How the Slaveholding Founders Really Felt About Slavery
· Reason
The Declaration of Independence accused the king and Parliament of Great Britain of "exciting domestic insurrections" among the half-million people enslaved in the American colonies. This was a reference to the November 1775 proclamation by Virginia's royal governor, Lord Dunmore, that he would free "all indentured servants, Negroes, or others, (appertaining to rebels)" who were "able and willing to bear arms" against the American revolutionaries.
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Today's readers often consider it hypocritical that the Founders denounced Britain for offering black Americans the same freedom for which they were themselves fighting. Some of the revolutionary era's readers thought the same thing. In 1776, the London writer John Lind published a pamphlet responding line by line to the Declaration, and in it he ridiculed the patriots: "Is it for them to complain of the offer of freedom held out to these wretched beings? of the offer of reinstating them in that equality which, in this very paper, is declared to be the gift of God to all?"
What Lind overlooked was that Americans did not deny that it was self-contradictory for them to hold slaves while proclaiming liberty to be every person's birthright. On the contrary, their embarrassment over that inconsistency had been particularly glaring when Virginians drafted their Declaration of Rights in June 1776. Thomas Jefferson went even further, admitting that slaves were justified in violently rebelling against their oppressors. The thought that God's "justice cannot sleep forever" made him "tremble," he said.
But the real story of the "domestic insurrections" passage is more complicated than modern readers typically realize. The best point to begin understanding it is October 1769, when a poor man named Samuel Howell approached Jefferson, then a 26-year-old lawyer practicing in Williamsburg, to ask for help in defending his freedom against the claim that he was a slave.
Howell's great-grandfather was a black man who'd had a baby girl with a white woman. Under Virginia laws of that time, the daughter was bound to servitude until the age of 31, and during those years, she gave birth to Howell's mother. She, too, was enslaved until the age of 31, and during that time, she gave birth to Howell himself. The owner of Howell's mother and grandmother, thinking that Virginia law also rendered Howell a slave until the age of 31, then sold him.
Two Virginia laws governed Howell's situation. The first provided that if "any woman servant" or "free Christian white woman" were to "have [a] bastard child by a negro," the resulting child would be "a servant until it shall be thirty-one years of age." The second provided that if a "female mulatto…obliged to serve till the age of thirty or thirty-one years shall, during the time of her servitude, have any child…such child shall serve the master…until it shall attain the same age the mother of such child was obliged by law to serve unto." The first condemned Howell's grandmother to servitude, and his mother probably qualified as a "female mulatto." Howell was born during her period of servitude, so he too would be bound to serve until the age of 31.
Nevertheless, Jefferson agreed to argue for Howell's freedom. His anti-slavery sympathies were well known; during the 1760s, he took six "freedom cases," including Howell's, charging nothing for his services as he sought to defend the accused against the charge that they were slaves. In Howell's case, he first argued that the fact that Howell's purported owner had sold him rendered the servitude mandate void. "Bond servants" (that is, temporary as opposed to lifetime slaves) were not salable, he asserted, because they were properly classified as a kind of apprentice rather than property. The reason for the 31-year rule, he continued, was actually to ensure that the parents of illicit mixed-race children cared for them instead of abandoning them. Allowing people to sell "bond servants" would give parents a way to evade the law and escape their paternal responsibilities. And because bond servants could not be sold, the attempted sale voided Howell's bondage status and rendered him free.
It was a creative argument. But Jefferson's second argument was even more audacious. He claimed that the two statutes governed only the cases of Howell's grandmother and mother, not Howell himself. Although they might seem to apply to every succeeding generation automatically, they could not actually do so because that would violate natural law. "Under the law of nature, all men are born free," he told the court. "Everyone comes into the world with a right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will. This is what is called personal liberty, and it is given him by the law of nature, because [it is] necessary for his own sustenance." The statute enslaving the grandmother was bad enough, but to inflict bondage on generation after generation of innocent children was untenable. And the Virginia legislature must have realized this, he added, because the very fact that it had passed the second act, specifying that children "shall be bond or free according to the conditions of their mothers," proved that lawmakers never believed that the first act would inflict slavery on every descendant of the initial liaison. "It remains for some future legislature," Jefferson concluded, "if any shall be found wicked enough, to extend [slavery] to the grandchildren."
Jefferson's case was idealistic, even naive, and it did not impress the judges. When the opposing lawyer, Jefferson's mentor George Wythe, rose to present the counterargument, they waved him back into his seat. They did not need to hear what he had to say. They had already made up their minds. With a bang of the gavel, they declared that Howell would remain in servitude.
