The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (12 page)

William Ellison, for example, was born a slave in 1790 in upcountry South Carolina. As a young apprentice he learned the new and highly prized craft of making and repairing cotton gins. After apparently purchasing his own freedom in 1816, Ellison bought freedom for his wife and daughter and shrewdly won the respect of his white clients and neighbors. He bought slaves to work in his gin shop and eventually became a cotton planter and owner of sixty-three slaves. By 1860, Ellison’s property holdings placed him among the richest 10 percent in South Carolina’s wealthy Sumter District. He owned
more
slaves than 97 percent of the state’s slaveholders. Since the combined personal estate of all the other 328 free blacks in the district amounted to only $7,580, Ellison’s personal property was seven times greater than their combined total and more than five hundred times greater than the free colored mean. In Louisiana there were a few black planters who were even richer than Ellison.
³³

But if parts of the Lower South approached the West Indian model, Barbados shared certain characteristics with the Southern slave states. As Britain’s oldest West Indian colony apart from
St. Kitt’s, Barbados had a relatively large population of native-born whites whose racism and fear of
freedmen paralleled that of their North American brethren. And in Barbados, as in the Upper South, a large proportion of the freedman population was black. Yet the Barbadian freedmen generally supported the slave regime and pressed for legal reforms that would remove their invidious disabilities and protect them from being insulted or assaulted by slaves and lower-class whites.
³⁴

In the Upper South, freedmen and slaves were more united by common interests, since the large white majority tended to treat them as a single inferior group. In no other New World society were freedmen regarded with such hostility or subjected to such a humiliating and slavelike status. Like the free states to the North, the Upper South had pretensions of being a white man’s country, a land in which the presence of black slaves was an unfortunate and perhaps temporary accident. Obsessed with the fear of
racial amalgamation, Upper South whites could not tolerate a middle ground between black and white or between bondage and freedom. In actuality, free blacks provided nonslaveholders with an indispensable pool of cheap labor for temporary hire. But however useful to the Upper South’s increasingly diversified economy, free blacks could be accepted only if their status differed little from that of slaves. Accordingly, as African Americans developed their own churches, fraternal societies, and other
institutions, freedmen and slaves frequently intermingled.
³⁵

To be sure, even in the West Indies the relations between freedmen and slaves were extremely complex. Some slaves were light-skinned; some were better off in material terms than most freedmen. Freedmen intermarried with slaves and engaged in less-formal sexual contacts; throughout the New World they accumulated the funds, often after many years of labor, to purchase the freedom of slave parents, wives, children, and other relatives. Some of the “slaves” nominally owned
by
free blacks, especially in the United States, were family members whose
manumission was prevented by various legal restrictions.
Freedmen and slaves also traded and fraternized with one another, and in the Upper South, especially, freedmen sometimes aided and gave shelter to fugitives.

But such instances of racial solidarity were the result of common racial oppression. Even in the Upper South, most free blacks were far too prudent and realistic to challenge the slave system. Elsewhere, a free colored elite accepted slavery as an unalterable fact of life and joined white planters in resisting emancipation. From their first organized protests in Saint-Domingue, freedmen demanded an equal right to participate in the system, so that wealth rather than race would be the criterion of status. For whites, however, the somatological traits of African ancestry symbolized the dishonor and degradation that were inseparable from chattel slavery. If manumission were itself sufficient to wipe away what the
Jamaican Assembly termed the “corruption of blood,” slavery would lose its ideological basis. As the example of Saint-Domingue suggested, the freedmen’s drive for equal
rights carried implications that extended far beyond any intended objectives.

Discussions of the later debates over slave emancipation seldom mention the spectacular
growth of freedman
populations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The world marveled over the fact that after 1790 the total United States population continued to double in less than twenty-five years, representing a rate of increase of about 35 percent each decade. From 1790 to 1830 the American slave population grew at a decadal rate of about 30 percent. But the free black population shot ahead by 82 percent in the decade 1790–1800 and by 72 percent in the decade 1800–1810.
³⁶

Although the Northern states were gradually abolishing slavery in this period, the free black population increased at a faster rate in the South—in the Lower South by 99 percent between 1790–1800, and by 223 percent between 1800 and 1810. The latter figure was inflated by the acquisition of
Louisiana and by the influx of West Indian free coloreds. But in Virginia, where the numbers involved were considerably larger than in the states farther south, the free black population grew from an estimated 2,000 in 1782 to 20,000 in 1800 and to more than
30,500 in 1810. During the twenty years from 1790 to 1810, the number of
free
blacks in Maryland more than quadrupled; the
slave population increased by a mere 8 percent. Until the 1830s, when restrictions against
manumission began taking
effect, free blacks were the fastest growing segment of the Southern population.
³⁷

The available statistics, which probably underestimate the actual growth of the free
black population, are far less satisfactory for the
West Indies. It is clear, however, that in Saint-Domingue the freedman population grew at a faster rate than in the British colonies and had equaled or even surpassed the white population by the first years of the French Revolution. The number of free coloreds in Saint-Domingue doubled from 1770 to 1780 and more than doubled from 1780 to 1789. In Jamaica the free black and colored population increased by 170 percent between 1768 and 1789 and by more than 280 percent in the thirty-six years between 1789 and 1825. In Barbados the comparable figures are 163 percent for the period 1786–1801 and 133 percent for the period 1801–1829.
³⁸

What were the implications of this soaring freedman population? The lessons from
Latin America, which had always been more tolerant of manumission, were ambiguous. In countries that never became dependent on a plantation economy and that could draw on a large supply of indigenous peon labor, manumissions and mortality gradually eroded the slave population; ultimately, slave owners could offer little resistance to general emancipation laws. But in Cuba and Brazil the emergence of a large free colored population did not inhibit the continuing growth of plantation economies based on the African slave trade. Presumably, slave labor would have been no less viable in Cuba and Brazil if planters had been able to rely, as in the United States, on a slave population that grew rapidly from natural reproduction.

