More important, however, none of these freedom suits actually outlawed slavery in the commonwealth, despite what historians have written over the years. Judges William Cushing (who owned slaves and resisted freeing them) and Nathaniel Peaslee Sargent are often given credit for instructing their juries to find slavery illegal—based on Article I—but none of the cases recorded any antislavery statements, and the juries decided only the facts in the case, that Mum Bett and Walker had been beaten and, for various reasons, were no longer slaves. In the instance of Jennison v. Caldwell, the jury actually found that Jennison (Walker’s owner) had been deprived of the labor of his property. Moreover, as one analyst of the cases has asserted, there is “not one shred of evidence to indicate that the Walker cases [and Mum Bett’s] brought an end to the institution of slavery.” In fact, none of the freedom cases brought to trial after 1780 gained any attention beyond their localities, and they failed to be reported in any newspapers of the era.
Additionally, Ashley refused to give up and petitioned the Massachusetts House of Representatives to adopt legislation protecting slave owning. He warned that failure to do so would likely invite huge numbers of black people to Massachusetts seeking their freedom and whom the commonwealth would have to support. Agitated by Ashley’s racial rantings, the House passed a bill to end slavery gradually, thus seeking to control manumissions in such a way as to not burden public resources. The Massachusetts Senate rejected the move but kept the idea on its agenda for about three years. Instead, in 1787 the legislature barred any blacks not “citizens” from remaining in the commonwealth for more than two months.
Phillis Wheatley, probably by Scipio Moorhead, 1773. Frontispiece for Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (London: Printed for A Bell, 1773). Library of Congress. Wheatley (1753–1784) published the first book by an African American, wrote against slavery, and played an important role in creating the Black Atlantic literary tradition. Remarkably, she came to Boston from West Africa in 1761, quickly mastered English, and penned her first poem four years later.
Massachusetts finally did outlaw the slave trade in 1788, but upheld any trading contracts made before adoption of the law. While it is true that slavery became economically insignificant in Massachusetts long before 1790, and the first census recorded no slaves in the state, the institution did not die completely. In 1800, 1,339 slaves lived in New England (with probably many missed by the census); and 30 years later, 48 slaves still lived in the region, with at least 1 in Massachusetts.38
The significance of the Mum Bett case and the other freedom suits of the 1780s lay more in how they reflected public attitudes in the post-Revolutionary period, rather than in how they shaped opinion or the law. While the various freedom suits did not legally end slavery in the commonwealth, they certainly indicated how juries were likely to decide such cases. As for Ashley and other defenders of slavery of the old order, they simply read public opinion and decided to drop their costly appeals. At least one slave owner made an attempt to sell his human property in the Caribbean before losing them in a suit, but most remaining owners simply released their slaves. Thus, it was not by law or in the courts that slavery died, as the Reverend Jeremy Belknap observed in 1795, but in the court of “publick opinion.”
For Mum Bett, the change was profound. She rejected Ashley’s belated offers of employment and went to work, happily, for the Sedgwick family, dying in 1829 at 87 years of age. She did not, thankfully, end her days as the slave Mum Bett, but rather as the Massachusetts citizen Elizabeth Freeman, a name that carried with it the aspirations of a people.39
FOR A TIME, THE VICTORY OF ELIZABETH FREEMAN AND OTHER NEW ENGLAND SLAVES APPEARED TO BE SETTING THE STAGE FOR SOMETHING MUCH LARGER. The American Revolution had sparked a wave of freedom movements that transformed the Atlantic world. Not coincidentally, northern states, including the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, began adopting gradual emancipation laws.
As early as 1775, Dr. Benjamin Rush and other Philadelphians founded the Quaker-dominated Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage—which before long became the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. Ten years later, in 1785, wealthy patrons organized the New York Manumission Society, which bore primary responsibility for educating black children, but spent most of its resources protecting blacks from kidnapping and providing legal advice. Connecticut and Rhode Island, the great slave-trading center, both adopted gradual emancipation laws, while Vermont, which never possessed any meaningful number of slaves, outlawed the institution in its founding constitution. By 1804, New Hampshire, New York, and New Jersey had followed suit, although in New York slavery did not completely end until 1827.
