Unrequited Toil Full Book-pages.pdf

Introduction The essence of US slavery was forced labor. Enslaved people’s unrequited toil built a significant portion of the nation’s wealth. They labored in many farming, mining, construction, tran...

Introduction The essence of US slavery was forced labor. Enslaved people’s unrequited toil built a significant portion of the nation’s wealth. They labored in many farming, mining, construction, transport, and factory settings. But by the 1830s most worked in cotton fields in the Deep South in the most important sector of the American economy. The cotton bales they made streamed into factories in New and old England, spun into yarn and woven into fabric that clothed people across the globe. Cotton shipped abroad each year increased from just a few thousand bales in 1790 to 4 million by 1860. It rose as a proportion of US exports nearly fivefold from 1800 to 1820. By 1840, cotton made up half the value of the nation’s exports, reaching above 57 percent in 1860. And the population of enslaved people grew rapidly too. Nearly 1.2 million bondspersons counted in 1810 became ancestors of nearly 4 million in 1860. They toiled over a landscape several times as large and were fourfold more productive in cotton yielded per enslaved worker. Slavery remade the landscape, shaping the contours of significant parts of the country. Enslaved people became the largest share of property other than the land itself. As property they were worth correspondingly more over time. Between 1770 and 1810, slaves as capital were worth between two and a half and three years of national – not just Southern – income. The value of slaves was roughly double the national value of housing, and in the South, “slave capital largely supplanted and surpassed landed capital.”1 In 1830, aggregated slave property was worth $577 million or 15 percent 1 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 160–61 (quote, 161). 1 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139226585.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press  2 Unrequited Toil of the national wealth. By 1860, the figure reached more than $3 billion or nearly 19 percent of the total US wealth (the equivalent of $12.7 trillion as a share of 2016 gross domestic product).2 By then slave property was worth more than all the investments in factories and railroads combined. Cotton growth guided seemingly everything, even in parts of the coun- try where cotton did not flourish. A slave market spanned the distance of 1,000 miles from the top of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland to the Brazos River bottom in Texas. To get all those bondspersons into the cotton fields, enslavers broke up African American families in old neighborhoods in the Seaboard South. Those were the descendants of enslaved people brought into colonies since the early seventeenth century. And when enslavers set out to make a fortune, they took the able-bodied with them, constructing slave labor camps or what they called plantations. And slavery affected nearly every American, in the cotton shirts, ships’ sails, and banknotes made of cotton fiber. Americans tasted slavery in pies or cookies sweetened with cane sugar, chewed twists of tobacco, enjoyed a bowl of rice, or ate bread baked with Virginia wheat flour. All those commodities were slave-made. Those who savored Texas beef steaks or Southern barbecue ate products of slave labor too. And collateral indus- tries thrived on it even where slavery was outlawed. Some New England factories made coarse woolens designed to clothe bondspersons. Northern bankers furnished capital to buy cotton acreage and slaves. Some banks even sold bonds derived from slave assets, becoming virtual slave dealers. Other city merchants from Boston, Philadelphia, and New York took commissions and shipped cotton. At the base of those supply chains, slavery was much more personal. It was violent social control over African-descended people. Slavery in colonial British North America became closely associated with African heritage. As it developed, slavery and race became fused to such a degree that noticeable markers of African descent became disqualifications from civil rights. Over time, African-descended people had to demonstrate that they were not slaves. And for black people in most states, slavery was the basic assumption in American law. By the same token, European descent became closely associated with citizenship and a rough political equality 2 Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2014), 246; Samuel H. Williamson, “Seven Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a U.S. Dollar Amount, 1774 to Present,” MeasuringWorth, online: www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/, accessed: April 10, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139226585.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press  Introduction 3 in the early United States, so much so that by the 1840s, a recent male European immigrant could virtually step off the ship and go to the polls to vote while an African American man whose ancestors had been in the country for several generations could not. African-descended Americans bore the social costs of slavery. They paid several times over, in fact. They paid at the point of sale when children were stolen by strangers, when parents were snatched up by slave traders, or when spouses were separated at sheriffs’ auctions follow- ing owners’ deaths or business failures. Enslaved people forfeited social capital when separations prevented ancestors’ wisdom and knowledge from being passed to the next generation. They paid with ruined health. Their bodies were bruised, broken, or raped through machine-tooled violence in the fields and under their roofs, tears of anguish and humilia- tion running down the generations. They paid for the pernicious myth that dark skin was inferior to light – that African ancestry was lower than European. And they paid with the generations-deep theft of wages, stolen inventions, and unrepaid investments in mastering the skills that produced millions of bales of cotton and other goods and commodities. Yet enslaved people did not simply struggle along with the forlorn hope of a better day. They unfastened chains as solitary fugitives and as armed rebels. Some stood up to individual owners and overseers. Others joined invading forces. In each generation, handfuls picked up books and took up pens, using hard-won literacy to publicize African Americans’ protests and visions of liberation. They worked to undermine slavery’s laws and poli- tical support. In quiet places of worship, they developed new theologies, new ways of knowing, and new ways of narrating their world. African- descended artists set about creating literature, music, and poetry, funda- mentals of American culture. The shared experience of forced labor bound many together, but the unruly strategies of enslavers tended to pull bonds- people relentlessly apart. Slavery was never one thing, and enslaved people were never homogenous. There was no stagnation or sleepy plantation. There was precious little community. And never before did slavery trans- form in such a short time and within one political nation as in the United States of America. Cotton capitalism stood at the center of US slavery, but it was one among many variations over space and time. There was never one Slave South but “many Souths,” each with differing kinds of slavery.3 Work 3 William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion, vol. 1: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1990), 35. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139226585.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press  4 Unrequited Toil varied by region and social situation. Some bondspersons labored in city factories or urban dwellings. Others grew grain, sawed timber, smithed iron, milled flour, or caulked ships’ hulls. Some cultivated rice in the swampy Lowcountry while others staffed Louisiana canebrakes. Bondspersons served plates of food or drove wagons, and worked on steamboats or in railroad gangs. Some were forced to perform sex work. The young pulled weeds and tended cattle. The aged cradled babies and groomed horses. And their toils changed over time. Cotton slavery, along with nineteenth-century African American language, folklore, and reli- gious persuasions, would have been unrecognizable to the first African arrivals in British North America in the early seventeenth century. Instead of cotton slavery being normative, it should be thought of as the product of a certain time and place, distinctive in the Americas and indeed the globe, a highly commercialized outcome of a centuries-long process. Slavery in British North America began when castoffs of a broader Atlantic slave trade arrived in distant outposts of empire. The engine of the transatlantic slave trade of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was sugar and, secondarily, gold and silver. But what became the Eastern United States grew no sugar, and its gold had not yet been discovered. One historian terms the first generations of enslaved people “Atlantic creoles.”4 They arrived in New England, New York, the Virginia and Maryland Chesapeake, and the Carolina Lowcountry. Atlantic creoles were often multilingual, Muslim, Catholic, or adherents of African tradi- tional religions.5 They generally understood the geography over which they were scattered. On arrival in the colonies, few Atlantic creoles considered themselves African, let alone African American. Those identities took time to develop. Many seventeenth-century arrivals in New Amsterdam were from southwestern Africa and arrived speaking Kongo or Mbundu as well as Portuguese or Dutch. Some arrived from Madagascar. Others were already creolized, re-exported from the Caribbean or Brazil. The English conquered New Amsterdam in 1664, and New York became the biggest slave colony in English North America in the seventeenth century. Until 1700 more African-descended people lived in New York than in Virginia or South Carolina. In New York, African-descended 4 Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 29. 