The effects that both Racial Slavery and the American
Revolution have on each other are discussed in this week’s reading of the
Davis. In particular, he points out the central paradox of white Americans
seeking freedom from the “enslavement” of the British while they simultaneously
enslave another group of people. In this sense, Davis showed that the colonies
were in danger of “a revolution within the Revolution” (147).
Davis discusses how during the time of the Enlightenment
and, more specifically, the American Revolution, opposition to slavery
transformed into a more concrete ideology. Davis makes the claim that in the
cases of many slave revolts throughout history, the slaves merely opposed their
own enslavement, rather than the actual idea
of slavery. However, the American concept of liberty in regards to the British
allowed slaves to have a new ideological discourse opposing slavery. Davis
explains a few cases in which slave owners emancipated their own slaves when
confronted with this ideological contradiction (144-6). Although these
manumissions were relatively atypical, they do show that some slave owners were
open to an ideological change. So one question I had was whether on not all
slave owners really grasped the moral implications of slavery, seeing as some
were willing to free their own slaves when they were shown their own hypocrisy
(i.e. seeking freedom while denying it to others).
What jarred me the most while reading was when Davis
described how the British (Dunmore) attempted to get slaves to run away, and
how the Americans (Clinton) tried to counteract it (150). It seemed to perfectly
foreshadow the Civil War when describing how the South’s (in this case,
Georgia’s) economy was ruined when slaves escaped. I also found it shocking to
realize that despite the many movements to emancipate slaves or at least
restrict slavery, very few people actually opposed slavery based on its
morality. For example, the British tried to emancipate slaves as a strategy
against America (which often times led to them being sold as slaves elsewhere)
and many Americans only wanted to restrict slavery because they did not like Africans
and African-Americans and did not want them to live in their country (154).
Davis clearly describes how and why Racial Slavery and the
American Revolution become entangled with each other. But, what were the
ultimate effects that this clash of ideologies had on America’s road to
Abolition? Hypothetically, could the emancipation of slaves have come sooner if
events played out differently during the Revolution, or was the time simply “not
ripe” so to speak?
This week’s reading from Davis highlighted some very interesting points about yet another ideological shift during the American Revolution; this ideological shift led to progress towards, along with the fear of, emancipation for African slaves. As Matt describes in his post, during the American Revolution many Americans, especially in northern states, realized the hypocrisy of enslaving Africans while they were simultaneously fighting against “enslavement” from the British. Davis provides an example of this when Captain William Whipple asks his slave Prince, who was also briefly an oarsman in George Washington’s brigade, why he was “moody and depressed. Prince responded, “‘Master, you are going to fight for your liberty, but I have none to fight for’” (144). Whipple proceeds to free Prince immediately, which is the same mindset many non slave-dependent owners had during the American Revolution. With this said, the point I found most interesting was the point Davis explains as “Negrophobic racism,” which Matt also mentions by describing that Americans didn’t want Africans in their country. Davis emphasizes how important political leaders such as Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, etc. simply inherited racial slavery but didn’t like the concept because they believed Africans and African-Americans were the root of “all the defects, mistakes, sins, shortcomings, and animality of an otherwise almost perfect nation” (154). It is intriguing to see how Americans both recognized the evil of enslavement but continued to blame their predecessors or even the slaves themselves.
ReplyDeleteTo address Matt’s question posed about whether the Civil War could have occurred any sooner given altered events during the American Revolution, I offer my opinion. I believe the Civil War happened at the time it did because the South was further rooted in the economics of slavery. Although, as Davis mentions, Georgia did suffer dips in the economy due to losses of slaves, the South was still “tinkering,” if you will, with the ways slaves could be utilized in different types of labor. Instead of the Civil War really being a war between morals, it was more so an economic war where the industrial North wanted the South to give up its “primitive” economic strategy. Since the South was so dependent on slavery, especially due to the cotton gin (which was created after the American Revolution), they felt they were physically unable to give slavery up. Yet since the South still wasn’t fixated on slavery quite enough to start a Civil War earlier than it did.
ReplyDeleteIn response to TJ, his statement is overall correct that the “morals” of Americans were still in development, blaming predecessors or their own slaves. My only issue with it may be that many Americans still didn’t fully recognize slavery as “evil.” Immoral perhaps, but Slavery still hadn’t been identified as such a terrible practice that it was fully frowned upon quite yet. Those thoughts didn’t fully develop until Abolitionism more popularly rose to the surface.
