Slavery and freedom were constituent elements in American institutions
from the very beginning. In the inherent antagonism of the two,
DeTocqueville recognized the most serious menace to the permanence of
the nation.[122] Slavery, which came in time to be known as the
"peculiar institution" of the South, gradually shaped the social,
moral, economic and political ideas of that section to fit its genius.
The more democratic tendencies of the free industrial order of the
North served by contrast to crystallize still more the group
consciousness of the South. In this wise the erstwhile loyal South was
slowly transformed into a section that was prepared to place local and
sectional interests above national, and the result was secession. Just
as it was not loyalty to inalienable human rights in the abstract that
brought about the abolition of slavery in the North, but rather the
gradual expansion of the idea of liberty through the free give and
take of a vigorous democracy in which economic and social conditions
militated against slavery, so it was not loyalty to States' rights in
the abstract that brought about the Civil War but rather the alien
group consciousness of the slave States which was the outgrowth of
totally different economic and social conditions. It is the object of
this paper to trace the influence of these various factors upon the
status of the slave.
Slavery of both Indians and Negroes and white servitude were well
recognized forms of social status in all the colonies, and slavery was
general down to the time of the American Revolution. As early as 1639
we hear of a Negro slave in Pennsylvania. In 1644 Negroes were in
demand to work the lowlands of the Delaware. In 1685 William Penn
directed his steward at Pennsbury to secure blacks for work "since
they might be held for life," which was not true of indentured
servants.[123] Negro slaves were sold in Maryland in 1642.[124]
Negroes are referred to in the Connecticut records as early as
1660.[125] An "act against trading with negro slaves" was passed in
Elizabeth-Town, New Jersey, in 1682.[126] An entry in Winthrop's
Journal, February 26, 1638, states that a "Mr. Peirce, in the Salem
ship, the _Desire_, returned from the West Indies after seven months.
He had been to Providence, and brought some cotton, and tobacco, and
_Negroes_, etc."[127] The twenty Negroes sold to the colonists at
Jamestown, 1619, were the first landed on the soil of Virginia and
possibly the first brought to the American colonies.[128]
There is evidence to show that the status of the Negro was at first
very closely affiliated with that of the white servant with whom the
colonists were thoroughly familiar and who stood half way between
freedom and complete subjection. It is probable, therefore, that both
Indian and Negro servitude preceded Indian and Negro slavery in all
the colonies,[129] though the transition to slavery as the normal
status of the Negro was very speedily made. The first and essential
feature in this transition was the lengthening of the period of
servitude from a limited time to the natural life. The slave differed
from the servant then not so much in the loss of liberty, civil and
political, as in the perpetual nature of that loss.[130]
There were several factors operating in the case of the Negro to fix
the status of the slave as his normal condition, the earliest and one
of the strongest of which was economic in character. Certainly the
influences which brought Negro slavery to the West-Indies and later to
the British colonies to the north were primarily economic. As a result
of her great commercial expansion in the first half of the fifteenth
century Spain had established a thriving slave trade with the west
coast of Africa. When it was discovered that the natives of the West
Indies, who had been enslaved to meet the labor demands of the new
world, were unable to do the work Spain began to import Negro slave
labor at the suggestion of Bishop Las Casas, thus turning the stream
of slave trade westward about the beginning of the sixteenth century.
