A Disease in the Public Mind (6 page)

In a gruesome aftermath, the South Carolinians executed most of the Kongo army's survivors. A few were sold to buyers in the West Indies. The heads of many rebels were mounted on stakes along roads around Charleston as warnings to other slaves who might be considering a revolt. The shaken South Carolinians passed a Negro Act, which required a ratio of at least one white to every ten blacks on a plantation—a dictum soon ignored.

The law also prohibited blacks from growing their own food, learning to read, or earning money in their spare time. Another clause made it difficult to free a slave. The goal was to create a system with a minimum of freedom. Only in this claustrophobic world would South Carolinians feel safe.

Over the next two years, slave uprisings elsewhere in South Carolina and Georgia did little to enlarge this sense of theoretic security. Even more sensational was a revolt in New York City in 1741. About 20 percent of the city's population were slaves, stirring uneasiness among the whites. The conspiracy was led by a slave who was urged on by a Catholic priest, a refugee from persecution in Protestant-controlled England.

The plan was similar to the 1712 uprising—to start a series of fires that would devastate the city, then kill the whites as they struggled to extinguish them. But the scale and ambitions of these conspirators were larger. Two Spanish-speaking slaves assured the rebels they would receive help from Spain and France, who were at war with England.

The conspirators met at a tavern frequented by blacks and poor whites; it was run by a man in sympathy with the rebels. In a few weeks, no less than thirteen fires erupted. The most unnerving blaze destroyed the royal governor's house and much of Fort George, the city's principal defense against an attack from the sea.

A woman who lived at the tavern offered to identify the conspirators to escape punishment for a recent arrest for theft. In a series of trials, seventeen blacks were convicted and hanged, thirteen blacks were burned at the stake, and four whites, including the suspected priest, were hanged. Another seventy suspected blacks were deported to the West Indies. The story, reported in newspapers from Boston to Savannah, sent new shock waves of fear and anxiety about black uprisings up and down the thousand-mile Atlantic coastline.
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As the thirteen North American colonies became more prosperous and sophisticated, fears of political oppression began to absorb the public mind. In the early 1760s, rebellious James Otis of Massachusetts disputed the British Parliament's claim to the right to tax the Americans. “Taxation without
representation is tyranny,” he declared, words that the Catholic Irish, ruled as a conquered nation by the Protestant English, had been using in vain for several decades. Men in other colonies took the same stance, as the British, with an arrogance that seemed to come naturally to them, inflicted more taxes.

Benjamin Rush, an outspoken Philadelphia doctor, condemned the “servitude” Parliament inflicted on Americans. Even a moderate Virginia planter like George Washington began to see a transatlantic hand in his pocket whenever Parliament was in the mood. It was imperative for the Americans to resist this incipient tyranny, Washington said, before they were reduced to “the most abject state of slavery that ever was designed for mankind.”
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This political slavery was defined by a New Englander as “being wholly under the power and control of another as to our actions and properties.” The words were obviously inspired by African slavery as practiced in both the North and South. James Otis, in one of his assaults on the British, made the comparison explicit. Was it right, he asked, to enslave a man because he was black? “Will short curled hair like wool . . . help the argument? Can any logical inference in favor of slavery be drawn from a flat nose, a long or short face?” Slavery made no more sense, Otis argued, than the British claim that Parliament had power over colonists living three thousand miles away who, in the course of the previous 150 years, had tamed a wilderness and created free societies.
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Parliament, encouraged by the headstrong young king, George III, ignored these explosive words. The New Englanders were soon led by Boston's Samuel Adams, who would later confess that independence had been the “first wish of [his] heart” for a long time. They united the colonies with resentful letters and broadsides circulated by Committees of Correspondence. Newspapers became “political engines” that preached rebellious ideas in fiery prose. Next, boycotts of British products shook the merchant class of the Mother Country and demonstrated a growing American unity of purpose.

In December 1773, Sam Adams's followers dumped thousands of pounds of British East India Company tea, worth a half million modern dollars, into Boston Harbor to protest a three-pence-per-pound royal tax. The British
responded by sending four regiments to close the port of Boston, instantly alienating the rest of the colonies. Soon a “continental” congress met in Philadelphia, with delegates from every colony except Georgia.

Britain ignored the congress's respectful pleas to King George, asking him to resolve the crisis. In Massachusetts an embryo army of “minute men,” sworn to fight on sixty seconds notice, began drilling in the countryside outside Boston. When the second Continental Congress met in the spring of 1775, George Washington, a delegate from Virginia, wore the military uniform of a colonel of his colony's militia. It was a bold prediction that war was imminent.

On April 19, 1775, gunfire between redcoats and Americans in Lexington, Massachusetts, triggered a running battle that left over a hundred men dead on both sides. To unite the colonies, Sam Adams and his second cousin John, who had displayed considerable ability as a legislative leader, proposed George Washington as commander in chief of an American army.

