by Eamonn Bellin
The American Founding is a font of modern liberal ideas and institutions. Principles that undergird modern democracies like self-determination, popular legitimacy, and civic nationalism have antecedents in 1776. So too, however, do their illiberal antagonists. Twentieth century historians like Charles Beard criticized the Founding as pretextual equality concealing oligarchy.[i] Another indictment comes from historians of slavery. Fleetingly, revolutionaries like Patrick Henry judged slavery “inconsistent with the Bible and destructive to Liberty.”[ii] These emancipatory impulses soon withered. By 1800, there were almost 900,000 enslaved Africans in the United States, almost three times as many as in 1760.[iii]
Scholarship on “Second Slavery” posits that revolutionary political and economic change in the late eighteenth century strengthened slavery in the American South, Cuba, and Brazil.[iv] The authors of the 1619 Project propose that 1776 reinforced an authoritarian system of racial injustice.[v] Democratic forces in America have struggled against this system ever since. Not all scholars concur. Benjamin Quarles wrote in 1961 that Black Americans “quickly caught the spirit of ’76.”[vi] Douglas Egerton shows how African Americans navigated the Revolution to secure rights and build communities. Even as slaveholding elites foreclosed emancipation, “for black Americans, the Declaration was no hollow pretense but rather a solemn pledge.”[vii] Gordon Wood goes farther, arguing the Revolution stoked nineteenth century abolitionism, and laid a foundation for “all our current egalitarian thinking.”[viii]
Was 1776 an imperfect but real achievement for liberalism, or an original sin of American authoritarianism? This question cannot be answered within U.S. borders. As Second Slavery scholarship shows, the American Revolution’s reverberations were transnational.[ix] The Revolution solidified slavery in the American South but contributed to a crisis of slavery across the Atlantic world. This crisis inspired the international abolition movement and opened space for free African communities across the hemisphere, even as some slave societies emerged from the crisis stronger.
The Founders’ failure to end slavery, a system many knew as unjust, remains relevant in our struggles with antidemocratic prejudice and hate today. Transnationally situating the American Revolution closes the circle between the Founding’s historical context, its liberal legacy, and its entanglement with slavery. This in turn shows that the Revolution inadvertently weakened slavery, and consequently the foundation of authoritarian rule on four continents. Actions undertaken by patriots and loyalists alike disrupted for the first time slavery’s commercial expansion and institutional consolidation. In Britain, the Revolution encouraged restriction of slavery and instilled an imperial anxiety which condemned slavery for the empire’s decline. Finally, the Founding’s example of armed resistance traversed insurgent networks of fugitives, slaves, and sailors to inspire revolution against the Atlantic slavocracy, first on Saint Domingue, then throughout the Caribbean.
The Atlantic slave trade and plantation slavery appeared destined for unlimited growth before 1776. Almost half the African captives who endured the middle passage did so in the eighteenth century.[x] Britain dominated the slave trade, transporting three million captive Africans between 1713 and 1807.[xi] The century saw an explosion in rice, coffee, tobacco, and sugar production.[xii] The West Indies and American South grew rich exporting these fruits of slave labor. New England grew rich transporting captives and provisioning their plantations.[xiii] Burgeoning midatlantic seaports like New York relied on enslaved labor. Colonies once resistant to slavery submitted to popular demand and legalized bonded labor, as Georgia, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania did.[xiv] English writer Malachy Postlehwayt celebrated slavery as “an inexhaustible fund of wealth and naval power.”[xv]
The American Revolution was the first cloud to cross the sun of Atlantic slavery. It did so initially with the shade of military necessity. A fifth of the British North American population, enslaved people were potential manpower for both patriots and loyalists. The crown struck first. In 1775, Virginia’s governor Lord Dunmore promised freedom to any enslaved African who took up arms against the insurgents.[xvi] Some twenty thousand enslaved persons answered the call. While many did not gain their promised freedom, some did, resettling in Canada after the war.[xvii] They had fought in uniform against slaveholders who were now branded traitors, outside the law like fugitives. General Washington also admitted the necessity of employing enslaved manpower.[xviii] Many patriots resisted giving arms to enslaved persons, but some colonies, notably Rhode Island and Connecticut, outfitted units of enslaved soldiers.[xix] Enslaved soldiers were not uncommon in the Atlantic world, yet the supposed promise of emancipation in exchange for military service, made by warring rivals competing for political legitimacy, was radical.
