Penguin History of the United States of America (19 page)

All this shows how Pennsylvania was maturing. The process, and the direction in which it was moving, were clear to some contemporaries. So assertive had the assembly grown, even so early as 1707, that the then Governor remarked ‘it plainly appears that the aim is to revise the method of government according to our English Constitution, and establish one more nearly resembling a republic in its stead’. He was defending William Penn’s prerogatives, but the assertiveness was a fact all the same. In 1755 the Deputy-Governor wrote:

They have been most remarkably indulged, both by the Crown and Proprietaries, and are suffered to enjoy powers unknown to any assembly upon the continent, and even such as may render them a very dangerous body hereafter; but not content with privileges granted to them by charter they claim many more and among others an absolute exemption from the force of royal and proprietary instructions.

The Pennsylvanians, like other Americans, were now numerous and strong enough to insist on their own interests; they expressed themselves vigorously through their assembly and began the evolution of the American party system. They were well used to looking after themselves; they were not at all used to paying taxes. In all these respects they were typical of most of their fellow-colonials.

In one respect, however, they were highly atypical. ‘We do not like Negro servants,’ said Franklin firmly (although he allowed advertisements concerning such to appear in the
Pennsylvania Gazette)
. His objection was largely the outcome of European self-interest: he did not want to see the province overrun, as the southern and Caribbean colonies had been, by Africans. He was eventually to take a much higher view of the question. But his original attitude was as characteristically Pennsylvanian as it was untypical of mid-century America in general. Few Philadelphian merchants entered the slave-trade, which was the staple of Newport, Rhode Island, an equally Quaker city. Pennsylvania originally accepted slavery and promulgated a harsh code of regulations to govern it. Free Africans were attacked as ‘idle slothful people… who often prove burthensome to the neighbourhood, and afford ill examples to other negroes’. But from the start there were doubts. The earliest anti-slavery petition came from German town in
1688. Memories of the persecutions they themselves had suffered, and their central doctrine of the Inner Light (God working in the hearts and consciences of men), slowly led the Quakers of Philadelphia to see things as they were. A rise in white immigration, making black labour less necessary, was a great help. The Quakers began to move to the position that no member of the Society of Friends might be a slave-trader. They sent emissaries over to England with the message, which soon found willing hearers. Thus began one of the most important developments in the history of humanity: organized anti-slavery. But it did not achieve maturity or success overnight. In the eighteenth century slavery and the slave-trade were at their height. It is more than time to examine these most tragic of American institutions.

Slavery is a form of service imposed and maintained by force: no more, no less. It treats men as things, as pieces of property.
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To define it is to condemn it. It violates the Golden Rule. As Abraham Lincoln is said to have replied to a pro-slavery argument, ‘What is this good thing that no man wants for himself?’

So much is clear to us; but it has only become clear during the past 250 years. The historical problem is that of deciding why slavery was abolished, not why it arose, for it seems to have existed continuously since the dawn of history. In some societies it was mild or limited in scope, or eventually died out. The English in England, for example, had lost all the medieval forms of servitude by 1600 at the latest. But they did not hesitate to introduce slavery into their new empire a few years later; and the system of indentured servitude, which paved the way for that of African enslavement, was evolved out of Tudor methods of dealing with the unemployed and beggars which in their harshness resemble the colonial slave codes.
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In spite of their Christianity and growing civilization, the English were still (myths of Merry England to the contrary) ceaselessly cruel in their social relations.

