Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic

Matthew Mason

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780807876633
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios afroamericanos

Giving close consideration to previously neglected debates, Matthew Mason challenges the common contention that slavery held little political significance in America until the Missouri Crisis of 1819. Mason demonstrates that slavery and politics were enmeshed in the creation of the nation, and in fact there was never a time between the Revolution and the Civil War in which slavery went uncontested. The American Revolution set in motion the split between slave states and free states, but Mason explains that the divide took on greater importance in the early nineteenth century. He examines the partisan and geopolitical uses of slavery, the conflicts between free states and their slaveholding neighbors, and the political impact of African Americans across the country. Offering a full picture of the politics of slavery in the crucial years of the early republic, Mason demonstrates that partisans and patriots, slave and free--and not just abolitionists and advocates of slavery--should be considered important players in the politics of slavery in the United States.

Chapter 1: Slavery and Politics to 1808

THE POLITICAL HISTORY of slavery in North America began in earnest with the American Revolution. The years of struggle against Great Britain took what had been weak and disparate strands of opposition to slavery and bound them into a powerful antislavery ideology and movement. The new concern with human bondage also transformed slavery into a potent weapon with a variety of political uses, both international and domestic. Americans, both slaveholders and nonslaveholders, felt compelled to respond to these developments. The contrast between the responses of the Northern and the Southern states opened up a sectional division over slavery for the first time, with consequences that could not have been more momentous. The era of the Revolution set these developments in motion, but their impact and implications were still unclear when this epoch closed with the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade to the United States in 1808.

Serious, sustained scrutiny of slavery in North America—indeed, in the Western world—arose for the first time in the 1760s in tandem with the political and military strife between Great Britain and her colonies. This is not to assert that slavery had never troubled Western man before then. Indeed, as David Brion Davis has written, “slavery had long been a source of latent tension in Western culture.”¹ But before the late eighteenth century, Western intellectual traditions presented “a framework of thought that would exclude any attempt to abolish slavery as an institution.” There were exceptions to this rule, but they were aberrations in their respective times and places and cannot be called part of any antislavery tradition.² Even in the late seventeenth century and first half of the eighteenth century, only occasional rhetorical flourishes and faint glimmerings of moral opposition to slavery appeared, demonstrating “how remote abolitionism was from even the more liberal minds of” the world.³

What was true of the Western world generally held for Britain’s North American colonies before their conflict with the imperial power. Attempts to keep particular colonies free of slavery were not actuated by principled opposition to the institution; moreover, they failed. For instance, Rhode Island’s 1652 effort to limit involuntary servitude to ten-year terms floundered, and in short order the colony’s ports became leading centers of the African slave trade.⁴ Georgia’s leading lights were more persistent but just as unsuccessful. For much of the 1730s and 1740s, the proprietors and settlers of this new colony debated whether to retain the original ban on African slavery. In the course of this debate, moral opposition to slavery surfaced only rarely, as the antislavery side emphasized practical reasons to exclude slaves. And after 1750, Georgia joined its neighbor to the north, South Carolina, as a colony fully committed to plantation slavery.⁵

Georgia joined more than South Carolina, for slavery was of vital importance in Northern as well as Southern colonies. The institution took different forms in different colonies and was more important in some than in others. But, especially in New England, the Atlantic slave trade was a key contributor to economic growth. Accordingly, holding or trading in slaves was far from an impediment to respectability—indeed, many of New England’s first families participated in the African slave trade.⁶ In parts of colonies such as New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, slave labor was becoming more rather than less important at midcentury.⁷

Protests against the growth and importance of slavery in the colonies were few and far between, and protests against slavery per se were even scarcer. A well-known exception was Puritan divine Samuel Sewall’s pamphlet The Selling of Joseph, published in Boston in 1700. But after this protest against the slave trade, Sewall did not pay public attention to the subject. This flicker of antislavery sentiment hardly constituted an antislavery movement.⁸ Preachers, especially in New England, had no hesitance in reproving sin, but in the early and mid-eighteenth century, slavery was not yet on their list of crying offenses. Colonists of various denominations grappled with the righteousness of slavery before the American Revolution, but they rarely if ever came to any conclusion that fundamentally challenged slavery.⁹ Later depictions of a transhistorically antislavery New England notwithstanding, even there opposition to the principle of slaveholding was fleeting and rare.

