These Truths

by Jill Lepore

  42.John Harpham, “The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery,” PhD thesis, Harvard University, 2018, ch. 2.

  43.Quoted in Harpham, “Intellectual Origins of American Slavery,” 28, 32.

  44.Harpham, “Intellectual Origins of American Slavery,” 34.

  45.Quoted in Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 5. For slavery, broadly, see also Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture; Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); Peter Kolchin, American Slavery 1619–1877 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993); Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

  46.Quoted in Stanley Engerman, Seymour Drescher, and Robert Paquette, eds., Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 105–13.

  47.Quoted in A. Leon Higginbotham Jr., Shades of Freedom: Racial Politics and Presumptions of the American Legal Process (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 18–27.

  48.Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York: Norton, 2008), 45.

  49.“Massachusetts Body of Liberties of 1641,” in The Colonial Laws of Massachusetts, ed. W. H. Whitmore (Boston, 1890), clause 91 on 53.

  50.Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: Norton, 1988), chs. 3 and 4.

  51.Ibid., 72–87.

  52.John Milton, Areopagitica: A Speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicens’d Printing, to the Parliament of England (London, 1644), 30.

  53.Roger Williams to the Town of Providence, January 15, 1655, in The Complete Writings of Roger Williams, 7 vols. (New York: Russell and Russell, 1963), 6:278–79.

  54.William Penn, The Frame of the Government of the Province of Pennsilvania [sic] in America (London, 1682), 11.

  55.Although the Second Treatise was not published until 1689–90, Locke wrote parts of it in or around 1682, including the chapter “Of Property,” at a time when he was revising The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina. David Armitage, “John Locke, Carolina, and the ‘Two Treatises of Government,’” Political Theory 32 (2004): 602–27.

  56.“Charter of Carolina and Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina,” in The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and Other Organic Laws, 5:2743, 2783–84.

  57.Armitage, “John Locke, Carolina, and the ‘Two Treatises of Government.’”

  58.Sir Thomas More, Utopia, ed. Edward Surtz (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964), 76.

  59.Armitage, “John Locke, Carolina, and the ‘Two Treatises of Government.’” And, broadly, see also John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), and Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations of John Locke’s Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

  60.Great Newes from the Barbadoes, or, A True and Faithful Account of the Grand Conspiracy of the Negroes Against the English (London: Printed for L. Curtis, 1676), 9–10; Nathaniel Saltonstall, A New and Further Narrative of the State of New-England (London, 1676), 71–74; Lepore, The Name of War, 167–68. And see also Stephen Saunders Webb, 1676: The End of American Independence (New York: Knopf, 1984).

  61.Christine Daniels, “‘Without Any Limitacon of Time’: Debt Servitude in Colonial America,” Labor History 36 (1995): 232–50.

  62.Quoted in Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 97.

  63.Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (New York: Knopf, 1998), quotations on 58–59.

  64.“A Full and Particular Account of the Negro Plot in Antigua,” New-York Weekly Journal, March 28, April 4, April 11, April 18, April 25, 1737. And see David Barry Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels: A Study of Master-Slave Relations in Antigua (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 3–62. I discuss some of these episodes and write, broadly, on fears of Indian wars and slave rebellions and their influence on the origins of American politics in Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (New York: Knopf, 2005).

  65.New-York Weekly Journal, March 28, 1737; Pennsylvania Gazette, October 19 and 20, 1738.

  66.Quoted in Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York: Viking, 2001), 238.

  67.On Stono, see Peter Wood, Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: Norton, 1974); Peter Charles Hoffer, Cry Liberty: The Great Stono River Slave Rebellion of 1739 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Jack Shuler, Calling Out Liberty: The Stono Slave Rebellion and the Universal Struggle for Human Rights (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009).

  68.“An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing Negroes,” 1740, in David J. McCord, ed., The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, 22 vols. (Columbia, SC: A. S. Johnston, 1840), 7:397.

  69.Most usefully, see Charles E. Clark, The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo-American Culture, 1665–1740 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

  70.On Jane Franklin, and on her relationship with her brother, see Carl Van Doren, Jane Mecom, the Favorite Sister of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Viking, 1950), and Jill Lepore, Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin (New York: Knopf, 2013). Much of their correspondence is reproduced in The Letters of Benjamin Franklin and Jane Mecom, ed. Carl Van Doren (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950), but here I instead cite the online PBF. Van Doren refers to Jane Franklin throughout, by her married name, Jane Mecom; but for clarity I here refer to her throughout as Jane Franklin.

  71.Cotton Mather quoted in J. A. Leo Lemay, The Life of Benjamin Franklin, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 1:114. And see Perry Miller, introduction to The New-England Courant: A Selection of Certain Issues (Boston: Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1956), 5–9; and Thomas C. Leonard, The Power of the Press: The Birth of American Political Reporting (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), ch. 1.

  72.John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Cato’s Letters: Or, Essays on Liberty, 4 vols. (4th ed.; London: W. Wilkins et al., 1737), Letter No. 15, 1:96.

  73.Benjamin Franklin, “Apology for Printers,” Pennsylvania Gazette, June 10, 1731.

