Antislavery and Abolitionism
in British Colonial North America
and the United States
AAS 101
Review Slides for Prof. French’s Lecture
Nov. 16
Study Question:
Why did movements to stop the importation
of slaves from Africa and abolish slavery in
America arise in the mid- to late eighteenth
century after centuries of apathy on the
subject?
According to historian Peter Kolchin, several factors converged
to produce this development.
• Age of Enlightenment
• A rising belief in the malleability of human nature and the
influence of environment on human behavior
• The spread of capitalism and its ideology of free labor
• Fourth, new religious developments (Great Awakening)
Two Abolitionist Campaigns
1. Movement for the Abolition of the International
Slave Trade (outlawed by U.S. Congress in
1808)
2. Movement for the Abolition of Slavery and the
Domestic Slave Trade (abolished by presidential
decree in rebel states only, 1863; abolished
throughout US by constitutional amendment in
1865)
The movement to abolish the international
slave trade, beginning in the early 18th
century, enjoyed widespread support among
slaveholders in Virginia and the Upper
South.
In 1723, the Virginia General Assembly passed an
“Act for Laying Duty on Liquors and Slaves,”
which imposed a forty-shilling duty on imported
slave laborers.
The act, supported by the great planters, was
designed to limit the number of slaves employed
in the cultivation of tobacco with the aim of
reducing production and raising prices. British
authorities revoked the duties, citing their adverse
effect on commerce.
The great planters – concerned about the
uncontrolled growth of the slave population
through importation and natural reproduction –
continued to push the British colonial government
for restrictions on the international slave trade.
Some planters, such as William Byrd II, added an
humanitarian component to the economic
argument against the slave trade. In 1736, Byrd
wrote that Parliament must “put an end to this
unchristian Traffick of making Merchandize of
Our Fellow Creatures.”
The British Crown’s veto of slave trade duties
became one the major grievances cited by
the America’s slaveholding patriots in
building a case for independence from
Great Britain.
1772: Virginia’s House of Burgesses asks King
George III to halt importation
of slaves into colonies
Justification
1. Humanitarian: “The importation of Slaves into the Colonies from the Coast of Africa
hath long been considered as a Trade of great Inhumanity …
2. Public Safety: “Under its present Encouragement, we have too much Reason to fear [it]
will endanger the very Existence of your Majesty’s American dominions . . .
3. Political Economy: “We are sensible that some of your majesty’s subjects in GreatBritain may reap Emoluments from this Sort of Traffic, but when we consider that it
greatly retards the Settlement of the Colonies with more useful inhabitants, and may, in
Time, have the most destructive Influence, we presume to hope that the Interest of a few
will be disregarded when placed in Competition with the Security and Happiness of such
Numbers of your Majesty’s dutiful and loyal subjects.”
April 1774: Thomas Jefferson cites the King
George’s veto of Virginia’s anti-slave trade
legislation as a prime example of his
“shameful abuse” of power.
“The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in
those colonies, where it was unhappily introduced in their infant
state. But previous to the enfranchisement of the slaves we
have, it is necessary to exclude all further importations from
Africa; yet our repeated attempts to effect this by prohibitions,
and by imposing duties which might amount to a prohibition,
have been hitherto defeated by his majesty's negative: Thus
preferring the immediate advantages of a few African corsairs to
the lasting interests of the American states, and to the rights of
human nature, deeply wounded by this infamous practice.”
Thomas Jefferson, “A Summary View of the Rights of British
America” (1774)
1774: Resolutions adopted by Virginia counties
condemn the African slave trade “injurious,”
“wicked,” “cruel” and “unnatural”
Text of Fairfax County, Va., resolution, George Washington, Esq.,
presiding:
Resolved, That is it is the opinion of this meeting that, during our
present difficulties and distress, no slaves ought to be imported into
any of the British colonies on this continent; and we take this
opportunity of declaring our most earnest wishes to see an entire
stop forever put to such a wicked, cruel, and unnatural trade.
October 1774: Articles of Association adopted by
delegates to the First Continental Congress include this
anti-slave importation resolution:
“We will neither import nor purchase, any slave imported after the
first day of December next; after which time, we will wholly
discontinue the slave trade, and will neither be concerned in it
ourselves, nor will we hire our vessels, nor sell our commodities or
manufactures to those who are concerned in it.”
1776: Jefferson’s Draft of Declaration of
Independence indicts King George III for
perpetuating the slave trade
“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its
most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant
people [Africans] who never offended him, captivating and
carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur
miserable death in their transportation thither.”
