Period: 1800-1860 Guided Readings: Antislavery
AntislaveryIntroduction
The abolition of slavery represents one of the greatest moral achievements in history. As late as 1750, slavery was legal from Canada to the tip of Argentina. Each of the 13 American colonies permitted slavery, and before the Revolution, only one colony--Georgia--had sought to prohibit the institution. The governments of Britain, France, Denmark, Holland, Portugal, and Spain all openly participated in the slave trade, and no church had discouraged its members from owning or trading in slaves.
Yet within half a century, protests against slavery had become widespread. By 1804, every state north of Maryland and Delaware had either freed its slaves or adopted gradual emancipation schemes. In 1807, both the United States and Britain outlawed the Atlantic slave trade.
When Congress prohibited the trans-Atlantic slave trade, there were grounds for believing that slavery was a declining institution. In 1784, the Continental Congress fell one vote short of passing a bill that would have excluded slavery forever from the trans-Appalachian West. In 1787, Congress did bar slavery from the Old Northwest, the region north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi. During the 1780s and 1790s, the number of slaves freed by their masters rose dramatically in the Upper South. At the present rate of progress, one religious leader predicted in 1791, within fifty years it will "be as shameful for a man to hold a Negro slave, as to be guilty of common robbery or theft." But when William Lloyd Garrison called for an immediate end to slavery in 1831, the grounds for optimism had evaporated. Despite the end of the Atlantic slave trade, the slave population in the United States had grown to 1.5 million in 1820 and over two million a decade later. The cotton kingdom had expanded into Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri. In the North, free blacks faced increasingly harsh discrimination.
The Rise of Antislavery Thoughts
The original opponents of slavery were deeply religious women and men who believed that slavery was sinful. Most of the earliest critics of slavery were Quakers. The Society of Friends, as the group was formally known, was a religious denomination that had arisen during England's civil war of the mid-1600s. They wanted to live free of sin, and condemned war, and refused to bear arms, take oaths, or bow or take off their hats to social superiors. Rejecting an ordained ministry, the Quakers believed that the Holy Spirit was present in every human heart.
Compared to other religious sects of the time, the Quakers were extraordinarily egalitarian. Quaker women assumed ministerial role and Quakers rejected the notion that infants were born sinful.
Widespread Quaker opposition to slavery arose during the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), when many Friends were persecuted for refusing to fight or pay taxes. Many members of the group responded to persecution by asserting the duty of individual Quakers to confront evil. As a result, a growing number of Quakers began to take active steps against poverty, the drinking of hard liquor, unjust Indian policies, and, above all, slavery. During the 1750s, 1760s, and 1770s, the Quakers became the first organization in history to prohibit slaveholding.
The very first antislavery petition in the New World was drafted in 1688 by Dutch-speaking Quakers who lived in Germantown, Penn. Their ancestors had been tortured and persecuted for their religious beliefs, and they saw a striking similarity between their ancestors' sufferings and the sufferings of slaves. They charged that Africans had been seized illegally from their homelands, shipped across the Atlantic against their will, and sold away from their families.
In 1688, the Germantown Quakers stood alone in their protests against slavery. They passed their petition on to other Quakers in Pennsylvania, only to see their protest against slavery ignored.
Read the following excerpt from the Germantown Quaker Petition of 1688 and identify the reasons why they opposed slavery:
"There is a saying, that we should do to all men like as we will be done ourselves; making no difference of what generation, descent, or colour they are.... To bring men hither [to America], or to rob and sell them against their will, we stand against. In Europe there are many oppressed for conscience-sake; and here there are those oppressed which are of a black colour....Pray, what thing in the world can be done worse towards us, than if men should rob or steal us away, and sell us for slaves to strange countries; separating husbands from their wives and children."
Was the Revolution a missed opportunity to end slavery?
The Revolution greatly stimulated opposition to slavery. Many Americans recognized that it was hypocritical for them to fight for liberty while they continued to hold slaves. Slavery contradicted the idea that all human beings were born with certain natural and inalienable rights, including the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.
Between the 1760s and the 1780s, large numbers of white Americans began to grapple, for the first time, with the discrepancy of slavery in a republican society committed to liberty. A series of events illustrate the revolutionary generation's unease with slavery.
- In 1770, Massachusetts debated a bill "to prevent the...inslaving Mankind in the Province."
- In 1774, the Continental Congress prohibited the Atlantic slave trade.
- Also in 1774, Vermont became the first political jurisdiction to outlaw slavery when it prohibited the institution in its Constitution.
- In 1780, Pennsylvania became the first state to vote to end slavery, when it adopted a gradual emancipation plan.
