Standard-Bearers of Equality

America's First Abolition Movement

Paul J. Polgar

• Editorial: Omohundro Institute and UNC Press
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781469653945
• Categoría: Histoire
• Categoría: Histoire afro-américaine

Paul Polgar recovers the racially inclusive vision of America's first abolition movement. In showcasing the activities of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, the New York Manumission Society, and their African American allies during the post-Revolutionary and early national eras, he unearths this coalition's comprehensive agenda for black freedom and equality. By guarding and expanding the rights of people of African descent and demonstrating that black Americans could become virtuous citizens of the new Republic, these activists, whom Polgar names "first movement abolitionists, " sought to end white prejudice and eliminate racial inequality. Beginning in the 1820s, however, colonization threatened to eclipse this racially inclusive movement. Colonizationists claimed that what they saw as permanent black inferiority and unconquerable white prejudice meant that slavery could end only if those freed were exiled from the United States. In pulling many reformers into their orbit, this radically different antislavery movement marginalized the activism of America's first abolitionists and obscured the racially progressive origins of American abolitionism that Polgar now recaptures. By reinterpreting the early history of American antislavery, Polgar illustrates that the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are as integral to histories of race, rights, and reform in the United States as the mid-nineteenth century.

CHAPTER 1

The Making of a Movement

Progress, Problems, and the Ambiguous Origins of the Abolitionist Project

What could an illegally enslaved West Indian migrant, the first treasury secretary of the United States, a New York playwright, a Philadelphia physician, a northern free black minister, and a Quaker educator possibly have in common? They all contributed to first movement abolitionism. An admixture of free black community leaders, elite white Americans, Quaker activists, and unfree black laborers would seem to make for a strange set of allies and a disjointed reform movement. Yet each of these groups shared a measured confidence and basic optimism that sustained the program of abolitionism they would jointly create. This mix of historical actors firmly committed themselves to the idea of antislavery progress, or the belief that, through the agency of reformers, the trajectory of post-Revolutionary and early national America would lead toward emancipation, black uplift, and the dissolution of white prejudice.¹

While first movement abolitionists coalesced around the idea of antislavery progress, the many obstacles they faced informed the shape and scope of their activism. For one, slavery in the mid-Atlantic was based on racial oppression and long-standing white prejudice toward people of color, facts that would continually haunt the efforts of first movement abolitionists. Second, the American Revolution, which influenced and gave broader purchase to opposing slavery, also made abolitionism problematic. Slavery’s defenders responded to claims of universal liberty and underlying black equality at the heart of first movement abolitionism by counterclaiming that people of African descent remained ineligible to join independent America as responsible free men and women. Questions derived during the Revolutionary era regarding the capacity of African Americans for freedom posed thorny dilemmas for abolition’s advocates. Third, the nature and pace of black freedom in the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century mid-Atlantic left African American liberty tenuous and free black rights contested. Thus, if the idea of antislavery progress informed the ethos of first movement abolitionists, the roadblocks to emancipation galvanized them into action.

THE BEASTS OF THE PEOPLE

Examining the solidification of racial slavery in the colonial mid-Atlantic reveals the entrenched barriers facing first movement abolitionists. Slavery never took root in the colonies north of Maryland to the same extent as it did in the southern colonies. Lacking a staple crop from which to form the large-scale plantation system that came to define the colonial South, the middle colonies did not end up staking their social, economic, and cultural systems on chattel slavery. Still, slavery’s presence in the region was undeniable. From the wheat fields of Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Delaware to the artisan shops of New York City and the bustling port of Philadelphia, enslaved people filled a variety of roles for the labor-hungry white settlers as domestics, mercantile workers, craftsmen, and farm laborers.²

Beginning with the English takeover of the mid-Atlantic region from the Dutch and Swedes in the 1660s, the Restoration monarchy adopted a policy of encouraging the African slave trade and rewarding slaveholders with land. During the first decade of the 1700s, mid-Atlantic colonial officials wrote into law statutes clearly demarcating slavery as a heritable and unalterable condition. A 1702 New York law officially acknowledged the chattel principle of American slavery by deeming enslaved people “the property of Christians.” In 1706, the New York Assembly sanctioned slavery as an inherited state following the status of the mother. This same law, along with one issued in East Jersey in 1704, shut the door to Christianity as a means for the enslaved to claim their freedom by decreeing that baptism could not change slave status. In 1700, the Pennsylvania Assembly (whose laws at this time also applied to the colony of Delaware) issued an edict entitled A Supplement to An Act for the Better Regulation of Servants that endorsed black bondage as a lifelong condition, legally distinct from that of indentured servitude.³

Mid-Atlantic colonial officials did more than inscribe racial slavery in the record books. From the close of the seventeenth century through the 1740s, the assemblies of the middle colonies enacted a spate of codes that condemned bondspersons to an inferior and unequal status. All four of the middle colonies created special courts for enslaved people accused of crimes. The fate of those subject to these courts was decided, not by a jury, but by a group of justices and prominent freeholders called specifically to mete out an often rough justice to enslaved blacks. Further handicapping the ability of the enslaved to receive a fair trial, none of the middle colonies sanctioned enslaved peoples’ testimony unless it was directed at other black bondspersons. The testimony of the enslaved was almost always used to implicate bondspersons in plots against their masters or the state, and an enslaved person was never permitted to answer the accusations of a free person. The slave courts allowed colonial authorities to expedite the punishment of bondspersons, limit the ability of the enslaved to defend themselves, and inflict upon those found guilty penalties reserved only for persons of African descent.⁴

