14

Between Slavery and Freedom

The greatest republican reform of the period was the anti-slavery movement. Of course, the Revolution freed only a fraction of the nearly half a million slaves in the colonies in 1776—and many modern historians have called the Revolution’s inability to free all the slaves its greatest failure. But the Revolution did accomplish a great deal: it created for the first time in American history the cultural atmosphere that made African American slavery abhorrent to many Americans.

By attacking slavery more fiercely than ever before, Revolutionary Americans freed tens of thousands of slaves. But the Revolution’s libertarian and egalitarian message had perverse consequences. It forced those Southerners who chose to retain slavery to fall back on the alleged racial deficiencies of blacks as a justification for an institution that hitherto they had taken for granted and had never before needed to justify. The anti-slavery movement that arose out of the Revolution inadvertently produced racism in America.

HEREDITARY CHATTEL SLAVERY—one person owning the life and labor of another person and that person’s progeny—is virtually incomprehensible to those living in the West today, even though as many as twenty-seven million people in the world may be presently enslaved.¹ In fact, slavery has existed in a variety of cultures for thousands of years, including those of the ancient Greeks and Romans, the medieval Koreans, the Pacific Northwest Indians, and the pre-Columbian Aztecs. The pre-Norman English practiced slavery, as did the Vikings, the many ethnic groups of Africa, and the early Islamic Arabs; indeed, beginning in the 600s Muslims may have transported over the next twelve centuries as many sub-Saharan Africans to various parts of the Islamic world, from Spain to India, as were taken to the Western Hemisphere.²

Yet as ubiquitous as slavery was in the ancient and pre-modern worlds, including the early Islamic world, there was nothing anywhere quite like the African plantation slavery that developed in the Americas. Between 1500 and the mid-nineteenth century some eleven or twelve million slaves were brought from Africa to the Americas. The prosperity of the European colonies in the New World depended upon the labor of these millions of African slaves and their enslaved descendants. Slavery existed everywhere in the Americas, from the villages of French Canada to the sugar plantations of Portuguese Brazil.

Slavery in the New World was never a monolithic institution; it differed both in space and time, and slavery in British North America differed sharply from slavery in the rest of the New World. In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the English mainland colonies imported about two hundred thousand African slaves, a small percentage of the millions who were brought to the Caribbean and South American colonies, where the mortality rates were horrendous. Far fewer slaves died prematurely on the North American mainland. In fact, by the late eighteenth century the slaves in most of the English mainland colonies were reproducing at the same rates as whites, already among the most fertile peoples in the Western world.³

By the eve of the Revolution white North American colonists possessed 460,000 African American slaves, about a fifth of the total population. Most were held in the South. In 1770 the largest colony, Virginia, had about 188,000 black slaves, slightly more than 40 percent of the colony’s total population of 447,000. In 1770 South Carolina had the highest proportion of African American slaves to whites, 60 percent, or 75,000, of the total population of 124,000. In these Southern colonies slavery lay at the heart of the economy. The master-slave relationship supplied the standard for all other social relationships.

As it had been from the beginning in the seventeenth century, the South’s economy was based on the production and sale of staple crops—exotic agricultural goods that commanded special significance in international markets. Each of the South’s dominant slaveholding areas—the Chesapeake and the Lowcountry of South Carolina—had developed its own peculiar primary staple crop adapted to its climate and landscape, tobacco in the case of the Chesapeake and rice and indigo in the case of South Carolina.

Although both staples lent themselves to the development of plantation slave labor, they created different kinds of plantations and different systems of slavery. Because of the nature of tobacco production, the plantations in the Chesapeake tended to be much smaller with many fewer slaves than those in South Carolina. On the eve of the Revolution less than 30 percent of the slaves in the Chesapeake area lived on plantations with twenty or more slaves. Indeed, over one-third of the slaves in the Chesapeake resided on small plantations with fewer than ten slaves. Because tobacco exhausted the soil rather rapidly, the small plantations and their labor forces in Virginia had to keep pushing westward in search of fresh lands, creating instability in the lives of both slaves and masters.

Tobacco, moreover, was not always associated with slave labor, and many non-slaveholding white families in the Chesapeake continued to grow it throughout the eighteenth century and beyond. Consequently, slaves in the Chesapeake lived in a world surrounded by whites. No Virginia county contained a majority of blacks. Even in those Virginia counties with the largest numbers of slaves, at least a quarter of the households owned no slaves at all.⁴

Slavery in the Lowcountry was different. Over 80 percent of the slaves in South Carolina lived on substantial plantations possessing twenty or more slaves. Only a tiny proportion—7 percent—lived on small plantations with fewer than ten slaves. Unlike tobacco, rice cultivation required sizeable plantations; two-thirds of those in South Carolina exceeded five hundred acres. Rice was more laborious to produce than tobacco. One observer of the Lowcountry in 1775 noted that “the labour required for [rice] is only fit for slaves, and I think the hardest work I have seen them engaged in.”⁵ Unlike tobacco, rice did not exhaust the soil, and the need alternately to flood and drain the rice fields with tidewater meant that Lowcountry plantations necessarily remained close to estuaries. Consequently, the slaves and their descendants in South Carolina had a greater chance to remain on the same plantation for longer periods than was the case in Virginia. And they had fewer whites around them than in the Chesapeake. By 1790 eleven of the eighteen rural parishes of the Carolina Lowcountry were more than 80 percent black.

There were other differences. The Chesapeake plantations were much more diversified than those in Carolina, many of them growing wheat and other foodstuffs in addition to tobacco. In fact, in the decades leading up to the Revolution more and more of the Virginia plantations, like Washington’s Mount Vernon, began to replace tobacco with wheat. The spread of wheat production changed the nature of the skills the Chesapeake slaves needed. They had to learn to plow and take care of oxen and horses, which in turn required the growing of hay and other fodder and the manuring of land.

By the late eighteenth century the wheat-producing plantations in Virginia and Maryland had become highly organized operations with the slaves involved in a variety of specialized tasks. Growing wheat in place of tobacco, the planters began calling themselves “farmers,” with their slaves becoming farm workers instead of plantation hands. Because the more diversified agriculture required less labor, many of the Chesapeake farmers began hiring out their slaves. This practice in turn suggested to some in the Upper South that slavery might eventually be replaced by wage labor.⁶

The Chesapeake slaves also engaged in many more diverse crafts than their counterparts in the Deep South. The British traveler Isaac Weld noted that the leading Chesapeake planters “have nearly everything they can want on their own estates. Amongst their slaves are found tailors, shoemakers, carpenters, smiths, turners, wheelwrights, weavers, tanners, etc.”⁷ While the Virginia slaves tended to supply many of the needs of their plantations, the situation was different in the Deep South. Rice was a more lucrative crop than tobacco; throughout the eighteenth century the profits from rice had accounted for one-half to two-thirds of the annual value of South Carolina’s exports.⁸ As a consequence, few South Carolina plantations were willing to sacrifice rice production in order to diversify and produce other goods, including provisions. In 1774 the manager of two Lowcountry plantations warned the owner against planting corn to supply food for the plantations. “If more corn is to be raised there than common, there must of consequence less Rice be planted, and the latter is the most profitable Grain.” Instead, the manager urged that corn be purchased from the backcountry.⁹

Perhaps the most important distinction between the slave populations of the two regions was the different ways the two societies produced their slaves. On the eve of the Revolution over 90 percent of Virginia’s slaves were American born and had assimilated much of Anglo-American culture, including the English language. To supply itself with slaves Virginia had come to rely on the fertility of the large number of its native-born female slaves, who had come to equal the males in number; by the time of the Revolution Virginia had stopped importing slaves and never again resumed importing them.

By contrast, only 65 percent of South Carolina’s slaves were native born; over a third had been born in Africa. In the several decades following the Revolution South Carolina continued to import slaves, bringing in as many as seventy thousand, some from the West Indies, most of them from Africa. Indeed, South Carolina imported more slaves than any other colony on the North American mainland. Since most of the slaves brought into South Carolina from Africa were male adults, the natural growth of the slave population in the colony and state was retarded—the presence of a large number of native-born female slaves being the key to natural growth.

