The Debate over Free Trade and Slavery during the American Revolution

The Debate Over Free Trade

At the radical end of the Revolution spectrum, some patriots pushed for governments to limit the accumulation of wealth.
Inflation was common after the American Revolution.
Congress itself encouraged states to fix wages and prices.
The Republican ideal supported governments promoting the public good, not individual interests.
There was a theme in America of conflict between "free markets" and the "public good."

Slavery and the Revolution

African-Americans saw the American Revolution as an opportunity to claim freedom.
In 1776, when the United States declared its independence, the slave population had grown to 500,000, about one-fifth of the new nation's inhabitants.
Slave owning and slave trading were accepted routines of colonial life.

The Language of Slavery and Freedom

Slavery played a central part in the language of revolution.
Apart from "liberty," it was the word most frequently invoked in the era's legal and political literature.
Eighteenth-century writers frequently juxtaposed freedom and slavery as "the two extremes of happiness and misery in society."
In the era's debates over British rule, slavery was primarily a political category, shorthand for the denial of one's personal and political rights by arbitrary government.
Those who lacked a voice in public affairs were considered "enslaved."
By the eve of independence, the contrast between Britain, "a kingdom of slaves," and America, a "country of free men," had become a standard part of the language of resistance.
Colonial writers of the 1760s occasionally made a direct connection between slavery as a reality and slavery as a metaphor.
James Otis of Massachusetts popularized the idea that Parliament lacked the authority to tax the colonies and regulate their commerce.
Otis insisted that freedom must be universal: "What man is or ever was born free if every man is not?"
Otis wrote of blacks as flesh and blood British subjects "entitled to all the civil rights of such."
Edmund Burke suggested that familiarity with slavery made colonial leaders unusually sensitive to threats to their own liberties.
Dr. Samuel Johnson questioned the colonists' apparent hypocrisy, asking, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of negroes?"

Obstacles to Abolition

At the time of the Revolution, slavery was an old institution in America.
It existed in every colony and formed the basis of the economy and social structure from Maryland southward.
At least 40 percent of Virginia's population and even higher proportions in Georgia and South Carolina were slaves.
Virtually every founding father owned slaves at one point in his life, including southern planters, northern merchants, lawyers, and farmers. (John Adams and Tom Paine were notable exceptions.)
Thomas Jefferson owned more than 100 slaves when he wrote of mankind's unalienable right to liberty.
Some patriots argued that slavery for blacks made freedom possible for whites.
Eliminating the dependent poor from the political nation left the public arena to men of propertied independence.
Owning slaves offered a route to economic autonomy, deemed necessary for genuine freedom.
A 1780 Virginia law rewarded veterans of the War of Independence with 300 acres of land and a slave.
South Carolina and Georgia promised every white military volunteer a slave at the war's end.
The Lockean vision of the political community could be invoked to defend bondage.
Nothing was more essential to freedom than the right of self-government and the protection of property against outside interference.
Seizing slave property would be an infringement on liberty.
Requiring owners to give up their slave property would reduce them to slavery.

Petitions for Freedom

The Revolution inspired widespread hopes that slavery could be removed from American life.
Slaves themselves appreciated that by defining freedom as a universal right, the leaders of the Revolution had devised a weapon that could be used against their own bondage.
The language of liberty echoed in slave communities, North and South.
Slaves appropriated the patriotic ideology for their own purposes.
The most insistent advocates of freedom as a universal entitlement were African-Americans.
As early as 1766, white Charlestonians had been shocked when their opposition to the Stamp Act inspired a group of blacks to parade about the city crying "Liberty."
The Provincial Congress of South Carolina felt compelled to investigate the "high notions of liberty" the struggle against Britain had inspired among the slaves.
The first concrete steps toward emancipation in revolutionary America were "freedom petitions."
Some slaves sued in court for being "illegally detained in slavery."
The turmoil of war offered other avenues to freedom.
Many slaves ran away from their masters and tried to pass as freeborn.
The number of fugitive slave advertisements in colonial newspapers rose dramatically in the 1770s and 1780s.
In 1776, Lemuel Haynes urged that Americans "extend" their conception of freedom.
Blacks sought to make white Americans understand slavery as a concrete reality.
Petitioning for their freedom in 1773, a group of New England slaves exclaimed, "We have no property! We have no wives! No children! We have no city! No country!"
Most slaves of the revolutionary era were only one or two generations removed from Africa.
Phillis Wheatley's love of freedom arose from the "cruel fate" of being "snatch'd from Afric's" shore.
Blacks demonstrated how American they had become by invoking the Revolution's ideology of liberty to demand their own rights and by defining freedom as a universal entitlement.

British Emancipation

Some 5,000 slaves fought for American independence and many thereby gained their freedom.
Lord Dunmore's proclamation of 1775 and the Phillipsburgh Proclamation of General Henry Clinton offered sanctuary to slaves who escaped to British lines.
Numerous signers of the Declaration of Independence lost slaves as a result.
Nearly 100,000 slaves, including one-quarter of all the slaves in South Carolina and one-third of those in Georgia, deserted their owners and fled to British lines.
At the war's end, some 20,000 were living in three enclaves of British control.
Sir Guy Carleton replied that returning the slaves would be "a dishonorable violation of the public faith," since they had been promised their freedom.
More than 15,000 black men, women, and children accompanied the British out of the country.
They ended up in Nova Scotia, England, and Sierra Leone.
Harry Washington, an African-born slave of George Washington, fled to join Lord Dunmore and eventually became a corporal in a black British regiment, the Black Pioneers.
The issue of compensation for the slaves who departed with the British poisoned relations between Britain and the new United States for decades to come.
Finally, in 1827, Britain agreed to make payments to 1,100 Americans who claimed they had been improperly deprived of their slave property.

Voluntary Emancipation

During the War of Independence, nearly every state prohibited or discouraged the further importation of slaves from Africa.
During the 1780s, a considerable number of slaveholders, especially in Virginia and Maryland, voluntarily emancipated their slaves.
In 1796, Robert Carter III provided for the gradual emancipation of the more than 400 slaves he owned.
In the same year, Richard Randolph drafted a will that condemned slavery as an "infamous."