations so advantageous to Great-Britain; that Traffic only affording our Planters a constant Supply of Negro Servants for the culture of their Lands.…
The Negroe-Trade therefore…may be justly esteemed an inexhaustible Fund of Wealth and Naval Power to this Nation. And by the Overplus of Negroes…we have drawn likewise no inconsiderable Quantities of Treasure from the Spaniards.
…Many are prepossessed against this Trade, thinking it a barbarous, inhuman and unlawful Traffic for a Christian Country to Trade in Blacks; to which I would beg leave to observe; that though the odious Appellation of Slaves is annexed to this Trade, it being called by some the Slave-Trade, yet it does not appear from the best Enquiry I have been able to make, that the State of those People is changed for the worse by being Servants to our British Planters in America; they are certainly treated with great Lenity and Humanity: And as the Improvement of the Planter's Estates depends upon due Care being taken of their Healths and Lives, I cannot but think their Condition is much bettered to what it was in their own Country.
…But I never heard it said that the Lives of Negroes in the Servitude of our Planters were less tolerable than those of Colliers and Miners in all Christian Countries.
What Was the Middle Passage?
Of course, the key to the Triangle Trade was a large supply of “merchandise.”
In Africa, few Europeans ever actually captured a slave. The work of capturing and enslaving Africans was generally done by other Africans, who sold their prisoners to Arab coastal traders. Who were these unlucky millions? Like slavery through the ages, African slavery began with prisoners of war. Some were tribal royalty, prizes of war, taken by neigboring or enemy tribesmen and sold to Arab traders for rum, codfish, salt, and Spanish money. In some cases they were criminals or debtors. Eventually they were simply the subjects of African kings and local chieftains who were unable to resist the temptation of the European riches and goods placed before them. Linked together in coffles—chains that bound the captives together by the neck, a word derived from the Arabic for caravan—the Africans were turned over to the Arab merchants who ran the slave markets of Africa's West Coast.
In The Africans, journalist David Lamb described a modern visit to the bleak cells where the African captives once awaited their fate:
It was here, in the dark, dank slave house that Arab traders bartered and bickered with European shippers, here that the Africans spent the last weeks in their homeland, awaiting a buyer, a boat and, at the end of a long, harrowing voyage, a master.
In the weighing room below the trading office, the men's muscles were examined, the women's breasts measured, the children's teeth checked. Those were the qualities—muscles, breasts, teeth—on which human worth was judged. The slaves were fattened like livestock up to what was considered the ideal shipping weight, 140 pounds, and those who remained sickly or fell victim to pneumonia or tuberculosis were segregated from the rest by an Arab doctor, led into a corridor whose open door overlooked the ocean and tossed out for the sharks.
The Europeans and Americans brought their trade goods, landing at fortresses along the West African coast where the captives had already been introduced to barbaric tortures meant to break their will to escape. For those who attempted to flee, there was an anklet through which a spike was driven into the foot. Another device used a spike to seal the lips of defiant captives. The masters of the slave ships bartered their material cargo for human cargo, branding the Africans before forcing them into the holds.
On the voyage, the captives were packed as tightly as “books upon the shelf” in the hellhole below the decks, usually with no more than eighteen inches of space above them. One captain recorded, “They had not so much room as a man in his coffin, either in length or breadth. It was impossible for them to turn or shift with any degree of ease.”
In this floating coffin, the journey lasted six to ten weeks. The water was impure, the food inedible, if available at all. When a ship ran low on provisions, captives were simply thrown overboard. Those who became weak or sick were also thrown overboard. Those who became weak or sick were also thrown overboad. Many others committed suicide by jumping into the sea rather than submit.
When this dreadful middle passage or journey to the islands of Jamaica or Barbados ended, the survivors were delivered to slave dealers and the vessels were loaded with agricultural products from the Caribbean plantations for the final leg of the voyage north to New England. Many of the merchants and shipowners of New England, those respectable Puritan gentlemen who would foot the bill for the American Revolution, profited handsomely from their slave ships. They invested their profits wisely in factories, mines, and transportation, providing much of the impetus for the great Industrial Revolution that would eventually help separate North and South.
