Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815
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Given this experience and these attitudes, imagine the sensation created in Boston in 1802 by Deborah Sampson Gannett. This forty-two-year-old woman appeared onstage in female clothes to recount her experiences in the Revolutionary War as a disguised Continental Army soldier. Following her lecture, Gannett changed into a military uniform and demonstrated her ability to perform the soldier’s manual exercise of arms.
After her spectacular appearance in Boston, Gannett went on a year’s tour throughout New England and New York, playing mostly to packed houses—the first such lecture tour by an American woman. Yet her lectures, written by her mentor and memoirist Herman Mann, were ambivalent. Her mere presence, of course, awed many spectators, for she was attractive and not at all masculine. At the same time, however, Gannett needed to assure her audience that she was not the threat to the social order that she appeared to be. By 1802 a reaction against the egalitarian sentiments of Mary Wollstonecraft was taking place, and Gannett had to adapt to the new climate of opinion. Even Judith Sargent Murray had written that “we are not desirous to array THE SEX in martial habiliments.”
Gannett admitted that what she had done twenty years earlier in joining the army in disguise was “a breach in decorum of my sex unquestionably,” which “ought to expel me from the enjoyment of society, from the acknowledgement of my own sex.” But then she went on to explain that she had been caught up in a frenzy of patriotism “that could brook no control” and had “burst the tyrant bands which held my sex in awe, and clandestinely, or by stealth, grasped an opportunity which custom and the world seemed to deny as natural privilege.” In the end, however, she offset her assertion of freedom and independence for her sex by conceding that the proper role for women was to mold men and to be satisfied with the “dignified title and encomium of MISTRESS AND LADY, in our kitchens and in our parlours,” and by acknowledging that “the field and the cabinet are the proper spheres assigned to our MASTERS and our LORDS.” Still, the fact that she was traveling without male escort and lecturing to large audiences was an inspiring object lesson in female autonomy.106
Since the Revolution had made all Americans conscious of rights, feminists were bound to note that the Revolution had failed to fulfill its promises for women. Some, like the writer Charles Brockden Brown in his novel Alcuin: A Dialogue (1798) and the legal commentator St. George Tucker, saw an inconsistency between the Revolution’s rhetoric and American practice. Tucker had to admit that women were taxed without their consent, like “aliens . . . children under the age of discretion, idiots, and lunatics.”107 For a brief period between 1790 and 1807 unmarried property-holding women took advantage of a clause in the New Jersey constitution that granted the franchise to all free inhabitants with property worth fifty pounds. Apparently some women voted for Federalist candidates too often, for critics began complaining that women were too timid and pliant and too dependent on male relatives for direction to exercise the ballot intelligently. In 1807 a Republican-sponsored law limited the franchise to white taxpaying male citizens. Few women in New Jersey seem to have lamented the loss of the vote.
Despite all the talk of women’s rights, most women in this period were not yet eager to vote and participate in politics. The suggestions in the magazines of the day for female political equality were few and far between, and none of the major political leaders ever seriously considered the direct political participation of women in politics. “A woman in politics is like a monkey in a toy shop,” declared the noted lawyer Jeremiah Mason, the Federalist U.S. senator from New Hampshire in 1814. “She can do no good, and may do harm.” President Jefferson abruptly cut off any suggestion that women might be appointed to governmental office: it was “an innovation for which the public is not prepared, nor am I.”108 Although the gaining of political rights for women was never a realistic possibility in this period, there were isolated voices preparing the way for the future.
All this promotion of rights and reforms helped to strengthen the civil society that worked to hold the Republic together. But these particular rights and reforms did not begin to deal with the greatest evil afflicting American society—slavery.
14
Between Slavery and Freedom
The greatest republican reform of the period was the anti-slavery movement. Of course, the Revolution freed only a fraction of the nearly half a million slaves in the colonies in 1776—and many modern historians have called the Revolution’s inability to free all the slaves its greatest failure. But the Revolution did accomplish a great deal: it created for the first time in American history the cultural atmosphere that made African American slavery abhorrent to many Americans.