For the most part, I agree with Jacob's point about the Civil War and slavery, but I disagree with his claim that it was only the South that was dependent on slavery. Even though Southern slave owners were pushed to emancipate their slaves, it took nearly a century to actually do it because the US economy was still so fragile. I think even though the notion of slavery was a logical inconsistency on the part of the Americans, and many knew it, the institution of slavery was too valuable to risk losing: especially in the first years of the United States being a country. Even the Northerners feared losing slavery when the British attacked because it would absolutely paralyze the economy, as we had been so dependent on it for so many years. The Civil War was prompted by the fact that factories were beginning to pop up in the North as the United States became more and more self sufficient. Only then were Northerners able to really make a strong case for abolishing slavery.
ReplyDelete(I have more to add): Davis made the point I talked about above clear with his reference to arming slaves to fight the British. Many slaves fought and earned their freedom, but many, as Davis also mentions, found themselves back in slavery. All the while the North could do nothing about it as cotton, indigo, rice, and tobacco were the lifeblood of the American economy around the turn of the 18th century.
DeleteAs others have written this week’s reading attempts to look at the disconnect between fighting for liberty and the institution of slavery. In response to Matt’s question I believe that it would have been nearly impossible to eradicate slavery at the time the constitution was written, as it was already a polarizing is as demonstrated by huge sticking points at the convention like how slaves would be counted for both representation and taxation purposes. I also think it would have been a problem to confront what many were becoming uncomfortable with but very few people were willing to outright reject and risk the unity of the nation. Along with that many founding fathers also owned a large number of slaves. The Smithsonian did an exhibit a couple of years ago that detailed what we know of the lives of the numerous slaves that lived on Thomas Jefferson’s plantation an interesting article about it can be found here, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/The-Little-Known-Dark-Side-of-Thomas-Jefferson-169780996.html. Without the founding fathers having the ability to renounce the slave trade there was little to no hope for the new country to start with a constitution outlawing the very practice those who wrote it were participating in.
ReplyDeleteIn the time immediately following the Revolution very few of the monumental works that would drive people towards abolition had been published. There was no book by Fredrick Douglas and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin had not been published yet. It was not until the horrors of slavery became everyday knowledge that a large enough coalition could be built by those who were not around it every day.
I agree completely with Julia’s point when it comes to Matt’s question—at the time the American Revolution was happening and, later, coming to a close, the idea of abolishing slavery completely doesn’t seem like it could have been feasible considering that many of the men who were in the process of designing the constitution were slave owners themselves and clearly benefitted from slavery. I think this point connects well to the other comments referring to the disconnect of freedoms faced during the Revolution, seeing as nascent America was, in a way, a nation freed from the control of a ruling force while the young country still maintained a similar grip on its slaves. The point of Davis’ that struck me most was the anecdote about the slave, Prince, who noted that while his master was fighting for liberty, he was fighting for nothing at all due to his complete lack of liberty. Therein lies the key to the fear of a revolution within the Revolution: how could slaves be expected to fight for the freedom of country they had no such freedom in?
ReplyDeleteThe contradiction of wanting liberty for Americans while enslaving human beings in a more inhumane manner than the dominance of the British stood out in the reading. By this point, most American slave owners believed in the humanity of their slaves and thats why it perplexes me that a lot of the slave owners still did not free their slaves. Luckily some, like Captain William Whipple, saw the paradox and freed their slaves. If Americans at this period of time still didn't believe in the humanity of the African Americans, it would make more sense for them to deny them freedom. Gabriel asserted, "I have adventured my life in endeavoring to obtain the liberty of my countrymen [i.e. Africab Americans], and am a willing sacrifice in their cause." The fact that not all Americans believed in freedom for ALL is shocking and hypocritical.
ReplyDeleteJulia makes a great point that not everyone knew how devastating the slave's situations were and there was a lot of ignorance at the time. I do not think the emancipation would have come sooner because of the mindset of so many of the people and the economic dependence of slavery in the South. The Revolutionary War also influenced Americans by wanting to disentangle themselves from Great Britain and blaming them for slavery.
Related to Jacob's ideas, one interesting point that Davis makes is the Revolutionary War's significance in helping to create the sectional conflict about slavery that plagued the United States for the years leading up to the Civil War.