And those penalties were harsh. Even in a period when corporal punishment for a variety of crimes was standard, condemned enslaved people faced an especially cruel and unusual type of punishment. In Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New York, enslaved men and women found guilty of stealing goods could be whipped as much as the judges and freeholders who decided the case deemed appropriate, even as equivalent white transgressions were limited to a set number of lashes. New York made it lawful for towns to employ a “common Whipper” for enslaved violators of the law. In addition to being given forty stripes, New Jersey law mandated that enslaved people found guilty of pilfering goods be branded with the letter T on their left cheek. For other misdemeanors in which free offenders would have received a fine, enslaved persons, because they had no legally recognized possessions, found themselves tied to the whipping post. Pennsylvania and New Jersey required the castration of bondspersons who attempted to rape “or have carnal Knowledge” of white women, whereas Delaware ordered their ears cut off.⁵

But the most brutal punishments were reserved for enslaved people deemed guilty of murdering their masters or conspiring to incite a rebellion. In 1694, an enslaved man in New Jersey convicted of murder was to have his hand severed and “burned before thine eyes,” after which he was to be hanged and his corpse burned. Fourteen years later, two enslaved people on Long Island who had killed their master and his family were put to death. One was burned alive while the other was “hung in gibbets, and placed astride a sharp iron.” They were subjected “to all the torment possible for a terror to others.” Enslaved people were often called to witness these brutal executions. One formerly enslaved man never forgot the “dreadful screams” of a twenty-year-old bondsperson whom he was forced to watch burn at the stake not long before the American Revolution. The misery of the man being executed was compounded when the flames “kindled but slowly,” causing his cries to “be heard at a distance of three miles.” The aftermath of slave rebellions in New York in 1712 and 1741 left many enslaved people to be broken on a wheel, hanged, and burned at the stake (the last of these capital punishments was one that bondspersons received particularly often). If these executions disregarded the humanity of the enslaved, the property rights of slaveholders were not forgotten. Masters of those executed were compensated for their property, symbolizing how the value of the enslaved was measured, not by their personhood, but by their status as chattel objects. In sum, the middle colonies instituted a special system of justice for enslaved persons marked by a level of physical violence and brutality far exceeding that applied to free persons.⁶

Not only did the middle colonies seek to violently repress enslaved defiance, but bondspersons were also subject to a much greater number of legal restrictions than their free counterparts. To mitigate the threat of enslaved blacks running away or meeting to potentially instigate a rebellion, the mid-Atlantic legislatures restricted the free movement of the enslaved. New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware ordered enslaved persons to stay within ten miles of their masters’ homes at all times, unless given special written authorization by their owners. New Jersey and Pennsylvania enlisted the assistance of white inhabitants by handing out a monetary reward to the person who tracked down and then whipped on the spot the enslaved individual found outside the ten-mile boundary. Enslaved people were also forbidden from gathering in groups because of the widespread fear that such meetings could lead to insurrection plans. These laws hampered the lives of the enslaved and discouraged the construction of vibrant enslaved communities. Additional withholdings of the rights of bondspersons to trade goods, carry arms, drink spirits, and stay out past a certain time of night worked to stifle the autonomy of enslaved people and leave them vulnerable to stark penal correction.⁷

Free blacks of the colonial mid-Atlantic likewise found their rights highly circumscribed. In societies where slavery and blackness were nearly synonymous terms, colonial lawmakers viewed free persons of color as dangerous aberrations and made a concerted effort to discourage black freedom. Anticipating that free and enslaved blacks would always be in league with one another in illicit activities, free persons of color were barred from trading with bondspersons and entertaining enslaved people in their homes. Stripping a basic right of freedom, a 1704 New Jersey law denied the right of liberated blacks to own property. Masters who manumitted their enslaved laborers were mandated to post bond, often for sums far exceeding the value of any individual enslaved person. A 1712 New York law labeled free blacks “Idle slothful” and a “charge on the place where they are,” requiring a two-hundred-pound surety for each enslaved person manumitted. Pennsylvania’s Assembly correspondingly identified free persons of color as “idle, slothfull people” who “often prove burdensome to the neighborhood and afford ill examples to other negroes.” A law passed in the 1725–1726 session threatened reenslavement for Pennsylvania’s persons of color who “loiter and misspend” their time and required the overseers of the poor to bind out for indenture all manumitted blacks under the age of twenty-one and every child of free blacks. The message of these laws was clear. Free people of color were unsuited for liberty and in need of being prevented from injuring the sanctity of white society.⁸