By attacking slavery more fiercely than ever before, Revolutionary Americans freed tens of thousands of slaves. But the Revolution’s libertarian and egalitarian message had perverse consequences. It forced those Southerners who chose to retain slavery to fall back on the alleged racial deficiencies of blacks as a justification for an institution that hitherto they had taken for granted and had never before needed to justify. The anti-slavery movement that arose out of the Revolution inadvertently produced racism in America.
HEREDITARY CHATTEL SLAVERY—one person owning the life and labor of another person and that person’s progeny—is virtually incomprehensible to those living in the West today, even though as many as twenty-seven million people in the world may be presently enslaved.1 In fact, slavery has existed in a variety of cultures for thousands of years, including those of the ancient Greeks and Romans, the medieval Koreans, the Pacific Northwest Indians, and the pre-Columbian Aztecs. The pre-Norman English practiced slavery, as did the Vikings, the many ethnic groups of Africa, and the early Islamic Arabs; indeed, beginning in the 600s Muslims may have transported over the next twelve centuries as many sub-Saharan Africans to various parts of the Islamic world, from Spain to India, as were taken to the Western Hemisphere.2
Yet as ubiquitous as slavery was in the ancient and pre-modern worlds, including the early Islamic world, there was nothing anywhere quite like the African plantation slavery that developed in the Americas. Between 1500 and the mid-nineteenth century some eleven or twelve million slaves were brought from Africa to the Americas. The prosperity of the European colonies in the New World depended upon the labor of these millions of African slaves and their enslaved descendants. Slavery existed everywhere in the Americas, from the villages of French Canada to the sugar plantations of Portuguese Brazil.
Slavery in the New World was never a monolithic institution; it differed both in space and time, and slavery in British North America differed sharply from slavery in the rest of the New World. In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the English mainland colonies imported about two hundred thousand African slaves, a small percentage of the millions who were brought to the Caribbean and South American colonies, where the mortality rates were horrendous. Far fewer slaves died prematurely on the North American mainland. In fact, by the late eighteenth century the slaves in most of the English mainland colonies were reproducing at the same rates as whites, already among the most fertile peoples in the Western world.3
By the eve of the Revolution white North American colonists possessed 460,000 African American slaves, about a fifth of the total population. Most were held in the South. In 1770 the largest colony, Virginia, had about 188,000 black slaves, slightly more than 40 percent of the colony’s total population of 447,000. In 1770 South Carolina had the highest proportion of African American slaves to whites, 60 percent, or 75,000, of the total population of 124,000. In these Southern colonies slavery lay at the heart of the economy. The master-slave relationship supplied the standard for all other social relationships.
As it had been from the beginning in the seventeenth century, the South’s economy was based on the production and sale of staple crops—exotic agricultural goods that commanded special significance in international markets. Each of the South’s dominant slaveholding areas—the Chesapeake and the Lowcountry of South C
arolina—had developed its own peculiar primary staple crop adapted to its climate and landscape, tobacco in the case of the Chesapeake and rice and indigo in the case of South Carolina.
Although both staples lent themselves to the development of plantation slave labor, they created different kinds of plantations and different systems of slavery. Because of the nature of tobacco production, the plantations in the Chesapeake tended to be much smaller with many fewer slaves than those in South Carolina. On the eve of the Revolution less than 30 percent of the slaves in the Chesapeake area lived on plantations with twenty or more slaves. Indeed, over one-third of the slaves in the Chesapeake resided on small plantations with fewer than ten slaves. Because tobacco exhausted the soil rather rapidly, the small plantations and their labor forces in Virginia had to keep pushing westward in search of fresh lands, creating instability in the lives of both slaves and masters.
