The Virginian Thomas Jefferson certainly lived among many mulattos. His father-in-law, John Wayles, had six children with a mulatto slave, Betty Hemings. When Jefferson married Wayles’s daughter, Martha, these enslaved children, including the quadroon Sally Hemings, passed to Jefferson. Although the evidence is now overwhelming that Jefferson was sexually involved with Sally Hemings, that may be less important than the fact that miscegenation was part of his family and going on all around him at Monticello.16 That alone may help explain Jefferson’s deep fear of racial mixing.
Jefferson was in most respects a typical slaveholder. Although he always condemned slavery, he did own one of the largest slave populations in Virginia. Upon the division of his father-in-law’s estate in 1774 he became, in fact, the second-largest slaveholder in Albemarle County. Thereafter the number of his slaves remained around two hundred—with increases through births offset by periodic sales to pay off debts. Jefferson was known to be a good master, reluctant to break up families or to sell slaves except for delinquency or at their own request. Nevertheless, between 1784 and 1794 he disposed of 161 people by sale or gift. It is true that Jefferson was averse to separating young children from their parents; but once slave boys or girls reached the age of ten or twelve and their working lives began, they were no longer children in Jefferson’s mind.
Monticello was a working plantation, and Jefferson was eager to make it pay. His slaves may have been members of his “family,” but they were units of production as well. Everywhere on his plantation he sought to eliminate pockets of idleness. If a slave was too old or too sick to work in the fields, he or she was put to tending the vegetable gardens or to cooking in the quarters. When one of his former head men named Nace became ill, Jefferson ordered that he be “entirely kept from labour until he recovers”; nevertheless, Nace was to spend his days indoors shelling corn or making shoes or baskets. Jefferson was willing to prescribe lighter work for women who were pregnant or raising infant children because they were actually breeding more property; thus, said Jefferson, “a child raised every 2 years is of more profit than the crop of the best laboring man.” This was one of the times, he said, when “providence has made our interest and our duties coincide perfectly.”17
“I love industry and abhor severity,” declared Jefferson, and apparently he himself never physically punished a slave. Yet the coercion of the lash lay behind the workings of Monticello, as it did for all plantations. Jefferson certainly had no scruples in ordering disobedient slaves whipped; and those he could not correct he sold, often as a lesson to the other slaves. Jefferson ordered one particularly unmanageable slave to be sold so far away that it would seem to his companions “as if he were put out of the way by death.” That Jefferson was considered to be a kind and gentle master suggests how pernicious the practice of slavery could be. As he himself pointed out, a master “nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.”18
ALTHOUGH NEARLY 90 PERCENT of all the slaves lived in the slave societies of the South, slavery was not inconsequential in the Northern parts of America. On the eve of the Revolution nearly fifty thousand slaves lived in the North. In the middle of the eighteenth century one out of every five families in Boston owned at least one slave. In 1767 nearly 9 percent of the population of Philadelphia was enslaved. In 1760 black slaves made up nearly 8 percent of the population of Rhode Island and nearly 7 percent of the population of New Jersey, most of them clustered around the port cities and towns.
By 1770 black slaves constituted 12 percent of the population of the colony of New York and a bit over 14 percent in the city of New York. Slaves were widely distributed in small units throughout the city; even as late as 1790 one out of every five households owned at least one slave. Indeed, the proportion of households in New York City and its surrounding counties owning slaves was greater than that of any Southern state—nearly 40 percent of the white households for the New York City area compared to 36. 5 percent for Maryland and 34 percent for South Carolina. Of course, the number of slaves held by each household in New York City and its immediate hinterland was much smaller than those of the South, averaging fewer than four slaves per household.19
Most of the rural Northern slaves were farm laborers of one sort or another. Only in South County (then called King’s County), Rhode Island, was there anything resembling the plantations of the South. These plantations, which produced dairy products and livestock, especially pacer horses, ranged from three-hundred-acre farms to large sprawling units that measured in square miles. The Narragansett Planters, as they were called, tried to live like Southern aristocrats, but the slave populations on their plantations tended to be much smaller, running about a dozen to a dozen and a half on each plantation. In South County the black proportion of the population ranged from 15 to 25 percent, making this area the most slave-ridden of any place in New England; indeed, the towns of South Kingstown and Charlestown in South County had proportions of black populations that rivaled those of Virginia, 30 to 40 percent. Some of the slaves may have been racially mixed, for many Narragansett Indians, devastated and scattered by King Philip’s War in the previous century, had intermarried with blacks.20
In most parts of the Northern colonies slaves tended to live much closer to their white masters than the slaves of the South-–usually jammed into the garrets, backrooms, and barns of their white owners rather than living in separate slave quarters. On the eve of the Revolution one-third or more of the Northern slaves lived in the several cities, where they performed a variety of tasks as domestics, teamsters, tradesmen, dock workers, and sailors. One out of four blacks in Rhode Island, for example, lived in the slave-trading entrepôt of Newport, where they constituted 20 percent of the city’s population.21 Despite this urban clustering of black slaves, however, the Northern colonies were not slave societies like those of the South, and slavery was just one form of labor among many and not the dominant model in the society.