Majority of Delegates to
U.S. Constitutional Convention (1787)
Opposed International Slave Trade
Yet delegates from South Carolina and Georgia, with some
support from North Carolina, rejected any interference with the
slave trade. To keep these colonies in the Union, the other
delegates agreed to a compromise: The Constitution would ban
federal action against the international slave trade for twenty
years.
Constitutional Ban
on International Slave Trade
Art. I, Sect. 9: The Migration or Importation of such
Persons as any of the States now existing shall think
proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the
Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight
hundred and eight (1808), but a Tax or duty may be
imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten
dollars for each Person.
Illustrating
the Horrors of
the Middle
Passage
Plan of the Slave
Ship Brookes, first
published in 1789
State laws prohibiting participation by U.S.
citizens in the trade were reinforced by federal
law in 1794. Congress banned the trade in
1808.
Study Questions:
Why did the international slave trade become such an
easy target for abolitionists? Why was the practice
almost universally condemned by the late 18th
century?
Why, in the view of some historians, did the early
success of the anti-international slave trade
movement weaken the campaign to abolish the
domestic slave trade and slavery in the United States?
Rise of Interstate or
Domestic Slave Trade in the U.S.
(“The Second Middle Passage”)
• Fueled by closing of international trade in 1808
and expansion of slavery into cotton states of the
Deep South.
• An estimated 300,000 Virginia slaves were sold
“down the river,” many of them from Alexandria,
within sight of the nation’s capital, to a large depot
near Natchez, Mississippi.
Growth of Slavery in Lower South
1800-1860
500000
450000
400000
350000
300000
250000
200000
150000
100000
50000
0
1800
1820
1840
1860
Georgia
(1788)
Misssissippi S. Carolina
(1817)
(1788)
Alabama
(1819)
Even as slaves were transported into the
Lower South, the birthrate among enslaved
women rose, creating a large proportion of
children born into bondage. By 1830, nearly
700,000 of the two million slaves were
younger than 10.
By 1860, the ratio of blacks to whites in the
Upper South was 30:100. In the Lower
South, the ratio was 82:100.
Overview of Antislavery Activism
Between 1777 and 1804, all states from
Pennsylvania northward provided effectively for
the eventual abolition of slavery.
In the same period, in the antislavery South, the tide
of public sentiment and action moved tentatively
in the direction of abolition until the 1790s, but
then took a reactionary turn. By 1807, it was clear
that colonization was the only acceptable program
of antislavery activism in the South.
Jefferson’s
Emancipation/Colonization Scheme
(Notes on the State of Virginia, 1785)
Jefferson’s plan called for all blacks born after a certain date
to be freed at birth, raised at public expense till the age of
majority, then “to be colonized to such place as the
circumstances of the time should render most proper.”
To replace its diminishing slave labor force, the plan called
for Virginia “to send vessels at the same time to other parts
of the world for an equal number of white inhabitants; to
induce whom to migrate hither, proper encouragements
were to be proposed.”
Jefferson’s Rationale for the
Colonization of Manumitted Slaves
Outside U.S. as a Condition of their Freedom
From Query XIV: Laws
It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus
save the expence of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will
leave? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the
blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which
nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce
convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other
race. -- To these objections, which are political, may be added others, which are physical
and moral.
From Query XVIII: Manners
For if a slave can have a country in this world, it must be any other in preference to that in
which he is born to live and labour for another: in which he must lock up the faculties of
his nature, contribute as far as depends on his individual endeavours to the evanishment of
the human race, or entail his own miserable condition on the endless generations
proceeding from him.
Jefferson’s plan inspired the founding of The American
Colonization Society in 1817.
While many of those present at the founding of the Society
shared Jefferson’s view of slavery as an evil inheritance
from Great Britain and a grievous burden to the American
slaveholder, they did not necessarily share his view of
colonization as a first step toward abolishing slavery.
Several of the organizers, led by chairman Henry Clay of
Kentucky, insisted on constitutional guarantees that the
group would not “touch or agitate, in the slightest degree,”
the issue of slavery.
As slavery expanded into the cotton-rich states of
Gulf Region, the South moved to protect the
“peculiar institution” from internal criticism and
outside interference. The Southern antislavery
movement, in the Jeffersonian tradition of gradual
emancipation and colonization, withered and died.
The case for slavery as a positive good became
orthodoxy for a new generation of proslavery
ideologues and demagogues.
The slow death of slavery in the North began
after the Revolution. The egalitarian
promise of the Great Awakening and the
Declaration of Independence, combined
with economic changes that made slavery
less profitable in the North, generated
support for gradual emancipation.
