Between Slavery and Freedom

by Julie Winch

  In addition to those who served in the Continental Navy or the state navies, thousands of other seafarers, black and white, opted to become privateers. As the war progressed, merchants and ship owners followed the venerable tradition established by the British and the French in earlier conflicts. Under license from their home state or from the newly-organized United States, they refitted trading vessels as armed raiders with the goal of plundering enemy shipping—and everyone, from the captain and the owner of the privateer down to the humblest ship’s boy, got a share of the plunder. With money at stake, captains of privateers did not care about the race or the status of a crew member. Black men and boys thronged the wharves, eager to ship out, make money, and in the case of runaway slaves make good their escape.

  After the British surrender at Yorktown in 1781, as British commanders began preparing to evacuate their forces from the ports they still held, the ex-slaves who had escaped and joined the British feared they would be left behind. They grew even more desperate when they learned that the peace treaty that officially ended hostilities stipulated that slaves must be returned to their owners. They crowded on to British ships, pleading to go somewhere—anywhere—where they could be free. Sometimes they met with a sympathetic hearing. Realizing what was going on, George Washington raced to New York and insisted to the British commander, Sir Guy Carleton, that the terms of surrender required him to hand over all the runaways who were within British lines. Carleton refused, maintaining that the British had made a pledge of freedom to the slaves who sided with them and he intended to honor that pledge.

  At least 10,000 black people, and perhaps as many as 20,000, left with the British. For some it was only a brief respite. British officers who were far less honorable than Carleton re-enslaved them. Other black loyalists were more fortunate. Hundreds headed to England and tried to build new lives for themselves there. Many more went to the West Indies where they resettled as free people, although maintaining one’s liberty in the midst of a slave-holding society was fraught with difficulties. By far the largest contingent found a dubious freedom in Nova Scotia. The failure of the British authorities to provide for them as generously as they provided for white loyalists prompted the black loyalists to petition the government in London for relief, and led to a mass exodus to Britain’s new West African colony of Sierra Leone. However, enough black Americans remained in Nova Scotia to establish their own communities, some of which survive to this day. Few black loyalists received pensions because the British government considered it payment enough that they were no longer slaves. A black man needed to prove that he had been free before the war to have any hope of getting a penny for his services to the king.

  On the patriot side, some black men returned from the battlefield only to have their masters on whose behalf they had fought reclaim them as slaves. Others came back to enjoy their freedom, and in some instances with enough money to buy their loved ones out of bondage. They returned with tales to tell, and with valuable military or naval experience. In most instances, they had fought alongside white men. Ironically, few black men who had fought in the Revolution had done so in all-black units. Not until the Korean War would the United States have such a racially integrated fighting force.

  Black veterans had often traveled far from home. They had met people from many different backgrounds and they had endured all kinds of hardships—hunger, exposure to the elements, inadequate clothing, and harsh discipline, along with separation from friends and family. For the majority, whether they had been free before they enlisted or whether they had been enslaved, these were hardships with which they were already painfully familiar. The home front to which these men returned was very different from the one they had left. The war and their role in it had led to a period of profound change for themselves, their families, the entire black population, and the nation as a whole. For some black people the war and its aftermath meant freedom and the chance to achieve a measure of social and economic independence. For others it saw the betrayal of a dream.

  The war for black liberty would continue long after the British surrender and long after the thirteen newly independent states had united to form a new nation. Nonetheless, the American Revolution had an important impact on slavery. Prior to the Revolution, slavery existed in all of the British colonies of North America. During and after the Revolution, many of the newly emerging states in the North took steps to end the system, either by abolishing slavery in their state constitutions or by adopting gradual abolition laws.

  Vermont was the first state to outlaw slavery in its state constitution. The fact that slavery had historically played a minor role in Vermont meant there were few black people in the state. White Vermonters did not anticipate a difficult transition from slavery to freedom when they framed a constitution in 1777 that declared that “No male person ought . . . to serve any person as a servant, slave, or apprentice after he arrives to the age of twenty-one years, nor female in like manner after . . . the age of eighteen years.”4 As for civil rights for free people of African ancestry, lawmakers left things vague, but apparently black men could and did vote in Vermont.

