Part 9 (1/2)
REVOLUTION AND REACTION
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 Ma.s.sachusetts were a c.u.mulation 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 const.i.tutional 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 a.s.semblies 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 p.r.o.nouncements 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 pa.s.sage, 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 Ma.s.sacre” 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 Was.h.i.+ngton in March, 1779, the enrollment of three thousand blacks in the Southern department.
Hamilton warmly endorsed the project, and Was.h.i.+ngton 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 pa.s.sive 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 a.s.serting 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 inst.i.tution.
As to public acts, the Vermont convention of 1777 when claiming statehood for its community framed a const.i.tution with a bill of rights a.s.serting 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, Ma.s.sachusetts in 1780, and New Hamps.h.i.+re in 1784. In the first of these the holding of slaves persisted undisturbed by this action; and in New Hamps.h.i.+re the custom died from the dearth of slaves rather than from the natural-rights clause. In Ma.s.sachusetts 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 a.s.sault 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 Cus.h.i.+ng 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 Ma.s.sachusetts_, 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.
Pet.i.tions 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 Ma.s.sachusetts 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: Ma.s.sachusetts Historical Society _Collections_, XLIII, 386.]
[Footnote 9: Moore, pp. 227-229.]
Racial antipathy and cla.s.s 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 Ma.s.sachusetts, 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: Ma.s.sachusetts 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 emanc.i.p.ation 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.]