Slavery in the US after Independence

In the newly independent United States, slavery seemed to be on the decline

Britain punished the new nation for revolution by closing its West Indian markets to Chesapeake tobacco and Carolina rice

This resulted in enslavers with surplus bound laborers working at a losing economic game

Enslaved Americans faced a conflict of rootedness versus rootlessness, knitting ties against unraveling by enslavers

Victorious Patriots hesitated to free bondspersons too soon

They worked to preserve slave societies in the Chesapeake, Carolinas, and Georgia

Mid-Atlantic enslavers reasserted control over African-descended people

The failure of republican principles to apply to enslaved people is linked to the economic geography of slavery

After 1776, states with small slave populations began to abolish slavery gradually, but freedom did not equal citizenship

Vermont, with the smallest slave population, was the only state to immediately outlaw slavery

Other New England states, along with New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, opted for gradual abolition or left it to the courts

States dependent on slave labor did not consider abolition

Some states permitted individual manumission, liberalizing manumission laws (except North Carolina)

Property rights in people remained, and few succeeded in bargaining their way out of bondage

Despite British closures of West Indies rice markets, South Carolina and Georgia planters resumed importing captive Africans

Chesapeake enslavers began selling bondspersons in an interstate trade

Even in states where slavery was marginal, enslavers held on to bondspersons with market value.

States north of Delaware gradually abolished slavery, but colonial history disadvantaged free African-descended people

Those at the bottom of old patronage structures found themselves at the mercy of labor markets

The new United States was a fragile confederation of states, and like colonial predecessors, they formulated individual laws on slavery

Between 1777 and 1804, all states north of Maryland adopted measures to abolish slavery, mostly gradually

Revolutionary state governments experimented with republican government, creating new state constitutions

Abolition appeals were part of the language of liberties and rights

State legislators stood on principle when attempting to write abolition measures into law in areas where slavery remained marginal

Measures concerning slavery were subject to compromise based on competing interests

Vermont's 1777 constitution abolished slavery and servitude for adults and established religious liberty regardless of race

Colorblind measures were uncontroversial in a state with few enslavers and a small black population

New Hampshire's 1783 constitution used similar language of rights, but slavery's status was ill-defined

Massachusetts's 1780 constitution declared all men free and equal but omitted a clear statement of slavery's illegality

The challenge to slavery in Massachusetts came from a former slave, Quok Walker, who sued for assault

Walker v. Jennison (1783) ended with the ruling that "the idea of slavery is inconsistent with our own conduct and Constitution"

Favorable rulings by lower courts had already freed Massachusetts resident Mum Bett, who became Elizabeth Freeman

Even in freedom, women were not citizens, and black women like Elizabeth Freeman were doubly disenfranchised

The Walker decision did not free other slaves, but it decided that Massachusetts law did not protect slave property

Legal ambiguity worked in favor of Walker and abolition

Owners were enraged, with one attempting to sell his bondspeople to Barbados, though public opinion was against this

When New York and Pennsylvania confronted the issue, they also confronted financial interests in slavery

New York made a false start in abolishing slavery as the 1777 constitution protected property, including slaves

Military service was one avenue to freedom in New York, as they manumitted any enslaved person who served the Patriot cause

The state also punished Loyalists by stripping them of slave property

In 1786, there were nearly 19,000 African-descended people in New York

Census-takers would count 21,324 slaves in New York in 1790, more than half of all those held in bondage north of Maryland

They did not pass an emancipation law until 1799 and even that trapped families in slavery until the second quarter of the nineteenth century

Pennsylvania struggled with the issue of liberty versus property rights in its 1780 constitution

Philadelphia was the largest city and the epicenter of liberty, and the Society of Friends was a vocal opponent of slavery

Pennsylvania's population was just 3 percent black and enslavers were distributed through a small proportion of the population

Yet despite such marginal interests in slavery, the state refused to end it

Pennsylvania passed an abolition act that failed to free any slaves as any child born of a slave mother after March 1, 1780 would have to serve twenty-eight years

The measure made it possible to hold two more generations of descendants

Some Pennsylvania enslavers exploited a loophole, taking pregnant bondswomen out of state so that babies would not be born under the abolition act

Rhode Island passed an abolition law in 1784, a half-measure that freed no slaves immediately

With the help of Quaker businessman Moses Brown, Rhode Island passed a measure that freed slaves born after March 1, 1784, females at eighteen and males at twenty-one