  Pennsylvania’s Gradual Abolition Law was the culmination of decades of antislavery agitation by black people, both enslaved and free, and by white critics of slavery. Although the Quakers had rid themselves of slave-holding, most of their neighbors had not. Pressuring Pennsylvania to live up to the principles of liberty was an uphill battle. The Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, and for Improving the Condition of the African Race, composed largely of Quakers, disintegrated during the war, although it was reborn a few years later. Black Pennsylvanians cooperated with white abolitionists, but they did not rely on their efforts alone. Slaves did everything they could to gain their own freedom, while the free helped their enslaved friends and family members and endeavored to improve their own situation.

  In 1780, with the war still raging, Pennsylvania lawmakers finally approved a gradual abolition law. The law was limited in scope, and applied only to children born after the date of its passage (March 1), and then only when they reached the age of twenty-eight. Until then they were to be bound or “apprenticed” to the people who owned their mothers: they could be sold, leased, even left with real estate and farm animals in people’s wills. And, given life expectancy at the time, they might well die before they ever secured their full freedom. Although Pennsylvania had taken its first wavering steps toward ending human bondage, the law said nothing about what rights free people of color would enjoy. It would be left to black women and men themselves to give true meaning to their freedom, and they would prove resolute in their determination to make sure that they and their descendants were free in more than name only.

  The path to ending slavery in Massachusetts was a tortuous one. Within the white community the debate over the ownership of one human being by another had gone on for decades, although few whites were willing to do more than pay lip service to the notion of liberty for all. Black people did not leave it to a handful of well-disposed whites to act for them. They pushed the issue beyond platitudes and high-sounding but empty phrases. In 1780, the newly independent state had adopted a constitution that said that “all men are born free and equal.” Two slaves, Quock Walker and Mumbet alias Elizabeth Freeman, brought separate court actions in which they and their lawyers cited that “free and equal” clause and tested its deeper meaning. The attorneys for Walker and Freeman contended that unless anyone could prove that the term “all men” did not apply to black people, the constitution effectively outlawed slavery. While Walker and Freeman gained their freedom, it was a matter of opinion whether slavery in Massachusetts was illegal. In the 1783 Walker case Chief Justice William Cushing ruled that “the idea of slavery is inconsistent with our own conduct and Constitution.”5 However, lawmakers did not follow up on the Walker and Freeman verdicts by introducing an abolition law. Individual slaves took matters into their
own hands by pressuring their owners to liberate them or by simply walking away. Some owners stubbornly insisted that the law still protected their property rights, and some black people remained in bondage for years, but by the late 1780s it was clear that the institution of slavery was dying in Massachusetts.

  New Hampshire took as long and as twisted a path to abolition as did Massachusetts, and it, too, left the question of black rights vague and ill-defined. If the Granite State did not have as many slaves as Massachusetts, it still had a substantial number, and they were assertive and articulate. In 1779, slaves in and around Portsmouth seized the initiative, possibly with help from members of the admittedly small free community of color. They approached the legislature and challenged lawmakers to live up to the ideals of independence and rights for all. They wanted to be treated like other inhabitants and have “an Opportunity of evincing to the World our Love of Freedom by . . . opposing the Efforts of Tyranny and Oppression over the Country in which we ourselves have been so long injuriously enslaved.” If New Hampshire abolished slavery—a practice that flew in the face of “Justice and Humanity”—they pledged that every black man would be happy to fight alongside his white brothers against the forces of the King of England.6 In 1783, the state adopted a constitution that said that “all men [were] born equal and independent,” and had certain “natural rights,” which included “enjoying . . . life and liberty.”7 That did not amount to immediate emancipation, but the enslaved claimed their freedom from owners who were not sure they could hold on to them. Within a decade slavery had faded away. What did not fade so completely were old patterns of thought on the part of white people in New Hampshire. Black people determined to enjoy the same rights as their white neighbors now that they were free faced many challenges.