By the time the international slave trade was legally prohibited in 1808, South Carolina had imported about twice as many slaves as Virginia, even though its slave population of two hundred thousand was only half that of Virginia’s. South Carolina’s greater reliance on importation gave its slave society and culture an African tone and character that did not exist to the same degree in the Chesapeake. Most of the slaves in the Carolina Lowcountry carved out a distinctive culture for themselves, including not only their own African-English hybrid language, Gullah, but their own styles of personal display, including the wearing of beards and jewelry. Actually, everywhere in America the black slaves worked out their own syncretic forms for their African American culture—in their music, religion, funerals, humor, and entertainments. Whites had an especially hard time making sense of the dancing, singing, and rejoicing that took place at black funerals; they tended to dismiss these practices as “festive accompaniments” without realizing they were a ritual celebration of the deceased’s journey back “home” to Africa.¹⁰

The nature of the staple also gave the Lowcountry Carolina slaves greater autonomy than their counterparts in the Chesapeake. Since producing rice did not require close supervision, the white planters came to rely on a task system of labor. Giving the slaves tasks to complete allowed the slaves who worked quickly opportunities for free time to grow their own crops or to produce goods for themselves or for sale. In 1796 the South Carolina legislature attempted to regulate this practice of the slaves selling and buying their own goods and thus implicitly legitimated it.¹¹

Slaves in Virginia had no such free time and had much more difficulty earning extra money for themselves. Since tobacco needed considerable care and attention, producing it required a very different system of labor management. White planters in the Chesapeake relied on gang labor for the production of tobacco—using small units of closely supervised laborers who worked from sunup to sundown with no incentive to work quickly. Consequently, Chesapeake slaves developed all sorts of resourceful methods of malingering and shirking the work, frustrating their masters to no end.

Washington concluded that his slaves worked four times as fast when he was directly supervising them than when he was absent. Try as he might, he was never able to get his slaves to work efficiently, which was one of the initial reasons he came to oppose the institution. He realized that the slaves had no incentive to work hard and develop “a good name” for themselves. This he thought was slavery’s greatest single flaw as a system of labor. He believed that people strove to do well in life in order to win the respect of others. But slaves had no opportunity to win respect or earn good reputations; hence their presumed lack of ambition. He often wondered what they might accomplish if they were free men.¹²

Although masters and slaves often developed close and sometimes even affectionate relationships, especially in the Chesapeake area, no one ever forgot that the entire system rested on violence and brute force. Masters in South Carolina sometimes branded their slaves and punished them with a ferocity that outsiders found appalling. Four hundred lashes washed down with salt and water was considered “but Slite punishment” compared to the ingenious cruelties some planters could think up to inflict on their disobedient slaves, including, as one observer noted, putting a slave “on the picket with his Left Hand tied to his left toe behind him and Right hand to the post and his Right foot on the pickets till it worked through his foot.”¹³

Although master-slave relations were more brutal and more impersonal in the Lowcountry than in the Chesapeake, everywhere the slave system bred a pervasive sense of hierarchy. “Societies of men could not subsist unless there were a subordination of one to another,” declared a Virginia lawyer in 1772. “That in this subordination the department of slaves must be filled by some, or there would be a defect in the scale of order.”¹⁴ More than anything else, that sense of hierarchy separated the Southern states from those of the North.

OF COURSE, THERE WERE ALWAYS MASTERS who took advantage of this subordination, especially with their female slaves. In the Lowcountry of South Carolina, the incidence of whites having slave concubines was often casually accepted and even treated with amusement. This was largely because whites and slaves tended to live farther apart from one another, and thus miscegenation was not as widespread as it was in the Chesapeake. In Virginia, where whites and slaves lived more closely together, such racial mixing became more common with increasing numbers of mulattos.¹⁵

The Virginian Thomas Jefferson certainly lived among many mulattos. His father-in-law, John Wayles, had six children with a mulatto slave, Betty Hemings. When Jefferson married Wayles’s daughter, Martha, these enslaved children, including the quadroon Sally Hemings, passed to Jefferson. Although the evidence is now overwhelming that Jefferson was sexually involved with Sally Hemings, that may be less important than the fact that miscegenation was part of his family and going on all around him at Monticello.¹⁶ That alone may help explain Jefferson’s deep fear of racial mixing.

Jefferson was in most respects a typical slaveholder. Although he always condemned slavery, he did own one of the largest slave populations in Virginia. Upon the division of his father-in-law’s estate in 1774 he became, in fact, the second-largest slaveholder in Albemarle County. Thereafter the number of his slaves remained around two hundred—with increases through births offset by periodic sales to pay off debts. Jefferson was known to be a good master, reluctant to break up families or to sell slaves except for delinquency or at their own request. Nevertheless, between 1784 and 1794 he disposed of 161 people by sale or gift. It is true that Jefferson was averse to separating young children from their parents; but once slave boys or girls reached the age of ten or twelve and their working lives began, they were no longer children in Jefferson’s mind.

Monticello was a working plantation, and Jefferson was eager to make it pay. His slaves may have been members of his “family,” but they were units of production as well. Everywhere on his plantation he sought to eliminate pockets of idleness. If a slave was too old or too sick to work in the fields, he or she was put to tending the vegetable gardens or to cooking in the quarters. When one of his former head men named Nace became ill, Jefferson ordered that he be “entirely kept from labour until he recovers”; nevertheless, Nace was to spend his days indoors shelling corn or making shoes or baskets. Jefferson was willing to prescribe lighter work for women who were pregnant or raising infant children because they were actually breeding more property; thus, said Jefferson, “a child raised every 2 years is of more profit than the crop of the best laboring man.” This was one of the times, he said, when “providence has made our interest and our duties coincide perfectly.”¹⁷

“I love industry and abhor severity,” declared Jefferson, and apparently he himself never physically punished a slave. Yet the coercion of the lash lay behind the workings of Monticello, as it did for all plantations. Jefferson certainly had no scruples in ordering disobedient slaves whipped; and those he could not correct he sold, often as a lesson to the other slaves. Jefferson ordered one particularly unmanageable slave to be sold so far away that it would seem to his companions “as if he were put out of the way by death.” That Jefferson was considered to be a kind and gentle master suggests how pernicious the practice of slavery could be. As he himself pointed out, a master “nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.”¹⁸

ALTHOUGH NEARLY 90 PERCENT of all the slaves lived in the slave societies of the South, slavery was not inconsequential in the Northern parts of America. On the eve of the Revolution nearly fifty thousand slaves lived in the North. In the middle of the eighteenth century one out of every five families in Boston owned at least one slave. In 1767 nearly 9 percent of the population of Philadelphia was enslaved. In 1760 black slaves made up nearly 8 percent of the population of Rhode Island and nearly 7 percent of the population of New Jersey, most of them clustered around the port cities and towns.

By 1770 black slaves constituted 12 percent of the population of the colony of New York and a bit over 14 percent in the city of New York. Slaves were widely distributed in small units throughout the city; even as late as 1790 one out of every five households owned at least one slave. Indeed, the proportion of households in New York City and its surrounding counties owning slaves was greater than that of any Southern state—nearly 40 percent of the white households for the New York City area compared to 36. 5 percent for Maryland and 34 percent for South Carolina. Of course, the number of slaves held by each household in New York City and its immediate hinterland was much smaller than those of the South, averaging fewer than four slaves per household.¹⁹

Most of the rural Northern slaves were farm laborers of one sort or another. Only in South County (then called King’s County), Rhode Island, was there anything resembling the plantations of the South. These plantations, which produced dairy products and livestock, especially pacer horses, ranged from three-hundred-acre farms to large sprawling units that measured in square miles. The Narragansett Planters, as they were called, tried to live like Southern aristocrats, but the slave populations on their plantations tended to be much smaller, running about a dozen to a dozen and a half on each plantation. In South County the black proportion of the population ranged from 15 to 25 percent, making this area the most slave-ridden of any place in New England; indeed, the towns of South Kingstown and Charlestown in South County had proportions of black populations that rivaled those of Virginia, 30 to 40 percent. Some of the slaves may have been racially mixed, for many Narragansett Indians, devastated and scattered by King Philip’s War in the previous century, had intermarried with blacks.²⁰

In most parts of the Northern colonies slaves tended to live much closer to their white masters than the slaves of the South-–usually jammed into the garrets, backrooms, and barns of their white owners rather than living in separate slave quarters. On the eve of the Revolution one-third or more of the Northern slaves lived in the several cities, where they performed a variety of tasks as domestics, teamsters, tradesmen, dock workers, and sailors. One out of four blacks in Rhode Island, for example, lived in the slave-trading entrepôt of Newport, where they constituted 20 percent of the city’s population.²¹ Despite this urban clustering of black slaves, however, the Northern colonies were not slave societies like those of the South, and slavery was just one form of labor among many and not the dominant model in the society.

