Chapter 6: The American Revolution PDF

C HAPTER 6 1700 Samuel Sewall’s The Selling of Joseph, first antislavery tract in America 1770s Freedom petitions presented by slaves to New England courts 1776 Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations John Adams’s Thoughts on Government 1777 Vermo...

C HAPTER 6 1700 Samuel Sewall’s The Selling of Joseph, first antislavery tract in America 1770s Freedom petitions presented by slaves to New England courts 1776 Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations John Adams’s Thoughts on Government 1777 Vermont state constitution bans slavery 1779 Thomas Jefferson writes Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom Phillipsburgh Proclamation 1780 Robert Morris becomes director of congressional fiscal policy 1782 Deborah Sampson enlists in Continental army 1790 First national census 1792 Liberty Displaying the Arts and Sciences The Revolution Within DEMOCRATIZING FREEDOM THE LIMITS OF LIBERTY The Dream of Equality Colonial Loyalists Expanding the Political Nation The Loyalists’ Plight The Revolution in Pennsylvania The Indians’ Revolution The New Constitutions White Freedom, Indian Freedom The Right to Vote Democratizing Government SLAVERY AND THE REVOLUTION TOWARD RELIGIOUS The Language of Slavery and TOLERATION Freedom Catholic Americans Obstacles to Abolition The Founders and Religion The Cause of General Liberty Separating Church and State Petitions for Freedom Jefferson and Religious Liberty British Emancipators The Revolution and the Voluntary Emancipations Churches Abolition in the North A Virtuous Citizenry Free Black Communities DEFINING ECONOMIC DAUGHTERS OF LIBERTY FREEDOM Revolutionary Women Toward Free Labor Gender and Politics The Soul of a Republic Republican Motherhood The Politics of Inflation The Arduous Struggle for Liberty The Debate over Free Trade In Side of the Old Lutheran Church in 1800, York, Pa. A watercolor by a local artist depicts the interior of one of the numerous churches that flourished after independence. While the choir sings, a man chases a dog out of the building and another man stokes the stove. The institutionalization of religious liberty was one of the most important results of the American Revolution.  F OCUS Q UESTIONS ©lB orn in Massachusetts in 1744, Abigail Adams became one of the revolutionary era’s most articulate and influential women. At a time when educational opportunities for girls were extremely limited, she taught herself by reading books in the library of her father, a How did equality become a stronger component of Congregational minister. In 1764, she married John Adams, a young American freedom after lawyer about to emerge as a leading advocate of resistance to British the Revolution? taxation and, eventually, of American independence. During the War of Independence, with her husband away in Philadelphia and Europe How did the expansion of serving the American cause, she stayed behind at their Massachusetts religious liberty after the home, raising their four children and managing the family’s farm. The Revolution reflect the new letters they exchanged form one of the most remarkable correspondences American ideal of freedom? in American history. She addressed John as “Dear friend,” and signed her letters “Portia”—after Brutus’s devoted wife in Shakespeare’s play Julius How did the definition Caesar. Though denied an official role in politics, Abigail Adams was a of economic freedom keen observer of public affairs. She kept her husband informed of events change after the Revolu- in Massachusetts and offered opinions on political matters. Later, when tion, and who benefited Adams served as president, he relied on her advice more than on members from the changes? of his cabinet. How did the Revolution In March 1776, a few months before the Second Continental Congress diminish the freedoms of declared American independence, Abigail Adams wrote her best-known both Loyalists and Native letter to her husband. She began by commenting indirectly on the evils Americans? of slavery. How strong, she wondered, could the “passion for Liberty” be among those “accustomed to deprive their fellow citizens of theirs.” She What was the impact of went on to urge Congress, when it drew up a “Code of Laws” for the the Revolution on slavery? new republic, to “remember the ladies.” All men, she warned, “would How did the Revolution be tyrants if they could.” Women, she playfully suggested, “will not hold affect the status of women? ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.” It was the leaders of colonial society who initiated resistance to British taxation. But, as Abigail Adams’s letter illustrates, the struggle for American liberty emboldened other colonists to demand more liberty for themselves. All revolutions enlarge the public sphere, inspiring previously marginalized groups to express their own dreams of freedom. At a time when so many Americans—slaves, indentured servants, women, Indians, apprentices, propertyless men—were denied full freedom, the struggle against Britain threw into question many forms of authority and inequality. Abigail Adams did not believe in female equality in a modern sense. She accepted the prevailing belief that a woman’s primary responsibility was to her family. But she resented the “absolute power” husbands exercised over their wives. “Put it out of the power of husbands,” she wrote, “to use us as they will”—a discreet reference to men’s legal control over the bodies of their wives, and their right to inflict physical punish- ment on them. Her letter is widely remembered today. Less familiar is How did equality become a stronger component of American freedom after the Revolution? 221 John Adams’s response, which illuminated how the Revolution had unleashed challenges to all sorts of inherited ideas of deference and authority: “We have been told that our struggle has loosened the bands of government everywhere; that children and apprentices were disobedient; that schools and colleges were grown turbulent; that Indians slighted their guardians, and negroes grew insolent to their masters.” To John Adams, this upheaval, including his wife’s claim to greater freedom, was an affront to the natural order of things. To others, it formed the essence of the American Revolution. D E M O C R AT I Z I N G F R E E D O M THE DREAM OF EQUALITY Abigail Adams, a portrait by Gilbert The American Revolution took place at three levels simultaneously. It was Stuart, painted over several years a struggle for national independence, a phase in a century-long global battle beginning in 1800. Stuart told a friend among European empires, and a conflict over what kind of nation an inde- that, as a young woman, Adams must pendent America should be. have been a “perfect Venus.” With its wide distribution of property, lack of a legally established hereditary aristocracy, and established churches far less powerful than in Britain, colonial America was a society with deep democratic potential. But it took the struggle for independence to transform it into a nation that celebrated equality and opportunity. The Revolution unleashed public debates and political and social struggles that enlarged the scope of free- dom and challenged inherited structures of power within America. In rejecting the crown and the principle of hereditary aristocracy, many Americans also rejected the society of privilege, patronage, and fixed sta- tus that these institutions embodied. To be sure, the men who led the Revolution from start to finish were by and large members of the American elite. The lower classes did not rise to power as a result of inde- pendence. Nonetheless, the idea of liberty became a revolutionary rallying cry, a standard by which to judge and challenge home-grown institutions as well as imperial ones. Jefferson’s seemingly straightforward assertion in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” announced a radical principle whose full implications no one could anticipate. In both Britain and its colonies, a well-ordered society was widely thought to depend on obedience to authority—the power of rulers over their subjects, husbands over wives, parents over children, employers over servants and apprentices, slave- holders over slaves. Inequality had been fundamental to the colonial social order; the Revolution challenged it in many ways. Henceforth, American freedom would be forever linked with the idea of equality—equality before the law, equality in political rights, equality of economic opportunity, and, for some, equality of condition. “Whenever I use the words freedom or rights,” wrote Thomas Paine, “I desire to be understood to mean a perfect equality of them.... The floor of Freedom is as level as water.” 