URGENT ASSIGNMENT

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African Americans And The American Revolution African Americans and the Rhetoric of Revolution

Thomas Jefferson, and other leaders of the Revolution, studied and borrowed ideas of natural rights from

European Enlightenment philosophers such as John Locke. They then incorporated natural rights theory into

documents like the Declaration of Independence that not only justified the Revolution but served, in Jefferson’s

words, as “an expression of the American mind.” Natural rights, such as the right to be free and pursue one’s

own “happiness,” are rights all human beings possess that are not granted by government and cannot be revoked

or repealed. As it says in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, natural rights are “truths” that are

“self-evident” and “unalienable” such as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

How could a group of people feel so passionate about these unalienable rights, yet maintain the brutal practice

of human bondage? Somehow slavery would manage to survive the revolutionary era despite fervent arguments

about its incompatibility with the new nation’s founding ideals.(5) Nevertheless, black people in particular seized

on the rhetoric of the American Revolution to highlight the contradiction between the colonists’ cries for

freedom and liberty from British oppression and the existence of racial slavery in the colonies. (1)

African Americans, both slave and free, immediately jumped into the fray when white colonists began to protest

British colonial rule for the first time in 1765 in response to the Stamp Act, which imposed a tax on newspapers,

pamphlets, and legal documents. Many colonists viewed the act as an arbitrary tax designed only to generate

revenue to pay down debt Britain accrued during the French and Indian War, which colonists helped the British

win in the 1750s and 1760s. Colonists also resented that this tax was imposed on them without having a voice in

Parliament, which led to cries of “No taxation without representation!”

In Charleston, South Carolina, slaves saw white protesters take to the streets and chant, “Liberty! Liberty! And

stamp’d paper.” The issue of taxation, of course, mattered far less to slaves than the language whites used in

their protests. Soon after Charleston’s white residents protested the Stamp Act, some of the city’s slaves

responded with their own chants of “Liberty! Liberty!,” which shocked and frightened white residents. “If most

slaves were illiterate,” writes historian David Brian Davis, “white leaders knew or soon discovered that the

slaves’ networks of communication passed on every kind of news almost as quickly as horses could gallop.”

(Davis, 2006, p.144–146)

A visual protest against the Stamp Act printed in a colonial American newspaper.Figure 4-1: O!

the fatal stamp by Pennsylvania Journal is in the Public Domain .

African Americans, and some whites opposed to slavery, also recognized the curious irony of

statements made by some white colonists that characterized British policies as a conspiracy that

threatened to turn free white people into “slaves,” that is, people lacking the same rights and

liberties as British citizens overseas. In 1774, George Washington characterized the plight of colonists under

British rule as analogous to that of black slaves ruled over by white slaves masters like himself. Writing after

Parliament passed the Intolerable Acts to punish rebellious colonists for the Boston Tea Party, Washington said,

“the crisis is arrived when we must assert our rights, or submit to every imposition, that can be heaped upon us,

till custom and use shall make us tame and abject slaves, as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway.”

(Jordan, 1968, p. 262)

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At the time, Washington was a political leader in Virginia and the master of a large plantation along the

Potomac River, Mt. Vernon, where he personally owned more than one hundred slaves. In the late 1760s, the

famous Philadelphia physician, Benjamin Rush, wrote a correspondent in France about how the Revolution’s

rhetoric of liberty and freedom, and the potential for enslavement or servitude, forced American colonists to

reckon with the hypocrisy of fighting for liberty and rights while countenancing racial slavery. “It would be

useless for us to denounce the servitude to which the Parliament of Great Britain wishes to reduce us, while we

continue to keep our fellow creatures in slavery just because their color is different from ours.” (Davis, 2006, p.

145).

George Washington and his family depicted at Washington’s Mt. Vernon

plantation home in Virginia.Figure 4-2: The Washington Family by Edward

Savage is in the Public Domain .

