Woolman petitioned the Rhode Island legislature to abolish the slave trade. The Newport Quakers, spurred by Thomas Hazard, expressed a cautious “unity” with the idea. The legislature ignored the petition. But Thomas Hazard vowed to devote the rest of his life to fighting for the abolition of slavery.
Back home in New Jersey, Woolman continued the struggle. To bear witness, he stopped using sugar when he realized it was produced by slaves in the West Indies. He called blacks his brothers and sisters, and reminded people that God was indifferent to the color of a person’s skin. When he realized most of the clothes worn by colonists were dyed with indigo produced by slaves, he wore only undyed garments. This meant he wore white all year.
In 1772 John Woolman went to England, hoping to enlist English Quakers in a campaign to outlaw the slave trade in the entire British empire. He appeared at the London Yearly Meeting of Ministers and Elders, the most respected body in Quakerdom. More than a few members were rich, and many of them were distinguished scientists and thinkers.
These sophisticated Londoners goggled at John Woolman. “His dress was as follows,” one wrote. “A white hat, a coarse raw linen shirt, his coat, waistcoat and breeches of white coarse woolen cloth, with yarn stockings.” He presented to the Meeting his introduction from his brethren in New Jersey. It was read aloud. According to one account of the ensuing scene, Dr. John Fothergill, a noted physician, rose to suggest in an icy voice that Woolman’s “service”—the concern that had brought him across the ocean—was accepted without any need for him to speak, and he should go home as soon as possible.
Any other man might have slunk out the door, but John Woolman—firmly, calmly, without a hint of anger or reproof in his voice—rose and began explaining why he had come to England. When he finished, there was a long embarrassed silence. Dr. Fothergill broke it by rising and asking John Woolman to forgive him.10
This was the beginning of a series of heartfelt welcomes that Woolman received from English Quakers as he trudged north from London through the summery countryside to the town of York. There he spoke again on the evils of the slave trade. But toward the close of his speech, his normally smooth sentences became confused. By that night he was complaining of dizziness and weakness. The following day, everyone realized John Woolman had smallpox.
His English hosts nursed him tenderly, but the disease, one of the worst killers of the time, was inexorable. About 2:00 a.m. a week later, Woolman awoke and asked for a pen. On a piece of paper he wrote: “I believe my being here is in the wisdom of Christ.” A few hours later he was dead.
In the eyes of the world, John Woolman died an eccentric failure. But within fourteen years his friend Thomas Hazard would persuade the Rhode Island legislature to prohibit the importation of slaves. Anthony Benezet, inspired by Woolman’s pamphlet to the Philadelphia Meeting, founded a school for black children and wrote a series of blazing denunciations of slavery and the slave trade. In the decades after his death, Woolman’s journal was reprinted dozens of times, reaching tens of thousands of readers.
• • •
Thus far we have not paid much attention to the black men and women who were the victims of this oppressive global system. How did they respond to the cruelties of what was soon called “the Middle Passage” across the Atlantic from Africa? For weeks, they were chained in a ship’s hold with about as much space as a corpse had in a coffin. Since profit was the purpose of the voyage, they were fed only enough to maintain life. No one bothered to dispose of the feces and urine from their bodies, creating a stench below decks that few passengers or crew members could inhale for more than a few minutes.
It should surprise no one to learn that the captives found these conditions unendurable. Not a few slaves committed suicide by jumping overboard during the few minutes each day that they were permitted to come up on deck. Others found ways to break their chains and launched shipboard insurrections, sometimes using weapons smuggled to them by female slaves, who were allowed more freedom aboard the ship. Occasionally the rebels succeeded in capturing the ship and returning to Africa. Most of the revolts were suppressed with murderous fury.
About 10 percent of the slave ships experienced insurrections. One English captain, writing in 1700, told how he searched every corner of his ship each day, looking for pieces of wood or metal that could be used as weapons, and occasionally discovering a concealed knife. He insisted such vigilance was the only way to head off sudden death.11
A good example of the slaves’ resourcefulness was a near eruption on a ship captained by twenty-five-year-old John Newton in 1751. A slave who was brought up on deck because he had oozing ulcers on his body managed to steal a marlin spike and pass it through the deck grating to the slaves below. In an hour, twenty slaves had broken their chains and loosened the bulkhead doors of the hold. Captain Newton thanked God (he was deeply religious) that he had a full crew aboard. His sailors were able to smash the uprising in a few violent minutes.
As time passed, many slave ships bought insurrection insurance. But this practice led to another abuse. Some captains, fearful that sick slaves would communicate their illness to others on the ship, threw the diseased Negroes overboard and claimed payment for them from the insurance company. There were few limits to the cruelties that slave ship captains felt they could perpetrate without fear of retribution.12
• • •
In America, recently arrived slaves were often rebellious, especially when they encountered slaves from the West Indies, where brutal treatment made revolts frequent. In 1712, two slaves from the islands led a revolt in New York that began by setting a building on fire. They killed nine white men who were trying to extinguish the blaze. The insurrection was quickly suppressed.
