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American Negro Slavery
Chapter VII Revolution and Reaction
by Phillips, Ulrich Bonnell
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After the whole group of colonies had long been left in salutary neglect
by the British authorities, George III and his ministers undertook the
creation of an imperial control; and Parliament was too much at the king's
command for opposing statesmen to stop the project. The Americans wakened
resentfully to the new conditions. The revived navigation laws, the stamp
act, the tea duty, and the dispatch of redcoats to coerce Massachusetts
were a cumulation of grievances not to be borne by high-spirited people.
For some years the colonial spokesmen tried to persuade the British
government that it was violating historic and constitutional rights; but
these efforts had little success. To the argument that the empire was
composed of parts mutually independent in legislation, it was replied that
Parliament had legislated imperially ever since the empire's beginning, and
that the colonial assemblies possessed only such powers as Parliament might
allow. The plea of no taxation without representation was answered by the
doctrine that all elements in the empire were virtually represented in
Parliament. The stress laid by the colonials upon their rights as Britons
met the administration's emphasis upon the duty of all British subjects
to obey British laws. This countering of pleas of exemption with
pronouncements of authority drove the complainants at length from proposals
of reform to projects of revolution. For this the solidarity of the
continent was essential, and that was to be gained only by the most
vigorous agitation with the aid of the most effective campaign cries. The
claim of historic immunities was largely discarded in favor of the more
glittering doctrines current in the philosophy of the time. The demands for
local self-government or for national independence, one or both of which
were the genuine issues at stake, were subordinated to the claim of the
inherent and inalienable rights of man. Hence the culminating formulation
in the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by
their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness." The cause of the community was to be
won under the guise of the cause of individuals.
In Jefferson's original draft of the great declaration there was a
paragraph indicting the king for having kept open the African slave trade
against colonial efforts to close it, and for having violated thereby the
"most sacred rights of life and liberty of a distant people, who never
offended him, captivating them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to
incur miserable death in their transportation thither." This passage,
according to Jefferson's account, "was struck out 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. Our Northern
brethren also I believe," Jefferson continued, "felt a little tender under
these censures, for though their people have very few slaves themselves,
yet they have been pretty considerable carriers of them to others."[1] By
reason of the general stress upon the inherent liberty of all men, however,
the question of negro status, despite its omission from the Declaration,
was an inevitable corollary to that of American independence.
[Footnote 1: Herbert Friedenwald, The Declaration of Independence (New
York, 1904), pp. 130, 272.]
Negroes had a barely appreciable share in precipitating the Revolution
and in waging the war. The "Boston Massacre" was occasioned in part by an
insult offered by a slave to a British soldier two days before; and in that
celebrated affray itself, Crispus Attucks, a mulatto slave, was one of the
five inhabitants of Boston slain. During the course of the war free negro
and slave enlistments were encouraged by law in the states where racial
control was not reckoned vital, and they were informally permitted in the
rest. The British also utilized this resource in some degree. As early as
November 7, 1775, Lord Dunmore, the ousted royal governor of Virginia,
issued a proclamation offering freedom to all slaves "appertaining to
rebels" who would join him "for the more speedy reducing this colony to a
proper sense of their duty to his Majesty's crown and dignity."[2] In reply
the Virginia press warned the negroes against British perfidy; and the
revolutionary government, while announcing the penalties for servile
revolt, promised freedom to such as would promptly desert the British
standard. Some hundreds of negroes appear to have joined Dunmore, but they
did not save him from being driven away.[3]
[Footnote 2: American Archives, Force ed., fourth series, III, 1385.]
[Footnote 3: Ibid., III, 1387; IV, 84, 85; V, 160, 162.]
When several years afterward military operations were transferred to the
extreme South, where the whites were few and the blacks many, the problem
of negro enlistments became at once more pressing and more delicate. Henry
Laurens of South Carolina proposed to General Washington in March, 1779,
the enrollment of three thousand blacks in the Southern department.