Legal changes were also affected by northern colonies during the Revolution. This again began as a matter of necessity. The laws of many colonies demanded alteration now that the authority of the king had been disavowed. The prospect of change encouraged debate on the principles governing such changes. This mattered little in colonies dominated by men like Henry Laurens, South Carolina’s most prodigious slave trafficker and a prominent supporter of the patriot rebellion. Yet in the North, debate over slavery’s legal status fostered coalitions comprising free and enslaved Black Northerners, white abolitionists, and white patriots who could no longer reconcile egalitarian principles with human bondage. Accordingly, between 1777 and 1784, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island began to legally dismantle slavery.[xx]
Before the American Revolution, slavery had expanded in the Atlantic world. After Lexington and Concord, the bounds of slavery for the first time shrank. Profits off slavery also shrank for the first time, another result of wartime necessity. American privateers and fleets from France, Spain, and Holland descended onto the Atlantic commerce of the British West Indies. Overmatched, the British Royal Navy was helpless to protect colonial trade. The British West Indies never regained their prosperity. Europe embraced French and Spanish colonies for sugar and other tropical goods. In 1700, British planters supplied half the sugar consumed in Western Europe. In 1789, Saint Domingue exported more than all the British colonies combined.[xxi] Bowing to colonial lobbying, the British government imposed bounties favoring West Indian sugar, but this deepened the colonies’ unpopularity with the British public.[xxii] Conditions became dire. Sixty plantations had been abandoned in Jamaica, formerly the center of sugar production, by 1800.[xxiii]
In Britain, regulation and criticism of slavery originated in the trauma of defeat. For some, like abolitionist Granville Sharp and church prelates Bishops Porteus and Horsley, American independence was divine retribution for the iniquities of slavery and the slave trade.[xxiv] For others, like Whig parliamentarian Charles James Fox, the “virtual representation” of West Indian enslavers malignly influenced Westminster.[xxv] Better to lose the West Indies as well, Fox declared, than continue Britain’s tainted association with slave regimes.[xxvi] Both the English and Scottish courts agreed, declaring slavery illegal under their common laws in the 1780s.[xxvii] In 1781, a British court for the first time held a slave ship’s captain liable for the murder of enslaved captives.[xxviii] At the end of the decade, Parliament for the first time ordered regulations specific to the welfare of enslaved Africans crossing the Atlantic.[xxix] These modest measures motivated more action.
The West Indian colonists for their part darkened metropolitan perceptions of Britain’s remaining colonies. Anxious to insulate their enslaved “property” from interference, colonies like Jamaica passed resolutions denying Parliament’s right to interfere in domestic concerns.[xxx] To Westminster, this was the American Revolution redux. By the early nineteenth century, the British political imaginary suspected the morals and loyalty of the West Indian colonies; the slave trade and slavery inspired their suspicions.[xxxi]
Britain’s estrangement from its colonies over slavery exerted international influence. In 1807, Parliament prohibited the slave trade. In the next decade, British envoys pressured governments in Latin America, France, Spain, and Portugal, to commit to the suppression of the slave trade.[xxxii] At the Verona Conference of 1822, the Duke of Wellington declared “no state in the New World will be recognized by Great Britain which has not frankly and completely abolished the trade in slaves.”[xxxiii]An archconservative in a habitually antidemocratic government, Wellington’s outlook reflected the extent to which hostility to the slave trade had become political consensus. Prohibitions on the slave trade were for many decades honored in the breach. Yet defeat in the American Revolution made the antislavery cause central to British imperial politics and an article of the international legal landscape.
Enslaved uprisings existed before the American Revolution. The enslaved resisted to acquire negotiating leverage, as they did in Dutch Berbice.[xxxiv] They fought to escape their captors, as they did in South Carolina’s Stono Rebellion.[xxxv] They revolted by activating transatlantic networks of knowledge and support, as the enslaved warriors of Tacky’s Revolt did in Jamaica.[xxxvi] Many of these uprisings, however, were aimed to liberate a specific enslaved community, rather than overthrow slavery as such. Thus, the Maroon communities of Jamaica, after battling Jamaican slaveholders for freedom in the 1720s, allied with those same planters to suppress Tacky’s Revolt in 1760. After the American Revolution, enslaved revolts sharpened as radical political projects, aiming to revoke the legality of slave regimes. This is not to suggest that freedom was absent as a goal in earlier uprisings. Yet the egalitarian rhetoric of 1776 and the immensity of political change it occasioned encouraged enslaved people across the Atlantic to imagine a systematic end to slavery. Ensuing events in Saint Domingue would reveal the potency of this liberatory horizon.
