IV.

Colonial Opposition to Slavery

Throughout most of the colonial period, opposition to slavery among white Americans was virtually nonexistent. Settlers in the 17th and early 18th centuries came from sharply stratified societies in which the wealthy savagely exploited members of the lower classes. Lacking a later generation’s belief in natural human equality, they saw little reason to question the enslavement of Africans. As they sought to mold a docile labor force, planters resorted to harsh, repressive measures that included liberal use of whipping and branding.

Gradually, changes occurred in the way masters looked on both their slaves and themselves. Many second-generation masters, who unlike their parents had grown up with slaves, came to regard them as inferior members of their extended families. Such slaveowners looked upon themselves as kindly patriarchs who, like benevolent despots, ruled their people firmly but fairly and looked after their needs. Slavery remained harshly repressive: masters continued to rely heavily on the lash for discipline, and few if any slaves saw their owners as the kindly guardians that they proclaimed themselves to be. Still, many slaveowners accepted the idea that they should treat their slaves humanely.

Some slaveowners went further. The last third of the 18th century saw the first widespread questioning of slavery by white Americans. This questioning increased after the American Revolution (1775-1783), which sharply increased egalitarian thinking. The contradiction between the rhetoric of documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the reality of slavery was apparent. Many leaders of the new government, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, while slaveholders, were profoundly troubled by slavery. Although leery of rash actions, they undertook a series of cautious acts that they thought would lead to gradual abolition of slavery.

These acts included measures in all states north of Delaware to abolish slavery. A few states did away with slavery immediately. More typical were gradual emancipation acts, such as that passed by Pennsylvania in 1780, whereby all children born to slaves in the future would be freed when they became 28 years old. Two significant measures dated from 1787. First, the Northwest Ordinance barred slavery from the Northwest Territory, an area that included much of what is now the upper Midwest. Second, a compromise reached at the Constitutional Convention allowed the Congress of the United States to outlaw the importation of slaves in 1808. Meanwhile, a number of states passed acts making it easier for individuals to free their slaves. Hundreds of slaveowners, especially in the upper South, set some or all of their slaves free. In addition, tens of thousands of slaves acted on their own, taking advantage of wartime disruption to escape from their masters. As a result, the number of free blacks, which had been tiny before the Revolution, surged during the last quarter of the 18th century.

Nevertheless, the Revolutionary-era challenge to slavery was successful only in the North, where the investment in slaves was small. The antislavery movement never made much progress in Georgia and South Carolina, where planters imported tens of thousands of Africans to beat the cut-off of the slave trade in 1808. In the upper South, sentiment in favor of equality faded, along with revolutionary enthusiasm, in the 1790s and 1800s. The end of slave imports did not undermine slavery as it did elsewhere because the slave population in the United States was self-reproducing. The ultimate result of the first antislavery movement was to leave slavery a newly sectional institution, on the road to abolition throughout the North but largely intact in the South.