PREVALENT AS IT WAS everywhere in colonial America, slavery in the first half of the eighteenth century was very much taken for granted. It was still a cruel and brutal age, as the system of criminal punishments revealed, and many believed that slavery was merely part of the natural order of things. An educated and enlightened slaveholder like William Byrd of Westover in Virginia never expressed any guilt or misgivings over the owning of dozens of slaves. Of course, by the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth isolated conscience-stricken individuals spoke out against slavery, but they were few and far between, and mostly Quakers.

During the first half of the eighteenth century most Americans had simply accepted slavery as the lowest and most base status in a hierarchy of legal dependencies. The prevalence of hundreds of thousands of bonded white servants tended to blur the conspicuous nature of black slavery. With as much as half of colonial society at any moment legally unfree, the peculiar character of lifetime, hereditary black slavery was not always as obvious as it would become in the years following the Revolution when bonded white servitude virtually disappeared. Naturally, the leading Southern Revolutionaries—Washington, Jefferson, and Madison—all owned slaves; but so too did many of the Northern Revolutionaries—Boston’s John Hancock, New York’s Robert Livingston, and Philadelphia’s John Dickinson. On the eve of the Revolution the mayor of Philadelphia possessed thirty-one slaves.²²

The Revolution almost overnight made slavery a problem in ways that it had not been earlier. The contradiction between the appeal to liberty and the existence of slavery became obvious to all the Revolutionary leaders. They did not need to hear Dr. Johnson’s famous quip “How is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” in order to realize the painful inconsistency between their talk of freedom for themselves and their owning of black slaves. If all men were created equal, as all enlightened persons were now saying, then what justification could there be for holding Africans in slavery? Since Americans “are by the law of nature free born, as indeed all men are, white or black . . . does it follow,” asked James Otis of Massachusetts in 1764, “that ‘tis right to enslave a man because he is black? . . . Can any logical inference in favor of slavery be drawn from a flat nose, a long or short face?”²³

By the eve of the Revolution the contradiction had become excruciating for many, and Northerners, like Samuel Cooke in his Massachusetts election sermon of 1770, were anxious to confess that in tolerating black slavery “we, the patrons of liberty, have dishonored the Christian name, and degraded human nature nearly to a level with the beasts that perish.”²⁴ Even some prominent slaveholding Southerners, like Thomas Jefferson, were willing to declare that “the rights of human nature [are] deeply wounded by this infamous practice [of importing slaves],” and that “the abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state.”²⁵

As early as 1774 both Rhode Island and Connecticut prohibited new slaves from being brought into their colonies. In the preamble to their law the Rhode Islanders declared that since “the inhabitants of America are generally engaged in the preservations of their own rights and liberties, among which that of personal freedom must be considered the greatest,” it was obvious that “those who are desirous of enjoying all the advantages of liberty themselves should be willing to extend personal liberty to others.” Other states—Delaware, Virginia, Maryland, and South Carolina—soon followed in abolishing the slave trade, South Carolina only for a term of years. Given the mounting sense of inconsistency between the Revolutionary ideals and the holding of people in bondage, it is not surprising that the first anti-slave convention in the world was held in Philadelphia in 1775.

Everywhere in the country most of the Revolutionary leaders assumed that slavery was on its last legs and was headed for eventual destruction. On the eve of the Revolution Benjamin Rush believed that the desire to abolish the institution “prevails in our counsels and among all ranks in every province.” With hostility toward slavery mounting everywhere among the enlightened in the Atlantic world, he predicted in 1774 that “there will be not a Negro slave in North America in 40 years.”²⁶ Even some Virginians assumed slavery could not long endure. Jefferson told a French correspondent in 1786 that there were in the Virginia legislature “men of virtue enough to propose, and talents” to move toward, “the gradual emancipation of slaves.” To be sure, “they saw that the moment of doing it was not yet arrived,” but, said Jefferson, with “the spread of light and liberality” among the slaveholders that moment was coming.²⁷ Slavery simply could not stand against the relentless march of liberty and progress. That the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 was scrupulous in not mentioning “slaves,” “slavery,” or “Negroes” in the final draft of the Constitution seemed to point to a future without the shameful institution.

Predictions of slavery’s demise could not have been more wrong. Far from being doomed, American slavery in fact was on the verge of its greatest expansion.

HOW COULD THE REVOLUTIONARY LEADERS have been so mistaken? How could they have deceived themselves so completely? The Founders’ self-deception and mistaken optimism were understandable, for they wanted to believe the best, and initially there was evidence that slavery was in fact dying out. The Northern states, where slavery was not insignificant, were busy trying to eliminate the institution. Following the Americans’ early efforts to abolish the slave trade, they began attacking the institution of slavery itself with increasing passion.²⁸

In 1777 the future state of Vermont led the way in formally abolishing slavery. Its constitution of that year declared that no persons “born in this country, or brought from over sea, ought to be holden by law to serve any purpose, or servant, slave or apprentice” after they attained adulthood, unless “by their own consent,” or by appropriate court-ordered legal proscription.²⁹ Then in 1780 the Revolutionary government of Pennsylvania, admitting that slavery was “disgraceful to any people, and more especially to those who have been contending in the great cause of liberty themselves,” provided for the gradual emancipation of the state’s slaves.³⁰ In Boston free and enslaved blacks themselves took up the cause and used the Revolutionaries’ language against the institution, declaring that “they have in common with all men a Natural and Unalienable right to that freedom which the Grat Parent of the Universe hath Bestowed equally on all menkind.”³¹ In 1783 the Massachusetts Superior Court held that slavery was incompatible with the state’s constitution, particularly with its bill of rights, which declared that “all men are born free and equal.” A New Hampshire court did the same. Rhode Island and Connecticut passed gradual abolition laws in 1784. In the Pennsylvania ratifying convention James Wilson predicted that emancipation of all the slaves in the United States was inevitable. The abolition of the slave trade, he said, would lay “the foundation for banishing slavery out of this country; and though the period is more distant than I could wish, yet it will produce the same kind [of] gradual change [for the whole nation] which was pursued in Pennsylvania.”³² New York in 1799 and New Jersey in 1804 provided for the gradual elimination of slavery, though as late as 1810 over 40 percent of white households in New York City still contained slaves.³³ Nevertheless, by the early nineteenth century every Northern state had provided for the eventual end of slavery. By 1790 the number of free blacks in the Northern states had increased from several hundred in the 1770s to over twenty-seven thousand; by 1810 free blacks in the North numbered well over one hundred thousand.

Even the South, especially Virginia, the largest state in the Union, gave signs of wanting to soften and eventually end the institution. The Virginia and Maryland masters certainly treated their slaves more paternalistically than their counterparts in South Carolina and Georgia. The Creole slaves of the Upper South benefited not only from better food, clothing, and housing but also from more intimate daily contact with their masters than those in the Deep South. On the eve of the Revolution many of Virginia’s slaveholders had become more unwilling to break up families and had become more relaxed about slaves’ visiting between plantations and about slave truancy, even putting up with some slaves’ running away for days or even weeks at a time as long as they eventually returned. (Since there were no free states as yet, there was no place to run to anyway.) Nevertheless, by the time of the Revolution literate young blacks, like Isaac Bee of Carter’s Grove in Virginia, who, according to his master, “thinks he has a Right to his Freedom,” were willing to run off and try “to pass” as free men.³⁴

In the Upper South the black codes that had been passed at the beginning of the eighteenth century had fallen into neglect, and whites had become less concerned with racial separation than in the past. Fraternization between whites and black slaves had become more common, especially in drinking bouts, horse racing, cockfighting, and gambling. Slaves and lower-class whites often got together in drinking establishments. Blacks commonly supplied the music for white dances, which themselves became increasingly influenced by slave customs. Whites tended to treat the few free blacks in their midst much less severely than they would in the nineteenth century. Free blacks were allowed to acquire property, carry arms in militia groups, travel fairly freely, and even to vote in some areas.