More formidable was a rebellion in South Carolina in 1739. By this time the colony had been importing slaves so rapidly that in some districts blacks outnumbered whites by large majorities. In the West Indies, the ratio was often 10 to 1. But each West Indian island maintained at least one regiment of British troops to keep order. There were no professional soldiers in South Carolina. This may have emboldened a group of slaves from the African kingdom of Kongo to launch a revolt.
Their leader was a slave named Jemmy, who could read and write. Around him he gathered about twenty other slaves, all from Kongo. They were Catholics, like most of Kongo, thanks to centuries of contact with Portuguese traders. Lately the country had been racked by a civil war, which had led to the capture and enslavement of Jemmy and his friends.
Sunday, September 9, was the day after a Catholic feast day celebrating the birth of the Virgin Mary. With the hope of divine blessing, Jemmy and his followers marched on a store on the Stono River, southwest of Charleston, chanting “Liberty!” They killed the owners of the store and seized enough weapons and ammunition to make them a formidable force. Their destination was Spanish Florida, where they expected to receive a warm welcome from fellow Catholics, who were on the brink of a war with the British and Americans.
Hoping to gather recruits and find more weapons, the rebels burned a half dozen plantations and killed at least twenty whites who tried to resist them. By this time the South Carolina government had mustered about a hundred well-armed men on horseback. They overtook the slaves on the Edisto River, where a fierce fire fight erupted. It ended in the rout of the rebels, but not before they had killed twenty whites. A handful of Jemmy’s men retreated about thirty miles, where they were overtaken by a group of Chickasaw and Catawba Indians, hired by the South Carolinians. Also in this final fight were some loyal slaves, who were apparently eager to destroy the rebel remnant.13
In a gruesome aftermath, the South Carolinians executed most of the Kongo army’s survivors. A few were sold to buyers in the West Indies. The heads of many rebels were mounted on stakes along roads around Charleston as warnings to other slaves who might be considering a revolt. The shaken South Carolinians passed a Negro Act, which required a ratio of at least one white to every ten blacks on a plantati
on—a dictum soon ignored.
The law also prohibited blacks from growing their own food, learning to read, or earning money in their spare time. Another clause made it difficult to free a slave. The goal was to create a system with a minimum of freedom. Only in this claustrophobic world would South Carolinians feel safe.
Over the next two years, slave uprisings elsewhere in South Carolina and Georgia did little to enlarge this sense of theoretic security. Even more sensational was a revolt in New York City in 1741. About 20 percent of the city’s population were slaves, stirring uneasiness among the whites. The conspiracy was led by a slave who was urged on by a Catholic priest, a refugee from persecution in Protestant-controlled England.
The plan was similar to the 1712 uprising—to start a series of fires that would devastate the city, then kill the whites as they struggled to extinguish them. But the scale and ambitions of these conspirators were larger. Two Spanish-speaking slaves assured the rebels they would receive help from Spain and France, who were at war with England.
The conspirators met at a tavern frequented by blacks and poor whites; it was run by a man in sympathy with the rebels. In a few weeks, no less than thirteen fires erupted. The most unnerving blaze destroyed the royal governor’s house and much of Fort George, the city’s principal defense against an attack from the sea.
A woman who lived at the tavern offered to identify the conspirators to escape punishment for a recent arrest for theft. In a series of trials, seventeen blacks were convicted and hanged, thirteen blacks were burned at the stake, and four whites, including the suspected priest, were hanged. Another seventy suspected blacks were deported to the West Indies. The story, reported in newspapers from Boston to Savannah, sent new shock waves of fear and anxiety about black uprisings up and down the thousand-mile Atlantic coastline.14
• • •
As the thirteen North American colonies became more prosperous and sophisticated, fears of political oppression began to absorb the public mind. In the early 1760s, rebellious James Otis of Massachusetts disputed the British Parliament’s claim to the right to tax the Americans. “Taxation without representation is tyranny,” he declared, words that the Catholic Irish, ruled as a conquered nation by the Protestant English, had been using in vain for several decades. Men in other colonies took the same stance, as the British, with an arrogance that seemed to come naturally to them, inflicted more taxes.
Benjamin Rush, an outspoken Philadelphia doctor, condemned the “servitude” Parliament inflicted on Americans. Even a moderate Virginia planter like George Washington began to see a transatlantic hand in his pocket whenever Parliament was in the mood. It was imperative for the Americans to resist this incipient tyranny, Washington said, before they were reduced to “the most abject state of slavery that ever was designed for mankind.”15
This political slavery was defined by a New Englander as “being wholly under the power and control of another as to our actions and properties.” The words were obviously inspired by African slavery as practiced in both the North and South. James Otis, in one of his assaults on the British, made the comparison explicit. Was it right, he asked, to enslave a man because he was black? “Will short curled hair like wool . . . help the argument? Can any logical inference in favor of slavery be drawn from a flat nose, a long or short face?” Slavery made no more sense, Otis argued, than the British claim that Parliament had power over colonists living three thousand miles away who, in the course of the previous 150 years, had tamed a wilderness and created free societies.16
Parliament, encouraged by the headstrong young king, George III, ignored these explosive words. The New Englanders were soon led by Boston’s Samuel Adams, who would later confess that independence had been the “first wish of [his] heart” for a long time. They united the colonies with resentful letters and broadsides circulated by Committees of Correspondence. Newspapers became “political engines” that preached rebellious ideas in fiery prose. Next, boycotts of British products shook the merchant class of the Mother Country and demonstrated a growing American unity of purpose.