  Emancipation was also a long time coming in Rhode Island, the smallest state in the Union. Despite pressure from the slaves themselves, from the small but vocal free community of color, which included proud veterans of the Rhode Island Black Regiment, and from white sympathizers, slavery had powerful supporters. In 1784, though, the state legislature finally passed an abolition bill. Like the Pennsylvania law, the Rhode Island law only gradually phased out slavery. Children born to enslaved women after March 1, 1784 would eventually be free—females at eighteen and males at twenty-one. Until then they had to serve whoever owned their mothers. Once a black Rhode Islander ceased to be a slave, that did not mean he or she could settle down and live as white people did. Rhode Island had long since adopted the same tactic as Massachusetts when it came to dealing with anyone who seemed likely to become a public charge. The authorities “warned out” or expelled that individual, and if necessary their entire family. Liberated into a harsh world with few job opportunities and even fewer resources, African Americans often gravitated to the lower rungs of society, and that made them subject to the full weight of the law. They could be driven out of the township in which they lived, or forced over the state line into an equally unfriendly setting in Massachusetts or Connecticut.

  Despite the large number of slaves in Connecticut, the antislavery forces eventually prevailed there. Children born to enslaved women after March 1, 1784—the same date as in Rhode Island—would become free when they reached adulthood. Connecticut’s abolition law did nothing for those born before its passage. Theoretically, they would remain enslaved for the rest of their lives. As had happened in other states, though, some slaveholders released their slaves, while hundreds of bondspeople simply absconded. Judging by newspaper advertisements for runaways, Connecticut’s slaves were both resourceful and determined. If the law would not grant them their freedom, they would take it.

  Across the North in the 1770s and 1780s black people existed in freedom, in slavery, and in an uncertain position midway between slavery and freedom, with an end to their bondage in sight but with precious little freedom in their immediate future. Only Vermont had abolished slavery outright. Most Northern states had adopted gradual abolition, and although lawmakers in New Jersey and New York had debated abolition on a number of occasions, they had yet to take decisive action. And in none of the Northern states did the courts or the legislatures declare free black people citizens. Although they might not be slaves, they were somehow less than equal to whites in the eyes of the law and in the minds of their white neighbors. In 1788, for example, the Massachusetts General Court barred from the state all “Rogues, vagabonds, common beggars, and other idle, disorderly, and lewd Persons.”8 Not surprisingly, whites thought that many free blacks belonged to one of those unwelcome and unwanted groups. Expulsion of the black poor, the binding out of their children, and the routine incarceration of black law-breakers for longer terms than those that white lawbreakers received for the same offense—these practices were commonplace throughout the North. The states retained their old colonial-era restrictions and added new ones whenever lawmakers concluded that the free black population was getting too troublesome.

  In the immediate post-Revolutionary period the South was anything but united on the issue of black freedom. As they had done in the colonial era, slave owners in South Carolina and Georgia generally emancipated those individuals to whom they had a personal connection, including their concubines, their children, their biracial half-siblings, and their favored house slaves. The result was a small community of light-skinned people whose ties to their emancipators often endured into freedom. By contrast, in the Upper South emancipations were more general, and they took place for reasons of ideological or religious commitment, or as a result of economic considerations. And of course the slaves themselves pushed hard. To imply that they sat back and waited for whites to liberate them is to ignore a vital part of the picture.

  The enslaved seized their freedom through flight. They also sued, claiming that they were the descendants of white women. After a couple of well-publicized court victories in the 1780s, hundreds of slaves all over Maryland suddenly “discovered” that they had white female ancestors. When light-skinned slaves hinted that they had befriended a lawyer who would see justice done, some masters actually bargained with those slaves: if there was no more talk about white grandmothers and great-grandmothers and if they served quietly for a few more years they would get their freedom. It was not a game for the faint-of-heart. The power obviously lay with the master, but there was just a chance that he might want to avoid an expensive court case.