While one cannot equate abolitionist sentiment with any notion of equalitarianism, the Revolution had, as the Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn once wrote, ignited a “contagion of liberty” that both led many to question the institution of slavery and sparked an unprecedented wave of manumissions, especially in Virginia.40
In 1789, the French Revolution followed the American war, and in 1791, just two years later, 100,000 African slaves rose up against their hated French masters in the colony of Saint-Domingue, known because of its astonishing profitability as the “Pearl of the Antilles.” Fanned by the crosswinds of the Atlantic, the revolt took cues from the examples of America and France. In time, the slaves executed thousands of whites and burned their plantations. Their rebellion led to the decision to abolish slavery in the colony in 1793, a decision ratified by the French Assembly in 1794 and extended throughout the French Empire.
Despite this, Napoleon Bonaparte sent troops to the island in 1802 under the leadership of his brother-in-law, Charles Leclerc, attempting to rein in the semi-independent colony being led by self-declared “Governor-for-Life” Toussaint Louverture, and then to reinstate slavery. Bonaparte dreamed of making Saint-Domingue into the entrepôt for an empire that would spread out from New Orleans into the Louisiana territory of North America. Over the next two years, however, of the 34,000 unlucky French and allied soldiers sent to restore slavery on Saint-Domingue, 24,000 died and 7,000 lay sick, leaving only 3,000 effective soldiers in 1803. Before France finally gave up, thousands more would perish.41
Jean-Jacques Dessalines (following Louverture’s capture and imprisonment in France) turned the revolt into a well-organized revolution and Saint-Domingue into a graveyard for French arrogance and imperialism. Dessalines led his countrymen in the creation of the world’s first black republic, renamed the nation of Haiti, officially born on January 1, 1804. It had been the largest and most successful slave revolt in history.
Never before had slaves overthrown their masters and then created their own independent nation. Shock waves could be felt throughout the Atlantic world. Former Saint-Domingue slave owners poured into nearby Cuba and elsewhere in the Americas, including the United States, fleeing the retribution that surely would be visited on any supporter of slavery who remained on the island. Many, along with their African “property,” landed in New Orleans, Charleston, Philadelphia, and New York.
Even before the black rebels proved victorious, the revolt and the resulting immigrant influx aroused such fears that in 1802 the governor of South Carolina called out the state militia on a rumor that a shipload of slaves from the island was headed to Charleston. Earlier, in response to the outbreak of violence, Maryland and many southern states temporarily barred the importation of all slaves and even called a halt to the interstate traffic. North Carolina barred the presence of any black person from the West Indies; Georgia and Virginia prohibited free blacks from entering their states; and in 1798, Georgia abolished the slave trade by constitutional amendment. A slaveholder’s worst fears seemed realized.42
ONE OF THE FIRST AMERICAN ERUPTIONS RELATED TO THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR ON SAINT-DOMINGUE TOOK PLACE IN SLEEPY RICHMOND, VIRGINIA, planned by a slave named for the Bible’s divine messenger, Gabriel. Born prophetically in 1776 on the Prosser plantation, just six miles north of Richmo
nd, Gabriel grew up strong and tall, more than six feet in height. He became a skilled blacksmith and learned to read and write, placing him in the 5 percent of southern slaves who were literate. Since Gabriel wore rather fine clothing when not hammering at the forge, and since his owners allowed him to become literate, he was clearly much-favored property. Other slaves looked up to men like him.43
Gabriel and his two brothers, Martin and Solomon, grew up in an era of international revolution, intense political confrontations, the rise of evangelical Christianity, and a weakening slave regime in Virginia. In the immediate post-Revolutionary period, Virginia slave owners emancipated about 10,000 slaves, giving real substance to the idea that the Revolution had created a contagion of liberty. In the context of the French Revolution, the rhetoric of Jeffersonian democracy, and evangelicalism, many Virginia African Americans—free and slave—came to know unprecedented levels of liberty and understandably wanted more.