5 Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139226585.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press  Introduction 5 bondspersons tended to work on small farms or in trades and transporta- tion. Things were different farther south. Virginia’s earliest African arrivals were also from southwestern Africa, and a few worked their way out of slavery to become small landowners. Many toiled side by side with unfree indentured servants, poor Englishmen and women in tobacco fields with whom some made common cause. But in seventeenth-century South Carolina, most enslaved people were not even African-descended. They were captured Indians, taken from confederacies reaching as far west as present-day Arkansas, exported from Charles Town to destinations like Boston and Barbados. In the seventeenth century, the English North American colonies were societies with slaves as opposed to West Indian slave societies, the differ- ence being that societies with slaves were places in which slavery was marginal to economic activity and political institutions. Laws and cus- toms tended to keep enslaved people in chains, but they had some degree of mobility and did not seem a grave threat to domestic security. During the eighteenth century, patterns changed. The Chesapeake and Carolina Lowcountry emerged as slave societies in the decades after 1700. South Carolina enslavers shifted from exporting captive Indians to exporting rice. To do that they began buying Kongo and Senegambian captives (embarked from present-day Angola, Senegal, and Gambia) to toil in rice fields. As soon as the colony began importing Africans, South Carolina passed laws giving enslavers private authority to maim and kill in the name of discipline and security. In the eighteenth century, Chesapeake tobacco planters replaced English indentured servants with imported Africans, this time from the Bight of Biafra in present-day southern Nigeria and Cameroon. Perhaps four in five were Igbo. Unlike Atlantic creoles, these bondspersons were captured from the forested interior. Captives did not arrive speaking English or other European languages, but they did carve out distinctive cultural spaces on plantations. And by the time George Washington was born in 1732, Virginia was a slave society exporting tobacco. Like the Carolina Lowcountry, Tidewater Virginia relied on its black majority as the labor backbone of the staple crop. In slave societies, owners and managers intensified violence to boost productivity, mitigate rebelliousness, and prevent uprisings. Virginia passed laws permitting enslavers to inflict disfiguring punishments on bondspersons while requiring poor whites to perform militia service, policing the colony’s growing slave population. At the same time, New York and the mid-Atlantic colonies north of Delaware relied less https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139226585.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press  6 Unrequited Toil on slave labor. Their slave laws relaxed or fell into disuse, yet racial designations did not. Anti-black racism followed slavery’s development but did not unfollow its decline. As Virginia and South Carolina became slave societies, they drew a rigid color line. Any person of African descent was presumed to be enslaved. From the Lowcountry to New England, as one historian puts it, “racial exploitation and racial conflict have been part of the DNA of American culture.”6 And as they invented racial slavery, Americans were quickly commercializing it. That made it distinc- tive in both North America and the Atlantic world. Slavery was not generally commercialized in North America before the eighteenth century. In Native American contexts, captives were often incorporated – on the lowest rungs of a society – in place of lost members. They had spiritual and social worth rather than commercial value. Most captives were children and females, some traded and others captured, who were easier to incorporate than adult males. And captivity was not neces- sarily better in African or Native American contexts than in US slavery so far as material conditions or physical treatment were concerned. In the North American interior, Iroquois captives, for instance, were subject to arbitrary and intensive personal violence long after capture.7 Comparing circumstances of personal violence versus contexts misses the point. Differing global slaveries were not qualitatively better or worse; rather they had different defining characteristics and values structures. In precolonial West Africa, being enslaved meant not belonging to a lineage. Captives had political value, and enslavement did not imply chattel slavery or commercial ownership. Captives were outsiders. Lineages or kinship networks – rather than individuals – were the building blocks of polities, states, and kingdoms. Bondspersons tended to be kid- nap victims, human debt payments, or war captives. Some had been condemned for witchcraft. By definition they were outside of a lineage in places in which status and citizenship were determined by membership. Slaves streaming in from tributary states or captives of foreign wars were different ethnicities than captors, but African slavery was not a function of race. The charge that black people enslaved – and sold – other black people would not have made sense to African people whose identity was Akan, 6 David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006), 226. 7 Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139226585.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press  Introduction 7 Yoruba, or Bambara. To Europeans unfamiliar with the intricacies of African political economies, captives looked black or African and could be lumped together. John Pory, colonial Virginia’s first elected speaker in its assembly, popularized the myth that Africans were biblically “des- cended from Ham the cursed son of Noah.”8 The Hamitic myth legitimat- ing enslavement ignored historical context and difference. Some enslavers noticed differences but attributed stereotypes to them. “Igbos,” writes one historian, were thought “prone to suicide and must be watched; Coromantees [Akan from present-day Ghana] were rebellious and must be chained; Angolas were passive and need not be chained.” But such superficial observations mask the incredible complexity of African poli- tical, social, and linguistic diversity, along with the fact that participating in the slave trade was often a defensive strategy. Some polities, such as Dahomey in present-day Benin, were highly stratified kingdoms while others, such as the Balanta of present-day Guinea-Bissau, were acephalous (headless). Dahomey consolidated and took captives to protect its own citizens from slavery while the Balanta took refuge in places enslavers found hard to penetrate. There were other critical differences. Among African polities, linguistic differences could be as pronounced as those between English and Chinese. Some were Muslim like the states of the Sokoto Caliphate in present-day northern Nigeria; others were Christian, like the kingdom of Kongo centered in what is now northern Angola, while many were devoted both to a world-historical religion such as Islam and also the gods of their ancestors.9 In that context, enslaved people were those without a social identity other than that of their captors. Even so, slavery within West African polities was characterized by toil and degradation. Most enslaved people in Africa worked in food production, which was usually female gendered. Environmental conditions in forests and most savannas prevented agricultural methods using draft animals. Human power was essential. And most African slaves were female. Ironically, not belonging to a lineage could in some circumstances make slaves fit for civil service since it implied no family loyalties. And some polities fielded slave armies loyal to the government rather than to a lineage or 8 Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York, NY: Nation Books, 2016), 34. 