Republican Principles and Slavery

• In the newly independent United States, slavery appeared to be declining.
• Britain hurt the US economy by shutting West Indian markets to Chesapeake tobacco and Carolina rice. This left slaveholders with more workers than they needed given falling demand.
• Enslaved African Americans struggled between staying connected to family and yearning for opportunities beyond slaveholder control.
• Victorious Patriots protected slavery. They upheld slave societies in the Chesapeake, the Carolinas, and Georgia. Planters in the Mid-Atlantic states tightened their control of enslaved people.

Republican Principles & Slavery

• It is often been asked why the values of liberty and self-government did not apply to enslaved people.
• The economic geography of slavery provides one answer.
• After 1776, states with smaller enslaved populations started abolishing slavery gradually.
• Even with slavery outlawed, full citizenship was not always granted.
• Vermont was the only state to immediately outlaw slavery. Vermont had a very small enslaved population.
• Gradual abolition or court challenges were used in the rest of New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey instead of immediate emancipation.
• States that relied on slave labor did not think about abolition.
• Some states allowed manumission (freeing of enslaved people individually).
• Manumission laws were liberalized in Virginia, Maryland, and other southern states (except North Carolina).
• Property rights in enslaved persons were upheld by states. Few enslaved people could negotiate their freedom.

Interstate Trade & Holding On

• After Britain shut West Indies rice markets Georgia and South Carolina planters began importing captive Africans again.
• Chesapeake slaveholders started selling enslaved people in an interstate trade to meet this demand.
• Even in states with small enslaved populations, slaveholders kept enslaved people if they held market value.

Northern States & Limited Equality

• States north of Delaware slowly abolished slavery.
• However, the perception that people of African descent were suited for servitude hindered full equality, even where slavery was disappearing.
• This perception disadvantaged free African-descended people.
• Wage and labor markets that provided them with very low earnings, persisted after enslavement.
• The new United States was a fragile union of states acting like small republics.
• The states, like their colonial forerunners, passed their own laws relating to slavery.
• All states north of Maryland passed measures setting slavery on the path to abolition between 1777 and 1804, but these plans occurred gradually.
• Revolutionary state governments formed new state constitutions that experimented with republican government throughout the war.
• Black activists such as Lemuel Haynes and Felix Holbrook used the language of liberties and rights to call for abolition.
• Abolition initiatives were more successful in regions where enslavement was already declining.

Constitutional Conventions & Compromise

• Like other issues addressed by state constitutional conventions, slavery measures were subject to compromise.
• Vermont was the first state to abolish slavery in its 1777 constitution, doing so for males over twenty-one and females over eighteen.
• The constitution established religious liberty and enfranchised almost all adult males regardless of race or previous condition of servitude.
• Colorblind measures were unchallenged due to a small number of slaveholders and a small population of Black people in Vermont where in 1790, the nonwhite population was 0.3 percent of the state.
• New Hampshire's 1783 constitution also strongly protected individual rights, but it was vague on slavery.
• The enslaved population fell from 633 to 158 people between 1767 and 1790 and was counted in single digits in nineteenth-century censuses.
• Massachusetts used the same language.
• The Massachusetts constitution of 1780 declared that all men are born free and equal and have certain unalienable rights."
• The constitution failed to explicitly declare slavery illegal.

Challenges to Slavery

• The challenge to slavery in Massachusetts came not from freedom seeking statesmen but from a former slave.
• The challenge also came from a former slave: Quok Walker.
• It is unclear whether Walker had state constitution in mind when he ran away from his enslaver in 1781.
• Walker believed that he was a free man at twenty-eight. He refused to return to his enslaver and Walker was beaten with a whip handle.
• He hired a lawyer to sue for the assault, not for his freedom.
• Walker's legal recourse came while the War of Independence raged. This shows how far Revolutionary concepts had spread.

Walker v. Jennison

• Walker wagered that a court would uphold the republican beliefs of Massachusetts Patriots.
• Walker v. Jennison went to the Supreme Judicial Court, which found in 1783 that "the idea of slavery is inconsistent with our own conduct and Constitution."
• Lower courts had freed Massachusetts resident Mum Bett (later known as Elizabeth Freeman) because of previous favourable rulings.
• But even in freedom, women were not citizens.
• Married women's legal identities were still parts of their husbands, under laws of coverture.
• Abigail Adams asked her husband, John Adams, to remember the ladies. The Founders ignored her pleas.
• Black women like Elizabeth Freeman were doubly disenfranchised.

Massachusetts & Early Emancipation

• The Walker ruling did not free any other slaves, but it determined that Massachusetts law did not recognise slave property.
• The legal uncertainty favored Walker and abolition, but other bondspersons would need to sue for freedom on their own.
• One slaveholder in Massachusetts tried to sell the people he enslaved to Barbados because he was so enraged by the ruling.
• Public opinion backed the high court.
• Slavery was marginal in Massachusetts, as it was elsewhere in New England, which had held Africans and Indians as slaves since the 1600s.
• New York and Pennsylvania also faced financial interests in slavery when they addressed the issue.