222 C H. 6 The Revolution Within DEMOCRATIZING FREEDOM Americans have frequently defined the idea of freedom in relation to its opposite, which in the eighteenth century meant the EXPANDING THE POLITICAL NATION highly unequal societies of the Old World. With liberty and equality as their rallying cries, previously marginalized This engraving, The Coronation of groups advanced their demands. Long-accepted relations of dependency Louis XVI of France, reveals the splendor and restrictions on freedom suddenly appeared illegitimate—a process not of the royal court, but also illustrates the intended by most of the leading patriots. In political, social, and religious world of fixed, unequal classes and social life, Americans challenged the previous domination by a privileged few. In privilege repudiated by American the end, the Revolution did not undo the obedience to which male heads of revolutionaries. household were entitled from their wives and children, and, at least in the southern states, their slaves. For free men, however, the democratization of freedom was dramatic. Nowhere was this more evident than in challenges to the traditional limitation of political participation to those who owned property. In the political thought of the eighteenth century, “democracy” had sev- eral meanings. One, derived from the writings of Aristotle, defined democ- racy as a system in which the entire people governed directly. However, this was thought to mean mob rule. Another definition viewed democracy as the condition of primitive societies, which was not appropriate for the complex modern world. British thinkers sometimes used the word when referring to the House of Commons, the “democratic” branch of a mixed government. Yet another understanding revolved less around the structure of government than the fact that a government served the interests of the people rather than an elite. In the wake of the American Revolution, the term came into wider use to express the popular aspirations for greater equality inspired by the struggle for independence. How did equality become a stronger component of American freedom after the Revolution? 223 “We are all, from the cobbler up to the senator, become politicians,” declared a Boston letter writer in 1774. Throughout the colonies, election campaigns became freewheeling debates on the fundamentals of govern- ment. Universal male suffrage, religious toleration, and even the abolition of slavery were discussed not only by the educated elite but by artisans, small farmers, and laborers, now emerging as a self-conscious element in politics. In many colonies-turned-states, the militia, composed largely of members of the “lower orders,” became a “school of political democracy.” Its members demanded the right to elect all their officers and to vote for public officials whether or not they met age and property qualifications. They thereby established the tradition that service in the army enabled excluded groups to stake a claim to full citizenship. THE REVOLUTION IN P E N N S Y LVA N I A The Revolution’s radical potential was more evident in Pennsylvania than in any other state. Elsewhere, the established leadership either embraced independence by the spring of 1776 or split into pro-British and pro-independence factions (in New York, for example, the Livingstons and their supporters ended up as patriots, the De Lanceys as Loyalists). But in Pennsylvania nearly the entire prewar elite opposed independence, fearing that severing the tie with Britain would lead to rule by the “rabble” and to attacks on property. The vacuum of political leadership opened the door for the rise of a new pro-independence grouping, based on the artisan and lower-class commu- nities of Philadelphia, and organized in extralegal committees and the local militia. Their leaders included Thomas Paine (the author of Common Sense), Benjamin Rush (a local physician), Timothy Matlack (the son of a local brewer), and Thomas Young (who had already been involved in the Sons of Liberty in Albany and Boston). As a group, these were men of modest wealth who stood outside the merchant elite, had little political influence before 1776, and believed strongly in democratic reform. Paine and Young had only recently arrived in Philadelphia. They formed a temporary alliance with supporters of independence in the Second Continental Congress (then meeting in Philadelphia), who disapproved of their strong belief in equality but hoped to move Pennsylvania toward a break with Britain. As the public sphere expanded far beyond its previous boundaries, equality became the rallying cry of Pennsylvania’s radicals. They particu- larly attacked property qualifications for voting. “God gave mankind free- dom by nature,” declared the anonymous author of the pamphlet The People the Best Governors, “and made every man equal to his neighbors.” The peo- ple, therefore, were “the best guardians of their own liberties,” and every free man should be eligible to vote and hold office. In June 1776, a broad- side (a printed sheet posted in public places) warned citizens to distrust “great and over-grown rich men” who were inclined “to be framing distinc- tions in society.” Three months after independence, Pennsylvania adopted a new state constitution that sought to institutionalize democracy by con- centrating power in a one-house legislature elected annually by all men over age twenty-one who paid taxes. It abolished the office of governor, dis- pensed with property qualifications for officeholding, and provided that 224 C H. 6 The Revolution Within DEMOCRATIZING FREEDOM schools with low fees be established in every county. It also included clauses guaranteeing “freedom of speech, and of writing,” and religious liberty. THE NEW CONSTITUTIONS Like Pennsylvania, every state adopted a new constitution in the aftermath of independence. Nearly all Americans now agreed that their governments must be republics, meaning that their authority rested on the consent of the governed, and that there would be no king or hereditary aristocracy. The essence of a republic, Paine wrote, was not the “particular form” of government, but its object: the “public good.” But as to how a republican government should be structured so as to promote the public good, there was much disagreement. Pennsylvania’s new constitution reflected the belief that since the people had a single set of interests, a single legislative house was sufficient to rep- resent it. In part to counteract what he saw as Pennsylvania’s excessive rad- icalism, John Adams in 1776 published Thoughts on Government, which insisted that the new constitutions should create “balanced governments” whose structure would reflect the division of society between the wealthy (represented in the upper house) and ordinary men (who would control the lower). A powerful governor and judiciary would ensure that neither class infringed on the liberty of the other. Adams’s call for two-house legislatures John Dickinson’s copy of the Pennsylvania was followed by every state except Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Vermont. constitution of 1776, with handwritten But only his own state, Massachusetts, gave the governor an effective veto proposals for changes. Dickinson, one of over laws passed by the legislature. Americans had come to believe that the more conservative advocates of excessive royal authority had undermined British liberty. They had long independence, felt the new state resented efforts by appointed governors to challenge the power of colonial constitution was far too democratic. assemblies. They preferred power to rest with the legislature. He crossed out a provision that all “free men” should be eligible to hold office, and THE RIGHT TO VOTE another declaring the people not bound by laws that did not promote “the common The issue of requirements for voting and officeholding proved far more good.” contentious. Conservative patriots struggled valiantly to reassert the rationale for the old voting restrictions. It was ridiculous, wrote one pam- phleteer, to think that “every silly clown and illiterate mechanic [artisan]” deserved a voice in government. To John Adams, as conservative on the internal affairs of America as he had been radical on independence, free- dom and equality were opposites. Men without property, he believed, had no “judgment of their own,” and the removal of property qualifications, therefore, would “confound and destroy all distinctions, and prostrate all ranks to one common level.” Eliminating traditional social ranks, however, was precisely the aim of the era’s radical democrats, including the most influential promoter of independence, Thomas Paine. The provisions of the new state constitutions reflected the balance of power between advocates of internal change and those who feared exces- sive democracy. The least democratization occurred in the southern states, whose highly deferential political traditions enabled the landed gentry to retain their control of political affairs. In Virginia and South Carolina, the new constitutions retained property qualifications for voting and authorized the gentry-dominated legislature to choose the governor. How did equality become a stronger component of American freedom after the Revolution? 