In 1800, Richmond possessed a population of 5,700 people, about half of whom were black. Additionally, about 4,600 slaves and 500 free African Americans lived in the surrounding Henrico County, a region dominated by tobacco and wheat. Whites were the minority. Thomas Prosser, Gabriel’s first owner, was both a successful planter and a merchant, a partner in the trading firm of Alexander Front & Company, and a legislator in the Virginia House of Burgesses. With 53 slaves, he was one of the largest slave owners in the county. He was probably typical for the times in the way he treated his slaves, allowing for much time off. As the plantations strove to be self-sufficient, masters had great incentives for their slaves to gain valuable skills—even, as in the case of Gabriel, literacy.
Possession of these skills could give a slave a certain liminal status—what the historian Rebecca J. Scott in another context, using a metaphor from the discipline of statistics, calls “degrees of freedom”—which a later generation of masters would abhor. It was not uncommon for slaves to travel great distances to see family members—with or without the officially required passes—and to hire out their own time when the season permitted it. When Gabriel’s owner died in 1798, his son Thomas Henry assumed control of the plantation. He increased the level of economic activity, becoming rather more successful than his father, which allowed him to spend much of his time in a townhouse in Richmond, and this left Gabriel even more time to call his own.44
Gabriel’s road to revolution began prosaically with a scuffle over a stolen pig. Stealing by a slave could bring on severe punishment, depending upon circumstances, but fighting a white man and biting off his ear, as Gabriel did, could lead to execution. One of Gabriel’s accomplices in this escapade went unpunished, but another received 39 lashes and narrowly escaped execution by pleading “benefit of clergy.” (This holdover from colonial law was grounded in an ancient English law originally applicable to clerics that mitigated capital punishment or the first conviction of a felony. It had expanded to apply to those with literacy in 19th-century Virginia, but by an oversight was only available to African Americans.) Gabriel did not escape punishment, however, and received a brand on one of his hands that meant death if he ever engaged in anything similar again. He came away from the incident with intense resentment. The liberty permitted by his owner allowed Gabriel to visit Richmond often and frequent the many taverns that catered to the working class, white and black. He grumbled to associates over beer and grog and began formulating plans for freedom, inspired by the pig incident and fortified by the heated political controversies between the Jeffersonian Democrats and Federalists.
But even more directly, Gabriel found inspiration in the French and Saint-Domingue revolutions. Coincidentally, he met two French soldiers in the Richmond taverns who had remained behind after the close of the American Revolution and, still fired with Revolutionary fervor, encouraged Gabriel in his desire for freedom, not just for himself but for all slaves and even for oppressed white workingmen. Misunderstanding the context of political debates in the early Republic—or appropriating them for his own ends—Gabriel concluded that Jeffersonian Democratic ideology encompassed the interests of slaves, white mechanics, sailors, and workingmen, who could combine to oppose the Federalist merchant class.
Moreover, the fears that Virginia whites expressed over the impact of the Saint-Domingue Revolution only incited Gabriel further. Conservative whites had spread rumors that the revolutionary government in France had ordered a black rebel from Saint-Domingue to lead an army of former slaves and invade the southern United States. Gabriel could read these reports for himself and overhear the dire stories of whites who had fled the island, and he could speak with the slaves that the French colonial slaveholders had brought to Virginia from Saint-Domingue. In this hothouse of Richmond political life, with stories of the black slave insurrection, the slaves’ military victories over their masters, and the granting of their freedom by the French Assembly permeating the air, Gabriel understandably concluded in the spring of the critical political year 1800 that slaves could, in fact, throw off their chains.45 (Neither he nor Toussaint Louverture could imagine that First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte would seek to reinstate slavery on the island just two years later.)
