No institution was more directly affected by the liberalizing spirit of the Revolution than chattel slavery. To be sure, the enslavement of nearly half a million blacks was not eradicated at the Revolution, and in modern eyes this failure amid all the high-blown talk of liberty and equality becomes the one glaring and even hypocritical inconsistency of the Revolutionary era. Indeed, far more blacks lived in slavery at the end of the Revolutionary era than at the beginning, and slavery in parts of America, far from declining, was on the verge of its greatest expansion. Nevertheless, the Revolution had a powerful effect in eventually bringing an end to slavery in America. It suddenly and effectively ended the social and intellectual environment that had allowed slavery to exist everywhere for thousands of years without substantial questioning.
The colonists had generally taken slavery for granted as part of the natural order of a monarchical society and as one aspect of the general brutality and cheapness of life in those premodern and prehumanitarian times. Originally, slavery had been regarded merely as the most base and degraded status in a hierarchy of many statuses and ranks of freedom and unfreedom, and that attitude had lingered on. Bondage and servitude in many forms had continued to exist in pre-Revolutionary America, and the colonists had felt little need to defend slavery any more than other forms of debasement. Now, however, republican citizenship suddenly brought into question all kinds of personal dependency. For the first time in their history Americans were compelled to confront the slavery in their midst as an aberration, as a “peculiar institution,” and, if they were to retain it, to explain and justify it.
Even before the Declaration of Independence, the libertarian atmosphere of the imperial controversy had exposed the excruciating contradiction of slavery. James Otis in 1764 had declared that all the colonists were “by the law of nature freeborn, as indeed all men are, white or black. . . . Does it follow that ’tis right to enslave a man because he is black?” How could white Americans contend for liberty while holding other men in slavery? As the crisis deepened, such questions became more and more insistent.
The initial efforts to end the contradiction were directed at the slave trade. In 1774, the Continental Congress urged abolishing the slave trade, which a half-dozen northern states quickly did. In 1775 the Quakers of Philadelphia formed the first antislavery society in the world, and soon similar societies were organized elsewhere, even in the South. During the war Congress and the northern states together with Maryland gave freedom to black slaves who enlisted in their armies. In various ways the Revolution worked to weaken the institution.
In the North, slavery of a less harsh sort than existed in the South had been widespread but not deeply rooted in the society or economy. Slavery in the North was thus susceptible to political pressure in a way that was not true in the South, and it very slowly and haltingly began to recede. In the decades following the Revolution the northern states moved to destroy the institution, and by 1804 every northern state had committed itself to emancipation in one form or another. In many cases blacks themselves took the lead in using the Revolutionary language of liberty to attack slavery. By 1810 the number of free blacks in the northern states had grown from several hundred in 1770 to nearly 50,000. The Revolutionary vision of a society of independent freeholders led Congress in the 1780s specifically to forbid slavery in the newly organized Northwest Territory between the Appalachians and the Mississippi. The new federal Constitution promised, in 1808, an end to the international importation of slaves, which many hoped would cripple the institution. In fact, all of the Revolutionary leaders, including southerners like Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and Henry Laurens, deplored the injustice of slavery and assumed that it would soon die away. This was perhaps the most illusory of the several illusions the Revolutionary leaders had about the future of America.
At first, it seemed that slavery might be eliminated even in the South. More antislavery societies existed in the South than in the North, and manumissions became very frequent in the immediate post-Revolutionary period; in Virginia alone the number of free blacks increased from 3,000 in 1780 to 13,000 by 1790. But in the end, slavery in the South was too entrenched to be legislatively or judicially abolished. Southern whites who had been in the vanguard of the Revolutionary movement and among the most fervent spokesmen for its libertarianism now began developing a self-conscious sense of difference from the rest of America that they had never had to the same degree before. By the 1790s the South was living with a growing fear, fed by the Negro insurrections in Santo Domingo, of the newly invigorated American presumption that people everywhere, white or black, yearned for freedom.