HI-170B

The changing nature of revolutionary America, under the influence of republican values, necessitated a change in the conception of race in the new society. The Revolutionary zeal for liberty and equality, the struggle for freedom from the oppressive slavery which was imminent under English rule, and the need for a distinctly American form of social cohesion in the new society all found sustenance in the doctrine of republicanism. The glaring contradiction in values which the continued existence of slavery posed in the minds of many republican leaders in this period grew to enormous proportions during the revolutionary period. Although the Revolutionary war brought on a revolution in ideals, slavery was not abolished until nearly a century later. However, it was not that the noble ideals of the American revolutionaries were not in fact genuine; the problem was that the founders of the American nation defined membership in its republican society so narrowly that by 1790, blacks had become undesirables, and in the eyes of a republican society which defined itself as exclusively white, certainly not "...endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights."[1] The egalitarian ideal of the Revolution, which would have seemed to offer hope for a change in the thinking which kept Africans in bondage, was altered by the ideals of republicanism.

During the Revolution, America was in the process of overthrowing the old political as well as social orders, and the ingredients in the glue of society was fast changing from patronage and patriarchy, to the elements of virtue, meaning the sacrifice of the individual good for the common one. This was the "essence of republicanism" and encompassed the idealistic goal of the Revolution.[2] It not only meant the elimination of the king and the patriarchal social system, but it "added a moral dimension...to the political separation from England."[3] According to a sermon delivered in December 1774 by the pastor Samuel Williams, "a free government...cannot be supported without Virtue."[4] Virtue was the basis of the new free society, as the "common good of the whole" depended on the individuals in the society performing their duties and sacrificing their own individual interests.[5] Unlike the King and his underlings, who had possessed no virtuous traits and were responsible for the disintegration of English society, the new Americans would have to control their passions and temptations to corruption in order for American society to remain immune from the disease which was ravaging their English homeland. The patriarchal system, those who took advantage of patronage, as well as the King himself, had allowed idleness, wealth, and power to corrupt them totally.[6] The men who were waging the Revolution, both in body and mind, were determined never to allow this degradation of national character to occur in the new nation.

The elite in revolutionary society determined culture as well as policy, and the classical values of temperance, fortitude, dignity, and most importantly, independence, acted as a formula for the proper functioning of the individuals in society, which would lead to the efficient functioning of the nation as a whole. The personal was made necessarily political, and the revolutionary leaders created a new form of cultural politics which would determine the success of an America free from English control. The new society would be governed by the principle of equality, but the Revolution was not an attempt to eliminate the existence of social distinctions. It only sought to change the criteria by which one came to rise into the upper echelons of society. Republican thinkers heralded achieved status as infinitely more desirable than one ascribed through birth or patronage. According to Gordon S. Wood, the "truly natural aristocracy" was "based on virtue, temperance, independence, and devotion to the commonwealth."[7] When republican thinkers considered blacks in terms of virtue, temperance, independence, and then asked themselves what role Africans would play in the ideal republican society, they viewed slavery with a decidedly more critical eye. Revolutionary America was by no means confident in its moral constitution, and it was "the pervasive fear that they were not predestined to be a virtuous and egalitarian people that...drove them into revolution in 1776. It was this fear and not their confidence in the peculiarity of their character..." [italics mine].[8] Indeed, when considering the issue of slavery, Americans truly had an ambivalent image of themselves as a virtuous people. On the one hand they admired their republican, virtuous traits, but on the other they saw all of their weaknesses, both as individuals unable to truly sacrifice for the public good, and as a society doomed because of it. "Their society seemed strangely both unequal and unequal, virtuous and vicious."[9] The elite republicans in America had to either justify slavery to themselves and others in order to perpetuate it, or argue against it completely. However, the seeming contradiction between ideals and reality decreased in importance in the minds of many as the definition of republican citizenship gradually took on a racial connotation. The traits of republican citizens were increasingly disassociated from Africans, as in the eyes of prominent members of society, African slaves came to represent everything good republicans were not.