Gabriel began his plot in his blacksmith shop, where he convinced his brother Solomon and another servant on the Prosser plantation to join his quest for freedom. The number of his contacts grew, reaching Richmond, other nearby towns and plantations, and well beyond to Petersburg and Norfolk, word spreading through free and enslaved black people who worked the waterways. Aided by his French associates, Gabriel believed that he could rally at least 1,000 slaves to his banner of “Death or Liberty,” inverting the famed cry of the slaveholding revolutionary Patrick Henry. With incredible daring—and naïveté—he planned to march to Richmond, seize weapons stored there, and hold Governor James Monroe as a hostage until the merchant class agreed to establish equal rights for all. He did not seek to make war on all white people—far from it. He believed that the interests of the working class, Quakers, Baptists, and French all coincided with African Americans against the merchant class, who, he held, imposed the thralldom under which the oppressed labored.
During the summer, possessing few weapons, Gabriel put his blacksmithing skills to work and began literally making swords out of plowshares and other farm implements. He planned his uprising for the end of August. Word of the day and time had gone out far and wide. But when the time to strike came, one of the worst thunderstorms in recent memory came with it, washing away roads and disrupting travel. Gabriel hesitated, but believed that even a small band could march to Richmond, take the armory, and distribute weapons to slaves and workers who would rally to the cause. Telling so many other black people about his plans represented a necessary gamble to gain supporters, but also exposed him to the possibility of betrayal. Fearing retribution if the plot failed, a slave aptly named Pharoah exposed Gabriel’s plans. Others soon talked to save their lives.46
Was Gabriel’s plot simply naïve? Could it actually have succeeded? Many whites in Richmond thought so. The unpredictable John Randolph believed that the plot had failed only because of the “heavy fall of rain which made the water courses impassable.” Outnumbered by African Americans, whites also lacked personal weapons. If Gabriel had managed to rally 100 or more blacks to his standard, he might have been able to seize Governor James Monroe as a hostage as planned and negotiate a settlement, although the chances of such an outcome seem rather slender. Given racial attitudes and white fears of an insurrection in the style of Toussaint Louverture, whites undoubtedly would have crushed any revolt that they believed aimed at taking possession of their property and their “white women,” even if it took time and many lives.47
Toussaint L’Ouverture, by Nicholas Eustache Maurin, one of a series sold in Paris and London in 1832. Hand-colored lithograph. Collection of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Show trials and prompt executions followed discovery of the plot. Ironically, those free African Americans accused of complicity went unpunished since
no Virginia court would recognize the testimony of a slave against a free person, and the only actual witnesses to the conspiracy were other slaves. By October 3, 17 men had been hanged and 30 more languished in jail, with many more death sentences likely to follow. But some white leaders like Thomas Jefferson and even Governor Monroe worried about the impact of a bloodbath of retribution and the costs to the commonwealth as it had to reimburse owners for the loss of their slaves, still considered their property. As the number of executions reached 25, the cost reached the exorbitant amount of $9,000 or so, money that cash-strapped Virginia could ill afford. Thus, authorities began pardoning a few conspirators and transporting others out of state, saving Gabriel for last. Despite his pleas, they hanged him alone on October 10, in front of those who reviled him and imagined a bloodthirsty black Saint-Domingue rapist rather than someone inspired by the liberty and freedom they themselves enjoyed.48
The newly formed United States, styling itself as a beacon of freedom and an Empire for Liberty, as Thomas Jefferson termed it, saw only alarm emanating from Saint-Domingue. As president, Jefferson feared that the black republic—formed in 1804 when Dessalines chose the name Haiti for the new nation, replacing the French colonial name of Saint-Domingue—would become a base for European adventurism in the hemisphere. Even worse, the self-freed slaves—whom he called “cannibals of the terrible republic”—might succeed as a nation.
The African Americans Page 9