Eighty-Eight Years

The Long Death of Slavery in the United States, 1777–1865

Patrick Rael, Richard Newman, Manisha Sinha

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780820348292
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Esclavitud

Why did it take so long to end slavery in the United States, and what did it mean that the nation existed eighty-eight years as a "house divided against itself," as Abraham Lincoln put it? The decline of slavery throughout the Atlantic world was a protracted affair, says Patrick Rael, but no other nation endured anything like the United States. Here the process took from 1777, when Vermont wrote slavery out of its state constitution, to 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery nationwide.

Rael immerses readers in the mix of social, geographic, economic, and political factors that shaped this unique American experience. He not only takes a far longer view of slavery's demise than do those who date it to the rise of abolitionism in 1831, he also places it in a broader Atlantic context. We see how slavery ended variously by consent or force across time and place and how views on slavery evolved differently between the centers of European power and their colonial peripheries—some of which would become power centers themselves.

Rael shows how African Americans played the central role in ending slavery in the United States. Fueled by new Revolutionary ideals of self-rule and universal equality—and on their own or alongside abolitionists—both slaves and free blacks slowly turned American opinion against the slave interests in the South. Secession followed, and then began the national bloodbath that would demand slavery's complete destruction.

SECTION 1

The Age of Revolution

CHAPTER 1

Impious Prayers

Slavery and the Revolution

THE LOUDEST YELPS

Colonial Complaints and the Revolutionary Paradox

Samuel Johnson was not a man to bandy words. In the midst of Britain’s imperial crisis with its mainland North American colonies, the renowned lexicographer and pamphleteer exercised his polemical skills to attack upstart colonials who complained of “taxation without representation.” Those who held slaves, the Tory argued, had little business proclaiming the virtues of liberty. “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” he famously wondered.¹

This frequently cited illustration of American hypocrisy is seldom explored in detail. The pamphlet in which it appears—titled Taxation No Tyranny: An Answer to the Resolution and Address of the American Congress (1775)—reveals much about the slaveholding colonies’ connection to their mother country on the brink of the American Revolution. Johnson’s first concern was not slavery—in the pamphlet his “loudest yelps” jibe appears incidental—but the political character of empire. Colonials, he noted, argued that to be taxed without direct representation in Parliament denied their rights as Englishmen. Johnson replied that even in Britain few commanded the vote, and thus the colonists were “represented by the same virtual representation as the greater part of Englishmen.”² Besides, the colonial relationship obviated Americans’ right to direct representation, though not their obligation to obey their rulers. Colonies simply did not enjoy the same political privileges as did those at home. In Johnson’s formulation, those departing for America had “voluntarily resigned” their right to direct representation “for something, in their opinion, of more estimation”: the opportunity offered in America. “By his own choice,” Johnson argued, the colonist “has left a country, where he had a vote and little property, for another, where he has great property, but no vote.” Colonial subjects therefore possessed “the happiness of being protected by law, and the duty of obeying it.”³

But what of liberty? Sympathetic ears in Britain, including influential members of Parliament, worried about undermining the liberties of Englishmen regardless of where they lived. Johnson had little patience for such concerns. “Chains need not be put upon those who will be restrained without them,” he aphorized. Freedom existed in tenuous balance with subjugation, liberty with order. Some might claim that “liberty is the birthright of man, and where obedience is compelled, there is no liberty.” Johnson replied simply, “government is necessary to man, and where obedience is not compelled, there is no government.” It was at this point, in countering colonists’ reliance on the doctrine of universal human liberty, that Johnson targeted the gulf between American principle and practice. “We are told, that the subjection of Americans may tend to the diminution of our own liberties,” Johnson wrote. “If slavery be thus fatally contagious, how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” Johnson’s point was thus not simply that the most ardent advocates of liberty in America seemed to have little problem enslaving fellow humans. It was that the practice of slavery did not seem to obviate the pursuit of liberty. In fact, he intimated, the two might have been linked. Somehow, the colonials had developed radical notions of liberty while practicing the most extreme form of oppression known to the Atlantic world.⁴

Perhaps this was no coincidence. Historian Edmund Morgan has suggested that radical notions of liberty emerged in the colonies alongside, and indeed because of, the development of slavery. Morgan argues that privileged colonial plantation barons could afford to preach equality and democracy, and thus enlist the political loyalties of less privileged whites, precisely because a caste of completely oppressed black slaves ensured that all whites could share a common freedom—a principle scholars have termed herrenvolk democracy.⁵ As Morgan put it, “Aristocrats could more safely preach equality in a slave society than in a free one. Slaves did not become leveling mobs, because their owners would see to it that they had no chance to.” What was more, the practice of enslavement may have lent a special poignancy to claims for liberty. The Virginia Founders Morgan studied “may have had a special appreciation of the freedom dear to republicans, because they saw every day what life without it could be like.”⁶ British Parliamentarian Edmund Burke, in a fitting riposte to Johnson, stated as much in 1775. Wherever slaves figured prominently in the population, he said, “those who are free, are by far the most proud and jealous of their freedom.” For them, freedom was “not only an enjoyment, but a kind of rank and privilege.” Because slaves occupied the lowest orders of society and lived in misery, free people equated liberty with privilege. “Liberty looks, amongst them, like something that is more noble and liberal.”⁷ Ideas of freedom and slavery thus developed out of a complex dialectical relationship with each other. In the plantation periphery of colonial America, notions of political equality grew out of their distinction from the practice of enslavement. As some became less free, others could become more so. The very notion of liberty, Morgan contends, evolved alongside its opposite.⁸

