Slave Nation (6 page)

Attempts to confine discussions of the
Somerset
decision to drawing rooms and law offices failed. The unobtrusive servants who appeared to be part of the furniture—after all, they were literally property—must have heard the irate slave owners complain about the decision. This incredible news led some slaves to decide to free themselves and go to England.

How did the slave owners and their lawyers react to these threats from the
Somerset
opinion? First, they thought long and hard about the policies, the practicalities, and the legalities of their situation. They could have done nothing and waited to see if their fears were well grounded. But they rejected this course: Lord Mansfield had long been a major political figure in England, as well as a distinguished judge, and his opinion appeared deadly serious.

Second, they could have sought assurances from Britain that it would cease meddling in their internal affairs—to transform their relationship with Britain from that of an inferior jurisdiction to one of a partnership. That would require the British to repeal the Declaratory Act, thereby agreeing to share sovereignty with the colonies. But they knew Britain would not agree to such a partnership.
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Sovereignty, in the British view, was a unitary concept. A nation either had total control over a territory or none at all. Since the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Parliament had solidified its power over the king, and in 1766 had asserted it over the colonies as well. Lord Mansfield was a firm believer that Parliament was, and had to be, supreme in the British Empire.
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Third, the southerners might seek to secede from Britain. There had been much talk during the taxation crisis of 1765–1770 that the British claim of the power to tax the colonies was the equivalent to holding the colonies in slavery.
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This image could—and did—naturally lead to thoughts of independence. As John Adams wrote later to Jefferson:

The revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen years before a drop of blood was drawn at Lexington.
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A revolution would be most hazardous. Britain was the most powerful country in the world, both at sea and on land. Separation by rebellion was conceivable only if all the colonies—already chafing under British rule and worried about perceived threats to their liberty—were willing to unite in a rebellion that would secure the institution of slavery under an American government. The security the South needed was recognition of the complete freedom of each colony to conduct its internal affairs.

Would the northern colonies join in a revolution to protect southern slavery? The southerners were unsure. They did not know the northerners. Most colonists were provincials, attached to their colony and to Britain more than to each other. They certainly did not know their neighbors well enough to believe they would make common cause with the South to protect slavery. When the colonies had examined Benjamin Franklin’s Albany Plan for a defensive league against the French and Indians in 1754, they had all rejected it because it interfered with their internal affairs.
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The southerners did know that there was already some antislavery sentiment in the North. Although slavery was legal in all colonies, it was less prevalent in the North, particularly north of New York City where slaves provided much of the labor.

Northern attitudes toward slavery were ambivalent.
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Southerners may have heard that James Otis, the leading antislavery advocate in Massachusetts in the early 1760s, argued in the Superior Court of Massachusetts against “writs of assistance,” which were general search warrants. His argument included an attack on slavery as a violation of natural rights. In 1764, his pamphlet,
The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved,
stated, “The colonists are by the law of nature free born, as indeed all men are, white or black.”
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Southern papers had reported that, after the
Somerset
decision, there was dancing in the streets of Philadelphia.

On the other hand, some northerners had serious interests in slavery that paralleled the southerners. Shipyards built the cargo ships for the slave trade and other commercial ventures in which New England’s bottoms transported not only slaves, but also the products they produced. Northerners captained and manned these ships and supported their families and local communities with their incomes. They also participated in smuggling that evaded the navigation acts, which required colonial goods to be shipped through British ports.

Astute slave-owner-planter-lawyer-politicians would not jump from the frying pan of the threat from
Somerset
into a fire of northern antislavery attitudes. The South would not join with the North to seek revolution without assurance that southern slavery would be left alone. The generation of brilliant Virginian political figures—perhaps the greatest in our history—would not be so foolish as to leave that question unaddressed. The South would seek liberty from Britain, but only if doing so would protect slavery at home.

One of the most perceptive historians of slavery during the Revolution, Donald L. Robinson, in his
Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 1765–1820,
identified the tensions between northerners and southerners that existed in the early 1770s. To southerners, slavery was a necessity; to northerners steeped in a philosophy of natural rights, it was inconsistent and hypocritical. Robinson’s focus, however, was on the situation of the colonies in 1776, as the question of independence loomed large. But his analysis is equally applicable to the condition of the colonies in early 1773, once the Virginians recognized on the need for committees of correspondence to organize the colonies against the British.
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In the spring of 1773, Jefferson was still working on his “Summary View of the Rights of British America,” a short exposition of his theory of the origin of Virginia which brought him instant fame in the colonies.
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His basic premise was that Britain never retained power over the internal affairs of the colonies so neither the repugnancy clause nor the Declaratory Act could constitutionally establish British control over the colonies. He shared these views with his closest friends, the younger men in the House of Burgesses, as they considered how to address their fears of loss of slavery and their aspirations for the independence to protect it.