In 1773, Phyllis Wheatley, an eighteen-year-old poet who had been born in

West Africa but now lived as a slave in Massachusetts, reflected on the same

contradictions Rush highlighted a few years earlier. “In every human Breast,

God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom,” Wheatley

wrote. How then can white colonists reconcile the “Cry of Liberty” with the “Exercise of Oppressive Power

over others?” (Carson, Lapansky-Werner & Nash, 2019, p. 94)

That same year, which saw a record number of antislavery pamphlets published and sermons given in the

America colonies, a slave named Felix sent a freedom petition on behalf of himself and other slaves in

Massachusetts to the colonial governor and legislature. Freedom petitions, or freedom suits, had existed in the

American colonies since the late 1600s and allowed slaves to ask courts or legislatures to free them from

bondage on the basis of legal violations. While a small number of slaves petitioned courts for their freedom, the

number of petitions rose during the American Revolution. In his petition, Felix argued that slavery left black

people in bondage for life without the hope of acquiring property and freedom for themselves or their progeny.

No matter how devoted slaves were to their masters “neither they, nor their Children to all Generations, shall

ever be able to do so, or to possess and enjoy any Thing, no, not even Life itself, but in a Manner as the Beasts

that perish.” Since the law deprived slaves of property and instead made them into property, their condition

resembled that of an animal and not a human being. This was a violation of natural rights. “Relief” from the

legislature of Massachusetts that would not harm their masters, and free them from slavery, would be “to us…

as Life from the dead.” (Davis, 2006, p. 146)

Black Americans continued to petition for their freedom during the Revolutionary War, which broke out in

1775 in Massachusetts, while others free blacks protested on behalf of the enslaved by highlighting the

contradictions between a war fought for freedom and the persistence of slavery. In 1777, a former slave, named

Prince Hall, declared that the ideals Americans fought for “in the course of their unhappy difficulties with Great

Britain pleads stronger than a thousand arguments… [that black people] may be restored to the enjoyments of

that which is the natural right of all men.” (Carson, Lapansky-Werner & Nash, 2019, p. 94). Two years earlier,

Hall founded the first African American branch of Freemasonry and started the first black Masonic Lodge in

Boston. (1)

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Copper Engraving of Phyllis Wheatley that appears in her book of poetry,

Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, which was published in

1773.Figure 4-3: Phyllis Wheatley frontispiece by Scipio Moorhead is in

the Public Domain .

Thomas Jefferson

No one embodied the contradictions that lay at the heart of the Revolution’s

rhetoric more than Thomas Jefferson. Like George Washington, Jefferson was

part of Virginia’s slaveholding aristocracy. Slavery afforded Jefferson the

opportunity and freedom to pursue a career as a lawyer and political leader in

Virginia before and during the American Revolution. When the Revolution

broke out, Jefferson owned just under 200 slaves on his central Virginia

plantation, Monticello. As a student of the European Enlightenment, and a

scholar of treatises on natural rights written by Enlightenment philosophers

such as John Locke, Jefferson saw slavery as a regrettable institution and

hoped a process of gradual emancipation would eventually lead to its permanent demise.

When Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence in the summer of 1776, he used the language of natural

rights to justify the revolution and, in so doing, composed some of the most important, and potentially radical,

words in American history that carried anti-slavery overtones:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that there are endowed by the Creator

with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. (US, 1776)

Since he was writing about natural rights, and not political or civil rights, Jefferson saw this equality and desire

for freedom and “happiness” (i.e. property) as applying to all people, even Africans and African Americans.

Jefferson made this belief clear in a passage he wrote in an early draft of the Declaration that was eventually

removed because it threatened the support of the states of South Carolina and Georgia in the cause of

independence. In this passage, Jefferson blamed the African slave trade and slavery on King George rather than

on colonial slaveholders like himself. King George, he argued, “has waged cruel war against human nature

itself, violating the most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people [i.e. Africans] who

never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death

in their transportation thither.” (Davis, 2006, p. 146)

Despite Jefferson’s recognition that slavery violated the natural rights of Africans and African Americans, he

only freed a very small number of his slaves during his life and left hundreds still in bondage at his death in

1826. After the Revolution, Jefferson recognized that an explanation was in order. How could the author of the

Declaration of Independence, one of the most eloquent statements of the natural rights of all people, not free his

own slaves or advocate for the immediate abolition of slavery? Jefferson wrote his explanation in his only

published book, NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA (1782). In Jefferson’s mind, abolition carried grave

threats and risks to the young United States. He envisioned an apocalyptic race war in which former slaves

would slaughter former slave owners out of revenge. He also borrowed pseudo-scientific racist ideas from the

European Enlightenment that argued that Africans were inferior to Europeans, particularly in terms of

intellectual capacities, which made them unfit as citizens.

“Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they

have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances,

will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of

the one or the other race,” Jefferson wrote.

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He also feared racial “mixture” and the corruption of white racial purity, despite maintaining a sexual

relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings, a woman who bore him five children and who herself was the

product of a sexual encounter between Jefferson’s father-in-law and

Hemings’s mother, Betty. Jefferson still hoped emancipation would happen at

some distant date in the future and when it occurred all former slaves will

have to be “removed beyond the reach of mixture.” For Jefferson, the author

of the Declaration of Independence, eventual emancipation could only occur

with a plan for the colonization of African Americans outside of the United

States where they could have their own country separate from white

Americans. (1)

A caricature of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings.Figure 4-4: A

Philosophic Cock attributed to James Akin is in the Public Domain .

Fighting Their Way to Freedom Fighting Their Way to Freedom

In addition to filing freedom petitions and writing pamphlets advocating for the abolition of slavery, African

Americans fought for their freedom during the colonial and revolutionary era by serving in the military. African

and African American men, enslaved and free, from the South and the North, served in every war of

consequence during the colonial period. Sometimes slaveholders sent enslaved men to the front to fight in their

place or to do the menial labor entailed in building fortifications and supporting fighting troops. In other cases,

African runaways posed as free persons in order to serve on ships or to enlist as soldiers. The newspapers of the

colonial period often mention these facts in their advertisements of fugitive slaves.

Before the Revolution, between 1675 and 1739, the southern colonies were almost constantly involved in

fighting Native Americans or the Spanish. Southern planters were hesitant about arming Africans, as evidenced

by the legislation they passed prohibiting “Negro[es], mulatto[s] or Indian[s] from the military or bearing

arms.”

However, expedience required that equally as often the Virginians and South Carolina planters recruited black

men to fight in a militia or serve as “pioneers”, or “slave cowboys” to protect their settlements. In 1703, the

South Carolina assembly offered to free any slave who captured or killed hostile Native Americans. Beginning

as early as 1705, free blacks became eligible for enrollment in the militia. Unlike white persons, they were

required to muster for service without bringing arms. Several acts passed by the colonial assembly between

1723 and 1757, said that black men could serve as drummers, fifers, trumpeters, or “pioneers,” but not as

regular soldiers (Jackson 1942:251). The rank of “pioneer” gave them a special place as laborers and menial

servants. Many were freed for their services, but not all.

During the Revolutionary War some Africans and African Americans fought on the side of the patriots while

others fought on the side of the Loyalists. All enslaved people fought in order to gain freedom. (3)

Black Loyalists in the Revolutionary War

A member of Dunmore’s “Ethiopian” or black regiment that fought for the British or loyalist side during the

Revolutionary War.Figure 4-5: Ethiopian Regiment Uniform by Bantarleton is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

The British made the first move to enlist black soldiers. In November 1775, Lord Dunmore, the British colonial

governor of Virginia, issued a proclamation that all slaves belonging to rebels would be received into the British

forces and freed for their services. African Americans ran away to fight with the British in search of promised

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freedom for their services. Dunmore organized an “Ethiopian” regiment of about 300 African Americans, who

saw action at the Battle of Great Bridge in December 1775. (4)

The hope of freedom in return for service led many enslaved African Americans to leave the plantation to

follow the British Army. No exact statistics are available on the number of enslaved people who reached British

sanctuaries, but Thomas Jefferson estimated the number at 30,000 in 1778 alone (Tate 1865:119). In South

Carolina, some 5,000 enslaved people left the plantation to follow the British. The British confiscated other

enslaved people from patriots. The British organized the Africans following them as laborers, paying them

small sums in principal, although they charged them for clothes and upkeep, thus leaving them with little actual

monetary gain. The act of paying for labor defused the potential for rebellion and led to many courageous acts

on the part of black people.

During the final months of the British Occupation of South Carolina, in 1781,

General Leslie Clark formed black men into unit called Leslie’s “Black

Dragoons.”

