Primary Source’s Making Freedom: African Americans in United States History, was originally published in 2004, and was composed of five teacher sourcebooks. The forward and context essays, written by scholars of that time, were designed to provide background information necessary to understanding the primary sources and activities in each unit. In the spirit of consistency, we have opted to include the original context essays, as additional “further resources” that educators may opt to review in order to deepen their context knowledge further. It is important to note however, that unless otherwise noted, these context essays are presented here in their original form and have not been edited since their original publication. As a result, these essays may no longer reflect the most up to date historical information and/or may not reflect the instructional, pedagogical or culturally responsive approaches and linguistic expectations of today.
Slavery in the Era of the American Revolution
By Robert Allison
Book 2: A Song Full of Hope: 1770–1830, Context Essay 1
- Slavery and Liberty
When his owner brought enslaved African American James Somerset with him from Massachusetts to England in 1771, Somerset took the opportunity to escape. His owner recaptured him and decided to punish Somerset by selling him to a Jamaican sugar plantation. Slavery in Massachusetts was a hardship; in Jamaica, it was practically a death sentence. Somerset contacted Granville Sharp, an English philanthropist who had begun a one-man crusade against slavery. Sharp helped Somerset sue for his freedom. Slavery, he argued, violated natural law, and a man could only be held as a slave if Parliament expressly permitted it. The “air of England is too pure for a slave to breathe,” Somerset’s lawyers argued. After many delays, and after privately urging Parliament to make some positive law protecting slavery, in June 1772 England’s highest court ruled in Somerset’s favor. The law of Massachusetts, and of all other of Britain’s colonies, might recognize James Somerset as property, but the law of England recognized him only as a person.
Another slave in Massachusetts, Phillis Wheatley, wrote in 1774 that “in every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom. . . .” This principle was the root of both the Somerset decision and of an argument between the American colonies and the British parliament. Leaders in the American colonies argued that Parliament could not tax the people of the American colonies, nor regulate their trade, without their consent. To do so would deprive these people of their fundamental right to govern themselves. To make these people subject to Parliamentary power would deprive them of their liberty, and make them slaves.
The Massachusetts Assembly had led the American struggle against Parliament’s power to tax. Concurrently, four Massachusetts slaves, Peter Bestes, Sambo Freeman, Felix Holbrook, and Chester Joie, in 1773 petitioned the Assembly on behalf of their “fellow slaves in this Province” praising the leaders for their strong stand against arbitrary power. “We expect great things from men who have made such a noble stand against the designs of their
fellow men to enslave them.” The four slaves asked the assembly to consider their “deplorable state” and provide the relief which “as men, we have a natural right to. . . .” How could the Assembly, so boldly asserting the natural rights of men, deprive some men and women of liberty? British author Samuel Johnson, dismissing American grievances against Parliament, asked, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?”
Slavery was central to the American economy, so central it makes us wonder why the leaders of the American opposition introduced the idea of universal liberty into their argument. More than twenty percent of the American population were enslaved Africans or African-Americans. In Virginia and Maryland, the Assemblies resolved to end the slave trade as part of their resistance to British imperialism. Those Chesapeake colonies, producers of tobacco, were home to more than half of the slaves in North America. In fourteen of Virginia’s thirty-nine counties blacks were a majority, and in parts of South Carolina’s rice-producing low country, blacks formed ninety percent of the population.
Slavery and the slave trade were vital to each colonial economy. New England ships were among those bringing slaves from Africa to the New World in increasing numbers – an average of 60,000 slaves were brought to the Americas every year in the 1750s and 1760s. While the overwhelming number of Africans were landed on the sugar islands of the West Indies, the ports of Boston, Newport, New London, New York and Philadelphia thrived by sending food and supplies to feed the West Indian slave population, and refining the sugar brought back in return.
