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Declarations of Independence

Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties.¹

Thomas Jefferson, 1784

It is an image that goes to the heart of why African Americans have had to declare their own independence: Philadelphia, June 12, 1776. A rebellion has erupted in the British Empire’s Atlantic Seaboard colonies of North America. Thomas Jefferson, a representative in Virginia’s House of Burgesses (founded in the same year that the first group of Africans was brought to the colony of Jamestown), is now a delegate to the Second Continental Congress—a rogue assembly. Talk of liberty has been simmering in Philadelphia since May of the previous year. The thirty-three-year-old planter is charged by a committee of the assembly with the task of writing what will become the Declaration of Independence. Yet one out of every five people living in the colonies are enslaved black men, women, and children.

Jefferson was among the largest and wealthiest slave owners in the colonies. His life, like that of his fellow slave owners who supported American independence, rested on a basic contradiction: endorsing slavery while demanding liberty. The Virginian would include a line in his draft of the Declaration, later removed, denouncing the slave trade as a “cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people.” But he does not denounce slavery itself.² As he proclaims the “unalienable rights” of all “men” in his document, Jefferson will also see to it that among his hundreds of slaves, only three—one being his own child, through his slave Sally Hemings—are freed during his lifetime. The men and women in his tobacco fields, like Jefferson, are fully aware that their enslavement permits their master’s freedom; they also know that if they will ever gain their liberty, it will have to be through their own efforts.³

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Jefferson’s existence and prosperity depended upon the forced labor of the hundreds of men, women, and children he owned. In a typical year, he owned about two hundred slaves, almost half of whom were under the age of sixteen. In time, however, the master’s words of “equality” and “liberty” would be used by the very people he had purchased to advance their own rights and liberties. As it turns out, both Jefferson (and the colonial elite he represented) and the enslaved men and women on his plantation (and the many more they represented) sought their independence; the former from British tyranny, the latter from the bonds of slavery. However, for Africans and their descendants in the Americas, the struggle for liberation—unlike the struggle for national independence—had begun centuries earlier.

Beginning in the early sixteenth century, the Wolof, Bemba, Fulani, Ndongo, Igbo, Hausa, and Mande, among others, resisted their enslavement by fellow Africans for European trade. These men and women fought their captors in the face of almost constant threats or use of force, including beatings, whipping, rape, branding, and the deprivation of food, water, sleep, and shelter. Slavery had long been a part of many African and Eurasian societies; resistance would come at first point of contact. In West Africa, after capture, rebellions followed along the marches from the continent’s interior to the “factories” herding “cargo” at slaveholding forts and coastal castles such as at El Mina and Cape Coast, where enslaved men, women, and children awaited transport across the Atlantic. The fight often continued aboard merchant ships and upon arrival on the shores of Brazil, Hispaniola, Cuba, New Grenada, and other points of disembarkation in the Americas. Many killed themselves or their loved ones to escape slavery; others went insane in the process. Those who could, ran away, while others destroyed colonial property, took up arms, or formed maroon settlements in swamps or dense forests. Ranging in size from a few dozen people to several thousand, and organized on a military basis, such black-led settlements, monarchies, and even republics were created across the Americas—the Black Seminoles of Florida, the Palenque de San Basilio in Colombia, and the Republic of Palmares in Brazil, among others. Individual and collective efforts to resist, combat, and even overthrow slavery and their colonial drivers, however, resulted in limited success until the nineteenth century.⁴

African Americans who led the fight against slavery in the United States—a fraction of whom entered the electoral arena in the mid-nineteenth century—were descended from the men, women, and children who were forcibly brought to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. While most of the estimated twelve million African slave captives were taken to Brazil and the Caribbean, at least five hundred thousand were taken directly from Africa to the North American British colonies. Chained aboard slave vessels carrying anywhere from one dozen to five hundred people, Africans were initially brought to supplement indigenous slave labor and European indentured servants, eventually replacing both in the development of colonial plantation economies. Africans and their descendants planted tobacco, sugar, rice, indigo, and cotton, mined silver and gold, and worked as domestic servants and craftsmen. They brought, and in many parts of the Americas maintained, their languages, religions, philosophies, technologies, architecture, hairstyles, scars, clothing, music, and other traditions and cultural practices. They were Muslim, Christian, Kirdi (“pagans”), and animists of various backgrounds; they were artisans, peasant farmers, imams, scholars, military leaders, soldiers, royalty, and poor members of African societies whose own imperial battles fueled the Atlantic slave trade. In the process of the demographic rupture, black slave labor in the Americas would help create the economic basis for modern capitalism. By the mid-eighteenth century, it would also create the wealth that permitted—and helped to prompt—the governing class of one group of thirteen colonies on the Eastern Seaboard of North America to rebel against British imperial rule. The successful outcome of that colonial rebellion turned war for national independence not only ensured the ongoing production of wealth, but led to the formation of the hemisphere’s first white-led republic.⁵

For African Americans, the founding of the United States of America in the late eighteenth century would usher in a new phase in their struggle for liberation.⁶ By the time of the American Revolution, one out of every five people living in the colonies was legally enslaved—nearly half a million black men, women, and children. In time, one expression of the collective struggle for black emancipation—which included ongoing and aggressive forms of resistance to slavery—would take place in the electoral arena. There, fugitives and free African Americans alike engaged the two major parties and their proslavery policies through the building of independent politics and third-party movements.