9 Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York, NY: Viking, 2007), 212–13 (quotations); John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the New World, 2nd edn. (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1998). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139226585.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press  8 Unrequited Toil faction within it. Until the nineteenth century, there were few polities in West Africa in which enslaved people labored on commercial plantations. West African captives lived so close to the bone that few women were able to reproduce. And in response to European demand at the coast, the “way of death” usually associated with the transatlantic Middle Passage started deep inland, along a slaving frontier.10 Some 25 million African captives were taken in the four centuries of the transatlantic slave trade, males being sold and females retained by a one-to-two ratio. For males, captivity meant the likelihood of death, if not humiliation, violence, and transport to the coast, often through middlemen, followed by incarcera- tion and sale to European enslavers based on ships. That was no free market. On the West African coast, the one-way trade in captives to maritime buyers was overlaid with a complex web of taxes and gratuities to the local and regional authorities. In Luanda, in present-day Angola, Europeans had to pay for the privilege of buying captives, and local authorities tightly controlled trade. So too in Ouidah in present-day Benin, where the captive trade supported the Dahomey monarchy. Sale at the coast was the torturous beginning of the transatlantic cross- ing. Some 12 million – mostly males – crossed the Atlantic under those circumstances over four centuries; survivors were resold and enslaved in the Americas.11 By 1776, of all of those who sailed to the Americas, 80 percent of those who had crossed the Atlantic were African. Of the millions who crossed the Atlantic, however, about 560,000 arrived in British North America and the United States, or about 4.7 percent of the total. By comparison, 21 percent went to Spanish America; 4 percent went to the Dutch colonies; about 22 percent went to the British West Indies, including Barbados and Jamaica; more than 14 percent went to the French West Indies, including St. Domingue (Haiti), Guadaloupe, and Martinique; and 34 percent (a third) went to Brazil.12 For many, the path was indirect, and transport among colonies was part of a terrifying ordeal.13 That Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean was a journey into a new kind of slavery. It began in sugar fields where captives grew 10 Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988). 11 Sowande’ M. Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2016). 12 Enrico Dal Lago, American Slavery, Atlantic Slavery, and Beyond: The U.S. “Peculiar Institution” in International Perspective (New York, NY: Routledge, 2016), 22. 13 Gregory E. O’Malley, Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619–1807 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139226585.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press  Introduction 9 crops for export and intensified over hundreds of years. Slave ships arrived legally in the United States until 1808, when Congress banned the landing of foreign captives. As it developed in the nineteenth century, US slavery became closely associated with chattel slavery. As formerly enslaved James W. C. Pennington put it, “[t]he being of slavery, its soul and body, lives and moves in the chattel principle, the property principle, the bill of sale principle.”14 Chattel slavery was the ability to sell a human being pri- vately. It implied a market value and a cash equivalent. American ensla- vers bought captives with cash and credit and took out equity mortgages on slaves just as they did on real estate, the body of the enslaved person performing the function of collateral. Scholars call that commodification. In the early US republic, some states imposed restrictions on chattel slavery, such as outlawing the sale of a bondsperson under a deed of manumission (an act of freeing an individual). But even states that out- lawed slavery did not convert chattel slaves to non-slaves simply because they crossed a border into free territory. Courts made that clear repeat- edly. Instead, enslaved people were treated as moveable assets. In fact, US slavery between 1815 and 1865 was a “radically commer- cialized” extension of slavery in the Atlantic world.15 In that antebellum moment, argues one historian, “[s]lave property was mobile, self- supporting, more liquid than any store of value short of sterling bills, and perhaps the most attractive kind of collateral in the entire Western world.”16 Enslaved people could be converted into cash readily. Their market value was equity enslavers could leverage to raise capital. But the process did not happen immediately. The commercialization of American slavery closely followed a transition from colonial slavery to cotton slav- ery. The old British system of merchant capitalism supported the growth of rice, sugar, tobacco, and collateral commodities markets. It was capi- talistic but organized within an imperial framework. After 1783, the American economy changed dramatically, reorienting to a new birth of capitalism. Cotton – native to Mexico but scarcely planted before the Revolution – suddenly became vitally important. And the political econ- omy of slavery shifted. 14 James W. C. Pennington, The Fugitive Blacksmith; or, Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington, Pastor of a Presbyterian Church, New York, Formerly a Slave in the State of Maryland, United States (London: Charles Gilpin, 1849), iv. 15 Joseph C. Miller, The Problem of Slavery as History: A Global Approach (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 120. 16 Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told, 297. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139226585.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press  10 Unrequited Toil That seismic transition was part of a world-historical event known as the Industrial Revolution. Between 1780 and 1810, Britain generated more wealth in a shorter time than any society in global history, and at the center of that divergence from the other empires of the world was the manufacture of cotton yarn and fabric and the money and credit that financed it. English factory owners imported technologies from tradi- tional centers of spinning and weaving in South Asia and China, incre- mentally mechanizing production while bringing divisions of labor together under factory roofs. Water and then steam power from abundant coal boosted efficiencies that gave northwest England a global compara- tive advantage in the booming textile business. London and Liverpool merchants financed the process. And British imperial might opened mar- kets for cheap cottons, which disrupted old patterns of trade, labor, and consumption. In factories, workers were brought under the supervision of owners who regimented their working days and, increasingly, policed their behavior. Owners paid workers for their output, whether measured in pieces or in hours spent working. The key to American slavery was forcing work with violence and small incentives, and wages enslaved people earned were confiscated by owners. William Wells Brown called that “unrequited toil,” which was a protest against the dignity of fairly paid labor.17 Even without paying bondspersons, enslavers created factories in the fields. Enslavers strictly regimented time, policed workers’ lives, and demanded ever higher productivity. Their work regime was fully incorporated into an emerging capitalist modernity.18 The process spurred cotton cultivation in many places, including the Caribbean or West Indies, but the American South – within the newly independent United States – had a critical advantage. “What distinguished the United States from virtually every other cotton-growing area in the world was planters’ command of nearly unlimited supplies of land, labor, and capital, and their unparalleled political power.”19 Ironically, American independence gave unprecedented political representation to enslavers. All that was needed was a strategy. The confluence of a newly independent United States and a growth in demand for cotton led to a vision of a continental empire. When enslavers 17 William Wells Brown, Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself (Boston, MA: The Anti-Slavery Office, 1847), 14. 18 Mark M. Smith, Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). 19 Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York, NY: Vintage, 2014), 105. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139226585.