Did the American Revolution Significantly Change the Condition and Status of Black Americans?

Did the American Revolution Significantly Change the Condition and Status of Black Americans?

The issue: Unlike the kings and queens in the monarchies of Europe, America’s founders emphasized notions of liberty, freedom, and equality. But slavery was a long-established institution throughout the United States at the outbreak of the American Revolution. How well did the young nation uphold the virtues it claimed for itself?

• Arguments that the American Revolution did significantly change the condition and status of black Americans: The American Revolution presents many challenges to the institution of slavery in the new nation of the United States. It is philosophically inconsistent for the rebellious Americans to hold slaves in a republic founded upon principles of liberty and equality. Cognizant of the contradiction between liberty and slavery, northern states have passed immediate or gradual emancipation laws. Many individual masters in the revolutionary era have freed their slaves, while other bondpeople have taken advantage of wartime opportunities to run away or join the military. The Revolution has produced a rising population of free blacks, especially in urban centers of the North. The condition and status of many black Americans has changed as a result of the Revolution.
• Arguments that the American Revolution has not significantly changed the condition and status of black Americans: At the same time, much remains the same for black Americans after the Revolution. The founding generation has missed several opportunities to purge slavery from American shores and, instead, has permitted the institution to grow and expand in the South. In the North, emancipation is proceeding at a painfully slow rate. Freed slaves have discovered that most white Americans are unwilling to accept them as equal members of society. They continue to encounter prejudicial attitudes and discrimination in their daily lives. The Revolution marks a tremendous lost opportunity to change the history of black Americans.

  Don't use plagiarised sources.Get your custom essay just from $11/page

  GET CUSTOM PAPER

Background

Among the “self-evident” truths Thomas Jefferson identified in the Declaration of Independence was that “all men are created equal.” Presented to the public on July 4, 1776, the declaration formally announced the American colonies’ separation from Great Britain and the formation of an independent United States. The United States was founded on a unique set of principles. Unlike the kings and queens in the monarchies of Europe, America’s founders emphasized notions of liberty, freedom, and equality. But how well did the young nation uphold the virtues it claimed for itself? Slavery was a long-established institution throughout the United States at the outbreak of the American Revolution. What did the Revolution and its high-minded ideals mean for black Americans?

Some argue that the Revolution was a particularly momentous event for black Americans. Northern states abolished slavery, and some masters surrendered to their consciences and made individual decisions to free their bondpeople. Many slaves seized upon the opportunities the Revolution provided to run away from bondage, sometimes by running to British lines or enlisting in the U.S. military. Revolutionary-era manumissions and runaways led to an explosion of America’s free black population in urban port cities such as Philadelphia.

Others suggest that the American Revolution changed little for black Americans. Slavery persisted for decades in much of the North and flourished across the South. Blacks who achieved their freedom during the Revolution met with prejudice and discrimination in white society. Despite some advances made during the Revolution, most black Americans found that the new nation failed to live up to the principles it claimed to espouse because the founders could not envision a truly multiracial society.

Background

In the 1750s, Great Britain was engaged in the process of building an overseas empire. In North America, it fought an alliance of French and Indians for control of the interior of the continent and emerged victorious. The French and Indian War came to a conclusion with the signing of the Treaty of Paris (1763), which expelled the French from mainland colonial North America and secured for Britain lands east of the Mississippi River and north into Canada.

As the French and Indian War was winding down, King George III ascended to the throne in Britain in 1760. Unlike his two royal predecessors who had ruled since 1714, George III took a much more active role in governing Britain’s American colonies. One of the most pressing issues the new king had to contend with was his country’s depleted finances. Thanks to prolonged warfare, Britain had incurred massive debts, and now it needed to pay for thousands of soldiers to defend its colonial American holdings. It seemed reasonable to George III to have the colonists help pay for the recent war and their own continued protection.

