Despite limitations on inclusion, the passion for collective independence among the people of the thirteen colonies—the two Carolinas, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Virginia—grew more intense as they challenged the British crown’s policies, impositions, and ultimately, right to rule.
At the core of the colonists’ democratic rebellion, however, were the vexing issues of race: the enslavement of nearly 700,000 men, women, and children (whose numbers were growing daily), the ongoing slave trade, and the aggressive displacement of native peoples. In the process of rebellion and nation-building, the American revolutionaries failed to resolve the contradiction between their radical principles and philosophies, on the one hand, and their racist economic, political, and cultural self-interests on the other. Explicit and consistent expressions of repugnance regarding slavery by many of the founders and revolutionary leaders—no doubt genuinely felt in many instances—were offset by the reality of the racialized customs, policies, laws, and hierarchies that were perpetuated and enacted as the nation’s governing structure and earliest leaders emerged. This group included the nation’s first four presidents: George Washington (1789–1797), John Adams (1797–1801), Thomas Jefferson (1801–1809), and James Madison (1809–1817).
While some of the founding leaders of the United States found themselves ill at ease declaring freedom from British oppression while maintaining the institution of slavery, there were others whose primary motivation for seeking independence from England was to protect slavery from being outlawed by the British. In other words, the conventional narrative that the Founding Fathers and revolutionary leaders were driven only by the noble and enlightened notions of freedom and democracy and simply accommodated themselves to the evil of slavery as a necessary and unavoidable compromise evades a more disturbing analysis. An alternative view argues that a significant driving force behind the American Revolution—certainly not the only one—was a deeply rooted panic that continued ties to England would eventually remove white people’s power to enslave blacks. This was certainly the attitude of many Southern leaders and much of the slave-owning class in the key slavery states of Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia.
In Slave Nation, Alfred Blumrosen and Ruth Blumrosen meticulously and persuasively demonstrate the catalytic role of the little-known but highly decisive 1772 Somerset decision in England. They state, “The possibility of a British rejection of slavery anywhere in the empire appalled the plantation owners and their representatives because slavery was a necessary underpinning of their prosperity. Slavery was the foundation of the economic and social environment that their leaders represented and protected.”28
A case can be made that the spark of the American Revolution came in the person of James Somerset. Born in West Africa circa 1740 and captured by slavers in 1749, he was eventually sold to Charles Stewart, paymaster general of the American Board of Customs. Family matters took Stewart—and therefore his slave Somerset—to London in 1769 where they would live for three years. Perhaps it was Somerset’s encounters with free and fugitive blacks in London, hearing gut-wrenching British abolitionists’ speeches, or simply his own inextinguishable desire for liberation that fanned his courage to rebel, but in any case, on October 1, 1771, Somerset walked away from Stewart’s house with the intent never to return to bondage.
Stewart managed to have him tracked down, restrained, and shipped off aboard the vessel Ann and Mary with the objective of selling him in Jamaica as a punishment for his escape. Fortunately for Somerset, his cause was adopted by one of the most talented and effective abolitionists in England. Granville Sharp, an activist who in the recent past had successfully helped to emancipate five or six blacks pursuing freedom from their colonial enslavers, employed his steadfast determination to save Somerset.29 Sharp mobilized a young barrister named Francis Hargrave, who was eager to take the case, and others, including members of London’s black community. In the previous emancipations, the Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, Lord Mansfield (William Murray), had managed to convince the slave owners involved that it was in their best interest to grant freedom to their slaves rather than have the Court issue a ruling that could have sweeping and disastrous consequences for the whole slave system. It is unknown if the slave owners who preceded Mansfield knew that his beloved grandniece Dido Elizabeth Lindsey was racially mixed, which reportedly fostered his distaste for slavery.
Mansfield had selected himself to oversee the Somerset case. Though he tried repeatedly to persuade Stewart and Captain Knowles of the Ann and Mary to do the right thing and let Somerset go, the obdurate pair refused and decided to roll the dice and take their chances with Mansfield’s ruling. It was a bad choice for them and the institution from which they profited.