The old British Empire, like its rivals, was built on slavery. This means not only that the Atlantic slave-trade, centring on the Guinea Coast, was a large part of the world trade which the Empire was designed to capture, but that most of the Empire’s commerce was in the produce of slavery. Sugar was the chief imperial commodity: the sugar plantations of the Caribbean were worked by slaves.
¹⁶
Part of the sugar went to England, to enrich the merchants there; part in the form of molasses to New England,
to be made into rum.
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The sugar islands grew very little of their own food, so merchants found ready markets there for the produce of Ireland, Pennsylvania, New York and the New England fisheries. The significance of this trade is unmistakable: as Richard Pares put it, ‘Without it the sugar colonies could not have existed and the North American colonies could not have developed.
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Exposed to new diseases, overworked and underfed, a slave on a sugar plantation had a life-expectancy of only seven years; this, and the shortage of women (which implied a shortage of children), meant that the planters had to replenish their labour force by regularly importing new slaves, which of course was good business for the slave-traders. The East India Company and the English manufacturers got a share of the profit by producing iron, coarse cloth, beads and other items with which to tempt African traders with victims to sell. This triangular trade was, in fact, the symbol of the Empire.
Sicfortis Etruria crevit
: the countryside round Bristol soon gleamed with country palaces for the merchants; Glasgow became a great city; Liverpool added to its indirect profits by operating a small slave-market of its own. The guilt of living off the misery and oppression of fellow human beings spread throughout prosperous and virtuous British society. To take two random examples: a slave-based fortune paid for the splendid buildings by Hawksmoor at All Souls College, Oxford; and although Jane Austen made a hostile reference to the slave-trade in
Emma
, she also made the Bertram family in
Mansfield Park
largely dependent on a slave-plantation in Antigua for their wealth, apparently unconscious of the evil they were exploiting.

Nor was any part of the North American colonies free of guilt. By 1720 one-sixth of Boston’s population was black. Cotton Mather was once presented with a slave-boy by his grateful parishioners: he turned this to good account by baptizing the boy Onesimus
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and learning from him the practice of inoculation. Mather spoke up for the religious equality of blacks and advocated their education; but he also urged Africans to give up their foolish ‘fondness for freedom’ and to recognize that they were better off as slaves.
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In 1760 there were 16,340 blacks in New York, most of them slaves. Pennsylvania, New Jersey and the Three Counties throve on their exports to the slave-islands; and the southernmost colonies – Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia – all enjoyed, if that is the word, slave-based agrarian economies.

It is still a matter for learned argument what effects the slave-trade had
on the various African societies that were touched by it; but there is no dispute about what happened after the slaves were brought to the markets on the coast. After lengthy haggling, often complicated by rivalries among the slavers of different nationalities, some of the victims were bought and taken on board, while the rest were left rotting on shore, waiting for the next customers. The cargo slaves were meanwhile manacled with heavy iron chains in pairs. They were taken below and laid out, we are told by a reformed slaver,

in two rows one above the other, on each side of the ship, close to each other, like books upon a shelf. I have known them so close that the shelf would not easily contain one more. And I have known a white man sent down among the men to lay them in these rows to the greatest advantage, so that as little space as possible be lost… And every morning perhaps more instances than one are found of the living and the dead… fastened together.

For the slave-decks were not only hellishly uncomfortable, but also spreading-grounds for the diseases that many of the victims brought aboard with them. Ships sometimes sailed with hundreds on board and arrived having lost two-thirds of their complement, though the usual loss on British ships in the eighteenth century seems to have been more commonly in the region of 10 per cent, and the figure tended to decline, for it was considered prudent to take some measures to preserve the lives of the slaves: they were valuable property.
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It was usual to bring them up on deck and force them to dance and sing for the sake of their health. Some slavers bought instruments on the coast for the cargo to play; in this way African music was carried to the New World. The songs were usually laments: the slaves did not much enjoy these occasions, nor was it meant that they should. Too great liberality might lead to a successful uprising, and it was always necessary to be on guard against suicide attempts; so a brutal constraint was universal. At last the ship would complete the Atlantic crossing (‘the Middle Passage’) and the slaves would be sold again, again with every additional circumstance of indignity. If they were lucky they were shipped to the North American mainland; if they were not (and it is now thought that only 5 per cent of the total, or approximately 400,000, in the whole history of the trade were carried to British North America) they quickly rotted away in the mines, ranches and plantations of Brazil, Spanish America and the sugar islands.

In this fashion the African population of the colonies grew until just before the Revolution (and for some decades after it). It was, next to the
English, the largest ethnic group. The total number of slaves imported to the thirteen colonies or states before 1790 is thought to have been between 250,000 and 300,000 (our information is at present too scanty for greater precision), but very early, outside South Carolina at any rate, the African population began to show a natural increase which by the end of the century was approaching that of the Europeans. By 1775 there were approximately half a million African-Americans, many of whom had first-hand experience of the horrors of the Middle Passage.