The slave trade was also becoming a driving force in England’s economy. After 1750, Britain’s Royal African Company had taken over much of the African slave trade. While this gave England the economic benefit, it also gave England the considerable moral problem of profiting from the traffic in slaves. Philadelphia Quaker Anthony Benezet wrote An Account of Guinea in 1766, showing the history and cultural achievements of the people of West Africa, and condemning the slave trade as a moral crime. His Caution and Warning to Great Britain and her Colonies (1767) condemned slavery and the slave trade. In Philadelphia, Benezet opened a school for black children, showing that when given the opportunity they were as capable of learning as any other children. In England, philanthropist Granville Sharp reprinted Benezet’s pamphlets, and in Philadelphia Benezet reprinted Sharp’s pamphlet, The Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery (1769). Both men encouraged John Wesley, founder of Methodism, to write his own Thoughts on Slavery in 1774.
Sharp believed that the American colonial assemblies should be empowered to end slavery, and that they should resist Parliament’s attempts to constrain them. The American colonies in the early 1770s moved against the slave trade, as part of their general campaign against British trade policies. The assemblies adopted non-importation, but colonial governors, who represented royal authority, vetoed these measures. Only Parliament, the governors insisted, could regulate American trade. But by including an attack on the slave trade in their grievances against British policy, the assemblies heartened those seeking to abolish the slave trade (called “abolitionists”). Pennsylvania reformer Benjamin Rush predicted in 1773 that the “emancipation of slaves in America will now be attended with but few difficulties except such as arise from instructions given to our Governors not to favor laws made for that purpose.” Rush and other Americans blamed the British for perpetuating slavery in America. But slavery was being weakened, and would be swept away by the “spirit of liberty and religion with regard to the poor Negroes” which was “spreading rapidly through the country.”
II. England and American Slaves
The spirit of liberty did not spread as rapidly among white Americans as Rush had predicted. It did, however, stir in a different way among American slaves. James Madison, recently returned from Princeton to his family’s plantation in Virginia, wrote to his friend William Bradford (a Philadelphia printer) in 1774 that some slaves in his neighborhood were conspiring to join the King’s forces and win their freedom when war came. From Philadelphia, Bradford reported to Madison that a London correspondent told of a British plan to declare “all Slaves & Servants free that would take arms against the Americans.” Henry Muhlenberg, Philadelphia Lutheran minister, reported that slaves “secretly wished that the British army might win, for then all Negro slaves will gain their freedom.”
In November 1775, Virginia’s royal governor, Lord Dunmore, offered freedom to any slave who joined the Crown and resisted a rebel master.
Many did. Dunmore raised a regiment of black soldiers in Virginia. In 1775 the Dorchester County, Maryland, Committee of Inspection reported increasing “insolence” among blacks, and seized eighty guns, swords, and bayonets that the slaves had concealed. Thousands of former slaves left South Carolina with the British forces when the war ended, going to Canada or England, and bringing South Carolina’s slave population down from 104,000 in 1775 to 80,000 in 1782. Thomas Jefferson, whose plantation the British raided while he was governor (he was nearly captured; many of his slaves were taken by the British) estimated that 30,000 Virginia slaves ran off during the war. Slaves enlisting in the British army and running away from owners weakened the American cause. But slaves could also threaten the American cause by staying at home, acting as spies and transmitting information, or organizing rebellions of their own. A South Carolina delegate to Congress objected to having slaves counted for purposes of taxation since slaves were property, and for tax purposes there was no difference between a slave and a sheep. In response, Benjamin Franklin observed that “Slaves rather weaken than strengthen the state, and therefore there is some difference between them and sheep: sheep will never make any insurrections.”
Had the British used slavery against the Americans, the war certainly would have ended differently. But the British did not. Why not? The British were fighting to preserve the empire, and much of the empire’s wealth was produced by slave labor. Attack slavery in South Carolina and Virginia, and you threaten it in Barbados and Jamaica. Free the slaves of rebels in Virginia, and you threaten the loyalists there. Britain fought to preserve the colonial system, which depended on slavery, not to destroy it.