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From almost the beginning, the nation has been dominated by a two-party system. Two early factions, the Federalists and the anti-Federalists, would give rise to the first major political parties to rule the republic: the Federalist Party and the Democratic-Republican Party. The Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton, sought centralized national political and economic control, while their counterparts, led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, favored the concentration of political and economic control at the state level. With few exceptions, both parties, were united in their opposition to popular democracy. However, some among them raised concerns with regard to the kind of partisan power being wielded in the earliest years of the republic. In 1796, upon leaving the presidency, George Washington warned “in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party,” which he said could lead to a “permanent despotism.”⁷ By that time, however, the parties had already taken over (aided by Washington’s own participation as a Federalist supporter), their “despotism” only beginning. Over the next two centuries, black and white independents—those not affiliated with the two major parties—would work with dissident members of the ruling parties to challenge existing laws—beginning with those that were proslavery.⁸

Developed in the latter half of the eighteenth century, when talk of “freedom” and “equality” permeated the air, petitioning became the weapon of choice among those seeking civil redress from representative assemblies with regard to slavery. Long before the struggle for national independence began, enslaved African Americans had exercised their autonomy through acts of defiance and sabotage, fleeing, violence, or purchasing their own freedom. However, the Revolutionary War created new possibilities. The war brought forth a language of liberty that could be used by African Americans to assert their individual and collective freedom.⁹

In January of 1766, fully ten years before white colonists in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York declared their independence from Britain, African Americans could be heard in the streets of Charleston, South Carolina, chanting, “Liberty! Liberty!” Over the previous century, black men and women had taken up arms against their enslavers (as slaves had done on the island of Manhattan in 1712 and in Stono, South Carolina, in 1739). But as whispers and then open dialogue of freedom filled conversations in the shipyards and docks in response to parliamentary acts to “coerce” the increasingly emboldened British outposts, African Americans, along with their white allies, called on North American assemblies to abolish slavery.¹⁰

On April 20, 1773, four African Americans—Peter Bestes, Sambo Freeman, Felix Holbrook, and Chester Joie—submitted a petition to the provincial legislature of Massachusetts “In behalf of our fellow slaves of this province, and by order of their Committee.” They wrote, “We expect great things from men who have made such a noble stand against the designs of their fellow-men to enslave them.”¹¹ Drawing on the ruling white colonial responses to the acts of Parliament, African Americans struck at the contradiction of liberty for some resting on the enslavement of others. That contradiction, however, was not intended for actual slaves to use for their benefit, but only metaphorically among those calling for independence from Britain in response to their being politically “enslaved.” Nevertheless, the language of liberty was quickly appropriated by African Americans. Thus, both Patrick Henry’s rallying cry “Give me liberty or give me death!” in 1775 (while he held over one hundred black men, women, and children enslaved) and Thomas Jefferson’s equally impassioned declaration that “all men are created equal” a year later (when he personally owned over one hundred and fifty slaves) could be (and were) used to advance black liberation.¹²

Peter Bestes and his fellow petitioners were soon joined by other African Americans in petitioning colonial and newly emerging republican assemblies for their freedom. In 1777, a slave known only as “Prince” handed a petition for emancipation to the Massachusetts Assembly on behalf of “A Great Number of Blacks detained in a State of slavery in the Bowels of a free and Christian Country.” Two years later, a group of African American slaves in Connecticut sent a petition to their General Assembly; the following year, a group of seven free African Americans in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, issued a petition invoking their “privilage [sic] of freemen” to assert their right to vote. Efforts such as these to abolish slavery and extend black voting rights continued and formed the earliest instances of independent black political action.¹³

Pressure brought to bear in the revolutionary era through petitioning would help erode slavery and help to extend the rights of African Americans in the North. Slavery would be abolished in one of several ways: through constitutions (as in Vermont in 1777), by judicial decision (as in Massachusetts in 1783), and by gradual abolition acts (as in Pennsylvania in 1780 and Rhode Island and Connecticut in 1784). Gradual abolition was advocated by Federalists in New York (including Alexander Hamilton and John Jay) and adopted by the state legislature in 1799; New Jersey (the last Northern state to abolish slavery in gradual form) followed in 1804. Legislation for gradual abolition provided for those born into slavery after the act to be freed at a certain age (twenty-one in Pennsylvania and twenty-eight in New York), allowing slavemasters to continue to receive much of their slaves’ work as compensation for their loss of “property.”¹⁴