It was a humiliating lesson: Slavery's evils might be an interesting subject for coffeehouse debate, but colonial authorities were not prepared to upset a century and a half of economic policy. Still, as biographer Willard Sterne Randall observes, the Howell case marked "the first time Jefferson had spoken the words in public—'all men are born free'—six years before he wrote the Declaration…and he had said them first in the legal defense of a black slave."
American Hypocrisies, English HypocrisiesAccording to the classical liberalism Jefferson embraced, all people are fundamentally individual beings, responsible for their own actions and consequently endowed with the right to direct their own lives. This quality of self-responsibility, shared by all normal adults, makes people "equal" in an important sense: None is inherently entitled to control another's actions. Nor is this inherent liberty a function of tradition or culture. It is an unavoidable feature of human life. A person's individuality and self-possession are inalienable. Slavery, by contrast, is artificial, a man-made institution that can be tested against the standards of justice and found wanting.
As the clash between America and Britain accelerated in the 1770s, Tories would be quick to accuse the revolutionaries of hypocrisy for practicing slavery while protesting in defense of their own freedom. Samuel Johnson, of dictionary fame, sneered: "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" But it was not at all surprising that Americans who every day witnessed the horrors of slavery would dread, to the point of paranoia, the possibility of experiencing the same fate themselves. What is actually remarkable about the patriots is the degree of candor with which they confessed that slavery clashed with their principles. No patriot of stature ever defended the practice. And no considerable political movement in the English-speaking world had ever before condemned slavery as candidly and as often as the patriots did.
Benjamin Franklin, for example, anticipated Johnson's accusation and offered a reply in a 1770 newspaper article in which he imagined a dialogue between an American and two Britons. When the British characters call the American a hypocrite, he replies that this is unfair because "many thousands [in America] abhor the slave trade as much as [any Englishman] can do, conscientiously avoid being concerned with it, and do everything in their power to abolish it." Relatively few colonists own slaves, he continues, and it would be wrong to "stigmatize us all with that crime." Notably admitting that slavery was evil, Franklin, who, a few years later, would become president of the world's first anti-slavery society, went on to point out that the hypocrisy charge cut both ways: England "began the slave trade," and while Americans were certainly blameworthy for buying slaves, "you bring the slaves to us, and tempt us to purchase them." This rhetorical move, which Jefferson would employ in the Declaration six years later, might seem disingenuous to historians, but it's no more so than the language of today's political leaders who blame oil companies for climate change, tobacco companies for lung cancer, or fast-food companies for obesity, even though these businesses, too, merely serve consumer demand.
Worse, Franklin continued, when colonial governments tried to limit or prohibit slave importation, the imperial government "disapproved and repealed" those laws "as being prejudicial, forsooth, to the interest of the [Royal] African Company." He had in mind efforts by the assemblies of Pennsylvania in 1712, South Carolina in 1760, New Jersey in 1763, and Virginia in 1710, 1727, and 1766 to ban or restrict slave imports, all of which had been overridden by London officials.
British policy was, indeed, to prop up the Royal African Company. In 1770, the same year Franklin published his article, King George III vetoed yet another Virginian attempt to tax slave imports, declaring that it would "prejudice and obstruct as well the commerce of this kingdom as the cultivation and improvement" of Virginia. He went further, instructing all colonial governors, "upon pain of our highest displeasure," to veto "any laws whatever…by which the importation of slaves shall be in any respect prohibited or obstructed."
It was also illegal in Virginia to manumit slaves except for "meritorious services." Around the same time that he represented Howell in court, Jefferson took another quixotic step against slavery by drafting a bill to let masters free their slaves when they chose. Thinking himself too young and unknown to offer such a major proposal, he asked the respected elder legislator Richard Bland to sponsor it in the House of Burgesses. Bland agreed—and soon regretted it. When he rose to speak, other members shouted him down so ferociously that Bland dropped the subject. "He was denounced as an enemy to his country," Jefferson recalled, "and was treated with the grossest indecorum." The message was clear: Neither the royal government nor the planter class controlling the colony would tolerate outright attacks on slavery, and even modest efforts to limit it could destroy a man's political reputation.
True, efforts to limit the slave trade or allow manumission were not the same as attacking slavery in toto. But leaders who wanted to eradicate the practice itself thought the first steps must be gradual. Because the slave trade was held in such opprobrium, campaigning against it was the most political way to introduce the idea of prohibiting slavery itself.
This approach did have an element of disingenuousness, since cutting off the importation of slaves from abroad would likely increase the market value of those already in North America, thus creating an incentive to preserve slavery, rather than eradicate it. And there was another, more severe element of disingenuousness: the fact that many, including Jefferson, shared the racial prejudices that appeared to substantiate the claims of those who viewed Africans and their descendants as biologically doomed to servitude. Only a few years after independence, Jefferson published Notes on the State of Virginia, in which he set forth his "suspicion…that the blacks…are inferior to the whites." A later generation seized on his words to justify slavery, and although Jefferson himself denied this connection ("whatever be their degree of talent, it is no measure of their rights," he said), he did conclude that biological as well as historical differences between the races made it impossible for them to live together permanently in North America.