III. “All men created equal”
On the other hand, the Americans had based their claim to independence on the idea that “all men are created equal.” American slave-owners and American slaves had made a commitment to liberty and equality. But did this commitment mean the same thing to an American slave as it did to an American slave-holder?
As Jefferson was drafting the Declaration of Independence, back in Virginia planter and statesman George Mason was working on a Constitution for that state. Mason understood that the purpose of government was to protect the rights of individuals, so his Constitution began with a Declaration of Rights. The Declaration began by saying that “All men are born equally free and independent and have certain inherent natural Rights, of which they cannot by any Compact, deprive or divest their posterity. . . .” The other members of Virginia’s Assembly balked at this. What would this mean to Virginia’s slaves if they were declared to be free and equal, and to have natural rights? The Assembly made a careful amendment. “All men, when they entered into a state of society, had rights of which they could not be divested.” Thus, the Virginians could argue that the Africans they enslaved had not been in a state of society, and that they had agreed to their own enslavement. According to this tortured formulation, people in a civilized society could not agree to give up their natural rights, but those outside of society could do so.
Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence, after stating the fundamental precept that all men are created equal and have inalienable rights and that governments exist to secure these rights, listed the acts of the British government that were intended to destroy the rights of the colonists. Jefferson’s final charge against the King was that he had “waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.” He blasted the King for this “piratical warfare” and for keeping “open a market where MEN should be bought & sold. . . .” Jefferson ended this philippic against the King’s “assemblage of horrors” and this “execrable commerce” with a charge showing the ambivalence of the American cause: “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 has . . . 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.”
Congress struck this whole passage from the Declaration. The colonists had cut off the slave trade as part of their boycott of British goods, but South Carolina and Georgia would not renounce the trade for all time. And other delegates worried about the moral inconsistency in the charge that the King alone was responsible for slavery or the slave trade, or the final suggestion that the slaves would not have cause to rise up against their masters without the King’s provocation.
Though Congress expunged this attack on slavery from the Declaration, the rhetoric of liberty and equality remained intact. These ideas continued to form the basic idea for the purpose of government in the new nation.
In 1780, Massachusetts adopted a new Constitution, written by John Adams. The Massachusetts Constitution began with a Declaration of Rights, nearly identical with the Virginia Constitution (or change Mason to Jefferson?? Or am I all confused??) proposed four years earlier by Mason. All men are born free and have certain inherent rights of which they cannot be divested. To Quok Walker, a slave in Worcester County, and Elizabeth Freeman, a slave in Berkshire County, these words meant that no person in Massachusetts could be a slave.
Freeman (1781) and Walker (1783) took their cases to court. Levi Lincoln, a Worcester lawyer (who later served as Attorney General of the United States in Jefferson’s administration) argued Walker’s case. The presiding judge, William Cushing (whom George Washington later appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court) told the jury in Walker’s case that “the idea of slavery is inconsistent with our own conduct and Constitution.” While slavery had long been practiced in America and elsewhere, Cushing noted that “a different idea has taken place with the people of America, more favorable to the natural rights of mankind, and that natural, innate desire of Liberty with which Heaven (without regard to color, complexion, or shape of noses) has inspired all the human race.” Slavery, Cushing said, was inconsistent with the Massachusetts’s Constitution’s declaration “that all men are born free and equal—and that every subject is entitled to liberty, and to have it guarded by the laws, as well as life and property.” When the first U.S. census was taken in 1790, Massachusetts was the only state not to record any slaves.
