But increasingly the connection was made. Samuel Cooke, in his Massachusetts election sermon of 1770, argued that in tolerating Negro slavery “we, the patrons of liberty, have dishonored the Christian name, and degraded human nature nearly to a level with the beasts that perish,” and he devoted most of his text to “the cause of our African slaves.” Pointing out that God “is no respecter of persons,” he begged the assembled leaders of Massachusetts to take the initiative in this cause of the oppressed so relevant to their own more immediate cause. And Benjamin Rush, in a sweeping condemnation of slavery, “On Slave-Keeping” (1773), begged “Ye advocates for American liberty” to rouse themselves and “espouse the cause of humanity and general liberty.” Bear a testimony, he wrote in the language of the Quakers, “against a vice which degrades human nature … The plant of liberty is of so tender a nature that it cannot thrive long in the neighborhood of slavery. Remember, the eyes of all Europe are fixed upon you, to preserve an asylum for freedom in this country after the last pillars of it are fallen in every other quarter of the globe.”9
By 1774 this cry had become a commonplace in the pamphlet literature of the northern and middle colonies. How can we “reconcile the exercise of SLAVERY with our professions of freedom,” Richard Wells, “a citizen of Philadelphia,” demanded to know. There was no possible justification for the institution, he said. If, as some claimed, the slaves were bought from those who had a right to sell them, where are the titles to prove it? Even a convict who clearly “has forfeited his life to the laws of his country and is respited for transportation” has papers that show his just condemnation. And if the claim that we are inflicting just punishment on Africans for crimes committed in their native lands (“which is the last wretched argument … advocates for slavery insist on”) could be substantiated, what would it prove except that the colonists had become “executioners [for] an Ethiopian savage government”? The only claim the Americans had over the Africans is the claim of “force and power”; and that being the case, “what arguments can we advance in their favor which will not militate against ourselves, whilst England remains superior by land and by sea?” A remonstrance against the slave trade by the forthcoming Continental Congress and a pledge by the colonists not to import or buy slaves, would, he declared, “breathe such an independent spirit of liberty, and so corroborate our own claims that I should dare to hope for an intervening arm of Providence to be extended in our favor.” He concluded by reviewing the laws of manumission passed in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New Jersey.
Even more vigorous and more harshly abusive of the hypocrisy of colonial claims in the face of domestic slavery was the Baptist preacher and pamphleteer, John Allen. The “iniquitous and disgraceful practice of keeping African slaves,” he wrote in The Watchman’s Alarm, was a total abomination; it violated God’s laws, the charter of Massachusetts, the natural and inalienable rights of mankind, and the laws of society and humanity.
Blush ye pretended votaries for freedom! ye trifling patriots! who are making a vain parade of being advocates for the liberties of mankind, who are thus making a mockery of your profession by trampling on the sacred natural rights and privileges of Africans; for while you are fasting, praying, nonimporting, nonexporting, remonstrating, resolving, and pleading for a restoration of your charter rights, you at the same time are continuing this lawless, cruel, inhuman, and abominable practice of enslaving your fellow creatures …
It would not be surprising, he warned, if the Africans too took heart from the Biblical injunction to “loose the bands of wickedness, undo the heavy burdens, let the oppressed go free.” They had far greater reason than their masters to do so, for “what is a trifling three-penny duty on tea compared to the inestimable blessings of liberty to one captive?” Joyfully he celebrated those “sincere friends to the rights and liberties of mankind” who were known to have freed their slaves.