225 Maryland combined a low property qualification for voting with high requirements for officeholding, including £5,000—a veritable fortune—for the governor. The most democratic new constitutions moved much of the way toward the idea of voting as an entitlement rather than a privilege, but they gener- ally stopped short of universal suffrage, even for free men. Vermont’s constitution of 1777 was the only one to sever voting completely from financial considerations, eliminating not only property qualifications but the requirement that voters pay taxes. Pennsylvania’s constitution no longer required ownership of property, but it retained the taxpaying quali- fication. As a result, it enfranchised nearly all of the state’s free male popu- lation but left a small number, mainly paupers and domestic servants, still barred from voting. Nonetheless, even with the taxpaying requirement, it represented a dramatic departure from the colonial practice of restricting the suffrage to those who could claim to be economically independent. It elevated “personal liberty,” in the words of one essayist, to a position more important than property ownership in defining the boundaries of the political nation. DEMOCRATIZING GOVERNMENT Overall, the Revolution led to a great expansion of the right to vote. By the 1780s, with the exceptions of Virginia, Maryland, and New York, a large majority of the adult white male population could meet voting require- ments. New Jersey’s new state constitution, of 1776, granted the suffrage to all “inhabitants” who met a property qualification. Until the state added the word “male” (along with “white”) in 1807, property-owning women, mostly widows, did cast ballots. The new constitutions also expanded the number of legislative seats, with the result that numerous men of lesser property assumed political office. The debate over the suffrage would, of course, continue for many decades. For white men, the process of democra- tization did not run its course until the Age of Jackson; for women and non- whites, it would take much longer. Even during the Revolution, however, in the popular language of politics if not in law, freedom and an individual’s right to vote had become inter- changeable. “The suffrage,” declared a 1776 petition of disenfranchised North Carolinians, was “a right essential to and inseparable from freedom.” Without it, Americans could not enjoy “equal liberty.” A proposed new con- stitution for Massachusetts was rejected by a majority of the towns in 1778, partly because it contained a property qualification for voting. “All men were born equally free and independent,” declared the town of Lenox. How could they defend their “life and liberty and property” without a voice in electing public officials? A new draft, which retained a substantial requirement for voting in state elections but allowed virtually all men to vote for town officers, was approved in 1780. And every state except South Carolina provided for annual legislative elections, to ensure that represen- tatives remained closely accountable to the people. Henceforth, political freedom would mean not only, as in the past, a people’s right to be ruled by their chosen representatives but also an individual’s right to political participation. 226 C H. 6 The Revolution Within TOWARD RELIGIOUS TOLERATION T O WA R D R E L I G I O U S T O L E R AT I O N As remarkable as the expansion of polit- ical freedom was the Revolution’s impact on American religion. Religious tolera- tion, declared one Virginia patriot, was part of “the common cause of Freedom.” In Britain, Dissenters—Protestants who belonged to other denominations than the Anglican Church—had long invoked the language of liberty in seeking repeal of the laws that imposed various disabil- ities on non-Anglicans. (Few, however, included Catholics in their ringing calls for religious freedom.) We have A 1771 image of New York City lists some already seen that some colonies, like Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, had of the numerous churches visible from the long made a practice of toleration. But freedom of worship before the New Jersey shore, illustrating the diversity Revolution arose more from the reality of religious pluralism than from a of religions practiced in the city. well-developed theory of religious liberty. Apart from Rhode Island, New England had little homegrown experience of religious pluralism. Indeed, authorities in England had occasionally pressed the region’s rulers to become more tolerant. Before the Revolution, most colonies supported reli- gious institutions with public funds and discriminated in voting and officeholding against Catholics, Jews, and even dissenting Protestants. On the very eve of independence, Baptists who refused to pay taxes to support local Congregational ministers were still being jailed in Massachusetts. “While our country are pleading so high for liberty,” the victims com- plained, “yet they are denying of it to their neighbors.” CATHOLIC AMERICANS The War of Independence weakened the deep tradition of American anti- Catholicism. The First Continental Congress denounced the Quebec Act of 1774, which, as noted in the previous chapter, allowed Canadian Catholics to worship freely, as part of a plot to establish “popery” in North America. But a year later, when the Second Continental Congress decided on an ill-fated invasion of Canada, it invited the inhabitants of Quebec to join in the struggle against Britain, assuring them that Protestants and Catholics could readily cooperate. However, predominantly Catholic Quebec preferred being ruled from distant London rather than from Boston or Philadelphia. In 1778, the United States formed an alliance with France, a Catholic nation. Benedict Arnold justified his treason, in part, by saying that an alliance with “the enemy of the protestant faith” was too much for him to bear. But the indispensable assistance provided by France to American victory strengthened the idea that Catholics had a role to play in the newly independent nation. In fact, this represented a marked departure from the traditional notion that the full rights of Englishmen only applied to Protestants. When America’s first Roman Catholic bishop, James Carroll of Maryland, visited Boston in 1791, he received a cordial welcome. How did the expansion of religious liberty after the Revolution reflect the new American ideal of freedom? 227 THE FOUNDERS AND RELIGION The end of British rule immediately threw into question the privileged position enjoyed by the Anglican Church in many colonies. In Virginia, for example, backcountry Scotch-Irish Presbyterian farmers demanded relief from taxes supporting the official Anglican Church. “The free exercise of our rights of conscience,” one patriotic meeting resolved, formed an essen- tial part of “our liberties.” Many of the leaders of the Revolution considered it essential for the new nation to shield itself from the unruly passions and violent conflicts that religious differences had inspired during the past three centuries. Men like Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton believed religion necessary as a foundation of public morality. But they viewed religious doctrines through the Enlightenment lens of rationalism and skepticism. They believed in a benevolent Creator but not in supernat- ural interventions into the affairs of men. Jefferson wrote a version of the Bible and a life of Jesus that insisted that while Jesus had lived a deeply moral life, he was not divine and performed no miracles. In discussing the natural history of the Blue Ridge Mountains in his book Notes on the State of Virginia, he rejected the biblical account of creation in favor of a prolonged process of geological change. SEPARATING CHURCH AND STATE The drive to separate church and state brought together Deists like Jefferson, who hoped to erect a “wall of separation” that would free politics and the exercise of the intellect from religious control, with members of evangelical sects, who sought to protect religion from the corrupting embrace of government. Religious leaders continued to adhere to the tradi- tional definition