Slavery's Decline and Revival in the US

Slavery's Decline and Revival

• In the US, slavery initially appeared headed toward decline after independence.
• Britain punished America by restricting Chesapeake tobacco and Carolina rice access to West Indian markets, leading to economic struggles for enslavers.
• Enslaved people faced a dilemma between forming bonds and the disruptions caused by enslavers.
• Patriots hesitated to abolish slavery, aiming to salvage slave societies in specific regions.

Uneven Application of Republican Ideals

• The republican principles of liberty were often not extended to enslaved people due to economic considerations.
• States with smaller enslaved populations started gradual abolition, but freedom did not ensure citizenship.
• Vermont swiftly outlawed slavery, given its minimal enslaved population.
• New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey opted for gradual abolition or left it to courts and individual challenges.
• States reliant on slave labor did not consider abolishing it.
• Manumission was permitted in some areas, but the right to own people remained, limiting its success.

Economic Shifts and Resistance

• South Carolina and Georgia continued importing enslaved Africans despite British market closures.
• Chesapeake enslavers started selling enslaved people in an interstate trade due to demand.
• Enslavers retained enslaved people, even in states where slavery was decreasing, due to their market value.

Gradual Abolition and Its Limits

• States north of Delaware gradually abolished slavery.
• A colonial history associating African descent with servitude hindered full equality.
• Wage markets offered low-paying opportunities for free African-descended people.
• States created individual laws concerning slavery.
• Between 1777 and 1804, states north of Maryland started abolition, often gradually.
• New state constitutions experimented with republican government during the war.
• Abolition requests from black activists, like Lemuel Haynes, became part of the language of liberties.

Compromise and Constitutional Measures

• Measures concerning slavery were often compromised in state constitutional conventions.
• Vermont abolished slavery in its 1777 constitution and enfranchised nearly all adult males.
• Colorblind measures were less controversial in states with small black populations.
• New Hampshire's 1783 constitution had unclear language on slavery, leading to a decline in the slave population.

Legal Challenges and Freedom

• The Massachusetts constitution of 1780 emphasized natural rights, influencing black activists like Lemuel Haynes.
• Quok Walker, a former slave, sued his owner for assault, leading to a 1783 court ruling that slavery was inconsistent with the state constitution.
• Mum Bett, also known as Elizabeth Freeman, won her freedom in Massachusetts courts.
• Women, including black women like Elizabeth Freeman, remained disenfranchised.

New York and Pennsylvania's Approach

• The Walker decision in Massachusetts only freed the plaintiff, requiring others to sue for freedom individually.
• New York's 1777 constitution protected slave property while granting voting rights to freeholders regardless of race.
• Gouverneur Morris's proposal for universal freedom was dismissed.
• Military service in the Patriot cause was one path to freedom in New York.
• The New York Manumission Society was led by John Jay.

Abolition Laws

• New York excluded known supporters of the Crown or Loyalists from the ownership of slaves.
• Federal census takers would later count 21,324 slaves in New York in 1790.
• Pennsylvania's 1780 constitution did not free any slaves and any child born of a slave mother after would face 28 years of continued servitude.

Rhode Island & US Congress

• Rhode Island passed an abolition law in 1784 which did not immediately free any enslaved people.
• The state still remained active in the slave trade.
• There were fewer than 400 people enslaved in Rhode Island in 1800 due to the abolition act.
• Congress under the Articles of Confederation prohibited slavery north of the Ohio River.
• Northwest Ordinance of 1787 prohibited slavery in the territory.
• Some states like Ohio adopted antislavery constitutions.
• States like Indiana and Illinois treated African Americans as second-class citizens.

Race and Expansion

• The Thomas Jefferson administration made the Compact of 1802 with Georgia and promised to remove Indian nations in the way of slavery's expansion.
• Europeans developed an idea of white exceptionalism in the eighteenth century.

Perspectives on Race

• Carl Linnaeus classified humans and disparaged the physical features of African people.
• Thomas Jefferson argued against African American citizenship and for their removal from America.
• Jefferson believed that black men were more sexually aggressive and that blacks memories were dull and imagination was anomalous.

Post Revolution Slavery

• Liberalized manumission statutes were passed between 1782 and 1796 in Virginia and Maryland.
• There were increasing numbers of freed slaves in line with the slow pace of gradual abolition.
• Countervailing forces began to pull the process back toward slavery during this time.
• George Washington favored gradual emancipation but opposed Quaker antislavery activism.

Washington Actions

• Washington granted freedom to some after death but left others to be sold.
• Bushrod Washington sold fifty-four enslaved people to Louisiana enslavers in 1821.

US Constitution

• There was the federal Constitution safeguarded enslavers' property rights in people.
• The Constitution was a half-measure for enslavers.
• In gaining independence, Virginia lost the the British tobacco market.

Constitutional Convention

• The Southern delegates received half-loaves at the 1787 Constitutional Convention.
• The Constitution protected slave property.
• Also the Constitution empowered the government to return fugitive slave property.
• James Wilson told his fellow Pennsylvanians that he considered the 1808 Clause was laying the foundation for banishing slavery.

Cotton & Charleston

• James Madison glimpsed the possibility that cotton was key to America's future prosperity and its negative, slavery.
• Charleston, South Carolina was a regional destination for ships carrying the transatlantic slave trade until slavery was abolished in 1808.
• Congress acted to try and reduce foreign slave trade and US based slave trade.

Cleopatra Ship

• The voyage's British slave ship Cleopatra's brutal Captain John Butman was able to successfully argue his brutality served the legitimate ends of the trade.
• The US Congress had passed an act barring the slave trade to America starting in 1808.
• There were numerous deaths associated with slavery and the journey and slave trade itself.

American Revolution & Slavery

• The American Revolution started out with the idea that all men were created equal.
• In creating a nation they also created racial categories that infused the project.
• Racial categories meant Indians and African-descended people had no rightful place in that vision.
• The Revolution was transformative for citizens, but gains only for the demographic with citizenship.
• Nonwhite soldiers - were effectively forgotten.
• A growing empire of cotton and tobacco reshaped US slavery.