Hamilton warmly endorsed the project, and Washington and Madison more
guardedly. Congress recommended it to the states concerned, and pledged
itself to reimburse the masters and to set the slaves free with a payment
of fifty dollars to each of these at the end of the war. Eventually Colonel
John Laurens, the son of Henry, went South as an enthusiastic emissary of
the scheme, only to meet rebuff and failure.[4] Had the negroes in general
possessed any means of concerted action, they might conceivably have played
off the British and American belligerents to their own advantage. In
actuality, however, they were a passive element whose fate was affected
only so far as the master race determined.
[Footnote 4: G.W. Williams, History of the Negro Race in America (New
York [1882]), I, 353-362.]
Some of the politicians who championed the doctrine of liberty inherent and
universal used it merely as a means to a specific and somewhat unrelated
end. Others endorsed it literally and with resolve to apply it wherever
consistency might require. How could they justly continue to hold men in
bondage when in vindication of their own cause they were asserting the
right of all men to be free? Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Edmund
Randolph and many less prominent slaveholders were disquieted by the
question. Instances of private manumission became frequent, and memorials
were fairly numerous advocating anti-slavery legislation. Indeed Samuel
Hopkins of Rhode Island in a pamphlet of 1776 declared that slavery in
Anglo-America was "without the express sanction of civil government," and
censured the colonial authorities and citizens for having connived in the
maintenance of the wrongful institution.
As to public acts, the Vermont convention of 1777 when claiming statehood
for its community framed a constitution with a bill of rights asserting the
inherent freedom of all men and attaching to it an express prohibition of
slavery. The opposition of New York delayed Vermont's recognition until
1791 when she was admitted as a state with this provision unchanged.
Similar inherent-liberty clauses but without the expressed anti-slavery
application were incorporated into the bills of rights adopted severally by
Virginia in 1776, Massachusetts in 1780, and New Hampshire in 1784. In the
first of these the holding of slaves persisted undisturbed by this action;
and in New Hampshire the custom died from the dearth of slaves rather than
from the natural-rights clause. In Massachusetts likewise it is plain
from copious contemporary evidence that abolition was not intended by the
framers of the bill of rights nor thought by the people or the officials to
have been accomplished thereby.[5] One citizen, indeed, who wanted to keep
his woman slave but to be rid of her child soon to be born, advertised in
the Independent Chronicle of Boston at the close of 1780: "A negro child,
soon expected, of a good breed, may be owned by any person inclining to
take it, and money with it."[6] The courts of the commonwealth, however,
soon began to reflect anti-slavery sentiment, as Lord Mansfield had done in
the preceding decade in England,[7] and to make use of the bill of rights
to destroy the masters' dominion. The decisive case was the prosecution of
Nathaniel Jennison of Worcester County for assault and imprisonment alleged
to have been committed upon his absconded slave Quork Walker in the process
of his recovery. On the trial in 1783 the jury responded to a strong
anti-slavery charge from Chief Justice Cushing by returning a verdict
against Jennison, and the court fined him £50 and costs.
[Footnote 5: G.H. Moore, Notes on the History of Slavery in
Massachusetts, pp. 181-209.]
[Footnote 6: Ibid., p. 208. So far as the present writer's knowledge
extends, this item is without parallel at any other time or place.]
[Footnote 7: The case of James Somerset on habeas corpus, in Howell's
State Trials, XX, §548.]
This action prompted the negroes generally to leave their masters, though
some were deterred "on account of their age and infirmities, or because
they did not know how to provide for themselves, or for some pecuniary
consideration."[8] The former slaveholders now felt a double grievance:
they were deprived of their able-bodied negroes but were not relieved of
the legal obligation to support such others as remained on their hands.