Tobacco, moreover, was not always associated with slave labor, and many non-slaveholding white families in the Chesapeake continued to grow it throughout the eighteenth century and beyond. Consequently, slaves in the Chesapeake lived in a world surrounded by whites. No Virginia county contained a majority of blacks. Even in those Virginia counties with the largest numbers of slaves, at least a quarter of the households owned no slaves at all.4
Slavery in the Lowcountry was different. Over 80 percent of the slaves in South Carolina lived on substantial plantations possessing twenty or more slaves. Only a tiny proportion—7 percent—lived on small plantations with fewer than ten slaves. Unlike tobacco, rice cultivation required sizeable plantations; two-thirds of those in South Carolina exceeded five hundred acres. Rice was more laborious to produce than tobacco. One observer of the Lowcountry in 1775 noted that “the labour required for [rice] is only fit for slaves, and I think the hardest work I have seen them engaged in.”5 Unlike tobacco, rice did not exhaust the soil, and the need alternately to flood and drain the rice fields with tidewater meant that Lowcountry plantations necessarily remained close to estuaries. Consequently, the slaves and their descendants in South Carolina had a greater chance to remain on the same plantation for longer periods than was the case in Virginia. And they had fewer whites around them than in the Chesapeake. By 1790 eleven of the eighteen rural parishes of the Carolina Lowcountry were more than 80 percent black.
There were other differences. The Chesapeake plantations were much more diversified than those in Carolina, many of them growing wheat and other foodstuffs in addition to tobacco. In fact, in the decades leading up to the Revolution more and more of the Virginia plantations, like Washington’s Mount Vernon, began to replace tobacco with wheat. The spread of wheat production changed the nature of the skills the Chesapeake slaves needed. They had to learn to plow and take care of oxen and horses, which in turn required the growing of hay and other fodder and the manuring of land.
By the late eighteenth century the wheat-producing plantations in Virginia and Maryland had become highly organized operations with the slaves involved in a variety of specialized tasks. Growing wheat in place of tobacco, the planters began calling themselves “farmers,” with their slaves becoming farm workers instead of plantation hands. Because the more diversified agriculture required less labor, many of the Chesapeake farmers began hiring out their slaves. This practice in turn suggested to some in the Upper South that slavery might eventually be replaced by wage labor.6
The Chesapeake slaves also engaged in many more diverse crafts than their counterparts in the Deep South. The British traveler Isaac Weld noted that the leading Chesapeake planters “have nearly everything they can want on their own estates. Amongst their slaves are found tailors, shoemakers, carpenters, smiths, turners, wheelwrights, weavers, tanners, etc.”7 While the Virginia slaves tended to supply many of the needs of their plantations, the situation was different in the Deep South. Rice was a more lucrative crop than tobacco; throughout the eighteenth century the profits from rice had accounted for one-half to two-thirds of the annual value of South Carolina’s exports.8 As a consequence, few South Carolina plantations were willing to sacrifice rice production in order to diversify and produce other goods, including provisions. In 1774 the manager of two Lowcountry plantations warned the owner against planting corn to supply food for the plantations. “If more corn is to be raised there than common, there must of consequence less Rice be planted, and the latter is the most profitable Grain.” Instead, the manager urged that corn be purchased from the backcountry.9
Perhaps the most important distinction between the slave populations of the two regions was the different ways the two societies produced their slaves. On the eve of the Revolution over 90 percent of Virginia’s slaves were American born and had assimilated much of Anglo-American culture, including the English language. To supply itself with slaves Virginia had come to rely on the fertility of the large number of its native-born female slaves, who had come to equal the males in number; by the time of the Revolution Virginia had stopped importing slaves and never again resumed importing them.
By contrast, only 65 percent of South Carolina’s slaves were native born; over a third had been born in Africa. In the several decades following the Revolution South Carolina continued to import slaves, bringing in as many as seventy thousand, some from the West Indies, most of them from Africa. Indeed, South Carolina imported more slaves than any other colony on the North American mainland. Since most of the slaves brought into South Carolina from Africa were male adults, the natural growth of the slave population in the colony and state was retarded—the presence of a large number of native-born female slaves being the key to natural growth.
