In Jefferson's original draft of the great declaration there was a paragraph indicting the king for having kept open the African slave trade against colonial efforts to close it, and for having violated thereby the "most sacred rights of life and liberty of a distant people, who never offended him, captivating them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither." This passage, according to Jefferson's account, "was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves and who on the contrary still wished to continue it. Our Northern brethren also I believe," Jefferson continued, "felt a little tender under these censures, for though their people have very few slaves themselves, yet they have been pretty considerable carriers of them to others."[1] By reason of the general stress upon the inherent liberty of all men, however, the question of negro status, despite its omission from the Declaration, was an inevitable corollary to that of American independence.
[Footnote 1: Herbert Friedenwald, The Declaration of Independence (New
York, 1904), pp. 130, 272.]
Negroes had a barely appreciable share in precipitating the Revolution and in waging the war. The "Boston Massacre" was occasioned in part by an insult offered by a slave to a British soldier two days before; and in that celebrated affray itself, Crispus Attucks, a mulatto slave, was one of the five inhabitants of Boston slain. During the course of the war free negro and slave enlistments were encouraged by law in the states where racial control was not reckoned vital, and they were informally permitted in the rest. The British also utilized this resource in some degree. As early as November 7, 1775, Lord Dunmore, the ousted royal governor of Virginia, issued a proclamation offering freedom to all slaves "appertaining to rebels" who would join him "for the more speedy reducing this colony to a proper sense of their duty to his Majesty's crown and dignity."[2] In reply the Virginia press warned the negroes against British perfidy; and the revolutionary government, while announcing the penalties for servile revolt, promised freedom to such as would promptly desert the British standard. Some hundreds of negroes appear to have joined Dunmore, but they did not save him from being driven away.[3]
[Footnote 2: American Archives, Force ed., fourth series, III, 1385.]
[Footnote 3: Ibid., III, 1387; IV, 84, 85; V, 160, 162.]
When several years afterward military operations were transferred to the extreme South, where the whites were few and the blacks many, the problem of negro enlistments became at once more pressing and more delicate. Henry Laurens of South Carolina proposed to General Washington in March, 1779, the enrollment of three thousand blacks in the Southern department. Hamilton warmly endorsed the project, and Washington and Madison more guardedly. Congress recommended it to the states concerned, and pledged itself to reimburse the masters and to set the slaves free with a payment of fifty dollars to each of these at the end of the war. Eventually Colonel John Laurens, the son of Henry, went South as an enthusiastic emissary of the scheme, only to meet rebuff and failure.[4] Had the negroes in general possessed any means of concerted action, they might conceivably have played off the British and American belligerents to their own advantage. In actuality, however, they were a passive element whose fate was affected only so far as the master race determined.
[Footnote 4: G.W. Williams, History of the Negro Race in America (New
York [1882]), I, 353-362.]
Some of the politicians who championed the doctrine of liberty inherent and universal used it merely as a means to a specific and somewhat unrelated end. Others endorsed it literally and with resolve to apply it wherever consistency might require. How could they justly continue to hold men in bondage when in vindication of their own cause they were asserting the right of all men to be free? Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Edmund Randolph and many less prominent slaveholders were disquieted by the question. Instances of private manumission became frequent, and memorials were fairly numerous advocating anti-slavery legislation. Indeed Samuel Hopkins of Rhode Island in a pamphlet of 1776 declared that slavery in Anglo-America was "without the express sanction of civil government," and censured the colonial authorities and citizens for having connived in the maintenance of the wrongful institution.
As to public acts, the Vermont convention of 1777 when claiming statehood for its community framed a constitution with a bill of rights asserting the inherent freedom of all men and attaching to it an express prohibition of slavery. The opposition of New York delayed Vermont's recognition until 1791 when she was admitted as a state with this provision unchanged. Similar inherent-liberty clauses but without the expressed anti-slavery application were incorporated into the bills of rights adopted severally by Virginia in 1776, Massachusetts in 1780, and New Hampshire in 1784. In the first of these the holding of slaves persisted undisturbed by this action; and in New Hampshire the custom died from the dearth of slaves rather than from the natural-rights clause. In Massachusetts likewise it is plain from copious contemporary evidence that abolition was not intended by the framers of the bill of rights nor thought by the people or the officials to have been accomplished thereby.[5] One citizen, indeed, who wanted to keep his woman slave but to be rid of her child soon to be born, advertised in the Independent Chronicle of Boston at the close of 1780: "A negro child, soon expected, of a good breed, may be owned by any person inclining to take it, and money with it."[6] The courts of the commonwealth, however, soon began to reflect anti-slavery sentiment, as Lord Mansfield had done in the preceding decade in England,[7] and to make use of the bill of rights to destroy the masters' dominion. The decisive case was the prosecution of Nathaniel Jennison of Worcester County for assault and imprisonment alleged to have been committed upon his absconded slave Quork Walker in the process of his recovery. On the trial in 1783 the jury responded to a strong anti-slavery charge from Chief Justice Cushing by returning a verdict against Jennison, and the court fined him £50 and costs.
[Footnote 5: G.H. Moore, Notes on the History of Slavery in
Massachusetts, pp. 181-209.]