Moreover, in marked contrast to Latin American societies, the proportion of freedmen in the total black population of most Southern states never rose above 5 percent. After the 1820s the percentage stabilized or declined. Only in Delaware and northern Maryland did the number of freedmen surpass the number of slaves—in Delaware as early as 1800, a trend that continued to 1860, when free blacks outnumbered slaves by more than nine to one.
³⁹
Even without considering the rising demand for slaves, the growing number of slave owners, and the great migration of slaves and their masters to the Old Southwest, it is clear that manumissions were not sapping the vitality of the
peculiar institution except in parts of the upper Chesapeake, where
tobacco and
slaves had given way to wheat, free labor, and economic diversification. On the other hand, any thoughtful observer living in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had good grounds for wondering how long slavery could survive if free blacks continued to multiply at a much faster rate than either whites or slaves.

The very existence of a growing freedman population posed a political problem for societies committed to eighteenth-century ideals of citizenship and representative government. The Age of Revolution was an age of
petitioning for
legal and political
rights. From the 1770s to the 1820s, freedmen in various parts of the New World became keenly attuned to the political rhetoric of the time and developed a highly coherent sense of their rights. On rare occasions even
slaves drafted petitions, perhaps with the aid of freedmen, asking to be released from unmerited and unjustifiable bondage.

Beginning in 1773, for example, groups of Massachusetts slaves sent petitions to the General Court describing their hardships and appealing to the principles of colonists “who have made such a noble stand against the designs of their fellow-men to enslave them.” In 1777, a petition from
New Hampshire slaves spoke of freedom as “an inherent right of the human species” and condemned public tyranny and slavery as “alike detestable to minds conscious of the equal dignity of human nature.” Sometimes free blacks signed the petitions of slaves who demanded the restoration of their natural rights, as in the case of
Prince Hall, a Barbadian immigrant who organized a black Masonic lodge in Boston and who struggled there to improve the condition of free blacks. Some of the
New England petitions looked beyond the formal act of emancipation and asked for a grant of land that could be settled by blacks or for assistance in emigrating to Africa, “where we shall live among our equals and be more comfortable and happy, then [
sic
] we can be in our present situation.” In 1780, seven free blacks petitioned the Massachusetts Council and
House of Representatives to relieve them from the burden of paying
taxes as long as they were denied the
vote and “influence in the election with those that tax us.” This appeal was signed by
Paul Cuffe, a young mariner and future sea captain who would later play an important role in the African emigration movement.
⁴⁰

A few individual slaves had won freedom suits in the courts before the 1770s, especially in Massachusetts; in Jamaica a few free blacks
and coloreds had won special legislated privileges, including the right to a jury trial and even equal civil rights. But it took the
American and
French revolutions to inaugurate a new era of group
consciousness and political action. Unfortunately, there were few legislative bodies like those in New England that would receive petitions from freedmen, let alone
slaves.

In 1791, when some free
blacks in Charleston petitioned the state senate to repeal a law barring them from testifying in court against whites, they deferentially claimed that they did not “presume to hope” that they would be put on an equal footing with white citizens “in general.” The following year Jamaican legislators expressed alarm over a petition, written in “the language of fanaticism,” in which free coloreds complained that they paid
taxes but were denied the right to give evidence in court and were subject to discriminatory punishments and restrictions on bequeathing property. In 1799,
Absalom Jones and other free blacks in Philadelphia sent a respectful and cautiously worded petition to Congress complaining that many freedmen were being kidnapped on the shores of
Maryland and
Delaware and sold as slaves in Georgia. The petitioners called for a revision of the
fugitive slave law, an end to the slave trade, and measures that would ameliorate the hardships of slaves and prepare the way for eventual emancipation. For two days Congress engaged in heated debate over the threat the petition posed to national security.
George Thatcher, a Federalist from the
Maine district of Massachusetts, described slavery as “a cancer of immense magnitude” that would destroy the nation unless Congress began to take remedial action; he admitted that he actually admired the French for emancipating their slaves. John
Rutledge Jr., a Federalist from South Carolina, declared that the petition was an “entering wedge” that placed the country in “imminent danger”; he then reviewed the recent history of Saint-Domingue, which confirmed all the earlier unheeded warnings of the French
West Indian planters.
⁴¹

During the previous decade, New World slaveholders had learned that freedmen’s rights could become a fatally explosive issue even when taken up by an extremely cautious but revolutionary French assembly. Only six brief years separated the achievement of American independence, won with the aid of French land and naval forces that included an impressive number of West Indian freedmen, from the onset of the French Revolution. The 1780s seethed with agitation
for various kinds of reform, in the
slave states and colonies as well as in Britain and
France. Despite bitter resistance, Virginia led the way among Southern states in removing restrictions on private
manumission; five Northern states either abolished slavery by judicial decision or enacted statutes for gradual emancipation (a sixth state,
Vermont, had already adopted a constitution that outlawed human bondage).
British and then French reformers began pressing for international suppression of the African slave trade. The
gens de couleur
in the French West Indies asserted their right to legal equality with whites, nominally guaranteed by the seventeenth-century
Code noir,
and sent delegates to plead their cause to the French ministry. Since some of the wealthiest
gens de couleur
lived in France, the summoning of the
Estates General in 1789 presented an opportunity to win a national hearing and to nullify the humiliating colonial laws that defined them as an inferior caste.