of Christian liberty—submitting to God’s will and leading a moral life—but increasingly felt this could be achieved without the sup- port of government. Christ’s kingdom, as Isaac Backus, the Baptist leader, put it, was “not of this world.” The movement toward religious freedom received a major impetus during the revolutionary era. Throughout the new nation, states disestab- lished their established churches—that is, deprived them of public funding and special legal privileges—although in some cases they appropriated money for the general support of Protestant denominations. The seven state constitutions that began with declarations of rights all declared a commitment to “the free exercise of religion.” To be sure, every state but New York—whose constitution of 1777 estab- lished complete religious liberty—kept intact colonial provisions barring Jews from voting and holding public office. Seven states limited officehold- ing to Protestants. Massachusetts retained its Congregationalist establish- ment well into the nineteenth century. Its new constitution declared church attendance compulsory while guaranteeing freedom of individual worship. It would not end public financial support for religious institu- tions until 1833. Throughout the country, however, Catholics gained the right to worship without persecution. Maryland’s constitution of 1776 restored to the large Catholic population the civil and political rights that had been denied them for nearly a century. 228 C H. 6 The Revolution Within TOWARD RELIGIOUS TOLERATION A draft of Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, JEFFERSON AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY published in 1779 in order to encourage public discussion of the issue. The bill was In Virginia, Thomas Jefferson drew up a Bill for Establishing Religious enacted in 1786. Freedom, which was introduced in the House of Burgesses in 1779 and adopted, after considerable controversy, in 1786. “I have sworn on the altar of God,” he would later write, “eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” Jefferson viewed established churches as a major example of such despotism and, as his statement reveals, believed that religious liberty served God’s will. Jefferson’s bill, whose preamble declared that God “hath created the mind free,” eliminated religious require- ments for voting and officeholding and government financial support for churches, and barred the state from “forcing” individuals to adopt one or How did the expansion of religious liberty after the Revolution reflect the new American ideal of freedom? 229 another religious outlook. Late in life, Jefferson would list this measure, along with the Declaration of Independence and the founding of the University of Virginia, as the three accomplishments (leaving out his two terms as president) for which he wished to be remembered. Religious liberty became the model for the revolutionary generation’s definition of “rights” as private matters that must be protected from gov- ernmental interference. In an overwhelmingly Christian (though not nec- essarily churchgoing) nation, the separation of church and state drew a sharp line between public authority and a realm defined as “private,” rein- forcing the idea that rights exist as restraints on the power of government. It also offered a new justification for the idea of the United States as a bea- con of liberty. In successfully opposing a Virginia tax for the general sup- port of Christian churches, James Madison insisted that one reason for the complete separation of church and state was to reinforce the principle that the new nation offered “asylum to the persecuted and oppressed of every nation and religion.” THE REVOLUTION AND THE CHURCHES Thus, the Revolution enhanced the diversity of American Christianity and expanded the idea of religious liberty. But even as the separation of church and state created the social and political space that allowed all kinds of reli- gious institutions to flourish, the culture of individual rights of which that separation was a part threatened to undermine church authority. One example was the experience of the Moravian Brethren, who had emigrated from Germany to North Carolina on the eve of independence. To the dismay of the Moravian elders, younger members of the community, Ezra Stiles, the president of Yale College, like so many other Americans of the revolutionary generation, insisted on drew this sketch of a flag in his diary on asserting “their alleged freedom and human rights.” Some became unruly April 24, 1783, shortly after Congress and refused to obey the orders of town leaders. Many rejected the commu- ratified the Treaty of Paris. Thirteen stars nity’s tradition of arranged marriages, insisting on choosing their own hus- surround the coat of arms of Pennsylvania. bands and wives. To the elders, the idea of individual liberty—which they The banner text illustrates the linkage called, disparagingly, “the American freedom”—was little more than “an among virtue, liberty, and American opportunity for temptation,” a threat to independence. the spirit of self-sacrifice and communal loyalty essential to Christian liberty. But despite such fears, the Revolution did not end the influence of religion on American society—quite the reverse. American churches, in the words of one Presbyterian leader, learned to adapt to living at a time when “a spirit of liberty prevails.” Thanks to religious freedom, the early republic witnessed an amazing proliferation of religious deno- minations. The most well-established churches—Anglican, Presbyterian, and Congregationalist—found themselves constantly challenged by upstarts like Free-Will Baptists and Universalists. Today, even as debate continues over the 230 C H. 6 The Revolution Within DEFINING ECONOMIC FREEDOM proper relationship between spiritual and political authority, more than 1,300 religions are practiced in the United States. A VIRTUOUS CITIZENRY Despite the separation of church and state, colonial leaders were not hostile to religion. Most were devout Christians, and even Deists who attended no organized church believed religious values reinforced the moral qualities necessary for a republic to prosper. Public authority continued to support religious values, in laws barring non-Christians from office and in the continued prosecution of blasphemy and breaches of the Sabbath. Pennsylvania’s new democratic constitu- tion required citizens to acknowledge the existence of God, and it directed the legislature to enact “laws for the prevention of vice and immorality.” In the nineteenth cen- tury, Pennsylvania’s lawmakers took this mandate so seri- ously that the state became as famous for its laws against swearing and desecrating the Sabbath as it had been in colonial times for religious freedom. Patriot leaders worried about the character of future citizens, especially how to encourage the quality of “virtue,” the ability to sacrifice self-inter- The Self, an engraving in The est for the public good. Some, like Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Columbian Magazine, 1789, illustrates Rush, put forward plans for the establishment of free, state-supported pub- various admirable qualities radiating lic schools. These would instruct future citizens in what Adams called “the outward from the virtuous citizen, principles of freedom,” equipping them for participation in the now- including love for one’s family, community, expanded public sphere and for the wise election of representatives. A and nation. broad diffusion of knowledge was essential for a government based on the will of the people to survive and for America to avoid the fixed class struc- ture of Europe. No nation, Jefferson wrote, could “expect to be ignorant and free.” DEFINING ECONOMIC FREEDOM TOWARD FREE LABOR In economic as well as political and religious affairs, the Revolution rewrote the definition of freedom. In colonial America, slavery was one part of a broad spectrum of kinds of unfree labor. In the generation after independence, with the rapid decline of indentured servitude and appren- ticeship and the transformation of paid domestic service into an occupa- tion for blacks and white females, the halfway houses between slavery and freedom disappeared, at least for white men. The decline of these forms of labor had many causes. Wage workers became more available as inden- tured servants completed their terms of required labor, and considerable numbers of servants and apprentices took advantage of the turmoil of the Revolution to escape from their masters. The democratization of freedom contributed to these changes. The lack of freedom inherent in apprenticeship and servitude increasingly came How did the definition of economic freedom change after the Revolution, and who benefited from the changes? 