Podcast
Questions and Answers
What economic factor initially contributed to the idea that slavery might be on the decline in the newly independent United States?
What economic factor initially contributed to the idea that slavery might be on the decline in the newly independent United States?
- Increased demand for labor in northern industries.
- British closure of West Indian markets to Chesapeake tobacco and Carolina rice. (correct)
- Government subsidies for alternative agricultural products.
- A surplus of skilled labor due to increased immigration.
Why was Vermont the first state to abolish slavery immediately after the Revolutionary War?
Why was Vermont the first state to abolish slavery immediately after the Revolutionary War?
- It had a large Quaker population advocating for abolition.
- Its economy was heavily dependent on manufacturing rather than agriculture.
- Its constitution was drafted by prominent abolitionists.
- It had the smallest slave population. (correct)
What was the general approach of New England states, New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey toward emancipation after the Revolutionary War?
What was the general approach of New England states, New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey toward emancipation after the Revolutionary War?
- Continued reliance on slave labor for economic growth.
- Forcible relocation of enslaved people to other states.
- Immediate and unconditional emancipation for all enslaved people.
- Gradual abolition or leaving it to the courts and enslaved people to challenge their enslavement. (correct)
How did the economic activities in South Carolina and Georgia influence their stance on the continuation of slavery after the Revolutionary War?
How did the economic activities in South Carolina and Georgia influence their stance on the continuation of slavery after the Revolutionary War?
What contributed to the disadvantage of free African-descended people, even in states where slavery was disappearing?
What contributed to the disadvantage of free African-descended people, even in states where slavery was disappearing?
What was the significance of the Quok Walker case in Massachusetts regarding the institution of slavery?
What was the significance of the Quok Walker case in Massachusetts regarding the institution of slavery?
How did New York's initial approach to abolishing slavery reflect a compromise between liberty and property rights?
How did New York's initial approach to abolishing slavery reflect a compromise between liberty and property rights?
What action was New York willing to take against Loyalists when it came to enslaved people?
What action was New York willing to take against Loyalists when it came to enslaved people?
What was a common characteristic of abolition laws passed in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania?
What was a common characteristic of abolition laws passed in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania?
Despite passing abolition laws, what economic activity did Rhode Island merchants and shippers continue to engage in?
Despite passing abolition laws, what economic activity did Rhode Island merchants and shippers continue to engage in?
What did the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 stipulate regarding slavery in the specified territory?
What did the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 stipulate regarding slavery in the specified territory?
How did the US Congress respond to pressure from enslavers to safeguard slave property south of Virginia in 1790?
How did the US Congress respond to pressure from enslavers to safeguard slave property south of Virginia in 1790?
What was Thomas Jefferson's stance on African American citizenship, as expressed in his Notes on the State of Virginia?
What was Thomas Jefferson's stance on African American citizenship, as expressed in his Notes on the State of Virginia?
What actions did Mary Pleasants of Goochland County, Virginia, take regarding slavery, and what motivated her decision?
What actions did Mary Pleasants of Goochland County, Virginia, take regarding slavery, and what motivated her decision?
What was a provision the enslaved inherited in George Washington's will?
What was a provision the enslaved inherited in George Washington's will?
Why is it surprising that enslavers did not insist on more secure constitutional protections?
Why is it surprising that enslavers did not insist on more secure constitutional protections?
According to delegate James Wilson, what did it mean?
According to delegate James Wilson, what did it mean?
What was the consequence of cotton production in the US?
What was the consequence of cotton production in the US?
Which location would one likely see a slave revolt?
Which location would one likely see a slave revolt?
In the newly created nation, what were the gains for the citizens?
In the newly created nation, what were the gains for the citizens?
Flashcards
British Economic Impact Post-Revolution
British Economic Impact Post-Revolution
Britain punished the new nation by closing its West Indian markets to Chesapeake tobacco and Carolina rice, leaving enslavers with surplus laborers working at a losing economic game.
Abolition Post-1776
Abolition Post-1776
After 1776, states with small or marginal slave populations began to abolish slavery gradually, but freedom did not equal citizenship.
Vermont's Stance on Slavery
Vermont's Stance on Slavery
Vermont was the sole state that outlawed slavery immediately, owing to it's small slave population.