Vermont abolished slavery by state
constitution in 1777, tens years before the
ratification of the U.S. Constitution.
Massachusetts abolished slavery by judicial
decision (the Quock Walker case) in 1783.
Although slavery continued to exist in
Massachusetts, the Quock Walker decision
indicated that it would no longer be
supported by the state courts.
Other Northern states followed suit, emancipating slaves by
constitution or judicial decision:
Pennsylvania – 1780
Rhode Island – 1784 (post-nati, first slave freed 1811)
Connecticut – 1784 (post-nati, 1818)
New Hampshire – 1788-89
New York – 1799 (post-nati, 1827)
Ohio – 1802
New Jersey – 1804 (post-nati, 1825)
Indiana -- 1816
Illinois – 1818 (post-nati, 1845)
• Post-nati emancipation kept those “freed” at birth in servitude
until age 28
• Some masters required long indentureships as condition of
freedom
• Former masters kept former slaves in state of dependence by
providing provision grounds adequate to survival but
insufficient for profitable cultivation
• Impoverished free blacks forced to apprentice their children;
unable to support elderly relatives
The legal status of African Americans varied from state
to state in the North
Massachusetts: full citizenship
Pennsylvania: disfranchisement
Variables:
– Numerical strength of black population
– Geographic position of state
– Political and economic factors
“Jim Crow” Laws and Customs in the
Antebellum North and West
• Testimony of African Americans disallowed in cases where white man was
a party (Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, and California)
• African Americans barred, by law and custom, from serving on juries (all
states but Massachusetts)
• African Americans prohibited from holding real estate, making contracts,
filing lawsuits (Oregon)
• Unequal enforcement of laws; unequal sentencing
• Racial segregation enforced by custom, if not law, in schools, public transit
(railway cars, stage coaches, steamboats), hotels, restaurants, churches,
hospitals, prisons, graveyards, etc.
The Economics of Repression
African Americans were
• restricted to the lowest paid, often most
dangerous, most menial jobs
• limited to work as servants, seamen, and common
laborers
• denied access by unions to skilled trades
• employed as strike-breakers, further alienating
them from whites-only unions
Many Northern and Western states adopted
laws restricting or prohibiting
in-migration of blacks
• Rationale: restriction necessary to keep the peace,
prevent influx of manumitted slaves expelled from
Southern states.
• Many Northern whites – particularly in border states - feared their states would become de facto
“colonies” for the South’s unwanted free black
population.
Methods of Restriction
State laws and, in some cases, state constitutions,
discouraged free black immigration. African
Americans seeking to resettle in the older states of
the North and the new states of the West were:
– Barred outright from entry
– Required to produce proof of freedom and
citizenship in another state
– Required to post a bond ($500 to $1000)
guaranteeing good behavior
Contrast Anti-Black Immigration Laws to
“Naturalization” of White Immigrants
Naturalization: “to invest (an alien) with the rights and
privileges of a citizen.”
The earliest naturalization laws adopted by Congress
(1790, 1795, 1798) limited the extension of U.S.
citizenship to free white persons of good moral
character.
These white immigrants, particularly the Irish, drove
African Americans out of the menial positions they once
monopolized.
German and Irish Immigration,
1830-1860
180
160
140
120
Irish
German
other
100
80
60
40
20
0
1830
1840
1850
1860
Frederick Douglass on Anti-Black Prejudice
Among Irish-American Immigrants (1854)
“The Irish, who, at home, readily sympathize with the oppressed
everywhere, are instantly taught when they step upon our soil to hate
and despise the negro. They are taught to believe that he eats the bread
that belongs to them. The cruel lie is told them, that we deprive them of
labor and receive the money which would otherwise make its way into
their pockets. Sir, the Irish-American will find out his mistake one day.
He will find that in assuming our avocation, he has also assumed our
degradation. But for the present we are the sufferers. Our old
employments by which we have been accustomed to gain a livelihood
are gradually slipping from our hands: every hour sees us elbowed out
of some employment to make room for some newly arrived emigrant
from the Emerald Isle, whose hunger and color entitle him to special
favor. These white men are becoming house-servants, cooks, stewards,
waiters, and flunkies.”
Source: Speech to American Anti-Slavery Society in New York as
quoted in Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.