Civil War Voices
From The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789), the first published autobiography of an African American and the first of thousands of narratives by former slaves that appeared throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The first object that saluted my eyes when I arrived on the coast was the sea, and a slave ship, which was then riding at anchor, and waiting for its cargo. These filled me with astonishment, that was soon converted into terror, which I am yet at a loss to describe…. I was immediately handled and tossed up to see if I was sound, by some of the crew; and I was now persuaded that I had got into a world of bad spirits, and that they were going to kill me. Their complexions too, differing so much from ours, their long hair, and the language they spoke, confirm me in this belief. Indeed such were the horrors of my views and fears at the moment, that if ten thousand worlds had been my own, I would have freely parted with them all to have exchanged my condition with the meanest slave in my own country. When I looked round the ship too, and saw a large furnace or copper boiling and a multitude of black people of every description, chained together, every one of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow, I no longer doubted of my fate; and, quite overpowered with horror and anguish, I fell motionless on the deck, and fainted. When I recovered a little, I found some black people about me, who I believed were some of those who brought me on board, and had been receiving their pay: They talked to me in order to cheer me, but all in vain. I asked them if we were not to be eaten by those white men with horrible looks, red faces and long hair….
… I was soon put down under the decks, and there I received such a salutation in my nostrils as I had never experienced in my life; so that, with the loathsomeness of the stench, and with my crying together, I became so sick and low that I was not able to eat, nor had I the least desire to taste any thing. I now wished for the last friend, death, to relieve me; but soon, to my grief, two of the white men offered me eatables; and, on my refusing to eat, one of them held me fast by the hands…and tied my feet, while the other flogged me severely. I had never experienced any thing of this kind before, and although, not being used to the water, I naturally feared that element the first time I saw it, yet nevertheless, could I have got over the nettings, I would have jumped over the side, but I could not; and besides the crew used to watch us very closely, who were not chained down to the decks, lest we should leap into the water. I have seen some of these poor African prisoners most severely cut for attempting to do so, and hourly whipped for not eating. This indeed was often the case with myself….
… At last, when the ship, in which we were, had got in all her cargo, they made ready with many fearful noises, and we were all put under deck, so that we could not see how they managed the vessel.
But this disappointment was the least of my grief. The stench of the hold, while we were on the coast, was so intolerably loathsome, that it was dangerous to remain there for any time, and some of us had been permitted to stay on the deck for the fresh air, but now that the whole ship's cargo was confined together, it became absolutely pestilential. The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, being so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died, thus falling victims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers. This deplorable situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains, now become insupportable; and the filth of necessary tubs, into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered it a scene of horror almost inconceivable. Happily, perhaps, for myself, I was soon reduced so low here that it was thought necessary to keep me almost continually on deck; and from my extreme youth, I was not put in fetters. In this situation I expected every hour to share the fate of my companions, some of whom were almost daily brought upon the deck at the point of death, and I began to hope that death would soon put an end to my miseries.
Equiano survived the trip, the slave market in Barbados, and a colonial Virginia plantation. Subsequently, he was sold to a British naval officer, who thought it clever to rename the slave boy Gustavus Vassa, after a Swedish king. Vassa was taken to Nova Scotia and later to the Mediterranean. From a third master, a Quaker named Robert King, he learned to read and write. Permitted to earn extra money, he purchased his freedom in 1766 and pursued a series of adventures that included a polar voyage. His memoir appeared in 1789, one of the few slave narratives that includes an account of the transatlantic voyage.
What Was the Stono Rebellion?