Northern States & Slavery
Northern States & Slavery
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Timeline of Abolition Measures
Timeline of Abolition Measures
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Walker v. Jennison Case
Walker v. Jennison Case
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New York's Contradictory Constitution
New York's Contradictory Constitution
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Pennsylvania's Abolition Act of 1780
Pennsylvania's Abolition Act of 1780
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Northwest Ordinance of 1787
Northwest Ordinance of 1787
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Compact of 1802 between Georgia and the Federal Government
Compact of 1802 between Georgia and the Federal Government
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Jefferson's 'Notes on the State of Virginia'
Jefferson's 'Notes on the State of Virginia'
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The 1808 Clause of the Constitution
The 1808 Clause of the Constitution
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Study Notes
- In the newly independent United States, slavery appeared to be declining.
- Britain hurt the United States after the revolution by restricting access to West Indian markets for Chesapeake tobacco and Carolina rice.
- This left enslavers with surplus labor and economic losses.
- Enslaved people had to weigh their desire to stay in a place against the disruption caused by enslavers.
- There was conflict regarding rootedness versus rootlessness.
- Victorious Patriots were hesitant to free enslaved people too quickly.
- Efforts were made to repair slave societies in the Chesapeake, Carolinas, and Georgia, while enslavers in the mid-Atlantic reinforced their control over African-descended individuals.
- A key question is the republican principles of liberty and self-government did not extend to enslaved people.
- The economic geography of slavery offers a partial explanation.
- States with small slave populations started gradual abolition after 1776.
- Freedom did not guarantee citizenship.
- Vermont, which had the smallest slave population, was the only state to immediately outlaw slavery.
- Gradual abolition was favored over immediate emancipation in the rest of New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, or it was left to the courts and African-descended individuals to challenge their enslavement.
- States that relied on slave labor didn't consider abolition, but some allowed manumission, or the freeing of individuals.
- Manumission laws were relaxed in Virginia, Maryland, and other southern states, excluding North Carolina.
- Property rights in people remained, and few enslaved people successfully negotiated their freedom.
- South Carolina and Georgia planters resumed importing captive Africans, even with British closures of West Indies rice.
- Chesapeake enslavers began selling enslaved people in an interstate trade due to the demand.
- Enslavers continued to hold onto enslaved people with market value, even in states where slavery was marginal.
- States north of Delaware slowly abolished slavery, but a long history of linking African descent with servitude hindered full equality.
- Free African-descended people were disadvantaged by this notion.
- People at the bottom of old patronage structures were often at the mercy of wage and labor markets.
- The new United States was a loose group of independent states that behaved like small republics.
- The federal constitution was not drafted until four years after Britain formally recognized an independent United States, and like their colonial predecessors, the new states enacted individual laws regarding slavery.
- Between 1777 and 1804, all states north of Maryland adopted measures that put slavery on the path to abolition, usually gradually.
- During the upheavals of war, Revolutionary state governments developed new state constitutions, experimenting with republican government.
- Appeals for abolition by black activists such as Lemuel Haynes and Felix Holbrook, and many state legislators stood on principle when trying to write abolition measures into law.
- Such appeals found more support in areas where slavery was already limited.
- Measures about slavery were subject to compromise based on conflicting interests, similar to other questions tackled by state constitutional conventions.
- In its 1777 constitution Vermont abolished slavery and servitude 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, and colorblind measures were uncontroversial with so few enslavers and black people.
- In 1790, Vermont's population was 0.3 percent nonwhite, not counting Native Americans.
- The language of New Hampshire's 1783 constitution was stridently pro-individual rights, but slavery was left undefined.
- The slave population in New Hampshire fell from 633 to 158 people between 1767 and 1790 and would be counted in single digits in nineteenth-century censuses.
- Massachusetts adopted similar language.
- The Massachusetts constitution of 1780 states, "[a]ll men are born free and equal, and have certain natural essential, and unalienable rights," with activists like minister Lemuel Haynes and poet Phillis Wheatley articulating this during the Revolution.
- Massachusetts didn't clearly state that slavery was illegal.
- The challenge to slavery in Massachusetts came from a former slave and it is unclear whether Quok Walker had the Massachusetts constitution in mind when he fled the farm of his Worcester County owner in the spring of 1781.
