The greatest contradiction in early American history was the tension between the ideal of equality and the reality of slavery. The United States’ founding document, the Declaration of Independence, states that “all men are created equal.” Yet, at the moment this document was written, hundreds of thousands of African Americans were held in bondage as slaves. This contradiction created tremendous tension in the new Republic. Some states in the north, such as Massachusetts and New York, began to take action to abolish slavery. No such action was taken in the southern states.
The nation’s ideals were undermined by the continuation of slavery. How could a nation founded upon the ideal of liberty maintain slavery? This deep contradiction would ultimately result in a devastating Civil War.
Free and Equal Men
By the time of the Revolution, slavery had been firmly in place in America for over one hundred years. In many ways, the Revolution served to reinforce the assumptions about race among white Americans. They viewed the new nation as a white republic; blacks were slaves. Racial hatred of blacks increased during the Revolution because many slaves fled their white masters for the freedom offered by the British. Thomas Paine argued in Common Sense that Great Britain was guilty of inciting “the Negroes to destroy us.”
Slavery offered the most glaring contradiction between the idea of equality stated in the Declaration of Independence (“all men are created equal”) and the reality of race relations in the late eighteenth century.
Racism shaped white views of blacks. Although he penned the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson owned more than one hundred slaves, of whom he freed only a few either during his lifetime or in his will. He thought blacks were inferior to whites. White slaveholders often took their female slaves as mistresses. As slaves did not have the freedom to reject their master’s sexual advances, this was clearly rape. Most historians agree that Jefferson had several children with one of his slaves, Sally Hemmings.
Jefferson understood the contradiction fully, and his writings reveal hard-edged racist assumptions. In his Notes on the State of Virginia in the 1780s, Jefferson urged the end of slavery in Virginia and the removal of blacks from that state. He wrote: “It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expense of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race. To these objections, which are political, may be added others, which are physical and moral.” Jefferson envisioned an “empire of liberty” for white farmers and relied on the argument of sending blacks out of the United States, even if doing so would completely destroy the slaveholders’ wealth in their human property.
Southern planters strongly objected to Jefferson’s views on abolishing slavery and removing blacks from America. When Jefferson was a candidate for president in 1796, an anonymous “Southern Planter” wrote, “If this wild project succeeds, under the auspices of Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States, and three hundred thousand slaves are set free in Virginia, farewell to the safety, prosperity, the importance, perhaps the very existence of the Southern States.” Slaveholders and many other Americans protected and defended the institution.
While racial thinking permeated the new country, and slavery existed in all the new states, the ideals of the Revolution generated a movement toward the abolition of slavery. Private manumissions, by which slaveholders freed their slaves, provided one pathway from bondage. Slaveholders in Virginia freed some ten thousand slaves. Other revolutionaries formed societies dedicated to abolishing slavery. One of the earliest efforts began in 1775 in Philadelphia, where Dr. Benjamin Rush and other Philadelphia Quakers formed what became the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. Similarly, wealthy New Yorkers formed the New York Manumission Society in 1785. This society worked to educate black children and devoted funds to protect free blacks from kidnapping.
Slavery persisted in the North, however, and the example of Massachusetts highlights the complexity of the situation. The 1780 Massachusetts constitution technically freed all slaves. Nonetheless, several hundred individuals remained enslaved in the state. In the 1780s, a series of court decisions undermined slavery in Massachusetts when several slaves, citing assault by their masters, successfully sought their freedom in court. These individuals refused to be treated as slaves in the wake of the American Revolution. Despite these legal victories, about eleven hundred slaves continued to be held in the New England states in 1800. The contradictions illustrate the difference between the letter and the spirit of the laws abolishing slavery in Massachusetts. In all, over thirty-six thousand slaves remained in the North, with the highest concentrations in New Jersey and New York. New York only gradually phased out slavery, with the last slaves emancipated in the late 1820s.
Source: Corbett, P.S., Janssen V., Lund, J., Pfannestiel, T., Vickery, P., & Waskiewicz, S. U.S. History. OpenStax. 30 December 2014.
Free and Equal Men – VIDEO
Foner, E. The Civil War and Reconstruction, A House Divided, The Road to Civil War, 1850-1861. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVTqi_ewy5s
Summary
The Declaration of Independence, authored by Thomas Jefferson, famously states that “all men are created equal.” Yet, at the time of the American Revolution, the majority of African Americans in the nation were enslaved. In fact, Thomas Jefferson himself owned over 100 slaves. Slaves were treated brutally and as less than human beings. It was common for slave masters to rape slaves.
Following the American Revolution, abolitionist activity emerged in many northern states. In Pennsylvania, Quakers founded an abolition society. The Massachusetts Constitution formally abolished slavery in 1780. Still, action to abolish slavery was slow. Slaves continued to be held in bondage in New York until the late 1820s.