The dreadful journey finished, the slave ships landed in the West Indies at places like Barbados and Jamaica, where the human cargo was sent to the market to be sold. Those slaves who were sold to the colonies of North America made another voyage, to Atlantic ports like New York, Newport, and Boston, to be sold once again in American slave markets. Though a small fraction went to the northern colonies to become domestics or do factory work, the vast majority ended up in the Deep South to work the rice, tobacco, and, later, cotton plantations. Here was the scene of the greatest myth of the slave period—the image of slaves as docile, somewhat childlike laborers content with their situation. It was a paternalistic image perpetuated by slave owners, who wanted to present slavery as somehow beneficial to the slaves. This myth continued into this century and might be the greatest sin of books and films like Gone With the Wind.
Almost from its very beginnings in colonial America, slavery produced violent reactions by slaves, who protested either by working slowly and inefficiently, running away, or rebelling. Although the 1831 rebellion of Nat Turner is the most famous slave revolt—because it became the subject of William Styron's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967)—it was by no means unique.
New York was the site of some of the earliest and bloodiest slave uprisings. In Queens Country in 1708, an Indian slave and a black woman killed their master and his family of six. In two separate instances in 1712 and 1741, a total of fifty blacks and thirteen whites were killed. But one of the most violent early slave uprisings began on September 9, 1739, in Stono, South Carolina, on the Stono River about twenty miles from Charleston. The Stono Rebellion, the first mass slave revolt, was led by a slave named Jemmy. Apparently encouraged by Spanish missionaries and promised liberation, a group of twenty slaves attacked a store and killed the two storekeepers. Armed with guns and powder, they set off for St. Augustine, Florida. As they marched through the country with their captured weapons, according to one account, they set fire to plantations and cried out, “Liberty.” Gathering recruits, Jemmy and his band eventually grew to about a hundred. During a ten-mile march, they killed approximately thirty white people before an armed militia caught them in a field. Forty-four of the rebellious blacks died in the aftermath, and in one account the white planters “cutt off their heads and set them up at every Mile Post they came to.” Meant as a warning to other rebellious slaves, the display grimly recalled the famed ancient uprising of Spartacus, who led an army of slaves against the Roman legions. (After their defeat, six thousand followers of Spartacus were crucified and left to rot along a Roman highway.)
The Stono Rebellion was followed by two other uprisings in South Carolina that year. With each successive revolt, the colonies and later the states of the young Republic instituted new and harsher laws to control the slaves. Indeed, a great part of the objection to slavery came not from those who had moral qualms but from those who feared that the rapidly expanding numbers of slaves would eventually lead to more dangerous rebellions.
Documents of the Civil War
Following the Stono Rebellion, the colonial legislature of South Carolina, the Commons House of Assembly, passed An Act to Impose Duties on the Importation of Slaves (1740) out of fear of the growing number of slaves and the likelihood of future rebellions.
Whereas, the great importation of Negroes from the coast of Africa, who are generally of a barbarous and savage disposition, may hereafter prove of very dangerous consequence to the peace and safety of the Province, and which we have now more reason to be apprehensive of from the late rising in rebellion of a great number of the Negroes lately imported into the Province from the coast of Africa …and barbarously murdering upwards of twenty persons of His Majesty's faithful subjects of this Province; and whereas, the best way to prevent those fatal mischiefs for the future, will be to establish a method by which the importation of Negroes into the Province should be made a necessary means of introducing a proportionable number of white inhabitants into the same; and whereas, in order to effect this good purpose, it is fit and necessary that a sufficient fund should be appropriated by the laws of this Province for the better settling the frontiers…
… there shall be imposed and paid by all and every the inhabitants of this Province and other person and persons whomsoever, first purchasing any negro or other slave within the same which hath not been the space of six months within this Province, a certain tax or sum of twelve pounds current money for every such negro and other slave of the height of four feet and two inches and upwards; and for every one under that height, and above three feet two inches, the sum of five pounds like money; and for all under three feet two inches (suckling children excepted), two pounds ten shillings like money.
Civil War Voices
From Phillis Wheatley's “To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth” (1773).
