At the time that the Declaration of Independence was put forth, no authentic enumeration had been made; but when the first census was taken in 1791, the total number of slaves in what are now known as the Northern States, was forty thousand three hundred and seventy; in the Southern, six hundred and fifty-three thousand nine hundred and ten.
It is very common at this day to speak of our revolutionary struggle as commenced and hurried forward by a union of free and slave colonies; but such is not the fact. However slender and dubious its legal basis, slavery existed in each and all of the colonies that united to declare and maintain their Independence. Slaves were proportionately more numerous in certain portions of the South; but they were held with impunity throughout the North, advertised like dogs or horses, and sold at auction, or otherwise, as chattels. Vermont, then a territory in dispute between New Hampshire and New York, and with very few civilized inhabitants, mainly on its southern and eastern borders, is probably the only portion of the revolutionary confederation never polluted by the tread of a slave.
The spirit of liberty, aroused or intensified by the protracted struggle of the colonists against usurped and abused power in the mother-country, soon found itself engaged in natural antagonism against the current form of domestic despotism.
“How shall we complain of arbitrary or unlimited power exerted over us, while we exert a still more despotic and inexcusable power over a dependent and benighted race?” was very fairly asked. Several suits were brought in Massachusetts—where the fires of liberty burned earliest and brightest—to test the legal right of slaveholding; and the leading Whigs gave their money and their legal services to support these actions, which were generally on one ground or another, successful. Efforts for an express law of emancipation, however, failed, even in Massachusetts; the Legislature doubtless apprehended that such a measure, by alienating the slaveholders, would increase the number and power of the Tories; but in 1777, a privateer having brought a lot of captured slaves into Jamaica, and advertised them for sale, the General Court, as the legislative assembly was called, interfered, and had them set at liberty. The first Continental Congress which resolved to resist the usurpations and oppressions of Great Britain by force, had already declared that our struggle would be “for the cause of human nature,” which the Congress of 1776, under the lead of Thomas Jefferson, expanded into the noble affirmation of the right of “all men to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” contained in the immortal preamble to the Declaration of Independence. A like averment that “all men are born free and equal,” was in 1780 inserted in the Massachusetts Bill of Rights; and the Supreme Court of that State, in 1783, on an indictment of a master for assault and battery, held this declaration a bar to slave-holding henceforth in the State.
A similar clause in the second Constitution of New Hampshire, was held by the courts of that State to secure freedom to every child born therein after its adoption. Pennsylvania, in 1780, passed an act prohibiting the further introduction of slaves, and securing freedom to all persons born in that State thereafter. Connecticut and Rhode Island passed similar acts in 1784. Virginia, in 1778, on motion of Mr. Jefferson, prohibited the further importation of slaves; and in 1782, removed all legal restrictions on emancipation. Maryland adopted both of these in 1783. North Carolina, in 1786, declared the introduction of slaves into the State “of evil consequences and highly impolitic,” and imposed a duty of £5 per head thereon. New York and New Jersey followed the example of Virginia and Maryland, including the domestic in the same interdict with the foreign slave-trade. Neither of these states, however, declared a general emancipation until many years thereafter, and slavery did not wholly cease in New York until about 1830, nor in New Jersey till a much later date. The distinction of free and slave states, with the kindred assumption of a natural antagonism between the North and South, was utterly unknown to the men of the Revolution.
CHAPTER XXXI. SLAVES IN THE NORTHERN COLONIES.
The earliest account we have of slavery in Massachusetts is recorded in Josselyn’s description of his first visit to New England, in 1638. Even at that time, slave-raising on a small scale had an existence at the North. Josselyn says: “Mr. Maverick had a negro woman from whom he was desirous of having a breed of slaves; he therefore ordered his young negro man to sleep with her. The man obeyed his master so far as to go to bed, when the young woman kicked him out.”[46] This seems to have been the first case of an insurrection in the colonies, and commenced, too, by a woman. Probably this fact has escaped the notice of the modern advocates of “Woman’s Rights.” The public sentiment of the early Christians upon the question of slavery can be seen by the following form of ceremony, which was used at the marriage of slaves.
This was prepared and used by the Rev. Samuel Phillips, of Andover, whose ministry there, beginning in 1710, and ending with his death, in 1771, was a prolonged and eminently distinguished service of more than half the eighteenth century:—