The case of Virginia, which had 40 percent of the slave population in the United States, according to the census of 1790, is a good case to study in order to closely examine the apparent contradiction between the revolutionary doctrine of egalitarianism and the institution of slavery.[10] Slave labor was becoming progressively more desirable than free labor, as it was becoming more profitable for those with financial interests in owning slaves. The increased use of slave labor was not only more profitable for the individual plantation, but it additionally acted to decrease the amount of freemen moving into society. As indentured servants throughout the south increasingly gained their freedom, it became more difficult for them to acquire land, become independent, and hence, successful soon after 1640. There was only so much room at the top. By 1676, the year of Bacon's Rebellion, which Edmund Morgan characterized as a case of Virginia's "envious and angry" poor rising up against the landowners, around one-fourth of Virginian freedmen had no land whatsoever.[11] The fear of shiftless freedmen remained rampant in Virginia throughout the colonial period, and efforts to decrease the number of new freedmen steadily escalated through the next century. Landowners increasingly extended the terms of indentured servitude and restricted the movement of servants between towns. Ultimately, the most effective way of reducing the number of persons becoming freedmen was to reduce the influx of new indentured servants coming to America. The use of African slaves instead of white labor offered two advantages: it was more profitable, as the condition of servitude was permanent, and it reduced the need for importation of more indentured servants who swelled the ranks of the freedmen. According to Edmund S. Morgan, the freedmen never again posed a threat to Virginian society, as they were more able to find positions for themselves in Virginian society as the ranks of the freedmen stopped growing. The rights of the whites were paid for by taking them away from the blacks. Morgan asserted that "It was slavery...more than any other factor...that enabled Virginia to nourish representative government in a plantation society."[12] Seen in this light, a narrow definition of who enjoys rights as a citizen of society reconciles the apparent contradiction between political ideals and reality.

Thomas Jefferson, a prominent Virginia planter, exemplified revolutionary society's conflict between intellectual ideals and inescapable reality. Jefferson's view of the institution of slavery was deeply grounded in republican reasoning. The relationship between servant and slave was an "exercise of the most boisterous passions," as well as an inducement for white society to become lazy, to lose its industriousness, for "no man will labor for himself who can make another labor for him."[13] The very virtue of the American people was at stake, the very glue of the future republican society. Jefferson viewed the emancipation of slaves as a social imperative for a republican society to exist, but he could never give up his own personal interest in having slaves. As a planter in debt, he was dependent on his slaves and could never release them, even after the enactment of the Virginia manumission law in he 1780s.[14] Jefferson died a debtor, and ironically, was a prime example of what was not republican: dependent on the bondage of his fellow man for his own continued existence as a member of southern aristocratic society, just as dependent as he criticized the slaves or women for being. He was no more independent than the slaves were.

The existence of slavery as an institution in the revolutionary period, although understandable, even if sometimes not desirable to slave owners, still required justification in order to preserve the republican integrity of the nation. The planter's conscience was made easier if the slave was not viewed as a fellow man, but rather, as a dependent, uncontrolled embodiment of the passions that men tried to control: in essence all that was not republican. The relegation of the African to a sub-human status related directly to the republican goal of subjugating the passions of the body to the rational will of the mind: "Chain him, either chain him or expel his black shape from our midst, before we realize that he is ourselves."[15] Indeed, the pastor Samuel Williams, in his sermon lauding the importance of forming a republican society, characterized blacks as anything but potential republican citizens: In Africa, scarce any human being are to be found but barbarians, tyrants, and slaves: All equally remote from the true dignity of human nature, and from a well-regulated state of society."[16] Benjamin Franklin, one of the most influential figures in the revolutionary period, asked in his Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind "Why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White?"[17] Republicanism did not cast a favorable light upon blacks, in the eyes of many of those prominent in white society. However, there were exceptions to this general trend.

Benjamin Rush and most other slavery critics attacked slavery as morally wrong, beyond a mere threat to the republican virtue of the white slaveowner. Writing in 1773, Rush attacked the economic justification for maintaining slaves as cheaper labor, as he believed "No manufactory can ever be of consequence enough to society, to admit the least violation of the laws of justice or humanity."[18] Rush, like most other opponents of racial slavery, took a moralistic stance and criticized the institution as an abuse of fellow human beings, rather than the use of inferior creatures, or inferior beings, as most racial slavery supporters, Jefferson included, seemed to argue. Henry Laurens, a Charleston merchant and landowner, manumitted his slaves on the eve of the revolution, and lamented the existence of slavery as a leftover from British influence. In a letter to a friend he wrote, "What meanness! what complicated wickedness appears in this scene! O England, how changed! how fallen!"[19] Unlike Jefferson, sacrificed a l great deal to contribute to the public good as he interpreted it: the moral health of the nation. Richard Wells, a Quaker merchant from Philadelphia, who had written a pamphlet in 1774 which had taken the same assumption for granted as Laurens later would in his letter. Wells asked: "Is there a such thing with Englishmen...as partial liberty?" His belief in the humanity of the Africans was obvious when he ordered: "Let him who claims an exemption from the control Parliamentary power, shew to the world, by what right, human or divine, he keeps in cruel slavery his fellow man." He characterized the institution of slavery as "inhuman."[20] However even the arguments of an anti-slavery, staunchly republican figure like Benjamin Rush were easy to transform into arguments to exclude blacks from partipation in the new society.