Should you, my lord, while you pursue my song,
Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung,
Whence flow these wishes for the common good,
By feeling hearts alone best understood,
I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate
Was snatch'd from Afric's fancy'd happy seat;
What pangs excruciating must molest,
What sorrows labour in my parent's breast?
Steel'd was the soul and by no misery mov'd
That from a father seiz'd this babe belov'd.
Such, such my case. And can I then but pray
Others may never feel tyrannic sway.
Born in Africa, the young woman later called Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753-1794) was captured by slave traders at the age of eight. Sold to the Wheatley family of Boston, she was recognized as a prodigy and, by age thirteen, was writing poetry modeled on such English poets as Alexander Pope and translating from ancient Greek. Taken to England, she astonished the British literary world when her Poems on Various Subjects: Religious and Moral was published in London in 1773. Not everyone admired her skills. Jefferson dismissed Wheatley's poetry, perhaps because of its religious nature, writing, “Religion produced a Phillis Wheatley, but it could not produce a poet.”
Wheatley, along with other Africans like Olaudah Equiano, gave the lie to another myth of the slave period: that Africans were barbarous and inferior, unable to master complicated tasks, a myth that unthinkably remains alive in modern times in the flickering debate over race and intellect. One who doubted the ability of blacks was Jefferson, who not only knew of Wheatley but was also acquainted with another extraordinary black man of the period, Benjamin Banneker (1731-1806). His grandmother a Welsh convict, his grandfather an African slave, Banneker was born a free black in Maryland, a child of obvious talents. He received an education and established a reputation as a mathematician and astronomer. In 1791 he sent Jefferson, then George Washington's secretary of state, the manuscript of his Almanac, along with a letter in which he upbraided Jefferson for his contradictory views.
Suffer me to recall to your mind that time in which the arms of the British crown were exerted, with every powerful effort, in order to reduce you to a state of servitude; look back, I entreat you…. You were then impressed with proper ideas of the great violation of liberty, and the free possession of those blessings, to which you were entitled by nature; but sir, how pitiable is it to reflect, that although you were so fully convinced of the benevolence of the Father of Mankind, and of his equal and impartial distribution of these rights and privileges which he hath conferred upon them, that you should at the same time counteract his mercies, in detaining by fraud and violence, so numerous a part of my brethren under groaning captivity and cruel oppression, that you should at the same time be found guilty of that most criminal act, which you professedly detested in others.
Jefferson helped secure Banneker a position surveying the future capital of the United States. But he remained unconvinced that this black man's brilliance offered proof that the races were equal.
Documents of the Civil War
From Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (1776).
When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
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.
If Jefferson Believed What He Wrote, Why Did He Keep Slaves?
The cornerstone of American democracy, the clarion cry for generations of independence movements since, Jefferson's Declaration of Independence is familiar to generations of Americans. Less familiar to most Americans is what it didn't say.
On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee (1732-1794; remember the name Lee; it will come up again) rose before the Continental Congress in Philadelphia and proposed, “These united colonies are and ought to be free and independent States.” His call was seconded by John Adams of Massachusetts, and a committee was formed to draft a declaration of principles in line with Lee's resolution. Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston—all from the North—were chosen for the task but needed a Southerner for regional balance. Familiar with the writings of a bright, thirty-three-year-old Virginian, Adams suggested Thomas Jefferson. A fiery redhead, Jefferson had written an influential pamphlet claiming that the original settlers of America came as free individuals and had a natural right to choose their rulers. Jefferson not only joined the Committee of Five, but working in Philadelphia's sultry summer heat on a portable desk of his own design, he singlehandedly drafted a document. He first showed it to Adams and Franklin, each of whom recommended some minor word changes. It was then approved by the full committee without further change.
The document was presented on July 2 to the Continental Congress, which, in the nature of all Congresses since, decided to tack on some amendments. Sitting beside Franklin, a humiliated Jefferson fumed as the other delegates picked at his words and ideas for two and a half days. Fortunately for posterity, they left most of the language alone, but they did make some changes.
