Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (89 page)

The white evangelical Protestant groups of Baptists and later Methodists recruited blacks and mingled with them in their congregations. Some black evangelicals even preached to white congregations. Indeed, in the 1790s white residents of the Eastern Shore in Virginia pooled enough money to purchase the freedom of their black preacher. Not only were the Baptists and Methodists mixing whites and blacks, but these rapidly growing evangelical denominations were publicly voicing their opposition to slavery. When even Southerners like Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Henry Laurens, and St. George Tucker publicly deplored the injustice of slavery, from “that moment,” declared the New York physician and abolitionist E. H. Smith in 1798, “the slow, but certain, death-wound was inflicted upon it.”
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Other evidence from the Upper South seemed to reinforce the point. The increased hiring out of slaves convinced many in the Upper South that slavery would soon by replaced by wage labor. What could be a more conspicuous endorsement of the anti-slavery cause than having the College of William and Mary in 1791 confer an honorary degree on the celebrated British abolitionist Granville Sharp? That there were more anti-slave societies created in the South than in the North was bound to make people feel that the South was moving in the same direction of
gradual emancipation as the North, especially when these societies were publicly denouncing slavery as “not only an odious degradation, but an outrageous violation of one of the most essential rights of human nature.”
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In Virginia and Maryland some of these anti-slave societies brought “freedom suits” in the state courts that led to some piecemeal emancipation. If the slaves could demonstrate that they had a maternal white or Indian ancestor, they could be freed, and hearsay evidence was often enough to convince the courts. “Whole families,” recalled one sympathetic observer, “were often liberated by a single verdict, the fate of one relative deciding the fate of many.” By 1796 nearly thirty freedom suits were pending in Virginia courts.
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Other efforts in the Upper South to free slaves contributed to the sense that slavery was doomed everywhere in America. In 1782 Virginia allowed for the private manumission of slaves, and Delaware and Maryland soon followed with similar laws. Some slaves took advantage of these new liberal laws and worked to buy their own freedom. Of the slaves freed in Norfolk, Virginia, between 1791 and 1820, more than a third purchased themselves or were purchased by others, usually by their families. By 1790 the free black population in the Upper South had increased to over thirty thousand; by 1810 the free blacks in Virginia and Maryland numbered over ninety-four thousand. Many thought that the abolition of slavery itself was just a matter of time.

Some set forth what became the diffusionist position—that spreading slavery throughout the Western territories would make elimination of the institution easier. In 1798 Virginia congressman John Nicholas contended that opening up the Western Country to slavery would be a service to the entire Union. It would, he said, “spread the blacks over a large space, so that in time it might be safe to carry into effect the plan which certain philanthropists have so much at heart, and to which he had no objection, if it could be effected, viz., the emancipation of this class of men.” Since the Constitution’s restriction on acting against the slave trade until 1808 applied only to slaves brought into the states, Congress in 1798 prohibited the importation of slaves from abroad into the Mississippi Territory but purposefully allowed the introduction of slaves into the Western territories from elsewhere in the United States. A similar policy was followed in the newly organized Orleans Territory in 1804 when Congress forbade the importation of foreign slaves but allowed owners of slaves settling in the territory from other parts of the United States to bring their slaves with
them. The demand for slaves was so great in the Southwest that these restrictions were short-lived, and soon slaves were flowing into the Southwest not only from other parts of America but directly from Africa as well. But the diffusionist arguments voiced by slaveholders in the old states of the Upper South who had more slaves than they knew what to do with—self-serving as their arguments may have been—did suggest that many Southerners wanted to do away with slavery.
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Everywhere, even in South Carolina, slaveholders began to feel defensive about slavery and began to sense a public pressure against the institution that they had never felt before. Whites in Charleston expressed squeamishness about the evils of slavery, especially the public trading and punishment of slaves. Masters began toning down their fierce advertisements for runaway slaves and felt a need to justify their attempts to recover their slaves that they never had earlier. In the 1780s some of the Carolinian masters expressed a growing reluctance to break up families and even began manumitting their slaves, freeing more slaves in that decade than had been freed in the previous three decades.
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P
ERHAPS THE MAIN REASON
many were persuaded that slavery was on its way to extinction was the widespread enthusiasm throughout America for ending the despicable slave trade. Everywhere in the New World slavery was dependent on the continued importations of slaves from Africa—
except
for much of the North American continent. But the fact that the Deep South and the rest of the New World needed slave importations to maintain the institution deluded many Americans into believing that slavery in the United States was also dependent on the slave trade and that ending the slave trade would eventually end slavery itself.

Those who held out that hope simply did not appreciate how demographically different North American slavery was from that in South America and the Caribbean. They were blind to the fact that in most areas the slaves were growing nearly as rapidly as whites, nearly doubling in number every twenty to twenty-five years. Living with illusions, white leaders concluded that if the slave trade could be cut off, slavery would wither and die.

All the initial eagerness to end the slave trade, especially among the planters of the Upper South, suggested to Northerners a deeper antagonism to slavery than was in fact the case. Perhaps some of the Virginia planters sincerely believed that ending the slave trade would doom the institution, but many others knew that they had a surplus of slaves. In 1799 Washington had 317 slaves, most of whom were either too young or too old and infirm to work efficiently. Even so, he had more slaves than he needed for farming wheat and foodstuffs, and he did not want to return to planting tobacco. Yet he had no desire to sell “the overplus . . . because I am principled against this kind of traffic in the human species.” Nor did he want to hire them out, because he had “an aversion” to breaking up families. “What then is to be done?” he asked.
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Certainly Washington, like many other Virginia farmers, did not need more slaves and thus could welcome an end to the international slave trade. But not all Chesapeake planters were as scrupulous as Washington about not wanting to sell slaves and break up families, and they made the domestic slave trade in the Chesapeake flourish as never before. By 1810 one in five Chesapeake slaves was being sent westward to Kentucky and Tennessee.