  74.Hobbes, Leviathan, 64.

  75.Lepore, New York Burning, preface. My brief discussion here of Zenger’s trial and the 1741 slave conspiracy follows this earlier, book-length account of these same two signal events.

  76.Ibid., xii–xvii.

  77.Ibid., ch. 4.

  78.Ibid., xii–xvi.

  79.Ibid., xi–xii, 89–90.

  80.Benjamin Franklin to Richard Partridge, May 9, 1754, and The Albany Plan of Union, 1754, PBF. See also Taylor, American Colonies, 424–28.

  81.Benjamin Franklin, “A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge,” May 14, 1743, PBF.

  82.Alexander Hamilton, Gentleman’s Progress: The Itinerarium of Dr. Alexander Hamilton, 1744, ed. Carl Bridenbaugh (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1948), 199.

  83.Quoted in Albert David Belden, George Whitefield, the Awakener (New York: Macmillan, 1953), 4–5.

  84.Gilbert Tennent, A Solemn Warning to the Secure World, from the God of Terrible Majesty (Boston, 1735), 102.

  85.Benjamin Franklin, “Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, &c.,” 1751, PBF.

  86.Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, PBF.

  Three: OF WARS AND REVOLUTIONS

  1.Benjamin Lay, All Slave-Keepers (Philadelphia: B. Franklin, 1738), 16, 61, 271.

  2.“To be SOLD, by Benjamin Lay,” advertisement, American Weekly Mercury, October 19, 1732. And on Lay’s reading practices, see Marcus Rediker, The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017), ch. 5.


  3.Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 21.

  4.Roberts Vaux, Memoirs of the Lives of Benjamin Lay and Ralph Sandiford: Two of the Earliest Public Advocates for the Emancipation of the Enslaved Africans (Philadelphia, 1815), 1–55. Rediker, Fearless Benjamin Lay, 2.

  5.Advertisement for All Slave-Keepers [“Sold by B. Franklin”], American Weekly Mercury, September 7, 1738.

  6.New York Gazette, January 29, 1750. Boston Gazette, November 13, 1753. Pennsylvania Gazette, July 8, 1754. Maryland Gazette, February 6, 1755. Virginia Gazette, August 27, 1756.

  7.Franklin, Autobiography.

  8.Benjamin Franklin, Last Will and Testament, April 28, 1757, PBF. On Franklin and slavery, see David Waldstreicher, Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), and Gary B. Nash, “Franklin and Slavery,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 150 (2006): 618–35. Benjamin Franklin to Deborah Franklin, June 10, 1758, PBF. Rediker, Fearless Benjamin Lay, 121–23.

  9.[Benjamin Rush], “An Account of Benjamin Lay,” Columbian Magazine, March 1790, reprinted in Pennsylvania Mercury, April 29, 1790, and later published in Dr. Rush’s Literary, Moral, and Philosophical Essays (1798).

  10.Vaux, Memoirs, 51.

  11.Anthony Benezet, Observations on the Inslaving, Importing and Purchasing of Negroes (Germantown, PA: Christopher Sower, 1759), 7.

  12.Quoted in John Mack Faragher et al., Out of Many: A History of the American People, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000), 1:90.

  13.Quoted in Jane Kamensky, A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley (New York: Norton, 2016), 52.

  14.Quoted in Kamensky, Revolution in Color, 65; emphasis in original.

  15.Franklin, Autobiography.

  16.Ibid.

  17.Fred Anderson, A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years’ War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 111–20.

  18.Quoted in James T. Kloppenberg, Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 295.

  19.The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, ed. Jonathan Elliot, 5 vols. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1901), 1:443. Pinckney’s human property is listed on an inventory from 1787: https://www.nps.gov/chpi/planyourvisit/upload/African_Americans_at_Snee_Farm.pdf.

  20.King George quoted in Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 14. See also Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (New York: Knopf, 2000). For more on the empire-wide context, see David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds., The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–1840 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Eliga H. Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America c. 1750–1783 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

  21.Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack (Philadelphia: B. Franklin, 1737).

  22.James Otis to the Boston Town Meeting, 1763, quoted in James Grahame, The History of the Rise and Progress of the United States, 4 vols. (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1836), 4:447.

  23.Delaware prophet Neolin, in James Kenny journal entry, December 12, 1762, in “Journal of James Kenny, 1761–1763,” ed. John W. Jordan, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 37 (1913): 175.

  24.Broadly, see Carolyn Webber and Aaron Wildavsky, A History of Taxation and Expenditure in the Western World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986).

  25.Samuel Adams, “Instructions of the Town of Boston to its Representatives in the General Court, May 1764,” in The Writings of Samuel Adams, ed. Harry Alonzo Cushing, 4 vols. (New York: Putnam, 1904), 1:5.

  26.Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack for 1757, PBF.

  27.Richard Ford, “Imprisonment for Debt,” Michigan Law Review 25 (1926): 24–25. Bruce Mann, Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 286n8. See also Margot Finn, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 110.