King George III implemented measures designed to benefit the British treasury, but at the cost of disaffecting his subjects in the American colonies. To avoid conflict with Native Americans in the trans-Appalachian West and reduce the need to construct and man forts in the region, the king imposed the Proclamation Line of 1763. The proclamation drew an imaginary line drawn down the spine of the Appalachian Mountains and prohibited colonial settlement beyond it to the west. Britain also instituted a series of taxes upon the colonists, the most onerous being the Stamp Act of 1765, which taxed virtually anything printed, whether newspapers, almanacs, diplomas, or legal documents. To the colonists, the new taxes imposed by Parliament seemed rather blatant attempts to extort money from them. For the several decades prior to the reign of King George III, the colonies had grown accustomed to taxing themselves through their own assemblies. Suddenly in the 1760s, the British Parliament was becoming increasingly intrusive, taxing colonists who had no power to elect a single representative to that legislative body. “No taxation without representation” became a rallying cry for the disenchanted colonists.

As the colonists participated in boycotts and popular protests, they also began reassessing their relationship to the mother country. Colonial American thinkers found the writings of English political philosopher John Locke particularly relevant to their situation. Locke had penned Two Treatises on Government many decades before, in 1690, to justify William and Mary’s overthrow of England’s King James II in the Glorious Revolution. Locke’s work presented the social contract theory of government. Locke argued in his social contract theory that human beings had “natural rights,” including the rights to life, liberty, and property. The express purpose of government, he explained, was to protect those rights. When government failed in its responsibility, by infringing upon or abusing the rights of the people, those living under that government reserved the right to overthrow their corrupt government and create a new one.

Locke’s social contract theory held revolutionary implications for the colonists in their dispute with Great Britain. In the Declaration of Independence, the document through which the colonists severed their political ties to Great Britain and created the United States of America, author Thomas Jefferson drew heavily upon Locke’s ideas. When Jefferson wrote in the declaration’s second paragraph that “all men” held “certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,” he was restating Locke. Jefferson quickly summarized the social contract theory when he wrote, “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government…likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

For Jefferson to proclaim in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal,” he either had to have been blind to the institution of slavery or referring to a subset of the overall population of the United States. Jefferson was himself a slaveholder, and slavery had flourished in the colonies for more than a century before he wrote those famous words. In asserting the equality of all, Jefferson discounted the roughly half a million Africans and African Americans living in the newly formed United States. A glaring omission by modern standards, excluding blacks from the polity in his own time would not have made Jefferson exceptional. The Revolutionary War, however, fought to secure and affirm American independence, interjected slavery into the political debates of the period. The colonists’ talk of natural rights, liberty, freedom, and equality held special interest to black Americans. Like whites, Africans and African Americans made sacrifices during the revolutionary era. Most famously, Crispus Attucks, purportedly an escaped mulatto slave who worked in the maritime trades, counted among the five Americans killed by British soldiers in the Boston Massacre of March 1770. But did the American Revolution substantially alter the condition and status of black Americans?

The Case that the American Revolution Did Significantly Change the Condition and Status of Black Americans

The American Revolution proved a watershed event in the history of slavery in the United States. State legislatures passed a number of antislavery laws, and masters inspired by revolutionary rhetoric sometimes freed their slaves in a process known as manumission. The language the American colonists used to rationalize their uprising against Great Britain held particular resonance for black Americans and imbued the Revolution with special meaning for them. The disruptions of wartime provided opportunities for African and African-American slaves to escape bondage either by lending their services to the fight or by running away. The combination of fugitives who fled to freedom and those granted it by their owners led to the rise of the first significant population of free blacks in the United States. In many ways, black Americans indeed experienced a revolution within the Revolution.

The American Revolution revealed troubling inconsistencies between the rhetoric of the founders and the reality of the society in which they lived. In their disputes with the crown, the American colonists frequently complained of British attempts to “enslave” them, to take away their liberties and impose their will upon them. Pamphlets and other colonial-era literature repeatedly invoked the notion of slavery as political metaphor, noting slavery’s incompatibility with a natural rights doctrine that stressed the freedom of the individual. The language employed by the American patriots highlighted the contradiction between liberty on one hand and slavery on the other.

The words the colonists used for polemical purposes in condemning British oppression—their comments expressing fear of their own political enslavement—could not help but call attention to the literal enslavement of Africans and African-Americans living in the colonies. Contemporary observers were aware of the irony. The British writer Samuel Johnson, loyal to his king, scoffed, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”¹ The Revolution thus presented an ideological challenge to slavery and forced the rebellious colonists to attempt to reconcile revolutionary principles of liberty, freedom, and equality with the social fact of bondage.