Cushing noted a changed spirit in America, as the idea of liberty had taken on new meaning and importance. Pennsylvania adopted a gradual emancipation law in 1780, declaring all persons born on or after March 1, 1780, to be free. The children of all people in slavery before March 1, 1780, would be free on reaching the age of 28. Rhode Island and Connecticut adopted similar emancipation laws in 1784, and New York in 1799. These laws did not free slaves immediately. A slave born in Pennsylvania on February 28, 1780, could remain a slave until he or she died, and in New Jersey, where a gradual emancipation law passed in 1804, there would still be slaves at the time of the Civil War. But gradual emancipation designed to “compensate” slaveowners for their “property” was a first step, and even in Virginia and Maryland, which rejected gradual emancipation proposals, the legislatures made it easier for owners to free their slaves. The number of free blacks in the Chesapeake region grew throughout the Revolutionary period, so that by 1810 one third of the country’s free blacks lived in Virginia and Maryland, more than in any other region.
V. Blacks in the American Army
When George Washington arrived in Cambridge to take command of the Continental forces in 1775, he was disturbed to find white and black soldiers sharing the same camp. Black soldiers had fought in every engagement: at Lexington and Concord, and at Bunker Hill, where Peter Salem was credited with killing British major John Pitcairn. But Washington wanted to keep blacks out of the Continental army, and though his policy was adopted, he shortly had to reverse it as he could not refuse to allow willing men to serve. Rhode Island’s black regiment fought with distinction at Newport, and Connecticut’s black troops were under the nominal command of one of Washington’s chief aides. In 1779 Washington dispatched John Laurens to his native South Carolina to raise a black regiment, giving the soldiers “their freedom with their muskets,” in the words of Alexander Hamilton. However, South Carolina’s legislature refused to allow Laurens to raise this regiment.
Despite the ambivalence, or even resistance, of some whites, black men did join the American forces. Liberty, equality, and freedom took on a deeply personal meaning for many of these soldiers. Of three hundred black men known to have served in Connecticut’s military force, eighteen gave their last name as either “Freedom” or “Freeman”, and five others called themselves “Liberty.” Free black, James Forten, son of a Philadelphia sail-maker, and a former pupil of Anthony Benezet, enlisted on an American privateer. When he was captured at sea, the son of the British captain befriended the fifteen-year-old Forten. The friendship led the captain to offer Forten free passage to England. “NO! NO!” Forten replied. “I am here a prisoner for the liberties of my country; I never, NEVER, shall prove a traitor to her interests.” Forten, along with other captured Americans, spent the rest of the war on a British prison ship in New York harbor.
In the early years of the republic, black men like Forten fought for the revolutionary cause, Congress and other political leaders took steps toward fulfilling the promise of liberty. The Continental Congress adopted the Northwest Ordinance in 1787, barring slavery north of the Ohio River after 1800, and the Constitution, which went into effect in 1789, gave Congress the power to end the slave trade in 1807. But additional attempts to spur broader emancipation, or to protect the rights of free black people, sputtered and failed.
It may have seemed to African Americans that their chances for liberty would have been better under the British crown. Prince Hall, a free man from Barbados, who had petitioned the Massachusetts assembly on behalf of his neighbors in slavery, served in the Revolutionary army, and after the war wanted to form a Masonic lodge. Hall saw the benefit Masonic brotherhood had in fostering community bonds, but was not permitted to join any of the Boston lodges. He sought to charter a lodge that would admit blacks, but again was refused. So Hall sent to England for a charter, which was granted in 1787.
By the end of the war, James Allen, born a slave in Philadelphia , and Absalom Jones, born a slave in Delaware, had become free and, through hard work and talent, became leaders in the black community. Allen became a Methodist preacher, and in 1786 began preaching to blacks every Sunday morning at 5 a.m. so he would not interfere with services for whites. Just as Hall had been shut out of the Masons, an organization seeking universal brotherhood, Jones and Allen saw the line drawn between themselves and other Methodists. In 1787, they and other Philadelphia African Americans formed the Free African Society, a non-denominational meeting place for Philadelphia’s lack community.