Samuel Johnson had put his finger neatly on the issues. For one, he had intuited some uniquely New World sources for the emergence of revolutionary notions of liberty, which depended absolutely on the further degradation of Africans who arrived on American shores already deprived of rights. For another, he succinctly described the political relationship between a mother country determined to subordinate its colonies to national interests and colonies equally dedicated to their own autonomy. And his criticisms reflected many Britons’ justifiable confusion over colonial grievances. Had not the mother country only recently defended the colonials against rival native and European nations along the frontier? Indeed, the last of the great eighteenth-century wars for empire had begun in the mainland colonies, only later to spill over to the European continent. Unlike previous conflicts, the French and Indian War (known in Europe as the Seven Years’ War) began in the periphery, when in 1754 a young colonial militia commander, George Washington, tussled with French forces in the backwoods of western Virginia and Pennsylvania. The colonies had called upon their mother country for aid, and aid had come, along with victory. At the cost of several thousand British casualties, England had gained control of much of the eastern portion of the Mississippi River Valley, expelled France from mainland North America, and markedly improved security along the western frontier.

It was understandable, then, for those in the mother country to expect some gratitude from colonies that had benefitted from England’s protection, even to the point of soliciting payment for protection through taxes levied by Parliament. As Johnson put it, Britons might “think it reasonable, that they who thus flourish under the protection of our government, should contribute something toward its expense.” (He grumbled that should England “restore to the French what we have taken from them … we shall see our colonists at our feet, when they have an enemy so near them.”) But the colonies had enjoyed many decades of lax commercial regulation—years known as the “period of salutary neglect,” in which American merchants had become accustomed to regulating their own commercial affairs largely unhindered by the mother country. What was in some English minds a long-standing and comprehensive system of mercantile regulation did not appear so to colonial eyes. Many in the colonies viewed with disdain the Navigation Acts, which Parliament had begun legislating in the 1650s as part of an ad hoc system of measures designed to extract maximal benefit from the colonies for the British Empire in its never-ending contests with other national empires, such as France, Spain, and the Netherlands. But the acts had never been comprehensively imposed, and now many colonists, associating freedom from regulation with their rights as “freeborn Englishmen,” viewed demands for revenue as new impositions, not at all in keeping with the traditions of local governance they had grown accustomed to.

Eventually, of course, the colonies revolted. The story is too familiar, and too dense, to be anything more than sketched here. Tensions mounted in the early 1770s, as the Tory government in England squared off against colonial legislatures, particularly that of Massachusetts, over the question of revenue. In response to tax measures such as the Stamp Act of 1765 and the Townsend Duties of 1767, colonists—particularly in New England—resisted through increasingly direct action, such as the Boston Tea Party in 1773. Parliament sought to punish Massachusetts for its lead in instigating colonial defiance by imposing a series of measures known in America as the Intolerable Acts, which closed Boston’s port, undermined Massachusetts’s capacity for self-rule, and provided for the quartering of British troops throughout the colonies. The laws brought tensions to a head, and the showdown broke out into open conflict in April 1775, when British troops marched from Boston to Concord in search of munitions stored by the Massachusetts militia. On April 19, colonial militia squared off against British regulars; one among these—it has always been unclear who—fired the “shot heard ’round the world,” and armed struggle began.

Seeing their interests threatened, other mainland colonies banded together. Having first organized in September 1774 to respond to the Intolerable Acts, delegates reconvened as the Second Continental Congress in May 1775, shortly after the Battles of Lexington and Concord. This Congress functioned as the effective national government for the remainder of the war, directing a military effort that ranged from Canada to the Carolinas and the Mississippi Valley to the Caribbean. Indeed, the Revolution resparked long-standing European rivalries, leading to a resurgence of the eighteenth century’s worldwide wars for empire. Britain’s European opponents sought to undermine the powerful island nation by supporting the colonies, often covertly through finance, trade, and arms, as did the Spanish and Dutch. Continental armies faced enormous disadvantages, as General George Washington’s dreadful wintering at Valley Forge in 1777 made clear. But by winning a few clear victories, such as at Saratoga in 1777, and by simply remaining a viable fighting force, the colonials finally justified the formal intervention of France, Britain’s great rival and the most powerful nation in continental Europe. This aid proved critical for Washington’s successful siege of Yorktown in 1781, which ended military hostilities on the continent and brought a rebuffed Britain to the peace table. Great Britain, confronted by mounting losses, European support for the colonials, and the sheer costs of fighting a continental war across an ocean while simultaneously maintaining an enormous empire, let her thirteen mainland colonies go. After six years and the loss of perhaps fifty thousand killed and wounded Americans,⁹ the war was over. The tally of war also imposed enormous financial burdens on all participants, particularly France, where financial disaster, and consequent revolution, loomed. The 1783 Treaty of Paris acknowledged the independence of the United States, also ceding them an enormous swath of western lands. Liberty had been won. But at the time when independence had been declared in 1776, every one of these new states sanctioned and practiced the holding of fellow humans as property.