The revolutionary era witnessed the first major challenges to American slavery as first the colonies, then the states, took steps to confront the glaring contradiction. In 1774, the First Continental Congress ended the colonies’ participation in the transatlantic slave trade. No new slaves could legally arrive from Africa or the West Indies, and any discovered to have been smuggled in would be freed. In his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson condemned King George III for foisting slavery upon the colonists, encouraging the African slave trade, and urging slaves to defect to the British to take up arms against Americans. Though forced to purge this language from the final document, Jefferson still maintained that “all men are created equal.” Such prominent figures as Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and George Washington—all of whom owned slaves—publicly condemned the institution of slavery. The Northwest Ordinance, passed by the Confederation Congress in July 1787, prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory, consisting of the modern-day states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota.

After the United States declared its independence, individual states implemented various antislavery measures, either in their state constitutions or by law. Each one, North and South, outlawed the international slave trade by 1798, and at least in the North, slavery itself came under attack. Fewer slaves lived in the North than in the South, and they were less crucial to the functioning of the northern economy. Each of the northern states abolished slavery either immediately or gradually during or within a generation after the Revolution. Massachusetts and New Hampshire both provided for the immediate emancipation of slaves in 1783. Six years earlier and long before statehood in 1791, the independent republic of Vermont abolished slavery in its constitution of 1777. Northern state legislatures were more likely to abolish slavery gradually than immediately. Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey all passed gradual abolition laws that freed future generations of slaves once they reached adulthood. Pennsylvania passed the first of the five gradual emancipation laws in 1780. That legislation also freed any slave carried into the state after six months. By 1804, every single state north of Maryland and Delaware had implemented either an immediate or gradual emancipation measure. In addition, prior to the formal abolition of slavery in 1865, all states north of the Ohio River, Iowa, Minnesota, and the western states of California and Oregon all forbade slavery in their constitutions.

Many individual masters could not reconcile slaveholding with revolutionary principles and therefore elected to privately manumit, that is, free, their slaves during the war or shortly afterwards. Before the Revolution, laws in the southern colonies forbade or limited slaveholders’ ability to emancipate their slaves, even if so inclined. In many colonies, if masters desired to free a slave they were legally obligated to post prohibitively expensive bonds ensuring the freed person’s good behavior. During the Revolution, however, states began passing legislation to encourage private manumissions. State laws decreased the amount of money masters were required to post as bond or eliminated it altogether. In 1782, Virginia repealed a 1723 act that entirely prevented masters from freeing their slaves. By 1790 masters in every southern state except North Carolina could liberate their slaves if they so chose. Private acts of manumission during the revolutionary era were most numerous in Maryland and Virginia, the two states in which half of the United States’ black population resided in 1776. In the Upper South, the quantity of private manumissions threatened the very survival of slavery as an institution in Maryland and Delaware.

Like some revolutionary-era masters, slaves imbibed the philosophy of natural rights. As they watched white colonists protest British taxes, slaves appropriated the language of liberty for themselves and attached their own unique meaning to it. Enslavement framed a distinctive understanding of the Revolution that emphasized personal freedom. As a result, if a master reneged on promises of freedom, slaves might file freedom suits in court to gain their liberty. They sometimes sued for freedom by claiming descent from a white or Indian woman, for a child’s status as slave or free legally followed that of the mother. Tracing their ancestry in this way allowed them to show wrongful enslavement and thereby gain their liberty. Slaves in the revolutionary period sought redress not only through the judicial system but also through petitions to colonial and state legislatures. Very much aware of revolutionary rhetoric, blacks commonly petitioned on behalf of their own rights in the 1770s and 1780s.

If some slaves benefited from acts of private manumission, others took matters upon themselves during the Revolution by running away. Tens of thousands of slaves took advantage of wartime disruptions to abscond from their masters. Slaves fled to the northern states, to secluded southern swamps, to remote regions of the backcountry, to various Indian tribes such as the Cherokees or Creeks, to the Spanish in Florida, or aboard seagoing vessels. As many as 20,000 runaways escaped to British lines. In November 1775 Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, promised freedom to any slaves who fled their masters, joined the British, and took up arms against the American rebels. With the siege and surrender of Charleston, South Carolina, in 1780, British general Sir Henry Clinton echoed Dunmore’s pledge. Nearly 1000 blacks flocked to Dunmore’s ranks, and thousands of others escaped to British forces in Virginia, South Carolina, and elsewhere under the belief that they would be free at the conclusion of the war. According to Thomas Jefferson, there were 30,000 runaways in Virginia alone. South Carolina lost about one-quarter of its enslaved population amid the chaos of the Revolution, Georgia about two-thirds. Altogether, masters lost perhaps 100,000 slaves as a result of war, whether through runaways or death.