While scores of African Americans petitioned for their freedom during the era, most slaves who took action to liberate themselves tried either to escape from their captors or to buy freedom for themselves or loved ones. Still others decided to take up arms—including those who fought in the American Revolution.¹⁵ Thousands of slaves during the war joined the ranks of either the patriots or the British to obtain their freedom. Which side African Americans chose to fight on depended on where they were and what was, or appeared to be, most advantageous to them. Black men fought with the Continental Army in the earliest battles, at Concord, Lexington, and Bunker Hill. For their part, the British encouraged both male and female runaways to join their ranks. On November 7, 1775, Lord Dunmore, the British governor of the Virginia colony, intending to bolster the ranks of the British military while destabilizing the Southern plantation economy, issued a declaration granting freedom to any slave who joined his “Ethiopian Regiment” (a similar tactic would be used by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War with the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation).¹⁶ Over eight hundred slaves responded to Dunmore’s call. However, thousands of African Americans who served in the British army and navy were used as cannon fodder or returned to slavery following the war. Thousands more slaves escaped during the war, many securing their freedom by fighting on the patriot side, others fleeing to Canada, where they remained in safe harbor following the war. African Americans would thus make the Revolution their own by employing the language of liberty in their appeals for emancipation, fighting for their freedom, or escaping when possible.¹⁷

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Abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic appealed to assemblies and courts of law during the revolutionary era. James Somerset, a slave from Virginia, would successfully sue for his freedom in the British courts in 1772. Somerset had claimed his freedom under British law for having been brought to “free” England proper, where slavery was illegal. Over subsequent decades, the Somerset case was used as a precedent by abolitionists in arguing cases for emancipation. In Commonwealth v. Aves (1836), Justice Lemuel Shaw decided that slaves in transit in Massachusetts became free in accordance with the principal ruling in favor of Somerset.¹⁸

Legal pressures would be accompanied by ongoing petitioning of legislatures to act on behalf of the enslaved population. Petitioning had long been used by individuals seeking redress from Parliament or by patrons regarding private commercial transactions, but doing so as part of a broader political campaign emerged as an organizing tactic in the late eighteenth century. In 1788, fifteen years after Bestes and others presented their antislavery petition to the Massachusetts Legislature, the first major antislavery petition was circulated by abolitionists in England. A representative of the Jamaican sugar lobby expressed disbelief. Unlike the black petitioners in North America, those who were circulating the petition in England neither had been privately injured by slavery nor would directly benefit from its end. On what grounds, then, were they petitioning for abolition? The courts were equally perplexed and did what dozens of elected officials and jurists would do in the centuries that followed: rule that those bringing forth the petition or suit “lacked standing.” Nevertheless, between 1770 and 1792, petitioning was transformed from a tool of private interest to a public weapon in the fight to abolish slavery.

Predominantly white abolitionist societies that helped to gather petitions and filed lawsuits on behalf of slaves would appear in Philadelphia in 1775 and New York in 1785. Alongside these societies, free African Americans in Northern cities, including Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, joined their enslaved compatriots in petitioning campaigns and filing their own lawsuits. By the 1790s, petitions were being regularly launched at public meetings, accompanied by the pooling of money to purchase newspaper advertisements calling for abolition and other lobbying efforts directed at assemblies, individual politicians, or the larger public.¹⁹ Adding to this organizing momentum, black leaders in the North would form an array of mutual aid societies, fraternal orders, churches, and schools, through which African Americans were further mobilized. Results were realized locally, as a combination of prior black military service, individual abolitionist petitions for emancipation, and related actions by abolitionist societies pushed Northern legislatures either to end slavery within their jurisdictions or to provide for its gradual abolition. By 1784, with the exceptions of New York and New Jersey, every Northern state had enacted gradual emancipation laws.²⁰

The institution of slavery remained an integral part of New York’s economy even after the Revolution, as shipbuilding, slave insurance, and slave labor fueled multiple related businesses. Not surprisingly, the government of New York, whose constituency included slaveholding interests with political influence, resisted full emancipation until 1827. New York City had served as the principal entrepôt for the Northern slave trade up until 1775. With over twenty thousand slaves in New York in the final decade of the late eighteenth century generating profits for their masters, elected officials were slow to abolish the institution outright, opting to pass gradual laws instead, first in 1799 and then again in 1817.²¹

Prolonging the nation’s “peculiar institution” were the actions of the federal government at the founding of the republic. Slavery in the “land of liberty” was reconciled—codified and militarily enforced—under the combined political leadership of the Federalists and the anti-Federalists, the latter formally establishing themselves as the Democratic-Republican Party in 1792. As it were, the more popularly supported revolution of 1776, with its anticolonial activities having been more democratically organized (in the form of decentralized protests and armed rebellion), was usurped by a centralized revolution of the elite. While the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, passed by the Congress of Confederation, prohibited slavery in territories north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi, and two years later a provision was made in the U.S. Constitution that permitted the outlawing of the Atlantic slave trade after 1807, two other clauses in the Constitution significantly entrenched slavery: Article Four affirmed the right of slavemasters to recover runaway slaves, and, more damaging still, Article One provided that three-fifths of the slave population was to be counted for purposes of taxation and representation in the House of Representatives.²² The Constitution would thus guarantee slaveholders political power in national affairs far exceeding their actual numbers. It would also constitute the first among a number of major compromises between the two major parties at the expense of African Americans, to be followed by the Missouri Compromise of 1820 (permitting slavery to continue in the new state, even while slavery was banned in almost all remaining federal territories), the Compromise of 1850 (introducing a powerful fugitive slave law), the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 (which opened land previously closed to slavery), and the Compromise of 1877 (ending Reconstruction and national support for freedmen). Other compromises followed in the twentieth century.²³