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press  Introduction 11 in South Carolina and Georgia – where cotton grew well – looked to the west (lands straddling the Mississippi River), they saw forests beneath which cotton plantations could be constructed. The sovereignties of Native Americans did not seem to count much against the shimmering possibilities of a cotton paradise worked by bound laborers. When Virginia and Maryland enslavers looked to that same southwest, they viewed an outlet for their seeming surplus of bondspersons, the descen- dants of Igbos and Kongo captives now farming grain, cutting shingles, and transporting bushels. And when New Yorkers and other East Coast city merchants cast an eye on the distant river bottoms draining into the Mississippi River meandering toward New Orleans, they glimpsed the potential market for credit and consumer goods in the southern interior. And those interests in cotton, slavery, and credit coalesced in the federal government. The new US republic committed itself to westward expansion, a euphemism for conquering a continental empire. What it called the Old Southwest – the lands that became Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Texas – held the key to prosperity and power. And in a generation, American exports were reoriented to this global commodity, manufactured in England, and sold seemingly every- where from New York to Luanda to Dhaka, in present-day Bangladesh. Even New England factory owners – upstarts in the new industrial bonanza – took a friendly interest in the expansion of cotton slavery. But as slavery expansion became entrenched in the political institutions of the federal republic, slavery sowed divisions. Enslavers were too aggressively expansionist for many fellow citizens. Beginning in the 1810s, the movement of so many bondspersons across the South and into the West created suspicion among non-enslavers. Citizens in states like Ohio and Illinois, where slavery had been prohibited by the 1787 Northwest Ordinance and outlawed in state constitutions, looked west and saw enslavers as a threat to democracy. By the same token, enslavers considered barriers to slavery a threat to their rights. Citizens taking bondspersons from Virginia to Missouri held fast to their constitutionally protected property in people. Out of that conflict grew political disagreement that fell into crisis after 1845 when the United States annexed the enslavers’ republic of Texas. Historians have viewed the resulting US war against Mexico as the catalyst of the American Civil War of 1861–65, which brought chattel slavery to an end.20 20 Michael F. Holt, The Fate of Their Country: Politicians, Slavery Extension, and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2004). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139226585.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press  1 Counterrevolutionaries Patriots insisted that the War of American Independence (1775–82) was a struggle against British political slavery. In 1774, Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner and newly elected member of the Virginia General Assembly, voiced the widespread view that the imperial crisis was a “deliberate, systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.”1 But it was also a war to preserve and extend chattel slavery in the Chesapeake south to the Georgia Lowcountry. The seeming paradox of American freedom and American slavery is resolved by the fact that a rough political equality for whites was conditioned by if not premised on black–white inequality. Fighting for principles of political equality against a distant colonial authority, American Patriots struggled to preserve their own rights to property in people. African-descended Americans experienced the crush of those two opposing forces.2 Boston King was one. Enslaved near Charles Town (now Charleston), South Carolina, he escaped to the British, becoming a Loyalist and – as a consequence – a man without a country. He fled to New York with the British forces. And when the war ended, he fled again, becoming an expatriate in Nova Scotia, England, and finally Sierra Leone in West Africa. Like most bondspersons, he was faced with a series of narrow, even choiceless choices, and responded the best he could to contingent circumstances. 1 Thomas Jefferson cited in Peter A. Dorsey, Common Bondage: Slavery as Metaphor in Revolutionary America (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2009), 114. 2 Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 1975); Gerald Home, The Counter- Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2014). 12 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139226585.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press  Counterrevolutionaries 13 King was born in North America to a father who had survived the Middle Passage from Africa, most likely embarked on a slave ship sailing from Luanda in present-day Angola. “My father was stolen away from Africa when he was young,” he testified in 1798.3 Between 1730 and 1744, nearly three-quarters of South Carolina’s slaves had suffered capture and sale in the Kongo-Angola region. They were overwhelmingly male, and many captives were prisoners of war like the leaders of the 1739 Stono Rebellion. When Spanish authorities in Saint Augustine welcomed enslaved refugees fleeing down the coast from Carolina owners, they found that they were welcoming fellow Catholics. King’s father was a devoutly religious Anglican, although a law passed at mid-century outlawed missionary work to slaves. After 1750, most captives came from West Africa. King said nothing of the origins of his mother, but she was a seamstress and a healer adept at herbal remedies learned from local Indians. South Carolina has been termed a “Colony of a Colony” because in the eighteenth century, it produced rice and other foodstuffs for the British sugar islands along with export commodities like indigo.4 Rice-growing South Carolina used slave labor to grow food that other enslaved people would consume. By the time Boston King was born in 1760, South Carolina was majority black, and majority enslaved. He was spared fieldwork. When he was six, he performed household chores, and at nine he was tasked with tending cattle. King became a groom’s assistant, taking care of horses for a master who enjoyed the popular sport of horse racing. He fell in with chums who taught him to curse and swear. At twelve years old, he had a dreamlike vision of the Apocalypse including a glimpse of damned souls. King became a Christian. He quit cursing and keeping bad company, yet he could not advance in his faith through learning or public worship. But faith did not keep him from hardship. For losing or misplacing a tool, “my master beat me severely, striking me upon the head, or any other part without mercy.” The beatings came so hard that he could not work for weeks at a time.5 The War of Independence became King’s path out of slavery. 3 Boston King, “Memoirs of the Life of Boston King, a Black Preacher: Written by Himself, during His Residence at Kingswood School,” The Methodist Magazine (March–June 1798), 105 (quotation), online: http://antislavery.eserver.org/narratives/boston_king/, accessed: July 29, 2016. 4 Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York, NY: Random House, 1974), 13–34 (quotations). 5 King, “Memoirs of the Life of Boston King,” 107. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139226585.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press  14 Unrequited Toil It was a perilous road. British forces drove a wedge between Patriot enslavers and bondspersons like King. In 1779, General Sir Henry Clinton had issued a proclamation promising slaves freedom in exchange for service. It was patterned on a similar proclamation given by Virginia governor Lord Dunmore in 1775, which summoned black Loyalists by the hundreds. In South Carolina, thousands of enslaved people fled to the British. The British took Charleston in May 1780, but King initially hesitated. His parents were still in the area, and fleeing to the British meant possibly losing contact. But one day he was accused of stealing a horse and, faced with severe punishment, King recalled, “I determined to go to Charles-Town, and throw myself into the hands of the English.” It was a desperate move. “They received me readily,” he sighed, “and I began to feel the happiness of liberty, of which I knew nothing before.” Liberty was tenuous and solitary. “I was much grieved at first,” he recalled, “to be obliged to leave my friends, and reside among strangers.”6 Liberty nearly killed him. King contracted smallpox and, near death, was aided by an English soldier. King’s loyalty followed from his duty to the man. He worked as a nurse and as a manservant. And when the British lost South Carolina, King departed Charleston on a British warship. He wasn’t alone. Throughout the colonies, African-descended Loyalists aided a counterinsurgency against Patriot rebels. While Patriots were creating clandestine committees of correspondence to organize resistance against British authorities, they became alarmed when African-descended people formed similar communications networks. A Georgian worried to John Adams in 1775 that “[t]he negroes have a wonderful art of communicat- ing intelligence among themselves; it will run several hundreds of miles in a week or fortnight.”7 Patriots insisted that they were fighting against political enslavement by Britain. But facing a counterrevolution of black freedom, they were careful to distinguish political slavery for whites from chattel slavery for blacks. So many Africans had landed recently in the colonies that Patriot officials became panicked over possible slave rebellions. Virginia attempted to impose a prohibitive tax on slave imports, but Parliament overruled it. Both North Carolina and Georgia suspended slave imports. As disagreements between the colonies and Britain mounted in 1774, 6 King, “Memoirs of the Life of Boston King,” 108. 