The white evangelical Protestant groups of Baptists and later Methodists recruited blacks and mingled with them in their congregations. Some black evangelicals even preached to white congregations. Indeed, in the 1790s white residents of the Eastern Shore in Virginia pooled enough money to purchase the freedom of their black preacher. Not only were the Baptists and Methodists mixing whites and blacks, but these rapidly growing evangelical denominations were publicly voicing their opposition to slavery. When even Southerners like Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Henry Laurens, and St. George Tucker publicly deplored the injustice of slavery, from “that moment,” declared the New York physician and abolitionist E. H. Smith in 1798, “the slow, but certain, death-wound was inflicted upon it.”³⁵

Other evidence from the Upper South seemed to reinforce the point. The increased hiring out of slaves convinced many in the Upper South that slavery would soon by replaced by wage labor. What could be a more conspicuous endorsement of the anti-slavery cause than having the College of William and Mary in 1791 confer an honorary degree on the celebrated British abolitionist Granville Sharp? That there were more anti-slave societies created in the South than in the North was bound to make people feel that the South was moving in the same direction of gradual emancipation as the North, especially when these societies were publicly denouncing slavery as “not only an odious degradation, but an outrageous violation of one of the most essential rights of human nature.”³⁶ In Virginia and Maryland some of these anti-slave societies brought “freedom suits” in the state courts that led to some piecemeal emancipation. If the slaves could demonstrate that they had a maternal white or Indian ancestor, they could be freed, and hearsay evidence was often enough to convince the courts. “Whole families,” recalled one sympathetic observer, “were often liberated by a single verdict, the fate of one relative deciding the fate of many.” By 1796 nearly thirty freedom suits were pending in Virginia courts.³⁷

Other efforts in the Upper South to free slaves contributed to the sense that slavery was doomed everywhere in America. In 1782 Virginia allowed for the private manumission of slaves, and Delaware and Maryland soon followed with similar laws. Some slaves took advantage of these new liberal laws and worked to buy their own freedom. Of the slaves freed in Norfolk, Virginia, between 1791 and 1820, more than a third purchased themselves or were purchased by others, usually by their families. By 1790 the free black population in the Upper South had increased to over thirty thousand; by 1810 the free blacks in Virginia and Maryland numbered over ninety-four thousand. Many thought that the abolition of slavery itself was just a matter of time.

Some set forth what became the diffusionist position—that spreading slavery throughout the Western territories would make elimination of the institution easier. In 1798 Virginia congressman John Nicholas contended that opening up the Western Country to slavery would be a service to the entire Union. It would, he said, “spread the blacks over a large space, so that in time it might be safe to carry into effect the plan which certain philanthropists have so much at heart, and to which he had no objection, if it could be effected, viz., the emancipation of this class of men.” Since the Constitution’s restriction on acting against the slave trade until 1808 applied only to slaves brought into the states, Congress in 1798 prohibited the importation of slaves from abroad into the Mississippi Territory but purposefully allowed the introduction of slaves into the Western territories from elsewhere in the United States. A similar policy was followed in the newly organized Orleans Territory in 1804 when Congress forbade the importation of foreign slaves but allowed owners of slaves settling in the territory from other parts of the United States to bring their slaves with them. The demand for slaves was so great in the Southwest that these restrictions were short-lived, and soon slaves were flowing into the Southwest not only from other parts of America but directly from Africa as well. But the diffusionist arguments voiced by slaveholders in the old states of the Upper South who had more slaves than they knew what to do with—self-serving as their arguments may have been—did suggest that many Southerners wanted to do away with slavery.³⁸

Everywhere, even in South Carolina, slaveholders began to feel defensive about slavery and began to sense a public pressure against the institution that they had never felt before. Whites in Charleston expressed squeamishness about the evils of slavery, especially the public trading and punishment of slaves. Masters began toning down their fierce advertisements for runaway slaves and felt a need to justify their attempts to recover their slaves that they never had earlier. In the 1780s some of the Carolinian masters expressed a growing reluctance to break up families and even began manumitting their slaves, freeing more slaves in that decade than had been freed in the previous three decades.³⁹

PERHAPS THE MAIN REASON many were persuaded that slavery was on its way to extinction was the widespread enthusiasm throughout America for ending the despicable slave trade. Everywhere in the New World slavery was dependent on the continued importations of slaves from Africa—except for much of the North American continent. But the fact that the Deep South and the rest of the New World needed slave importations to maintain the institution deluded many Americans into believing that slavery in the United States was also dependent on the slave trade and that ending the slave trade would eventually end slavery itself.

Those who held out that hope simply did not appreciate how demographically different North American slavery was from that in South America and the Caribbean. They were blind to the fact that in most areas the slaves were growing nearly as rapidly as whites, nearly doubling in number every twenty to twenty-five years. Living with illusions, white leaders concluded that if the slave trade could be cut off, slavery would wither and die.

All the initial eagerness to end the slave trade, especially among the planters of the Upper South, suggested to Northerners a deeper antagonism to slavery than was in fact the case. Perhaps some of the Virginia planters sincerely believed that ending the slave trade would doom the institution, but many others knew that they had a surplus of slaves. In 1799 Washington had 317 slaves, most of whom were either too young or too old and infirm to work efficiently. Even so, he had more slaves than he needed for farming wheat and foodstuffs, and he did not want to return to planting tobacco. Yet he had no desire to sell “the overplus . . . because I am principled against this kind of traffic in the human species.” Nor did he want to hire them out, because he had “an aversion” to breaking up families. “What then is to be done?” he asked.⁴⁰

Certainly Washington, like many other Virginia farmers, did not need more slaves and thus could welcome an end to the international slave trade. But not all Chesapeake planters were as scrupulous as Washington about not wanting to sell slaves and break up families, and they made the domestic slave trade in the Chesapeake flourish as never before. By 1810 one in five Chesapeake slaves was being sent westward to Kentucky and Tennessee.

Northerners scarcely understood what was happening. They had little or no appreciation that slavery in the South was a healthy, vigorous, and expansive institution. As far as they were concerned, the Virginia and Maryland planters were enthusiastically supporting an end to the international slave trade as the first major step in eliminating the institution. This assault on the overseas slave trade appeared to align the Chesapeake planters with the anti-slave forces in the North and confused many Northerners about the real intentions of the Upper South.

The Constitution drafted in 1787 gave South Carolina and Georgia twenty years to import more slaves from abroad, but everyone clearly expected that in 1808 Congress would act to end the trade, which in turn would lead to the eradication of slavery itself. Actually all the states, including South Carolina, stopped importing slaves on their own during the 1790 s—actions that reinforced the conviction that slavery’s days were numbered.

YET THE EXPLOSIVE PRO-SLAVERY RESPONSE by representatives from the Deep South to two petitions from the Pennsylvania Abolition Society to Congress in 1790 to end the slave trade and slavery itself should have indicated that the eradication of slavery was not going to be as predictable as many had thought. “Let me remind men who expect a general emancipation by law,” warned one outraged South Carolinian congressman, “that this would never be submitted to by the Southern States without civil war!” Despite such angry outbursts, however, confidence in the future remained strong, and James Madison and other congressmen from the Upper South were able to bury the petitions in 1790. Their desire to smother even talk about the problem of slavery rested on their deeply mistaken assumption that the Revolutionary ideals of “Humanity & freedom” were, as Madison put it, “secretly undermining the institution.”⁴¹ Raising noise about slavery, said Madison, could only slow down the inevitable march of progress. Besides, as President Washington pointed out, the petitions against slavery in 1790 were ill timed; they threatened to break apart the Union just as it was getting on its feet.