In Rush's "Of the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic," written as late as 1786, the most education in a republican society should be designed to homogenize the masses, which would "fit them more easily for uniform and peaceable government." This was the manner in which persons could be transformed into "republican machines."[21] Rush's language here was indicative the existence of the logic that a uniformity in the republican masses was desirable as a goal, and making the people "homogenous" could be accomplished racially as well as ideologically. This argument makes sense in light of the fact that only six years later, he published "Observation intended to favour a supposition that the black Color (as it is called) of the Negroes is derived from the Leprosy." Although he never viewed the Negro race as an inferior race, but just a diseased one, he did advocate separation of the races for their own respective goods.[22] Rush's explanation for the slaves' apparent lack of virtue was explainable by the fact that virtuous living was impossible under conditions of bondage and enforced depravity. Emancipation would require the conversion of blacks into "republican machines" before they were admitted into American society.[23] But those who were already slaves were ineligible for emancipation, as they were already set in their ways, and only young blacks could be educated into the greater society. However, it would have been extremely easy for proponents of maintaining racial slavery to have regarded Rush's plan as an admission of all slaves' ineligibility for membership in a republican society at the time.

Men like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Rush exemplified the elite political reasoning of the Revolutionary era, as well as the two main types of arguments against allowing slavery's continued existence. However, their criticisms of slavery went unheeded for the most part, as it seemed the need for slave labor outweighed the moral cost of holding on to such a reprehensible institution. According to Gordon S. Wood, "...if any Americans were to retain it, as southern Americans eventually did, they would have to explain and justify it in new racial and anthropological ways that the former monarchical society had never needed."[24] Revolutionaries overthrew the old English social hierarchy of natural privilege and superiority, and a new social order established in the United States. The social relationship between slave and master had to be reworked, as there was no longer any unquestioned social hierarchy in which one was born. The new hierarchy was determined by merit and virtue, and white America had to assert itself as superior for reasons completely different from the way hierarchies were explained in England. The founders racialized the Africans and increasingly associated them with all that was unfit for republican society, as much as was necessary to justify the mistreatment of fellow human beings, in order to maintain humane status in their own eyes. The master could not allow himself to be degraded to the level of a savage, so he placed these traits onto the enslaved, so as to maintain some semblance of moral rectitude. What this meant for blacks was that by 1790, citizenship in America was narrowly defined as one committed to "`pure principles of Republicanism'" and the development of a society of "good and `useful' men, a homogeneous society." It was significant that the Naturalization Law of 1790 required that such members of society be white.[25] Republican society had effectively dehumanized the slaves as the embodiments of what it was afraid to admit it about itself - that republicans, in dehumanizing these people as slaves, had proven to themselves that they, in reality, possessed as little virtue as they claimed their African slaves did. To admit this, however, would have been disastrous. Republican Americans needed justifications for their actions, and they constructed them.

Morgan, Edmund S., "Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox," in Colonial America: Essays in politics and Social Development . (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973), 573-596

Runes, Dagobert D., ed. The Selected Writing of Benjamin Rush . (New York: Philosophical Library, 1947)

Takaki, Ronald. Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th Century America . (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990)

Wood, Gordon S. The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 . (W. W. Norton & Company: New York, 1969)

Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution . (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992)

[1]Colonies to Nation, p. 298

[2]Creation of the American Republic, p. 53,

[3]Creation of the American Republic, p. 47

[4]"A Discourse for the Love of Our Country," by Samuel Williams, in Colonial America, p. 379

[5]Ibid, p. 379

[6]Iron Cages, p. 7

[7]Creation of the American Republic, p. 71

[8]Creation of the American Republic, p. 108

[9]Creation of the American Republic, p. 123

[10]Colonial America, p. 574

[11]Colonial America, p. 587-589

[12]Colonial America, p. 590-595

[13]"Notes on the State of Virginia," by Thomas Jefferson, Colonies to Nation, p. 398

[14]Iron Cages, p. 43

[15]Winthrop Jordan, quoted in Iron Cages, p. 12

[16]"A Discourse for the Love of Our Country," by Samuel Williams, in Colonial America, p. 382

[17]Iron Cages, p. 14

[18]The Selected Writings of Benjamin Rush, p. 5

[19]Colonial America, p. 396

[20]Colonial America, p. 395

[21]Colonial America, pp. 400, 402

[22]Iron Cages, p. 30

[23]Ibid, p. 29

[24]The Radicalism of the American Revolution, p. 186

[25]Iron Cages p. 15