7 Sylviane A. Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2014), 117. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139226585.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press  Counterrevolutionaries 15 Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island banned the slave trade, citing its immorality. Whatever the reasons, the colonies suspended the importation of captives susceptible to the contagion of liberty that Patriots themselves were carrying up and down the Eastern Seaboard.8 African-descended Americans seized the ideas of the Revolution and claimed them as theirs. Patriots’ rhetoric of political liberty inspired pro- tests from the enslaved, and so did a British legal case, Somerset v. Stewart. In 1772, word reached America of a British court’s granting freedom for an enslaved man, James Somerset. Somerset was enslaved by a Boston customs official. While in England, Somerset fled from his owner after suffering injuries and abuse. When Somerset was recaptured, his owner consigned him to a ship bound for Jamaica. The court intervened and found that it was illegal for any bondsperson to be transported from England for the purpose of sale. Although ambiguous, the Somerset decision contributed to a rising tide of antislavery activism. African-descended colonists seized on the case to argue that they too were free. In early 1773, African-descended Bostonians led by Felix Holbrook petitioned the governor and legislature for slavery’s abolition. The legislature debated the petition, but opinion was divided. Radicals like merchant John Hancock considered it hypocritical to press for poli- tical liberty from Britain while holding slaves. But savvy political leaders like John Adams demurred. While sympathetic, he contended that it would be difficult to endorse African-descended people’s calls for liberty while making common cause with Virginians and New Yorkers who owned bondspersons.9 Like Patriot committees of correspondence, word of the petitions from Holbrook and others traveled up and down the colonies, on the lips of black sailors and from the mouths of wagoners and travelers. It inspired similar black activism in other locales. African-descended residents of Salem, Stratford, and Fairfield, Connecticut petitioned against slavery, contending that “the Cause of Liberty” was inconsistent with holding slaves.10 A group of black residents petitioned the New Hampshire gov- ernment for freedom. Protests inspired by the Somerset decision erupted in New Jersey and other colonies, and in a third petition submitted to 8 Edward Countryman, Enjoy the Same Liberty: Black Americans and the Revolutionary Era (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2011). 9 George William Van Cleve, A Slaveholders’ Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010), chap. 1. 10 Douglas R. Egerton, Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2009), 60. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139226585.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press  16 Unrequited Toil Massachusetts authorities, enslaved people joined Holbrook and demanded liberties based on natural rights. Again, the petitioners received no official response. In the revolutionary ferment of ideas, Lemuel Haynes gave one of the most urgent antislavery appeals building on the emerging black Patriot rhetoric. Haynes was the ideological brother of Thomas Paine, author of the radical pro-Patriot tract Common Sense. Haynes joined a Massachusetts militia in 1774 and a Connecticut regiment of the Continental Army during the war. He went on to become a preacher and theologian. “Liberty is [e]qually as pre[c]ious to a [b]lack man,” he argued in 1776, “as it is to a white one, and [b]ondage [e]qually as intollarable [sic] to the one as it is to the other.”11 Liberty has a powerful and widespread appeal, but one of the ironies of the American Revolution was that liberty for some was construed as their right to hold others in bondage. It was not merely that talk of liberty prompted a discussion of slavery, but that slavery framed discussions of liberty. When Virginia leaders like Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, or George Washington raised protests to imperial authority, they did not have to look farther than their own fields to imagine the effects of political oppression. Virginians would not be made slaves of a distant, unrepresentative British government and warned Britons that a Parliament that taxed subjects without proper representation was a looming tyranny. Loyalists rejected that position and held that Parliament represented all subjects. In his 1775 pamphlet on the justice of imperial taxation, British essayist Samuel Johnson bitingly wrote: “If slavery be thus fatally contagious, how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”12 After Lord Dunmore’s proclamation, hundreds, if not thousands, of black Virginians fled to the British. During the Revolution, some 100,000 bondspersons unfastened their chains. While most were later re-enslaved, many like Boston King made good their escape. But King left behind everything, including family, evacuating Charleston with the British forces for New York City, which had been under British control since the fall of 1776. 11 Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 171. 12 Samuel Johnson, Taxation no Tyranny: An Answer to the Resolutions and Addresses of the American Congress (London: T. Cadell, 1775), 89; David Waldstreicher, Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2004). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139226585.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press  Counterrevolutionaries 17 There King found himself some 750 miles away from slavery in South Carolina, but scarcely free. He attempted to ply his carpentry trade, but lacked carpentry tools and was forced to work as a domestic servant and manual laborer. After failing to earn enough in carpentry to clothe him- self, he consented to serve a master who worked him for four months without pay. But life brightened on the war-torn landscape. As King scouted for work and scrounged for food, he met a fellow refugee, Violet. The thirty-two-year-old had fled an owner in Wilmington, North Carolina, about 170 miles up the coast from Charleston. The two shared a familiar accent and the experience of war. Their courtship was brief. Boston and Violet married in 1780. Behind British lines, King was also able to worship with black Methodists, includ- ing refugees from the Virginia Tidewater. But that first year of marriage was turbulent. King came down with an illness that incapacitated him for five weeks. Scraping by, King risked re-enslavement by working aboard boats in New Jersey, attending a school at night, and learning to read the Bible. But northern New Jersey was scarcely stable. Irregular militias on both sides were taking property, harassing, and murdering one another. In late 1775, a twenty-one-year-old enslaved man named Titus had ditched his farm implements and set off for Williamsburg, Virginia, after word of Dunmore’s proclamation reached Monmouth County. Two years later, the six-foot-tall “Colonel Tye” reappeared at the Battle of Monmouth. Afterward, Tye led a Loyalist guerilla band that captured supplies and killed and arrested Patriots. Operating from Refugeetown on Sandy Hook, Colonel Tye’s multiracial militia enacted the Patriot night- mare of armed former slaves taking vengeance on whites.13 Tye’s campaigns were part of the social disruptions loosed by war, which nearly swept up Boston King. British authorities in New York City received Tye’s captives and paid him handsomely for much-needed sup- plies of livestock. But his command was short-lived. Tye died of wounds suffered in a raid in September 1780. Fleeing re-enslavement in New Jersey, Boston King escaped across the Arthur Kill River near Amboy at low tide. He crossed Staten Island and commandeered a boat that he rowed to Manhattan, where British authorities readmitted him to the city. He soon returned to Violet. “When I arrived at New York,” King sighed, “my friends rejoiced to see me once more restored to liberty, and joined me in praising the Lord for his mercy and goodness.”14 13 Egerton, Death or Liberty, chap. 3. 14 King, “Memoirs of the Life of Boston King,” 158. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139226585.