Petitions for their relief were considered by the legislature but never
acted upon. The legal situation continued vague, for although an act of
1788 forbade citizens to trade in slaves and another penalized the sojourn
for more than two months in Massachusetts of negroes from other states,[9]
no legislation defined the status of colored residents. In the federal
census of 1790, however, this was the only state in which no slaves were
listed.
[Footnote 8: Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, XLIII, 386.]
[Footnote 9: Moore, pp. 227-229.]
Racial antipathy and class antagonism among the whites appear to
have contributed to this result. John Adams wrote in 1795, with some
exaggeration and incoherence: "Argument might have [had] some weight in
the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts, but the real cause was the
multiplication of labouring white people, who would no longer suffer the
rich to employ these sable rivals so much to their injury ... If the
gentlemen had been permitted by law to hold slaves, the common white people
would have put the negroes to death, and their masters too, perhaps ...
The common white people, or rather the labouring people, were the cause of
rendering negroes unprofitable servants. Their scoffs and insults, their
continual insinuations, filled the negroes with discontent, made them lazy,
idle, proud, vicious, and at length wholly useless to their masters,
to such a degree that the abolition of slavery became a measure of
economy."[10]
[Footnote 10: Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, XLIII, 402.]
Slavery in the rest of the Northern states was as a rule not abolished, but
rather put in process of gradual extinction by legislation of a peculiar
sort enacted in response to agitations characteristic of the times.
Pennsylvania set the pattern in an act of 1780 providing that all children
born thereafter of slave mothers in the state were to be the servants of
their mothers' owners until reaching twenty-eight years of age, and then to
become free. Connecticut followed in 1784 with an act of similar purport
but with a specification of twenty-five years, afterward reduced to
twenty-one, as the age for freedom; and in 1840 she abolished her remnant
of slavery outright. In Rhode Island an act of the same year, 1784, enacted
that the children thereafter born of slave mothers were to be free at the
ages of twenty-one for males and eighteen for females, and that these
children were meanwhile to be supported and instructed at public expense;
but an amendment of the following year transferred to the mothers' owners
the burden of supporting the children, and ignored the matter of their
education. New York lagged until 1799, and then provided freedom for the
after-born only at twenty-eight and twenty-five years for males and females
respectively; but a further act of 1817 set the Fourth of July in 1827 as a
time for the emancipation for all remaining slaves in the state. New
Jersey fell into line last of all by an act of 1804 giving freedom to the
after-born at the ages of twenty-five for males and twenty-one for females;
and in 1846 she converted the surviving slaves nominally into apprentices
but without materially changing their condition. Supplementary legislation
here and there in these states bestowed freedom upon slaves in military
service, restrained the import and export of slaves, and forbade the
citizens to ply the slave trade by land or sea.[11]
[Footnote 11: E.R. Turner, The Negro in Pennsylvania, pp. 77-85; B.C.
Steiner, Slavery in Connecticut, pp. 30-32; Rhode Island Colonial
Records, X, 132, 133; A.J. Northrup, "Slavery in New York," in the New
York State Library Report for 1900, pp. 286-298; H.S. Cooley, "Slavery
in New Jersey" (Johns Hopkins University Studies, XIV, nos. 9, 10), pp.
47-50; F.B. Lee, New Jersey as a Colony and as a State (New York, 1912),
IV, 25-48.]
Thus from Pennsylvania eastward the riddance of slavery was procured or put
in train, generally by the device of emancipating the post nati; and in
consequence the slave population in that quarter dwindled before the middle
of the nineteenth century to a negligible residue. To the southward the
tobacco states, whose industry had reached a somewhat stationary condition,
found it a simple matter to prohibit the further importation of slaves from
Africa. Delaware did this in 1776, Virginia in 1778, Maryland in 1783 and
North Carolina in 1794. But in these commonwealths as well as in their more
southerly neighbors, the contemplation of the great social and economic
problems involved in disestablishing slavery daunted the bulk of the
citizens and impelled their representatives to conservatism. The advocacy
of abolition, whether sudden or gradual, was little more than sporadic.
