Between Slavery and Freedom (9 page)

Emancipation was also a long time coming in Rhode Island, the smallest state in the Union. Despite pressure from the slaves themselves, from the small but vocal free community of color, which included proud veterans of the Rhode Island Black Regiment, and from white sympathizers, slavery had powerful supporters. In 1784, though, the state legislature finally passed an abolition bill. Like the Pennsylvania law, the Rhode Island law only gradually phased out slavery. Children born to enslaved women after March 1, 1784 would eventually be free—females at eighteen and males at twenty-one. Until then they had to serve whoever owned their mothers. Once a black Rhode Islander ceased to be a slave, that did not mean he or she could settle down and live as white people did. Rhode Island had long since adopted the same tactic as Massachusetts when it came to dealing with anyone who seemed likely to become a public charge. The authorities “warned out” or expelled that individual, and if necessary their entire family. Liberated into a harsh world with few job opportunities and even fewer resources, African
Americans often gravitated to the lower rungs of society, and that made them subject to the full weight of the law. They could be driven out of the township in which they lived, or forced over the state line into an equally unfriendly setting in Massachusetts or Connecticut.

Despite the large number of slaves in Connecticut, the antislavery forces eventually prevailed there. Children born to enslaved women after March 1, 1784—the same date as in Rhode Island—would become free when they reached adulthood. Connecticut's abolition law did nothing for those born before its passage. Theoretically, they would remain enslaved for the rest of their lives. As had happened in other states, though, some slaveholders released their slaves, while hundreds of bondspeople simply absconded. Judging by newspaper advertisements for runaways, Connecticut's slaves were both resourceful and determined. If the law would not grant them their freedom, they would take it.

Across the North in the 1770s and 1780s black people existed in freedom, in slavery, and in an uncertain position midway between slavery and freedom, with an end to their bondage in sight but with precious little freedom in their immediate future. Only Vermont had abolished slavery outright. Most Northern states had adopted gradual abolition, and although lawmakers in New Jersey and New York had debated abolition on a number of occasions, they had yet to take decisive action. And in none of the Northern states did the courts or the legislatures declare free black people citizens. Although they might not be slaves, they were somehow less than equal to whites in the eyes of the law and in the minds of their white neighbors. In 1788, for example, the Massachusetts General Court barred from the state all “Rogues, vagabonds, common beggars, and other idle, disorderly, and lewd Persons.”
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Not surprisingly, whites thought that many free blacks belonged to one of those unwelcome and unwanted groups. Expulsion of the black poor, the binding out of their children, and the routine incarceration of black law-breakers for longer terms than those that white lawbreakers received for the same offense—these practices were commonplace throughout the North. The states retained their old colonial-era restrictions and added new ones whenever lawmakers concluded that the free black population was getting too troublesome.

In the immediate post-Revolutionary period the South was anything but united on the issue of black freedom. As they had done in the colonial era, slave owners in South Carolina and Georgia generally emancipated those individuals to whom they had a personal connection, including their concubines, their children, their biracial half-siblings, and their favored house slaves. The result was a small community of light-skinned people whose ties
to their emancipators often endured into freedom. By contrast, in the Upper South emancipations were more general, and they took place for reasons of ideological or religious commitment, or as a result of economic considerations. And of course the slaves themselves pushed hard. To imply that they sat back and waited for whites to liberate them is to ignore a vital part of the picture.

The enslaved seized their freedom through flight. They also sued, claiming that they were the descendants of white women. After a couple of well-publicized court victories in the 1780s, hundreds of slaves all over Maryland suddenly “discovered” that they had white female ancestors. When light-skinned slaves hinted that they had befriended a lawyer who would see justice done, some masters actually bargained with those slaves: if there was no more talk about white grandmothers and great-grandmothers and if they served quietly for a few more years they would get their freedom. It was not a game for the faint-of-heart. The power obviously lay with the master, but there was just a chance that he might want to avoid an expensive court case.

With or without the threat of lawsuits, other slaves gained their freedom. The Upper South was wavering. Tobacco prices tumbled in the 1780s as planters discovered that they had lost their once-reliable overseas customers. Instead of tobacco, they turned to growing wheat and raising hogs, only to find that they did not need as big a labor force. They could not sell their excess slaves because the market was glutted and no one was buying, so in some instances they let those slaves earn the price of their freedom. It also became simpler and cheaper to liberate one's slaves. In 1782, Virginia rewrote its law to allow owners to free almost anyone under the age of forty-five. Delaware and Maryland also eased the restrictions on freedom. Owners could essentially do what they liked with their “property.” Some called in their lawyers and instructed them to draw up formal deeds of emancipation. Others simply told their slaves they did not want or need them any longer. The free population received an additional boost as a result of African-American enlistment during the war. Black men who had served in their masters' stead pressed hard to make sure that their service did indeed translate into freedom. The region was also still feeling the reverberations from the Great Awakening. Some whites could not square slave ownership with their religious principles. For other owners the motivation was not so much evangelical religion as devotion to the libertarian principles of the Revolution.