The advent of the cotton gin and the westward expansion of the nation at the turn of the nineteenth century brought economic incentives, spurring the further development of plantation agriculture. In the North, African Americans continued petitioning and suing for their emancipation. Meanwhile, in the South, slave artisans, boatmen, and dockworkers—conveyers of information between black populations across the Mason-Dixon line—inspired antislavery action with news of the massive slave uprising on the French island colony of Saint-Domingue.²⁴

In 1791, within a few days’ journey from the port of New Orleans, tens of thousands of free and enslaved black men and women had taken up arms. Not only would the black West Indians of Saint-Domingue overthrow slavery in the French colony, but by 1804 they would establish the first free republic in the world. The black republic of Haiti would serve as particular inspiration for (and focus for the fear of) black liberation across the Americas.²⁵ The black republic, whose constitution abolished slavery, was in the unique position to call on the leaders of other newly emerging nations to link their struggles for national independence with the abolition of slavery. In 1815, in return for military assistance, Simón Bolívar—the George Washington of South America—promised Haiti’s republican president Alexandre Pétion that he would abolish slavery should his own independence struggle against Spain succeed. Like Dunmore before him and Lincoln after him, Bolívar would also offer emancipation to slaves who joined his army; thousands eventually served, many of whom formed some of the earliest free black communities in South America.²⁶

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As petitioning efforts in the United States continued in the early nineteenth century, so would slave rebellions, although on far smaller scales than in Haiti, where the demographics were significantly different (over 90 percent of the island’s population was black; by contrast, the black population in the U.S. never reached more than 20 percent). The use of violence by slaves to gain freedom was, besides suicide itself, the most extreme measure they could take; most often, it was suicidal in itself, since proslavery forces were highly organized and armed, ever vigilant for insurrection. African Americans leading armed rebellions would use the same language of freedom in justifying their actions as did those who petitioned for emancipation.

Late in 1800, a Virginian slave artisan named Gabriel Prosser began to amass a slave army. Prosser, a blacksmith, had fashioned weapons from iron tools and scrap metal while he planned a rebellion to seize control of Richmond. On the eve of the attack, however, those set to strike were stalled by a torrential downpour, which inundated the area and washed out key roads and bridges. Later that night Prosser was betrayed and then captured. The slogan Prosser had fashioned for the uprising, “Death or Liberty,” was to be carried by an estimated two thousand slaves recruited from the area. The slogan linked the struggle for black emancipation to the fight for national independence. As one of Prosser’s lieutenants declared at the sentencing trial: “I have nothing more to say in my defense than what General Washington would have had to offer had he been taken and put to trial. I have ventured my life . . . to obtain the liberty of my countrymen, and I am a willing sacrifice in their cause.”²⁷

Prosser’s conspiracy, combined with the example of free black Haiti, prompted fear among planters not only in Virginia but across the South. Surveillance of the Southern black population was intensified, and some free African Americans were even deported.²⁸ Within a decade, the “colonization” of free African Americans to Africa was being considered by both proponents of slavery and those against the institution, both groups believing that the free black population would ultimately not be able to assimilate into the dominant white society. The American Colonization Society (ACS), founded in 1816, numbered among its members white philanthropists, politicians, and businessmen including Henry Clay, John Randolph, Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, and Justice Bushrod Washington (a relative of George Washington). The organization would dedicate itself to promoting the manumission of slaves and the settlement of free African Americans in the colony of Liberia. African Americans from Richmond, where Prosser’s conspiracy continued to loom large, however, responded to the formation and colonization goal of the ACS by declaring: “[We] prefer being colonized in the most remote corner of the land of our nativity, to being exiled to a foreign country.”²⁹

Within weeks of the formation of the ACS, three thousand black men and women, including prominent community leaders such as James Forten (a Revolutionary War veteran who had vigorously opposed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793) and Bishop Richard Allen (founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church), convened at Bethel Church in Philadelphia. While scattered abolitionist activities had been taking place among African Americans since the late eighteenth century, black conventions starting in Philadelphia and Richmond in 1817 would form the precursor to a long series of annual and semiannual meetings beginning in the 1830s. The “Negro Conventions,” meeting statewide and nationally, continued through the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction. They were, along with the black churches, the first set of nationally established black organizations of the nineteenth century in which the pursuit of independent politics was discussed and planned.³⁰

As the nation’s domain continued to expand, driving indigenous populations to the edges of the western and southern frontiers, crises arose between pro- and antislavery political forces over the extension of slavery into new territories acquired or conquered by the republic. A bipartisan compromise in 1820 would temporarily resolve the crisis. Missouri was admitted as a slave state along with the free state of Maine, while slavery was excluded from the Louisiana Purchase land north of 36°30', but left untouched in the South, where state governments continued to enforce the institution. In the face of national political compromises, African American resistance to slavery would take the form of local action.