As the crisis deepened and Americans elaborated their love of liberty and their hatred of slavery, the problem posed by the bondage tolerated in their midst became more and more difficult to evade. What were they to say to the Englishmen who told them flatly to “put away the accursed thing (that horrid oppression) from among them, before they presumed to implore the interposition of divine justice: for, whilst they retain their brethren … in the most shameful involuntary servitude, it is profane in them to look up to the merciful Lord of all, and call Him father!” And what reply could Bostonians give to the Loyalist printer John Mein who denounced their hypocrisy in “ground[ing] their rebellions on the ‘immutable laws of nature’” and yet (“It cannot be! It is nevertheless very true”) themselves owned two thousand Negro slaves? Some found at least a partial excuse in pointing out, with Jefferson, that repeated attempts by certain colonies to ban the slave trade or tax it out of existence had met resounding vetoes in England so that the good of the colonies and the rights of human nature had been sacrificed to “the immediate advantages of a few African corsairs.”10
But the excuse was weak, and in any case something more than excuses was needed. Action was called for to restrict “the cruel and barbarous slave trade” and to alleviate the sufferings of the “oppressed and injured Africans.” And something even more than that was called for by preachers in the North devoted to the covenant theology: repentance, expiation, for sins so long committed. It was on this note, and with the explicit refutation of Locke’s justification of slavery as a proper alternative to condemning criminals to death, that the pre-Revolutionary discussion of chattel slavery in the context of Revolutionary ideology climaxed and concluded. Two powerful pamphlets entirely devoted to the subject of slavery, written by two close friends in the Congregational ministry, presented a broad range of antislavery arguments explicitly associated with Revolutionary ideology and centered on key doctrines of neo-Puritan theology. The first originated as a sermon delivered in Farmington, Connecticut, in 1774 on the eve of the meeting of the first Continental Congress. The preacher, Levi Hart, of the village of Griswold, prefaced his remarks by explaining that his aim was “to treat the subject only in a moral and religious view”; he would not pretend to pronounce on politics. But his sermon was a jeremiad in form typical of the sulphurous denunciations and exhortations by which the Puritan clergy had sought, since the end of the seventeenth century, to keep its version of orthodoxy relevant to the vital public affairs of the society.
He began by sharply contrasting liberty and slavery and by offering a variety of definitions of liberty, from which he concluded that any society that permits its members to deprive innocent people of their liberty or property was guilty of tyranny and oppression. Consider then the crime, the sin, involved in the toleration of and connivance in “the horrible slave trade” by the public in the British colonies. If facts did not compel him to, he said, he “could never believe that British Americans would be guilty of such a crime.” It had no justification whatever. The idea that slavery was a just and generous substitute for a deserved death penalty was irrelevant to the American situation, whatever its merits as a theory might be. “What have the unhappy Africans committed against the inhabitants of the British colonies and islands in the West Indies to authorize us to seize them, or bribe them to seize one another, and transport them a thousand leagues into a strange land, and enslave them for life?” It was now “high time for this colony to wake up and put an effectual stop to the cruel business of stealing and selling our fellow men.” For how, when the colonists themselves “are the tyrants,” could they plead for freedom? “What inconsistence and self-contradiction is this! … When, O when shall the happy day come, that Americans shall be consistently engaged in the cause of liberty?” Only on that day will American liberties be established on a lasting foundation, for only on that day will “the hard bondage of sin and satan” be thrown off and “the most perfect liberty” be enjoyed. Christ alone is “the giver and supporter of original, perfect freedom.” So, then, be wise in season,
bid adieu to the kingdom of dar
kness, the cause of tyranny and oppression, enlist under the captain of the Lord’s host, fight under his banner, you may be sure of victory, and liberty shall be your lasting reward, for whom the Son maketh free shall be free indeed.11
But it was left to Hart’s friend and mentor, Samuel Hopkins, student of Jonathan Edwards, rigorous theologian and powerful advocate of his own, “Hopkinsian,” version of predestinarian Calvinism, to make the final statement, and to link most securely the religious and secular underpinnings of antislavery. Hopkins’ interest in the cause of the Negro had been kindled much earlier, when he had first come to see the social meaning of his doctrines of “disinterested benevolence” and “general atonement.” For several years after his arrival in Newport, Rhode Island, he worked to free the slaves of masters near at hand; in 1770 he undertook the training of Negro missionaries to be sent to Africa as part of a scheme of colonization he promoted with his friend Ezra Stiles. The crisis of American affairs demanded a full clarification of his ideas, for he believed the cause of the colonies and the cause of emancipation to be indissolubly united. Hopkins’ explanation came in 1776 in a sixty-three page pamphlet entitled A Dialogue Concerning the Slavery of Africans; Shewing It To Be the Duty and Interest of the American Colonies To Emancipate All the African Slaves …