The Quakers formed the strongest exception to this rule of nonengagement, for they wrangled over the question of slavery’s rectitude early and often. As early as 1682, George Fox, the English founder of the Society of Friends, questioned slavery’s morality. In North America, the first Quaker protest against slaveholding came from a meeting of Friends in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1688. These Quakers appealed in large part to the Golden Rule and to the preservation of Pennsylvania’s good name in Europe. For their part, the recipients of this memorial—Society of Friends meetings in Philadelphia and Burlington—hoped to avoid the issue altogether, protesting that it was “of too great a weight” for them to decide.¹⁰ Other Quaker assaults on slavery followed in rapid succession, demonstrating the Quaker meetings’ inability to quiet the question. These arguments, and their reception, would become some of the timeless themes of antislavery agitation.

Yet even among the Quakers, antislavery progressed painfully and slowly before the Revolution, in part because wealthy slaveholders predominated in many of their meetings.¹¹ The opponents of slavery were more vocal and published their views more often. But whole sections of Quaker antislavery tracts were devoted to refuting arguments, biblical and otherwise, that their fellow Friends had advanced in defense of slavery.¹² It appears that the Friends pioneered both antislavery and proslavery in British North America.

Moreover, between the 1680s and the 1760s, this debate was almost entirely carried on among the Quakers themselves. Despite their power in Pennsylvania, both the Quakers as a sect and their concerns over slavery were marginal in both England and its colonies. Leading Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lay, for instance, gained notoriety for his striking object lessons, but his main audience was his coreligionists. He was an eccentric character—even those sympathetic to him have conceded that he may have been mentally deranged—who lived in “a cottage resembling, in its construction, a cave.”¹³ A colorful lunatic living in a cave embodied the place of antislavery in the colonial consciousness as late as the mid-eighteenth century.

In the midst of the Great Awakening, another liminal group arose whose members evinced at least some sympathy for the slave: evangelical Protestants. They shared a common experience of persecution with other sects who became leaders in religious antislavery, such as Quakers and Moravians. Indeed, they gloried in the fact that proud, worldly slaveholders persecuted both evangelicals and the lowest form of outcasts, slaves.¹⁴ This prepared some evangelical minds for antislavery, but not all embraced it. Leaders of the Great Awakening such as George Whitefield and Samuel Davies rebuked planters for abusing their slaves but not for holding them. They advocated a benevolent form of Christian slaveholding, and Whitefield employed slave labor at his orphanage in Georgia.¹⁵

If there was no automatic link between evangelicalism and opposition to slavery, neither was there such a connection between antislavery and more secular philosophies. The precepts of the Enlightenment brought some minds to the conclusion that slavery was unnatural and immoral. Yet to other Enlightenment thinkers, especially early in the movement, the slave trade and colonial plantation slavery were key elements in a grand, even “divinely contrived system” that was beneficial to all.¹⁶ Indeed, both sides of a Harvard forensic dispute over the justice of slavery appealed to Enlightenment notions of natural rights to support their position.¹⁷ Neither did the more specific ideology of the American Revolution automatically produce abolitionists, even when combined with evangelical religion. Many white patriots conceived of the struggle with Britain as designed only to preserve the rights of those who “were freeborn, never made slaves” by conquest or sale.¹⁸ In the mid-1780s, hundreds of Virginia evangelicals employed both their religious beliefs and the Revolution’s stress on property rights in a series of petitions against emancipation. They also branded their antislavery opponents “Enemies of our Country, Tools of the British Administration.”¹⁹