In 1822, in South Carolina, where an earlier generation of African Americans chanted “Liberty!” on the streets of Charleston in defiance of white authorities, another slave conspiracy was underway. This one was led by a black West Indian carpenter named Denmark Vesey, who had moved to Charleston where he bought his freedom after winning a local lottery. His plan gained the support of the city’s black artisans and ferry boatmen in the state’s coastal parishes. But, like Prosser, Vesey’s plot was uncovered. Sixty-seven men were convicted, thirty-five of whom were hanged, including Vesey himself. The black population faced further reprisals and systems of control (as with the passage of the Negro Seaman’s Act, which stipulated that any visiting free black sailor was to be jailed in Charleston). Both Prosser and Vesey were inspired by the slave revolt in Haiti. Unlike Prosser, however, Vesey was also motivated by deep religious convictions. He was a co-founder of a branch of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the shutting down of which by white officials incited him to action against the oppression all black people faced, free and enslaved alike. Such religious grounding mixed with a sense of collective responsibility, would, in coming years, meet with the trajectory of white religiously inspired reformers, many of whom would also seek to overthrow slavery as part of their moral duty as Christians.³¹

Driven by Christian egalitarianism, an evangelical revivalist movement, the Second Great Awakening, arose during the 1820s, helping to produce a new generation of abolitionists. For a minority of these men and women, slavery was an abominable sin contradicting the core teachings of Jesus Christ. Drawing on both the Bible and the Declaration of Independence (the latter in the process of being elevated to a kind of scripture), these particular evangelists, most of whom were white, concentrated in upstate New York and parts of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New England. To advance their holy crusade, they would use the commercial and communication networks that were connecting the nation into a marketplace of products and ideas—canals, the telegraph, the mass circulation of newspapers, and the beginning of railroads. In time, their outspokenness on the issue of slavery would lead to physical intimidation, verbal abuse, and beatings in order to prevent them from proselytizing and spreading their moral message of the depravity of slavery.

In 1829, the year State Supreme Court Justice Thomas Ruffin famously declared in North Carolina v. Mann that “the power of the master must be absolute to render the submission of the slave perfect,” David Walker, a free African American who sold used clothing, called for a general slave revolt if changes were not made.³² In his Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, an incendiary seventy-six-page pamphlet distributed across the North and South, Walker wrote that it would take a “God of justice and armies” to bring about the destruction of the slave system. While two years earlier Freedom’s Journal, a short-lived black newspaper, advocated the immediate emancipation of all slaves, the Appeal called, in the most militant language yet, for an armed insurrection toward that end.³³ More importantly still, Walker was making an appeal to unite free, fugitive, and enslaved African Americans into a joint movement. It was the opening shot by a new generation of black leaders who, within a decade, would enter the political arena via independent politics in the battle to end slavery.

Walker used to great effect the nation’s commercial networks, as well as those that slaves and free blacks had been developing since the Revolutionary War, to disseminate the pamphlet into the Deep South. Black seamen from Boston took copies sewn into the insides of their coats on trips to Charleston; from there African Americans passed along copies as far south as Savannah and New Orleans. Southern politicians desperately tried to have the Appeal suppressed, while white vigilantes attacked free African Americans in Wilmington, North Carolina, who had copies of the pamphlet, and four black men were arrested in New Orleans for carrying copies. Fearing the spread of Walker’s views, Southern legislatures enacted laws prohibiting the dissemination of antislavery literature and the teaching of reading or writing to slaves and free black men and women. Southern plantation owners offered a bounty of three thousand dollars to anyone who would kill Walker. Within a year, the black abolitionist was found dead at the doorstep of his home.³⁴

In 1831, as if in response to Walker’s pamphlet, one of the largest slave revolts prior to the Civil War erupted in Southampton County, Virginia, propelling militant abolitionism. Nat Turner, born in the same week of Prosser’s planned conspiracy, was a slave-prophet who for months had been secretly preaching and organizing African Americans throughout southern Virginia. The insurrection was planned for the Fourth of July, 1831, but had to be delayed due to his falling ill. Six weeks later, he led a bloody rebellion involving up to seventy slaves. Fifty-seven white men, women, and children were killed in the attacks. With swift and massive white militia forces brought in, Turner and his armed band were captured or killed.³⁵

Turner himself evaded capture until October 30. In all, Virginia would execute fifty-five African Americans and banish others. In addition, some two hundred black men and women, including dozens who had had nothing to do with the rebellion, were killed by white mobs. Turner was tried in Southampton County Court and sentenced to execution. On November 11, he was not only hanged but subsequently skinned. So fearful were white Virginians of another slave rebellion on par with, or greater than, Turner’s that the state legislature’s house came close to passing an act of gradual abolition. In a razor-thin vote, representatives decided against abolishing slavery, opting instead to implement even more repressive policies against the black population, both free and enslaved.³⁶

While most slave rebellions were contained, they could not be prevented from continuing to erupt in the United States or elsewhere in the hemisphere. Soon, slaves in Jamaica would rebel, on a scale dozens of times larger than the revolt in Virginia. The “Christmas Uprising” of 1831–32, led by Samuel Sharpe, which involved as many as sixty thousand slaves, would drive members of Parliament to emancipate slaves in the British Empire. The Slavery Abolition Act, which became effective in 1834, while it included a debilitating “apprentice” period for newly emancipated slaves, was, in turn, used to galvanize the abolitionist movement in the United States. Abolitionists across the Atlantic invited their American counterparts into their homes, schools, and churches in sympathy with their cause, and over the next generation a dozen black abolitionist leaders took the month-long sea journey to England, helping to generate international support for the movement at home.³⁷

