III DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
The Declaration of Independence, though accepted at once and to be regarded through all time by the liberty-loving world as the best and boldest declaration in favor of human rights, and the most pronounced protest against oppression of the human race, is totally silent as to the rights of the slaves in the colonies. It is true that Jefferson in his draft of this instrument, in the articles of indictment against King George III., used this language:
"He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in the transportation thither, . . . determined to keep open a market where white men should be bought and sold; he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce."
To conciliate Georgia and South Carolina, this part of the indictment was struck out. These colonies had never sought to restrain, but had always fostered the slave trade. Jefferson, in his Autobiography (vol. i, p. 19), suggests that other sections sympathized with Georgia and South Carolina in this matter.
"Our Northern brethren . . . felt a little tender under these censures: for though their people had very few slaves themselves, yet they had been considerable carriers of them to others."
Jefferson said King George preferred the advantage:
"of a few British corsairs to the lasting interests of the American States and to the rights of human nature, deeply wounded by this infamous practice."(10)
While it is not true, as has often been claimed, that England is solely responsible for the introduction of slavery into her American colonies, it is true that her King and Parliament opposed almost every attempt to prohibit it or to restrict the importation of slaves. Colonial legislative enactments of Virginia and other colonies directed against slavery were vetoed by the King or by his command by his royal governors. Such governors were early forbidden to give their assent to any measure restricting slavery in the American colonies, and this policy was pursued until the colonies became independent.(11)
The treaty of peace between Great Britain and the United States, signed at Paris, September 3, 1783, contained a stipulation that Great Britain should withdraw her armies from the United States "with all convenient speed, and without causing any destruction, or carrying away any negroes or other property of the American inhabitants." Both governments thus openly recognized, not only the existence of slavery in the United States, but that slaves were merely property.
While slavery was deeply seated in the colonies and had many advocates, including noted divines, who preached the "divinity of slavery," there were, in 1776, and earlier, many great men, South as well as North, who looked confidently to an early emancipation of slaves, and who were then active in suppressing the African slave trade, among whom were Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, and the two Adamses.
Washington presided at a "Fairfax County Convention," before the Revolution. It resolved that "no slaves ought to be imported into any of the British colonies"; and Washington himself expressed "the most earnest wish to see an entire stop forever put to such a wicked, cruel, and unnatural trade."(12)
John Wesley, when fully acquainted with American slavery and the slave trade, pronounced the latter as "the execrable sum of all villanies," and he inveighed against the former as the wickedest of human practices.
The Continental Congress of 1776 resolved, "that no slaves be imported into any of the thirteen United Colonies."
There had then been imported by the cruel traffic above 300,000 blacks, bought or stolen from the African shore; and the blacks then constituted twenty per cent. of the total population, a greater per centum than at any time since.
During the century previous to 1776, English and colonial slavers had carried into the West Indies and to English colonies nearly 3,000,000 negroes; and it is estimated that a quarter of a million more died of cruel treatment on shipboard, and their bodies were cast into the sea.
The words of the Declaration: "We hold these truths to be self- evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," were not accepted in fact as a charter of freedom for the enslaved African, but it remained for a Chief-Justice of the United States (Taney) more than eighty years later (March 5, 1857), in the Dred Scott decision, that did so much (as we will hereafter show) to disrupt the Union, to say:
"The language used in the Declaration of Independence shows that neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves, nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used."
And the Chief-Justice said further:
"They [the negroes] had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit."
Quoting the Declaration, "that all men are created equal," he continued:
"The general words above quoted would seem to embrace the whole human family, and if they were used in a similar instrument at this day would be so understood. But it is too clear for dispute that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this Declaration."
Notwithstanding this interpretation of the Declaration, free negroes fought for American independence at Bunker Hill; and although later it was decided that colored men should not be accepted as enlisted soldiers, General Washington did accept them, and thereafter they served in his army to the end of the war,(13) notably in large numbers at Yorktown.
The Royal Governor of Virginia in vain tried to induce slaves to revolt against their masters by promising them their freedom.
During Lord Howe's march through Pennsylvania it is said the slaves prayed for his success, believing he would set them free.
The British Parliament discussed a measure to set the slaves in the colonies free with a view to weaken their masters' ardor for freedom. In Rhode Island slaves were, by law, set free on condition that they enlisted in the army for the war.
(10) Parton's Life of Jefferson, p. 138.
(11) History Ready Reference, etc., vol. iv., p. 2923.
(12) Sparks's Life of Washington, vol. ii., p. 494.
(13) Bancroft, History of the United States, vol. iv., 223,322.