Notwithstanding the overall ambiguity of these religious and secular philosophies on slavery, they proved unfriendly to it when they converged in the late eighteenth century, when a sense of a confrontation between freedom and tyranny was international. This gave many Western people an apocalyptic sense of urgency that turned their faith and political precepts into strong rhetoric—and often action—against human bondage. Many more people than ever before thus awoke to the issue for the first time, feeling personally implicated in or affected by slavery.²⁰

The days of the Revolution were heady indeed, and this headiness included some remarkable changes for slavery in North America. In 1777, as Captain William Whipple of New Hampshire went off to fight the British, he noticed that his slave, Prince, was dejected. When Whipple asked him why, Prince responded: “Master, you are going to fight for your liberty, but I have none to fight for.” Whipple, “struck by the essential truth of Prince’s complaint,” immediately freed him.²¹ Whipple was unusual in his haste, but he was far from alone in coming to the conviction that slavery was wrong. In 1773, Philadelphia doctor and patriot Benjamin Rush observed that a small cadre of Quaker abolitionists “stood alone a few years ago in opposing Negro slavery in Philadelphia, and now three-fourths of the province as well as the city cry out against it.”²² By 1797, a New York diarist estimated that “within 20 years the opinion of the injustice of slaveholding has become almost universal.”²³ By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Americans of all ages—especially Northerners—could and did read antislavery textbooks and literature, see antislavery plays, and sing antislavery songs.²⁴

White Americans came to this destination by many roads, although two were particularly well traveled. In the midst of the political contention and war with Britain, especially when the war went badly for the patriots, a multitude of clergymen—especially but not exclusively New England Congregationalists—preached that God was punishing the colonists for their iniquities. Although this message was not new, it was novel to see slavery listed as “an Achan, an accursed thing that is the troubler of our land, and for which God is at this day contending with us.” In fact, some preachers even denounced “negro slavery” as “the most crying sin in our land.” Moreover, many contended that slavery was a national sin, for which God was using the British ministry as a rod to chasten all the colonists.²⁵ Legions of patriots also rebuked their fellows for inconsistency in holding slaves while striving for their own liberty. One writer only formulated this in a more extreme form than others when he compared American slaveholders condemning Britain’s tyranny to “an atrocious pirate, setting [sic] in all the solemn pomp of a judge, passing sentence of death on a petty thief.”²⁶

Many Revolutionary Americans’ opposition to slavery was more than rhetorical, and they formed the first non-Quaker antislavery movement in American history. For all its novelty and its connection to the political ideology of the American Revolution, Quakers and evangelicals remained prominent in the antislavery cause.²⁷ But this new movement was far more universal than the intrasectarian disputes of the colonial period—indeed, it was transatlantic. American and European—especially British—abolitionists corresponded, published each others’ works, and generally nourished each other’s efforts.²⁸

The new breed of abolitionists gave no quarter to slaveholders, branding them as tyrants, villains in this age when human liberty was the cause célèbre. They repeatedly argued that no man’s liberty—no matter his color—could safely be entrusted to those who had been “habituated to despotism by being the sovereigns of slaves.” Only their fear of white men’s political power kept them from enslaving whites as well as blacks.²⁹ After the publication of Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia in 1785, abolitionists delighted in quoting a slaveholder’s denunciation of the tyranny of the commerce between master and slave.³⁰ But although they drew on his antislavery passage, many abolitionists had nothing but disdain for Jefferson’s conclusion that slavery was for the time being a necessary evil given the obstacles to emancipation. They attributed this defense of slavery’s continuation to “interested motives,” arguing that if its proponents were not so blinded by selfish greed, “the mountains that are now raised up in the imagination would become a plain.”³¹ Thus some of the bolder abolitionists of the Revolutionary era sought to dismantle the necessary-evil apology for slavery even as it was being erected and to discredit slaveholders’ claims to share in the liberal impulses of their time.

But if their rhetoric was uncompromising, this generation of abolitionists’ programs was often limited and c...