Back in the United States, many of the same transportation and communication networks that helped to spread the abolitionist message reinforced Northern and Southern commercial ties. Railroads, waterways, and roadways linked the two regions as interdependent economic entities resting on the ongoing exploitation of black labor. As James Brewer Stewart notes, “The cotton revolution that swept the Mississippi-Alabama-Georgia frontier stimulated textile manufacturing and shipping in the Northeast. In the Northwest, yet another economic boom took shape as businessmen and farmers in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois developed lucrative relationships with the eastern seaboard, and the populations of Northern cities grew apace, led by a rapidly expanding, wage-earning working class.”³⁸ Among the wage-earning workers in the Northeast, and to a lesser extent in the West (modern Midwest), were free African Americans. In the 1820s, despite being legally free, this group did not have the same legal rights and privileges as their white counterparts.

According to the U.S. Census, by 1830 there were nearly three hundred and twenty thousand free African Americans in the nation compared to over two million slaves. While hundreds of free African Americans voted in local elections in the North during the early to mid-nineteenth century, their rights were increasingly called into question by legislators and then curtailed. The State Department refused to grant passports to free African Americans, issuing certificates instead. The department claimed the issuance of passports was tantamount to recognition of black citizenship, which it was unwilling to provide.³⁹ The mobilization of the free black population, combined with the actions of slaves, however, led to an explosion of antislavery initiatives in the 1830s.

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African Americans began using a range of tactics in the 1830s, including petitioning, pamphleteering, and violence, in a more concentrated and coordinated fashion than the earlier Revolutionary-era wave of abolitionists. Meanwhile, large slaveholding interests in South Carolina threatened secession from the Union. Southern white planters, through their Democratic Party representatives in Congress, demanded that they be allowed either to nullify the federal tariff or to secede from the Union. Beneath these demands, however, lay deep fears of militant black actions and the possibility of the federal government curtailing white planters’ “freedom” to exploit black labor.⁴⁰ The dramatic actions of two African Americans, David Walker and Nat Turner, the former advocating slave rebellion, the latter carrying out such a rebellion, would compel many Northern white reformers to take a visible stance against slavery. Other black abolitionists understood the importance of building biracial alliances in a white-dominated society and supporting the development of individual white leaders who could act on behalf of the antislavery cause. Toward this end, black abolitionists would help to launch the careers of some of the most notable white abolitionists of the era.⁴¹

William Lloyd Garrison, who became the best-known white abolitionist of the nineteenth century, established his Boston-based newspaper, the Liberator, in January of 1831 with the support of the free black community. James Vashon, a black barber, provided Garrison critical advances of funding, while James Forten, the black sailmaker and businessman who had been active in the antiemigration black conventions fifteen years earlier, subsidized the Liberator in its earliest stages. African Americans not only became the financial basis of Garrison’s newspaper but helped in its extensive distribution. In 1831, African Americans comprised 400 of the 450 subscribers to the newspaper. In 1833, though the number of white subscribers had grown, African Americans still made up the bulk of the subscription base, comprising more than 60 percent of the Liberator’s distribution list. In April of 1834, 75 percent of the newspaper’s two thousand subscribers were African American.⁴² African Americans provided Garrison with other critical support. In 1833, when he scheduled a trip to England to generate international support for the abolitionist cause in the United States, collections to fund his lobbying were taken up in the free black community, which quickly produced four hundred dollars. When Garrison ran out of money in England, the black Baptist minister Nathaniel Paul advanced two hundred dollars so that he could complete his task.⁴³

Garrison, like other advocates of moral suasion as the means to end slavery, was shaken by the violence of Nat Turner’s revolt in Virginia, and undertook his own organizing efforts. For Garrison, a newspaper, while important in helping to bring Northern public attention to the plight of slaves, was not enough; a regional organization was required to further the crusade. In January of 1832, Garrison helped to launch the New England Anti-Slavery Society. Within a year, he set out to establish a national body. His efforts culminated in the formation of the American Anti-Slavery Society.⁴⁴ Meeting in Philadelphia in December of 1833, black abolitionists Robert Purvis, James McCrummell, and James G. Barbadoes were among the signers of the society’s “Declaration of Sentiments.” Six African Americans sat on the national body’s board of managers. Garrison and white abolitionist brothers Arthur and Lewis Tappan met with James Forten and other influential black Philadelphians to shape the organization’s mission. The group promised to reach out to “every city, town and village in our land.” They planned on dispatching lecturers, enlisting the press, and circulating antislavery literature. Members sponsored lectures for Northern audiences where former slaves gave firsthand accounts of life under slavery. Over the next weeks and months, African Americans organized dozens of affiliates of the American Anti-Slavery Society, including groups in Ohio, Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania. Hundreds of black and white organizers would travel across the Northeast and West linking affiliated groups together. By 1834, abolitionists had established 60 auxiliary societies; by 1835, 200; by 1838, 1,350; and by 1840, at least 2,000, with nearly 200,000 members. Over two-thirds of the American Anti-Slavery Society’s members were women.⁴⁵