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press  18 Unrequited Toil And while black Loyalists found freedom among the British, Patriots promised freedom to African-descended soldiers who fought for the cause of independence. Both the US Continental Army and state militias enrolled African-descended soldiers, enslaved or free, and some of the former served in place of their owners. Whatever the wishes of comman- ders, units tended to be integrated. Some African-descended soldiers rose to noncommissioned officer, but none was commissioned an officer. African-descended enlistees tended to serve longer than their white coun- terparts and made up 10 percent of the Continental Army, or about 5,000 soldiers.15 Despite Patriot commitments to slavery’s continuation, African-descended soldiers helped win the War for Independence. By 1781, Patriots were winning the war. French military and financial assistance turned what looked like an impending American defeat in 1780 into an opening for peace negotiations. British forces invaded Virginia and from Yorktown and Portsmouth harassed the Patriots. Thousands more African-descended refugees fled to them, and British forces under Banastre Tarleton raided as far west as Thomas Jefferson’s Albemarle County. Sixteen enslaved people fled George Washington’s Mount Vernon on the Potomac River, and in all British General George Cornwallis’s forces attracted 4,500 former slaves.16 Then French forces landed 3,000 soldiers and imposed a naval blockade of the Chesapeake. The British invasion of Virginia was halted. Disease ravaged British soldiers and black Loyalists alike. Epidemics of typhus and smallpox broke out in camps, killing hundreds of the British troops under General George Cornwallis. African-descended fugitives from slavery were forced into the deadly camps and perished along with British soldiers. Many who fled from their erstwhile liberators were captured by forces under Washington, who led a force from New York in response to the invasion. Cornwallis was under siege at Yorktown, and hundreds of refugees starved and perished from disease in between the beleaguered British and the Franco-American forces. Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, Virginia, in October 1781. As had been the case on Gwynn 15 John Wood Sweet, “Venture Smith and the Law of Slavery,” in Venture Smith and the Business of Slavery and Freedom, ed. James Brewer Stewart (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), 83–128. 16 Gary B. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (New York, NY: Penguin, 2005), chap. 7; Andrew O’Shaughnessy, The Men Who Lost America: British Command during the Revolutionary War and the Preservation of the Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), chap. 7. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139226585.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press  Counterrevolutionaries 19 Island some twenty miles up the Chesapeake Bay, black refugees were in deplorable conditions as disease compounded famine. Virginia Patriot St. George Tucker observed that “[a]n immense number of Negroes have died in the most miserable Manner in York[town].”17 The survivors would be re-enslaved. As French ships sailed back to the Caribbean, word of Cornwallis’s surrender was on its way to London. The War of Independence was over. Despite the importance of enslaved people in the Revolution, peace negotiations between British and American diplomats ignored the plight of African-descended Loyalists. Their strategic importance had disap- peared. In defeat, many British officers like Banastre Tarleton betrayed little sympathy for the plight of African-descended Americans. Following the war, he would become perhaps the most energetic supporter of the transatlantic slave trade as a Member of Parliament representing Liverpool.18 The Treaty of Paris in 1783 recognized American indepen- dence, but British negotiators consented to American demands to recover their slaves. That threatened to shatter refugee communities in New York City. British forces evacuated New York in 1783 after news of the Treaty of Paris arrived. Enslavers arrived to claim some 6,000 African-descended refugees. King recalled seeing “our masters coming from Virginia, North- Carolina, and other parts, and seizing upon their slaves in the streets of New-York, or even dragging them out of their beds.” Dread of re- enslavement terrorized many of King’s friends and fellow worshippers. “For some days,” he recalled, “we lost our appetite for food, and sleep departed from our eyes.” But one British commander stood up for the black Loyalists who had risked so much. Disregarding terms of the peace treaty, British commander Sir Guy Carleton refused to return Boston King and thousands of others to slavery. But that meant leaving for good. At the end of April 1783, British officials recorded 3,000 African-descended refugees in what officials called a “Book of Negroes” as part of an evacuation of Loyalists to Nova Scotia. Many were given General Birch Certificates, so called after Brigadier-General Samuel Birch who issued them. Boston and Violet King were among them. He was listed as a twenty-three-year-old “stout fellow” 17 Michael A. McDonnell, The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 476. 18 Paula A. Dumas, Proslavery Britain: Fighting for Slavery in an Era of Abolition (London: Palgrave McMillan, 2016), chap. 1. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139226585.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press  20 Unrequited Toil and she a thirty-five-year-old “stout wench,” stout meaning sturdy or robust. They stepped onto dry land in early August in Birchtown, Nova Scotia, among 400 refugees who started a settlement. Birchtown was an enclave and several miles from Shelburne near the southeast tip of the island. Life was difficult for black Loyalist refugees. Besides poor prospects in farming, the King family faced hostility from white Nova Scotia residents. In 1784, white former soldiers attacked Birchtown. Boston and Violet King went through periods of famine and hardship, working a variety of jobs. Boston became a Methodist minister at Preston, near Halifax.19 But when the opportunity came to leave Nova Scotia with other refugees for a colony in West Africa, they took it. British abolitionists helped found Freetown, Sierra Leone, which promised to be a haven for African- descended people, including former slaves despite its close proximity to Bance Island, a hub of the transatlantic slave trade. Thomas Peters, who had fled from slavery in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1776, led some 1,196 African-descended Canadians to Freetown after securing sponsor- ship in England. But the refugee colony foundered because of poor pre- paration, fights among the leadership, hostility from locals, and above all a disease environment that claimed the lives of most of the settlers. Colonists were forced to seek help from neighboring slave traders. Violet and Boston King emigrated in 1792 and sojourned in England in 1794. Boston taught briefly near Bristol. The Kings returned to Sierra Leone in 1796 and continued to preach their Methodist faith. But black Americans were not going back to Africa so much as being cast ashore in a foreign, hostile place, thousands of miles from where King’s father had been embarked as a child. That odyssey ended for Boston King in 1802 when he, like Violet, succumbed to malaria on a West African landscape that was never quite home.20 The American Revolution decided the question of independence, but it did not decide whether slavery was a residue of the colonial past or a force shaping the future United States. Enslaved people had proved a powerful undercurrent that showed the inconsistencies in Patriots’ rhetoric and Patriots’ reluctance to include African-descended people in their vision of freedom and self-government. 19 James W. St. G. Walker, The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, 1783–1870 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993 [rep- rint; 1976]), chap. 4. 20 Egerton, Death or Liberty, chap. 8. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139226585.