Mob Violence/Forced Expulsion
Cincinnati Riots, 1829:
• Fear of growing black population in city
prompts enforcement of anti-immigration laws
• Mob violence drives 1,100 to 2,200 African
Americans out of city; many take refuge in
Canada
Black Northerners as “Maroons”
Historian Ira Berlin observes that the North was “not
free territory but rather, for most of the antebellum
era, a slave society undergoing a slow
transformation into a free one. Because Northern
black communities were embedded in a nation that
presumed black people to be slaves, black
communities cannot be included in a free society.
Instead, they assumed many of the characteristics
of quilombos or enclaves of fugitive slaves, and
black Northerners might be considered maroons.”
Black Northerners as “Maroons”
(cont’d)
“They were excluded from much of Northern
economic and social life and denied the rights
most Northerners equated with citizenship.
Moreover, like maroon enclaves, black Northern
communities developed an internal coherence in
ideology, leadership, and institutions, which stood
in opposition to – in fact, at war with, the
plantation society from which these communities
drew their members.”
Caricatures of Black Life in North
This cartoon, originally drawn by
Edward Williams Clay as one of
fourteen in a series called "Life in
Philadelphia“ (ca. 1828), satirized
the social conventions adopted by
Philadelphia's blacks.
In the cartoon, a well dressed black
man converses with a black
woman, who holds forth a tray
from a cellar door.
He asks, "Is Miss Dinah at home?
She replies, "Yes sir but she bery
potickly engaged in washing de
dishes."
He says, "Ah! I'm sorry I cant have the
honour to pay my devours to her.
Give her my card."
Caricatures of Black Life in the North
This cartoon, from the same “Life in Philadelphia” series, satirized
black celebrations of the prohibition of the international slave trade.
Caricatures of Black Life in the North
This cartoon, another in the "Life in Philadelphia“ series, satirized the
committees created by Philadelphia black churches to settle disputes and
monitor the moral behavior of members.
Consequences for
African American Life in the North
• Gradual emancipation/harsh conditions of freedom in North
inhibit development of independent family and community life
• Sustained impoverishment of newly freed blacks contributes to
racial stereotypes of moral and physical degradation; this feeds
into pro-slavery propaganda (i.e., “blacks better off under
slavery”
• Protracted period of emancipation creates class divisions
among African Americans
How did African Americans in the North,
living and working as despised minority,
establish and maintain a culture and
community life that sustained them?
Northern Black Abolitionist
Activity in the 1820s/1830s
• Community Organizing through Churches, Benevolent
Societies, Schools, Press
• Anti-Slavery/Anti-Colonization Meetings
• Negro Convention Movement (1st mtg. held in Philadelphia in
1830 in response to 1829 Cincinnati riots/passage and
enforcement of repressive legislation)
David Walker served as one of two Boston agents for the New
York-based Freedom’s Journal, the first African-American
newspaper.
Walker was active in the anti-slavery/anti-colonization
movement. In 1828, Walker delivered an address before the
newly established Massachusetts General Colored Association,
a group devoted to uniting “the colored population” of the
United States. “It is indispensably our duty,” Walker declared,
“to try every scheme we think will have a tendency to facilitate
our salvation, and leave the final result to that God, who holds
the destinies of people in the hollow of his hand, and who ever
has, and will, repay every nation according to its works.”
Rise of Militant Abolitionism
• David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens fo
the World (1829):
“Believe this, that it is no more harm for you to kill
a man, who is trying to kill you, than it is for you
to take a drink of water when thirsty; in fact, the
man who will stand still and let another man
murder him, is worse than an infidel, and, if he has
common sense, ought not to be pitied.”
Black abolitionist activity in 1820s represented
the vanguard of what became a racially
integrated mass movement in the 1830s.
Garrison’s Abolitionist Awakening
In 1829, as co-editor of the pro-colonization Genius of Universal Emancipation,
William Lloyd Garrison renounced gradualism and made the case for immediate,
unconditional abolition on four grounds:
•
That the slaves are entitled to immediate and complete emancipation: consequently,
to hold them longer in bondage is both tyrannical and unnecessary.
•
That the question of expediency has nothing to do with that of right; and it is not for
those who tyrannise to say when they may safely break the chains of their subjects.
•
That, on the ground of expediency, it would be wiser to set all the slaves free to-day
than to-morrow -- or next week, than next year.
•
That, as a very large portion of our coloured population were born on American
soil, they are at liberty to choose their own dwelling place; and we possess no right
to use coercive measures in their removal.
Garrison maintained that immediate emancipation
would remove “every inducement to revolt” and
hasten the transformation of slaves into “peaceable
citizens.” As he saw it, “one million of degraded
slaves are more dangerous to welfare of the country,
than would be two millions of degraded freemen.”
The sooner the religious and secular instruction of the
black masses began, he argued, “the better for them
and us.”