231 to be seen as incompatible with republican citizenship. Ebenezer Fox, a young apprentice on a Massachusetts farm, later recalled how he and other youths “made a direct application of the doctrines we heard daily, in rela- tion to the oppression of the mother country, to our own circumstance.... I thought that I was doing myself a great injustice by remaining in bondage, when I ought to go free.” Fox became one of many apprentices during the Revolution who decided to run away—or, as he put it, to “liber- ate myself.” On the eve of the battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775, Fox and a friend set off for Rhode Island. After briefly working as a sailor, Fox, still a teenager, joined the Continental army. In 1784, a group of “respectable” New Yorkers released a newly arrived shipload of indentured servants on the grounds that their status was “con- trary to... the idea of liberty this country has so happily established.” By 1800, indentured servitude had all but disappeared from the United States. This development sharpened the distinction between freedom and slavery and between a northern economy relying on what would come to be called “free labor” (that is, working for wages or owning a farm or shop) and a southern economy ever more heavily dependent on the labor of slaves. THE SOUL OF A REPUBLIC Americans of the revolutionary generation were preoccupied with the social conditions of freedom. Could a republic survive with a sizable dependent class of citizens? “A general and tolerably equal distribution of landed property,” proclaimed the educator and newspaper editor Noah Webster, “is the whole basis of national freedom.” “Equality,” he added, was “the very soul of a republic.” It outstripped in importance liberty of the View from Bushongo Tavern, an press, trial by jury, and other “palladia of freedom.” Even a conservative like engraving from The Columbian John Adams, who distrusted the era’s democratic upsurge, hoped that Magazine, 1788, depicts the landscape of every member of society could acquire land, “so that the multitude may be York County, Pennsylvania, exemplifying the kind of rural independence many Americans thought essential to freedom. 232 C H. 6 The Revolution Within DEFINING ECONOMIC FREEDOM possessed of small estates” and the new nation could avoid the emergence of fixed and unequal social classes. At the Revolution’s radical edge, some patriots believed that government had a responsibility to limit accumula- tions of property in the name of equality. To most free Americans, however, “equality” meant equal opportunity, rather than equality of condition. Many leaders of the Revolution nevertheless assumed that in the excep- tional circumstances of the New World, with its vast areas of available land and large population of independent farmers and artisans, the natural workings of society would produce justice, liberty, and equality. Like many other Americans of his generation, Thomas Jefferson believed that to lack economic resources was to lack freedom. Jefferson favored a limited state, but he also believed that government could help create free- dom’s institutional framework. His proudest achievements included laws passed by Virginia abolishing entail (the limitation of inheritance to a spec- ified line of heirs to keep an estate within a family) and primogeniture (the practice of passing a family’s land entirely to the eldest son). These meas- ures, he believed, would help to prevent the rise of a “future aristocracy.” To the same end, Jefferson proposed to award fifty acres of land to “every per- son of full age” who did not already possess it, another way government could enhance the liberty of its subjects. Of course, the land Jefferson hoped would secure American liberty would have to come from Indians. THE POLITICS OF INFLATION The Revolution thrust to the forefront of politics debates over whether local or national authorities should take steps to bolster household inde- pendence and protect Americans’ livelihoods by limiting price increases. Economic dislocations sharpened the controversy. To finance the war, Congress issued hundreds of millions of dollars in paper money. Coupled with wartime disruption of agriculture and trade and the hoarding of goods by some Americans hoping to profit from shortages, this produced an enormous increase in prices. The country, charged a letter to a Philadelphia newspaper in 1778, had been “reduced to the brink of ruin by the infamous practices of monopolizers.” “Hunger,” the writer warned, “will break through stone walls.” Between 1776 and 1779, more than thirty incidents took place in which crowds confronted merchants accused of holding scarce goods off the mar- ket. Often, they seized stocks of food and sold them at the traditional “just price,” a form of protest common in eighteenth-century England. In one such incident, a crowd of 100 Massachusetts women accused an “eminent, wealthy, stingy merchant” of hoarding coffee, opened his warehouse, and carted off the goods. “A large concourse of men,” wrote Abigail Adams, “stood amazed, silent spectators of the whole transaction.” THE DEBATE OVER FREE TRADE A broadside printed by the extralegal Philadelphia price-control committee, In 1779, with inflation totally out of control (in one month, prices in setting the retail prices of various goods Philadelphia jumped 45 percent), Congress urged states to adopt measures such as coffee, sugar, and rum. Advocates to fix wages and prices. The policy embodied the belief that the task of of a free market strongly opposed the republican government was to promote the public good, not individuals’ committee’s efforts. self-interest. Bitter comments appeared in the Philadelphia press about the How did the definition of economic freedom change after the Revolution, and who benefited from the changes? 233 city’s elite expending huge sums on “public dinners and other extravagan- zas” while many in the city were “destitute of the necessities of life.” But when a Committee of Safety tried to enforce price controls, it met spirited opposition from merchants and other advocates of a free market. In opposition to the traditional view that men should sacrifice for the public good, believers in freedom of trade argued that economic develop- ment arose from economic self-interest. Just as Newton had revealed the inner workings of the natural universe, so the social world also followed unchanging natural laws, among them that supply and demand regulated the prices of goods. Adam Smith’s great treatise on economics, The Wealth of Nations, published in England in 1776, was beginning to become known in the United States. Smith’s argument that the “invisible hand” of the free market directed economic life more effectively and fairly than governmen- tal intervention offered intellectual justification for those who believed that the economy should be left to regulate itself. Advocates of independence had envisioned America, released from the British Navigation Acts, trading freely with all the world. Opponents of price controls advocated free trade at home as well. “Let trade be as free as air,” wrote one merchant. “Natural liberty” would regulate prices. Here were two competing conceptions of economic freedom—one based on the traditional view that the interests of the community took precedence over the property rights of individuals, the other that unregulated economic freedom would produce social harmony and public gain. After 1779, the latter view gained ascendancy. In 1780, Robert Morris, a Philadelphia mer- chant and banker, became director of congressional fiscal policy. State and federal efforts to regulate prices ceased. But the clash between these two visions of economic freedom would continue long after independence had been achieved. “Yield to the mighty current of American freedom.” So a member of the South Carolina legislature implored his colleagues in 1777. The current of freedom swept away not only British authority but also the principle of hereditary rule, the privileges of established churches, long-standing habits of deference and hierarchy, and old limits on the political nation. Yet in other areas, the tide of freedom encountered obstacles that did not yield as easily to its powerful flow. THE LIMITS OF LIBERTY COLONIAL LOYALISTS Not all Americans shared in the democratization of freedom brought on by the American Revolution. Loyalists—those who retained their allegiance to the crown—experienced the conflict and its aftermath as a loss of liberty. Many leading Loyalists had supported American resistance in the 1760s but drew back at the prospect of independence and war. Loyalists included some of the most prominent Americans and some of the most humble. Altogether, an estimated 20 to 25 percent of free Americans remained loyal to the British, and nearly 20,000 fought on their side. At some points in the war, Loyalists serving with the British outnumbered Washington’s army. There were Loyalists in every colony, but they were most numerous in New York, Pennsylvania, and the backcountry of the Carolinas and Georgia. 