A substantial part of the Declaration was a long list of outrages committed against Americans by the king of England—this is the section most Americans have never bothered to look at. Some of these accusations were legitimate; others were inflamed rhetoric. But the accusation that caused the most dismay among the delegates was Jefferson's statement that the king was personally responsible for transporting slaves from Africa. In his draft, Jefferson had written:
… He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of distant people who have never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. 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 restrain this execrable commerce, determining to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold.
This controversial passage, Jefferson wrote later in his life, “was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it. Our Northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under those censures, for tho' their people have very few slaves themselves yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.”
After more wrangling, the amended Declaration was adopted unanimously by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, two days after it had already passed Lee's resolution of independence—the day that by all rights ought to be our national birthday. Disheartened by the damage he felt had been done to his Declaration, Jefferson withdrew from the Congress and returned to Virginia, where he served out the war years as its governor.
But the issue of Jefferson and his objection to the “execrable commerce” gets to the very heart of the American contradiction. Even more than his fellow Virginians and slaveholders George Washington, George Mason, the Lees, and Patrick Henry, Jefferson embodied the enigma of early American slavery. After all, he was the Enlightenment hero who wrote what was and remains one of the most radically idealistic and democratic documents in history.
His simple and seemingly unconditional statement that “all men are created equal,” a notion we accept today without question, was then about as radical as proposing to put the king himself in chains and auction him off. Yet Jefferson kept slaves, profited from them, and sold them on at least two occasions. A Monticello slave named Sandy, who had escaped and was returned, was sold to Jefferson's cousin. Slaves worked on his plantation and in the nail and brick factories he set up at Shadwell, his other property. During the Revolution, loyal slaves hid Jefferson's silverware when the British came to Monticello in hot pursuit of the rebel governor. Still, throughout his legal and political career, Jefferson argued against slavery as an institution and whenever possible attacked slavery's foundations. Late in his life he wrote, “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of Fate than that these people are to be free.”
The question has confounded historians and biographers. Jefferson was the greatest American example of the Enlightenment or Age of Reason, when European thinkers and writers like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, René Descartes and Immanuel Kant, had pioneered a new belief that reason—man's mind—could discover the laws underlying all nature. Emerging from centuries of European history dominated by the Roman Catholic Church, these men were saying that simple faith was no longer sufficient. They said, “Dare to know” and “I think, therefore I am.” The ideas of the Enlightenment, in which reason and science were elevated along with a new respect for humanity, profoundly influenced Jefferson. So how could a man who represented these ideals maintain a plantation whose economy was based on slave labor? Although Jefferson would write of the natural inferiority of blacks, he still believed they were men, as his bold use of the word men in the draft of the Declaration clearly shows. To Jefferson, equal meant in God's eyes, not in mental ability. He was also a man of his times, financially chained to a rigid social and economic system that did not welcome emancipation or Negro equality. Willard Sterne Randall, a recent biographer, may have summed it up well—if short of satisfactorily—when he wrote in Thomas Jefferson: A Life (1993):
All his adult life, Thomas Jefferson seems to have tossed and turned in an agony of ambivalence over the dilemma of slavery and freedom. Repeatedly he sought to have public institutions relieve him of the burden of his conscience while he tried to avoid giving offense to his close-knit family and the slaveowning society of his beloved Virginia. He knew slavery was evil, he called it evil and spoke out against it in a series of public forufms, but he would only push so far—and then he would fall back on a way of life utterly dependent on slave labor.
Documents of the Civil War
From the Northwest Ordinance, largely drafted by Thomas Jefferson in 1784 and adopted by the Continental Congress on July 13, 1787:
There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in said territory.
The Northwest Territory was a large area (more than 265,000 square miles) surrounding the Great Lakes that was ceded to the United States by Great Britain in 1783. When four existing states laid claim to parts of this huge, rich territory, the dispute was turned over to the Continental Congress. It in turn relied on a plan drafted by Jefferson which set the rules for forming new states out of this land. (Eventually the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota emerged.) Besides setting the boundaries of the states and establishing sixty thousand inhabitants as the population required for statehood, the Northwest Ordinance also prohibited slavery. That sanction marked the first federal restriction on slavery or the slave trade.