VI. Black Loyalists and Sierra Leone
Events in England, France, and their remaining American colonies influenced events in the newly-independent United States. When the defeated British forces evacuated New York in 1783, three thousand African Americans left with them. Many of these people settled in Nova Scotia, but others sailed for England. There, the black community, now freed by the Somerset decision, competed for jobs with white Britons. The British economy, stretched by the Seven Years War and now weakened by the American Revolution, could not easily absorb these new workers. The result was a growing population of black poor in London and other urban centers.
The presence of free Black poor people posed both a humanitarian and an ideological problem for British reformers or “abolitionists.” These men and women wanted to abolish the slave trade. They used many of the same arguments as the nineteenth-century abolitionists, who wanted an immediate end to slavery in America, but this abolition movement was based in England. British abolitionists Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson, and black abolitionists Olaudah Equiano and Ottabah Cogoano, had been arguing against the slave trade, and joining in the call to emancipate the slaves of the West Indies. Defenders of slavery argued that the West Indian sugar economy demanded slave labor, and that African slaves were not suited by nature to be free workers. They pointed to the large population of unemployed black men in England as proof. The British abolitionists formed the Society for the Abolition of Slavery in 1787, and proposed an ingenious solution. England could make a stand against the slave trade by establishing a colony in West Africa. This colony would have economic as well as moral benefits, as it would open African markets for British goods, provide raw materials to England, create markets for African goods and reduce the appeal of the slave trade to those African nations which profited by selling their enemies to the Europeans. To people the colony, the British could send the black Americans now unemployed in England. These colonists, most of whom had adopted Christianity in America, would help evangelize the African continent. These divergent motives made the Sierra Leone colony similar to Britain’s earlier colonial ventures in North America.
The Sierra Leone Company, under the advice of the antislavery philanthropists, hired Olaudah Equiano as quartermaster of the expedition. But after coming to see the conflicting motives among the various factions involved, and the mismanagement of the expedition by self-interested parties, Equiano withdrew his support, while a shipload of emigrants waited on the docks to embark for Sierra Leone. Nevertheless, three ships full of black migrants sailed for Africa in 1787, founding the city of Freetown and the colony of Sierra Leone.
The British philanthropists sent an emissary to America, William Thornton, a young doctor with antislavery convictions. Thornton proposed the Sierra Leone settlement to free African Americans. In New England, where he arrived first, he was warmly received, and black leaders Prince Hall and Paul Cuffee encouraged Thornton to find colonists in Philadelphia. But the Philadelphians, whatever lines of discrimination kept them out of the mainstream, preferred their community in Philadelphia to any prospective settlements in Sierra Leone. Thornton, for his part, remained in America, continuing to promote emigration by blacks to Africa. A doctor and opponent of slavery, Thornton is chiefly remembered for submitting a winning design in a contest to design a new Capitol for the United States—the elegant dome above the home of Congress was Thornton’s idea.
VII. France and Haiti
The American Revolution had an impact on America’s first ally, France. France, like England, was in serious economic trouble as a result of two costly (one disastrously so) wars. A series of bad harvests in the mid 1780s brought on a political crisis. In 1789 the crisis resulted in revolution, toppling the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the established church. To explain and justify these radical steps, France’s Assembly adopted a Declaration of the Rights of Man, inspired by the American Declaration, and asserting the same self-evident truths to which the Americans had pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor fourteen years earlier. Most Americans hailed the French Revolution as a continuation of their own.
In St. Domingue (now Haiti), France’s most important colony, the American or French ?) Revolution had profound implications. St. Domingue’s wealth came from sugar plantations worked by black slaves. When the French Assembly invited colonies to send delegations to Paris, white planters, who controlled St. Domingue’s economy, and free mulattos, who sought more power on the island, each sent representatives. Which delegation represented St. Domingue? On the island, the refusal of wealthy plantation owners and other whites to grant equal citizenship rights to the free people of color led to civil war. The slaves, under the leadership of Boukman and and Toussaint L’Ouverture, rose up in rebellion. During ten years of bloody conflict, the slaves and their free black leaders defeated French, British, and Spanish armies sent to suppress their revolution.
