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Slavery

American Eras

Slavery

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Before the Revolution. Patrick Henry in 1773 admitted that he was baffled that slavery and religion could coexist since Christianity’s “chief excellence consists in softening

the human heart, in cherishing and improving its finer feelings....” He also wondered how in Virginia, “a country above all other fond of liberty,” men could maintain an institution “as repugnant to humanity as it is inconsistent with the Bible and destructive to liberty.” Yet he owned slaves, saying “I am drawn along by the general inconvenience of living without them, I will not, I cannot justify it.” His proposed solution was simply the hope for some eventual emancipation. “Let us transmit to our descendants together with our slaves, a pity for their unhappy lot and an abhorrence for slavery.”

Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson, also a slave owner, argued a case in a Virginia court in 1770 on behalf of a mulatto whose mother, at the time he was born, was bound in indentured service for a period of years. Jefferson argued that while the mother might still be subject to the indenture, the son should be free. “All men are born free...with a right to his own person.... This is what is called personal liberty, and is given him by the author of nature....” His argument failed in that slave-owning society, but his words were a preview of what he would write six years later in the Declaration of Independence.

Somersett’s Case. A Virginia slave, James Somersett, was taken to England. When his owner tried to send him to Jamaica, Somersett took his case to court in 1772. Lord Chief Justice William Mansfield ruled that slavery could not exist without positive legislative enactments, and since Parliament had never created the institution, slavery did not exist in England. Hence, Somersett and any slave who set foot in England were free. While this was an important court decision, it seemed to be ignored in America.

Second Continental Congress. In the beginning of 1776 the Second Continental Congress began to discuss independence and urged the colonial assemblies to establish independent governments. As the assemblies and conventions prepared declarations of rights that might serve as the basis for new forms of government, they had difficult balancing acts to perform. They had to articulate a statement about freedom in a way that would stimulate revolutionary fervor yet not amount to abolition of slavery. The Virginia convention considered a resolution that “all men are born equally free and independent,” to be too broad. They finally settled on “all men are by nature equally free and independent,” and they enjoy their various rights “when they enter into a state of society.” The delegates considered their slaves not part of society and thereby excluded from the declaration.

The New States. As the colonies declared independence they adopted constitutions and bills of rights. In many of the constitutional conventions, the delegates discussed the issue of slavery, but not one expressly abolished the institution in its constitution. (The 1777 constitution of Vermont had an abolition clause, but the region did not officially become a state until 1791.) Delaware’s constitution prohibited the importation of slaves, and Virginia did the same by statute in 1778. Pennsylvania’s assembly passed a statute in 1780 that provided for gradual abolition—any child born to a slave mother after 1780 would be free once he or she reached age twenty-eight. The Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1777 considered a bill that would abolish slavery, but decided not to act on it for fear of offending the Southern colonies. Three years later, however, Massachusetts adopted a bill of rights as part of its constitution that specified that “all men are born free and equal.” In a 1783 superior court case involving a fugitive slave, Chief Justice William Cushing stated that this language had abolished slavery in Massachusetts. Jefferson drafted a plan (which was never formally submitted for legislative action) for the emancipation of all Virginia’s slaves. He proposed removing them to some undetermined wilderness area, where they would be free and independent, and replacing them with white European immigrants.

Sources

Willi Paul Adams, The First American Constitutions (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980);

Dumas Malone, Jefferson the Virginian (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948);

Henry Mayer, A Son of Thunder (New York: Franklin Watts 1986).

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