While freely admitting the impossibility of discussing this subject, within any reasonable limits, without necessarily omitting mention of many publications, containing an amount of extremely valuable information, the aim of this work will be to trace the evolution of the question as it has appeared, in the expression of both whites and Negroes, in that country in which public opinion is said to exercise the greatest influence upon government. In undertaking such an examination it would be hardly necessary to make any very close scrutiny of the Colonial period, from the fact that while there was opinion that found expression in acts, statements and laws, the colonies, being under the control of Great Britain, were subjected to her policies and representative of her civilization. The extraordinary case therefore of a Massachusetts slave-owner, Maverick, who simply for breeding purposes, in 1636, forced an African woman of high rank, owned by him, to accept the embraces of a common young Negro[1] was but a way of expressing contempt for the race. The Maryland Act of 1663, a far less coarse expression, involved all white women who failed to entertain it. In Stroud’s “Sketch of the laws of Slavery,” published in 1827, we find on page 2:
“Section 2. And forasmuch as divers free born English women forgetful of their free condition, and to the disgrace of our nation do intermarry with Negro slaves” such “free born women ... shall serve the master of such slave during the life of her husband and all the issue of such free born women, so married shall be slaves as their fathers were.”
Yet despite these two striking illustrations at these early dates, broadly speaking, we might claim that in British America “up to 1700 and perhaps beyond, the sentiment North and South concerning the Negro or his enslavement differed but slightly; for while the South Carolina Act of 1690 did provide severe regulations for Negro and Indian slaves, a study of the statutes from 1698”[2] “and later of the press, indicates a sentiment against the importation of Negroes, which however was forced upon that province, as upon others, by the British Government.”[3]
The Revolutionary war, which shook off this controlling force, associated the States together, under the Articles of Confederation, thus paving the way for that great experiment, the Constitutional Federal Republic, which succeeded it.
It was in the deliberations of the great Convention, which framed that “more perfect union”, that the Negro question really first arose, as a matter of vital political concern; nor among all the questions which confronted that extraordinary body, did there appear a graver one, than that affecting the status of the colored people of the Union.
This class represented, at that time, about one-fifth of the population of the thirteen States, which it was the aim to unite, or 737,208 blacks as against 3,172,006 whites[4], and while of these 737,208 colored persons some 59,527 were free, in every one of the thirteen States, except Massachusetts, there were slaves, and in only one State, outside of New England, Pennsylvania, were free persons of color more numerous than slaves.
In eight of the thirteen States the Negro slaves greatly outnumbered the free persons of color; while in still another, with a total of 5,572 colored persons, the colored freedmen exceeded the slaves by only 54.
Under these conditions, it was not unnatural that the question should have presented itself as one of slavery versus freedom, rather than Negroes versus whites, and for the seventy years in which slavery continued to exist, that fact served to obscure, to quite an extent, the appreciation of the distinct question of color and race. Yet by some, at an exceedingly early date, it was recognized, that apart from the consideration of how they might be held, the mere presence in the Republic of a large and growing number of people of an inferior race, presented a serious problem.
When the consideration of the basis upon which Federal representation should rest, and direct taxes be apportioned, was reached, the framers of the Constitution found themselves, therefore, confronted with a political question of the first magnitude, in the existence of the slave trade.
What was the slave? A man or a chattel?