Slaves who absconded to the British met a variety of fates. Many who fled to the British died of illness, poor nutrition, or war injuries. Survivors were not always granted their freedom as promised. Some were re-enslaved in the Bahamas and parts of the British Caribbean. The British sent others to Spanish Florida and some 3000 to the Canadian maritime province of Nova Scotia. From there, British abolitionists helped relocate 1,000 former slaves to the African nation of Sierra Leone. Others migrated to London. Because most of the slaves who fled to British lines were young adult men, the enslaved population remaining in the United States included greater percentages of women, older slaves, and enslaved children than existed before the Revolution.

The lure of freedom meant that blacks who participated directly in the American Revolution more frequently fought on the British than on the American side of the conflict. Many slaves believed a British victory would bring emancipation for all bondpeople. Thus, when British forces occupied Philadelphia, slaves reported to the British, anxious to gain their freedom. A smaller number of slaves cast their lot with the patriot forces, but American military leaders initially resisted allowing slaves or free blacks to serve. Many commanding officers were large slaveholders themselves and feared the prospect of the Revolution unleashing a slave insurrection. Early on in the war, blacks most commonly aided the American cause as mariners on the high seas. They served in state militias only rarely and were barred from serving in the Continental Army. A patriot manpower shortage already evident by 1777, however, forced the Americans to re-evaluate their policies. Patriot forces began accepting black enlistments, but initially only in Maryland and the northern states. Prince, a slave belonging to a New Hampshire master, helped clandestinely row George Washington across the Delaware River under the cover of darkness Christmas night of 1776, contributing directly to the patriot cause in the Battle of Trenton. Rhode Island promised freedom to 250 slaves for their participation in the war effort. Connecticut and Rhode Island both created all-black regiments, but throughout the American Revolution, most blacks served in integrated units, usually laboring at menial tasks such as drumming or cooking rather than fighting on the battlefield. The U.S. Congress approved arming some 3000 black troops in South Carolina and Georgia, offering to compensate masters and liberate slaves upon completion of their service. South Carolina rejected the plan, however, fearful it would undermine the institution of slavery. Ultimately, approximately 5000 slaves served in the Continental Army. With the conclusion of hostilities, state legislatures took steps to liberate individual black soldiers who fought in the war and prevent their re-enslavement.

The combination of manumissions and runaways during the Revolution led to a striking demographic development: the staggering growth of a free black population in the United States. The number of free blacks—statistically insignificant before the Revolution—rose to 60,000 across the country by 1790. Free blacks counted as only 1.6 percent of the total population but almost 8 percent of the black population. Their numbers increased most dramatically in the Upper South and middle states, regions where private manumissions were more prevalent. Neither Delaware nor Maryland passed an immediate or gradual emancipation law; nevertheless, privately manumitted slaves contributed to the swelling of the free black population in those states. By 1790, Delaware boasted almost 3,900 free blacks, Maryland 8,000. Another 13,000 free blacks resided in Virginia, up from 1,800 just eight years earlier.

In the 1780s, Philadelphia emerged as the most important urban center for the nation’s free blacks. Thousands of freed slaves from the nearby Upper South states of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia made their way north to Pennsylvania’s largest city. Migration from the countryside to urban areas made sense for free blacks. In cities, especially port towns such as Philadelphia, New York, or Boston, work was more plentiful. The maritime trades provided employment to black men, while black women labored as domestics, laundresses, and seamstresses. In addition to finding economic opportunities, free blacks who congregated in the nation’s cities also developed a social and communal life. They could more readily find a spouse, construct families and households, and establish institutions such as churches and mutual aid societies to help ease the transition to freedom.