By way of the English island colonies, the Bermudas and Barbados, the
slave trade extended northward to the American colonies, the first
slaves being brought from the West Indies to Virginia in 1619, so that
by the end of the seventeenth century the traffic had reached
proportions that frightened the colonists into taking measures for its
restriction.[131]
The fact that Negro slavery reached American soil by way of the West
Indies is not without significance as throwing light upon the status
of the slave especially in the southern colonies such as the Carolinas
and Georgia. The first Negro slaves imported into South Carolina came
from Barbados in 1671 and there is reason for thinking that the
Barbadian slave code and customs were imported with the slaves, for
the act passed in Barbados in 1668 declaring Negro slaves to be real
estate was copied very closely in the South Carolina act of
1690.[132] The stringency of the Barbadian slave code and the
resulting barbarous treatment of the slaves have made the little
island famous in history. "For a hundred years," says Johnston,
"slaves in Barbados were mutilated, tortured, gibbeted alive and left
to starve to death, burnt alive, flung into coppers of boiling sugar,
whipped to death, overworked, underfed, obliged from sheer lack of any
clothing to expose their nudity to the jeers of the 'poor'
whites."[133] And yet the owners of these slaves were English, of the
same stock under which developed the mild patriarchal type of slavery
of Virginia. The difference in the status of the slave in Virginia and
in the northern colonies as opposed to the colonies farther south,
where in some places the Barbadian conditions were at least
approximated, is to be explained in terms of the different social and
economic conditions rather than the character of the slave-owners. The
West Indian type of slavery was not conducive to the more intimate and
sympathetic relations which arose between slave and master in the
colonies to the north where a fairly complete integration of the Negro
in the social consciousness of the white took place.
It is easy to distinguish factors in the economic conditions in the
northern and southern colonies which brought about these differences
in the status of the slave in the two sections. In the trading
colonies of New England and in the farming colonies of the Middle
States the occupations in which slave labor could be profitably made
use of were limited in number. The climate was too cool, especially
for freshly imported slaves. Slave labor was ill adapted to the kind
of crops the soil demanded. The status of the slave from the very
nature of the case approximated that of the servant. The slaves became
for the most part servants, the time of whose service was perpetual.
The slaves of Pennsylvania, for this reason, were treated much more
kindly than the Negroes in the West Indies. Their lot was doubtless
far happier than that of the slaves in the lower South.[134]
The conditions in the planting colonies from Virginia southward were
different. Here was an unlimited supply of fertile lands which lent
themselves readily to the unskillful and exhausting methods of slave
labor. Here too was a warm climate congenial to the Negro, though
enervating and often unhealthful for the white. The staples, such as
the sugar cane, rice and later the cotton plant, were such as the
unscientific slave labor might easily cultivate. All the conditions of
profitable slave labor were present, namely, possibilities for
concentration of labor, its absolute control and direction and
exploitation.
The status of the Negro in the planting colonies was the outcome of
these economic conditions. He was deprived of the stimulating effect
of personal intercourse with the white, enjoyed by the slave at the
north. His status was fixed by a certain position in an industrial
system, the tendency of which was to attach him more and more to the
soil and, especially on the larger plantation, to make of him a
"living tool." He became, as time went on, the economic unit. Even
free labor, in so far as it survived slave labor, was forced to take
its measure of values from the slave. There were of course gradations
in status even among the slaves in the lower South so that the same
system could include the conditions described in Fanny Kemble's
_Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation_ as well as those
portrayed in Smedes' _Memorials of a Southern Planter_. If we take the
whole sweep of country from New England to the far South, the
differences in the status of the slave varied still more, including
the exceedingly mild form of slavery in Pennsylvania where the slave
was not essentially different from the indentured servant, the
patriarchal slavery of Virginia, as well as the capitalistic
exploitation of slave labor in the great rice plantations of South
Carolina and Georgia and the cotton and cane plantations of
Mississippi and Louisiana. Here, in some cases at least, the West
Indian conditions were approximated. In the lower South particularly
were found those conditions which as we shall see later tended to fix
the slave status as an integral part of southern life so that in time
it came to be spoken of as the South's "peculiar institution."
Strange as it may seem, religion also played a large part in the
determination of the status of the slave in early colonial days. Just
as it was the zeal of the early Church which had much to do with the
eradication of the slavery of antiquity, so it was also the zeal and
bigotry of churchmen that had much to do with the reinstatement of
slavery of a type worse in some respects than that of antiquity.
