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

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,

in 1776, extend to the enslaved people working on the plantations of the elites.

In fact, the rise of the idea of liberty in America was coupled with the rise of slavery. For the Atlantic world’s ruling class, importing enslaved Africans was the most profitable form of labour and was also considered to be a less risky investment than employing indentured white or Indigenous servants. In the new United States in particular, strong social sanctions placed against the enslaved peoples made it so that the lower-class whites who did not own property or slaves had more opportunities to prosper in American society and the Atlantic economy. They were able to “acquire social, psychological, and political advantages that turned the thrust of exploitation away from them and align them with their exploiters.”9 Additionally, the plantation economic model that proved so profitable in the American states allowed the new republic to flourish in its trade with the Atlantic world. It was also the source of wealth of the southern aristocratic slaveholders who had led the thirteen states to victory in the Revolutionary War. As Edmund Morgan notes, “American reliance on slave labour must be viewed in the context of the American struggle for a separate and equal station among the nations of the Earth.”10

Since the American Revolution there had existed a divide between the ideologies of northern and southern Americans. Both regions were passionately committed to the idea of liberty however, they held different ideas for how liberty was to be applied in society. For northerners, liberty meant the protection of property in order to enjoy the independence and freedom of movement it provided. For southerners, slavery was “a prerequisite for the maintenance of the liberty they had won in the revolution.”11

In the societal and economic context of the United States immediately following the Revolutionary War, slavery could not have been abolished. For all Americans, north and south, the plantation economy was a vital cornerstone to ensuring the success of their republican experiment. However, as southern plantation owners and farmers began creeping into the western frontier of the continent, there came a growing fear in the north that their freedom to own property would be infringed upon.

The abolitionist movement was born in the north, with it gaining greater traction there than in the south. But it was not, for most American abolitionists, a moral cause or a humanitarian movement, but rather a movement to protect their white material interests and social positions. From the northerner’s perspective, southern slaveholders’ expansion into the west infringed upon the boundless opportunities the ‘newly discovered’ land represented. For the north, their freedom to expand their own interests westward was being threatened by slave power. The southern elites had already taken control of the federal government, and their economic power, which was so closely associated with their enslaved workers, was on the verge of overwhelming the north.12

Slavery persisted until 1863 when the Thirteenth Amendment was passed. However, the introduction of Jim Crow laws and other segregationist policies proved that even after emancipation, racial segregation, and the oppression of people of colour was a necessary institution for white Americans to remain in a position of political, economic, and social power.

Maritha Louw

Political Studies (Honours), History concentration