NOTHING BUT CHATTEL

Liberty, Property, and Slaves

Johnson’s “loudest yelps” quip posed the central questions for the revolutionaries: How could those arguing most ardently for liberty hold some in abject and complete servitude without becoming hypocrites? How committed were the patriots—not just to their own liberty, but to liberty as a universal principle? The point was not lost on the revolutionaries themselves, nor on those they held as slaves. With justice, succeeding generations have castigated the Founders for the disjuncture between their principles and their practice. Yet to dismiss the founding generation as merely hypocritical fundamentally mischaracterizes its thought world. The very disjuncture between slavery and freedom that permits modern observers to judge those such as Thomas Jefferson was itself in the process of historical formation at the time of the Revolution. This is, in fact, our subject.

The era of democratic revolutions that struck the Atlantic world in the half century from 1775 to 1825 birthed the widespread understanding of these two concepts, slavery and freedom, as we know them today. Recall that the Atlantic system of slavery had developed as a fundamental element of the expansion of European economies, and thus constituted an important stage in the growth of world capitalism. As this “merchant capitalism” developed in the early modern Atlantic world, it fostered a relatively narrow and absolute brand of bondage. “Slavery,” which once described a broad range of particularly degraded social statuses in rigorously hierarchical social systems, transformed into the notion that humans (and their progeny in perpetuity) could be nothing but property. The transformation was neither seamless nor complete, for in certain times and places in the Atlantic world the enslaved could make critical claims rooted in their humanity. Yet, compared with the wide range of previous practices that have been termed “slavery”—from captive assimilation and debt peonage in sub-Saharan Africa, to the powerful but unfree court eunuchs and warrior castes of the Ottoman Empire—it is safe to say that the expansion of the plantation complex into the New World brought with it the most highly capitalistic forms of servitude yet known. Of all slaves in world history, Atlantic ones were most likely to be defined in law as nothing but chattel.

This posed a problem, though. By the eighteenth century, the world of merchant capitalism was steadily enshrining bourgeois property relations, or the idea of human society as a world primarily composed of individuals who owned things, like land, livestock, or goods produced through labor. (Of course all of these, including one’s own labor, could be bartered or sold, but this presumed a world of absolute ownership of things.) In fact, the rhetoric of rights surrounding the democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries often posed “liberty” as little more than the uncontested right to own and use property free of arbitrary molestation. The great theorists of liberalism, such as John Locke, had listed security in “the possession of outward things” among the very purposes that government should serve. As Locke had written in 1690, “the great and chief end … of Mens uniting into Commonwealths, and putting themselves under Government, is the Preservation of their Property.” Seventy-five years later, William Blackstone, whose influential Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–69) the American revolutionaries widely referenced, listed “the right of private property,” along with “personal security” and “personal liberty,” among the “natural liberties” all men had a right to enjoy. So sacrosanct was property to Blackstone that the government could not expropriate it through taxes, “even for the defence of the realm or the support of government,” except through citizens’ own consent or the consent of their representatives.¹⁰

Grievances to the mother country during the revolutionary crisis clearly relied upon this understanding of property’s relation to liberty. Colonists deprecated the Sugar Act of 1764, which for the first time imposed direct taxes on them for the purposes of alleviating the national debt. New York’s state legislature declared to the House of Commons that where taxation occurs without consent, “there can be no Liberty, no Happiness, no Security.” Freedom from such imposition was “inseparable from the very Idea of Property, for who can call that his own, which may be taken away at the Pleasure of another?”¹¹ Likewise, the Stamp Act Congress of 1765 charged that Parliament’s appropriation of colonial property to supply British troops was “unreasonable and inconsistent with the principles and spirit of the British constitution,”¹² while the First Continental Congress declared property provisions of the Intolerable Acts “subversive of American rights.”¹³ Colonial patriot James Otis first penned the phrase “life, liberty, and property” in a 1764 pamphlet (Locke had used “life, liberty, or estate” in the Second Treatise on Government), a formulation appropriated and modified by later documents, like the Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress (1774) and Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776). The Declaration of Independence’s more famous phrasing—“life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—merely sought an expansive view of property’s importance to liberty.

The idea that humans might be included among the forms of property deemed justly inviolable raised thorny problems for the revolutionary generation. In precapitalistic worlds lacking absolute property rights, enslavement constituted merely an extremely unbalanced form of the exercise of “rights in persons,” in which some in a social group claimed obligations from others. Marriage, for example, in which parties exchanged mutual obligations (one party obtained the wealth represented by the incorporation of a new person, while that person obtained a guarantee of protection), constituted a far more symmetrical relation. In contrast, one deemed an absolute slave could ...