Intended to cow enslaved and free blacks into submission, the slave laws led instead to a cycle of enslaved resistance and still more draconian measures, all of which worked against recognizing the humanity of black people. Many of the slave codes were written in response to, or in anticipation of, slave insurrections. New York City was thrown into a panic in 1712 when some twenty-four enslaved Africans set a building on fire and then hid in the surrounding woods. When a group of whites arrived to stifle the flames, the insurrectionists pounced, killing nine whites and wounding seven others. Upon capture, multiple blacks were put to death. An Act for Preventing Suppressing and Punishing the Conspiracy and Insurrection of Negroes and Other Slaves, which set legal precedents for much of the colony’s slave laws, soon followed the executions. In 1734, New Jersey whites got word of a supposed plot by enslaved people in the eastern portion of the colony. The enslaved were to slay their masters and then escape to Indian territory, where they would ally themselves with the French. Many of those accused were fortunate enough only to have their ears chopped off.⁹

Most enslaved people neither killed their masters nor plotted to destroy white society through a violent uprising. Yet colonial whites of the mid-Atlantic came to associate blacks, whether enslaved or free, with crime, violence, and barbarous tendencies. These white perceptions of enslaved blacks are elucidated in a printed account of the 1741 New York slave conspiracy. During the winter of 1740–1741, after several city buildings were set ablaze and an enslaved person was seen fleeing one of these fires, New York’s authorities uncovered a supposed crime ring implicating lower-class whites and blacks in the conflagrations. The prosecution’s evidence was based on the unreliable testimony of a sixteen-year-old white servant. By the time the trials ceased, thirty enslaved people were executed and seventy banished from the colony. Not long after the prosecutions had ended, the presiding judge, Daniel Horsmanden, published a transcript of the trials. In a diatribe directed at one of the condemned bondspersons during the 1741 trials, Horsmanden harangued the soon-to-be-executed enslaved man that “most, of your Complexion” are “worthless, detestable Wretches.” Estimating that cruelty and a savage disposition was “in the very Nature and Temper of ye,” Horsmanden declared that blacks had clearly “degenerated” so far “below the Dignity of Humane Species, that even the brute Animals may upbraid ye.” Black people as a whole, he concluded, were the “the Beasts of the People.”¹⁰

This phrase, “the Beasts of the People,” is an apt metaphor to describe the way many white colonists must have viewed people of African descent. Although a racism based on biological difference would not emerge until the nineteenth century, colonial whites did not need pseudoscientific theories to prove to them that black people were degraded and naturally fitted for chattel bondage. The way their societies were structured told them as much. The legal and social dynamics of racial slavery in colonial America codified white prejudice and made it visceral. When human bondage came under widespread attack for the first time during the Revolutionary era, the defenders of slavery would turn to the well-established and deeply engrained colonial white American belief that persons of African descent belonged in slavery.¹¹

THE PROMISE AND PROBLEM OF ANTISLAVERY IN THE REVOLUTIONARY ERA

The American Revolution would have an ambivalent but formative influence on the first abolition movement. Although instigated by colonial grievances over British imperial policies, the Revolution politicized chattel slavery and gave the institution a discursive significance it had previously lacked. Revolutionary writers and orators claimed that they were being made into “virtual” slaves by the unrighteous impositions of the British government. When white Americans railed at Britons for keeping them in virtual slavery, they did not speak simply for the sake of political hyperbole. The concept of political slavery was vital to the colonial American rationale for independence from Britain. Revolutionary pamphleteers and newspaper writers attempted to persuade the public that, through the arbitrary power and autocratic coercion of a distant British crown, the individual agency, personal independence, and even bodily autonomy of the American colonists was under serious duress. In order for the colonists to avoid the fate of millions of subjects in tyrannical Europe, these Revolutionaries wrote, they needed to reclaim their natural rights as a free and independent people or become slaves to the British Empire’s despotic rule. Repeatedly in the literature of the Revolutionary War era, warnings of imminent enslavement to English oppressors rang through the political discourse.¹²

In the imperial debate between the metropole and British North American colonies, slavery became a kind of political cudgel used to indict the other side as base posers of moral virtue. British imperial writers labeled the American patriots sanctimonious hypocrites who rhapsodized about natural liberty and equality while holding people in chains. The patriots shot back that it was under the fostering guidance of British imperial policy that slavery had taken root in the colonies in the first place, and it was at the hands of English officials that colonial restrictions on the importation of enslaved Africans had been defeated. Slavery had been made “not merely a moral problem, but a political problem.” In this changed context from the colonial era, that chattel slavery was the plight of more than half a million people did not escape the attention of some Americans. From Pennsylvania to Massachusetts, politicians, preachers, and propagandists drew on the newfound political salience of the institution of slavery in extending the rhetoric of natural rights to the enslaved.¹³

Some of the most powerful antislavery rhetoric in this era came from enslaved people themselves, who repurposed Revolutionary discourse to bring to bear a biting critique of the American Revolutionary cause absent abolition. Between 1773 and 1777, bondspersons in Massachusetts submitted a series of petitions to Governor Thomas Hutchinson and the colonial legislature pressing for emancipation. Seizing on the antislavery potential of the American Revolutionary War era, the enslaved and free blacks of Massachusetts appealed directly to their state’s political system to extend the promises of freedom to those imprisoned in bondage. The petitioners cl...