  28.Edwin T. Randall, “Imprisonment for Debt in America: Fact and Fiction,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 39 (June 1952): 89–102; George Philip Bauer, “The Movement Against Imprisonment for Debt in the United States,” PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1935.

  29.Quoted in Kamensky, Revolution in Color, 99.

  30.T. H. Breen, Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), esp. chs. 4 and 5.

  31.Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 3:322–23. See also Trevor Burnard, Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650–1820 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

  32.Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 3:245.

  33.Boston Gazette, October 14, 1765.

  34.Benjamin Franklin to David Hall, February 14, 1765, PBF.

  35.Journal of the First Congress of the American Colonies, in Opposition to the Tyrannical Acts of the British Parliament. Held at New York, October 7, 1765 (New York, 1845), 28.

  36.Bauer, “The Movement Against Imprisonment for Debt,” 77.

  37.The Examination of Doctor Benjamin Franklin, before an August Assembly, relating to the Repeal of the Stamp Act, &c. (Philadelphia, 1766).

  38.Donna Spindel, “The Stamp Act Crisis in the British West Indies,” Journal of American Studies 11 (1977): 214–15. And, broadly, see Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), and Selwyn H. H. Carrington, The British West Indies during the American Revolution (Providence, RI: Foris, 1988).

  39.Quoted in O’Shaughnessy, Empire Divided, 153.

  40.John Adams diary, January 2, 1766, Adams Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society (hereafter AFP); O’Shaughnessy, Empire Divided, 99.

  41.Kender Mason to the Treasury, December 22, 1765, T 1/452/291–294, National Archives (Kew), London, England. With thanks to Peter Pellizzari.

  42.Quoted in T. R. Clayton, “Sophistry, Security, and Socio-Political Structures in the American Revolution; or Why Jamaica Did Not Rebel,” Historical Journal 29 (1986): 328.

  43.James Otis, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1764), 43–44.

  44.Benjamin Franklin to John Waring, December 17, 1763, PBF; George Mason to George Washington, December 23, 1765, in The Papers of George Washington, ed. Philander D. Chase, 24 vols. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1987), 7:424–25. And see Philip D. Morgan, “‘To Get Quit of Negroes’: George Washington and Slavery,” Journal of American Studies 39 (2005): 414.

  45.Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 146. Otis, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved, 4.

  46.Jane Franklin to Benjamin Franklin, April 2, 1789, PBF.

  47.Jane Franklin to Benjamin Franklin, December 1, 1767, PBF.

  48.John Adams diary, November 11, 1766, AFP.

  49.Benjamin Franklin to Jane Franklin, March 1, 1766, PBF.

  50.Journals of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts, 50 vols. (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1974), 43:xii.

  51.Jane Franklin to Benjamin Franklin, November 7, 1768, PBF; “Boston Town Meeting Instructions to its Representatives in the General Court,” May 15, 1770, in Record Commissioners of the City of Boston, Boston Town Records, 1770–1777 (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, 1887), 26; O’Shaughnessy, Empire Divided, 51.

  52.Samuel Cooke, A Sermon Preached at Cambridge (Boston, 1770), 42; James Warren to John Adams, June 22, 1777, in The Papers of John Adams, ed. Robert J. Taylor, 18 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Un
iversity Press, 2006), 5:231.

  53.“Peter Bestes and Other Slaves Petition for Freedom, April 20, 1773,” in Howard Zinn, Voices of a People’s History of the United States (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004), 55; Virginia Gazette, September 30, 1773.

  54.Noah Feldman, The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President (New York: Random House, 2017), 9–12, 18.

  55.Morgan, “‘To Get Quit of Negroes,’” 410.

  56.George Washington to Robert Mackenzie, October 10, 1774, in The Writings of George Washington, ed. John C. Fitzpatrick, 39 vols. (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1931–44), 3:246.

  57.Feldman, Three Lives of James Madison, 19.

  58.Patrick Henry quoted in John Adams Diary 22A, “Notes of Debates in the Continental Congress,” September 6, 1774, AFP.

  59.The Petition of Jamaica to the King, London Gazette, December 1775.

  60.Address to the Assembly of Jamaica, July 25, 1775, Journals of the Continental Congress; Samuel Johnson, Taxation No Tyranny: An Answer to the Resolutions and Address of the American Colonies (London, 1775), 89; Johnson’s toast is quoted in Kamensky, Revolution in Color, 323; Rush is quoted in Peter A. Dorsey, Common Bondage: Slavery as Metaphor in Revolutionary America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009), 105.

  61.Peter Edes, A Diary of Peter Edes (Bangor, ME: Samuel Smith, 1837).

  62.Jane Franklin to Benjamin Franklin, May 14, 1775, PBF.

  63.Benjamin Franklin to Jane Franklin, June 17, 1775, PBF.

  64.James Madison to William Bradford, June 19, 1775, quoted in Feldman, Three Lives of James Madison, 24.

  65.Douglas B. Chambers, Murder at Montpelier: Igbo Africans in Virginia (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005), 9–10.

  66.Morgan, “‘To Get Quit of Negroes,’” 411.

  67.Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 218.