Speaking of the custom of the Spaniards of enslaving the Moors that
fell into their hands through conquest, Prescott says: "It was the
received opinion among good Catholics of that period, that heathen and
barbarous nations were placed by the circumstances of their infidelity
without the pale both of spiritual and civil rights."[135] The
expansion that took place as a result of the discovery of the new
world brought Europeans into contact with heathen who according to the
prevailing opinions were without the pale of Christianity and,
therefore, possessed of no rights that Christians need observe. It is
not surprising then that Columbus brought back Indian slaves with him,
though Isabella ordered returned those "who had not been taken in just
war."
The Puritan settlers of New England were not one whit behind the
Spanish in making use of the same religious grounds for the enslaving
of the Indians conquered in war. Roger Williams in a letter to John
Winthrop in 1637 writes as follows of a successful expedition against
the Pequots: "It having again pleased the Most High to put into our
hands another miserable drove of Adam's degenerate seed, and our
brethren by nature, I am bold (if I may not offend in it) to request
the keeping and bringing up of one of the children." The following
extract from a letter to Winthrop in 1645 is a curious mixture of
religious bigotry and Yankee shrewdness: "A war with the Narragansetts
is very considerable to this plantation, for I doubt whether it be not
sin in us, having power in our hands, to suffer them to maintain the
worship of the devil, which their pow wows often do; secondly, if upon
a just war the Lord should deliver them into our hands, we might
easily have men, women and children enough to exchange for Moors
(Negroes?) which will be more gainful pillage for us than we conceive,
for I do not see how we can thrive until we get into a flock of slaves
sufficient to do all our business, for our children's children will
hardly see this great continent filled with people, so that our
servants will still desire freedom to plant for themselves and not
stay but for very great wages. And I suppose you know very well how we
shall maintain twenty Moors cheaper than one English servant."[136]
Few passages better illustrate how religious ideas and economic needs
conspired to bring about the enslavement of both Indian and Negro at
this early period.
Race also played its part in determining the slave status. There was
present more or less from the very beginning of slavery in States like
Virginia the tendency to limit such servitude to the Negro race. At
first, when both Indian and Negro slaves were found together, there
was no _a priori_ ground for discriminating against the Negro in favor
of the Indian and designating the status of the slave as the normal
status of the Negro. The probable reason is that racial
characteristics of the Indian made him a bad subject for slavery. The
Massachusetts colonists found the Pequot Indians surly, revengeful and
in the words of Cotton Mather unable to "endure the Yoke."[137] The
Negro, on the contrary, proved himself much more tractable and
therefore more profitable as a slave. These plastic race traits, in
fact, have enabled the Negro to survive while the less adaptive Indian
has disappeared. Thus the bonds of a servile status hardened from
decade to decade about the Negro, being determined partly by economic
needs, partly by religious prejudices and partly by the Negro's own
peculiar racial traits.
Legislation, which always follows in the wake of status and normally
gives expression to it, corroborates what has just been stated.
