For slaves—about 20 percent of the colonial population in 1775—the war fueled hopes for their own independence, and that repeatedly placed them at odds with white revolutionaries. The contradiction had been brewing since the days of the Stamp Act protests. Charleston, South Carolina, had declared martial law for a week when slaves echoed white protestors’ shouts for “Liberty.” The crowd of Boston artisans led by Ebenezer McIntosh had excluded all blacks so as not to encourage their insubordination. By the time the revolutionary war began, a rising tide of slave conspiracies, mutinies, and petitions for freedom had made it clear that slaves stood ready to fight for whichever side offered better possibilities for emancipation.
Black men both slave and free served in the New England militia units that mobilized against the British in spring 1775 and in the Continental Army’s earliest regiments. All of these troops were volunteers. Slaves usually enlisted with their owners’ consent and always with the understanding that military service would render them free. That crack in the edifice of slavery agitated the Continental Congress, whose unity in behalf of the war rested on an agreement that it would not liberate slaves. In February 1776, following months of debate among Congressmen and military commanders, George Washington ordered that free black men who had already served could reenlist in the Continental Army but that no other black or Indian soldiers would be accepted. By summer, militia laws in the various colonies had been amended to exclude all but white men.
As Continental leaders debated black enlistment, slaves in Virginia made a bid for freedom under British auspices. In November 1775, the colony’s royal governor, Lord John Dunmore, issued a proclamation promising freedom to all slaves who belonged to American rebels and bore arms for Britain. In the few weeks that elapsed before Continental troops drove Dunmore from the mainland, some 700 slaves made their way to his camp near Norfolk. About 1,000 more later managed to reach his ships anchored off Virginia’s shore, and in summer 1776, when he sailed to Staten Island, slaves from New York and New Jersey reinforced his black regiment. By the end of the war, tens of thousands of escaped slaves—men and women alike—would serve Britain’s army as soldiers or workers behind the lines.
Native Americans fought for both sides too, though most would have preferred to stay neutral. From Pequot towns in New England to Catawba villages in South Carolina, Indians in the heartlands of white settlement joined the revolution’s troops in 1775 and resisted exclusion the following year. But the vast network of Indian nations on the colonies’ frontiers spurned overtures from the Continentals and the British. As the Seneca chief Kayashuta explained, “We must be Fools indeed to imagine that they regard us or our Interest who want to bring us into an unnecessary War.” In the end, though, few frontier nations could avoid the fight. Combatants from both sides penetrated more and more of Indian country and tolerated no neutrals. Forced to choose, many nations split into opposing camps, but most people sided with Britain, which pledged to uphold Indian claims to land the colonists had time and again tried to grab.
The Declaration of Independence pointedly ignored the revolution’s incongruities: that slaveholders shouted for liberty; that black and Indian volunteers for the cause had been turned away; that the Continental Congress still sought allies among frontier Indians who did not wish to fight; that republican values ran deeper at the revolution’s grassroots than among its official leaders in Congress. Thomas Jefferson revised his first draft of the Declaration to delete the charge that King George disgraced himself by abetting slavery and the slave trade. The final draft’s bill of grievances climaxed with the complaint that he incited “domestic insurrections” (a euphemism for slave revolts) and courted military assistance from “merciless Indian Savages.” To defend slavery and condemn Indians contradicted the statement that “all men are created equal,” but this was a political document, not a treatise on logic. If the congressmen thought themselves more equal than most—“an aristocracy of virtue and talent,” as Jefferson later put it—they also knew that the revolution could not succeed unless masses of commoners saw it as their own.
THE PEOPLE’S WAR AND THE GENTLEMEN’S REPUBLIC
As Tom Paine observed in 1792, “The Independence of America, considered merely as a separation from England, would have been a matter but of little importance, had it not been accompanied by a Revolution in the principles and practice of Governments.” Common people, who bore the brunt of the war with Britain, took part in the political revolution as well. The elite remained in command, however, and concessions to those below were not evenly distributed.
After the Continental Congress declared independence, the rebel colonies—now members of the United States of America—began to draw up constitutions for state government. Virtually all of the men involved in this process agreed that politics should remain a male affair and that governments should be elected. But there was no consensus as to how much political power should belong to ordinary men compared to men of the elite.
Pennsylvania fashioned the most democratic constitution, adopted in summer 1776. It gave all taxpaying freemen the right to vote and hold office, created a unicameral legislature to be elected every year, and authorized the governor to do little more than execute the legislature’s decisions. Except in emergencies, legislators could not pass a bill into law unless its text had first been distributed for discussion by the general public. In 1777, when small farmers in upper New York broke away to form the new state of Vermont (not formally part of the United States until 1791), they wrote a constitution modeled on Pennsylvania’s.
By and large, however, state constitutional conventions were dominated by conservatives and strictly limited democracy. In Maryland and Virginia, for example, planters preserved their political clout by instituting stiff property qualifications for both voters and officeholders and by setting long intervals between elections. In New York and Massachusetts, merchants and lawyers drafted constitutions that provided for powerful governors and bicameral legislatures in which assemblies chosen by the whole electorate (male taxpayers) shared lawmaking with senates elected by wealthy men. New Jersey was the only state that enfranchised women—as long as they were unmarried and met the same high property requirements as men.