Civil War Voices
Oliver Ellsworth, a delegate from Connecticut to the Constitutional Convention, in 1787: “Slavery in time will not be a speck in our country.”
What Did the Constitution Say About Slavery?
Within months of the passage of the Northwest Ordinance, the Continental Congress was back at work on a much bigger task, drafting a new Constitution for the United States of America. Just about everyone agreed that the Articles of Confederation, adopted in 1781, was inadequate to run the new country. To keep the power of the states strong and to avoid having a powerful central government like the one they had just fought, the Founding Fathers had managed to create a toothless beast. Under the Articles of Confederation there was no common currency; individual states were printing their own money. There was no army to protect citizens from Indians, foreign threat, or another popular rebellion. And the last of these is exactly what happened in Massachusetts, “the cradle of liberty,” where a group of struggling farmers, veterans of the Revolution, discovered they were not much better off after independence than they had been before. Led in 1786 by a farmer named Daniel Shays, they decided to raise a little hell of their own. Shays's Rebellion, as it was called, was put down without too much bloodshed, but the uproar it caused made America's new ruling class realize they needed a better set of rules to govern this country.
Accordingly, the Constitutional Convention was convened in Philadelphia in the spring and summer of 1787 to devise a new form of government, one that was consistent with the ideals of the Revolution but that would effectively manage a new and growing nation.
The Constitution they debated and drafted was, like all political documents, a compromise. The biggest compromise involved the creation of a legislature. The small states wanted equal representation. The larger states wanted representation based on population. Roger Sherman, a tough, plain-spoken Yankee from Connecticut, proposed a seemingly obvious and elegant solution: The legislature would include two houses. One would be based on population—the House of Representatives. The second would have an equal number of representatives—the Senate.
The other thorny issue was slavery. Many of the delegates wanted to see slavery eradicated, for economic and political reasons as well as moral ones. But since a good many of them had most of their wealth tied up in slaves, the continued existence of slavery was not debatable. Several other convenient compromises took care of these problems—but only for the moment.
Documents of the Civil War
From the Constitution of the United States, drafted in 1787 and ratified in 1789. (Emphasis added.)
We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Article I. Section 2.3: Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this Union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other persons. [This marked a compromise on the issue of counting slaves, who could not vote, in the census that would determine the number of representatives a state would determine the number of representatives a state would have in Congress. Nonslave states didn't want to count them; slave states did. The compromise meant that slaves were counted as three fifths of a person.]
Article I, Section 9: 1. The migration or importation of such persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a tax or duty may be imposed on such importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each person. [This agreement would cause trouble. Abolitionists pointed to the clause as proof that the Fathers wanted to do away with slavery. Slavers argued that it provided constitutional protection for slavery.]
Article IV, Section 2.3: No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such labor may be due. [Another sop to slaveholders, this clause protected slave owners from the loss of runaway slaves. Bolstered by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, slave owners had federal law on their side. Escaped slaves had to be returned.]
Fighting for independence didn't guarantee better treatment under a new government, as Daniel Shays and his fellow farmers in Massachusetts had learned. It was also a lesson for the estimated five thousand African Americans who fought in the Revolution. Ironically, they might have been better off fighting for the British, for during the war, the British Army had offered freedom to any slave who came over to fight the American rebels. How many actually did so is a guess. And more than a few who were promised their freedom may have ended up being sold back into slavery in the West Indies. The other irony is that the slaves would have been freed sooner if the British had kept their American colonies, for the British abolished the slave trade in 1807 and West Indian slavery in 1833.
