The False Promise of Liberty: Slavery and the American Revolution
ENDNOTES
The Declaration of Independence lists liberty as one of humanity’s inalienable rights. Though the ‘Land of the Free’ was born out of the fight for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, American ‘liberty’ can be best understood as a vague constellation of values.1 At its most basic understanding, liberty means that one can act however one wishes as long as those actions do not infringe upon the life and liberty of another person. But American liberty, in particular, could better be defined by its limits. For example, “The master’s freedom rested on the reality of slavery, the vaunted autonomy of men on the subordinate position of women.”2 Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration’s author, believed that white men could only be free if they enjoyed the economic freedom of owning land on which to support themselves and their families. The limited application for these inalienable rights explains why the American experience of freedom has always been subject to disagreement and conflict. Even a deadly civil war did not resolve the disagreements, and the issues that guided the twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement remain unresolved today. From the beginning of the Republic, despite their enormous contributions of African Americans to the Revolutionary War effort, at least one-fifth of the American population was denied the very rights their country had fought to establish. Prior to 1776, the Patriots compared their colonial experience under the British as one of slavery. The political oppression the Patriots claimed to have suffered under King George III was, to them, “a condition as one of enslavement – nor merely metaphorical, but real enslavement – and they frequently cited the condition of their slaves as precisely what they meant when they wanted to be clear about what they were prepared to die for.”3 America’s colonial experience in particular struck in them an inherent distrust of executive power and a hatred for royal government. The Founding Fathers mention this in the Declaration of Independence, stating: “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.”4 The Patriots’ perspective of freedom “could be summed up in the belief in the inherent right to make what you can of yourself in every way, without being told what to think, do, or say.”5 Republicanism, thus, was intensified by the Patriots’ experience of enforcing slavery, in which they could witness the “immediate experience of what it could mean to be at the mercy of a tyrant.”6
“Declaration of Independence” (1819), by John Trumbull, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
But freedom in America has often been referred to as a paradox. Though they claimed to be fighting in a “passionate defense of the principle of freedom,” many of the Patriots who instigated the Revolution were major slaveholders.7 Leaders such as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington had hundreds of enslaved people working for them under oppressive conditions while they were fighting for their own liberty.8 The “Laws of Nature” they claimed to be gifted by God to all men in the Declaration of Independence did not,