This second generation of abolitionists, more militant than those of the late eighteenth century, used the term anti-slavery to distinguish themselves from the earlier movement. They also distinguished themselves by drawing many of their white allies from rural areas, such as the small Ohio community where Owen Brown lived. Brown was the father of John Brown, famed in years to come as the symbol of the most militant form of abolitionism: armed insurrection. The call among antislavery activists for immediate emancipation provoked reaction from nearly every part of the white social order in the 1830s. Those who profited directly from the slave-based trade between the North and South were openly hostile toward those who advocated immediate emancipation. However, the antislavery “immediatists,” which included perhaps less than 5 percent of the nation’s total white population, were becoming an increasingly vocal minority, and an intolerable voice to their opponents.⁴⁶

African Americans calling for immediate emancipation faced not only the ire of the establishment but often exclusion, even hostility, from many white male abolitionists and their organizations. Although the American Anti-Slavery Society encouraged the participation of African Americans, as late as 1836 at least 143 of the nearly 1,000 local white-controlled abolitionist societies excluded African Americans (as well as white women) from their membership. The radical vision of the most progressive abolitionists—that all men and women should be citizens—posed a threat to white domination, including the domination of white male abolitionist leaders in the movement. As the historian Leon Litwack writes, “It was possible to be both ‘antislavery’ and anti-Negro,” as many white abolitionists—male and female—were against slavery but maintained their position as racial superiors.⁴⁷

African Americans, having followed their own courses of action, had created over fifty black abolitionist groups before the 1830s. Such black organizational independence gained particular significance when African Americans were refused membership in white abolitionist organizations during the 1830s.⁴⁸ Black initiatives nevertheless spurred several leading white abolitionists to follow the lead of the free black community, as in the debate over free black colonization. The white abolitionist Lewis Tappan noted that “it was [African Americans’] united and strenuous opposition to the expatriation scheme that first induced Garrison and others to oppose it.”⁴⁹ Garrison had initially favored free black emigration and colonization, but shifted his position, bringing him closer in line with the views of the free black Northern communities. Toward this end, in 1831 he would attend the National Negro Convention, which was among the first of a number of national black conventions that soon constituted a movement of its own.

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Throughout most of the 1830s and into the 1850s, the national black convention movement provided an important venue for independent black organizing. Six national conventions were held, supplemented by hundreds of state and local meetings.⁵⁰ The first official National Negro Convention was held in Philadelphia on September 20–22, 1830 (other national meetings of African Americans had taken place beginning in the late 1810s but are not considered part of the convention movement as such). The Negro Convention’s organizers were all leading black abolitionists of the day, including the veteran Richard Allen (elected president of the body), James Forten, and Rev. Samuel E. Cornish. Forty delegates, representing seven states, attended the first meeting. Among the issues discussed were the pros and cons of emigration and the planning of educational initiatives. Over the years, black abolitionists maintained close ties with the Negro Conventions even as they continued to work with predominantly white antislavery societies. For these African Americans, not only did the conventions provide a national forum to develop social and educational programs, but questions about whether or not to support certain political candidates, or the advantages or disadvantages of creating a third party, were beginning to be raised.⁵¹

Although the leadership of the black conventions was primarily drawn from black ministers, its participants came from across the African American community. Both the black churches in the North and the “invisible institution” in the South (where African Americans gathered in the fields late at night to worship, celebrate, and pray) had functioned as wellsprings for the cultivation of black leaders since the turn of the nineteenth century. Even black leaders without a ministerial background, such as Frederick Douglass, were influenced by the teachings of the church and the oratorical styles of the black preachers they had seen. Black abolitionists would powerfully combine the religious basis of African American life with the most progressive principles contained in the nation’s founding documents to justify the abolition of slavery on both moral and political grounds.

In 1831, in the Liberator, the black abolitionist Maria Stewart published her first essay, and the first political manifesto written by an African American woman, entitled “Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality, the Sure Foundation on Which We Must Build.” Stewart articulated the synthesis of secular and religious inspirations driving black abolitionism. She argued that the Bible and the Declaration of Independence provide all people—men, women, rich, poor, black, and white—with the universal birthright of freedom.⁵² In doing so, she and her abolitionist contemporaries were creating a new definition and understanding of what it meant to be an American. As Eric Foner observes, “The abolitionists . . . invented a new and different Constitution, a different reading of the Constitution, very much informed by the Declaration of Independence and its affirmation of human equality; and posited it as an alternative to the dominant vision of America as a white society, which was so prominent in [the early nineteenth-century].”⁵³

The new generation of black abolitionists would make slavery an issue of polarizing public debate.⁵⁴ Petitions varied in their demands. Many called on Congress to abolish slavery in the nation’s capital, where it had clear jurisdiction to do so.⁵⁵ But whether through petitions, publications and pamphleteering, public speaking, or boycotting of slave-produced goods, antebellum abolitionists stressed the immorality and injustice of slavery. For reformers who came after them, these abolitionists would also serve as role models by advancing their radically democratic vision of society through innovative forms of propaganda: mass mailings of antislavery writings and the popular distribution of prints and other visual images on household wares; the publication of biographies and autobiographies of fugitives and former slaves; the sending out of scores of speakers on regional lecture circuits (as well as overseas); and the development of well-coordinated and broad petitioning campaigns directed toward government officials.⁵⁶ African Americans, organized into vigilance committees (whose members also harbored fugitive slaves as part of the Underground Railroad), would join the mass-petitioning campaigns of the mid-1830s. Over the course of several years, black and white abolitionists sent tens of thousands of petitions to Congress to remove slavery in all federal holdings, including the District of Columbia.