There is no question that black men served conspicuously in the patriot armies. A black soldier named Oliver Cromwell helped row Washington across the Delaware. (He is for some reason absent in the famous painting of the scene. Oops!) Service by blacks in the American navy was even more commonplace, for recruiting for naval service was difficult, so captains became color-blind when a black face was enlisting. But the nation that emerged under the Constitution had little to offer the black people of America, free or slave. While the Constitution never specifically mentioned slaves, it substituted polite legalisms such as “persons held to service.” Under the Constitution, slavery could not be touched for twenty years. Slaves would not be able to vote and would be counted in the census as three fifths of a person—a key political victory for the slaveholding states, who would see their political muscle in Congress grow out of proportion to their white population. And slavery could be taxed. It might be wrong, but we still might as well make a few bucks from it.
Elbridge Gerry (1744-1814), a member of the Continental Congress as well as a signer of the Declaration of Independence from Massachusetts, didn't think all this compromising was such a good idea. He prophetically wrote to his wife, “I am exceedingly distressed at the proceedings of the Convention…They will lay the foundation of a Civil War.” Later governor of Massachusetts and vicepresident in James Madison's second term, Gerry refused to sign the Constitution. Apart from his prescient wisdom, he was immortalized in American politics when the Massachusetts legislature, at his direction, passed a law redistributing the electoral districts to ensure that Gerry's party would retain control. One Federalist complained that the oddly shaped districts Gerry had mapped out looked like salamanders, hence the political term gerrymander.
Civil War Voices
Benjamin Franklin, in a fund-raising address for the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, and the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage (November 9, 1789).
It is with peculiar satisfaction we assure the friends of humanity, that, in prosecuting the design of our association, our endeavours have proved successful, far beyond our most sanguine expectations.
…Slavery is such an atrocious debasement of human nature, that its very extirpation, if not performed with solicitous care, may sometimes open a source of serious evils.
The unhappy man, who has long been treated as a brute animal, too frequently sinks beneath the common standard of the human species. The galling chains that bind his body, do also fetter his intellectual faculties, and impair the social affections of his heart. Accustomed to move like a mere machine, by the will of a master, reflection is suspended; he has not the power of choice; and reason and conscience have but little influence over his conduct, because he is chiefly governed by the passion of fear. He is poor and friendless; perhaps worn out by extreme labour, age, and disease.
Under such circumstances, freedom may often prove a misfortune to himself, and prejudicial to society.
Attention to emancipated black people, it is therefore to be hoped, will become a branch of our national policy; but, as far as we contribute to promote this emancipation, so far that attention is evidently a serious duty incumbent on us, and which we mean to discharge to the best of our judgment and abilities.
To instruct, to advise, to qualify those, who have been restored to freedom, for the exercise and enjoyment of civil liberty, to promote in them habits of industry, to furnish them with employments suited to their age, sex, talents, and other circumstances, and to procure their children an education calculated for their future situation in life; these are the great outlines of the annexed plan, which we have adopted, and which we conceive will essentially promote the public good, and the happiness of these our higher to too much neglected fellow-creatures….
Signed, by order of the Society,
B. FRANKLIN, President
Widely recognized as an author, scientist, diplomat, inventor, philosopher, printer, and the first American to gain international renown, Franklin (1706-1790) had owned slaves for thirty years. As a printer and publisher, he also accepted advertisements for slave sales, and he considered blacks inferior to whites in their “natural capacities.”
When Franklin did come to oppose slavery, it seemed to have been only partially out of strict moral reasons. He believed that slavery encouraged idleness, the same reason he opposed relief for the poor. Franklin was, above all, the high priest of honest labor. But in his later years his views changed dramatically, and he became president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. In the society's platform, he called for a national policy of educating and training freed blacks for gainful employment.
Franklin, along with Jefferson, Washington, and other Founding Fathers, recognized that slavery was wrong. They understood that it hurt the ideals of liberty and democracy for which they had struggled and that it would have to end in America. The only question was one of timing: How long would slavery last? But to many other Americans the issue was not so simple, and the question of slavery ran like a deadly undercurrent beneath every important national question for more than fifty years.