The people were not to be stampeded in the cause of inherent rights or
any other abstract philosophy. It was a condition and not a theory which
confronted them.
In Delaware, however, the problem was hardly formidable, for at the time of
the first federal census there were hardly nine thousand slaves and a third
as many colored freemen in her gross population of some sixty thousand
souls. Nevertheless a bill for gradual abolition considered by the
legislature in 1786 appears not to have been brought to a vote,[12] and no
action in the premises was taken thereafter. The retention of slavery seems
to have been mainly due to mere public inertia and to the pressure of
political sympathy with the more distinctively Southern states. Because of
her border position and her dearth of plantation industry, the slaves in
Delaware steadily decreased to less than eighteen hundred in 1860, while
the free negroes grew to more than ten times as many.
[Footnote 12: J.R. Brackett, "The Status of the Slave, 1775-1789," in J.F.
Jameson ed., Essays in the Constitutional History of the United States,
1775-1789 (Boston, 1889), pp. 300-302.]
In Maryland various projects for abolition, presented by the Quakers
between 1785 and 1791 and supported by William Pinckney and Charles
Carroll, were successively defeated in the legislature; and efforts
to remove the legal restraints on private manumission were likewise
thwarted.[13] These restrictions, which applied merely to the freeing of
slaves above middle age, were in fact very slight. The manumissions indeed
were so frequent and the conditions of life in Maryland were so attractive
to free negroes, or at least so much less oppressive than in most other
states, that while the slave population decreased between 1790 and 1860
from 103,036 to 87,189 souls the colored freemen multiplied from 8046 to
83,942, a number greater by twenty-five thousand than that in any other
commonwealth.
[Footnote 13: J.R. Brackett, The Negro in Maryland (Baltimore, 1899), pp.
52-64, 148-155.]
Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1785 that anti-slavery men were as scarce to the
southward of Chesapeake Bay as they were common to the north of it, while
in Maryland, and still more in Virginia, the bulk of the people approved
the doctrine and a respectable minority were ready to adopt it in practice,
"a minority which for weight and worth of character preponderates against
the greater number who have not the courage to divest their families of
a property which, however, keeps their conscience unquiet." Virginia,
he continued, "is the next state to which we may turn our eyes for the
interesting spectacle of justice in conflict with avarice and oppression, a
conflict in which the sacred side is gaining daily recruits from the influx
into office of young men grown and growing up. These have sucked in the
principles of liberty as it were with their mother's milk, and it is to
them that I look with anxiety to turn the fate of the question."[14]
Jefferson had already tried to raise the issue by having a committee for
revising the Virginia laws, appointed in 1776 with himself a member, frame
a special amendment for disestablishing slavery. This contemplated a
gradual emancipation of the after-born children, their tutelage by the
state, their colonization at maturity, and their replacement in Virginia
by white immigrants.[15] But a knowledge that such a project would raise
a storm caused even its framers to lay it aside. The abolition of
primogeniture and the severance of church from state absorbed reformers'
energies at the expense of the slavery question.
[Footnote 14: Jefferson, Writings, P.L. Ford ed., IV, 82-83.]
[Footnote 15: Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, various editions, query 14.]
When writing his Notes on Virginia in 1781 Jefferson denounced the
slaveholding system in phrases afterward classic among abolitionists: "With
what execration should the statesman be loaded who, permitting one-half of
the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other, transforms those
into despots and these into enemies ... And can the liberties of a nation
be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction
in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That
they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my
country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep
forever."[16] In the course of the same work, however, he deprecated
abolition unless it were to be accompanied with deportation: "Why not
retain and incorporate the blacks into the state...? Deep rooted prejudices
entertained by the whites, ten thousand recollections by the blacks of the
injuries they have sustained, new provocations, the real distinctions which
nature has made, and many other circumstances, will divide us into
parties and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the
extermination of the one or the other race ... This unfortunate difference
of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the
emancipation of these people. Many of their advocates while they wish to
vindicate the liberty of human nature are anxious also to preserve its
dignity and beauty. Some of these, embarrassed by the question 'What
further is to be done with them?' join themselves in opposition with those
who are actuated by sordid avarice only. Among the Romans, emancipation
required but one effort. The slave when made free might mix without
staining the blood of his master. But with us a second is necessary
unknown to history. When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of
mixture."[17]
[Footnote 16: Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, query 18.]