ReplyDeleteAs Davis emphasizes, the British practice of encouraging Southern slaves to run away from their plantations and desert to the British army created a mindset in the South where they felt like their slaves were a vulnerable investment and could be taken away at any time, as had been demonstrated in the past, just on a much smaller scale.
However, while the war caused Southern slaveholders to tighten their grip on slavery, the opposite effect was had in the North. The revolutionary rhetoric propagated by the predominantly Northern revolutionaries began to take effect among its producers, who began to see the hypocrisy of fighting a war for freedom while holding slaves. This put them on the path to eventual abolitionism, setting the stage for sectional conflict with the slaveholding South.
While it is obvious that abolition had no serious hold during the American Revolution, as Davis seems to get at, it wasn’t nonexistent. After watching one of the videos Mr. Kogan posted I dug a little deeper into a thread that wasn’t mentioned as prominently in Davis. I explored deeper into the idea of manumission as a result of a plantation owners own religious beliefs. I specifically learned about Robert Carter III. He was a Virginian plantation owner, a Founding Father, and a forward thinking religious man. He based his religious beliefs off of a mix of the Baptists and Quakers. Starting soon after the ratification of the Constitution, Carter began looking to his religious theories which prompted him to manumit 452 slaves from his plantation. As can be imagined he received a fair bit of flack for this move and was under tight scrutiny in Virginia. He held by this religious motive and began to pick up a small following in the North, mainly Pennsylvania, which promoted similar thought throughout the South, but saw relatively low success. I found Carter III to be very interesting because he follows this strain that seems to pop up only very momentarily during the history, because often religion is used inversely to prove the morality of slavery as opposed to the immorality.
ReplyDeleteThis being said, I think that in the Davis chapter he supports this idea that there were abolition movements on the small scale but not on the large scale like we see in the 1850s and 60s. Similarly, most of these small movements were quickly forgotten and buried. For example, Robert Carter III died in his sleep, and the next day his son, who had inherited his plantation, immediately went out and purchased 452 slaves to replace those that his father had set free.
To answer Matt’s question about how things would have changed if events had played out differently, I think that if some of these smaller abolition movements would have taken hold on even a small scale in the South, then the tightness of the ties to slavery would have possibly been loosened over the long run. I think that the fact that these small movements were crushed so quickly lead to a longer period of time before abolition because the movement had to essentially be raised from the ashes, even though it was much easier to make an argument once the atrocities of slavery had been publicized as Julia mentioned.
It was interesting to see the relationship between racial slavery and the American Revolution in this week’s reading because Davis reveals the hypocrisy and irony of slave ownership (mostly seen in the north). The idea that Americans were fighting for their freedom against the British while taking the freedom of slaves is essential to understanding slavery in America at the time of this reading because there were not many slave revolts or big abolition movements, so the slaves are caught between the South, North, or the British. The South had become so economically dependent on slavery that they found it more difficult to see the hypocrisy of their actions while the North, who was less dependent on slavery seemed to have more instances where they showed understanding for the want of freedom. For example, the story of Whipple freeing Prince, which other people have used as an example of how the North seemed to have more sympathy or at least did more to abolish slavery.
ReplyDeleteI think Julia’s point of all the founding fathers being slave owners is important to consider when figuring out if the abolition of slavery seemed like it was going to happen because it seems unlikely that much will change with slavery when the leaders of the country are all slave owners. I think Jacob B’s insight of the story of Carter III shows that not all southerners were unwilling to change and ultimately believe that everyone deserves freedom even if Carter believed it for religious and not just personal and moral reasons.
One of the threads I found most interesting was the contradiction between the revolutionaries trying to break free of the British, yet they enslave people in the process. One point I would like to make is that I think to some extent the Americans had only known the way of the British, ie get others to do the work for you, therefore when they began to develop their own society separate from the British, they did not know what else to do besides get others to do their work for them. After they began to depend so heavily on the work of slaves, I also think that the Americans became so reliant on it that they could not afford to find it immoral because they could not really survive without it. Therefore, to address Matt's initial question, the revolutionaries own personal beliefs essentially became moot. Thus I think that the manumissions discussed in Davis were as Matt said extremely atypical. I believe that of course there will be some people who oppose slavery, and thus will act on it, but for the most part the mindset people had was to pretty much just go with the flow, and keep slavery alive. But I think this posses an interesting point it that it shows the beginnings of tension related to the Civil War, demonstrating that at least some people were split from the rest of the group.
ReplyDelete