When the United States of America was formed in 1776, its declaration that every American had to right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". This didn't include the half a million slaves in the new country, where only a fraction were freed following the Revolution. Why?
Slaves were Freed
According to Gordon S. Wood's 2009 book, Empire of Liberty - A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815, the American Revolution did accomplish a lot of good things: it created the cultural conciousness that made slavery in America seem wrong, that had not existed on a large-scale before. This conciousness helped many Americans, particularly in the North, free over 10,000 slaves by Revolution's end. But in the South, land owners and farmers kept slaves because they felt that African Americans were mentally inferior to Caucasians. So they felt justified in keeping slaves.
Slavery in America
Europeans started transporting over a million Africans to America in 1500 as slaves. By the early 1770's, before the American Revolution, Caucasians in North America had about 460,000 slaves, about one-fifth of the total population. Most worked in the American South. Although 90% of all slaves in America were in the South, the North had significant numbers of slaves. Right before the Revolution, almost 50,000 slaves lived in the North. As a matter of fact one out of every five families in Boston had at least one slave, and 9% of those were enslaved in Philadelphia; cities that were the cradles of American liberty. Most of the Northern slaves were farm laborers and tended to live closer to their White masters than those slaves of the South, who were in the words of Gordon S. Wood, "jammed into the garrets, backrooms and barns of their White owners rather than living in separate slave quarters". One-third or more of the Northern slaves lived in several cities, where they did a lot of different things - domestic work, trade work, dock work and more. Slavery in the North was just one form of labor among many types and not the main type, unlike in the South. Right before the Revolution, slavery was taken for granted by Americans at large. It was like in earlier time periods a cruel and brutal time and slavery was just another fact of life.
The Revolt against Slavery
Quakers started to criticize the idea of slavery. Samuel Cooke of Massachucetts said "We, the patrons of liberty, have dishonored the Christian name, and degraded human nature nearly to a level with the beasts that perish.". Thomas Jefferson, a slaveholder, said that "the rights of human nature deeply wounded by this infamous practice," and that "the abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies where it was unhappily introduced in their state."
In 1774, Rhode Island and Connecticut, still British colonies, prohibited new slaves from being brought into their colonies. Soon, following independence, Delaware, Virginia, Maryland, and South Carolina abolished slavery.
During the Revolution, Colonial leaders started to ponder the question of slavery. The first anti-slavery convention was in Philadelphia in 1775. Most Revolutionary leaders thought that slavery would die of its own accord. Some Virginians predicted that slavery would die too. Thomas Jefferson, said that slaves would be freed someday but that "moment of doing it was not yet arrived", but that "the spread of light and liberalty" among the slaveholders at that moment, was coming. Unfortunately, during the Continental Convention of 1787, the architects of the final draft of the Constitution did not mention "slaves", "slavery" or "Negroes". They only assumed that slavery would die of its own accord. That assumption allowed slaveholders the right to keep slaves.
References:
Woods, Gordon S. Empire of Liberty - A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815. 2009. Pages 508, 512-524.
Daniel Cunningham - Daniel Cunningham graduated from Hudson Valley Community College in 2006 with an Associate in Arts degree in Individual Studies. His ...
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