Adopting new names marked a personal sort of liberation and a statement of political assertion for the nation’s rising free black population. Whereas the relatively small numbers of free blacks in the Lower South kept the name of their former master to reap the benefits of a connection to an influential family, in the North and Upper South former slaves chose new names for themselves as they cast off their enslaved past. Naming patterns proved revealing. In deciding their own names, free blacks typically chose full English or biblical names. They avoided diminutive English names such as Bob for Robert or Bill for William, classical names such as Pompey or Caesar, as well as distinctly African names such as Cudjo. In selecting last names of their own, free blacks in the North and Upper South opted for common English surnames such as Smith, Brown, and Johnson. In Philadelphia and other northern locales, some free blacks chose the family names Freeman or Newman to sever symbolically their ties to slavery.

Many early American free blacks achieved success and notoriety. Benjamin Banneker, a free black from Maryland, was the mixed-race grandson of a white woman who liberated one of her slaves and married him. Banneker had a distinguished career as a mathematician and astronomer, publishing several almanacs in the 1790s. In Philadelphia, the free black sailmaker James Forten became one of the wealthiest black men in America. He used his fortune to advance equal rights for blacks and other social causes. When white churches in Philadelphia ignored blacks’ needs and discriminated against black congregants, two former slaves, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, spearheaded the formation of an independent black church in that city. Further north, in Massachusetts, sailor Paul Cuffe amassed a fortune in the shipping business and supported a plan for black colonization in Sierra Leone.

African-American historian Benjamin Quarles called the Revolutionary War “a black declaration of independence.” Many subsequent scholars have agreed. Gary Nash referred to the American Revolution as “the largest slave uprising in our history.”² There is much to commend their arguments. The American Revolution challenged the ideological foundations of slavery. Whites and blacks alike recognized the contradiction of slaveholding in a country founded upon principles of liberty, equality, and justice. To remedy that disjunction, northern states passed immediate or gradual emancipation laws, and many individual masters with nagging consciences manumitted their slaves. Slaves themselves took advantage of wartime opportunities to run away, serve militarily, and sue or petition for their rights. For black Americans, the United States was much different after the Revolution than before. Slavery had fallen under attack and was peacefully if slowly eradicated in the North. Northern slaves accounted for less than 6 percent of the nation’s total slave population in 1790. No longer was slavery a truly national institution but rather the peculiar institution of the South. The confinement of slavery below the Mason-Dixon Line and the parallel rise of a free black population that forged communities in the infant nation’s cities demonstrate just how dramatically the Revolution altered the American social landscape.

The Case that the American Revolution Did Not Significantly Change the Condition and Status of Black Americans

As author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson proclaimed that “all men are created equal,” but the American Revolution produced no egalitarian reality. Slavery expanded in the South, held in Chesapeake, and was eliminated only through excruciatingly slow processes in most of the North. Slaves fortunate enough to escape bondage in the revolutionary period found that emancipation did not bring equality with whites or freedom as whites understood it. For most black Americans, the Revolution did little to change their condition or status.

Despite the revolutionary-era assault on bondage, the manumissions, and the runaways, the institution of slavery persisted and thrived in the United States. America’s slave population had more than doubled in the thirty years leading up to the first national census in 1790, which found a total of more than 680,000 slaves across the country. In 1790, almost one in five Americans was held in bondage. The upward trajectory of the nation’s overall slave population continued, doubling between 1770 and 1810 and tripling between 1775 and 1825. The growth of the enslaved population was uneven, however. As it declined in the North and in Delaware, it expanded dramatically in southern states such as Virginia. The nearly 293,000 slaves in Virginia in 1790 marked an increase of one-third in only eight years. The loss of tens of thousands of slaves during the Revolutionary War heightened the resolve of southern states to preserve the bondpeople who remained. To compensate for wartime reductions, Georgia kept open the transatlantic slave trade until 1798, and South Carolina reopened it in 1803 after a sixteen-year hiatus. According to historian David Brion Davis, “Between 1790 and 1807 the United States imported more African slaves than during any twenty-year period of the colonial era.”³ More than 35,000 new arrivals were more than enough to compensate for wartime losses of human chattel. Through a combination of slave imports and natural reproduction, slavery became more entrenched in the South than ever. More human beings were forced into slavery during the revolutionary era than escaped it.