234 C H. 6 The Revolution Within THE LIMITS OF LIBERTY Some were wealthy men whose livelihoods depended on close working relationships with Britain—lawyers, merchants, Anglican ministers, and imperial officials. Many feared anarchy in the event of an American victory. “Liberty,” one wrote, “can have no existence without obedience to the laws.” The struggle for independence heightened existing tensions between ethnic groups and social classes within the colonies. Some Loyalist ethnic minorities, like Highland Scots in North Carolina, feared that local majori- ties would infringe on their freedom to enjoy cultural autonomy. In the South, many backcountry farmers who had long resented the domination of public affairs by wealthy planters sided with the British. So did tenants on the New York estates of patriot landlords like the Livingston family. Robert Livingston had signed the Declaration of Independence. When the army of General Burgoyne approached Livingston’s manor in 1777, tenants rose in revolt, hoping the British would confiscate his land and distribute it among themselves. Their hopes were dashed by Burgoyne’s defeat at Saratoga. In the South, numerous slaves sided with the British, hoping an American defeat would bring them freedom. THE LOYALISTS ’ PLIGHT The War of Independence was in some respects a civil war among Amer- icans. “This country,” wrote a German colonel fighting with the British, “is the scene of the most cruel events. Neighbors are on opposite sides, children are against their fathers.” Freedom of expression is often a casualty of war, and many Americans were deprived of basic rights in the name of liberty. After Dr. Abner Beebe, of East Haddam, Connecticut, spoke “very freely” in favor of the British, a mob attacked his house and destroyed his gristmill. Beebe himself was “assaulted, stripped naked, and hot pitch [tar] was poured upon him.” The new state governments, or in other instances A 1780 British cartoon commenting on the crowds of patriots, suppressed newspapers thought to be loyal to Britain. “cruel fate” of American Loyalists. Pro- Pennsylvania arrested and seized the property of Quakers, Mennonites, independence colonists are likened to and Moravians—pacifist denominations who refused to bear arms because savage Indians. of their religious beliefs. With the approval of Congress, many states required residents to take oaths of alle- giance to the new nation. Those who refused were denied the right to vote and in many cases forced into exile. “The flames of discord,” wrote one British observer, “are sprouting from the seeds of liberty.” Some wealthy Loyalists saw their land confiscated and sold at auction. Twenty-eight estates belonging to New Hampshire governor John Wentworth and his family were seized, as were the holdings of great New York Loyalist land- lords like the De Lancey and Philipse families. Most of the buyers of this land were merchants, lawyers, and established landowners. Unable to afford the purchase price, tenants had no choice but to con- tinue to labor for the new owners. H o w d i d t h e R e v o l u t i o n d i m i n i s h t h e f r e e d o m s o f b o t h L o y a l i s t s a n d Na t i v e A m e r i c a n s ? 235 LOYALISM IN THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION Hudson Bay NEWFOUNDLAND St. P i e rre & Mi q ue l on ( Fra n ce) LOWER CANADA Halifax uper i or MAINE eS NOVA Lak (part of MA) SCOTIA La UPPER NEW CANADA HAMPSHIRE ke an o ntari L a k e Mi chig Hu r NEW Boston L. O YORK MASSACHUSETTS on rie RHODE ISLAND eE Lak CONNECTICUT PENNSYLVANIA NEW JERSEY DELAWARE SPANISH MARYLAND VIRGINIA LOUISIANA NORTH At la nti c Be rm u da CAROLINA O ce an SOUTH CAROLINA Charleston GEORGIA FLORIDA Ba ham a s Strongly Loyalist colonists Gulf of Mexico Loyalist or neutral Indians Neutral colonists 0 200 400 miles Strong patriot support Other British territory 0 200 400 kilometers SPANISH CUBA The Revolutionary War was, in some ways, a civil war within the colonies. There were Loyalists in every colony; they were most numerous in New York and North and South Carolina. 236 C H. 6 The Revolution Within THE LIMITS OF LIBERTY When the war ended, as many as 100,000 Loyalists (including 20,000 slaves) were banished from the United States or emigrated voluntarily— mostly to Britain, Canada, or the West Indies—rather than live in an inde- pendent United States. But for those who remained, hostility proved to be short-lived. In the Treaty of Paris of 1783, as noted in Chapter 5, Americans pledged to end the persecution of Loyalists by state and local governments and to restore property seized during the war. American leaders believed the new nation needed to establish an international reputation for fairness and civility. States soon repealed their test oaths for voting and officehold- ing. Loyalists who did not leave the country were quickly reintegrated into American society, although despite the promise of the Treaty of Paris, con- fiscated Loyalist property was not returned. THE INDIANS ’ REVOLUTION Another group for whom American independence spelled a loss of freedom—the Indians—was less fortunate. Despite the Proclamation of 1763, discussed in Chapter 4, colonists had continued to move westward during the 1760s and early 1770s, leading Indian tribes to complain of intru- sions on their land. Lord Dunmore, Virginia’s royal governor, observed in 1772 that he had found it impossible “to restrain the Americans.... They do not conceive that government has any right to forbid their taking posses- sion of a vast tract of country” or to force them to honor treaties with Indians. Kentucky, the principal hunting ground of southern Cherokees and numerous Ohio Valley Indians, became a flash point of conflict among settlers, land speculators, and Native Americans, with the faraway British government seeking in vain to impose order. Many patriot leaders, includ- ing George Washington, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Jefferson, were deeply involved in western land speculation. Washington himself had acquired over 60,000 acres of land in western Pennsylvania after the Seven Years’ War by purchasing land vouchers (a form of soldiers’ wages) from his men at discount rates. Indeed, British efforts to restrain land speculation west of the line specified by the Proclamation of 1763 had been one of the many grievances of Virginia’s revolutionary generation. About 200,000 Native Americans lived east of the Mississippi River in 1790. Like white Americans, Indians divided in allegiance during the War of Independence. Some, like the Stockbridge tribe in Massachusetts, suffered heavy losses fighting the British. Many tribes tried to maintain neutrality, only to see themselves break into pro-American and pro-British factions. Most of the Iroquois nations sided with the British, but the Oneida joined the Americans. Despite strenuous efforts to avoid conflict, members of the Iroquois Confederacy for the first time faced each other in battle. (After the war, the Oneida submitted to Congress claims for losses suffered during the war, including sheep, hogs, kettles, frying pans, plows, and pewter plates—evidence of how fully they had been integrated into the market economy.) In the South, younger Cherokee leaders joined the British while older chiefs tended to favor the Americans. Other southern tribes like the Choctaw and Creek remained loyal to the crown. Among the grievances listed by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence was Britain’s enlisting “savages” to fight on its side. But in the H o w d i d t h e R e v o l u t i o n d i m i n i s h t h e f r e e d o m s o f b o t h L o y a l i s t s a n d Na t i v e A m e r i c a n s ? 