When the United States and France became engaged in a quasi-war in 1798 (neither nation formally declared one ), President John Adams opened negotiations with the black rebels on St. Domingue, led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, the brilliant self-educated son of slave parents. The United States supplied Toussaint’s forces with weapons to fight their French former masters. When Napoleon took power in France, he sought to restore slavery and sugar production in St. Domingue, but the army he sent, led by his brother-in-law, was destroyed by Toussaint’s superior generalship and decimated by yellow fever. Napoleon managed to capture Toussaint by trickery, and the general died in a French prison, but Napoleon could not suppress the spirit of liberty in Haiti. In 1804, it became the second independent republic in the New World.
Napoleon had held great dreams of recreating France’s New World empire, beginning with the colony of Louisiana, which gave France control of the Mississippi. But without St. Domingue, he could not develop Louisiana. Napoleon turned his attention to asserting control of the European continent. At this moment negotiators arrived in Paris from the United States, interested in securing for Americans the right to use the port of New Orleans. Napoleon offered to sell them all of Louisiana for $15 million.
VIII. Expansion of Slavery
The Haitian Revolution and the Louisiana Purchase begin another story in American, and African American, history. While the founders of the American republic had not ended slavery throughout the new nation, they had barred slavery in American territories north of the Ohio River (1800) and ended the African slave trade (1807). Eight states had either ended slavery altogether, or had passed laws to eliminate the institution gradually, typically by freeing slaves born after a certain date. Maryland and Delaware, which did not abolish the institution, encouraged manumission, and some Virginia slave holders, including Edward Coles, James Madison’s secretary, and John Randolph, Republican leader of the House of Representatives, settled their former slaves as free people on farms in Ohio and Illinois.
But the American acquisition of Louisiana, provoked by Napoleon’s inability to defeat Touissaint, would have a tremendous impact on the future development of the United States. The Mississippi had formed a border for the United States, Spain controlled the Mississippi, along with the rivers flowing through Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico. With no outlets to the sea, the territory was worth little to American farmers—certainly it would not be worth the effort it would take to dislodge the Chicasaw, Choctaw, and Creek people who controlled the region. Spain, and British agents in Pensacola and Mobile, traded with these native peoples, keeping their friendship against any American encroachment. But when France sold Louisiana to the Americans, the power dynamic in the region shifted in favor of the United States.
Along with this political barrier, the Americans removed a technological barrier to development. The vast interior region stretching from the Appalachians in Georgia to the Mississippi River would become an ideal place to grow cotton, but until the 1790s cotton was not a profitable crop for Americans. It was grown on the Georgia and South Carolina sea islands, but it needed hours of intense labor to separate seeds from the bolls of cotton, and to comb the fibers to prepare for spinning. The state of Georgia, wanting to move settlement inland from the rice-producing sea coast, held a contest to design an invention to solve this problem. New Englander Eli Whitney, visiting the Georgia plantation of fellow New Englander Catherine Greene (her late husband, Nathanael Greene, former Quaker from Rhode Island, had been one of Washington’s best generals), put his mind to this problem. Whitney’s “cotton engine” cleaned the cotton bolls and aligned the fibers with the crank of a handle. While Whitney went on to mass produce guns, his cotton gin made cotton the leading American export by 1820. The labor of planting and harvesting cotton, and then “ginning” the bolls through Whitney’s machine, would be done by black men and women, as slavery would spread through the newly-opened territories of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.
First, though, the Native Americans had to be pushed from the region. In 1814, American forces under Andrew Jackson, supported by Choctaw warriors under Pushmataha, defeated the Creeks in Alabama. The previous year, William Henry Harrison had defeated a joint Native and British force led by the Shawnee leader Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatwa (“The Prophet”) at the Thames River, Ontario. This defeated the last resisting native people east of the Mississippi, and shortly afterward the United States developed the idea of moving its Indian allies, the Cherokees and Choctaws, west of the Mississippi. Spain still used its Gulf Coast outposts, Mobile and Pensacola, to encourage rebellion by slaves in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, and to provide a refuge for runaway slaves. But in 1817 Andrew Jackson seized Pensacola, and Spain negotiated to sell Florida to the United States.