- In 1782, Virginia repealed its ban on private manumissions; Delaware did the same in 1787 and Maryland in 1790.
- In 1783, Thomas Jefferson proposed that Virginia outlaw the introduction of any more slaves into the state and declare all African Americans born after Dec. 31, 1800, free.
- In 1784, the leaders of the Methodists--the fastest growing religious denomination in Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia--prohibited slaveholders from joining the church and called on Methodists who owned slaves to free them.
At the same time, all the northern states committed themselves to emancipation. Vermont outlawed slavery in its constitution; Massachusetts and New Hampshire ended slavery by judicial decree. Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Rhode Island adopted gradual emancipation measures. Even in states where slave holding interests were deeply entrenched, gradual emancipation schemes adopted. New York passed a gradual abolition law in 1799 and New Jersey in 1804. For a time it seemed that Maryland and Delaware might adopt similar legislation.
The Impact of the Revolution on Slavery
The Revolution had contradictory effects on slavery. The northern states either abolished the institution outright or adopted gradual emancipation schemes. In the South, the Revolution severely disrupted slavery, but ultimately white Southerners succeeded in strengthening the institution. The Revolution also inspired African-American resistance against slavery.
During the Revolution, thousands of slaves obtained their freedom by running away. Thomas Jefferson estimated that 30,000 slaves fled their masters during the British invasion of Virginia in 1781. Some 5,000 slaves in Georgia and 20,000 slaves in South Carolina--perhaps a quarter of their slave populations--gained freedom as a result of the conflict. By the 1790s, however, the slave population was growing again and was beginning to spread into new lands in what would become the cotton belt.
Inspired by the natural rights philosophy of the Revolution, free blacks agitated against slavery. They petitioned Congress to end the slave trade and state legislatures to abolish slavery. They repeatedly pointed out the contradiction between American ideals of liberty and equality and the base reality of slavery.
Slaves began to speak the language of natural rights. In 1800, a group of slaves in Virginia plotted to seize the city of Richmond. Led by a man named Gabriel, the insurrection was inspired in part by the slave revolt that began in the French colony of St. Domingue (Haiti) in 1791. It was also motivated by the ideals of liberty that had led the American colonists to revolt against Britain. About 30 of the accused conspirators were executed, and many others were sold as slaves to Spanish and Portuguese colonies.
Here, a visitor to Virginia describes why one of the slaves had decided to participate in Gabriel's revolt.
"In the afternoon I passed by a field in which several poor slaves had lately been executed, on the charge of having an intention to rise against their masters. A lawyer who was present at their trials at Richmond, informed me that on one of them begin asked, what he had to say to the court on his defence, he replied in a manly tone of voice: "I have nothing more to offer than what General Washington would have had to offer, had he been taken by the British and put to trial by them. I have adventured my life in endeavouring to obtain the liberty of my countrymen, and am a willing sacrifice in their cause: and I beg, as a favour, that I may be immediately led to execution. I know that you have pre-determined to shed my blood, why then all this mockery of a trial?"
President Thomas Jefferson recognized that the Virginian slaves had been motivated by the same ideals that had inspired white colonists to revolt against Britain. In a letter to the U.S. Minister to Britain, Jefferson proposed that a group of the insurgent slaves be deported to Sierra Leone in West Africa, where an English abolitionist organization had established Freetown as a home for former slaves. Jefferson told the minister to assure the British that the rebel slaves were not criminals, but men aspiring for freedom.
The negotiations with the British were unsuccessful, and most of the accused conspirators were sold as slaves to Spain and Portugal's New World colonies. For Jefferson, Gabriel's Conspiracy reinforced his view that race war could be avoided only if emancipation were tied to expatriation--what came to be called colonization.
Thomas Jefferson, July 13, 1802, to Rufus King, U.S. Minister to Britain:
"[The slaves in question] are not felons, or common malefactors, but persons guilty of what the safety of society, under actual circumstances, obliges us to treat as a crime, but which their feelings may represent in a far different shape. They are such as will be a valuable acquisition to the settlement already existing there, and well calculated to cooperate in the place of civilization."
The Decline of Antislavery Sentiment in the South
During the late 18th century, the South was unique among slave societies in its openness to antislavery ideas. In Maryland and North Carolina, Quakers freed more than 1500 slaves and sent them out of state. Scattered Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian ministers condemned slavery as a sin "contrary to the word of God." Meanwhile, many planters, especially in Virginia and Maryland, described slavery as a source of debt, economic stagnation, and moral dissipation.