[Footnote 17: Ibid., query 14.]
George Washington wrote in 1786 that one of his chief wishes was that some
plan might be adopted "by which slavery may be abolished by slow, sure and
imperceptible degrees." But he noted in the same year that some abolition
petitions presented to the Virginia legislature had barely been given a
reading.[18]
[Footnote 18: Washington, Writings, W.C. Ford ed., XI, 20, 62.]
Seeking to revive the issue, Judge St. George Tucker, professor of law in
William and Mary College, inquired of leading citizens of Massachusetts in
1795 for data and advice, and undaunted by discouraging reports received in
reply or by the specific dissuasion of John Adams, he framed an intricate
plan for extremely gradual emancipation and for expelling the freedmen
without expense to the state by merely making their conditions of life
unbearable. This was presented to the legislature in a pamphlet of 1796
at the height of the party strife between the Federalists and
Democratic-Republicans; and it was impatiently dismissed from
consideration.[19] Tucker, still nursing his project, reprinted his
"dissertation" as an appendix to his edition of Blackstone in 1803, where
the people and the politicians let it remain buried. In public opinion, the
problem as to the freedmen remained unsolved and insoluble.
[Footnote 19: St. George Tucker, A Dissertation on Slavery, with a
proposal for the gradual abolition of it in the State of Virginia
(Philadelphia, 1796, reprinted New York, 1860). Tucker's Massachusetts
correspondence is printed in the Massachusetts Historical Society
Collections, XLIII (Belknap papers), 379-431.]
Meanwhile the Virginia black code had been considerably moderated during
and after the Revolution; and in particular the previous almost iron-clad
prohibition of private manumission had been wholly removed in effect by an
act of 1782. In spite of restrictions afterward imposed upon manumission
and upon the residence of new freedmen in the state, the free negroes
increased on a scale comparable to that in Maryland. As compared with an
estimate of less than two thousand in 1782, there were 12,866 in 1790,
20,124 in 1800, and 30,570 in 1810. Thereafter the number advanced more
slowly until it reached 58,042, about one-eighth as many as the slaves
numbered, in 1860.
In the more southerly states condemnation of slavery was rare. Among
the people of Georgia, the depressing experience of the colony under a
prohibition of it was too fresh in memory for them to contemplate with
favor a fresh deprivation. In South Carolina Christopher Gadsden had
written in 1766 likening slavery to a crime, and a decade afterward Henry
Laurens wrote: "You know, my dear son, I abhor slavery.... The day, I hope
is approaching when from principles of gratitude as well as justice every
man will strive to be foremost in showing his readiness to comply with the
golden rule. Not less than twenty thousand pounds sterling would all my
negroes produce if sold at public auction tomorrow.... Nevertheless I am
devising means for manumitting many of them, and for cutting off the entail
of slavery. Great powers oppose me--the laws and customs of my country,
my own and the avarice of my countrymen. What will my children say if
I deprive them of so much estate? These are difficulties, but not
insuperable. I will do as much as I can in my time, and leave the rest to
a better hand. I am not one of those ... who dare trust in Providence for
defence and security of their own liberty while they enslave and wish
to continue in slavery thousands who are as well entitled to freedom as
themselves. I perceive the work before me is great. I shall appear to many
as a promoter not only of strange but of dangerous doctrines; it will
therefore be necessary to proceed with caution."[20] Had either Gadsden
or Laurens entertained thoughts of launching an anti-slavery campaign,
however, the palpable hopelessness of such a project in their community
must have dissuaded them. The negroes of the rice coast were so
outnumbering and so crude that an agitation applying the doctrine of
inherent liberty and equality to them could only have had the effect of
discrediting the doctrine itself. Furthermore, the industrial prospect,
the swamps and forests calling for conversion into prosperous plantations,
suggested an increase rather than a diminution of the slave labor supply.