Sugar plantations had driven the slave trade in the eighteenth century. Now, in the nineteenth century, cotton plantations, with a similar insatiable demand for labor, would dominate the institution of slavery, and the political and economic institutions of the United States. Just as all regions of the colonies had participated in the eighteenth-century slave system, all would have a hand in the cotton economy. Cotton grown by enslaved African Americans in Georgia and Mississippi, was converted into woven cloth in the factory mills of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. In 1787, it had seemed that slavery was bottled up, that it could expand no farther, and that liberty would vanquish slavery in America. But by 1817, the demand for slave labor was greater than ever. Since the African slave trade had been stopped in 1808, the increased demand for labor meant that now African Americans were moved from Virginia and South Carolina to the cotton plantations of Alabama and Mississippi or the sugar plantations of Louisiana. After the War of 1812, historian Henry Adams (great-grandson of John Adams) noted, Americans thought more about the price of cotton and less about the rights of man. But the fundamental principle Phillis Wheatley had called love of freedom remained in the hearts of the enslaved.
IX. Paul Cuffe and Denmark Vesey
African Americans took different steps to act on their love of freedom. Paul Cuffe’s father was an African brought to Massachusetts as a slave in the 1720s, and his mother was a Wampanoag Indian. A Quaker with close ties to the Rotch family (they had owned the ship which carried the East India Company’s tea to Boston in 1773) Cuffe after the war had become one of the most successful African American businessmen of the day. He owned ships that traded between New England and the Chesapeake, and with Liverpool. His all-black crews) caused a stir when they arrived in slave states or in the center of England’s slave trade. Though the African American community of Philadelphia, led by Richard Allen, James Forten, and Absalom Jones, had rebuffed emissaries from London’s Sierra Leone backers in the late 1780s, Cuffe was more receptive.
He believed that the Sierra Leone colony presented possibilities for an African American trading network. With resources of lumber and naval stores, Sierra Leone was closer to the lucrative South Atlantic whale hunting grounds. Cuffe envisioned using Sierra Leone as a base for his whaling interests. This would make the colony profitable, and could truly make it a refuge for displaced Africans. Cuffe sailed from Westport, Massachusetts, with nine families, eighteen adults and twenty children, in December 1815, to join the colony of Sierra Leone. Cuffe’s own family remained in Massachusetts, where he returned six months later. Cuffe’s aim was to build in the Sierra Leone colony an African economic trading base. But with the colony under the control of London, it was impossible for an American merchant like Cuffe to prosper in it. And as long as West Indian sugar plantations needed slaves, the slave trade would disrupt the economies and societies of West Africa.
Cuffe’s death in 1817 ended the possibility of a viable commercial link between Africa and African Americans. Just as he was hoping to link together the various strands of the British antislavery movement, others in America were pursuing colonization as a solution to the problem of race and slavery in America. The American Colonization Society, founded in 1816, had as its goal the gradual emancipation of American slaves and their colonization to some place either in the Louisiana territory, or beyond the territorial limits of the United States. The Sierra Leone enterprise had begun with the motive of finding a safe haven for former slaves; the American Colonization Society’s motive became the removal of free blacks from the United States. The white leaders of the A.C.S., including James Madison, Henry Clay, and John Marshall, had a genuine hatred for the institution of slavery. But they also believed that black and white Americans could not live together peacefully, that, whatever their own personal feelings, the majority of whites would not regard blacks as their equals, and that black men and women would be relegated to permanent second-class status. These leaders also feared that black men and women, having been enslaved for so long by whites, would never trust whites to treat them fairly. The A.C.S. launched the colony of Liberia in 1821, but found it very difficult to convince free blacks to emigrate. By the 1820s black Americans, slave and free, were no longer Africans. Home and family were in America, not in Africa, and their future lay in America.