  With or without the threat of lawsuits, other slaves gained their freedom. The Upper South was wavering. Tobacco prices tumbled in the 1780s as planters discovered that they had lost their once-reliable overseas customers. Instead of tobacco, they turned to growing wheat and raising hogs, only to find that they did not need as big a labor force. They could not sell their excess slaves because the market was glutted and no one was buying, so in some instances they let those slaves earn the price of their freedom. It also became simpler and cheaper to liberate one’s slaves. In 1782, Virginia rewrote its law to allow owners to free almost anyone under the age of forty-five. Delaware and Maryland also eased the restrictions on freedom. Owners could essentially do what they liked with their “property.” Some called in their lawyers and instructed them to draw up formal deeds of emancipation. Others simply told their slaves they did not want or need them any longer. The free population received an additional boost as a result of African-American enlistment during the war. Black men who had served in their masters’ stead pressed hard to make sure that their service did indeed translate into freedom. The region was also still feeling the reverberations from the Great Awakening. Some whites could not square slave ownership with their religious principles. For other owners the motivation was not so much evangelical religion as devotion to the libertarian principles of the Revolution.

  In sharp contrast to the Upper South, the Lower South was largely untouched by religious or philosophical impulses to end slavery. The political leaders of South Carolina and Georgia had made their views abundantly clear when they had refused to liberate their slaves t
o fight the British. Once the war was over, they were determined to maintain their control over their remaining slaves. The legislatures of the two states made a few minor concessions to owners who wanted to emancipate one or two favored slaves, but they soon clamped down. Although the economy was no better in the Lower South in the 1780s than it was in the Upper South, slave owners remained firmly committed to the notion that slavery was the natural condition of black people. They also reflected on the fact that whites were in the minority across the region. If they freed their slaves, they feared that black people would take over. They might avenge their sufferings or they might intermarry with whites. Both prospects filled white Georgians and South Carolinians with dread. They did as they had always done. They liberated enslaved people to whom they had ties of blood and affection and did their best to keep the rest in bondage. The free black population did grow in the immediate postwar years as people maneuvered their way out of slavery, formed stable family units and had children who were born free. However, in comparison to the Upper South, where thousands of slaves gained their liberty every year during the 1780s, the free population of the Lower South grew at a very slow rate

  At the national level, liberty for black people proved such a sensitive issue that white politicians backed away from dealing with it. Thomas Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration of Independence had included a stinging denunciation of King George III for, among other evidence of his wickedness, making war on the peoples of Africa, enslaving them, and dumping them in the American colonies. Many of Jefferson’s fellow delegates to the Continental Congress found his words unsettling. They reasoned, not surprisingly, that if they accepted his draft and did ultimately prevail against the armies of Great Britain, they had committed themselves to doing away with slavery. The offending passage disappeared. However, even in its modified form, the Declaration’s resounding phrases about “all men” being created equal and being entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness heartened black people who heard them or read them. On July 8, 1776, when the High Sheriff of Philadelphia read the Declaration to the populace for the first time, a nine-year-old black child stood in the crowd in the State House Yard and listened intently. The promises enshrined in the document that the Continental Congress had approved four days earlier resonated with James Forten and would continue to do so. As soon as he was old enough, he signed up aboard a patriot privateer. He was captured by the British, rejected a tempting offer to switch sides, and endured months of captivity on a prison-ship. He believed wholeheartedly that the new nation was worth risking his life for. Thomas Jefferson and his brethren had spoken so eloquently about freedom. They could hardly continue to hold their fellow Americans in slavery. Forten himself was freeborn, although he sympathized with the enslaved and wanted to see their bondage ended. Equally important to him was the “pursuit of happiness.” He concluded that meant full citizenship for everyone once slavery had been banished from American soil. As the years passed and Forten grew to manhood, he discovered that America was only partially fulfilling its commitment to liberty and justice for all.