The Bone and Sinew of the Land

by Anna-Lisa Cox

  True, when finally signed in 1787, the Constitution included much meant to strengthen the power of enslavers to keep people in bondage—even if those people tried to run or rebel. And patriots with printing presses had done everything they could to foment hate and prejudice to rouse the fighting spirits of white men. But even before there was a constitution, the fervor for freedom had started. Enslaved people knew of the words of the Declaration of Independence, those words about the self-evident truth that all men are created equal and that all those equally created men have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And their white lawyers knew those words. And their white judges knew those words. And, together, they were acting on them.21

  Around 1781 an enslaved man called Quok Walker sued for his freedom in a Massachusetts court. Other enslaved people were petitioning for their freedom as well, including a woman called Mumbet. And when they won in 1783, they won freedom for their entire state. For the judge agreed that—among other things—slavery was at direct odds with the words of the Massachusetts constitution about the equality of men. As a group of enslaved people in New Hampshire argued to a judge in 1779, while the Revolutionary War still raged, “Freedom is the inherent right of the human species.”22

  But it was more than the courts, it was the idea of liberty. Enslaved people had been suing for and even winning their freedom for a while, without effecting more than their own individual freedom. But that was before the Declaration of Independence. That was before the Revolution.

  Some white Americans had been turning toward freedom because of their faith. Quakers, many of them from the southern slave colonies, had decided that human bondage was a sin. And they had been working to free hundreds of the people they held enslaved. The Episcopal Methodist Church, at its first conference in 1784, took a firm stand on slavery and the equality of all people, regardless of the color of their skin, stating, “Slavery is contrary to the laws of God, man, and nature, and hurtful to society; contrary to the dictates of conscience and true religion; and doing what we would not others should do unto us.” And in 1794 the general assembly of the Presbyterian Church resolved that any person who “keeps, sells or buys” a human being is a “man stealer,” which is “the highest kind of theft” and a violation of the Eighth Commandment.23

  As the ideas of freedom and equality were gaining power, whole states started tipping toward freedom.

  Vermont was first in 1777, before some even thought of it as a state, and then more started joining the cause. By 1804 seven more states had followed Vermont’s lead, including Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. This meant that a total of eight of the nation’s original thirteen colonies had voluntarily decided to end slavery by 1804.

  These were not easy decisions, for they had an impact not only on those who owned enslaved people but on those who were involved in the lucrative slave trade. And when the slave state of New York finally decided to gradually abolish slavery in 1799, the other slave states must have been stunned.

  New York Harbor is today filled with boats of tourists traveling past a statue dedicated to liberty. But once those same waters carried massive ships filled with people in chains. And the sale of those who survived the brutal and often deadly journey was making some New Yorkers very wealthy. In 1785, after fierce resistance, New York decided to end the sale of enslaved people imported into the state, effectively closing its ports to those massive ships. And in 1799 that state decided to slowly end slavery. This turning away from wealth toward liberty must have been a shock to the remaining slave states. True, it was a slow turning, and for years an incomplete and far from perfect one. But it was still a turning.24

  In other states where whites could not be convinced to officially give up enslavement, granting freedom was made easier. Colonial Virginia had long had laws intended to make manumission very challenging. But this was a new time and a new nation, and even Virginia eased its restrictions on liberation. Between 1782 and 1806 roughly 10,000 people were recorded as freed in that state. And North Carolina’s free African American population rose from roughly 5,000 in 1790 to over 10,200 in 1810, despite its much stricter manumission laws. We may never have an accurate count, however, of the men and women freed, as many were never counted and others, like Charles Grier, were leaving slave states in order to be freed.25

  Other states, like Maryland and Delaware, made new laws not only encouraging freedom but also discouraging the removal or sale of an enslaved person out of the state. This meant that by the time the Civil War broke out, most people of African descent in Delaware were free.26

  This was an extraordinary time, full of confusion and conflict but also hope.

  And moves were also being made toward equality. The Northwest Territory almost doubled the landmass of the new United States, and that region was designated slavery-free. But another clause in the Northwest Ordinance was significant—a clause for equality. For the ordinance gave all freemen the right to vote.27

  To be sure those freemen—or anyone else who wanted to vote almost everywhere in the nation at this time—had to be men. And they had to be property owners. The writers of the ordinance decided that a man must own fifty acres to vote and two hundred acres to run for office. There were other caveats as well, but none of them, not one, mentioned skin color. This was not an omission; this was knowing inclusion. It was understood that if skin color was not mentioned, then any property-holding man over the age of twenty-one could vote.28

  Indeed, the wording of the ordinance was very similar to North Carolina’s 1776 constitution, which also stated, among other lengthy requirements, that “all freeman of the age of twenty-one years” could vote. But none of those requirements used the word “white.” And soon, free propertied African American men were voting in North Carolina.29