In sharp contrast to the Upper South, the Lower South was largely untouched by religious or philosophical impulses to end slavery. The political leaders of South Carolina and Georgia had made their views abundantly
clear when they had refused to liberate their slaves to fight the British. Once the war was over, they were determined to maintain their control over their remaining slaves. The legislatures of the two states made a few minor concessions to owners who wanted to emancipate one or two favored slaves, but they soon clamped down. Although the economy was no better in the Lower South in the 1780s than it was in the Upper South, slave owners remained firmly committed to the notion that slavery was the natural condition of black people. They also reflected on the fact that whites were in the minority across the region. If they freed their slaves, they feared that black people would take over. They might avenge their sufferings or they might intermarry with whites. Both prospects filled white Georgians and South Carolinians with dread. They did as they had always done. They liberated enslaved people to whom they had ties of blood and affection and did their best to keep the rest in bondage. The free black population did grow in the immediate postwar years as people maneuvered their way out of slavery, formed stable family units and had children who were born free. However, in comparison to the Upper South, where thousands of slaves gained their liberty every year during the 1780s, the free population of the Lower South grew at a very slow rate

At the national level, liberty for black people proved such a sensitive issue that white politicians backed away from dealing with it. Thomas Jefferson's first draft of the Declaration of Independence had included a stinging denunciation of King George III for, among other evidence of his wickedness, making war on the peoples of Africa, enslaving them, and dumping them in the American colonies. Many of Jefferson's fellow delegates to the Continental Congress found his words unsettling. They reasoned, not surprisingly, that if they accepted his draft and did ultimately prevail against the armies of Great Britain, they had committed themselves to doing away with slavery. The offending passage disappeared. However, even in its modified form, the Declaration's resounding phrases about “all men” being created equal and being entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness heartened black people who heard them or read them. On July 8, 1776, when the High Sheriff of Philadelphia read the Declaration to the populace for the first time, a nine-year-old black child stood in the crowd in the State House Yard and listened intently. The promises enshrined in the document that the Continental Congress had approved four days earlier resonated with James Forten and would continue to do so. As soon as he was old enough, he signed up aboard a patriot privateer. He was captured by the British, rejected a tempting offer to switch sides, and endured months of captivity on a prison-ship. He believed wholeheartedly that the new nation was worth risking
his life for. Thomas Jefferson and his brethren had spoken so eloquently about freedom. They could hardly continue to hold their fellow Americans in slavery. Forten himself was freeborn, although he sympathized with the enslaved and wanted to see their bondage ended. Equally important to him was the “pursuit of happiness.” He concluded that meant full citizenship for everyone once slavery had been banished from American soil. As the years passed and Forten grew to manhood, he discovered that America was only partially fulfilling its commitment to liberty and justice for all.

The Articles of Confederation, the framework of government the delegates to the Continental Congress formally adopted in 1781, said nothing about slavery, emancipation, or rights for black people. Those were matters for the individual states to decide upon. There was one piece of legislation passed during the period of Confederation, however, that had far-reaching implications for the nation as a whole and most especially for black Americans. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 described in detail what was to happen to the land between the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and the Great Lakes, the old Illinois Country. The United States had gained the territory from Britain at the end of the war. Lawmakers proposed to divide the vast area into five territories, each of which could apply for statehood. None of those states could permit slavery to exist within their borders. Few of the congressmen who approved the Ordinance were ardent abolitionists. Their goal was to keep the Old Northwest for white family farmers by barring entry to planters from the South with huge gangs of slaves. The fate of the slaves who were already living in the Old Northwest, some of them from the days when the French had controlled the region, remained uncertain. The governments of the new states—states that did not even exist yet—would ultimately have to address that thorny question, along with the issue of what rights, if any, free black people would have.

When the Founding Fathers gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to revise the Articles of Confederation, and ended by crafting an entirely new document, they again skirted around the matter of slavery. They discovered how volatile it could be when they tackled the apportioning of political representation. While each state would have two senators, its number of representatives would depend on the size of its population. Determining who could vote was left up to each state, but determining who should be counted was another matter. The Three-Fifths Compromise resolved the impasse by proposing that, in reckoning population, five slaves would be equal to three nonslaves. So much for the slaves, but when it came to black people who were not enslaved, the Founding Fathers said nothing, beyond implying that the census-takers would enumerate them with all other free people.

As the white Founding Fathers put the finishing touches to the U.S. Constitution and prepared to depart Philadelphia, a group of free black Founding Fathers set to work. They were a diverse group—Richard Allen, a self-purchased ex-slave from Delaware; Absalom Jones, another former slave who had paid for his freedom and become a moderately successful craftsman; William Gray, an independent tradesman; and some two dozen other men, all of them free and all of them determined to use their freedom well. Their immediate goal was to create an organization that would secure their own and their families' futures. They knew that if they fell upon hard times they could not expect help from the white community, so they undertook to pay money into a common fund on which they could draw in time of need. Their mutual benefit society was not the only one in existence. Free blacks in Newport, Rhode Island had already formed the Newport African Union, and there were probably similar societies in other cities and towns. However, the Free African Society was undoubtedly the largest and most ambitious of any of the groups. In part, that was because of the sheer size of Philadelphia's free community of color, which numbered around 1,800 people in 1787, more than any other city in the former British colonies. The message that Jones, Allen, Gray and the other officers of the new Free African Society wanted to send to whites and blacks, though, was about more than strength in numbers. They pledged themselves to live lives that were beyond reproach, and they called upon other free people of color to subscribe to the same moral values of thrift and piety, temperance, charity, neighborliness, faithfulness, and respect for authority because adhering to those values would benefit them all, and because it would prove to doubting whites that all black people, in Philadelphia and throughout the nation, deserved freedom and equal treatment.

Allen, Jones, Gray and their friends answered loudly and clearly one fundamental question, namely whether they believed that black people had a future in America, or at least anywhere in the vicinity of white people. The issue had already surfaced in the petitions that the slaves in Massachusetts had sent to the General Court and to the British governor in the months preceding the Revolution. Some of the petitioners had declared that if they got their freedom they would leave for Africa, while others had spoken of moving to the western fringes of Massachusetts. Perhaps these two groups of black men had reasoned that whites would be more apt to liberate them if they promised to go away, or perhaps they thought they would be truly free only when they could live as
they
chose, not as whites chose for them.