- Walker hired a lawyer to sue for the assault, not to gain his freedom, because he believed himself to be a free man at twenty-five.
- Walker sought a legal remedy, which shows how far Revolutionary rhetoric had penetrated the popular understanding, sought a legal remedy while the War of Independence was still raging in the southern part of the country.
- Walker v. Jennison, ended in the Supreme Judicial Court's 1783 ruling that "the idea of slavery is inconsistent with our own conduct and Constitution."
- In the meantime, favorable rulings by lower courts had already freed Massachusetts resident Mum Bett, also known as Elizabeth Freeman.
- But even in freedom, women were not citizens, and married women's legal identities were still considered parts of their husbands' under laws of coverture.
- Abigail Adams wrote her husband, John Adams, in March 1776, "[r]emember all [m]en would be tyrants if they could," But founders ignored such prayers, and black women like Elizabeth Freeman were doubly disenfranchised.
- The Walker decision did not free any other slaves, but it decided that Massachusetts law did not protect slave property.
- There was a legal ambiguity that worked in favor of Walker and abolition, but it also meant that any other bondsperson would have to sue for freedom.
- Some owners were enraged at the decision, and one attempted to sell his bondspeople to Barbados.
- Slavery was marginal, yet New Englanders had enslaved Africans and Indians since the seventeenth century.
- New York made a false start in abolishing slavery and when New York and Pennsylvania confronted the issue, they also confronted financial interests in slavery.
- The 1777 constitution protected property, including slave property while fugitives from Virginia and elsewhere were fleeing to British-occupied New York City in 1777.
- The 1777 constitution permitted freeholders, owners of real property to vote regardless of race but delegates rejected the proposal that "every being who breathes the air of this State shall enjoy the privileges of a freeman".
- New York enslavers made up a considerable financial interest and Black New Yorkers pressed for their freedom, and Jay led the New York Manumission Society.
- Unlike elsewhere, military service was one way to freedom in New York with the state government manumitted any enslaved person who served the Patriot cause in the state militia or in George Washington's Continental Army.
- The state was also willing to punish Loyalists by stripping them of slave property and declared that known supporters of the Crown forfeited their slave property and there were nearly 19,000 African-descended people in New York in 1786.
- Takers would count 21,324 slaves in New York in 1790, more than half of all those held in bondage north of Maryland.
- The state would not pass an emancipation law until 1799, and even that measure trapped members of families in slavery until the second quarter of the nineteenth century.
- Pennsylvania struggled with the issue of human liberty versus property rights in its 1780 constitution.
- The Declaration of Independence had been drafted and adopted in Philadelphia, which was also the geographic center of Quakerism, and the Society of Friends was a vocal opponent of slavery.
- African-descended reformers petitioned the government to live up to the Revolution's republican ideals and restore "the common blessings".
- Pennsylvania's population was just 3 percent black, and enslavers were distributed through a small proportion of the population.
- The state refused to end slavery as after a flood of petitions and Quaker organizing, Pennsylvania passed an abolition act that failed to free any slaves which any child born of a slave mother after March 1, 1780 would have to serve twenty-eight years of bondage.
- The measure made it possible for an owner to hold in slavery two more generations of descendants.
- Pennsylvania ended up abolishing slavery in 1847, but in practical terms the abolition act was a life sentence to slavery made in the name of liberty.
- Pennsylvania enslavers exploited a loophole, taking pregnant bondswomen out of state so that babies would not be born under the abolition act, and the legislature had to close the loophole in 1788.
- Lower New England states took their cue from Pennsylvania.
- Rhode Island passed an abolition law in 1784 by Moses Brown and passed a gradual abolition measure that freed all slaves born after March 1, 1784, females at eighteen and males at twenty-one.
- While the measure freed Rhode Island bondspersons, shippers and merchants remained active in the transatlantic slave trade, just as they had before the Revolution and embarked nearly 25,000 more captives on the Middle Passage.
- Following the Revolution, half of the captives embarked on Rhode Island ships were sold to Cuba, a Spanish colony and thirty percent went to South Carolina and more than 8 percent went to neighboring Georgia.
- Rhode Islanders would continue to embark tens of thousands more in the nineteenth century.
- And yet fewer than 400 enslaved people were counted in Rhode Island in 1800, subject to its gradual abolition act.