During the early 19th century, however, Quakers and Unitarians who were strongly antagonist to slavery, migrated out of the region. Many southern religious sects that had expressed opposition to slavery modified their religious beliefs. By the second decade of the 19th century, antislavery sentiment was confined to Kentucky, Maryland, the Piedmont counties of North Carolina, and the mountains in eastern Tennessee and western Virginia.
Many white Southerners who felt genuine moral doubts about slavery directed their energies into "reforming" the institution. They tried to Christianize slaves, ameliorate their position, and make slavery conform to the ideal depicted in the Old Testament. During the 18th century, the slave codes were exceedingly harsh. They permitted owners to punish slaves by castration and amputation. Slaveowners had no specific obligations for housing, food, or clothing, and many observers reported seeing slaves half-clothed or naked.
During the early 19th century, southern state legislatures defined killing a slave with malice as murder and made dismemberment illegal. Three states forbade the sale of young slave children from their parents. Many of the new laws went unenforced, but they suggested that a new code of values was emerging under slavery. Paternalism was the defining characteristic of this new code. According to this new ideal, slaveholding carried strict obligations. Humane masters were supposed to show concern for the spiritual and physical well-being of their slaves.
These limited efforts at reform were accompanied by tighter restrictions on other aspects of slave life. Private manumissions were made illegal. Most states placed tight restrictions on slave funerals and barred black preachers from conducting religious services unless a white person was present.
Colonization
After the War of 1812, antislavery sentiment was deflected by colonization movement, a movement to transport free blacks to Africa.
A number of factors contributed to support for colonization. Racism increased dramatically after the Revolution. African-Americans were shut out from most forms of employment and from most schools, except for a few segregated schools. The strength of racial prejudice convinced some whites and a few African-Americans that it would never be possible for whites and blacks to live as genuine equals.
Slave revolts also led some to support colonization. In the aftermath of Haitian Revolution and Gabriel Conspiracy of 1800 and 1803 in Virginia, colonization seemed like a safe and sane approach to race relations.
During the 1810s and '20s, the colonization movement attracted a highly respectable leadership, including such major political leaders as Henry Clay. Congress helped fund the cost of transporting free blacks to Liberia (a colony and later a country established in West Africa by 83 free blacks).
In the face of this widespread consensus in favor of colonization, staunch opponents of slavery concentrated their efforts on lobbying for state emancipation acts and measures to prevent the kidnapping of free blacks. A few African-Americans supported colonization in the belief that it provided the only alternative to continued discrimination. Paul Cuffe (1759-1817), a Quaker sea captain who was the son of a former slave and an Indian woman, led the first experiment in colonization. In 1815, he transported 38 free blacks to Sierra Leone.
Most African-Americans opposed colonization. In August 1817, over 3000 African-Americans attended a protest meeting against colonization in Philadelphia. But during the 1850s, when many black abolitionists felt a deep sense of pessimism about their cause, colonization sentiment appeared again among free blacks. During the 15 months following passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, some 13,000 free blacks migrated to Canada.
A Dead-end on Slavery
By the early 1830s, the United States had reached a dead-end on slavery. Colonization had failed. Each year, the slave population grew by roughly 50,000, but in 1830, the American Colonization Society convinced just 259 free blacks to migrate to Africa.
Racial prejudice was intensifying. At the same time that many state legislatures adopted white manhood suffrage, they restricted voting by blacks. In 1829, white mobs forced over a thousand free blacks in Cincinnati to emigrate to Canada. After white abolitionists proposed to build a manual labor college for African-Americans in New Haven, Conn., white mobs terrorized the town's black ghetto.
Meanwhile, the threat of violence loomed. In 1822, a slave insurrection, led by Denmark Vesey, was uncovered in Charleston, S.C. In 1829, David Walker, a second-hand clothing dealer in Boston, issued a militant appeal, threatening insurrection and violence if calls for the abolition of slavery and improved conditions for free blacks were not realized.
African-Americans took the lead in staging protests against slavery. As discrimination and white racial violence intensified, blacks strengthened community ties by establishing separate churches, schools, fraternal orders, voluntary associations, and the first African-American newspapers. They also staged parades to commemorate the Haitian Revolution and the adoption of abolition laws in the North. In 1830, forty black delegates from eight states held the first of a series of annual conventions that denounced slavery and called for an end to discriminatory laws in the northern states.
Immediate Abolition
On the first day of January, 1831, William Lloyd Garrison began publishing The Liberator, the country's first publication to demand an immediate end to slavery without compensation to their owners. Within four years, 200 abolition societies had sprouted up in the North and had mounted a massive propaganda campaign to proclaim the sinfulness of slavery.