From the patriots’ point of view, one historian comments, “The knowledge that

hundreds of self-liberated slaves were in possession of weapons caused

resentment and detestation (Frey 1991:125–167).” The British went on to form

autonomous “Negro” units for service in Florida and the West Indies. Their

service convinced others that the best solution to British military problems in the

West Indies was to enlist slaves by offering them freedom. The British

subsequently sent black regiments for service in Saint Domingue during the

French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars (Frey 1991). (3)

At the war’s end in 1783, some 20,000 blacks left with the British, preferring an

uncertain future elsewhere to returning to their old masters and

plantations. (4) They hoped that the British government would uphold the promise

of freedom and help them establish new homes elsewhere in the Empire. The

Treaty of Paris, which ended the war, demanded that British troops leave

runaway slaves behind, but the British military commanders upheld earlier

promises and evacuated thousands of freedmen, transporting them to Canada, the

Caribbean, or Great Britain. They would eventually play a role in settling Nova Scotia, and through the

subsequent efforts of David George, a black loyalist and Baptist preacher, some settled in Sierra Leone, in

Africa. Black loyalists, however, continued to face social and economic marginalization, including restrictions

on land ownership within the British Empire. (2)

Black Patriots in the Revolutionary War

In the 1850s, the free black abolitionist, William C. Nell of Boston, published the nation’s first histories of

African Americans that addressed the military service on the Patriot side during the American Revolution. In

his 1855 publication, Colored Patriots of the American Revolution , he singled out Crispus Attucks, a black man

of African and Native American ancestry who worked on whaling ships in Massachusetts, as the first man to die

in the American fight for independence. Five years before war broke out between colonists and Britain, Attucks

had been one of five Americans killed in the Boston Massacre on March 5, 1770. Attucks became something of

martyr and a symbol of British oppression. A century after the massacre, a Massachusetts poet honored and

memorialized Attucks in a long poem that praised him as the “first to defy, and the first to die.” (Carson,

Lapansky-Werner & Nash, 2019, p.98) (1)

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A lithograph created by John Bufford

made during the mid-nineteenth century

depicting the Boston Massacre of 1770.

Crispus Attucks is shown in the center

foreground of the image after being shot

by a British solider.Figure 4-6: Boston

Massacre by John H. Bufford is in

the Public Domain .

Despite the patriotic fervor Attucks’s

death may have inspired, far fewer black

people fought alongside the Americans

against the British during the

Revolutionary War. Nevertheless, some

black men in New England rallied to the

patriot cause and were part of the militia

forces that were organized into the new

Continental Army. Approximately 5

percent of the American soldiers at the

Battle of Bunker Hill (June 17, 1775) were black. New England blacks mostly served in integrated units and

received the same pay as whites, although none held a rank higher than corporal.

Historians estimate that about 5,000 black soldiers ultimately fought on the patriot side. The exact number will

never be known because eighteenth century muster rolls usually did not indicate race. Careful comparisons

between muster rolls and church, census, and other records have recently helped identify many black soldiers.

Additionally, various eyewitness accounts provide some indication of the level of African Americans’

participation during the war. Baron von Closen, a member of Rochambeau’s French army at Yorktown, wrote

in July 1781, “A quarter of them [the American army] are Negroes, merry, confident and sturdy.”

The use of black men as soldiers, whether freemen or slaves, was avoided early in the war by Congress and

George Washington, General of the Continental Army. The prospect of armed slave revolts proved more

threatening to white American society than British redcoats. General Washington allowed the enlistment of free

blacks with “prior military experience” in January 1776, and extended the enlistment terms to all free blacks in

January 1777 in order to help fill the depleted ranks of the Continental Army. Because the states constantly

failed to meet their quotas of manpower for the army, Congress authorized the enlistment of all blacks, free and

slave, in 1777. Of the southern states, only Maryland permitted African Americans to enlist. In 1779, Congress

offered slave masters in South Carolina and Georgia $1,000 for each slave they provided to the army, but the

legislatures of both states refused the offer. Thus, the greatest number of black soldiers in the American army

came from the North.

Although most Continental regiments were integrated, a notable exception was the elite First Rhode Island.