Virginia in the act of 1670 first fixed the legal status of the slave
and so worded the act as virtually to protect the Indian from
enslavement. By an act of 1705 she made Indian enslavement illegal,
thus practically limiting slavery to the Negro. Hence at the time when
Virginia drew up her famous Declaration of Rights, in which she
affirmed the natural equality and inalienable rights of all men, the
prevailing sentiment of the community undoubtedly was that the normal
status of the Negro was that of the slave, which status placed him
entirely without the scope of these lofty declarations. The protests
of such men as George Wythe and Thomas Jefferson were contrary to the
drift of the social mind.[138] The last stage in this process of
determining status on the basis of race is to be found in the various
slave codes that grew up in the Southern States. They were supposed to
be done away with forever by the war amendments and Sumner's famous
Bill of Rights but the problem is one far too subtle and intricate for
regulation by statute, as the Supreme Court has discovered. Status
based upon color still exists both North and South though without
legal sanction.[139]
The noble conceptions of freedom and equality which were embodied in
the bills of rights and the Declaration of Independence were destined
in time to triumph over slavery, though not without bloodshed. It is
interesting to trace their influence on the status of the slave. The
doctrine of human rights found in the Declaration of Independence and
in the bills of rights of the State constitutions, despite its
metaphysical cast, is not derived from the political philosophy of the
French; the key of the demolished Bastile sent by Lafayette to
Washington by the hand of Thomas Paine symbolized rather the debt owed
to America by France.[140] The Declaration itself perhaps shows
closer affiliations with John Locke's _Treatise on Civil Government_,
which may be taken as a statement of the principles contended for in
the Puritan Revolution of 1688. But even Locke's ideas of civil and
religious liberty were not original with him. They were in reality the
result of applying to the sphere of politics the logical implications
of doctrines preached by the Protestant reformers of a century or two
earlier in their revolt against the authority of tradition. To be sure
the masses of men were ignorant of the theological distinctions drawn
by Luther and Knox between the democracy of sin under the first Adam
and the democracy of grace under the second Adam or Christ. The
levelling effect of these ideas, however, was unmistakably felt as in
the doggerel of John Ball, the mad Wycliffite priest of Kent,
"When Adam dalf and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?"
In the next century under the pressure of their struggle against
injustice masquerading behind charters and parliaments, the Puritans
under the leadership of John Locke made their appeal to natural rights
just as the reformers before them had made their appeal to the higher
rights and duties that hold in a spiritual kingdom of grace. The
appeal, originally religious in origin, now appears stripped of its
theological setting and hence with a certain "metaphysical nakedness"
which only the enthusiasm and sense of need arising from the
necessities of their situation prevented its champions from
perceiving. Locke and Blackstone, while insisting upon the absolute
and inalienable rights of the individual, never broke with the feeling
for precedent inherent in the Englishman. The natural rights they
preached were only conceived as having validity within the sphere of
the British subject and not for humanity in general.[141]
In very much the same way the colonists, in the struggles against
royal oppression, felt the need for a higher and more comprehensive
sanction for their conduct and following the precedent set them by the
Puritans of the seventeenth century, they fell back upon the notion of
inalienable rights possessed by each individual independent of
society. Here, too, the inspiration and original setting of these
ideas were strongly religious. Religious toleration had gained
constitutional recognition in almost all the colonies so that the
political movement out of which American freedom was born had the
powerful support of religious sanction. To this fact must be
attributed in part at least the tone of finality and absoluteness in
the American declarations of rights. Out of this universal recognition
of liberty of conscience arose the notion of a right of a higher sort
not inherited but inherent and inalienable because rooted in man's
religious nature--"a God-given franchise."
This sense of the inherent and inalienable nature of the rights of
conscience was, under the stress of the immediate political exigencies
of the struggle with England, very easily and naturally extended from
the sphere of religion to that of civil and political rights. It
provided the sanction for the break with the mother-country that was
contemplated. Virginia's declaration of rights was intended to be law,
for the preamble states that these rights "do pertain to them (the
people of Virginia) and their posterity as the basis and foundation of
government." And what are these rights? They are first of all, "That
all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain
inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society,
they can not by any compact deprive or divest their posterity,
etc."[142] Thus, from the logic of events and not as a result of a
philosophical speculation, the Revolutionary fathers were forced to
take advanced ground in their definition of human rights. Leaving the
fixed social order of the old country for the wilderness, where the
only society was that of the savage, they naturally looked upon
government as arising out of a compact behind which lay the sovereign
autonomy of the individual by virtue of inalienable rights given him
by God. What more natural in their revolt from the old country than to
make this doctrine the political and moral sanction of their course?