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press  2 Slow Death for Slavery? In the newly independent United States, slavery seemed to be on the road to marginality, even extinction. Britain punished the new nation for revolution by closing its West Indian markets to Chesapeake tobacco and Carolina rice, which left enslavers with surplus bound laborers work- ing at a losing economic game. And after the tumultuous seven-year war, enslaved Americans faced a conflict of rootedness versus rootlessness, knitting ties against the constant unraveling done by enslavers. But victor- ious Patriots hedged against freeing bondspersons too soon. They scrambled to patch up the slave societies in the Chesapeake, Carolinas, and Georgia, while mid-Atlantic enslavers reasserted their control over African-descended people. It is often asked why the republican principles of liberty and self- government did not apply to enslaved people. One answer has to do with the economic geography of slavery. After 1776, states with small or marginal slave populations began to abolish slavery gradually. But free- dom did not equal citizenship. In the flush of Revolutionary fervor, the sole state that outlawed slavery immediately was Vermont, which had the smallest slave population. The rest of New England, along with New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, refused to emancipate enslaved people, instead setting a course for gradual abolition or else leaving it to courts and African-descended people to challenge their enslavement. States dependent on slave labor did not consider abolition. But some permitted manumission or freeing bondspersons individually. Virginia, Maryland, and other states to the south (except North Carolina) liberal- ized manumission laws. They left in place property rights in people, and few enslaved people succeeded in bargaining their way out of bondage. 21 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139226585.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press  22 Unrequited Toil Despite British closures of West Indies rice markets, South Carolina and Georgia planters resumed importing captive Africans. Noticing such a demand, enslavers in the Chesapeake began selling bondspersons in an interstate trade. And even in states where slavery was marginal, enslavers held on to the bondspersons who had market value in other states. States north of Delaware gradually abolished slavery, but a long colo- nial history of associating African descent with servitude worked against full equality even where slavery was marginal or disappearing. That perception disadvantaged free African-descended people. As colonial hierarchies crumbled, those at the bottom of the old structures of patron- age often found themselves at the mercy of wage and labor markets that even in the best of times permitted workers to scrape by. The new United States was a fragile confederation of independent states that acted like small republics. When Britain formally recognized an independent United States, the federal constitution would not be drafted for four years, and like their colonial predecessors, the new states formulated individual laws regarding slavery. Between 1777 and 1804, all states north of Maryland adopted measures that set slavery on the road to abolition, most doing so gradually. During the upheavals of war, Revolutionary state governments created new state constitutions – some more than one – that experimented with republican government. Abolition appeals by black activists such as Lemuel Haynes and Felix Holbrook were part of the language of liberties and rights, and in the course of fighting a revolution for those ideals, many state legislators stood on principle when attempting to write abolition measures into law. But appeals to abandon slavery found more purchase in areas where slavery remained marginal. Like so many other questions state constitutional conventions tackled, measures concerning slavery were subject to compromise based on compet- ing interests. Vermont took a bold early step in its 1777 constitution, abolishing slavery and servitude for males over twenty-one and females over eighteen. The constitution established religious liberty and enfranchised nearly all adult males regardless of race or previous condition of servitude. But colorblind measures were uncontroversial in a state with a handful of enslavers and a miniscule population of black people. Not counting Native Americans, Vermont was 0.3 percent nonwhite in 1790. In neighboring New Hampshire, the language of its 1783 constitution was just as stridently pro- individual rights, but slavery was left ill-defined. The slave population fell from 633 to 158 people between 1767 and 1790 and would be counted in single digits in nineteenth-century censuses. Neighboring Massachusetts adopted similar language. The first article of the Massachusetts constitution https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139226585.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press  Slow Death for Slavery? 23 of 1780 reads, “[a]ll men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights,” which was essentially what Felix Holbrook had argued in 1773 and black activists like minister Lemuel Haynes and poet Phillis Wheatley articulated during the Revolution.1 But Massachusetts omitted a clear statement of slavery’s illegality. The challenge to slavery in Massachusetts came not from freedom- seeking statesmen but from a former slave. Whether Quok Walker had the Massachusetts constitution in mind when he fled the farm of his Worcester County owner in the spring of 1781 is unclear. But the twenty- eight-year-old clearly thought himself a free man at twenty-five. He refused to return, and the enraged owner and some hired men caught up with him at the farm of his younger brother and beat him with the handle of a whip. They locked him in a barn. Walker escaped and hired a lawyer to sue not for his freedom, but for the assault. Walker sought a legal remedy while the War of Independence was still raging in the southern part of the country. It was an exceptional move that illustrates how far Revolutionary rhetoric had penetrated the popular understanding. Walker wagered that a court would uphold the republican principles for which Massachusetts Patriots were fighting. The case, 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.”2 In the meantime, favorable rulings by lower courts had already freed Massachusetts resident Mum Bett, who emerged from slav- ery as Elizabeth Freeman.3 But even in freedom, women were not citizens. Married women’s legal identities were still considered parts of their husbands’ under laws of coverture. “I desire you would [r]emember the [l]adies,” Abigail Adams wrote her husband, John Adams, in March 1776, “[r]emember all [m]en would be tyrants if they could.”4 Founders ignored such prayers. And black women like Elizabeth Freeman were doubly disenfranchised. 1 Emily Blanck, Tyrannicide: Forging an American Law of Slavery in Revolutionary South Carolina and Massachusetts (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2014), 119 (quota- tion), “Slavery in New Hampshire,” Slavery in the North, online: http://slavenorth.com /newhampshire.htm, accessed: July 29, 2016. 2 Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. Nathaniel Jennison (1783), in A Necessary Evil? Slavery and the Debate over the Constitution, ed. John P. Kaminski (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1995), 18. 3 Ben Z. Rose, Mother of Freedom: Mum Bett and the Roots of Abolition (Waverly, MA: TreeLine Press, 2009). 4 Abigail Adams to John Adams, March 31, 1776, cited in Lynne Withey, Dearest Friend: A Life of Abigail Adams (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 81. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139226585.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press  24 Unrequited Toil The Walker decision did not free any other slaves, but it decided that Massachusetts law did not protect slave property. The legal ambiguity 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. One attempted to sell his bondspeople to Barbados. But public opinion was squarely on the side of the high court. Slavery was marginal in Massachusetts, as it was elsewhere in New England, even though New Englanders had enslaved Africans and Indians since the seventeenth century.5 When New York and Pennsylvania confronted the issue, they also confronted financial interests in slavery. New York made a false start in abolishing slavery. While fugitives from Virginia and elsewhere were fleeing to British-occupied New York City in 1777, the state passed a constitution that protected property, including slave property. The 1777 constitution permitted freeholders – owners of real property – to vote regardless of race. Delegate and congressman Gouverneur Morris proposed that “every being who breathes the air of this State shall enjoy the privileges of a freeman,” but fellow delegates received his statement as so much bluster.6 Several years later, future governor and chief justice of the US Supreme Court John Jay wrote to Morris and Robert R. Livingston, “I should also have been for a clause against the continuation of domestic slavery,” but New York enslavers made up a considerable financial interest.7 Black New Yorkers pressed for their freedom, and Jay led the New York Manumission Society. Unlike elsewhere, military service was one avenue to freedom in New York. While Boston King was in New York City in 1781, 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. Following the British evacuation, the legislature declared that known sup- porters of the Crown forfeited their slave property. In 1786, there were nearly 19,000 African-descended people in New York. Federal census- 5 Wendy Warren, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America (New York, NY: Liveright, 2016). 