Whatever their formal rights to a voice in politics, both men and women of the lower classes made their voices heard. When wartime shortages pushed food prices through the roof, popular protests forced every state north of Maryland to enact price controls. Angry crowds of women meanwhile raided the storerooms of merchants and shopkeepers guilty of price gouging or suspected of hoarding necessities. In the port cities, sailors and craft journeymen struck for pay hikes to meet the rising cost of living. In 1779, militiamen in Philadelphia assaulted the home of a prominent lawyer opposed to price controls and even wheeled up a piece of artillery before they were dispersed by a unit of light cavalry. The countryside was also in turmoil. Many tenant farmers stopped paying rent and joined with small freeholders to appropriate land owned by wealthy men who sided with Britain.
Slaves fled their masters in unprecedented numbers, 30,000 in Virginia alone, according to Thomas Jefferson’s estimate. Petitions for freedom poured into state courts and legislatures, often echoing the Declaration of Independence. One petition presented in Massachusetts in January 1777 argued that slaves “have in common with all other Men a Natural and Unalienable Right to that freedom which the Great Parent of the Universe hath bestowed equally on all menkind.”
Quite a few fugitive slaves joined the Continental Army, whose color bars disintegrated as the fighting dragged on. The turning point came in 1777, when Congress scrambled to reinforce the military. American diplomats stepped up efforts to win European allies and eventually brought France, Spain, and Holland into the war. Various blends of diplomacy and coercion yielded Indian allies from the Delawares, Tuscaroras, Penobscots, and other frontier nations. Mainly, however, Congress looked to the states. Starting in January 1777, each had to supply the army with a certain quot
a of regular troops. Unlike state militiamen, who enlisted for three to twelve months, the regulars served for three years. Volunteers for such duty were so scarce that state recruiters usually welcomed one and all, ignoring legalities as to who could and could not serve.
Every state soon instituted a military draft, which ushered in more drastic changes in the army’s makeup. While the draft laws typically conscripted white men only, that did not determine who actually served. A man who was summoned could send his slave, his indentured servant, his apprentice or any paid substitute to take his place. Many draftees did just that, and many a town hired outsiders to substitute for its residents, if only to keep the local militia intact. By the end of the decade, the Continental Army bore little resemblance to the volunteer force that had mustered in 1775. Most of the soldiers were now conscripts or their stand-ins. Artisans, journeymen, and small landowners, the core of the old army, were now outnumbered by lowlier groups—common laborers and landless farmers along with apprentices, servants, and slaves.
The enlistment of bound workers pitted private-property rights against the public need for troops. Numerous petitioners called on Congress to stop military recruiters from inducting bondsmen without their masters’ consent or compensation. A county committee in Cumberland, Pennsylvania, protested on the grounds that “all apprentices and servants are the property of their masters and mistresses, and every mode of depriving such masters and mistresses of their property is a violation of the rights of mankind.” Jonathan Hobby of Concord, Massachusetts, sued the army to return a teenaged slave who had enlisted while Hobby was out of town. Military judges agreed that Hobby’s property rights had been violated but declined to rule on his suit. Congress waffled too, telling the military to return runaway bondsmen at their masters’ request but ignoring the routine violations of this order. The sharpest controversies concerned state laws on the enlistment of slaves. Northern and middle states quickly approved this practice once Congress assigned troop quotas. Maryland followed suit in 1780, after three years of debate and failure to meet its quota. Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia resisted to the bitter end, though they allowed black freemen to substitute for white conscripts. From the late 1770s until the fighting ceased, emissaries from Congress and General George Washington badgered these states to raise slave battalions. Every request was, to quote one of Washington’s aides, “drowned by the howlings of a triple-headed monster in which prejudice, avarice and pusillanimity were united.”
A different sprit prevailed among the army’s rank and file, where men of every color—and some women disguised as men—soldiered for meager pay almost always in arrears. There were a few all-black regiments. Enlistees from Indian towns sometimes signed up in groups and formed their own squads. But most units were fully integrated, and they all merged in battle, with common soldiers of every description fighting side by side. The Massachusetts rosters included Ben Russell, a white apprentice printer from Worcester; Ezekiel Brown, a white Concord schoolmaster fresh out of debtor’s prison; Cesar Perry, a free black laborer from Bristol County; Charlestown Edes, a black slave from Groton; and the farmer Daniel Nimham, a Wappinger Indian elder from Stockbridge who died in battle near New York City. At least one woman was also part of this mix: Deborah Sampson, a white woman from Middleborough who grew up as an indentured servant and, at age twenty-one, went off to war under the name of Robert Shurleff.