Mustered into service in July 1778, the First Rhode Island numbered 197 black enlisted men commanded by

white officers. Baron von Closen described the regiment as “the most neatly dressed, the best under arms, and

the most precise in its maneuvers.” The regiment received its baptism of fire at the battle of Rhode Island

(Newport) on August 29, 1778, successfully defeating three assaults by veteran Hessian troops. At the siege of

Yorktown, on the night of October 14, 1781, the regiment’s light company participated in the assault and

capture of Redoubt 10. On June 13, 1783, the regiment was disbanded, receiving high praise for its service.

Another notable black unit, recruited in the French colony of St. Domingue (present-day Haiti), fought with the

French and patriots at the Battle of Savannah (October 9, 1779). (4)

In Maryland the other part of the Chesapeake region, black men were not considered to be among the optional

sources for filling quotas in the Continental Army or the militia units until enlistment shortfalls made it

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expedient to broaden the base of eligible persons. A “Return of the Negroes in the Army, August 24, 1778”

indicates there were about 95 “Negroes” among the Maryland troops. However, finding the identification of

these men is difficult because they were rarely identified by race on muster rolls. By 1780 Maryland was ready

to accept enlistments from any source and more “negroes” enlisted. In 1781 Charles Carroll wrote his father

“we shall pass a law tomorrow for raising a Negro regiment of 750—every person having six Negroes between

fourteen and forty-five years of age may have a Negro taken from him if the Negro should be willing to enlist

for the war (Maryland State Archives, 84:297 as cited by Kreinheder and Schmidt 2001:121).

The North Carolina General Assembly initiated a draft in 1777 providing “that all men within the ages of 16

and 50 were liable to serve…[in the Continental Army]…or find an able bodied man to take their place” There

were no color qualifications made in the act. The fact that men of “mixed colors” participated in North Carolina

military units is evident from many sources (Schmidt 2001:159).

Georgia, not even 50 years a colony at the onset of the War, had about 18,000 enslaved people in its population

even though they declared their “abhorrence of the unnatural practice on slavery,” in their 1775 declaration of

support for the patriots in Boston and Massachusetts and for the Revolutionary War to come. Georgia used the

conflict to try to improve relationships with Native Americans in the colony. The Georgia records of minorities’

service in the military are not always clear. The National Society of the daughters of the American Revolution

authenticated records identify four “Black” soldiers and one “Indian” soldier from Georgia (2001:1181–182).

The Revolutionary War was not exclusively a “Man’s World.” Four women have been authenticated in southern

colonial records of Africans and Indians serving in the Revolutionary War. Sarah, a “Black” woman, worked in

the lead mines of Virginia, Catherine the Grenadier, also known as the Shawnee woman, served in the

Continental Army as did Nancy Ward another Native American woman from North Carolina. Patty was a

“Black” seamstress, whose name is found in the papers of Henry Laurens, performed military service for South

Carolina (African American and American Indian Patriots of the American Revolution, 2001:148, 153,166,

182).

After the war, the black soldiers and seamen of Virginia were liberally rewarded in money, land bounties, and

granted them pensions. In common with other states, Virginia also provided for the manumission of some slaves

who fought. However, they had to petition the courts to gain freedom and were not successful until ten or more

years after the struggle. In the next century, the children of African American Revolutionary War veterans who

did not receive land, petitioned the State of Virginia for land, and received it (Jackson 1942). (3)

The Impact of the Revolution on Slavery The Impact of the Revolution on Slavery The American Revolution generated unprecedented debates about morality of slavery and its compatibility with

the founding creeds of the new nation. Though the Revolution did not lead to abolition of slavery, it set off a

process of both immediate and gradual emancipation in northern states. The South’s slave system suffered

because of the war, which resulted in a decline in production and a loss of thousands of slaves to the British.

Though a small number of slaveholders, particularly in Virginia, emancipated their slaves after the Revolution,

slavery remained entrenched in the southern states and would only become more profitable and spread further to

the west and south during the late eighteenth and into the nineteenth century.

In 1775, the year the Revolutionary War began, Quakers founded the world’s first antislavery society in

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Quakers, also known as the Society of Friends, are a pacifist Christian sect that

believe all humans possess an inner light, that God dwells inside everyone. Consequently, most Quakers have

espoused historically controversial ideas of racial and gender equality, and viewed slavery as an immoral and

dehumanizing institution, despite the fact that some Quakers still owned slaves before the Revolution.