  And North Carolina was not alone. By 1792 ten other states had similar constitutions, refusing to use color to confine the vote, including the newly created state of Kentucky, which had entered the union that year. Of course, in that same year whites in Delaware, in a backlash against the growing number of free people of African descent in their state, worked hard to exclude all but whites from the right to vote. Still, in 1792, on the eve of the nation’s second election, as it stood poised to reelect George Washington as president, the entire Northwest Territory as well as eleven of the nation’s fifteen states had decided to use inclusive language regarding voting rights in their constitutions.30

  Of course, this was not a perfect time or a perfect period of freeing. While this passion for liberty may have been popular, and social pressure was being brought to bear on white enslavers to give up the wealth they had amassed by owning people, not everyone was enthusiastic. Most states, regardless of whether some might have been thought of as southerly or northerly, had active abolitionist organizations, but Georgia and South Carolina never did. And some of the states that had officially abolished slavery decided to end the practice so gradually that it would take decades before all people were free. Indeed, some whites in New Jersey were so loath to encourage the course of liberty that they still held people enslaved when the Civil War broke out.31

  Today we can easily view slavery as such a poisonous institution that its demise was all but inevitable. But in early America, its ending required tremendous social and economic change and was far from certain. Nothing about freedom was fated. It faced fierce resistance.

  As Manisha Sinha points out in The Slave’s Cause, her magisterial book on the struggle to end slavery in America, almost every case in which a state abolished slavery at this time involved the efforts of both people of African descent and their white allies to challenge the system of bondage. They were rarely loved or lauded for their resistance; instead they were often punished for their work.

  And even as people were working together to end slavery and fight for equality, prejudiced whites were working to diminish or eliminate equality and freedom. But African Americans and their white allies w
ere aware of this backlash. They understood that they had to constantly renew, reinforce, and defend the fervor for freedom, and equality. Nothing was guaranteed, not even the clause in the Constitution that seemed to promise the end of the slave trade in 1808.

  And the members of abolition societies across the new United States knew of this resistance as well. That was one reason why roughly two dozen of these revolutionary abolitionists decided to meet in Philadelphia in 1794. They had been active in their own states but had never convened like this before. Maybe they had been inspired by another revolution. Just a few months earlier, representatives from Saint-Domingue had landed in Philadelphia. They represented the leaders of the most successful slave revolt in the new world—a war that had been fought and won in Saint-Domingue in 1791. They arrived in Philadelphia with their French white abolitionist allies, who had just formally announced that the entire island was free of slavery. One of those allies was the French-born abolitionist August Polverel, who had been the one to make the official proclamation of the abolition of all slavery on the Caribbean island of Saint-Domingue. In that proclamation, Polverel stated, “The slavery of a single individual is incompatible with the principles of the Republic.” The nations acting upon these revolutionary ideals had a relationship so intertwined that the ship Polverel traveled on, in order to make his proclamation to the residents of Saint-Domingue, was named America. But America, France, and Saint-Domingue had long had intertwined histories, bound together by slavery as well as freedom. For this was the same Caribbean island that the French Philip Renault had come to in the 1720s to purchase people to work the lands that would later become the state of Illinois. Now, seventy years later, delegates from Saint-Domingue—European-born, African-born, and Saint-Domingue-born—had stopped in America on their way to Paris to announce this important emancipation to the new Revolutionary National Convention now trying to lead the radical Republic of France—because France was now a revolutionary nation as well.32

  News of the Saint-Domingue revolution of 1791 and the French Revolution had swept Europe and the Americas. But there was already resistance, and when the delegates from Saint-Domingue landed in Philadelphia, they were physically attacked by French sailors as they disembarked from their ship. The African-born delegate Jean-Baptiste Belley bore the brunt of the attack.33

  But the delegates survived, made it to New York, and sailed for France. Arriving in Paris they went to the Convention Hall, where one of the French deputies rose to greet them, announcing that these revolutionary men from across the Atlantic—African, Caribbean, and European—were making it possible to complete the project of the Revolution. The French deputy added that while the French revolutionaries had succeeded in dismantling the hierarchies of the monarchy and the church, these delegates from Saint-Domingue would help France overcome the “aristocracy of skin,” to win the battle against prejudice directed at African-descended people.34

  And when the French National Convention affirmed that slavery was “abolished throughout the territory of the Republic; in consequence, all men, without distinction of color, will enjoy the rights of French citizens,” the African-born revolutionary leader Jean-Baptiste Belley stood up amid the applause and, in a voice loud enough to be heard above the noise in the hall, proclaimed that his actions over the decades since he had made himself free by purchasing himself made him a true revolutionary and valuable citizen of the new republic.35

  Many at that first abolitionist convention in Philadelphia were also working toward these same two goals: ending slavery and abolishing inequality based on skin color. They worked hard for days to write a petition to the federal government, arguing for many causes, including the immediate end of slavery, a halt to the sale of enslaved people from the United States for export to other nations, and the defense of the rights of all free American men, no matter what their skin color.36