As the institution of slavery gained strength in the South, congressional delegates missed several opportunities to abolish slavery or stem its expansion. Under the Articles of Confederation, Congress received Quaker antislavery petitions in 1783 and 1785 requesting the termination of the international slave trade and the abolition of slavery itself, but it refused to act. Upon achieving independence from Great Britain by the Treaty of Paris (1783), British imperial policies that had inhibited westward migration, such as the Proclamation Line of 1763, no longer applied. The Indian lands in the Ohio and Tennessee River Valleys that the United States acquired were laid open to slavery. Thomas Jefferson submitted a proposal to exclude slavery from the trans-Appalachian West, both north and south of the Ohio River, but it fell one vote short of passage in 1784. By the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the Confederation Congress did prohibit slavery from the area north of the Ohio, but it freed no slaves already living there and did not contain any enforcement mechanism to prevent slaveholders from filtering in with their bondpeople. Despite the restriction on slavery in the Northwest Territory, hundreds of slaves lived in Illinois and Indiana for decades after the ordinance was enacted. Moreover, by excluding slavery north of the Ohio, the ordinance implied the legitimacy of slavery in the region to the south, in Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi.

The contradiction of slaveholding in the American republic was perhaps best personified in Thomas Jefferson, the slaveholder who wrote in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.” In Virginia, Jefferson proposed a bill in 1776 to emancipate slaves born in his state after passage of the act, and in 1783 he drafted a law to prevent the introduction of new slaves into Virginia and free all of those born after December 31, 1800. Neither measure passed, but both added to Jefferson’s antislavery bona fides. Simultaneously, however, over the course of his lifetime hundreds of slaves called Jefferson “master.” Despite revolutionary-era condemnations of slavery and a rising number of private manumissions, Jefferson liberated only eight total slaves (including five in his will), all relatives of Sally Hemings, the bondwoman with whom Jefferson carried on a long-term relationship. Like other masters across the South, Jefferson built his lifestyle on the backs of his slaves. Jefferson entertained extravagantly at Monticello; the finest French wines graced his table. The income Jefferson’s slaves generated only partly financed his lavish ways and profligate spending. To pay debts totaling in the millions in modern-day dollars at the time of his death, Jefferson’s will authorized the sale of 200 slaves at auction. That Jefferson’s public proclamations about slavery contradicted his own actions as a master did not set him apart from many of his slaveholding contemporaries.

The revolutionary-era fervor to manumit slaves proved fleeting, even among northern slaveholders. North or South, many masters relied economically on their slaves and resisted emancipating valuable bondpeople, and white Americans respected masters’ property rights in their slaves. As a result, emancipation was out of the question in the slave-rich South. Like other state assemblies in the South, the Virginia legislature in 1806 tightened its manumission policy, reversing the revolutionary trend toward liberalizing emancipation laws. Throughout most of the North, emancipation could proceed only gradually. Gradual emancipation laws in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, and New Jersey freed no slaves at the time of passage and only emancipated enslaved children once they reached adulthood. Pennsylvania, which in 1780 enacted the first gradual emancipation statute, required the registration of existing slaves and liberated the children born to them upon attaining the age of twenty-eight. Any enslaved infant born in Pennsylvania before March 1, 1780, however, still faced a lifetime of servitude. Rhode Island freed children born to slaves after March 1, 1784, but bound them until the age of twenty-one if male, eighteen if female. Such gradual emancipation schemes lessened the economic impact of losing a slave. Laws that bound slaves until their late teens or twenties permitted masters the right to extract labor from their bondpeople for several productive years. That appropriation of slaves’ time served to compensate masters for the impending loss of their labor.

In 1804, New Jersey became the last of the northern states to pass a gradual emancipation law, but it took several more decades to make freedom a reality for thousands. Combined, New York and New Jersey—the two northern states with the largest slave populations—held 33,000 bondpeople in 1800. By 1820, this figure was reduced by almost half, but 17,000 slaves still lived there. As late as 1840, more than 1100 slaves resided in the northern states, almost 60 percent of them in New Jersey. In even the North, liberation for slaves unfolded slowly and unevenly.