Jefferson was one of many white Southerners who, while regarding slavery as evil, found it impossible to imagine a peaceful multiracial democracy. They knew of no historical precedent for such a thing; the record with which the American Founders were familiar suggested that racially and religiously diverse societies could be governed only by emperors, as with Rome, or through legal segregation, as with medieval Jerusalem. No civilization known to man had ever successfully abolished slavery; history seemed instead to prove that mass emancipation led inevitably to deadly reprisals and civil war.
That was precisely what Lord Dunmore seemed to have in mind. He designed his 1775 Proclamation as a weapon of terror. It was an ancient tactic, one used in Greek and Roman times, and classically educated plantation owners were all too familiar with the numerous slave revolts in the Roman Republic, including three "servile wars" between 135 and 71 B.C. Among the most frightening precedents was the Second Servile War, sparked by the Roman Senate's decision to free 800 Bithynians who had been enslaved for debt. The Senate did this in hopes that they would join the Roman military, but it sparked a bloody uprising instead. "Calamities overspread all Sicily," wrote the historian Diodorus Siculus. Slaves "committed all sorts of rapines and acts of wickedness; for they shamefully killed all before them, whether bond or free, that none might be left to tell tales."
Virginians also knew that the people they held in chains were justified in fighting for their freedom, and that embarrassing fact made the specter of rebellion all the more chilling. "The Almighty," Jefferson wrote when contemplating the possibility, "has no attribute which can take side with [whites] in such a contest."
The Revolution as OpportunityAll these factors hovered in the background in the summer of 1776, when Jefferson began writing the Declaration of Independence. In his initial draft, he wrote that the king and his deputies were "inciting insurrections of our fellow subjects citizens with the allurements of forfeiture and confiscation." This did not refer to slavery at all, but to efforts by British leaders to encourage American Loyalists or neutrals ("subjects," which Jefferson changed to "citizens") to help suppress the rebellion.
Under Britain's laws of attainder and forfeiture, rebels were liable to having their property confiscated for treason and likely bestowed on informants as a reward. Jefferson was saying that this "allurement" was designed to encourage infighting among colonists.
Then, he had followed that allegation with a separate clause accusing the king of "prompting our negroes to rise in arms among us; those very negroes whom by an inhuman use of his negative he hath from time to time refused us permission to exclude by law." Coupling the complaint of inciting insurrection with a complaint about the monarchy's refusal to let colonists ban the slave trade cushioned the charge of hypocrisy by acknowledging slavery to be "inhuman" (again implicitly admitting that slaves who "rose in arms" were justified in doing so), while also saying that the violence and civilian casualties that would likely result from a servile war were things no worthy monarch would intentionally provoke.
In his next draft, Jefferson expanded on this point. Retaining the "treasonable insurrections" clause (regarding Loyalists), he deleted the "rise in arms" clause and replaced it with a paragraph--long accusation against the king, into which he poured more vitriol than anywhere else in the document. This indignant passage, longer than any other in the Declaration, condemned the king for fostering and maintaining slavery, using words that made the entire list of grievances seem to rise to this climax:
"He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another."
This reiterated the complaint that while George III refused to veto Parliament's bills, he did veto colonial bills and completely banned laws limiting slave importation. The bottom line was clear: The king and his deputies were creating a tragically explosive situation by enslaving people to increase imperial wealth, then unleashing the victims of slavery on white Virginians to increase imperial power.
Jefferson was proud of this passage, and John Adams admired it too. Five decades later, Adams recalled that he was "delighted with its high tone, and the flights of oratory with which it abounded, especially that concerning Negro slavery." The Declaration's rhetorical momentum rose from relatively minor accusations of failing to approve "wholesome" legislation to a denunciation of the king as a false Christian, a pirate who would embarrass even "infidels," and a man willing to trick slaves into murdering his subjects.
Bizarrely, recent historians have viewed this paragraph not as proof of Jefferson's anti-slavery views but as evidence of his mendacity. They contend that blaming the monarchy for slavery's presence in America was so implausible that it proves Jefferson was engaging in a rhetorical sleight of hand. Joseph Ellis, for example, accused Jefferson of "juggling two incompatible formulations: One is to blame the king for slavery; the other is to blame him for emancipating the slaves." Garry Wills, too, claimed that Jefferson was "twist[ing] language and logic in an unfortunate way," and that the Virginian actually thought "the king's real crime [was] his attempt to free Virginia's slaves."