New York & False Starts

• New York made a false start in abolishing slavery.
• The state passed a constitution in 1777, protecting property including enslaved people at a time when many from around the colonies were fleeing to British-occupied New York City.
• Slaveholders, or freeholders, owners of real property, were permitted to vote by the 1777 constitution, regardless of race.
• Gouverneur Morris suggested that "every being who breathes the air of this State shall enjoy the privileges of a freeman", but fellow delegates reacted to his statement with disbelief.
• John Jay wrote to Morris and Robert R. Livingston several years later that he "should also have been for a clause against the continuation of domestic slavery," although New York slaveholders made up a significant financial interest.

Military Service & Freedom

• Military service was a route to freedom in New York, unlike other places.
• In 1781, the state government freed any enslaved individual who served for the Patriot cause in the state militia or in George Washington's Continental Army.
• The state was also willing to strip Loyalists of their slave property.
• The legislature declared that Crown supporters forfeited their slave property following the British withdrawal. there were about 19,000 African-descended people in New York By 1786.

New York Figures & the 1799 Emancipation Law

• According to federal census takers there were 21,324 slaves in New York in 1790, more than half of all those held in bondage north of Maryland.
• A law was passed in New York in 1799, and even that law still trapped members of families in slavery until the second quarter of the nineteenth century.

Pennsylvania & Human Rights

• The 1780 constitution of Pennsylvania struggled with the issue of human liberty versus property rights.
• Philadelphia was the largest American city, the location of the national Congress under the Articles of Confederation, and the center of liberty for many Americans.
• It was where the Declaration of Independence was drafted and adopted.
• Pennsylvania was also the geographical center of Quakerism. The Society of Friends vocally opposed slavery.
• African-descended reformers petitioned government to live up to Revolutionary ideals and restore “the common blessings” of liberty.
• Pennsylvania's population was just 3% black. Small percentage of the population distributed among very few enslavers.
• The state refused to end slavery entirely.
• Pennsylvania passed an abolition act due to a wave of petitions and Quaker organizing, but it did not free any slaves.
• Under the 1780 abolition act, any child born to a slave mother after March 1, 1780 had to serve twenty-eight years of bondage.
• The act enabled an enslaver to continue to hold two more generations of descendants in slavery.
• According to others, the Pennsylvania law would permit an enslaved female born in late February 1780 to give birth to a child at age forty would not be released by the law until 1848, almost 70 years after its enactment.

Exploitation & Pennsylvania Loopholes

• Eventually, Pennsylvania abolished slavery in 1847, but the abolition act was practically a life sentence to slavery.
• Some Pennsylvania enslavers exploited a loophole by taking pregnant women out of state so that babies would not be born under the abolition act.
• The legislature had to close the loophole in 1788.
• Lower New England states took their cue from Pennsylvania.

Rhode Island Abolition Law

• Rhode Island passed an abolition law in 1784, but it was a half-measure that freed no slaves immediately.
• The Society of Friends agitated for black freedom, just like in Pennsylvania.
• Rhode Island passed a gradual abolition measure with Moses Brown's (brother of slave trader John Brown) help.
• The measure freed all slaves born after March 1, 1784, females at eighteen and males at twenty-one.

Continued Slave Trade

• Even after the measure freed Rhode Island bondspersons, merchants remained involved in the transatlantic slave trade.
• Between 1751 and 1775, Rhode Island shipped 41,581 captives, selling survivors in the Americas.
• After state abolition, they transported approximately 25,000 more captives.
• Half the captives on Rhode Island ships were sold to Cuba following the Revolution.
• Thirty percent went to South Carolina and eight percent to neighboring Georgia.
• Fewer than 400 enslaved people were counted in Rhode Island in 1800.

Connecticut & New Jersey

• Connecticut, home to fewer than 3,000 enslaved people, passed the Gradual Abolition Act of 1784, which freed no bondsperson in slavery but only those born after March 1, 1784, and only after twenty-five years.
• New Jersey was not until 1804 that it passed a gradual abolition measure, freeing enslaved children born after the Fourth of July but also bound them to service for twenty-one years if female and twenty-five if male.
• The shoulders of enslaved people and their loved ones were ultimately burdened by liberation.

Property Rights & Expectations

• Enslaved people's property rights were one of many barriers to rising from slavery.
• It was widely expected that slavery would be limited to a small area of land where it could be eliminated.

Northwest Ordinance of 1787

• Congress under the Articles of Confederation banned slavery in the territory north of the Ohio River and west of Pennsylvania to the Mississippi River.
• The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 made sure that "there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude" in the territory.
• It included the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin for which abolition was adopted.
• Some of those states, like Ohio, adopted antislavery constitutions, others, like Indiana and Illinois, treated African Americans as second- or third-class citizens.
• These states imposed restrictions on bond posting, identification, and fines for non-compliance.