Most white Americans were unprepared to welcome emancipated slaves into free society. They viewed blacks as inherently inferior and could not accept them as equals. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, published in 1784, Thomas Jefferson gave voice to the widespread racial stereotypes that he shared with many of his contemporaries. Jefferson described blacks as, by nature, both physically and mentally inferior to whites. The racial differences between blacks and whites he found so evident precluded the possibility of harmonious coexistence. Jefferson furthermore considered free blacks a dangerous element within society. He feared that emancipated slaves, filled with fresh memories of the horrors of bondage, might seek vengeance upon whites and ignite a race war. In the 1790s, Jefferson’s nightmare of black insurrection became reality on the French Caribbean island of St. Domingue. There, a slave uprising culminated in the overthrow of the European colonizers and the creation of Haiti, the first independent black republic in the Western Hemisphere. Pervasive fears of such a rebellion in the United States prompted some negrophobic whites to question whether freed slaves should be allowed to live in their midst. They preferred expelling blacks to living in proximity to them. In 1776, Thomas Jefferson’s proposal to emancipate Virginia’s slaves included provisions for their removal from the state. Jefferson clearly did not want free blacks residing in Virginia, but the state’s revolutionary-era manumission law allowed them to stay. In 1806, however, the law changed, requiring Virginia’s emancipated slaves to leave the state within a year. Only with special legislative permission could they be allowed to remain. Anxieties over the presence of freed blacks also inspired various proposals for colonization abroad, most often in Africa. Commonly held white racial attitudes prevented the assimilation of blacks and the formation of a genuinely biracial society in early America.

Early American blacks experienced discriminatory treatment in many facets of their lives—social, economic, and political. The American Revolution inspired some degree of racial goodwill, but white racial attitudes hardened after the 1780s. In the North, hostilities toward free blacks increased as emancipated slaves established their own churches, schools, and mutual aid societies, even though blacks were often excluded from equivalent white institutions. Many northern whites also feared a flood of free blacks inundating urban areas such as Philadelphia in search of work. Free blacks were denied many employment opportunities and typically relegated to menial jobs. Economically strapped free black parents in Philadelphia frequently indentured their children to more affluent, white families, often until the age of twenty-eight. These indentured free blacks experienced a degree of unfreedom that resembled slavery. Barred from many occupations, free blacks were also frequently excluded from the body politic. Most states North and South passed legislation denying them suffrage. Free blacks could vote in only five of the original thirteen states: New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and North Carolina. Other laws prevented free blacks from sitting on juries or testifying against whites. Free blacks also had to register in their county of residence and were restricted in their ability to travel. Even in the North, unwary free blacks risked kidnapping by unscrupulous whites who sold them into slavery. Although free, emancipated slaves did not share full citizenship rights with white Americans.

The American Revolution briefly called slavery into question but ultimately left much unchanged for black Americans. Slavery continued to flourish as even founders with seeming antislavery credentials such as Thomas Jefferson failed in practice to live up to revolutionary ideals. No immediate or gradual emancipation laws passed in southern legislatures, and in most of the North, manumission proceeded at a snail’s pace. Moreover, the growing free black population of the United States that emerged in the wake of the Revolution achieved a quasi-freedom without gaining all the rights white Americans enjoyed. The American Revolution marks a missed opportunity in the history of race relations in the United States. When Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal,” he was referring to whites, as blacks did not become equal citizens of the American republic.

Outcome and Impact

General George Washington’s defeat of Great Britain’s Lord Cornwallis at the Battle of Yorktown in 1781 marked the last major engagement of the American Revolution. It was the victory the United States needed to drive Britain to the bargaining table and draw the war to a close. By the Treaty of Paris (1783), the American Revolution came to a formal conclusion, Britain recognized American independence, and the United States acquired land from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River. America’s expanding boundaries made additional room for slavery. Although the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 prohibited slavery north of the Ohio River, it suggested that the region to the south was ripe for settlement by masters and their slaves. With the advent of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin in the 1790s, a mechanical contraption that simplified the process of extracting the seed from the cotton fiber, the cotton frontier was able to spread from east to west across the Deep South states of Alabama, Mississippi, and beyond over the next several decades. The American Revolution dealt slavery a glancing blow, but in actuality paved the way for the expansion of the institution.