As early as 1786 Washington not only had vowed privately to purchase no more slaves but had expressed his deepest wish that the Virginia legislature might adopt some plan by which slavery could be “abolished by slow, sure, & imperceptible degrees.” In the early 1790s, like others, he seemed to rest his hopes on the ending of the slave trade in 1808, and in early 1794 he actually introduced into the Senate a petition from the New England Quakers urging an end to American participation in the international slave trade. Although the Constitution forbade Congress from preventing the importation of slaves until 1808, Congress decided in 1794 that it had the authority to prohibit American citizens from selling captured Africans to foreign traders and to prevent foreign ships involved in the slave trade from being outfitted in American ports.⁴²

Madison and Washington were not the only leaders who had a naïve faith in the future. Vice-President John Adams thought that when the imports of slaves were cut off, white laborers would become sufficiently numerous that piecemeal private manumissions of the slaves could take place. Oliver Ellsworth, the third chief justice of the Supreme Court and a strict, hard-headed Connecticut Calvinist, agreed. He believed that “as population increases, poor labourers will be so plenty as to render slaves useless. Slavery in time will not be a speck in our country.”⁴³

Besides the Deep South’s impassioned response to the 1790 Quaker petitions to end slavery, other signals suggested that slavery was not dying away. In 1803 South Carolina reopened its slave trade, a minor shock that should have prepared Americans for the big quake—the Missouri crisis of 1819—that lay ahead. Between 1803 and 1807 South Carolina brought in nearly forty thousand slaves, over twice as many in that four-year period as in any similar period in its history.⁴⁴

With slavery slowly disappearing in the North and yet persisting in the South, the nation was moving in two different directions. By the beginning of the nineteenth century Virginia was still the largest state in the Union, with 885,000 people, nearly equal to the population of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia combined. But its white population was expanding slowly, and tens of thousands of Virginians were pushing out of the Tidewater into the Piedmont and then even farther west and south into Kentucky and Tennessee in search of new land. At the same time, the black population in the Chesapeake was growing faster than the white population and was steadily being moved westward along with over two hundred thousand migrating white farmers. Although nearly one hundred thousand slaves were removed from Maryland and Virginia in the two decades after 1790, the black slave population of the Chesapeake still totaled well over five hundred thousand in 1810.

Each of the Chesapeake states of Maryland and Virginia responded differently to the rapidly growing slave populations. Although both states began manumitting slaves in the aftermath of the Revolution, Maryland freed many more than Virginia. Having no western piedmont to expand into, many of the Maryland planters were faced with either selling or freeing their slaves, and many chose to free them. By 1810 20 percent of Maryland blacks had gained their freedom, accelerating a process that continued up to the eve of the Civil War, when half the black population of the state had become free.

By contrast, only 7 percent of Virginia’s black population was free by 1810, and by the eve of the Civil War the percentage of free blacks never got beyond 10 percent. White planters either moved out of the state with their slaves or sold their excessive slaves to whites in other states or to their fellow Virginians. The result was that an ever larger proportion of white Virginians, especially in the Piedmont, became slaveholders in the decades between 1782 and 1810. Prior to the Revolution the majority of white Virginians had not owned slaves; by 1810 that had dramatically changed: the majority of white Virginians were now personally involved in the institution of slavery and the patriarchal politics that slavery promoted. With the spread of slavery to deeper levels of its population, Virginia became less and less the revolutionary leader of liberalism that it had been in 1776.⁴⁵

MOST OF THE SOUTH became Jeffersonian Republican. As early as the Fourth Congress in 1795–1797, over 80 percent of the Southern congressmen voted in opposition to the Federalist administration. In the presidential election of 1796 the Federalist John Adams received only two Southern electoral votes in comparison to Jefferson’s forty-three.⁴⁶

But not all the South was Republican, at least not at first. During the 1790s parts of South Carolina had been strongly Federalist, especially the Lowcountry and the city of Charleston.⁴⁷ By 1800 Charleston had emerged as the most European and the least entrepreneurial-minded city of the large port cities of the United States. In the eighteenth century it had been one of the five largest colonial cities in North America with a flourishing commerce controlled by South Carolinian merchant-planters. But by the early nineteenth century merchants from the North and from Europe had taken over the city’s countinghouses, and the Carolinian nabobs who had once been merchants became increasingly disdainful of all those who were engaged in trade.⁴⁸

The swampy land of the Carolina Lowcountry tended to breed mosquitoes and malaria, which encouraged white families to abandon the area in the summer months. Consequently, many of the Lowcountry planters became absentee owners of their plantations, with hired white overseers managing the many black slaves. The early nineteenth century was the golden age for these sea island Carolina planters, who by 1810 owned over two hundred plantations, each with a hundred slaves or more. Although the Lowcountry had only one-fifth of the state’s population, it contained three-fourths of its wealth. Its slaveholding planting class built huge mansions, bought elegant furniture, drank and ate the best of everything, dressed in the latest London fashions, intermarried with one another, voted for Federalists, and made believe they were English aristocrats.

In the coastal areas of the Lowcountry, where water was readily available, rice remained the principal staple, but planters in the lowlands also began turning to cotton, the long staple sort that was ideal for lace or fine linens. Although the long-staple cotton was lucrative, it was hard to grow and flourished only in the coastal areas. Many Carolinians would have liked to grow the short-staple cotton, which was appropriate for coarse fabrics and potentially very profitable, but they did not yet know how to process it easily. Separating the seeds from the cotton fibers by hand was so time-consuming and labor-intensive that results were measured in ounces rather than pounds.

Although sooner or later someone would have found a way to mechanize the process, it was left to a Massachusetts-born Yale graduate with an acute mechanical aptitude, Eli Whitney, to acquire the financial backing of Catherine Littlefield Greene, widow of General Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island, and come up with his invention of a cotton gin in 1793. His machine solved the perennial problem of removing seeds from the short-staple cotton; it, said Whitney, “required the labor of one man to turn it and with which one man will clean ten times as much cotton as he can in any other way before now, and also cleanse it much better than in the usual mode.” Planters pirated Whitney’s design and built large gins (short for engine) to process huge amounts of cotton. By 1805, in a little over a decade, cotton production in the South had multiplied thirty-fold, from two million pounds to sixty million pounds a year.⁴⁹

The cotton gin turned the Carolina Upcountry into the greatest cotton producing area in the country. Prior to the 1790s the region had been dominated by yeoman farmers with few slaves raising tobacco for a little cash. By 1815 the interior of the state was full of small slaveholding cotton-producing planters, all eager to become aristocratic gentry like those of the Lowcountry. Cotton-production needed slaves, and the numbers multiplied dramatically. In 1790 five-sixths of all of the state’s slaves had belonged to Lowcountry plantations; by 1820 most of the state’s slaves were working in the Upcountry.⁵⁰

From Carolina and Georgia, cotton and slavery soon moved to the new territories of the Southwest. Planters in the Natchez region quickly abandoned indigo and tobacco for the much more lucrative cotton. As early as 1800 a traveling minister in Mississippi noted that cotton was “now the staple commodity in the territory.” Merchants from New Orleans began furiously competing with one another to line up contracts with cotton-producing planters. Since everyone presumed that only slaves could work the cotton fields, any effort to limit slavery in the Southwest was met with fierce opposition. The planters declared that without slaves, “the farms in this District would be but little more value by 1810 to the present occupiers than an equal quantity of waste land.” In 1799 a Mississippi planter told his relatives back in Virginia to sell his property in Richmond and buy slaves. “I would take two Negros for it,” he said. “They would here sell for 1,000 or 1200 Dollars.” Everywhere in the Upper South increasing numbers of slaveholders either pulled up stakes and moved with their slaves to Mississippi or sold slaves at great profit to friends and relatives who were settling in the new territory. Between 1800 and 1810 the slave population of the Mississippi Territory increased from about thirty-five hundred to nearly seventeen thousand, with most of them producing cotton.⁵¹

In Orleans Territory sugar became the principal crop, especially following the slave rebellion and the collapse of the economy in Saint-Domingue. By 1802 seventy-five sugar plantations bordering the Mississippi River in lower Louisiana and staffed by slaves produced more than five million pounds of sugar annually; by 1810 sugar production had doubled. With rising sugar profits, the population of the area increased rapidly, with the number of slaves growing faster than the white population. In 1806 the Louisiana Gazette reminded slave-owners in the “middle and southern states” (identifying, as Washington had, the Upper South with the middle states) that the Orleans Territory offered “an outlet for the superabundance of their black population, and an extravagant price for what will shortly be to them, an incumbrance instead of an advantage.” Slaves were flooded into Louisiana, turning New Orleans into one of the major slave markets in America. By 1810 New Orleans had become the largest city south of Baltimore and the fifth largest in the nation. By 1812 Louisiana had become a state.⁵²

IN THE SOUTH AND SOUTHWEST there was democracy of a sort: some legislative elections, usually full white manhood suffrage, much talk of equal rights, and many rhetorical denunciations of “aristocrats.” Beneath these democratic and egalitarian trappings, however, the politics of these Southern and Southwestern areas continued to be remarkably traditional and hierarchical.