Shippers and merchants remained active in the transatlantic slave trade

By 1800, fewer than 400 enslaved people were counted in Rhode Island, subject to its gradual abolition act

Connecticut passed an Act of 1784, which freed no bondsperson then in slavery but only 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

Like so many other questions state constitutional conventions tackled, property rights was one of a constellation of impediments to the African-descended peoples

There was a widespread expectation that slavery would be confined

Congress prohibited slavery in the territory north of the Ohio River and west of Pennsylvania

The Northwest Ordinance (1787) provided that "there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude" in the territory

States carved out of this territory abolished slavery, but treated African Americans as second or third-class citizens

In 1790, the first US Congress safeguarded slave property south of Virginia

The Southwest Ordinance covered what became Tennessee, providing "that no regulations made or to be made by Congress, shall tend to emancipate slaves"

The Thomas Jefferson administration made the Compact of 1802 with Georgia, promising to remove Indian nations that stood in the way of slavery's expansion

The federal government encouraged slavery's expansion into the Old Southwest and restricted it north of the Ohio River

prejudice against African-descended people had existed since the early days of the slave trade from Africa, but it was not until the eighteenth century that Europeans developed an idea of white exceptionalism

Early in the century, Carl Linnaeus classified human beings as a primate species and then divided humans into subspecies including Europeans, Native Americans, Asians, and Africans

Thomas Jefferson argued against African American citizenship on the assumption that "that the blacks are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind."

Slavery ought to be removed, but so should African-descended people

Jefferson contemplated a gradual abolition measure coupled with expatriation

Racial attributes closed the possibility of citizenship

Jefferson deprecated Phillis Wheatley's poetry and Ignatius Sancho's writings

Jefferson's views distance African-descended Americans from inclusion in the Revolutionary experiment

Yet, slave owners in the Chesapeake remained deeply ambivalent and Virginia and Maryland passed liberalized manumission statutes

A handful of Quakers took the lead: freedom came sans pay or healthcare

Even at the slow pace of gradual abolition and individual manumissions, Americans of African descent seemed on track to move towards freedom

Yet even in this ferment of freedom, countervailing forces began to pull the process back toward slavery

the act of "Freeing" was a financial loss that enslavers were unwilling to take

Among those enslavers was George Washington: his ambivalence and hesitation played havoc with his bondspersons.

In death, Washington granted freedom for some but would ultimately leave others to be sold.

Spanning the political distances among the states and their regions, the federal Constitution safeguarded slave owners property rights in people but set limits on the political representation of enslaved people's owners

In gaining independence, Virginia and Maryland enslavers lost the British tobacco market.

in the lull before the Haitian and American Revolution, many uncertainties around slavery remained.

The Southern delegates received half-loaves at the 1787 Constitutional Convention.

The Constitution protected slave property but limited enslavers' representation in the national legislature restricted to three-fifths of the numbers of their bondspersons

The Constitution's 1808 Clause prohibited Congress from banning the imports of foreign captives for twenty years

Delegates from states where slavery was marginal argued that the Constitution was a framework that slowly constricted a political evil

delegate James Wilson told his fellow Pennsylvanians hoped on the gradual abolition Wilson saw in the Pennsylvania Model

But Madison saw the possibility for expansion via cotton, key to america's future

In 1787, a delegate by way of James Wilson, said, "that is a considered [the 1808 Clause] as laying the foundation for banishing slavery out of this country."

both Washington and Jefferson stated that cotton meant slavery

When Congress abolished slavery in 1808, Charleston in South Carolina was a regional destination for ships carrying transatlantic slave trade slaves

Union of Newport, Rhode Island came came to Charleston with 168 of 188 surviving captives bought off the Gold Coast during the "slave"s "Fourth of july"

In December a boat arrived at the region with hundreds of "slaves, many taken from Angola

A revolution commencing with the idea that all men are created equal culminated in an enslavers' republic

It flattened colonial hierarchies of class and overthrew British rule

Patriots developed a grammar of political freedom, framed uniting citizens from Massachusetts to Georgia'

Patriots who banded together to fight British redcoats (colonists) also fought British allies

Patriots also went to war with British-allied indians and "slave" African-descended loyalists to Britan

also, with the creation of the new "revolutionary democracy" that they also created racial boundaries.

the "Indians" (native-americans) and or African-descended people had no rightful place in that vision

The American Revolution was transformative for citizens, but their gains were accented by the Revolution's shortcomings for women (equal votes) and African ancestry In a republic of white male citizens, black disqualification would be predicated on perceived inferiority