He painted a vivid and affecting picture of the reality of Negro slavery; the viciousness of the slave trade, corrupting to both slavers and enslaved; the horrors of the transportation and marketing of the Negroes; and their treatment on the American plantations. Methodically he examined the common arguments in defense of the practice, rejecting as nonsense both the idea that slavery was a means of bringing Christianity to the heathens, and the notion that a “forfeiture” was somehow involved in their bondage. The Negroes, he said, have “never forfeited their liberty or given anyone the right to enslave and sell them.” Yet they are held in bondage by those whose own struggle for liberty they daily witness and whose heroic pronouncements that slavery is worse than death they must continuously hear. “Oh, the shocking, the intolerable inconsistence! … This gross, barefaced, practiced inconsistence.” The slavery we complain of “is lighter than a feather compared to their heavy doom, and may be called liberty and happiness when contrasted with the most abject slavery and inutterable wretchedness to which they are subjected.” Our so-called Sons of Liberty: what are they but oppressors of thousands “who have as good a claim to liberty as themselves, [and] are shocked with the glaring inconsistence”? For such a sin, he concluded, multiplied in its evil by the indifference that surrounds it, we are under divine judgment. In such a state, only calamities will attend our efforts. Our cause will never triumph until the evil is expunged, until repentance and restitution are truly made. For the struggle for liberty in America can prosper only under God’s protection, and that will never fully be granted while the enslavement of the Negroes continues. If we persist, Hopkins warned, the vengeance of God will be upon us: He will withdraw from us such protection as He has so far given, and “punish us seven times more.” The guilt was universal; let repentance be so too.12
Such ideas were weapons. By July of 1776 much had already been done to extend the reign of liberty to the enslaved Negroes. In Massachusetts, efforts had been made as early as 1767 to abolish the slave trade, and in 1771 and 1774 the legislature voted conclusively to do so but was rebuffed by the governor’s veto. In the same year the Continental Congress pledged itself to discontinue the slave trade everywhere, while Rhode Island, acknowledging that “those who are desirous of enjoying all the advantages of liberty themselves should be willing to extend personal liberty to others,” ruled that slaves imported into the colony would thereafter automatically become free. Connecticut did the same; Delaware prohibited importation; and Pennsylvania taxed the trade out of existence. There, too, in 1775, the Quakers, long the most outspoken advocates of emancipation though not leaders in the Revolutionary movement, formed the first antislavery society in the Western world. In the South there was at least a general acquiescence in the Congress’ inclusion of the slave trade in the nonimportation program and satisfaction on the part of many when in April 1776 Congress fulfilled its earlier pledge and voted “that no slaves be imported into any of the thirteen colonies.”13
The institution of chattel slavery was not dead, even in the North, nor would it be for many years to come; critics of the Declaration of Independence would continue to join with Thomas Hutchinson in condemning the apparent hypocrisy of a people who declared that all men were created equal, endowed with inalienable rights, and yet deprived “more than an hundred thousand Africans of their rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and in some degree to their lives.” But it had been subjected to severe pressure as a result of the extension of Revolutionary ideas, and it bore the marks ever after. As long as the institution of slavery lasted, the burden of proof would lie with its advocates to show why the statement “all men are created equal” did not mean precisely what it said: all men, “white or black.”14
2. ESTABLISHMENT OF RELIGION
Whatever one’s views of sin and retribution, in strictly secular terms the “shocking, the intolerable inconsistence” of chattel slavery could not be denied: in many minds the cause of emancipation came naturally and logically to be associated with the defense of American liberty against the encroachments of the English government. Yet nothing shows the protean, uncontrollable character of the Revolutionary movement more clearly than the position in which certain of the spokesmen for antislavery found themselves in regard to another issue which also took fire in the heat of the Revolution. For if Otis and Cooke, Hart and Hopkins were fervent in the struggle against chattel slavery, they were members, if not leaders, of churches in some degree established, and these, to others, were as inconsistent as slavery with the logic of Revolutionary thought, “Freedom from Civil and Ecclesiastical Slavery” being both, one pamphlet proclaimed in its title, “the Purchase of Christ.”15
The establishment of religion had been a problem for Americans almost from the first years of settlement. Though most of the early settlers had carried with them traditional assumptions concerning the state’s responsibility for supervising and enforcing orthodox religious institutions, and though most of the original communities had sought to recreate ecclesiastical establishments, there had been difficulties from the start. In some places, as in Virginia, trouble was created by the physical circumstances of the situation: the scattering of population and the distance from ecclesiastical centers in Europe. Elsewhere, as in Massachusetts, where the physical circumstances were favorable, the very intensity of religious motivation and the desire to specify and enforce a letter-perfect orthodoxy led to schismatic challenges to the establishment. Still elsewhere, as in New York, the sheer diversity of religious persuasions in the population made the establishment of any one church problematic.