Southwest Ordinance

• Southern slaveholders pressured the first US Congress.
• In 1790, the Southwest Ordinance was passed covering what became Tennessee. Under it, “no regulations made or to be made by Congress, shall tend to emancipate slaves."
• Congress was not expected to restrict slavery south of Tennessee.
• Even before the rise of the cotton economy, the federal government encouraged slavery's spread into the Old Southwest and limited it north of the Ohio River.

Racial Theories

• Americans were theorizing race and racial difference.
• Since slavery began in Africa, prejudice against African-descended people had existed.
• Europeans began to conceptualize white exceptionalism.
• Carl Linnaeus categorised humans as a "the humans" primates.
• Then divided into Europeans, Native Americans, Asians, and Africans.
• While disparaging their physical features, Linnaeus portrayed African-descended people as craft indolent and negligent.

Thomas Jefferson & Notes on the State of Virginia

• Virginia Governor Thomas Jefferson published a well-crafted concept of the state in 1780 called Notes on the State of Virginia.
• At a moment where anything was possible, he argued against African American citizenship.
• He made the argument the endowments, both of body and mind of blacks blacks are inferior.
• According to Jefferson, slavery and African-descended people must be removed.
• Memories of historical wrongs posed a gathering threat to European-descended Americans.
• Jefferson considered freeing women at eighteen/males at twenty-one, but they must be removed. Racial traits prevented citizenship.
• He claimed that blacks were more sexually aggressive, more eager, and less tender in affection.
• Blacks' memories "are equal to the whites[']; in reason much inferior," he argued; "in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous."
• Intellectual underachievement was attributed to their apparent lack of intellectual and moral advancement.
• Jefferson criticized Phillis Wheatley and Ignatius Sancho's writings.
• Jefferson excused using the claims to distance African-descended Americans from inclusion in the Revolutionary experiment.

The Chesapeake's Reaction

• Slave owners in the Chesapeake were conflicted during the Revolution.
• Between 1782 and 1796, Virginia and Maryland enacted liberalized manumission legislation.
• Legislation was previously required to liberate the enslaved peoples.
• Quakers had already taken the lead.
• Mary Pleasants manumitted five slaves on Independence Day due to to belief that freedom Natural Right of all mankind.

Countervailing Losses

• Despite the gradual abolition, slaves looked to move in the direction of greater freedom.
• Even with gradule manumission, free people of African descent totalled was 5%, 8% by 1790 and 11% by 1800.
• Both the revolution and 1790 led to a rise in the amount of free black people nearly by half.
• More than half of Delaware's black population was free in 1800
• One-fifth of Maryland African Americans.
• A move toward slavery was noticed, despite the laws passed that moved past this by people north of the Mason-Dixon line.
• Most bondspersons were young ,so manumission represented a loss that slaveholders were hesitant to make so a financial loss in among them all.
• For George Washington it cause him to oppose Quaker activism while he was in favor of abolition laws for gradual emancipation.

Washington's Death & Contradictions

• Washington provided his bondsersons freedom in his last will, the others were sold when they died.
• Washington owned 316 bondspeople Washington's will ordered 123 enslaved to that be manumitted following the passing of his wife, Martha.
• Resources by state provided for elderly care with orphaned and to those that struggle to get them service bound out.
• Washington's nephew and US Supreme Court Judge Bushrod Washington took the debts so had to trade more enslaved to pay for them.
• When the principle of the Chattel undermined its goal of justice, legacy was a irony.

The Constitution & Half-Measures

• Enslaved people were protected by the Constitution, but property and enslavers could not politically represent slaves themselves.
• Constitution was half-measure that came about as the 1780s transatlantic height trade.
• One could assume the enslavers wouldn't insist secure constitutional protections since they knew they were bargains from an area of the world with relative weakness.
• By Independence, Virginia and Maryland lost tobacco markets.
• The Carribbean market became lost following British exit on rice.
• Revolution hadn't been happened and no one knew that cotton was America's biggest contribution/

Southern Delegates

• Southern delegates received half-loaves at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 instead of absolute protections for enslaved property.
• The Constitution's Clause made clear that imports of foregin captivies in the amount of years expected.
• States that opposed to very little slavery states argued state that framed slow political evil since there was no protection.

Hope & Cotton

• Like James Madison, James Wilson glimpse at possibility that cotton can lead to America's prosperity and along with that the expansion to slavery.
• Until abolished by Congress, The sea port of Charleston was a destination region for slaves.
• Of the 133 ships United States by the year 1807 alone that carried almost about 20,000 the landings had 126 land in South Carolina that Charleston existed by ship.

Radical Elements

• Revolution commencing began to all men are created equal during enslaver in the end's republic.
• Overthrew British ruled and it flattened hierarchies of class and colonised and developed an element of political freedom.

Patriots & Contradictions

• To fight British redcoats it united all, so they had to fought British-allied Indians who created a nation they were had to make racial categories during the project in which Indians held no right for African-descendants people to vision.
• The transformations, so revolutionary and made progress against the gain and short comming.
• Lack of a place for women made that they where non existant and as growing of cotton and enslaving the people, where army black at the same time that the former were and not the latter.