Virginia’s popular government, for example, bore little resemblance to the popular governments of New England. Not only was voting still confined to fifty-acre freeholders and done orally, but the wealthy Tidewater planters retained a disproportionate representation in the legislature. “The haughty and purse-proud landlords,” noted a Massachusetts visitor, “form an aristocracy over the dependent democracy.”⁵³ While this was no doubt an exaggeration that only a frosty Yankee could make, it contained more than a grain of truth. Unlike in the Northern states, the only elected officials in Virginia were federal congressmen and state legislators; all the rest were either selected by the legislature or appointed by the governor or the county courts, which were self-perpetuating oligarchies that dominated local government. Thus popular democratic politics in Virginia and elsewhere in the South was severely limited, especially in contrast to the states of the North, where nearly all state and local offices had become elective and the turbulence of politics and the turnover of offices were much greater.

Like Virginia, the other Southern states and territories—Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi—continued to rely on mostly appointed local officials with the legislatures very much in control of government. Although the big slaveholding planters did not dominate all the political offices in these states, they set the tone for their societies; unlike in the North, where lawyers tended to dominate officeholding, many of the officeholders in these Southern and Southwestern states were themselves slaveholding farmers, with a vested interest in the institution of slavery.

That institution tended to create a different economy, society, politics, and culture than the North. While the North was coming to value labor as fit for all social ranks, much of the white population of the South was becoming more and more contemptuous of work and desirous of acquiring the leisure that slavery seemed to offer. Indeed, so great was the white cult of indolence that some Southerners began to worry about the discrepancy between an industrious North and a lethargic South. “Where there is Negro slavery,” one concerned Virginian told Madison, “there will be laziness, carelessness, and wastefulness,” not as much among the slaves as among the white masters. This Virginian even claimed that “our intelligent Negroes are far superior in mind, morals and manners than those who are placed in authority over them.”⁵⁴

Slavery and the Southern economy tended to breed deference. Not only did the wealthy slaveholding planters’ management of the overseas marketing of the staple crop, whether cotton or tobacco, help to reinforce a social hierarchy of patrons and clients, but ultimately, and more important, their patriarchal system of slavery sustained that hierarchy. The commercial institutions that were springing up in the North had no counterparts in the Southern states. The South contained fewer turnpikes, fewer canals, fewer banks, fewer corporations, and fewer issuers of paper money than the North. Slavery even perversely affected the tax system and other public policies in the South. The Southern legislatures taxed their citizens much less heavily and spent much less on education and social services than did the legislatures of the North. “Slavery,” as one historian has said, “had profoundly antidemocratic effects on American politics.” The Southern planters could not afford to allow non-slaveholding majorities in their states to burden their peculiar “species of property,” and they used their disproportionate representation in their state legislatures to protect themselves. For example, even though slaves made up only 16 percent of Kentucky’s population, the minority of slaveholders in the state were able to write into Kentucky’s 1792 constitution the nation’s first explicit protection of slavery, declaring that “the legislature shall have no power to pass laws for the emancipation of slaves without the consent of their owners.”⁵⁵

In the early Republic North and South may have been both American and republican, both professing a similar rhetoric of liberty and popular government, but below the surface they were fast becoming different places—one coming to value common labor as the supreme human activity, the other continuing to think of labor in traditional terms as mean and despicable and fit only for slaves.

AS THE SECTIONS gradually grew apart, each began expressing increasing frustration with the other, aggravating an antagonism that had been present from the beginning of the Revolution. Northerners, especially New England Federalists, began to complain about what they saw as unjustified Southern dominance of the federal government. They focused on the three-fifths clause of the Constitution that counted slaves as three-fifths of a person for the levying of direct taxes and for assessing representation in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College. Since the federal government had seldom directly taxed its citizens and was unlikely to do so very often, representation became the main issue people cared about.

In the Constitutional Convention of 1787 the aristocratic Gouverneur Morris had attacked the three-fifths clause as an unjust support for slavery, one that gave the slave states an incentive to import more slaves. But the Convention had overwhelmingly rejected Morris’s proposal that the slaves not be counted at all, with only New Jersey voting for it. Once that proposal was defeated, the most plausible alternative to the three-fifths clause was to count the slaves as five-fifths, that is, as full persons, which would have given the slaveholding South even more political strength. But that alternative, suggested by both James Madison and John Rutledge, went nowhere. Caught between not counting the slaves at all and counting them fully, the Convention wrote the three-fifths compromise into the Constitution.

In 1787–1788 most Northern Federalists like Rufus King accepted the three-fifths compromise as the necessary price to be paid to keep the South in the Union. But with the rise of the Republican opposition in the 1790s climaxing with the election of Jefferson and a Republican Congress in 1800, the Federalists began to change their minds. They realized only too well that the Jeffersonian Republican party was Southern based and was solidly dependent on Southern slaveholding leadership. The fact that Jefferson won the election of 1800 with 82 percent of the electoral vote of the slave states and only 27 percent of the Northern states reinforced the Federalists’ fear that the South was taking over the nation; indeed, the Federalists came to believe that their displacement from the national government was due almost entirely to the overrepresentation of the South in Congress and the Electoral College. Federalists like Timothy Pickering, the former secretary of state, began referring to Jefferson as the “Negro President” and began urging that the Constitution be amended to end this Southern dominance.⁵⁶

Thus was born the idea of the “slave power” that was unfairly usurping control of the national government from the free states.⁵⁷ The fact that Pickering and other Federalists tended to lump the free middle states, especially Pennsylvania, in with the Southern states as part of the Negro-based Republican takeover of the government reduces somewhat the cogency of their argument. But that may be less important than the politics of the matter. The Federalists needed an issue to combat the victorious Republicans, and their principled stand against slavery was the most effective means of mobilizing opposition to the Republicans in the North—at least until Jefferson in 1807 tried his disastrous experiment with the embargo that cut off all overseas trade.

DURING THE COURSE OF THE 1790S the earlier enthusiasm of those in the Upper South to liberalize their society and to create a looser slave regime began to dissipate. Probably nothing did more to diminish the initial optimism of many whites in Virginia about the end of slavery than the black rebellion in the French colony of Saint-Domingue on the island of Hispaniola. The rebellion began in 1790 with an uprising of free coloreds, a diverse group who numbered about thirty thousand and included French-educated planters, tradesmen, artisans, and small landowners. The insurgents had been infected with French revolutionary principles and now demanded equality with whites. The whites numbered about forty thousand, but they were bitterly divided between the grands blancs and the disorderly and marginalized petits blancs. Beneath the whites and the free coloreds were five hundred thousand African slaves.

Neither the free coloreds nor the whites realized the extent to which their clash over equality and the principles of the French Revolution was affecting the slaves. In August 1791 the slaves on the northern plains rose up, soon becoming a force of twelve thousand that began killing whites and destroying plantations. Brutal retaliation by the whites did not stop growing numbers of slaves from deserting the plantations. Confronted with this rebellion from below, officials in France belatedly sought to forge an alliance between the whites and the free coloreds and sent six thousand troops to put down the slave rebellion. But the whites and free coloreds were so divided by factions that the fighting became worse and eventually spilled over into the Spanish portion of Hispaniola (the present-day Dominican Republic). With the end of the French monarchy and the outbreak of war between France and England in 1793, English forces invaded the island and soon became entangled in the brutal racial wars. Although the great ex-slave leader of the revolt François-Dominique Toussaint L’Ouverture tried to preserve a multi-racial society, he could not contain the chaos that spiraled into what became the rebellion’s eventual goal of eliminating from the island both slavery and whites.