What if…

The Revolution inspired a range of antislavery statutes. Absent the ideological conundrum slavery posed to liberty-loving Americans in the revolutionary context, the northern states may not—or may not as quickly—have passed the immediate or gradual emancipation laws they did. The American Revolution lent philosophical impetus to the antislavery cause. Without an independent United States, Great Britain may have overturned any manumission laws passed by colonial legislatures.

Had Britain defeated the rebellious colonists, the fate of slavery would have been uncertain. British imperial policies had the effect of retarding the westward expansion of American colonists, confining them to the strip of land east of the Appalachian Mountains. King George III opposed incurring the additional expenses of constructing western garrisons and manning the forts with soldiers. Masters may have been unable or unwilling to carry their slaves into a dangerous, unprotected frontier region, and slavery may have stagnated along the eastern seaboard.

Eventually Great Britain made the institution of slavery illegal throughout its empire in 1834, more than three decades before the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution freed those blacks still enslaved in the American South. At first glance, it seems obvious that American slaves would have gained their freedom much more quickly had they remained under the British imperial umbrella. But could the British Parliament have passed the Emancipation Act of 1833 if the American colonies remained within its empire? Britain successfully enacted its emancipation program because the funds were available to compensate masters deprived of their slaves under the law. The government paid masters a fair value for the slaves they freed, sparing slaveholders economic hardship due to liberating their bondpeople. With approximately two million additional slaves to pay for in the American South, Britain’s compensated emancipation program may very well have proven prohibitively costly. Had southern slaves also been included in Britain’s emancipation policy, expenses would likely have risen 150 percent, from 20 million to roughly 50 million pounds.

A similar program of compensated emancipation seemed not to occur to revolutionary-era legislators in the United States. Many masters voluntarily manumitted their slaves during the Revolution, but a compensation program would certainly have increased the tally. Providing masters compensation for liberating their slaves would have been the only way to avoid violating sacrosanct principles of private property. Any such governmental program, however, would have been economically devastating to an infant nation already in dire financial straits. Historian Gary Nash calculated that if 600,000 slaves were emancipated at an average cost of $150 each, the $90 million expense (more than $2 billion in today’s dollars) would have placed an incredible economic strain on the country. Sales of the valuable lands in the trans-Appalachian West the United States acquired after the Revolution might have compensated masters who freed their bondpeople. Yet without their slaves, masters would have considered western lands less valuable since they had no one to work it. With no compensated emancipation plan in place in the United States, slavery continued to grow and expand despite the momentary possibilities of the revolutionary period.

Bibliography

Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998. One of the major works on the history of slavery in early America. Part III examines slaves and free blacks in the revolutionary era.

———-, and Ronald Hoffman, eds. Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983. A brilliant collection of essays from many of the leading scholars of Africans and African Americans in the revolutionary era.

Davis, David Brion. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Chapter seven, “The Problem of Slavery in the American Revolution.” Offers perhaps the most concise, informative account available on the subject.

——-. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975. Examines the antislavery movement during and after the American Revolution in Atlantic perspective.

Finkelman, Paul. Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1996. The fifth and sixth chapters, on Thomas Jefferson, supply a pointed critique of those scholars who tout the sage of Monticello’s antislavery credentials.

Frey, Sylvia R. Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Examines relations between masters, slaves, and the British in the revolutionary South.

MacLeod, Duncan J. Slavery, Race and the American Revolution. London: Cambridge University Press, 1974. One of the earlier book-length accounts of the failure of the American Revolution to live up to its rhetoric.

Nash, Gary B. Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720-1840. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. A detailed look at the development of a free black community in a city that straddled the North and the South.

———-. Race and Revolution. Madison, Wis.: Madison House, 1990. A collection of three essays written for the Merrill Jensen Lectures in Constitutional Studies at the University of Wisconsin, one of which criticizes the North for failing to do more to eradicate slavery. Includes nineteen primary source documents.

Quarles, Benjamin. The Negro in the American Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961. The pioneering book on African Americans in the Revolution.

White, Shane. Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770-1810. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991. An excellent case study of emancipation in a major northern city.

Footnotes

(1) Quoted in David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 144.

(2) Benjamin Quarles, “The Revolutionary War as a Black Declaration of Independence,” in Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, eds. Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983), xv, 283; Gary B. Nash, Race and Revolution (Madison, Wis.: Madison House, 1990), 57.

(3) David Brion Davis, “American Slavery and the American Revolution,” in Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, 265.