On June 22, 1772, as the colonies were increasingly preparing for war, Lord Mansfield delivered his terse verdict:
The state of slavery is of such a nature that it is incapable of being introduced on any reason, moral or political; but only by positive law, which preserves its force long after the reasons, occasion, and time itself from whence it was created, is erased from memory: it’s so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it but positive law.30
Lord Mansfield concluded, in other words, that nothing existed in English law that sanctioned slavery or could compel Somerset to return to bondage. He continued, in words that would bring celebration to Somerset and hope to the enslaved across the British Empire, including its thirteen American colonies, “Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from the decision, I cannot say this case is allowed by the law of England and therefore the black must be discharged.”31
This was the first time that the King’s Bench Court had issued a ruling that definitively granted freedom to slaves should they choose to seek it in Britain. The “odious” slave system had just been struck a lethal blow in England, liberating 14,000 to 15,000 blacks who had been enslaved there.32
The ripple effect was immediate. Transnational black jubilation was broad and swift. So too was the effort by enslaved blacks in the American colonies, who learned of the decision and immediately sought ways to get to England. In Virginia, a slave named Bacchus escaped and was believed headed to Great Britain because he had learned about the Somerset case.33 The decision was also a catalyst for whites who were opposed to slavery. According to historian John Hope Franklin, the Somerset decision directly led to the formation of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787.34
It would be an understatement to say that celebration of the decision was not universal. While the ruling did not specifically include the colonies, they were political entities under British rule, hence slave owners in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia—the four colonies that profited most from slavery—drew the sobering conclusion that the day was likely near when the Somerset decision would also apply to them. Preempting the British Crown’s abolition of slavery in the colonies became a matter of urgency in the South. Slave owners who perhaps had been hesitant about joining the independence movement now enlisted fully, but their participation came with a price: the perpetuation of slavery. The historical fact is that the American rebellion could not have advanced without a commitment by the revolutionary leadership to continue the institution of slavery after their break from England. Thus deeply conflicting motives—freedom and slavery—drove the white colonists’ willingness to risk staging an armed revolution.
It is worth noting that Northern states benefited substantially from slavery even though slave labor on their own soil was minimal in comparison to the South. Shipbuilding, the trade in slaves, and other commercial and financial activities, such as high tariffs and taxes on slave traders, were absolutely essential to the Northern economy in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and other states. Those industries also generated thousands of jobs for lawyers, clerks, accountants, insuran
ce agents, and the like. Thus Northern leaders were not as much compromised as complicit in perpetuating slavery.
This Faustian bargain would be reflected in the debates and ultimate articulation of the founding documents that would come to define the United States. In each struggle over the tone, content, and purpose of the Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, and Constitution, the issue of slavery was raised and negotiated until leaders of the slave-driven South obtained concessions they considered adequate. While many Northern leaders may have privately found slavery abhorrent, and some even stated so publicly, there was barely an abolitionist word spoken or action taken when it came down to practical matters. The consequences of these decisions would profoundly influence the future course of race and class relations, law, and culture in the United States.
The political life and distribution of power of the nation was shaped by this compromise. For 200 years and beyond, the nation would struggle with a hierarchy of citizenship in which people of color found that freedom had multiple definitions and applications under U.S. law and public policy. The nation’s founders could not escape the judgment of history by fudging words in the Declaration, Articles of Confederation, and Constitution; nothing could mask the reality that these iconic documents sanctioned and defended the institution of slavery.
Black radicals from slave revolt leader Nat Turner and human rights advocate Fannie Lou Hamer to the indomitable Harriet Tubman, black power advocate Malcolm X, and many others would reference these texts and the hypocrisy they embodied in their original intent. Conservative defenders of “original intent” obscure the unambiguous willingness of the nation’s catalytic leaders to politically and socially continue the disenfranchisement of millions. The Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, and Constitution were as visionary as they were contradictory. They became the building blocks of a divided nation and the White House that would preside over it.
The Declaration of Independence
Perhaps no other document from the era carries as much symbolism as the Declaration of Independence. In 1776, at the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia, the throng of rebelling white landowners declared themselves independent of the British crown and, on July 4, 1776, issued the Declaration of Independence. Written primarily by Thomas Jefferson, owner of hundreds of slaves, the Declaration sought to explain to the world the principles and rationale driving the break with England.
By the time of the Second Continental Congress, several colonies had already declared their split from King George, most notably Virginia. As one of the centers of the revolution, Virginia aggressively began to break from British authority and issued its own declaration of why it was necessary to do so. Adopted on June 12, 1776, Virginia’s Declaration of Rights was also a declaration in defense of slavery. In its final version it stated, in part,
That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.35
The original draft by George Mason did not include the phrase “when they enter into a state of society,” leaving an opening, so felt most delegates to the Virginia Convention, for the document to be interpreted in a way that would assign these inherent rights to people then enslaved. As one delegate later noted, “They saw in the sweeping phraseology of the declaration that its adoption into the fundamental law would immediately emancipate the slave.”36 Realistically, there was little chance of that, however, as those in the powerful slave-owning class wanted total assurance that their interests were safe. The strategic addition of the phrase “when they enter into a state of society” was necessary to blunt any legal challenges to the institution of slavery. The new phrase was understood to be a reference to those outside of the state of society, i.e., those who were enslaved, and therefore they were not by colonial political or legal standards equally free, independent, or in possession of any rights whatsoever. While it was presumed by some that those who were outside would one day enter society, Virginia’s Declaration of Rights fundamentally denied rights for enslaved blacks while giving legal and philosophical cover for whites to continue to profit from owning, breeding, and trading blacks.