Most Americans, including slaves, knew what was taking place in Saint-Domingue. Between 1791 and 1804 the American press carried regular reports of atrocities on the island. Moreover, thousands of refugees, both white and black, fled from the chaos, many of them to the United States, especially to the cities of Charleston, Norfolk, and Philadelphia. By 1795 as many as twelve thousand Dominguan slaves had entered the United States, bringing with them knowledge that slaves in the New World were capable of overthrowing white rule. Governor Charles Pinckney of South Carolina was not alone in realizing “that the day will arrive when [the Southern states] may be exposed to the same insurrection.”⁵⁸

Frightened of the contagion of this West Indian slave rebellion, most Southern states, but not Virginia, barred Dominguan slaves from entry. Consequently, many of them ended up in Virginia and throughout the decade of the 1790s stimulated wild fears of slave insurrections in the state. In June 1793 John Randolph reported overhearing two slaves planning “to kill the white people.” When one of the slaves expressed skepticism about the plan, the other reminded him “how the blacks has kill’d the whites in the French Island . . . a little while ago.” News of the rebellion in Saint-Domingue was everywhere, and the island could not help becoming a symbol of black liberation. Throughout the 1790s major slave conspiracies were uncovered in the Spanish colonies of Cuba and Louisiana, and slave rebellions actually broke out in Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Curaçao, and Grenada. As Federalist Rufus King pointed out, “the example upon our slaves in the Southern states” was obvious.⁵⁹

During the 1790s talk of slave insurrections in the United States became increasingly prevalent—eroding whatever liberal feelings the Upper South hitherto had toward the ending of slavery. By the end of the decade, as one Virginia slaveholder put it, “the emancipation fume has long evaporated and not a word is now said about it.”⁶⁰

IN 1800 WHAT THE VIRGINIAN SLAVEHOLDERS had long dreaded finally arrived—a widespread conspiracy among their slaves to rise up and abolish slavery. In the area around Richmond a group of artisan-slaves enjoyed a much greater degree of liberty and mobility than they had in the past. Slaves with skills were often able to hire themselves out where needed, pay their masters a share of their wages, and thus earn some money for themselves. These slave-artisans often mingled with both free-black and white artisans in a shadowy interracial underworld that floated between freedom and slavery. The twenty-four-year-old blacksmith Gabriel, owned by planter Thomas Prosser of Henrico County, in which Richmond was located, participated in this borderland world in which heady talk of liberty and natural rights was increasingly common. Already convicted and branded for fighting with a white man, Gabriel was on fire to destroy the system of slavery. He was not alone: as one of the black rebels, Jack Ditcher, declared, “We have as much right to fight for our liberty as any men.”⁶¹

The timing of the conspirators was influenced by the explosive atmosphere of 1799–1800 when the Federalists and Republicans seemed to many to be on the verge of civil war. The Federalists in Virginia, who were mostly merchants and bankers confined to the thriving commercial cities of Richmond, Norfolk, and Fredericksburg, predicted that a Jefferson victory in the election of 1800 would lead to a liberation of the slaves, or worse, a slave insurrection. At the same time, the artisans in the towns, like their brethren in the North, were advocating a more equitable distribution of wealth and were attacking the Federalists for being rich drones who lived off of other men’s labor. Amidst these kinds of charges and counter-charges with predictions of violence and armies clashing, Gabriel and other slave artisans thought that their slave insurrection would become part of a larger upheaval in Virginia and, perhaps, even in the nation.

Gabriel and his conspirators envisioned not simply a slave revolt but a republican revolution against rich merchants that would transform Virginia society. They believed that “the poor white people” and the “most redoubtable democrats” in Richmond would rise with them in rebellion against the existing order. But if the whites would not join the insurrection, then they would all be killed, with the exception of “Quakers, Methodists, and French people,” since they were “friendly to liberty.”⁶²

Although Gabriel may not have originated the conspiracy, he quickly became its leader. Beginning around April 1800, he and other slave artisans began recruiting rebels in the taverns and religious meetings of Richmond and other towns. Five or six hundred men at least orally agreed to participate in the insurrection. Hoping eventually to have a thousand-strong army, the leaders tried recruiting from the rural plantations with less success than they had among the artisans. The rebels planned everything with military precision. They stole guns, made swords from scythes, and organized their army into three groups that would march on Richmond, the capital, under the banner of “Death or Liberty.” Two of the groups planned to set diversionary fires in the warehouse district, while the main group led by Gabriel would seize the state’s treasury, the magazine where military supplies were stored, and Governor James Monroe. The attack was set for August 30, 1800.

On the appointed day two slaves informed their master of the uprising, and at the same time a torrential rain flooded roads and bridges, making it impossible for the rebels to meet and coordinate their plans. The rebellion was doomed from the start.

At first some whites scoffed at the idea of a massive conspiracy, but as the white militia over the next several weeks hunted down dozens of rebels, white Virginians became more and more terrified as they learned of the scope of the miscarried insurrection. Eventually twenty-seven men, including Gabriel, were tried and hanged for their participation in the conspiracy; others were sold and transported out of the state. Some of the rebels knew only too well how to make the white Virginians squirm. One of them, speaking at his trial, declared, “I have nothing more to offer than what General Washington would have had to offer, had he been taken by the British and put to trial. I have adventured my life in endeavouring to obtain the liberty of my countrymen, and am a willing sacrifice in their cause.”⁶³

Governor Monroe thought it “strange” that the slaves should have embarked on “this novel and unexampled enterprise of their own accord.” After all, he said, “their treatment has been more favorable since the revolution,” and because of the end of the slave importations into the state, there were proportionally fewer of them. Unable to understand why the rebellion should have come from those slaves who suffered the fewest restrictions and experienced the greatest taste of liberty, Monroe could only conclude that some outsiders put them up to it.⁶⁴

Virginia Federalists, eager to make political capital out of the conspiracy, were quick to blame the Republicans for their constant sermonizing on the doctrine of “liberty and equality.” “It has been most imprudently propagated for several years at our tables while our servants were standing behind our chairs. It has been preached from the pulpits, Methodists and Baptists alike without reserve. Democrats have talked it, what else then could we expect except what has happened?” We have learned a lesson, said the Virginia Federalists. “There can be no compromise between liberty and slavery.” We must either abolish slavery or continue it. “If we continue it, it must be restricted, all the vigorous laws must be reenacted which experience has proved necessary to keep it within bounds.. . . If we will keep a ferocious monster within our country, we must keep him in chains.” The two decades of liberalization had to come to an end. Otherwise these Virginians believed they would end up with “the horrors of St. Domingo.”⁶⁵

The New England Federalists picked up the refrain and taunted the Southern Republicans for having brought their misery upon themselves. “If any thing will correct & bring to repentance old hardened sinners in Jacobinism,” said the Boston Gazette, “it must be an insurrection of their slaves .” Hamilton’s friend Robert Troup joked to Rufus King about how the Virginia Republicans “are beginning to feel the happy effects of liberty and equality.”⁶⁶ Of course, the New England Federalists had little to fear from slave rebellions and were even willing to support the slave insurrection in Saint-Domingue as long as it hurt the Jacobinical French. The Adams administration supplied arms to Toussaint and at one point in 1798 actually intervened with naval support on Toussaint’s behalf; it even encouraged the black leader to declare independence from France.

With the end of the Quasi-War with France in 1800 and Jefferson’s election as president, American policy inevitably changed. After Napoleon failed to recover the colony for France in 1803, Haiti, as the black rebels called their new republic, finally became the second independent state of the New World; unlike the United States, Haiti succeeded in ending slavery and proclaiming racial equality at the moment of its independence. Although the United States was usually eager to encourage revolutions and during the nineteenth century was often the first state in the world to extend diplomatic recognition to new republics, in the case of the Haitian republic the nation behaved differently. Not until the Civil War did the United States recognize the Haitian republic.

GABRIEL’S CONSPIRACY was the final straw. The earlier liberal climate was already dissipating; now it definitely had to be eliminated. The planned slave insurrection convinced many Virginians that they had been terribly mistaken in loosening the bonds of slavery in the aftermath of the Revolution. They now sensed that slavery could not easily exist in a society that extolled freedom. They agreed with Federalist critics that too much preaching of liberty and equality undermined the institution of slavery. The South would have to become a very different place from what many of them had envisioned in the 1780 s. The earlier leniency in judging “freedom suits” in Virginia ended, and manumissions in the state rapidly declined. Southerners began reversing their earlier examples of racial mingling. The evangelical Protestant churches ended their practice of mixed congregations. The Southern states began enacting new sets of black codes that resembled later Jim Crow laws, tightening up the institution of slavery and restricting the behavior of free blacks. With the possibility of slaves running away to the free states of the North, despite the fugitive slave clause (Article IV, Section 2) of the Constitution, the planters of the Upper South could no longer regard truancy with the casualness they had earlier. Free blacks now had to carry papers or wear arm patches affirming their status; of course, this was partly for their own security, but the practices only reemphasized the identity between blackness and slavery.