6 Douglas R. Egerton, Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2009), 111. 7 Patrick Rael, Eighty-Eight Years: The Long Death of Slavery in the United States, 1777–1865 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2015), chaps. 1–2; John Jay to R. R. Livingston and Gouverneur Morris, April 29, 1785, in America’s Founding Charters: Primary Documents of Colonial and Revolutionary Era Governance, vol. 3, ed. Jon L. Wakelyn (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006), 802 (quotation). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139226585.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press  Slow Death for Slavery? 25 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.8 Pennsylvania struggled with the issue of human liberty versus property rights in its 1780 constitution. Philadelphia was the largest American city, home to the national Congress convened under the Articles of Confederation, and in many Americans’ minds the epicenter of liberty. The Declaration of Independence had been drafted and adopted there. Pennsylvania 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 repub- lican ideals and restore “the common blessings” of liberty to which all Americans were entitled.9 Besides that, Pennsylvania’s population was just 3 percent black, and enslavers were distributed through a small proportion of the population. In 1780, about 400 Philadelphia residents owned 539 bondspersons, and in neighboring Chester County about 200 owners held 493 people in slavery.10 Yet despite such a marginal interest in slavery, the state refused to end it. After a flood of petitions and Quaker organizing, Pennsylvania passed an abolition act that failed to free any slaves. The 1780 abolition act held that any child born of a slave mother after March 1, 1780 would have to serve twenty-eight years of bondage. Any child born to an enslaved mother would still be enslaved. The measure made it possible for an owner to hold in slavery two more generations of descendants. One pair of historians contends that under Pennsylvania law, an enslaved female born in late February 1780 could give birth at age forty to a child who would not be freed by the law until 1848, nearly seventy years after the act was passed. 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.11 Some 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. 8 Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), chap. 1. 9 Egerton, Death or Liberty, 98. 10 Gary B. Nash and Jean R. Soderlund, Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1991), 138. 11 Nash and Soderlund, Freedom by Degrees, 111. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139226585.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press  26 Unrequited Toil Rhode Island passed an abolition law in 1784, but it was also a half- measure that freed no slaves immediately. As in Pennsylvania, the Society of Friends agitated for black freedom. With the help of Quaker businessman Moses Brown (brother of slave trader John Brown), Rhode Island passed a gradual abolition measure that freed all slaves born after March 1, 1784, females at eighteen and males at twenty-one.12 But while the measure freed Rhode Island bondspersons, shippers and merchants remained active in the transatlantic slave trade, just as they had before the Revolution. Between 1751 and 1775, Rhode Island slavers embarked 41,581 captives and sold the survivors in the Americas. In the next quarter century – even after state abolition – Rhode Island shippers 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. 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.13 Other so-called free states were reluctant to extinguish citizens’ prop- erty in people. Connecticut, home to fewer than 3,000 enslaved people, passed the Gradual Abolition Act of 1784, which freed no bondsperson then in slavery but only those born after March 1, 1784, and only after twenty-five. Life expectancy at birth was not much above thirty. 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. Liberty ultimately fell on the shoulders of enslaved people and loved ones.14 Enslavers’ property rights was one of a constellation of impediments to African-descended people’s rise from slavery. But there was a widespread expectation that slavery would be confined to a narrow patch of land on which it might be extinguished. 12 Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), chaps. 2–3. 13 Christy Clark-Pujara, Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2016), chap. 1; Gregory E. O’Malley, Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619–1807 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). 14 James J. Gigantino II, The Ragged Road to Abolition: Slavery and Freedom in New Jersey, 1775–1865 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139226585.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press  Slow Death for Slavery? 27 Early national attempts to regulate the spread of slavery were ambiva- lent. 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.15 Some of those states, like Ohio, adopted antislavery constitutions, but others, like Indiana and Illinois, treated African Americans as second- or third-class citizens, imposing requirements that black residents post bonds, carry identification attesting to their free status, and become subject to fines or even slavery for a term should they fail to comply.16 In 1790, the first US Congress responded to pressure from enslavers to safeguard slave property south of Virginia. It 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.”17 South of Tennessee no one expected Congress to restrict slavery. And when the Thomas Jefferson administration made the Compact of 1802 with Georgia, in which that state ceded lands west of its present border to the federal government, federal authorities promised to remove Indian nations that stood in the way of slavery’s expansion. So even before the rise of the cotton economy the federal government encouraged slavery’s expansion into the Old Southwest and restricted it north of the Ohio River. At the same time Americans were theorizing race and racial difference. Prejudice against African-descended people had existed at least 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, Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus classified human beings as a primate species and then divided humans into subspecies including Europeans, Native Americans, Asians, and Africans. While disparaging their physical features, Linnaeus contended that African-descended peo- ple were “[c]rafty, indolent, negligent... Governed by caprice.”18 15 John Craig Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2007), 9. 16 Matthew Salafia, Slavery’s Borderland: Freedom and Bondage along the Ohio River (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 17 Jeffrey Allen Zemler, James Madison, the South, and the Trans-Appalachian West, 1783–1803 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 129. 18 Andrew S. Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 158. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139226585.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press  28 Unrequited Toil Europeans, by contrast, were “acute, inventive,” and ruled by law.19 Such thinking appeased Europeans’ conceptions of superiority, empha- sizing inherent characteristics rather than religion or achievement. Some European scholars like Johann Friedrich Blumenbach disputed such hierarchies, but he was in a minority. In 1780, classically educated Virginia governor Thomas Jefferson penned an elegant blueprint for his newly independent state, Notes on the State of Virginia. At a historical moment with so many open possibilities, he 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.”20 Slavery ought to be removed, he contended, but so should African- descended people. Their historical memories of wrongs posed a gathering threat to European-descended Americans. Jefferson contem- plated a gradual abolition measure that freed females at eighteen and males at twenty-one, but that freedom would be coupled with expatria- tion. They must be sent away from America. 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.”21 Blacks’ mem- ories “are equal to the whites[’]; in reason much inferior,” he argued; “in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.” He made some allowances for the fact that African-descended people had been put to agricultural labor, but did not let that excuse their apparent lack of intellectual and moral advancement. “They astonish you with strokes of the most sublime oratory; such as prove their reason and sentiment strong, their imagination glowing and elevated,” he conceded. “But never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture.” Positioning himself as a proponent of racism and a critic of African-descended authors’ literature, Jefferson deprecated Phillis Wheatley’s poetry and Ignatius Sancho’s writings. “Their griefs are transient,” he argued, as if to excuse the litany of charges used to 19 George M. Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 56. 20