Georgia and South Carolina, in fact, were more inclined to keep open the
African slave trade than to relinquish control of the negro population.
Revolutionary liberalism had but the slightest of echoes there.
[Footnote 20: Frank Moore ed., Correspondence of Henry Laurens (New York,
1861), pp. 20, 21. The version of this letter given by Professor Wallace in
his Life of Henry Laurens, p. 446, which varies from the present one, was
derived from a paraphrase by John Laurens to whom the original was written.
Cf. South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine, X. 49. For
related items in the Laurens correspondence see D.D. Wallace, Life of
Henry Laurens, pp. 445, 447-455.]
In North Carolina the prevailing lack of enterprise in public affairs had
no exception in regard to slavery. The Quakers alone condemned it. When in
1797 Nathaniel Macon, a pronounced individualist and the chief spokesman of
his state in Congress, discussed the general subject he said "there was not
a gentleman in North Carolina who did not wish there were no blacks in the
country. It was a misfortune--he considered it a curse; but there was no
way of getting rid of them." Macon put his emphasis upon the negro problem
rather than upon the question of slavery, and in so doing he doubtless
reflected the thought of his community.[21] The legislation of North
Carolina regarding racial control, like that of the period in South
Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee and Kentucky, was more conservative than
liberal.
[Footnote 21: Annals of Congress, VII, 661. American historians, through
preoccupation or inadvertence, have often confused anti-negro with
anti-slavery expressions. In reciting the speech of Macon here quoted
McMaster has replaced "blacks" with "slaves"; and incidentally he has made
the whole discussion apply to Georgia instead of North Carolina. Rhodes
in turn has implicitly followed McMaster in both errors. J.B. McMaster,
History of the People of the United States, II, 359; J.F. Rhodes,
History of the United States, I, 19.]
The central government of the United States during the Revolution and the
Confederation was little concerned with slavery problems except in its
diplomatic affairs, where the question was merely the adjustment of
property in slaves, and except in regard to the western territories.
Proposals for the prohibition of slavery in these wilderness regions were
included in the first projects for establishing governments in them.
Timothy Pickering and certain military colleagues framed a plan in 1780 for
a state beyond the Ohio River with slavery excluded; but it was allowed
to drop out of consideration. In the next year an ordinance drafted by
Jefferson was introduced into Congress for erecting territorial governments
over the whole area ceded or to be ceded by the states, from the
Alleghanies to the Mississippi and from Canada to West Florida; and one of
its features was a prohibition of slavery after the year 1800 throughout
the region concerned. Under the Articles of Confederation, the Congress
could enact legislation only by the affirmative votes of seven state
delegations. When the ballot was taken on the anti-slavery clause the six
states from Pennsylvania eastward voted aye: Maryland, Virginia and South
Carolina voted no; and the other states were absent. Jefferson was not
alone in feeling chagrin at the defeat and in resolving to persevere.