Up to 20,000 women served the army in other ways. Most were soldiers’ wives or widows, sometimes with children in tow. Since the Continental Army did not provide family allowances, poor women often had little choice but to follow the troops and work for rations. They served as cooks, seamstresses, laundresses, and nurses, and in the heat of battle, quite a few fought. The most famous was Mary Hays McCauley, who earned the nickname Molly Pitcher by carrying water to soldiers on the front lines. When her husband fell from wounds or fatigue, she took his place as a cannon loader. Though General Washington called women “camp followers” a nuisance, he was known to assign them to cannon crews when he ran short of men.
Tensions between the troops and their commanders ran high throughout the war. From the moment they took charge, Washington and his corps of officers complained about undisciplined foot soldiers. One captain described them as “the strangest mixture of Indians, Negroes, and whites, with old men and mere children, which together with a nasty lousy appearance make a shocking spectacle.” The three-year enlistments instituted in 1777 were supposed to whip the army into shape; but recruits who entered under the draft proved even more unruly than their predecessors. Several times in 1780, units from Pennsylvania and New Jersey mutinied over short rations and pay, and the ringleaders were executed on Washington’s orders.
If ragtag troops were hard to govern, however, they defeated the world’s foremost imperial power. Of the 200,000 troops who fought Britain, about half served in local militias. Assembling at need, harassing the enemy with sniping fire, they made every British expedition costly. But Continental regulars endured the heaviest combat, casualties, and privations. The victory belonged first and foremost to them.
The fighting ended suddenly in October 1781, when the British army in Virginia was trapped between American and French forces. That winter Parliament voted to abandon the war, and in 1782 the British troops withdrew from all states, accompanied by some 30,000 former slaves who had assisted them in the war. In the Treaty of Paris, signed in 1783, Britain formally recognized American independence and transferred to the United States all territory east of the Mississippi River, south of the Great Lakes, and north of Florida. Slavery, Indian land rights, and other issues Congress had sidestepped in the Declaration of Independence would now come sharply to the fore.
Settlers and speculators rushed into the northwestern frontier, snatching land from Indian allies as well as those who had sided with Britain. To restore law and order, Congress made the thefts legal. By 1790, treaties signed at gunpoint had deprived Indians of nearly all their land between Lake Ontario and the Ohio River. Back east, Indian veterans of the Continental Army did not fare much better. Debts incurred when the men were away compelled many households to sell off their land. Massachusetts rescinded Indians’ right to self-government, putting their towns under the authority of white overseers. In the space of a few years the new republic made explicit the principle that Indians were not “created equal,” not even those who had bled for the revolution; and hardly anyone save for Indians themselves disputed that injustice.
Servitude became a more contentious issue. Master craftsmen pushed for stricter laws to control apprentices, who ran away even more frequently than during the war. Starting in 1783, state after state stiffened the penalties for runaway apprentices and anyone who helped them abscond. But in most cases the new statutes also extended republican rights to apprentices, declaring that they could not be bound to labor beyond age twenty-one and spelling out procedures by which they could sue their masters for cruelty or neglect.
The indenture of European immigrants came under fire too. Right after the war, societies to protect indentured servants from abuse sprang up in New York, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. German immigrants, many of whom had arrived as redemptioners, were especially active in this cause. In 1784, one group in New York City paid off the indentures of a shipload of new immigrants and condemned the “traffic in White People” as a British custom at odds with “the idea of liberty this country has so happily established.”
Movements against slavery gathered on a larger scale, inspired by republican ideals, religious fervor, and the emancipation of several thousand black war veterans. In northern states, slave trading was outlawed and slavery itself edged toward extinction. Vermont had set the example in 1777, abolishing slavery under its constitution. In 1783, New Hampshire did the same, and Massachusetts courts ruled slavery illegal. Elsewhere in the North, freedom came at a snail’s pace under gradual emancipation laws enacted by Pennsylvania (1780), Connecticut (1784), Rhode Island (1784), New York (
1799), and New Jersey (1804). Designed to reconcile slaves’ rights to liberty and masters’ rights to property, these statutes freed enslaved women’s future off-spring but only after they reached ages ranging from eighteen to twenty-eight.
In the southern states slavery expanded, despite opposition from some quarters. During the 1780s, a number of slaveholders in the upper South caught the “contagion of liberty” and voluntarily freed their slaves. By the early 1790s, local societies to promote manumission had formed statewide networks in Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. No southern legislature moved to abolish slavery, however. Nor did manumission societies spread to the lower South, or even make a sizable dent on their home ground.
From Delaware to Georgia, the great majority of slaveholders sought to increase holdings depleted in wartime. They tracked down runaways, purchased the slaves southern states had confiscated from people who sided with Britain, imported tens of thousands of captives from Africa or the Caribbean, and enslaved some free blacks kidnapped from as far north as Massachusetts. In other cases masters reasserted claims to slaves freed during the war so that they could substitute for white conscripts.
These efforts more than offset freedom’s progress in the North. By 1790, the free black population reached almost 60,000, up from just a few thousand at the start of the revolution; but slaves numbered about 698,000, compared to 500,000 in 1775. Some 658,000 slaves lived in the South, a little over 100,000 in Maryland and in each of the Carolinas. The largest slave-holder by far was Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia, where the census of 1790 counted 292,627 slaves.
From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend Page 6