The rich emotional life aroused by the war for national independence
as well as the struggle of over half a century later for the
emancipation of the slave have given to these ideas of inalienable
human rights a hold upon the conscience of the nation altogether
incommensurate with their actual validity. It would be a thankless
task and yet an altogether feasible one to show that the Revolutionary
fathers did not break with English traditions in their declarations of
rights. They simply stripped these principles of their original
religious and political setting and persuaded themselves that through
a fresh and rigorous restatement of them they had established their
finality and originality. A stream is not changed by altering the name
it bears at its fountain head. The very enthusiasm and loyalty of the
men of '76 for what has been called "metaphysical jargon" leads one to
suspect that the ultimate basis of these ideas lay in the social
consciousness of the people. The democratic ideals they expressed in
institutional forms--social, political or religious--belonged, of
course, to the social heritage they brought with them from the old
country. They did not, therefore, discover these "lost title deeds of
the human race." It would be much nearer the truth to say they merely
stated them clearly because by virtue of previous training and a new
environment they had succeeded best in realizing those conditions,
social and political, which alone make their clear statement possible.
The measure of success and validity of any social doctrine, no matter
how abstract, is to be found in its harmony with the background from
which it springs and in the extent to which it actually succeeds in
effecting needed social adjustments. It was perfectly natural that our
forefathers should wish to proclaim as a new and unalterable truth,
the everlasting possession of themselves and of all free people, what
they already enjoyed. This did not alter the fact that the only
guarantee for the perpetuity of these rights was the vigorous
democracy of which they were the expression. "The Americans," writes
Jellinek, "could calmly precede their plan of government with a bill
of rights, because that government and the controlling laws had
already long existed."[143]
As these great notions of human rights first took hold of the Anglo
Saxon through religion, so it was through religion also that the
ideals of freedom and equality first affected the status of the slave.
We have already seen what was the prevailing doctrine of Christendom
at the time of the discovery of the new world. It was that infidels
and heathen were without the Christian fold and so did not come under
those sanctions of conduct that prevailed in the dealings of
Christians with each other. The colonists, therefore, assumed "a right
to treat the Indians on the footing of Canaanites or Amalekites" with
no rights a Christian need regard.[144] The same was held true of
the Negroes. In time, however, petitions began to be received from
slaves desiring to be admitted to baptism and this raised the
question concerning the status of the slave after conversion to
Christianity.[145] The dilemma faced by the slave-owner with religious
scruples was as follows: To confer baptism would be in accordance with
the contention of pious churchmen that slavery was but a means to
bring about the salvation of the heathen.[146] On the other hand, to
admit to baptism would, according to the doctrines of the Reformation,
destroy the slave status entirely. By virtue of having entered the
democracy of grace represented by the Church of Christ, the
distinction of bond and free disappeared. To keep out the slave would
be to hamper the spread of Christianity; to admit him would be to
eliminate slavery.
This problem, however, seems never to have troubled the Puritan's
conscience greatly.[147] From his stern, high Calvinistic point of
view he was the elect of the earth, to whom the Almighty had given the
heathen for an inheritance, and in this he found a satisfactory
justification for his harsh and high-handed dealings with weaker races
such as the Indian and the Negro. Yet the germ of freedom contained in
the limited democracy of the elect of Calvinism was bound in time to
break the hard theological moulds in which it was originally cast. It
did this subsequently under the stress of external events in the
effort to throw off the shackles of British oppression. Nowhere did
the essential injustice of slavery become more evident to the minds of
men than in the healthful humanizing and socializing atmosphere of the
progressive industrial democracy of New England.
