Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (icecream ebook reader txt) 📗

abolitionist Granville Sharp employed 1,200 of them as the core of a black colonization experiment in Sierra Leone, on the west coast of Africa.

But the effect on the structures of slavery was significant: more than 5,000 Georgia slaves fled to the protection of King George when the British invaded Georgia in 1779, another 20,000 South Carolina slaves found refuge under British guns in Charleston, and 5,000 more (including thirty slaves belonging to Thomas Jefferson) followed Lord Cornwallis’s ill-fated army to Yorktown. In New York City, which the British had occupied for most of the Revolution, runaway slaves swelled the free black population, while in Philadelphia the slave population had fallen from 1,400 to 400 by the close of the Revolution. Over the course of the war, upward of 80,000 American slaves (a fifth of the entire American slave population) ran away, joined the British, or found some other way of beating a path to freedom.80

The political idealism of the Revolution also encouraged, and sometimes forced, white slave owners to liberate their slaves. There were, as Samuel Johnson remarked, few things more incongruous than listening to yelps for liberty from the mouths of slave drivers. It remained the great and abiding paradox of the American argument over liberty and power that Jeffersonian and Jacksonian Democrats, who wailed so persistently against the encroachments of power, rested their fortunes so routinely on depriving black slaves of liberty; and that Federalists and Whigs, who saw much more need for the exercise of power in government and commerce, were the least enthusiastic about slavery.

A number of Americans felt the pain of that paradox enough to manumit their slaves (as George Washington did in his will) or pass laws that at least ended the slave trade in their states. As early as 1774, the Massachusetts Provincial Convention suggested “that while we are attempting to free ourselves from our present embarrassments, and preserve ourselves from slavery, that we also take into consideration the state and circumstances of the negro slaves in this province.” By the time the Constitution was written, laws prohibiting the slave trade had been passed in Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, and slave owners such as Abijah Holbrook, a Connecticut miller, were “influenced by motives of humanity and benevolence” to free their slaves, “believing that all mankind are entitled to equal liberty and freedom.” Joseph Story, the brightest luminary among American lawyers, insisted in 1819 that “our constitutions of government have declared, that all men are born free and equal, and have certain inalienable rights, among which are the right of enjoying their lives, liberties, and property, and of seeking and obtaining their own safety and happiness. May not the miserable African ask, ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’” 81

Free blacks also took the future of their own people in hand. “Freedom suits” were filed by black Americans in northern courts, and litigious slaves in Massachusetts such as Quok Walker in Walker v. Jennison in 1781 (and its companion case, Jennison v. Caldwell) and Elizabeth Freeman in Brom and Bett vs. Ashley, also in 1781, claimed freedom on the grounds that the new Massachusetts constitution had declared that all individuals were “born free and equal.” Others organized manumission societies to assist in purchasing the freedom of other blacks still in bondage, or prosecute slave owners guilty of abuse.82

More than secular political ideas, however, religious commitment formed the backbone of much of the North’s hostility to slavery. Protestant evangelicalism was as fully devoted to the importance of individual spiritual freedom as republicanism was devoted to political freedom, and the two ideologies found a common cause in opposing slavery just as evangelicals and Whigs had found common cause in promoting personal self-transformation. The most famous evangelical preacher in the North before the Civil War, Charles Grandison Finney, denounced “the abominable institution of slavery” and openly declared that “no slave holder could come to our communion.” The evangelicals were joined by other streams of religious dissent. The Quakers, awakened by the writing and preaching of Anthony Benezet and John Woolman, moved to admonish and then discipline slaveholders in 1750s, and by the time of the Revolution, slavery had disappeared almost entirely from American Quaker communities.83

Not all of the rising agitation against slavery was limited to the North. Prior to the 1830s, many Southerners expressed a sense of shame over slavery for both political and religious reasons. Thomas Jefferson offers one of the best-known and most ambivalent cases of Southern anti-slavery feeling, for Jefferson fully understood that slavery was a vicious and unjust system that mocked the liberty and equality he had made his political gospel. “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free,” Jefferson declared; if there was no initiative to free the slaves, he could only “tremble for my country,” for he knew “that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever; that considering numbers, nature and natural means only,” a slave uprising “is among possible events.” In that case, “the Almighty has no attribute which can takes side with us in such a contest.”84

And so Jefferson wrote the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which organized the new territories of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin so that slavery would be permanently illegal there. As late as 1827, there were 106 anti-slavery societies in the Southern states as opposed to 24 in the North, and with nearly five times as many members. In 1829, a convention called to rewrite Virginia’s state constitution heatedly debated the wisdom of perpetuating slavery in the Old Dominion. “I wish, indeed, that I had been born in a land where domestic and negro slavery is unknown,” announced one delegate to the convention. “I shall never wish that I had been born out of Virginia—but I wish, that Providence had spared my country this moral and political evil.”85

But anti-slavery opinion in the South remained weak, and palsied by racism. For all of Jefferson’s guilt over slaveholding, the right time and