But what kind of a future would it be? Would it be the kind of future Paul Cuffe envisioned, of free black men and women entering into trade with the wider world, as Americans? Or would it be a future constrained by the people who claimed ownership over black Americans? Denmark Vesey, a free black carpenter married to a slave woman, provided one answer in 1822. Vesey was an active member of Charleston’s African Methodist Episcopal Church. He organized over a thousand South Carolina slaves in an attempt to seize their freedom by burning the city and killing its white inhabitants. June 16, 1822 was set as the day, but word leaked out. Vesey and other leaders were hanged, other participants were sold to the West Indies. A few escaped. There is evidence that David Walker, a tailor, was among them. Walker opened a tailor shop in Boston, and in 1829 wrote his Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, urging enslaved people to act on their right to freedom, given by God and recognized by the hypocritical Americans in their Declaration of Independence. Enslaved people had the right to kill their enslavers, Walker said, and he sent copies of his pamphlet in barrels of clothing made in New England for the plantation slaves of the South.
- Slavery and National Politics
Slavery became a national political issue in 1820, when the Missouri territory applied for statehood. Noting that most of Missouri lay north of the Ohio River, where the Northwest Ordinance prohibited slavery, Congressman James Tallmadge of New York proposed that slavery be banned in Missouri. The Missouri debate touched a raw nerve in American politics, and brought up the specter of disunion. The real issue was the future of the American republic. Ultimately Congress resolved the question through an elaborate compromise: Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state.; Maine, until then part of Massachusetts, was admitted to the Union as a free state; and slavery would be prohibited north of the 36 degrees and 30 minutes line (Missouri’s southern border). This line made most of the Louisiana territory free, and seemed at least temporarily to have halted slavery’s spread.
But the Missouri debate had touched off something else. In Congress, little of the Missouri debate hinged on the morality of slavery; most of it dealt with Constitutional questions or the efficacy of slave versus free labor. Much of the attack on the institution of slavery warned that slavery weakened society, or that a black population posed dangers in white society. This racist element was new, and made this debate very different from earlier discussions of slavery.
In Congress, Charles Pinckney of South Carolina defended the right of slaveholders to bring their property into Missouri, and grew quite elegiac when he recounted how blacks and whites had fought together to secure American independence. James Madison noted that although Massachusetts congressmen led the effort to keep slavery out of Missouri, their own state prohibited blacks from serving in the militia or serving on juries. Thomas Jefferson, who half a century earlier had tried to condemn England’s king for piratical warfare against human nature, now blamed England for stirring up the Missouri trouble. Abolition, Jefferson said, was an English hobbyhorse, one they would ride to death, not in the interest of freeing slaves, but merely to cause trouble for American republicans.
XI. Spirit of Liberty
The spirit of liberty, which Phillis Wheatley saw as implanted in every human breast, had brought the American republic into being. Phillis Wheatley could with no apparent contradiction condemn slavery and write a poem celebrating George Washington, who received her poem as a signal honor. The American Revolution had awakened the spirit of liberty everywhere, but by 1820 the American republic had confined to white men alone the enjoyment of liberty. While half of the American states had prohibited slavery by 1820, there were by that year more slaves in America than there had been Americans in 1775, and more than a million American slaves would be sold from Virginia and the Carolinas to Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Missouri by 1860.
Though the spirit of liberty would be constrained and confined, it could not be extinguished. The American Revolution had awakened it, and it would continue to glow in the hearts of the oppressed, as Phillis Wheatley had written it would. It would stir the nation again, when revived in the hearts of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, Abraham Lincoln and William Lloyd Garrison, Fannie Lou Hamer and Martin Luther King, Jr.