In the southern colonies especially, the question about the status of
the converted slave threatened to interfere with the slave-traffic so
that several of them passed acts to relieve the consciences of its
citizens. That of Virginia in 1667 is typical. It was enacted that
"Baptism doth not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage
or freedom; in order that diverse masters freed from this doubt may
more carefully endeavor the propagation of Christianity."[148] This
act is interesting as showing the appearance even at this early period
of the ethical dualism between free spiritual personality and the
physical disabilities of slavery. This in time became classic with
pro-slavery writers and perhaps received its strongest statement in a
book that appeared even after emancipation.[149]
In the constitution of the province of Carolina, drawn up by John
Locke in 1669, we have another interesting instance of the way in
which the traditions of freedom associated with religion conflicted
with slavery. The author of the famous _Treatise on Government_, which
was in part the inspiration of our Declaration of Independence, did
not feel that slavery was in any way incompatible with the doctrine
of freedom. Locke's constitution takes it for granted that slaves
would form part of the population of the province, though the
constitution was drawn up possibly two years before the first slave
was brought to the colony.[150] Locke insists upon entire religious
freedom. "No person whatsoever shall disturb, molest, or persecute
another for his speculative opinions in religion or his way of
worship." But he stipulates that this spiritual freedom shall in no
way affect the status of the slave. "Since charity obliges us to wish
well to the souls of all men, and religion ought to alter nothing in
any man's civil estate or right, it shall be lawful for slaves, as
well as others, to enter themselves, and be of what church or
profession any of them shall think best and, therefore, be as fully
members as any freeman. But no slave shall hereby be exempted from
that civil dominion his master hath over him, but be in all things in
the same state and condition he was in before." And again, even more
explicitly in section 110: "Every freeman of Carolina shall have
absolute power and authority over his negro slaves, of what opinion or
religion soever." These sections were evidently intended to meet any
scruples that might arise as to the effect of conversion upon the
slave's status. The culmination of this discussion was an opinion of
the Crown-Attorney and Solicitor-General of England, given in 1729 in
response to an appeal from the colonists, to the effect that baptism
in no way changed the status of the slave.[151] The trade of British
merchantmen was being endangered and it was important to remove the
scruples of the religious slaveholder.
In this feeling of Christian sympathy and fellowship for the slave who
professed Christianity undoubtedly lay potentialities for the
betterment of his conditions. Had there been favorable economic and
political forces working to bring these notions of equality more and
more to the consciousness of men, just as the storm and stress of
political struggle forced them to espouse the doctrines of inalienable
human rights, doubtless freedom would have come to the slave with the
growing sense of the wider implications of democracy. Certainly had
there prevailed in the South economic and social forces similar to
those in the North, the emancipation of the Negro would have taken
place naturally and normally in both sections. That Locke and his
contemporaries felt no incongruity between their ideas of liberty and
the existence of slavery must be attributed to the fact that the full
social implications of their doctrines had not yet been brought home
to them by industrial development. They accepted the status of the
slave as a matter of course in the existing agricultural order.
It is easy to see in Virginia, the chief slave-holding State of the
earlier period, how economic interests in time narrowed the sphere of
action and finally counteracted entirely the tendency of religion to
extend to the slave the ideal of freedom. In the act of 1670, the
first which dealt with slaves in Virginia, the enfranchising effect of
conversion was limited to servants imported from Christian lands; thus
were excluded at once the great majority of Negroes who came, of
course, from Africa. The few Negroes brought in from Christian lands,
such as England and the West Indies, were assigned by the act to the
status of servants from which many attained freedom. It was inevitable
that, in Virginia and the southern colonies especially, the religious
notion that profession of Christianity made a difference in status
should disappear before the more practical principle of race and
color. By the time of the Revolution the matter of religion had
practically disappeared as a factor in the status of the slave,[152]
except in so far as it continued in the form of the vicious ethical
dualism which asserted that the slave could enjoy equality and freedom
in the spiritual sphere while enduring physical bondage. This provided
an effective salve for many a pious slaveholder's conscience.
At the time of the American Revolution before the real problem of
slavery was felt, except in the minds of a few prophetic spirits such
as Jefferson, we can still detect two clearly marked tendencies. At
the South economic forces were combining with the social and racial
conditions to fix the status of slave as the normal condition of the
Negro, a most portentous fact for the future of that section. At the
North economic and social conditions were pointing already towards a
gradual emancipation of the slave in a democratic order that was
becoming more and more conscious of the full significance of the ideas
of freedom and equality.