PREVALENT AS IT WAS everywhere in colonial America, slavery in the first half of the eighteenth century was very much taken for granted. It was still a cruel and brutal age, as the system of criminal punishments revealed, and many believed that slavery was merely part of the natural order of things. An educated and enlightened slaveholder like William Byrd of Westover in Virginia never expressed any guilt or misgivings over the owning of dozens of slaves. Of course, by the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth isolated conscience-stricken individuals spoke out against slavery, but they were few and far between, and mostly Quakers.
During the first half of the eighteenth century most Americans had simply accepted slavery as the lowest and most base status in a hierarchy of legal dependencies. The prevalence of hundreds of thousands of bonded white servants tended to blur the conspicuous nature of black slavery. With as much as half of colonial society at any moment legally unfree, the peculiar character of lifetime, hereditary black slavery was not always as obvious as it would become in the years following the Revolution when bonded white servitude virtually disappeared. Naturally, the leading Southern Revolutionaries—Washington, Jefferson, and Madison—all owned slaves; but so too did many of the Northern Revolutionaries—Boston’s John Hancock, New York’s Robert Livingston, and Philadelphia’s John Dickinson. On the eve of the Revolution the mayor of Philadelphia possessed thirty-one slaves.22
The Revolution almost overnight made slavery a problem in ways that it had not been earlier. The contradiction between the appeal to liberty and the existence of slavery became obvious to all the Revolutionary leaders. They did not need to hear Dr. Johnson’s famous quip “How is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” in order to realize the painful inconsistency between their talk of freedom for themselves and their owning of black slaves. If all men were created equal, as all enlightened persons were now saying,
then what justification could there be for holding Africans in slavery? Since Americans “are by the law of nature free born, as indeed all men are, white or black . . . does it follow,” asked James Otis of Massachusetts in 1764, “that ‘tis right to enslave a man because he is black? . . . Can any logical inference in favor of slavery be drawn from a flat nose, a long or short face?”23
By the eve of the Revolution the contradiction had become excruciating for many, and Northerners, like Samuel Cooke in his Massachusetts election sermon of 1770, were anxious to confess that in tolerating black slavery “we, the patrons of liberty, have dishonored the Christian name, and degraded human nature nearly to a level with the beasts that perish.”24 Even some prominent slaveholding Southerners, like Thomas Jefferson, were willing to declare that “the rights of human nature [are] deeply wounded by this infamous practice [of importing slaves],” and that “the abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state.”25
As early as 1774 both Rhode Island and Connecticut prohibited new slaves from being brought into their colonies. In the preamble to their law the Rhode Islanders declared that since “the inhabitants of America are generally engaged in the preservations of their own rights and liberties, among which that of personal freedom must be considered the greatest,” it was obvious that “those who are desirous of enjoying all the advantages of liberty themselves should be willing to extend personal liberty to others.” Other states—Delaware, Virginia, Maryland, and South Carolina—soon followed in abolishing the slave trade, South Carolina only for a term of years. Given the mounting sense of inconsistency between the Revolutionary ideals and the holding of people in bondage, it is not surprising that the first anti-slave convention in the world was held in Philadelphia in 1775.
Everywhere in the country most of the Revolutionary leaders assumed that slavery was on its last legs and was headed for eventual destruction. On the eve of the Revolution Benjamin Rush believed that the desire to abolish the institution “prevails in our counsels and among all ranks in every province.” With hostility toward slavery mounting everywhere among the enlightened in the Atlantic world, he predicted in 1774 that “there will be not a Negro slave in North America in 40 years.”26 Even some Virginians assumed slavery could not long endure. Jefferson told a French correspondent in 1786 that there were in the Virginia legislature “men of virtue enough to propose, and talents” to move toward, “the gradual emancipation of slaves.” To be sure, “they saw that the moment of doing it was not yet arrived,” but, said Jefferson, with “the spread of light and liberality” among the slaveholders that moment was coming.27 Slavery simply could not stand against the relentless march of liberty and progress. That the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 was scrupulous in not mentioning “slaves,” “slavery,” or “Negroes” in the final draft of the Constitution seemed to point to a future without the shameful institution.
Predictions of slavery’s demise could not have been more wrong. Far from being doomed, American slavery in fact was on the verge of its greatest expansion.