To further both these concerns, they needed to determine how their own leaders, and those in other colonies, felt about slavery, and to measure the strength of these leaders’ support for Britain. Both objectives could be achieved by securing a resolution from the House of Burgesses, the lower house of the Virginia legislature, calling on all the colonies to create “committees of correspondence” to communicate with each other concerning British activities unfriendly to colonial interests. Richard Henry Lee, one of the “younger men” who would become prominent in the coming revolutionary period, characterized the measure as “leading to that union, and perfect understanding of each other, on which the political salvation of America so eminently depends.”
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According to Jefferson’s recollection:

Not thinking our old and leading members up to the point of forwardness and zeal which the times required, Mr. Henry, R. H. Lee, Francis L. Lee, Mr. Carr, and myself agreed to meet in the evening in a private room of the Raleigh to consult on the state of things.…We were all sensible that the most urgent of all measures was that of coming to an understanding with all the other colonies to consider the British claims as a common cause to all, to produce an unity of action: and for this purpose that a committee of correspondence in each colony would be the best instrument for intercommunication: and that their first measure would probably be to propose a meeting of deputies from every colony at some central place, who should be charged with the direction of the measures which should be taken by all.
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Some of these younger members were conflicted about the morality—but not the necessity—of the maintenance of slavery. Jefferson would later elegantly condemn slavery in a passage of the Declaration of Independence that was deleted by Congress.
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Much later, in his famous letter to Edward Coles in 1814, Jefferson concluded that public sentiment indicated “an apathy to every hope” that the younger generation “would have sympathized with oppression wherever found.”
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Richard Henry Lee’s initial speech to the Burgesses in 1759 had criticized slavery for weakening the energies of white Virginians. The importation of slaves “has been and will be attended with effects dangerous both to our political and moral interests.” Other colonies were outmatching Virginia because,

With their whites, they import arts and agriculture, while we, with our blacks, exclude both...they are deprived, forever deprived, of all the comfort of life, and to be made the most wretched of the human kind.
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Patrick Henry had also bemoaned slavery, while acknowledging its necessity. In Virginia, he wrote,

When the rights of humanity are defined and understood with precision…we find men, professing a religion the most humane, mild, meek, gentle, and generous, adopting a principle as repugnant to humanity as it is inconsistent with the Bible and destructive to liberty.…Would anyone think I am master of slaves of my own purchase!…I am drawn along by the general inconveniences of living without them, I will not, I cannot, justify it.
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They all knew that protecting slavery was essential to the political, social, and economic life of Virginia, and to their personal political futures.

They suppressed what negative feelings they may have had about slavery and gave free rein to their desires for independence to protect it. Any impulse to move to end slavery was outweighed by their fears, their guilt, and their need to maintain slavery as well as their desire for independence that had been kindled during the taxation issues of the 1760s and nurtured by British incursions into colonial self-government.

In fact, they were all in a position similar to Jefferson’s, as explained by economic historians Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick:

[Jefferson] would never, in fact, be anything but an insider. His rise was swift and smooth as leaders of the provincial elite quickly recognized his abilities and in effect brought him into the ruling group while still in his mid-twenties....The coercions of this insidership were undoubtedly considerable. The system had given him everything he could have asked for: wealth, love and a profitable marriage, social position, the fullest opportunity to engage his talents, and general recognition. He was thus allowed the luxury of determining which of these things he valued most, and which least, without having to give up any of them. Such being the case, the likelihood of his offering a basic challenge to that system, whatever the defects he might decide needed remedying, was not very great. He might suppose himself viewing it with detachment, but he would never do so from the outside.
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Jefferson’s sophistry, in his “Summary View” published in 1774, that the slave trade must be eliminated
before
slavery could be abolished, must be understood as going as far publicly toward restricting slavery as he thought possible without risking his political influence.
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But his conclusion was illogical. As historian Duncan MacLeod noted pithily: “It was slavery which supported the slave trade and not the converse.”
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Once the younger members were satisfied with their draft, they sounded out some of the senior leaders before proposing it. Jefferson recalled how the senior members had heckled Richard Bland, one of the most respected of Virginia’s elder statesmen, when he proposed a modest easing of the prohibition on manumission of slaves.
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Jefferson, as pictured by historian Joseph Ellis, did not like personal conflicts or confrontations. His forte was—among other things—in working out wide ranging theories and expressing them brilliantly in his writing. Ellis writes:

What his critics took to be hypocrisy was not really that at all. In some cases it was the desire to please different constituencies, to avoid conflict with colleagues. In other cases it was an orchestration of his internal voice, to avoid conflict with himself. Both the external and internal diplomacy grew out of his deep distaste for sharp disagreement and his bedrock belief that harmony was nature’s way of signaling the arrival of truth. More self-deception than calculated hypocrisy, it was nonetheless a disconcerting form of psychological agility that would make it possible for Jefferson to walk past the slave quarters on Mulberry Row at Monticello thinking about mankind’s brilliant prospects without any sense of contradiction.
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From their associations with the senior leaders, the younger members had reason to believe that their concerns for the preservation of Virginia’s slave system would override the older members’ attachment to the empire.

Tobacco cultivation had worn out many acres of Virginia so much that experiments in planting wheat had already been undertaken by George Washington, among others. Wheat required fewer slaves than tobacco. The cultivation of tobacco or wheat was easier than the cultivation of sugar or rice. As a result, in Virginia, slaves multiplied. In the rice fields of South Carolina, slaves died early, and had to be “replenished.” West Indian planters also required constant supplies of “new” slaves as the working conditions on the sugar plantations caused slaves to die young, and consequently not reproduce. In Virginia, and most of the South except South Carolina and Georgia, the life of the slave was “less onerous”; slaves did reproduce and increased their population.
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Historian Edmund Morgan explains:

In Virginia not only had the rate of mortality from disease gone down, but the less strenuous work of cultivating tobacco, as opposed to sugar, enabled slaves to retain their health and multiply. To make a profit, sugar planters worked their slaves to death; tobacco planters did not have to.
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