Only rarely in the settlement period, however, were difficulties created by anti-establishment principles, and only in one colony, Pennsylvania, did systematic, principled opposition to establishments survive to shape the character of instituted religion in the eighteenth century. Elsewhere the pattern of establishments in religion, like that of so many other areas of life in the colonies, was the result of unsystematic, incomplete, pragmatic modifications of a traditional model. By the 1750’s so irregular, so ill-defined, and so quickly shifting were the religious establishments in the various colonies that they defy a simple summary. In the Virginia of Jefferson’s youth, the Church of England was established; but the law requiring nonconformist organizations to register with the government was often ignored, especially in the western counties where the settlement of dissenters was actively promoted by the government; nonconformists were not barred from their own worship nor penalized for failure to attend the Anglican communion, and they were commonly exempted from parish taxes. Dissent within Protestantism excluded no one from voting or from holding public office: even Roman Catholics were known to occupy government po
sts despite the laws that excluded them. And Virginia’s was one of the more conservative establishments. The effective privileges of the Church of England were at least as weak in South Carolina and Georgia; they hardly existed in North Carolina. There was scarcely a vestige of them in the middle colonies, and where they had survived in law, as in four counties of New York, they were either ignored or had become embattled by violent opposition well before the Revolution. And in Massachusetts and Connecticut, where the establishment, being nonconformist according to English law, was legally tenuous to begin with, tolerance in worship and relief from church taxation had been extended to the major dissenting groups early in the century, resulting well before the Revolution in what John Adams described as “the most mild and equitable establishment of religion that was known in the world, if indeed [it] could be called an establishment.”16 And this had been further weakened by the splintering effect of the Great Awakening. Almost everywhere the Church of England, the established church of the highest state authority, was defensive, driven to rely more and more on its missionary arm, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, to sustain it against the cohorts of dissent.
That establishments of such irregularity and weakness should have come under fire at all is a measure of the contagiousness of Revolutionary thought. There had been deliberate opposition to establishments before the Revolution, but it had been scattered and ineffective. In Virginia, challenges had been made as early as the 1740’s by itinerant New Light Presbyterian preachers who shaped a spontaneous, formless outpouring of evangelical fervor into articulate defiance of ecclesiastical law. In Connecticut and Massachusetts the religious awakening of the mid-century had spawned uncontrollable groups of “Separates,” strict Congregationalists who believed their evangelicalism to be the only true orthodoxy and who therefore refused to accept the legal benefits available to officially recognized dissenters; they had attacked the establishment with all the arguments they could muster: arguments from “the Bible, natural law, the rights of Englishmen, covenants, charters, and statutes.” Claiming liberty of conscience to be an “unalienable right of every rational creature,” they had often preferred to suffer imprisonment and loss of property rather than to pay taxes in support of a church not their own; some had ended by advocating explicitly the complete separation of church and state.17
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution Page 31