237 A cartoon depicting a British officer war that raged throughout the western frontier, savagery was not confined buying the scalps of patriots from to either combatant. In the Ohio country, the British encouraged Indian Indians. Jefferson listed British incitement allies to burn frontier farms and settlements. For their part, otherwise of Indians against the colonists as one humane patriot leaders ignored the traditional rules of warfare when it of Americans’ grievances in the came to Indians. William Henry Drayton, a leader of the patriot cause in Declaration of Independence. South Carolina and the state’s chief justice in 1776, advised officers march- ing against the Cherokees to “cut up every Indian cornfield, burn every Indian town,” and enslave all Indian captives. Three years later, Washington dispatched an expedition, led by General John Sullivan, against hostile Iroquois, with the aim of “the total destruction and devastation of their set- tlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as pos- sible.” After his campaign ended, Sullivan reported that he had burned forty Indian towns, destroyed thousands of bushels of corn, and uprooted a vast number of fruit trees and vegetable gardens. Many Iroquois communi- ties faced starvation. In the Ohio Valley, as we will see in Chapter 7, fight- ing did not end until the 1790s. WHITE FREEDOM , INDIAN FREEDOM Independence created governments democratically accountable to voters who coveted Indian land. Indeed, to many patriots, access to Indian land was one of the fruits of American victory. Driving the Indians from the Ohio Valley, wrote Jefferson, would “add to the Empire of Liberty an extensive and fertile country.” But liberty for whites meant loss of liberty for Indians. “The whites were no sooner free themselves,” a Pequot, William Apess, would later write, than they turned on “the poor Indians.” Independence offered the opportunity to complete the process of dispossessing Indians of their rich lands in upstate New York, the Ohio Valley, and the southern backcoun- try. The only hope for the Indians, Jefferson wrote, lay in their “removal 238 C H. 6 The Revolution Within SLAVERY AND THE REVOLUTION beyond the Mississippi.” Even as the war raged, Americans forced defeated tribes like the Cherokee to cede most of their land. American independence, a group of visiting Indians told the Spanish governor at St. Louis, was “the greatest blow that could have been dealt us.” The Treaty of Paris marked the culmination of a century in which the bal- ance of power in eastern North America shifted away from the Indians and toward white Americans. The displacement of British power to Canada, coming twenty years after the departure of the French, left Indians with seriously diminished white support. Some Indian leaders, like Joseph Brant, a young Mohawk in upstate New York, hoped to create an Indian confederacy lying between Canada and the new United States. He sided with the British to try to achieve this goal. But in the Treaty of Paris, the British abandoned their Indian allies, agreeing to recognize American sov- ereignty over the entire region east of the Mississippi River, completely ignoring the Indian presence. To Indians, freedom meant defending their own independence and retaining possession of their land. Like other Americans, they appropriated the language of the Revolution and interpreted it according to their own experiences and for their own purposes. The Iroquois, declared one spokesman, were “a free people subject to no power on earth.” Creeks and Choctaws denied having done anything to forfeit their “independence and natural rights.” When Massachusetts established a system of state “guardianship” over previously self-governing tribes, a group of Mashpees petitioned the legislature, claiming for themselves “the rights of man” and complaining of this “infringement of freedom.” “Freedom” had not played a major part in Indians’ vocabulary before the Revolution. By the early nineteenth century, dictionaries of Indian lan- guages for the first time began to include the word. In a sense, Indians’ def- inition of their rights was becoming Americanized. But there seemed to be no permanent place for the descendants of the continent’s native popula- tion in a new nation bent on creating an empire in the West. SLAVERY AND THE REVOLUTION While Indians experienced American independence as a real threat to their own liberty, African-Americans saw in the ideals of the Revolution and the reality of war an opportunity to claim freedom. When the United States declared its independence in 1776, the slave population had grown to 500,000, about one-fifth of the new nation’s inhabitants. Slaveowning and slave trading were accepted routines of colonial life. Advertisements announcing the sale of slaves and seeking the return of runaways filled colonial newspapers. Sometimes, the same issues of patriotic newspapers that published accounts of the activities of the Sons of Liberty or argu- ments against the Stamp Act also contained slave sale notices. THE LANGUAGE OF SLAVERY AND FREEDOM Slavery played a central part in the language of revolution. Apart from “liberty,” it was the word most frequently invoked in the era’s legal and What was the impact of the Revolution on slavery? 239 political literature. Eighteenth-century writers frequently juxtaposed freedom and slavery as “the two extremes of happiness and misery in society.” Yet in the era’s debates over British rule, slav- ery was primarily a political category, shorthand for the denial of one’s per- sonal and political rights by arbitrary government. Those who lacked a voice in public affairs, declared a 1769 petition demanding an expansion of the right to vote in Britain, were “enslaved.” By the eve of independence, the contrast between Britain, “a kingdom of slaves,” and America, a “country of free Advertisement for newly arrived slaves, men,” had become a standard part of the language of resistance. Such lan- in a Savannah newspaper, 1774. Even guage was employed without irony even in areas where nearly half the as colonists defended their own liberty population in fact consisted of slaves. South Carolina, one writer declared against the British, the buying and selling in 1774, was a “sacred land” of freedom, where it was impossible to believe of slaves continued. that “slavery shall soon be permitted to erect her throne.” Colonial writers of the 1760s occasionally made a direct connection between slavery as a reality and slavery as a metaphor. Few were as forth- right as James Otis of Massachusetts, whose pamphlets did much to popu- larize the idea that Parliament lacked the authority to tax the colonies and regulate their commerce. Freedom, Otis insisted, must be universal: “What man is or ever was born free if every man is not?” Otis wrote of blacks not as examples of the loss of rights awaiting free Americans, but as flesh and blood British subjects “entitled to all the civil rights of such.” Otis was hardly typical of patriot leaders. But the presence of hundreds of thousands of slaves powerfully affected the meaning of freedom for the leaders of the American Revolution. In a famous speech to Parliament warning against attempts to intimidate the colonies, the British statesman Edmund Burke suggested that familiarity with slavery made colonial lead- ers unusually sensitive to threats to their own liberties. Where freedom was a privilege, not a common right, he observed, “those who are free are by far the most proud and jealous of their freedom.” On the other hand, many British observers could not resist pointing out the colonists’ appar- ent hypocrisy. “How is it,” asked Dr. Samuel Johnson, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of negroes?” OBSTACLES TO ABOLITION The contradiction between freedom and slavery seems so self-evident that it is difficult today to appreciate the power of the obstacles to abolition. At the time of the Revolution, slavery was already an old institution in America. It existed in every colony and formed the basis of the economy and social structure from Maryland southward. At least 40 percent of Virginia’s population and even higher proportions in Georgia and South Carolina were slaves. Virtually every founding father owned slaves at one point in his life, including not only southern planters but northern merchants, lawyers, and farmers. (John Adams and Tom Paine were notable exceptions.) 