What was the effect upon the status of the slave North and South of
the struggle for independence and the adoption of a declaration to the
effect that all men are free and equal and possessed of certain
inalienable rights?[153] In Pennsylvania from the very beginning of
the war of independence interest in the manumission of slaves
increased until it finally culminated in the act of 1780, an "Act for
the Gradual Abolition of Slavery," by adopting which Pennsylvania
became the first State to pass an abolition law.[154] The preamble of
this act asserts it to be the duty of Pennsylvanians to give
substantial proof of their gratitude for deliverance from the
oppression of Great Britain "by extending freedom to those of a
different color but the work of the same Almighty hand." Previous to
1776 discussion had been going on also in Massachusetts looking to the
abolition of slavery and in 1777 there was introduced an act with the
preamble declaring that "the practice of holding Africans and the
children born of them, or any other persons in slavery, is
unjustifiable in a civil government, at a time when they are asserting
their natural freedom."[155] This act never became law and it is an
interesting commentary upon conditions in the North, and especially in
New England, that in Massachusetts slavery was not abolished by
legislation but by the slow working of public sentiment. The assembly
of Rhode Island, likewise, prefaced an act against the importation of
slaves in 1774 by asserting that those who were struggling for the
preservation of their rights and liberties, among which that of
personal freedom is greatest, must be willing to extend a like liberty
to others.[156] Similar agitation and legislation were going on in
almost all the Northern and Middle States under the stimulus of the
spirit of freedom of the time.[157]
It is easy to note a change in the mental atmosphere as we pass to the
States farther south. The Assembly of Delaware tabled indefinitely a
bill of 1785 for the gradual abolition of slavery, and Maryland in her
declaration of rights adopted in 1776 restricted the enjoyment of
certain rights _to freemen only_. A petition introduced in the House
of Burgesses of Virginia in 1785, asking for general emancipation on
the ground that slavery was contrary to the principles of religion and
the ideas of freedom on which the government was founded, was read and
rejected without an opposing voice; Washington remarked in a letter to
Lafayette that it could hardly get a hearing.[158] In fact, there is
evidence for believing that, while leading men such as Jefferson,
Madison, Washington, Mason and Pinkney saw the evil of slavery and
wished heartily to rid their States of it, the mass of the citizens of
Maryland and Virginia did not wish to do away with the institution
either because of social habits and economic interests, or because
they felt unable to cope with the problem of an emancipated black
population. It must be remembered that in Maryland there were three
slaves to five whites, in Virginia and Georgia the numbers were about
equal, in South Carolina there were two slaves to one white, while in
Massachusetts there were sixty whites to one slave.[159] In the States
farther south, the Carolinas and Georgia, no change or attempted
change in the status of the slave seems to have occurred. The force
of social and economic habits was already too strong for the movings
of the spirit of freedom to affect the status of the slave.
The leaders of the time realized this only too well. Patrick Henry,
writing to a Quaker in 1773, said that slavery was "as repugnant to
humanity as it is inconsistent with the Bible and destructive of
liberty. Every thinking honest man rejects it as speculation, but how
few in practice from conscientious motives! Would any one believe that
I am a master of slaves of my own purchase? _I am drawn along by the
general inconvenience of living without them._"[160] Jefferson in a
letter written in 1815 expressed the hope that slavery would in time
yield "to the enlargement of the human mind, and its advancement in
science," but he confessed also that "where the disease is most deeply
seated, there it will be slowest in eradication. In the Northern
States it was merely superficial and easily corrected; in the
Southern, it is incorporated with the whole system, and requires time,
patience and perseverance in the curative process. That it may finally
be effected and its progress hastened, will be my last and fondest
prayer."[161]
Little light is gained as to the position occupied by the slave in the
social mind from the discussions and debates of the constitutional
convention of 1787, although slavery is tacitly recognized in the
clauses on representation and taxation, the extension of the
slave-trade, and the regulation of fugitive slaves. In connection with
the basis of representation and taxation the question arose whether
the slave was a person or a chattel, but it was debated not with the
view of bringing out what the consensus of opinion of the nation at
large was but rather with a view to the political exigencies of the
situation. The individual States had never been inclined nor did they
now propose to surrender to the Union the right to determine the
status of persons within their limits so that the debates were begun
with the general concession of the fact that slavery existed in some
of the States, that it would in all probability continue to exist, and
that the future of the institution was primarily a problem that
belonged to the individual States where it was found.