African American women played a critical role in the antislavery petitioning drives. Some of these women, such as Sarah Remond, Margaretta Forten, Clarissa Beman, and Sarah Mapps Douglass, not only emerged as leaders in the abolitionist movement, but subsequently became leaders in the early women’s rights movement. In 1837, women constituted almost half of the signers of a petition in the District of Columbia to abolish slavery in the capital. In Maine and Massachusetts, nearly two-thirds of the twenty-three thousand signers of a petition were women. Many of the black women who signed and led local petitioning efforts had also helped to pioneer the “free produce” movement. Organizations such as the Colored Free Produce Society of Pennsylvania offered foodstuffs produced by free labor as part of the boycotts against slave-produced goods.⁵⁷ Black women like Remond, Forten, Beman, and Douglass assumed leadership roles in local organizations that coordinated petitioning drives, from the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society and the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society to the Colored Female Anti-Slavery Society of Middleton.⁵⁸ Women’s participation in these organizations was sometimes life-threatening. In 1835, a white male mob stormed a meeting of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, where Garrison was preparing to speak. The mob strung a rope around Garrison’s neck and dragged him through the streets of Boston. He survived the attack, saved only by his arrest for “inciting a riot.”

Between 1833 and 1838, over three dozen riots erupted in Northern cities. All focused on symbols of black independence: African American churches, abolitionist organizations, businesses, and individual leaders. Such independence, and therefore the potential for ongoing defiance, combined with an increasingly militant call by black Northerners, led to a series of reactions from various white social and political establishments in the North and West. Black and white abolitionists, from leaders like Garrison to ordinary members of antislavery organizations, were assaulted; meanwhile, antislavery mail was confiscated by the government. In 1837, with David Walker’s death still vivid in the minds of abolitionists, Elijah P. Lovejoy, the white editor of the Alton Observer in Illinois, was murdered. This time the assassination took place in open confrontation. After having had his printing press destroyed on two other occasions, Lovejoy courageously, if not stubbornly, continued to write and print abolitionist tracts. On November 7, 1837, the editor and his assistants were trapped in a warehouse where their printing press was being stored. As he tried to put out a fire set by the mob surrounding the building, he was shot dead. The following year, Pennsylvania Hall, a building in which black and white abolitionists in Philadelphia regularly met, was attacked by another mob and burned to the ground while the city’s mayor stood idly by.

The year before Lovejoy was killed, elected officials with far greater authority than Boston’s mayor took less criminal, yet equally extraconstitutional, measures to quash abolitionist dissent. In 1836, bipartisan representatives (now Democrats and Whigs) responded to the influx of abolitionist petitions from across the North into Congress by passing a gag rule to table any petitions discussing abolition. Former president John Quincy Adams, then elected to the House of Representatives, defended the right of the antislavery petitioners on the grounds of free speech. Other congressmen later joined in, including Ohio Whig Representative Joshua R. Giddings, but it was Adams who gave voice to the abolitionists within Congress, although, ironically, he did not consider himself an abolitionist. Only after eight years of antislavery pressure within and outside Congress was the gag rule finally lifted.

As the antislavery movement grew in the 1830s, some African Americans began to raise the question of developing an electoral strategy. Those in favor of entering the political arena with candidates of their own argued that while proslavery forces wielded great political power, abolitionists had only moral power on their side. If slavery were to be abolished, they reasoned, the proslavery forces would have to be met on their own ground. Independent political action in the electoral arena was therefore necessary. It would include denying votes to candidates who did not support the abolition of slavery, backing individual candidates who supported abolition, and, if necessary, forming an antislavery political party to compete against the bipartisan establishment.⁵⁹

The New York–based Colored American, the leading black abolitionist paper of the day, reaffirmed the importance and need for independent black political organization and action.⁶⁰ However, Garrison and many of his followers had from the outset of the antislavery movement argued that separate organizations perpetuated racial prejudice and discrimination. A growing consensus among black leaders by the mid-1830s nevertheless stressed the need for their autonomy—in other words, independence. Samuel Ringgold Ward, a former slave who became a popular abolitionist speaker, asserted that the multiple wrongs inflicted on African Americans by the dominant white society made independent black organizations—be they churches, conventions, committees, or antislavery societies—critical in the cause.⁶¹ Garrisonians—a minority among the array of active abolitionists in the 1830s, but the most dominant and vocal minority—insisted that separate black organizations fostered racism and that slavery could only be abolished through moral suasion. To the Garrisonians, supporting candidates for public office took away from the purity of purpose in the holy cause, because politicians worked through compromise. But as violence grew against antislavery activists, many within the movement grew skeptical of pursuing a path in which proslavery forces were to be convinced to abolish slavery through moral appeals alone. Many of those men and women who had been gathering and sending petitions to Congress were on a different course, propelled by conditions and choice toward independent electoral action, coalition-building, and the formation of the first antislavery party.