In the South, some people were uneasily aware that they had “Domestick enemies” to worry about, as well as the British army. Would the British use the slaves' smoldering anger and hunger for freedom to undo the rebellious whites? South Carolina was riddled by fear of this all too real possibility as the Revolution gathered momentum. In Virginia, a farseeing if jittery young rebel, James Madison, started worrying about it as early as 1774.
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Little more than a year later, the hotheaded royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, called on the colony's slaves to desert their masters and rally to his standard with a promise of freedom. An alarmed George Washington wrote from Massachusetts that if Dunmore “is not crushed before Spring, he will become the most dangerous man in America. His strength will increase like a snowball rolling downhill.”

Only about 300 of Virginia's 200,000 slaves responded to Dunmore, who formed them into a “Loyal Ethiopian Regiment.” The governor's experiment came to an end at the December 9, 1775, Battle of Great Bridge. White Virginians and a sprinkling of free blacks routed Dunmore's recruits and a company of British regulars. Parliament hastily disowned the governor's scheme, which had turned numerous loyal slave-owners into rebels.
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Six months later, John Adams, whose speeches in the divided Continental Congress had made some listeners call him “the Atlas of Independence,” exulted when the delegates voted to declare America independent. Adams asked a thirty-three-year-old Virginia delegate, Thomas Jefferson, to prepare a written declaration explaining America's decision to become a new country. Few people realized that a major critic of slavery was stepping onto the world's stage.

CHAPTER 2

Slavery's Great Foe—and Unintended Friend

In his early days as a lawyer, Thomas Jefferson revealed an almost instinctive dislike of slavery. At the age of twenty-one, he had inherited 5,000 fertile acres and 52 slaves, making him a member of Virginia's ruling class. But slavery offended his sense of justice in a deep and intensely personal way. In one of his first law cases, Jefferson had maintained that a mulatto grandson of a white woman and a black slave should be considered a free man. His argument, which the astonished judge dismissed out of hand, declared slavery a violation of every person's natural right to freedom.
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Jefferson had been reluctant to accept the task of writing a declaration of independence. Back in Virginia, delegates were conferring on a constitution for the state. Jefferson wanted to be there to argue for the gradual abolition of slavery. He had even drafted his own version of a constitution, with an explicit provision for such a measure. At the same time, he did not underestimate the importance of the document he was asked to create. The rhythms of the Declaration's opening paragraph throb with a deeper timbre than anything else Jefferson ever wrote:

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them to another, and to assume among the powers of the earth a separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's god entitle them, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the reasons that impel them to this separation.

     
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Thomas Jefferson did not know—nor did anyone else who read these words in or out of the Continental Congress—that he had delivered a deathblow to American slavery. It would take another eight and a half decades to make this an historical fact. In the rest of the first draft of the Declaration, he made his detestation of slavery visible to every member of the Continental Congress.

After the opening paragraphs of fundamental principles, Jefferson began a ferocious indictment of King George III for his “repeated injuries and usurpations” aimed at establishing “absolute tyranny over these states.” Like the toll of a funereal bell, the accusations poured out:

He has refused his assent to laws the most wholesome and necessary for the public good . . .

     
He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices and the amount and payment of their salaries . . .

     
He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation & tyranny already begun.

Then came words that virtually exploded on the page:

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating the most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people,
who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither, this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain, determined to keep open the market where MEN could be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting these very people to rise in arms among us and to purchase that liberty of which he has denied them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

To this detonation of detestation, Jefferson added a searing indictment of the British people for doing nothing to prevent or soften King George's abuses. Then came sonorous closing paragraphs, declaring “these united colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is and ought to be totally dissolved.”
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Jefferson submitted this draft of the declaration to the Continental Congress. To his dismay, the delegates felt free to eliminate major passages. One of the first to go was the denunciation of slavery. In his old age, Jefferson claimed that delegates from South Carolina and Georgia objected to it, and some northern states that had participated in the slave trade “felt a little tender” on the subject. But tender feelings were hardly a main point. Congress was aware that Americans north and south had been involved with slavery for over a century, and had profited immensely from it.
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There was a well-grounded fear that the British would be quick to point this out if Jefferson's denunciation were included in the final version. Already, the King's ministers had hired the most famous writer of the era, Samuel Johnson, to
compose an anti-American pamphlet in which he sneered: “How is it we hear the greatest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”
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In Massachusetts, General George Washington was startled by how many blacks were in the impromptu army that was besieging the British regiments in Boston. Most of the blacks were free men like Salem Poor of Framingham, who had distinguished himself by his bravery and marksmanship at the battle of Bunker Hill in June 1775. Poor had volunteered to fight for his country when he heard about the bloodshed at Lexington.

In the Continental Congress, Edward Rutledge of South Carolina demanded a vote to bar blacks from the army. In a debate that foreshadowed future disagreements between North and South, Congress rejected the proposal. At first, Washington agreed with Rutledge. He issued an order forbidding the enlistment of “any stroller, Negro or vagabond.”