HOW COULD THE REVOLUTIONARY LEADERS have been so mistaken? How could they have deceived themselves so completely? The Founders’ self-deception and mistaken optimism were understandable, for they wanted to believe the best, and initially there was evidence that slavery was in fact dying out. The Northern states, where slavery was not insignificant, were busy trying to eliminate the institution. Following the Americans’ early efforts to abolish the slave trade, they began attacking the institution of slavery itself with increasing passion.28
In 1777 the future state of Vermont led the way in formally abolishing slavery. Its constitution of that year declared that no persons “born in this country, or brought from over sea, ought to be holden by law to serve any purpose, or servant, slave or apprentice” after they attained adulthood, unless “by their own consent,” or by appropriate court-ordered legal proscription.29 Then in 1780 the Revolutionary government of Pennsylvania, admitting that slavery was “disgraceful to any people, and more especially to those who have been contending in the great cause of liberty themselves,” provided for the gradual emancipation of the state’s slaves.30 In Boston free and enslaved blacks themselves took up the cause and used the Revolutionaries’ language against the institution, declaring that “they have in common with all men a Natural and Unalienable right to that freedom which the Grat Parent of the Universe hath Bestowed equally on all menkind.”31 In 1783 the Massachusetts Superior Court held that slavery was incompatible with the state’s constitution, particularly with its bill of rights, which declared that “all men are born free and equal.” A New Hampshire court did the same. Rhode Island and Connecticut passed gradual abolition laws in 1784. In the Pennsylvania ratifying convention James Wilson predicted that emancipation of all the slaves in the United States was inevitable. The abolition of the slave trade, he said, would lay “the foundation for banishing slavery out of this country; and though the period is more distant than I could wish, yet it will produce the same kind [of] gradual change [for the whole nation] which was pursued in Pennsylvania.”32 New York in 1799 and New Jersey in 1804 provided for the gradual elimination of slavery, though as late as 1810 over 40 percent of white households in New York City still contained slaves.33 Nevertheless, by the early nineteenth century every Northern state had provided for the eventual end of slavery. By 1790 the number of free blacks in the Northern states had increased from several hundred in the 1770s to over twenty-seven thousand; by 1810 free blacks in the North numbered well over one hundred thousand.
Even the South, especially Virginia, the largest state in the Union, gave signs of wanting to soften and eventually end the institution. The Virginia and Maryland masters certainly treated their slaves more paternalistically than their counterparts in South Carolina and Georgia. The Creole slaves of the Upper South benefited not only from better food, clothing, and housing but also from more intimate daily contact with their masters than those in the Deep South. On the eve of the Revolution many of Virginia’s slaveholders had become more unwilling to break up families and had become more relaxed about slaves’ visiting between plantations and about slave truancy, even putting up with some slaves’ running away for days or even weeks at a time as long as they eventually returned. (Since there were no free states as yet, there was no place to run to anyway.) Nevertheless, by the time of the Revolution literate young blacks, like Isaac Bee of Carter’s Grove in Virginia, who, according to his master, “thinks he has a Right to his Freedom,” were willing to run off and try “to pass” as free men.34
In the Upper South the black codes that had been passed at the beginning of the eighteenth century had fallen into neglect, and whites had become less concerned with racial separation than in the past. Fraternization between whites and black slaves had become more common, especially in drinking bouts, horse racing, cockfighting, and gambling. Slaves and lower-class whites often got together in drinking establishments. Blacks commonly supplied the music for white dances, which themselves became increasingly influenced by slave customs. Whites tended to treat the few free blacks in their midst much less severely than they would in the nineteenth century. Free blacks were allowed to acquire property, carry arms in militia groups, travel fairly freely, and even to vote in some areas.
The white evangelical Protestant groups of Baptists and later Methodists recruited blacks and mingled with them in their congregations. Some black evangelicals even preached to white congregations. Indeed, in the 1790s white residents of the Eastern Shore in Virginia pooled enough money to purchase the freedom of their black preacher. Not only were the Baptists and Methodists mixing whites and blacks, but these rapidly growing evangelical denominations were publicly voicing their opposition to slavery. When even Southerners like Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Henry Laurens, and St. George Tucker publicly deplored the injustice of slavery, from “that moment,” declared the New York physician and abolitioni
st E. H. Smith in 1798, “the slow, but certain, death-wound was inflicted upon it.”35
Other evidence from the Upper South seemed to reinforce the point. The increased hiring out of slaves convinced many in the Upper South that slavery would soon by replaced by wage labor. What could be a more conspicuous endorsement of the anti-slavery cause than having the College of William and Mary in 1791 confer an honorary degree on the celebrated British abolitionist Granville Sharp? That there were more anti-slave societies created in the South than in the North was bound to make people feel that the South was moving in the same direction of gradual emancipation as the North, especially when these societies were publicly denouncing slavery as “not only an odious degradation, but an outrageous violation of one of the most essential rights of human nature.”36 In Virginia and Maryland some of these anti-slave societies brought “freedom suits” in the state courts that led to some piecemeal emancipation. If the slaves could demonstrate that they had a maternal white or Indian ancestor, they could be freed, and hearsay evidence was often enough to convince the courts. “Whole families,” recalled one sympathetic observer, “were often liberated by a single verdict, the fate of one relative deciding the fate of many.” By 1796 nearly thirty freedom suits were pending in Virginia courts.37
Other efforts in the Upper South to free slaves contributed to the sense that slavery was doomed everywhere in America. In 1782 Virginia allowed for the private manumission of slaves, and Delaware and Maryland soon followed with similar laws. Some slaves took advantage of these new liberal laws and worked to buy their own freedom. Of the slaves freed in Norfolk, Virginia, between 1791 and 1820, more than a third purchased themselves or were purchased by others, usually by their families. By 1790 the free black population in the Upper South had increased to over thirty thousand; by 1810 the free blacks in Virginia and Maryland numbered over ninety-four thousand. Many thought that the abolition of slavery itself was just a matter of time.
Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 Page 65