In December 1773, Sam Adams’s followers dumped thousands of pounds of British East India Company tea, worth a half million modern dollars, into Boston Harbor to protest a three-pence-per-pound royal tax. The British responded by sending four regiments to close the port of Boston, instantly alienating the rest of the colonies. Soon a “continental” congress met in Philadelphia, with delegates from every colony except Georgia.
Britain ignored the congress’s respectful pleas to King George, asking him to resolve the crisis. In Massachusetts an embryo army of “minute men,” sworn to fight on sixty seconds notice, began drilling in the countryside outside Boston. When the second Continental Congress met in the spring of 1775, George Washington, a delegate from Virginia, wore the military uniform of a colonel of his colony’s militia. It was a bold prediction that war was imminent.
On April 19, 1775, gunfire between redcoats and Americans in Lexington, Massachusetts, triggered a running battle that left over a hundred men dead on both sides. To unite the colonies, Sam Adams and his second cousin John, who had displayed considerable ability as a legislative leader, proposed George Washington as commander in chief of an American army.
In the South, some people were uneasily aware that they had “Domestick enemies” to worry about, as well as the British army. Would the British use the slaves’ smoldering anger and hunger for freedom to undo the rebellious whites? South Carolina was riddled by fear of this all too real possibility as the Revolution gathered momentum. In Virginia, a farseeing if jittery young rebel, James Madison, started worrying about it as early as 1774.17
Little more than a year later, the hotheaded royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, called on the colony’s slaves to desert their masters and rally to his standard with a promise of freedom. An alarmed George Washington wrote from Massachusetts that if Dunmore “is not crushed before Spring, he will become the most dangerous man in America. His strength will increase like a snowball rolling downhill.”
Only about 300 of Virginia’s 200,000 slaves responded to Dunmore, who formed them into a “Loyal Ethiopian Regiment.” The governor’s experiment came to an end at the December 9, 1775, Battle of Great Bridge. White Virginians and a sprinkling of free blacks routed Dunmore’s recruits and a company of British regulars. Parliament hastily disowned the governor’s scheme, which had turned numerous loyal slave-owners into rebels.18
• • •
Six months later, John Adams, whose speeches in the divided Continental Congress had made some listeners call him “the Atlas of Independence,” exulted when the delegates voted to declare America independent. Adams asked a thirty-three-year-old Virginia delegate, Thomas Jefferson, to prepare a written declaration explaining America’s decision to become a new country. Few people realized that a major critic of slavery was stepping onto the world’s stage.
CHAPTER 2
Slavery’s Great Foe—and Unintended Friend
In his early days as a lawyer, Thomas Jefferson revealed an almost instinctive dislike of slavery. At the age of twenty-one, he had inherited 5,000 fertile acres and 52 slaves, making him a member of Virginia’s ruling class. But slavery offended his sense of justice in a deep and intensely personal way. In one of his first law cases, Jefferson had maintained that a mulatto grandson of a white woman and a black slave should be considered a free man. His argument, which the astonished judge dismissed out of hand, declared slavery a violation of every person’s natural right to freedom.1
Jefferson had been reluctant to accept the task of writing a declaration of independence. Back in Virginia, delegates were conferring on a constitution for the state. Jefferson wanted to be there to argue for the gradual abolition of slavery. He had even drafted his own version of a constitution, with an explicit provision for such a measure. At the same time, he did not underestimate the importance of the document he was asked to create. The rhythms of the Declaration’s opening pa
ragraph throb with a deeper timbre than anything else Jefferson ever wrote:
When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them to another, and to assume among the powers of the earth a separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s god entitle them, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the reasons that impel them to this separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Thomas Jefferson did not know—nor did anyone else who read these words in or out of the Continental Congress—that he had delivered a deathblow to American slavery. It would take another eight and a half decades to make this an historical fact. In the rest of the first draft of the Declaration, he made his detestation of slavery visible to every member of the Continental Congress.
After the opening paragraphs of fundamental principles, Jefferson began a ferocious indictment of King George III for his “repeated injuries and usurpations” aimed at establishing “absolute tyranny over these states.” Like the toll of a funereal bell, the accusations poured out:
He has refused his assent to laws the most wholesome and necessary for the public good . . .
He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices and the amount and payment of their salaries . . .
He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation & tyranny already begun.
Then came words that virtually exploded on the page:
He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating the most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people, who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither, this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain, determined to keep open the market where MEN could be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting these very people to rise in arms among us and to purchase that liberty of which he has denied them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
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