1831-32: A Watershed Year for Northern Abolitionist/
Southern Antislavery Movements
•
January 1831: First issue of Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator,
published in Boston
•
April 1831: April 1831: Virginia General Assembly passed a revised bill banning
the teaching of slaves and free blacks or mulattoes to read or write.
•
August 1831: Slave uprising in Southampton County, Virginia (Nat Turner’s
Rebellion). Many Southern slaveholders cite circulation of “incendiary literature” –
specifically Walker’s Appeal and Garrison’s Liberator -- as factors.
•
January-March 1832: Virginia General Assembly defers action on calls for gradual
emancipation. Under intense pressure to do something, Assembly passes a law
imposing harsh new restrictions on slaves and free blacks. Slavery debates
represent last gasp of the anti-slavery/anticolonization movement in the Upper
South.
As slavery expanded into the cotton-rich states
of Gulf Region, the South moved to protect the
“peculiar institution” from internal criticism
and outside interference. The Southern
antislavery movement, once vibrant, withered
and died. The case for slavery as a positive
good became orthodoxy for a new generation
of proslavery ideologues and demagogues.
Faced with severe persecution in the North,
African Americans debated whether to seek
asylum outside the United States or
continue to press for freedom and civil
rights.
2nd Annual Negro Convention
(June 1832 – Philadelphia)
“The recent occurrences at the South have swelled the tide of
prejudice until it has almost revolutionized public
sentiment, which has given birth to severe legislative
enactments in some of the States, and almost ruined our
interests and prospects in others, in which, in the opinion
of your Committee, our situation is more precarious than it
has been at any other period since the Declaration of
Independence.”
While generally opposed to colonization, delegates to
the Convention resolved to establish an agent in
Upper Canada “for the purpose of purchasing lands
and contributing to the wants of our people generally
who may be, by oppressive legislative enactments,
obliged to flee from these United States and take up
residence within her borders.”
American Antislavery Society
Founded
In December 1833, representatives of the major
abolitionist groups met in Philadelphia to form a new
national organization, the American Anti-Slavery
Society. The delegates adopted a Declaration of
Sentiments, written by Garrison, that endorsed the
revolutionary doctrine of human rights in the
Declaration of Independence while rejecting the
revolutionary violence employed by the Founding
Fathers.
“Their measures were physical resistance -- the
marshalling in arms -- the hostile array -- the
mortal encounter. Ours shall be such only as
the opposition of moral purity to moral
corruption -- the destruction of error by the
potency of truth -- the overthrow of prejudice
by the power of love-- and the abolition of
slavery by the spirit of repentance.”
The new group went on to declare every slaveholder
a “man-stealer” and every law upholding the right
of slavery “utterly null and void” in the eyes of
God. It reminded “the people of the free States”
that they were “living under a pledge of their
tremendous physical force, to fasten the galling
fetters of tyranny upon the limbs of millions in the
Southern states,” and urged them “to remove
slavery by moral and political action, as prescribed
in the Constitution of the United States.”
Reaction in the South
Abolitionist efforts to flood the Southern mails with
antislavery tracts and pamphlets prompted calls for federal
intervention on behalf of the slave states.
In his December 1835 message to Congress, President
Andrew Jackson urged passage of a law that would
“prohibit, under severe penalties, the circulation in the
Southern states, through the mails, of incendiary
publications, intended to instigate the slaves to
insurrection.” Meanwhile, states throughout the South
passed laws that gave postmasters and justices of the peace
broad new “inquisitorial powers” over the mails.
Increasingly, white Northerners came to see
their own civil liberties threatened by a
despotic “slave power conspiracy,” aided
and abetted by pro-slavery Presidents and
Supreme Court justices.
By the late 1830s, as mob violence against
abolitionists in the North increased, some
antislavery activists openly questioned the
Garrisonian doctrine of non-resistance.
The Martyrdom of Elijah Lovejoy
In Alton, Illinois, the abolitionist newspaper editor
Elijah Lovejoy declared that he would arm himself
to ward off mobs that had menaced his family and
destroyed three of his presses. When Lovejoy,
gun in hand, was shot and killed while confronting
a mob, many abolitionists – to the dismay of
Garrison -- hailed him as a Christian martyr.
Others found the Garrison’s “peace principles,”
which rejected participation in all activities of the
government (including voting and office-holding),
too extreme.
The schism within the American Anti-Slavery
Society led to the establishment of the rival
American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society
in 1840. It also revitalized the Negro
convention movement as an independent
voice of black abolitionism.