- Other so-called free states were reluctant to extinguish citizens' property in people with Connecticut, passing the Gradual Abolition Act of 1784, which freed those born after March 1, 1784, and only after twenty-five.
- It took until 1804 for New Jersey to pass a gradual abolition measure that freed all 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.
- Enslavers' property rights was one of a constellation of impediments to African-descended people's rise from slavery.
- There was a widespread expectation that slavery would be confined to a narrow patch of land on which it might be extinguished.
- Early national attempts to regulate the spread of slavery were ambivalent.
- "Congress under the Articles of Confederation prohibited slavery in the territory north of the Ohio River and west of Pennsylvania to the Mississippi River. "
- The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 - passed while the Constitutional Convention was meeting - provided that "there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude" in the territory.
- States carved out of it, including Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, abolished it.
- Some of those states, like Ohio, adopted antislavery constitutions, but others, like Indiana and Illinois, treated African Americans as second- or third-class citizens.
- In 1790, US Congress responded to pressure from enslavers to safeguard slave property south of Virginia and passed the Southwest Ordinance covering what became Tennessee, and providing "that no regulations made or to be made by Congress, shall tend to emancipate slaves."
- Federal authorities promised to remove Indian nations in which that state ceded lands west of its present border to the federal government.
- Americans were theorizing race and racial difference in which European's developed an idea of white exceptionalism.
- Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus classified human beings as a primate species and then divided humans into subspecies including Europeans, Native Americans, Asians, and Africans.
- Europeans were "acute, inventive," and ruled by law, while African-descended people were "[c]rafty, indolent, negligent Governed by caprice."
- Classically educated Virginia governor Thomas Jefferson penned an elegant blueprint for his newly independent state, Notes on the State of Virginia, and argued against African American citizenship on the assumption that "that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind."
- Slavery ought to be removed, he contended, but so should African-descended people through expatriation.
- They must be sent away from America, because racial attributes closed the possibility of citizenship.
- Black men were more sexually aggressive, he argued, "but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and emotion."
- Black's memories are equal to the white's; in reason much inferior, and in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.
- Such arguments distatnce African-descended Americans from inclusion in the Revolutionary experiment.
- Virginia and Maryland passed liberalized manumission statutes between 1782 and 1796 and by religious and moral "conviction and "being fully persuaded that freedom is the Natural Right of all mankind, and that no law, moral or divine, has given me a right to, or property in the persons of any of my fellow creatures,"
- Even at the slow pace of gradual abolition and individual manumissions, African Americans seemed to be moving in the direction of freedom.
- In 1776, free people of African descent accounted for just 5 percent of the black population. But by 1790, they were 8 percent; by 1800, 11 percent.
- North of the Mason-Dixon Line all of the states passed either immediate or gradual abolition laws by 1804.
- Most bondspersons were young, and manumission represented a financial loss that enslavers were unwilling to take.
- In death, Washington granted freedom for some but left others to be sold.
- The federal Constitution safeguarded enslavers' property rights in people but set limits on the political representation of enslaved people's owners.
- The Constitution protected slave property but limited enslavers' representation in the national legislature to three-fifths of the numbers of their bondspersons plus the number of free residents (excluding Indians).
- The Constitution's 1808 Clause prohibited Congress from banning the imports of foreign captives for twenty years.
- The constitution empowered the government to return fugitive slave property.
- There were attempts to abolish as Pennsylvania's delegate James Wilson told his fellow Pennsylvanians that "I consider [the 1808 Clause] as laying the foundation for banishing slavery out of this country."
- James Madison of Virginia glimpsed the possibility that cotton was key to America's future prosperity and with it slavery's expansion.
- Both understood that cotton meant slavery.
- Until Congress abolished slavery in 1808, the port of Charleston, South Carolina, was a regional destination for ships carrying the transatlantic slave trade.
- By February 1808, there were numerous journeys in which captives were sold as individuals or in small lots on the docks.
- There were radical elements to the American Revolution that inspired African Americans and used that language of liberty to argue for their inclusion in the project of American freedom.
- Patriots who banded together to fight British redcoats also fought British-allied Indians and African-descended loyalists.
- Patriots banded together to fight British redcoats also fought British-allied Indians and African-descended loyalists.
- In a republic of white male citizens, black disqualification would be predicated on perceived inferiority.
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