The problem facing the members of the convention was, therefore, to
provide a system of representation that would ensure political
equality to all sections and at the same time safeguard the peculiar
conditions and social and economic institutions of each State. To base
representation entirely upon the number of the free population would
give an undue preponderance to the free States, while to base it upon
all, both slave and free, would give an undue advantage to the five
slave States. Hence the rather queer compromise that representation
"shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons,
including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding
Indians not taxed, _three fifths of all other persons_"--"all other
persons" being a euphemism for "slaves," a term which does not occur
in the document. By this measure the slave was made to be only three
fifths of a full social unit, or three fifths of a man. This would
seem to imply that in the social consciousness of the nation at large
the slave was part chattel and part person and this doubtless was the
fact. Certainly this is not the last instance where a tendency has
manifested itself to assign to the Negro a sort of intermediary status
between a chattel and a full social unit. The question came up in 1829
in the Virginia constitutional convention in the struggle between the
slaveholding eastern and the free western section of that State.[162]
Doubtless one reason for the refusal of Congress to reduce the
representation of the Southern States, after the legislation of a few
years ago, that practically disfranchised the Negro in the far South,
has been an unwillingness thus to lend national sanction to the
inferior political as well as social status to which this legislation
has at least for the time being reduced the Negro.
The clause in the constitution which subjected its framers to the
bitterest criticism at the hands of anti-slavery agitators is that
which requires that a "person held to service"--the term "slave" is
here avoided also--in one State and escaping to another shall be
delivered up on claim of the party to whom the service is due. In view
of the interests to be reconciled this clause was undoubtedly
necessary to union.[163] If the free States were to become a place of
refuge for escaping slaves it meant disaster for the States in which
the institution of slavery existed and they insisted upon this as a
self-protective measure. The constitution recognized the right of each
State to preserve the integrity of its own domestic institutions. "It
can never too often be called to mind," says Rhodes, "that the
political parties of the Northern States and their senators and
representatives in Congress, scrupulously respected the constitutional
protection given to the peculiar institution of the South, until, by
her own act, secession dissolved the bonds of union."[164] The tragedy
of the situation lay in the fact that the political necessities of the
time made unavoidable this strange union between freedom and slavery,
the fundamental incompatibility of which the expanding national life
was bound to make clear to the minds of men.
Looking back on this momentous period we are struck with what Lecky
calls "the grotesque absurdity of slaveowners signing a Declaration of
Independence which asserted the inalienable right of every man to
liberty and equality."[165] That the contradiction existed, that it
was felt by men like Jefferson, and that it was destined to become
more prominent in the mind of the nation as the implications and
applications of the great ideas of freedom and equality were enriched
and enlarged in the expanding life of a virile democracy, can not be
denied. But it may be remarked in the defense of our Revolutionary
fathers that they were facing the practical problem of effecting
national unity and that "it is a tendency of the Anglo-Saxon race to
take the expedient in politics when the absolute right can not be
had."[166] They compromised on slavery and on the whole wisely.
Moreover, the history of the development of great moral and political
concepts indicates that men often formulate principles the logical
implications of which are not grasped until new problems and the
demand for new social adjustments emerge. The great moral categories
of courage, temperance and justice first received scientific
formulation at the hands of the Greeks; the ever swelling stream of
human civilization has vastly enriched and enlarged these conceptions
but without altering their essential meaning. When the idea of liberty
which in 1776 included only one class, namely, those who owned the
property and administered the government of the nation, was expanded
so as to include every member of the social order, at that moment
slavery was doomed.