A comparison of the birth-rate and death-rate of the North American plantations with those of plantations elsewhere, not to mention a comparison with the death-rate on shipboard, shows that conditions in the thirteen colonies, even in the tobacco- and rice-growing regions, were better than they might have been; but they were horrible enough. The system was one of forced labour and depended on the most brutal sanctions. Witches were not burned to death, but slaves were. So late as 1805 a slave suffered this punishment in North Carolina for poisoning her master, mistress and two other whites; the next year another, a man, was burned in Georgia for killing an overseer.
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Burning was a punishment that had earlier been fairly common, and it was resorted to on a grand scale in New York in 1740–41, when, in a scare that was the precise equivalent of the Salem witch-hunt, the city convinced itself that it was in imminent danger of being burned to the ground by a horde of popish blacks. Four whites were hanged, fourteen blacks were burned, eighteen were hanged, seventy deported. Everywhere the codes regulating slavery as a social institution authorized the harshest punishments and gave masters a free hand, up to and including the power of life and death, with their slaves. For private regulation, however, the whip was usually deemed sufficient: the diary of William Byrd, a cultivated Virginian gentleman, the colony’s most learned judge, shows him lashing one or more of his ‘servants’ every few weeks.
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Fearing to put ideas into their chattels’ heads, slave-owners would not let them be taught Christianity (not that the church had often baulked at recognizing the legitimacy of slavery) or be taught to read and write. Slaves were used casually as concubines, so much so that it has been thought that there was more inter-racial mingling in the eighteenth century than at any time since; the feelings of fathers, mothers and children were not respected, families being frequently broken up when the master wanted to sell. Slaves were outside the protection of the common law: even in Pennsylvania they were denied trial by jury. Above all the Africans were employed ruthlessly and incessantly to perform the heavy labour that the Europeans would not. To be a great tobacco planter in Virginia two things were required: plenty of cheap land
to replace the acres wasted by soil-exhaustion and soil-erosion, the marks of inefficient agriculture, and cheap labour (otherwise the overheads of running a large plantation would price its product out of the market). Oppression of the Indians provided the first, oppression of the Africans the second. On this foundation a splendid civilization was erected.

Or so it is conventional to state. Certainly it cannot be denied that for a short time Virginia produced numbers of men as remarkable for their character as their intellect. George Washington (1732–99), Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) and John Marshall (1755–1835) are only the greatest names among them. They were high-spirited, well-educated, rich, intelligent and responsible gentlemen, who broke a kingdom and created a republic. Many of them deeply disapproved of slavery, though few of them could think of anything to do to end it, save emancipating their own slaves in their wills, as Washington did. Meantime they planned to clear the Indian tribes from the lands west of the Appalachians and seize for themselves new fields to exploit through the labour of their bondsmen. They lived in handsome houses on tidal creeks and rivers, exporting tobacco to England, and in return importing the means to lead a civilized life as the English gentry understood it: port, porcelain and mahogany furniture. They sent their sons either to the Inns of Court to acquire a smattering of law and manners, or to Williamsburg, Jamestown’s successor as the capital of Virginia, where they could attend the college of William and Mary (founded in 1693) and later study, as Jefferson did, under the lawyers practising in the town. Their cultural achievements were real. William Byrd had one of the largest libraries in the colonies in his generation, as Jefferson had in his. And Monticello, Jefferson’s great dream house, designed by its owner, remains the most extraordinary building in the United States, as Versailles is in France. It was begun in 1770 and not finished until 1809, and incarnates a lifetime of steadily improving taste and skill. But like Versailles it has a profoundly ambiguous meaning. Jefferson, an architect and interior designer of genius, imposed his vision of the noble life on a Virginian hilltop as completely as the Sun King imposed his on the heaths of the île de France. Posterity does well to admire and cherish both monuments: posterity has not had to pay for them. Yet each glory was made possible only by a deeply oppressive society which ruthlessly exploited the weak.
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Jefferson, it is true, was a humane slave-master, where Louis XIV was a supremely callous king; but he was the beneficiary of a system which was the negation of humanity. And like the French monarchy, the Virginian system, because of its strength and weakness alike, carried the seeds of its own certain destruction within it.