  These American revolutionary abolitionists wrote in that petition, “Many reasons concur in persuading us to abolish domestic slavery in our country. It is inconsistent with the safety of the liberties of the United States,” for “freedom and slavery cannot long exist together”—echoing the words and sentiments of August Polverel in his speech on Saint-Domingue.37

  Even if the abolitionists in Philadelphia in 1794 had not heard Polverel’s exact words, they understood the context for their statement. So the convention of delegates of this early abolitionist organization carefully put together their petitions, urging the federal government not just to join with the revolutions in Saint-Domingue and France but to lead the charge for liberty and equality. As they wrote, “What people will advocate freedom… while they view the purest republic in the world tolerating in its bosom a body of slaves?” After all, this was “America, dignified by being the first in modern times, to assert and defend the equal rights of man.”38

  While these abolitionists praised the work done to give free property-owning African American men the equal right to vote in some states, they urged that all forms of racial prejudice be overturned, arguing that the new nation should have an “exploding of the general opinion that the color of a man is evidence of his deprivation of the rights of man.” They added that the fervor of freedom that was already sweeping the nation, causing whole states to abolish slavery, would not be a complete project without equality, for in “removing the sorrows of slavery, what do we effect, if the new-made man is relieved from the power of one, only to be sensible of his hopeless inferiority to all?” Criticizing unjust and prejudiced laws, the petitioners asked how a free man of color could own property and start a business if “the law does not spread its defense around him?” And they were quick to remind the federal government that equal protection under the law was a right, not a “privilege” or a “favour.”39

  These men were writing this during a time of great uncertainty and instability in the United States. The new nation was deeply in debt, and pirates were even attacking its ships and taking white Americans into slavery. If ever there were a time for the federal government to use any excuse it could think of to avoid living up to the expensive and difficult ideals of liberty and equality, this would be it. This would have been the time to ignore abolitionists’ petitions. This would have been the time to pass gag laws to silence anyone petitioning the federal government to end slavery.

  But instead, the federal government responded constructively. In almost apologetic language, it reminded the abolitionists of the limits of the federal government’s jurisdiction. But it did agree to end the sale and exportation of enslaved people from the United States. It was a small gesture, given that the institution of slavery persisted, but in a young nation, the profits from the slave trade were a real economic sacrifice in the name of moral progress. The nation’s leaders were willing to take at least a limited stand.40

  It certainly seemed like a stand to the DeWolf family, one of the wealthiest in the United States at that time. Their wealth was based on slave trading—bringing shiploads of horror in and out of Rhode Island, which like New York and other eastern coastal states had made a fortune from that trade. And the DeWolfs used every tactic, most illegal, to continue their lucrative trade even after its official abolition.41

  The fight against freedom was not limited to such tactics.

  Even with their success, the abolitionists gathered in Philadelphia knew that they—and many others—would need to continue to work hard to move forward against the powers that were opposing the goals of liberty and equality.

  Already whites in the section of the Northwest Territory now called the Ohio Territory were going to court to complain about the ban on slavery, and there were rumors that other states would soon join Delaware in excluding African Americans from the right to vote. Then, in 1799, possibly in response to the new state of Tennessee’s decision to allow voting rights for all, prejudiced whites in Kentucky denied African Americans equal voting rights just seven years after becoming a state with equal voting rights. In 1801 whites in Maryland followed suit. A
nd in 1807, New Jersey’s white residents, who had only decided in 1804 to take the slowest path to ending slavery possible, were already so concerned about the weakening of their status that they actually reversed the state’s constitution and barred black New Jersey citizens from voting.42

  More troubling still, the slave powers had their sights on the Northwest Territory, and they were working hard to grow slavery and diminish equality there. For they could see that the two were connected—that with equal rights came equal power, and that power might undermine slavery.

  In 1802 whites in Ohio petitioned to make it a slave state as soon as it applied for statehood, and for a brief period it looked like they might win. That same year, pro-slavery activist William Henry Harrison, the first governor of the Indiana Territory, joined forces with some of the enslavers around him to petition that the territory allow slaves, even temporarily. This was not an unimportant petition, for the Indiana Territory at that time covered a vast area. However, Harrison and his allies knew they had to tread carefully, for popular opinion was still against slavery at that time. So, they put a great deal of thought into their petition, delicately explaining that they understood that there were a “variety of opinions” on the subject of slavery and that while some thought it “decent and just” to hold people enslaved, many in America thought the practice evil. Indeed, they went to great length describing the disgust Americans felt toward slavery, adding that most thought of it as “a crime of the deepest stain; that it is repugnant to every opinion of natural justice, of political rights, and to every sentiment of humanity.” In the end, they begged that the evil of slavery be laid lightly on the territory only for a brief period so that it could be more quickly settled.43

  They would have said none of this if they did not believe that the sentiment against slavery was popular at that time, for only a fool states a counterargument in a debate unless it has very real weight and power against his claim. And Harrison and his men were no fools. But Harrison would have sent his petition off with some hope, for he also knew he had a terrible practicality on his side.