Northerners scarcely understood what was happening. They had little or no appreciation that slavery in the South was a healthy, vigorous, and expansive institution. As far as they were concerned, the Virginia and Maryland planters were enthusiastically supporting an end to the international slave trade as the first major step in eliminating the institution. This assault on the overseas slave trade appeared to align the Chesapeake planters with the anti-slave forces in the North and confused many Northerners about the real intentions of the Upper South.

The Constitution drafted in 1787 gave South Carolina and Georgia twenty years to import more slaves from abroad, but everyone clearly expected that in 1808 Congress would act to end the trade, which in turn would lead to the eradication of slavery itself. Actually all the states, including South Carolina, stopped importing slaves on their own during the 1790 s—actions that reinforced the conviction that slavery’s days were numbered.

Y
ET THE EXPLOSIVE PRO-SLAVERY RESPONSE
by representatives from the Deep South to two petitions from the Pennsylvania Abolition Society to Congress in 1790 to end the slave trade and slavery itself should have indicated that the eradication of slavery was not going to be as predictable as many had thought. “Let me remind men who expect a
general emancipation by law,” warned one outraged South Carolinian congressman, “that this would never be submitted to by the Southern States without civil war!” Despite such angry outbursts, however, confidence in the future remained strong, and James Madison and other congressmen from the Upper South were able to bury the petitions in 1790. Their desire to smother even talk about the problem of slavery rested on their deeply mistaken assumption that the Revolutionary ideals of “Humanity & freedom” were, as Madison put it, “secretly undermining the institution.”
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Raising noise about slavery, said Madison, could only slow down the inevitable march of progress. Besides, as President Washington pointed out, the petitions against slavery in 1790 were ill timed; they threatened to break apart the Union just as it was getting on its feet.

As early as 1786 Washington not only had vowed privately to purchase no more slaves but had expressed his deepest wish that the Virginia legislature might adopt some plan by which slavery could be “abolished by slow, sure, & imperceptible degrees.” In the early 1790s, like others, he seemed to rest his hopes on the ending of the slave trade in 1808, and in early 1794 he actually introduced into the Senate a petition from the New England Quakers urging an end to American participation in the international slave trade. Although the Constitution forbade Congress from preventing the importation of slaves until 1808, Congress decided in 1794 that it had the authority to prohibit American citizens from selling captured Africans to foreign traders and to prevent foreign ships involved in the slave trade from being outfitted in American ports.
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Madison and Washington were not the only leaders who had a naïve faith in the future. Vice-President John Adams thought that when the imports of slaves were cut off, white laborers would become sufficiently numerous that piecemeal private manumissions of the slaves could take place. Oliver Ellsworth, the third chief justice of the Supreme Court and a strict, hard-headed Connecticut Calvinist, agreed. He believed that “as population increases, poor labourers will be so plenty as to render slaves useless. Slavery in time will not be a speck in our country.”
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Besides the Deep South’s impassioned response to the 1790 Quaker petitions to end slavery, other signals suggested that slavery was not dying away. In 1803 South Carolina reopened its slave trade, a minor shock that should have prepared Americans for the big quake—the Missouri crisis of 1819—that lay ahead. Between 1803 and 1807 South Carolina brought in nearly forty thousand slaves, over twice as many in that four-year period as in any similar period in its history.
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With slavery slowly disappearing in the North and yet persisting in the South, the nation was moving in two different directions. By the beginning of the nineteenth century Virginia was still the largest state in the Union, with 885,000 people, nearly equal to the population of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia combined. But its white population was expanding slowly, and tens of thousands of Virginians were pushing out of the Tidewater into the Piedmont and then even farther west and south into Kentucky and Tennessee in search of new land. At the same time, the black population in the Chesapeake was growing faster than the white population and was steadily being moved westward along with over two hundred thousand migrating white farmers. Although nearly one hundred thousand slaves were removed from Maryland and Virginia in the two decades after 1790, the black slave population of the Chesapeake still totaled well over five hundred thousand in 1810.

Each of the Chesapeake states of Maryland and Virginia responded differently to the rapidly growing slave populations. Although both states began manumitting slaves in the aftermath of the Revolution, Maryland freed many more than Virginia. Having no western piedmont to expand into, many of the Maryland planters were faced with either selling or freeing their slaves, and many chose to free them. By 1810 20 percent of Maryland blacks had gained their freedom, accelerating a process that continued up to the eve of the Civil War, when half the black population of the state had become free.

By contrast, only 7 percent of Virginia’s black population was free by 1810, and by the eve of the Civil War the percentage of free blacks never got beyond 10 percent. White planters either moved out of the state with their slaves or sold their excessive slaves to whites in other states or to their fellow Virginians. The result was that an ever larger proportion of white Virginians, especially in the Piedmont, became slaveholders in the decades between 1782 and 1810. Prior to the Revolution the majority of
white Virginians had not owned slaves; by 1810 that had dramatically changed: the majority of white Virginians were now personally involved in the institution of slavery and the patriarchal politics that slavery promoted. With the spread of slavery to deeper levels of its population, Virginia became less and less the revolutionary leader of liberalism that it had been in 1776.
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M
OST OF THE
S
OUTH
became Jeffersonian Republican. As early as the Fourth Congress in 1795–1797, over 80 percent of the Southern congressmen voted in opposition to the Federalist administration. In the presidential election of 1796 the Federalist John Adams received only two Southern electoral votes in comparison to Jefferson’s forty-three.
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