240 C H. 6 The Revolution Within SLAVERY AND THE REVOLUTION Thomas Jefferson owned more than 100 slaves when he wrote of mankind’s unalienable right to liberty, and everything he cherished in his own manner of life, from lavish entertainments to the leisure that made possible the pursuit of arts and sciences, ultimately rested on slave labor. Some patriots, in fact, argued that slavery for blacks made freedom pos- sible for whites. Eliminating the great bulk of the dependent poor from the political nation left the public arena to men of propertied independence. Owning slaves offered a route to the economic autonomy widely deemed necessary for genuine freedom, a point driven home by a 1780 Virginia law that rewarded veterans of the War of Independence with 300 acres of land—and a slave. South Carolina and Georgia promised every white mili- tary volunteer a slave at the war’s end. So, too, the Lockean vision of the political community as a group of indi- viduals contracting together to secure their natural rights could readily be invoked to defend bondage. Nothing was more essential to freedom, in this view, than the right of self-government and the protection of property against outside interference. These principles suggested that for the gov- ernment to seize property—including slave property—against the owner’s will would be an infringement on liberty. If government by the consent of the governed formed the essence of political freedom, then to require own- ers to give up their slave property would reduce them to slavery. THE CAUSE OF GENERAL LIBERTY Nonetheless, by imparting so absolute a value to liberty and defining free- dom as a universal entitlement rather than a set of rights specific to a par- ticular place or people, the Revolution inevitably raised questions about the status of slavery in the new nation. Before independence, there had been little public discussion of the institution, even though enlightened opinion in the Atlantic world had come to view slavery as morally wrong and economically inefficient, a relic of a barbarous past. As early as 1688, a group of German Quakers issued a “protest” regarding the rights of blacks, declaring it as unjust “to have them slaves, as it is to have other white ones.” Samuel Sewall, a Boston merchant, published The Selling of Joseph in 1700, the first antislavery tract printed in America. All A 1775 notice in The Massachusetts Spy “the sons of Adam,” Sewall insisted, were entitled to “have equal right unto reporting a resolution of the Committees of liberty.” Slavery, as noted in Chapter 4, had initially been banned in Georgia Correspondence of Worcester County that (although it later came to sustain the rice-based plantation economy in advocated the abolition of slavery. that colony). During the course of the eighteenth century, antislavery senti- ments had spread among Pennsylvania’s Quakers, whose belief that all persons possessed the divine “inner light” made them particularly receptive. But it was during the revolutionary era that slavery for the first time became a focus of public debate. The Pennsylvania patriot Benjamin Rush in 1773 called upon “advocates for American liberty” to “espouse the cause of... general liberty” and warned that slavery was one of those What was the impact of the Revolution on slavery? 241 “national crimes” that one day would bring “national punishment.” Jefferson, as mentioned in the previous chapter, unsuccessfully tried to include criticism of slavery in the Declaration of Independence. Although a slaveholder himself, in private he condemned slavery as a system that every day imposed on its victims “more misery, than ages of that which [the colonists] rose in rebellion to oppose.” PETITIONS FOR FREEDOM The Revolution inspired widespread hopes that slavery could be removed from American life. Most dramatically, slaves themselves appreciated that by defining freedom as a universal right, the leaders of the Revolution had devised a weapon that could be used against their own bondage. The lan- guage of liberty echoed in slave communities, North and South. Living amid freedom but denied its benefits, slaves appropriated the patriotic ide- ology for their own purposes. The most insistent advocates of freedom as a universal entitlement were African-Americans, who demanded that the leaders of the struggle for independence live up to their self-proclaimed creed. As early as 1766, white Charlestonians had been shocked when their opposition to the Stamp Act inspired a group of blacks to parade about the city crying “Liberty.” Nine years later, the Provincial Congress of South Carolina felt compelled to investigate the “high notions of liberty” the struggle against Britain had inspired among the slaves. The first concrete steps toward emancipation in revolutionary America were “freedom petitions”—arguments for liberty presented to New England’s courts and legislatures in the early 1770s by enslaved African- Americans. How, one such petition asked, could America “seek release from English tyranny and not seek the same for disadvantaged Africans in her midst?” Some slaves sued in court for being “illegally detained in slav- ery.” The turmoil of war offered other avenues to freedom. Many slaves ran away from their masters and tried to pass as freeborn. The number of fugi- tive slave advertisements in colonial newspapers rose dramatically in the 1770s and 1780s. As one owner put it in accounting for his slave Jim’s escape, “I believe he has nothing in view but freedom.” In 1776, the year of American independence, Lemuel Haynes, a black member of the Massachusetts militia and later a celebrated minister, urged that Americans “extend” their conception of freedom. If liberty were truly “an innate principle” for all mankind, Haynes insisted, “even an African [had] as equally good a right to his liberty in common with Englishmen.” Throughout the revolutionary period, petitions, pamphlets, and sermons by blacks expressed “astonishment” that white patriots failed to realize that “every principle from which America has acted” demanded emancipa- tion. Blacks sought to make white Americans understand slavery as a con- crete reality—the denial of all the essential elements of freedom—not merely as a metaphor for the loss of political self-determination. Petitioning for their freedom in 1773, a group of New England slaves exclaimed, “We have no property! We have no wives! No children! We have no city! No country!” Most slaves of the revolutionary era were only one or two generations removed from Africa. They did not need the ideology of the Revolution to persuade them that freedom was a birthright—the experience of their par- 242 C H. 6 The Revolution Within SLAVERY AND THE REVOLUTION ents and grandparents suggested as much. “My love of freedom,” wrote the black poet Phillis Wheatley in 1783, arose from the “cruel fate” of being “snatch’d from Afric’s” shore. Brought as a slave to Boston in 1761, Wheatley learned to read and published her first poem in a New England newspaper in 1765, when she was around twelve years old. The fact that a volume of her poems had to be printed with a testimonial from promi- nent citizens, including patriot leader John Hancock, affirming that she was in fact the author, illustrates that many whites found it difficult to accept the idea of blacks’ intellectual ability. Yet by invoking the Revolution’s ideology of liberty to demand their own rights and by defin- ing freedom as a universal entitlement, blacks demonstrated how American they had become, even as they sought to redefine what American freedom in fact represented. BRITISH EMANCIPATORS As noted in the previous chapter, some 5,000 slaves fought for American A portrait of the poet Phillis Wheatley independence and many thereby gained their freedom. Yet far more slaves (1753–1784). obtained liberty from the British. Lord Dunmore’s proclamation of 1775, and the Phillipsburgh Proclamation of General Henry Clinton issued four years later, offered sanctuary to slaves who escaped to British lines. Numerous signers of the Declaration of Independence lost slaves as a result. Thirty of Thomas Jefferson’s slaves ran away to the British, as did slaves owned by Patrick Henry and James Madison. All told, nearly 100,000 slaves, including one-quarter of all the slaves in South Carolina and one- third of those in Georgia, deserted their owners and fled to British lines. This was by far the largest exodus from the plantations until the outbreak of the Civil War. Some of these escaped slaves were recaptured as the tide of battle turned in the patriots’ favor. But at the war’s end, some 20,000 were living in three enclaves of British control—New York, Charleston, and Savannah. George Washington insisted they must be returned. Sir Guy Carleton, the British commander in New York, replied that to do so would be “a dishonorable violation of the public faith,” since they had been promised their freedom. In the end, more than 15,000 black men, women, and children accompa- nied the British out of the country. They ended up in Nova Scotia, England, and Sierra Leone, a settlement for former slaves from the United States established by the British on the coast of West Africa. Some were re-enslaved in the West Indies. A number of their stories were indeed remarkable. Harry Washington, an African-born slave of George Washington, had run away from Mount Vernon in 1771 but was recaptured. In 1775, he fled to join Lord Dunmore and eventually became a corporal in a black British regiment, the Black Pioneers. He eventually ended up in Sierra Leone, wh