Following the Quaker’s example, at least thirteen of anti-slavery societies came into existence in America

by 1788. (5)

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The fight for liberty led some American slaveholders to free their slaves, and most northern states soon passed

gradual emancipation laws. (2) In 1777, Vermont created a new state constitution that outlawed slavery making it

first place in the New World to do so. Six years later, Massachusetts and New Hampshire also outlawed slavery

through judicial decisions. Further to the south, Pennsylvania passed a law outlining a process of gradual

emancipation that said that the children born after March 1, 1780 to mothers who were slaves would be

considered indentured servants and be completely free from their masters when they turned 28. New York and

New Jersey, where slavery was more prevalent, did not pass gradual emancipation laws until 1799 and 1804,

respectively. (Davis, 2006) While the state of Delaware would not abolish slavery until the passage of the

Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, 31 percent of its African American population were free by 1790 because of

the anti-slavery activism of Quakers and Methodists. (Carson, 2019)

Some manumissions also occurred in the Upper South, most notably in Virginia. In 1782, near the end of the

Revolution, the Virginia Assembly passed a law that removed restrictions on masters to free their slaves. The

next year, the Assembly freed any slaves who had fought on behalf of the Continental Army during the war.

These new laws led to the rapid growth of Virginia’s free black population. In 1780, there were 2,800 free black

people and by 1810 there were 30,000 living in Virginia. Virginia also banned the foreign importation of slaves

in 1778, though more out of fear of a growing black population and concern that a large surplus of slaves would

diminish the market value of those the state’s slaveholders already owned. (Ford, 2009) (1)

On the other hand, the Lower South, particularly South Carolina and Georgia, remained passionately committed

to the African slave trade and some masters in the region revoked their offers of freedom for war service while

others forced freed black people back into bondage. (2)

Perhaps the most significant step to address the issue of slavery taken by the Continental Congress under the

Articles of Confederation, and before the ratification of the new United States Constitution, was the passage of

the Northwest Ordinance in 1787, which organized new territory west of the Appalachian Mountains and north

of the Ohio River. The Northwest Ordinance also prohibited slaveholders from bring in slaves into the

Northwest Territory while permitting slaveholders who already lived in the area to maintain their human

property. (Carson, Lapansky-Werner & Nash, 2019) (1)

A map that shows the land in black designated as the

Northwest Territory by the Northwest Ordinance of

1787. The map also shows the years that individual

territories in the region were admitted into the union as

states.

Figure 4-7: Northwest territory usa 1787 by Unknown

is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported .

The Revolution’s rhetoric of equality also created a

“revolutionary generation” of slaves and free black

Americans that would eventually galvanize the

antislavery movement well into the nineteenth

century. (2) The growing class of free blacks established

their own social institutions including churches,

schools, and benevolent societies. Black people associated with these institutions fought for the manumission of

their less fortunate brothers and sisters, lobbied for an end to the slave trade and of the institution of slavery.

They rooted their arguments in the language of natural rights and democratic principles and became the

conscience of the nation. (3)

Although the rise of the free black population is one of the most notable achievements of the Revolutionary Era,

it is important to note that the overall impact of the Revolution on slavery had negative consequences. In rice-

growing regions of South Carolina and Georgia, the patriot victory confirmed the power of the master class.

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Doubts about slavery and legal modifications that occurred in the North and Upper South never took serious

hold among whites in the Lower South. Even in Virginia, the move toward freeing some slaves was made more

difficult by new legal restrictions in 1792. In the North, where slavery was on its way out, racism still persisted,

as in a Massachusetts law of 1786 that prohibited whites from legally marrying African Americans, Indians, or

people of mixed race. (5)

The Revolution clearly had a mixed impact on slavery and contradictory meanings for African Americans. (5) It

failed to reconcile slavery with these new egalitarian republican societies, a tension that eventually boiled over

in the 1830s and 1840s and effectively tore the nation in two in the 1850s and 1860s. (2)

Slavery and the Constitution In the summer of 1787, political leaders of the United States met in Philadelphia to debate the creation of a new

federal constitution to replace the Articles of Confederation. The Articles of Confederation reflected the ideals

of the revolutionary generation who distrusted concentrated power and wanted to create a new nation that in no

way resembled the monarchy they fought to overthrow. Ten years after America declared its independence from

Britain, the intractable problems and glaring weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation were on full display.