Pickering expressed his own views in a letter to Rufus King: "To suffer the
continuance of slaves till they can be gradually emancipated, in states
already overrun with them, may be pardonable because unavoidable without
hazarding greater evils; but to introduce them into countries where none
already exist ... can never be forgiven." King in his turn introduced a
resolution virtually restoring the stricken clause, but was unable to bring
it to a vote. After being variously amended, the ordinance without this
clause was adopted. It was, however, temporary in its provision and
ineffectual in character; and soon the drafting of one adequate for
permanent purposes was begun. The adoption of this was hastened in July,
1787, by the offer of a New England company to buy from Congress a huge
tract of Ohio land. When the bill was put to the final vote it was
supported by every member with the sole exception of the New Yorker,
Abraham Yates. Delegations from all of the Southern states but Maryland
were present, and all of them voted aye. Its enactment gave to the country
a basic law for the territories in phrasing and in substance comparable to
the Declaration of Independence and the Federal Constitution. Applying
only to the region north of the Ohio River, the ordinance provided for
the erection of territories later to be admitted as states, guaranteed in
republican government, secured in the freedom of religion, jury trial and
all concomitant rights, endowed with public land for the support of schools
and universities, and while obligated to render fugitive slaves on claim
of their masters in the original states, shut out from the régime of
slaveholding itself.[22] "There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary
servitude in the said territory," it prescribed, "otherwise than in
punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." The
first Congress under the new constitution reënacted the ordinance, which
was the first and last antislavery achievement by the central government in
the period.
[Footnote 22: A.C. McLaughlin, The Confederation and the Constitution
(New York [1905]), chap. 7; B.A. Hinsdale, The Old Northwest (New York,
1888), chap. 15.]
By this time radicalism in general had spent much of its force. The
excessive stress which the Revolution had laid upon the liberty of
individuals had threatened for a time to break the community's grasp upon
the essentials of order and self-restraint. Social conventions of many
sorts were flouted; local factions resorted to terrorism against their
opponents; legislatures abused their power by confiscating loyalist
property and enacting laws for the dishonest promotion of debtor-class
interests, and the central government, made pitiably weak by the prevailing
jealousy of control, was kept wholly incompetent through the shirking
of burdens by states pledged to its financial support. But populism and
particularism brought their own cure. The paralysis of government now
enabled sober statesmen to point the prospect of ruin through chaos and
get a hearing in their advocacy of sound system. Exalted theorising on the
principles of liberty had merely destroyed the old régime: matter-of-fact
reckoning on principles of law and responsibility must build the new. The
plan of organization, furthermore, must be enough in keeping with the
popular will to procure a general ratification.
Negro slavery in the colonial period had been of continental extent but
under local control. At the close of the Revolution, as we have seen,
its area began to be sectionally confined while the jurisdiction over it
continued to lie in the several state governments. The great convention
at Philadelphia in 1787 might conceivably have undertaken the transfer of
authority over the whole matter to the central government; but on the one
hand the beginnings of sectional jealousy made the subject a delicate
one, and on the other hand the members were glad enough to lay aside all
problems not regarded as essential in their main task. Conscious ignorance
by even the best informed delegates from one section as to affairs in
another was a dissuasion from the centralizing of doubtful issues; and the
secrecy of the convention's proceedings exempted it from any pressure of
anti-slavery sentiment from outside.
On the whole the permanence of any critical problem in the premises was
discredited. Roger Sherman of Connecticut "observed that the abolition of
slavery seemed to be going on in the United States, and that the good sense
of the people of the several states would by degrees compleat it." His
colleague Oliver Ellsworth said, "The morality or wisdom of slavery are
considerations belonging to the states themselves"; and again, "Let us not
intermeddle. As population increases poor laborers will be so plenty as to
render slaves useless. Slavery in time will not be a speck in our country."
And Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts "thought we had nothing to do with the
conduct of states as to slaves, but ought to be careful not to give any
sanction to it." The agreement was general that the convention keep its
hands off so far as might be; but positive action was required upon
incidental phases which involved some degree of sanction for the
institution itself. These issues concerned the apportionment of
representation, the regulation of the African trade, and the rendition of
fugitives. This last was readily adjusted by the unanimous adoption of a
clause introduced by Pierce Butler of South Carolina and afterward changed
in its phrasing to read: "No person held to service or labour in one state
under the laws thereof escaping into another shall in consequence of any
law or regulation therein be discharged from such service or labour, but
shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labour
may be due." After some jockeying, the other two questions were settled by
compromise. Representation in the lower house of Congress was apportioned
among the states "according to their several members, which shall be
determined by adding to the whole number of free persons ... three fifths
of all other persons." As to the foreign slave trade, Congress was
forbidden to prohibit it prior to the year 1808, and was merely permitted
meanwhile to levy an import duty upon slaves at a rate of not more than ten
dollars each. [23]
[Footnote 23: Max Farrand ed., The Records of the Federal Convention (New
Haven, 1911), passim]
In the state conventions to which the Constitution was referred for
ratification the debates bore out a remark of Madison's at Philadelphia
that the real difference of interests lay not between the large and small
states but between those within and without the slaveholding influence. The
opponents of the Constitution at the North censured it as a pro-slavery
instrument, while its advocates apologized for its pertinent clauses on the
ground that nothing more hostile to the institution could have been carried
and that if the Constitution were rejected there would be no prospect of
a federal stoppage of importations at any time. But at the South the
opposition, except in Maryland and Virginia where the continuance of the
African trade was deprecated, declared the slavery concessions inadequate,
while the champions of the Constitution maintained that the utmost
practicable advantages for their sectional interest had been achieved.
Among the many amendments to the Constitution proposed by the ratifying
conventions the only one dealing with any phase of slavery was offered,
strange to say, by Rhode Island, whose inhabitants had been and still
were so active in the African trade. It reads: "As a traffic tending to
establish and continue the slavery of the human species is disgraceful to
the cause of liberty and humanity, Congress shall as soon as may be promote
and establish such laws as may effectually prevent the importation of
slaves of every description."[24] The proposal seems to have received no
further attention at the time.
[Footnote 24: This was dated May 29, 1790. H.V. Ames, "Proposed Amendment
to the Constitution of the United States," in the American Historical
Association Report for 1896, p. 208]
In the early sessions of Congress under the new Constitution most of the
few debates on slavery topics arose incidentally and ended without positive
action. The taxation of slave imports was proposed in 1789, but was never
enacted: sundry petitions of anti-slavery tenor, presented mostly by
Quakers, were given brief consideration in 1790 and again at the close
of the century but with no favorable results; and when, in 1797, a more
concrete issue was raised by memorials asking intervention on behalf of
some negroes whom Quakers had manumitted in North Carolina in disregard of
legal restraints and who had again been reduced to slavery, a committee
reported that the matter fell within the scope of judicial cognizance
alone, and the House dismissed the subject. For more than a decade, indeed,
the only legislation enacted by Congress concerned at all with slavery was
the act of 1793 empowering the master of an interstate fugitive to seize
him wherever found, carry him before any federal or state magistrate in the
vicinage, and procure a certificate warranting his removal to the state
from which he had fled. Proposals to supplement this rendition act on the
one hand by safeguarding free negroes from being kidnapped under fraudulent
claims and on the other hand by requiring employers of strange negroes to
publish descriptions of them and thus facilitate the recovery of runaways,
were each defeated in the House.
On the whole the glamor of revolutionary doctrines was passing, and self
interest was regaining its wonted supremacy. While the rising cotton
industry was giving the blacks in the South new value as slaves, Northern
spokesmen were frankly stating an antipathy of their people toward negroes
in any capacity whatever.[25] The succession of disasters in San Domingo,
meanwhile, gave warning against the upsetting of racial adjustments in the
black belts, and the Gabriel revolt of 1800 in Virginia drove the lesson
home. On slavery questions for a period of several decades the policy
of each of the two sections was merely to prevent itself from being
overreached. The conservative trend, however, could not wholly remove the
Revolution's impress of philosophical liberalism from the minds of men.
Slavery was always a thing of appreciable disrelish in many quarters; and
the slave trade especially, whether foreign or domestic, bore a permanent
stigma.
[Footnote 25: E. g., Annals of Congress, 1799-1801, pp. 230-246.]
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