Indeed, the very presence of free blacks now seemed to threaten the institution of slavery. “If blacks see all of their color [as] slaves,” declared a Virginia lawmaker, “it will seem to them a disposition of Providence and they will be content. But if they see others like themselves free, and enjoying rights they are deprived of, they will repine.”⁶⁷ This logic led the South to seek to expel all its free blacks and to abandon its earlier expectation that slavery would eventually come to an end.

In 1806 the Virginia legislature declared that any freed slave had to leave the state. In reaction Maryland, Kentucky, and Delaware prohibited those free blacks from seeking permanent residence within their borders. The Methodists and Baptists in the South revoked their previous stand against slavery, and the Southern societies promoting antislavery found themselves rapidly losing members. Virginia, which had been a symbol of hope at the time of the Revolution, increasingly turned inward and acted frightened and besieged. It developed an increasing contempt for the getting and spending—the capitalism—rapidly developing in the North and began to extol and exaggerate all those cavalier characteristics that Jefferson had outlined in the 1780 s: its liberality, its candor, and its aversion to the narrow, money-grasping greed of the hustling Yankees.

Above all, the South now needed to justify slavery. If the institution was not going to disappear after all but was to continue, then it had to be defended. At the outset of the Revolution, many Southern leaders like Patrick Henry had proclaimed that slavery was an evil but had thrown up their hands about what to do about it. “I will not, I cannot justify it,” Henry had said. But if slavery could not be eradicated, at least, he said, “let us treat the unhappy Victims with lenity, it is the furthest advance we can make towards Justice” and “a debt we owe to the purity of our Religion.”⁶⁸ Here were the seeds of the idea of Christian and patriarchal stewardship that eventually became a major justification of the institution.

Other Southerners now began suggesting a more insidious apology for slavery—based on the presumed racial inferiority of the blacks. Somehow, it was insinuated, if the Africans were not and could never be equal to whites, then their subjugation made sense; slavery became a means of civilizing them. Of course, the eighteenth century scarcely had a modern notion of race, that is, a biologically based distinction that separated one people from another. Belief in Genesis and God’s creation of a single species of human beings made any suggestion of fundamental natural differences among humans difficult to sustain. Although eighteenth-century thinkers obviously recognized that people differed from one another, most of them explained these differences by the workings of the environment or climate.

Now, however, some began to suggest that the characteristics of the African slaves might be innate and that in some basic sense they were designed for slavery. Although Jefferson was a committed environmentalist, in his Notes on the State of Virginia he had, nevertheless, intimated that the various characteristics of the blacks that he outlined—their tolerance of heat, their need for less sleep, their sexual ardor, their lack of imagination and artistic ability, and their musical talent—were inherent and not learned. He believed that the blacks’ deficiencies were innate, because when they mixed their blood with whites’, they improved “in body and mind,” which “proves that their inferiority is not the effect merely of their condition of life.” Still, Jefferson knew he was treading on precarious ground, where his “conclusion would degrade a whole race of men from the rank in the scale of beings which their Creator may perhaps have given them.” Hence he advanced his conclusion “as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in endowments both of body and mind.”⁶⁹

Unfortunately, said Jefferson, these natural differences were “a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.” The only solution he could conceive of was to remove the freed blacks “beyond the reach of mixture.” Although Jefferson had no apprehensions about mingling white blood with that of the Indian, he never ceased expressing his “great aversion” to racial mixing between blacks and whites. He could never really imagine freed blacks living in a white man’s America, and thus he wanted all blacks sent to the West Indies, or Africa, or anywhere as long as it was out of the country. Whites and blacks had to remain “as distinct as nature has made them.” Someday, he told Governor James Monroe of Virginia in 1801, the United States will “cover the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, & by similar laws; nor can we contemplate with satisfaction either blot or mixture on the surface.” By 1814 he was still repeating the same theme: the blacks’ “amalgamation with the other color,” he said, “produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character can innocently consent.”⁷⁰

By the early nineteenth century others picked up Jefferson’s suspicions of racial differences and expanded them. Scientists such as Charles Caldwell and Samuel Latham Mitchill raised doubts about climatic and environmental explanations for the differences between blacks and whites without explicitly repudiating the unitary creation of Genesis. Other scientists began laying the groundwork for the emergence of anthropological studies that would form the foundation for the pro-slavery arguments of the antebellum period. The slaves had no inherent capacity for freedom, it was said, and thus the slaveholders had a Christian and patriarchal responsibility to hold them in bondage and look after them. As one historian has concluded, blacks “had never before been so clearly defined as different and inferior, nor had their place in society ever before been so coherently and systematically deduced from those differences.” And it was not just the black slaves who were victimized by this racist thinking; it was free blacks as well.⁷¹

The Revolution had unleashed anti-slavery sentiments throughout much of the country, but its emphasis on equal citizenship and equal rights presented increasing difficulties for the anti-slavery movement. Anyone who talked about emancipating the black slaves was confronted with the problem of what to do with the freedmen. Jefferson had warned that the two peoples could not live side by side as equal citizens. “Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained”—all this plus the inherent differences, he said, “will produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.”⁷²

Even the most devoted abolitionists were anxious about what to do with the freedmen. With the increasing emphasis on black inferiority, expatriation of the blacks to some place outside of the United States became the only viable alternative to slavery. Even someone as sophisticated as Madison clung to the idea of colonizing blacks to some place outside of the country, although with decreasing confidence. He had promoted the idea ever since 1789, when he first suggested that an asylum “might prove a great encouragement to manumission in the southern parts of the U.S. and even afford the best hope yet presented of an end to slavery.”⁷³ Although removal of blacks became increasingly unlikely after 1806, talk of it continued and led eventually to the formation of the American Colonization Society in 1816–1817. This idea that hundreds of thousands of African Americans might be resettled elsewhere was another one of the many illusions that this Founding generation of Americans entertained.

SUDDENLY, THE COUNTRY became obsessed with racial distinctions and the problem of freed blacks. Even in the North the liberal atmosphere of the immediate post-Revolutionary years evaporated, and whites began to react against the increasing numbers of freed blacks. Even an otherwise Northern liberal clergyman refused to marry mixed-race couples, fearing that such “mixtures” would eventually create “a particoloured race” in the city of Philadelphia. In 1804 and 1807 Ohio required blacks entering the state to post a five-hundred-dollar bond guaranteeing their good behavior and to produce court certificates proving they were free. Officials from Pennsylvania, the earlier heart of abolitionism, worried about the implications of all the freed Southern slaves migrating to their state. “When they arrive,” declared a Philadelphian in 1805, “they almost generally abandon themselves to all manners of debauchery and dissipation, to the great annoyance of our citizens.” In that same year, 1805, a crowd of whites chased a group of assembled blacks from the Fourth of July celebration in Philadelphia, thus ending what had always been a biracial commemoration in the City of Brotherly Love. Although Massachusetts had been quick to free its slaves, the state now passed laws prohibiting interracial marriages and expelling all blacks who were not citizens of one state or another.⁷⁴

In New York in the second decade of the nineteenth century the Republican-dominated legislature took away the franchise of free blacks who had long possessed it, partly because they were black and partly because they had tended to vote for Federalists. The New York Federalists naturally had favored property qualifications for voting and did not oppose voting by blacks who could meet the property qualification. By contrast, the Republicans favored equal rights and universal manhood suffrage, but precisely for that reason could not tolerate blacks voting as equals with whites. At the same time as the New York Jeffersonian Republicans were denying the franchise to longtime black voters, they promoted illegal voting by Irish immigrants who were not yet citizens, knowing that such recent immigrants would vote for the Democratic-Republicans. Such were the strange and perverse consequences of republican equality and democracy.⁷⁵

Whites in the North began copying the South in separating the races in ways they had not done earlier. Free blacks were confined to distinct neighborhoods and to separate sections of theaters, circuses, churches, and other places. Most Americans, both Northerners and Southerners, were coming to think of the United States as “a white man’s country.”

Yet could the states of the young Republic hang together suspended between slavery and freedom? That was the worrying question that tainted all the exuberance and optimism of early nineteenth-century Americans.