Rather than a strong union, the United States of America resembled thirteen separate countries each concerned

about its own sovereignty and well-being rather than that of the nation. Now that the Revolutionary War was

over, what common cause and purpose held the states together? The nation, it seemed, was fraying apart at the

seams, threatening to splinter into a series of regional confederacies rather than a united nation.

The ardent nationalists, such as Virginia’s James Madison, met in Philadelphia in 1787 to propose a new federal

constitution they hoped would create “a more perfect union.” They also had an opportunity to address the issue

of slavery directly and, perhaps, set it on a path toward extinction since it clearly violated the principles of the

American Revolution. Instead, the framers of the Constitution swept the problem of slavery under the rug with a

series of compromises demanded by representatives from southern states in exchange for their support of the

new constitution. These compromises ensured the constitutional protection of slavery while also setting the

stage for future divisive debates over slavery that would threaten to break the union apart along sectional lines.

Of all the compromises that formed the Constitution, perhaps none would be more important than the

compromise over the slave trade. Americans generally perceived the trans-Atlantic slave trade as more violent

and immoral than slavery itself. Many Northerners opposed it on moral grounds. But they also understood that

letting southern states import more Africans would increase their political power. The Constitution counted

each black individual as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation, so in districts with many slaves,

the white voters had extra influence.

On the other hand, the states of the Upper South also welcomed a ban on the Atlantic trade because they already

had a surplus of slaves. Banning importation meant slave owners in Virginia and Maryland could get higher

prices when they sold their slaves to states like South Carolina and Georgia that were dependent upon a

continued slave trade.

New England and the Deep South agreed to what was called a “dirty compromise” at the Constitutional

Convention in 1787. New Englanders agreed to include a constitutional provision that protected the foreign

slave trade for twenty years; in exchange, South Carolina and Georgia delegates had agreed to support a

constitutional clause that made it easier for Congress to pass commercial legislation. As a result, the Atlantic

slave trade resumed until 1808 when it was outlawed for three reasons. First, Britain was also in the process of

outlawing the slave trade in 1807, and the United States did not want to concede any moral high ground to its

rival. Second, the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), a successful slave revolt against French colonial rule in the

West Indies, had changed the stakes in the debate. The image of thousands of armed black revolutionaries

terrified white Americans. Third, the Haitian Revolution had ended France’s plans to expand its presence in the

Americas, so in 1803, the United States had purchased the Louisiana Territory from the French at a fire-sale

price. This massive new territory, which had doubled the size of the United States, had put the question of

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slavery’s expansion at the top of the national agenda. Many white Americans, including President Thomas

Jefferson, thought that ending the external slave trade and dispersing the domestic slave population would keep

the United States a white man’s republic and perhaps even lead to the disappearance of slavery.

The ban on the slave trade, however, lacked effective enforcement measures and funding. Moreover, instead of

freeing illegally imported Africans, the act left their fate to the individual states, and many of those states

simply sold intercepted slaves at auction. Thus, the ban preserved the logic of property ownership in human

beings. The new federal government protected slavery as much as it expanded democratic rights and privileges

for white men. (2)

Conclusion The Revolution brought change for some black people, although nothing approaching full equality. The

courageous military service of African Americans and the revolutionary spirit ended slavery in New England

almost immediately. The middle states of New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey adopted policies of gradual

emancipation from 1780 to 1804. Many of the founders opposed slavery in principle (including some whose

wealth was largely in human property). Individual manumissions increased following the Revolution.

Still, free blacks in both the North and South faced persistent discrimination in virtually every aspect of life,

notably employment, housing, and education. Many of the founders hoped that slavery would eventually

disappear in the American South. When cotton became king in the South after 1800, this hope died. There was

just too much profit to be made working slaves on cotton plantations. The statement of human equality in the

Declaration of Independence was never entirely forgotten, however. It remained as an ideal that could be

appealed to by abolitionists and civil rights activists through the following decades. (5)