The language “all men are by nature equally free and independent” was too broad and viewed as too risky legally—especially for delegates representing slave states—to be left standing without qualifiers. As was the case in nearly all the documents that evolved in the revolutionary period, euphemisms and cautious language were employed to mask the patently contradictory and hypocritical nature of the politics. Although the words “slavery” and “slave” never appeared in the final version of this or any other founding document, all parties involved were fully conscious that the institution of slavery was being legally perpetuated.
Thomas Jefferson had a complicated relationship with slavery. While he did advocate legislating the emancipation of slaves in 1769 at the Virginia General Assembly, he was not so opposed to buying, selling, and forcing blacks to labor as slaves that he abstained from doing so himself. Throughout his life he owned hundreds of slaves. When tasked to draft the Declaration of Independence at the Second Continental Congress, Jefferson understood the politics of obfuscation that had been deftly employed in drafting Virginia’s political documents. But Jefferson appeared to envision a time when slavery would be abolished and wanted this national declaration to anticipate that period.
On the hot evenings of July, as Thomas Jefferson sat down to pen the words of the document that would truly ignite the Revolutionary War and “dissolve the political bonds” that connected the thirteen rebelling colonies to England, he was surely stressed and perhaps hungry after the long, increasingly hectic and demanding days. As his thoughts swirled over what words to use, he faced two tasks: to mount an argument justifying the armed revolt against King George, and to articulate a vision of a new nation. That vision included a call for participatory democracy, justice, political rights, and full citizenship—all genuinely radical ideas at the time. In the background, careful not to disturb his master’s state of concentration, Jefferson’s slave Richard quietly brought him his nightly tea. Richard had been born into slavery, and Jefferson brought him along on many of his travels. Perhaps the evening tea is exactly what was needed to facilitate the flow of ideas and words that would become the Declaration of Independence. Perhaps the irony was not lost on either of the two men.37
Jefferson’s famous opening to the Declaration reflected the highest aspirations of humanity, without even a hint of racial discord. The principles expressed and the language used to articulate them would resonate for centuries and become appropriated by the French Revolution and, paradoxically, the Vietnamese in their own struggle against French colonialism.38 As noted later, free and enslaved blacks would often quote from the Declaration to advance the antislavery struggle.
Jefferson wrote acutely: “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.”
His literary skills were put to full use in creating a document that had to satisfy competing concerns (pro-slavery vs. antislavery), competing eras (the present vs. the future), and competing temperaments (deliberative vs. brash). His opening phrase, gendered language notwithstanding, was noncategorical. While it did not explicitly include blacks, neither did it explicitly exclude them. It also differed from Virginia’s Declaration of Rights, written just one month earlier, in that Jefferson avoided the word “property” to forestall, unsuccessfully as it turned out, any future effort to rely on it as a justification for slavery.39
In an early draft of the Declaration, Jefferson included a rather long paragraph that is generally interpreted as antislavery
. The rejected clause read:
He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and 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 a market where men should be bought and 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 die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived 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.
According to Jefferson, the clause was rejected “in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it.”40 Jefferson also blamed his “northern brethren” who were complicit due to their own economic interests in the slave trade through shipping and other means. However, upon closer examination, the proposed clause actually criticized the slave trade—the capture, transportation, and sale of individuals into a life of enslavement—more so than slavery itself. After the sixteenth century, the latter could and did exist without the former. This was low-hanging fruit given that by 1776 nearly all of the colonies had abandoned, severely curtailed, or constrained the slave trade. Elite opposition to the slave trade was framed by interests that were more economic than moral. Blumrosen and Blumrosen contend that the Virginian’s opposition to the slave trade dated back to at least 1772 in part due to a surplus of enslaved people caused by a shift in agriculture as a result of soil depletion from tobacco farming.41 As a consequence, according to historian Gary Wills, excess slaves were being sold for great profit to owners of lands where rice, indigo, and cotton farming were growing.42 Additionally, historian Egerton believes that Jefferson wished “to relieve his new country—and, more profoundly, himself—of the guilt of importing hundreds of thousands of Africans before taking up arms in the cause of liberty” and to blame England, which at the time had not outlawed the slave trade, for forcing otherwise innocent people into the horror of slavery.43
The Black History of the White House Page 5