These accusations are off base. For one thing, the Dunmore proclamation did not free Virginia's slaves. It only promised freedom to slaves "appertaining to rebels" who were "able and willing to bear arms" for the king, not to anyone enslaved by a Loyalist or to women, children, the infirm, older people, or others unable to fight in the British military.
More important, although Jefferson was indeed engaged in rhetorical legerdemain, it was essentially the opposite of what Ellis, Wills, and others asserted. The political maneuver Jefferson was attempting aimed not to excuse slavery, but to damn it. Convinced that the Revolution offered a rare chance to wipe away the inherited evils of English tradition, he hoped to place Americans irrevocably on the record about slavery's evil in a way that would force them to work toward its eventual eradication.
Jefferson, Adams, and their colleagues knew the Revolution presented a special opportunity. "I wish with you that the genius of this country may expand itself, now [that] the shackles are knocked off," Adams wrote a friend in the weeks after independence. "But there is not a little danger of its becoming still more contracted. If a sufficient scope is not allowed for the human mind to exert itself…we shall become more despicably narrow, timid, selfish, base and barbarous."
Jefferson also thought the moment "for fixing every essential right on a legal basis" was now. With royal government swept away, there was nothing "to restrain us from doing right" and reforming colonial law "with a single eye to reason." He feared that "from the conclusion of this war we shall be going downhill"; once independence was achieved, politicians would lose "the general pulse of reformation," and citizens would "forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money." Therefore, "the shackles…which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of this war will remain on us long, will be made heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion."
Jefferson was already planning an ambitious set of legal reforms for his home state, everything from abolishing the established church and providing for the manumission of slaves to establishing a public school system and reforming the criminal code. Now he saw another opportunity. Knowing that people are typically less willing to admit their own faults than to blame others, he hoped that by asserting the injustice of slavery in unmistakable terms while simultaneously scapegoating the king, the Declaration would make it easier for his countrymen to view the practice as un-American. They might come to believe that slavery, like an established religion or the cruel punishments of English common law, was an outworn European notion, forced on Americans more or less against their will. Later historians might quibble about this, but the creation of a social narrative is part of a statesman's job during the act of founding, that is, of consecrating. When done right, it can draw the people toward what Abraham Lincoln later called their "better angels."
The Redacted DeclarationThere were good reasons to think this gambit would succeed. Public consciousness did seem to be awakening to slavery's evils. In 1785, Jefferson told a British abolitionist that Americans living north of the Chesapeake were becoming hostile to slavery because the younger generation had "sucked in the principles of liberty as it were with their mother's milk." Adams agreed. Slavery, he wrote in 1801, was "fast diminishing." Vermont banned it in 1777. Other states passed gradual anti-slavery laws, which did not liberate those already in chains but forbade new enslavement. Pennsylvania did so in 1780, Rhode Island and Connecticut in 1784, New York in 1799, and New Jersey in 1804. The Massachusetts Supreme Court declared slavery unconstitutional in 1783 on the grounds that it violated the principle "that all men are born free and equal." Meanwhile, economists, notably Adam Smith, were explaining that slavery is economically counterproductive. It therefore seemed plausible that with the right incentives, Americans might eliminate it entirely.
Of course, that was not to be. On Tuesday, July 1, 1776, the drafting committee presented the Declaration to the Continental Congress for a clause-by-clause discussion and debate, and Jefferson watched as his fellow delegates whittled away much of its latter half, entirely removing his attack on slavery. No records remain of who said what during these debates, although Jefferson recalled that Adams tirelessly defended every word in the draft, while Jefferson remained silent, as always. The "cruel war on human nature" passage was eliminated "in complaisance [sic] to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who, on the contrary, still wished to continue it," he wrote, as well as some Northerners, who, although holding "few slaves themselves," were "pretty considerable carriers of them to others." After deleting the paragraph, the Congress also changed the preceding clause, so that instead of denouncing the king and his governors for inciting "insurrections" by "our fellow citizens" (that is, white Loyalists), the final wording condemned him for "excit[ing] domestic insurrections," lumping together all types of internal sabotage that the British were provoking.
Watching his Declaration being edited was a maddening experience for Jefferson. When he returned to his apartment, he wrote out several painstaking copies of his original version, with marks to indicate the changes the Congress had made, and sent them to friends, asking them to agree that his initial draft was better. Fifty years later, he did the same in his memoirs. Jefferson's disappointment at the failure of his effort to embed a denunciation of slavery into the Declaration remained with him for the rest of his life.
This article is adapted from the book Proclaiming Liberty: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the Declaration of Independence by permission of the Cato Institute.
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