By the time the international slave trade was legally prohibited in 1808, South Carolina had imported about twice as many slaves as Virginia, even though its slave population of two hundred thousand was only half that of Virginia’s. South Carolina’s greater reliance on importation gave its slave society and culture an African tone and character that did not exist to the same degree in the Chesapeake. Most of the slaves in the Carolina Lowcountry carved out a distinctive culture for themselves, including not only their own African-English hybrid language, Gullah, but their own styles of personal display, including the wearing of beards and jewelry. Actually, everywhere in America the black slaves worked out their own syncretic forms for their African American culture—in their music, religion, funerals, humor, and entertainments. Whites had an especially hard time making sense of the dancing, singing, and rejoicing that took place at black funerals; they tended to dismiss these practices as “festive accompaniments” without realizing they were a ritual celebration of the deceased’s journey back “home” to Africa.10
The nature of the staple also gave the Lowcountry Carolina slaves greater autonomy than their counterparts in the Chesapeake. Since producing rice did not require close supervision, the white planters came to rely on a task system of labor. Giving the slaves tasks to complete allowed the slaves who worked quickly opportunities for free time to grow their own crops or to produce goods for themselves or for sale. In 1796 the South Carolina legislature attempted to regulate this practice of the slaves selling and buying their own goods and thus implicitly legitimated it.11
Slaves in Virginia had no such free time and had much more difficulty earning extra money for themselves. Since tobacco needed considerable care and attention, producing it required a very different system of labor management. White planters in the Chesapeake relied on gang labor for the production of tobacco—using small units of closely supervised laborers who worked from sunup to sundown with no incentive to work quickly. Consequently, Chesapeake slaves developed all sorts of resourceful methods of malingering and shirking the work, frustrating their masters to no end.
Washington concluded that his slaves worked four times as fast when he was directly supervising them than when he was absent. Try as he might, he was never able to get his slaves to work efficiently, which was one of the initial reasons he came to oppose the institution. He realized that
the slaves had no incentive to work hard and develop “a good name” for themselves. This he thought was slavery’s greatest single flaw as a system of labor. He believed that people strove to do well in life in order to win the respect of others. But slaves had no opportunity to win respect or earn good reputations; hence their presumed lack of ambition. He often wondered what they might accomplish if they were free men.12
Although masters and slaves often developed close and sometimes even affectionate relationships, especially in the Chesapeake area, no one ever forgot that the entire system rested on violence and brute force. Masters in South Carolina sometimes branded their slaves and punished them with a ferocity that outsiders found appalling. Four hundred lashes washed down with salt and water was considered “but Slite punishment” compared to the ingenious cruelties some planters could think up to inflict on their disobedient slaves, including, as one observer noted, putting a slave “on the picket with his Left Hand tied to his left toe behind him and Right hand to the post and his Right foot on the pickets till it worked through his foot.”13
Although master-slave relations were more brutal and more impersonal in the Lowcountry than in the Chesapeake, everywhere the slave system bred a pervasive sense of hierarchy. “Societies of men could not subsist unless there were a subordination of one to another,” declared a Virginia lawyer in 1772. “That in this subordination the department of slaves must be filled by some, or there would be a defect in the scale of order.”14 More than anything else, that sense of hierarchy separated the Southern states from those of the North.
OF COURSE, THERE WERE ALWAYS MASTERS who took advantage of this subordination, especially with their female slaves. In the Lowcountry of South Carolina, the incidence of whites having slave concubines was often casually accepted and even treated with amusement. This was largely because whites and slaves tended to live farther apart from one another, and thus miscegenation was not as widespread as it was in the Chesapeake. In Virginia, where whites and slaves lived more closely together, such racial mixing became more common with increasing numbers of mulattos.15