The American Revolution generated antislavery forces in the Caribbean stronghold of slavery, arriving through the intermediary of revolutionary France. Aggressive naval and military expenditure won France vengeance against Britain in 1783, but at the cost of penury by 1788. American-induced bankruptcy met with American-inspired ideals on the tennis court of Versailles in July 1789.[xxxvii] A key constituency in the propagation of revolution was common to America and France: the multinational, multiracial, and frequently mutinous sailors who carried Atlantic commerce.[xxxviii] The first casualty of the American Revolution, Crispus Attucks, was a sailor of African and indigenous ancestry.[xxxix] Through these sailors startling events and dangerous ideas crossed the ocean freely.
Motley crews of sailors brought the French Revolution to Saint Domingue, now Haiti. Sailors shared revolutionary developments with Saint Domingue’s enslaved subjects, including debate over slavery’s fate in the French empire. Following events in France, expectations of emancipation mounted for enslaved people, frustration at its delay deepened, and confidence in seizing it from a divided and demoralized slavocracy strengthened. Beginning in 1791, Saint Domingue’s enslaved undertook the unthinkable, throwing off their chains and establishing their own government.[xl]
Atlantic sailors, Julius Scott observed, fanned a “common wind” of revolution.[xli] It coursed across the Caribbean, bringing enslaved uprisings to Tortola, Jamaica, Demerara, and many other colonies after the Haitian Revolution. These uprisings emulated Haiti in their attentiveness to political developments around the Atlantic world. The enslaved of Demerara were motivated to rebel in 1823 by news of slavery amelioration laws passed by Westminster but blocked by the colonial government.[xlii] The cumulative effect of American, French, and Haitian revolutions infused radical politics into Atlantic communication networks. Informed by these networks, enslaved people developed new ambitions, and seized new opportunities to realize them. The American Revolution was the first gust of this common wind.
The “revolutionary” implications of the American Revolution are contested. The motivations of Revolutionary leadership were oftentimes conservative;[xliii] the constitutional settlement of 1789 yielded a composite of daringly new and dependably tested features. Many of the Revolution’s consequences, expulsion of loyalists, expropriation of indigenous lands, were revolutionary only in a destructive, authoritarian sense. Policy protections given to slavery in the Constitution were reactionary in the worst sense. The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 propelled slavery across the Mississippi Valley. Some historians of Germany have judged 1848, the year of failed liberal revolution, “the turning point at which modern history failed to turn,” anticipating catastrophic failure of democracy in 1933.[xliv] Was 1776 America’s failed turning point, setting up catastrophes like the Civil War, white supremacist “Redemption,” and Jim Crow?
The Revolution’s legacy connects with these catastrophes. Yet it connects as well to the forces that overcame them. The American Revolution was slavery’s first defeat. It encouraged further assaults. This is crucial, because the wealth slavery generated for planters, merchants, and manufacturers only grew thanks to the Industrial Revolution.[xlv] It took the multinational forces inspired by the American Revolution to match the strength of industrial era slavery. The liberal character and legacy of the American Revolution cannot be assessed in isolation from slavery, history’s most illiberal mode of government. That it failed to dismantle slavery condemned the Founding to fall short of its ideals. That it inspired, however inadvertently, a global arc of forces which gradually undermined and overthrew an international web of slave regimes shows that the legacy of the Founding is greater than the character of the Founders. The democratic principles of 1776 have their legacy in advancing the pursuit of a just and equal world, one which would realize these principles as self-evident.
Eamonn Bellin is a second year M.A. student in history at Georgetown University, where he studies the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. He graduated with a B.A. from George Washington University and formerly worked for the Alexander Hamilton Society, a foreign policy nonprofit in Washington D.C.
[i] Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (Mineola, N.Y: Dover Publications, 2004).
[ii] Douglas R Egerton, Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 49.
[iii] Egerton, Death or Liberty, 19.
[iv] Daniel Rood, The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017), 5.
[v] Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, Edited by Caitlin Roper, Ilena Silverman, and Jake Silverstein (New York, New York: One World, 2021)
[vi] Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution, (Chapel Hill: the University of North Carolina Press), 1996
[vii] Egerton, Death or Liberty, 63.
[viii] Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1992)
[ix] Robin Blackburn, “Why the Second Slavery?” in Dale Tomich, ed., Slavery and Capitalism in the Nineteenth Century, (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), pp. 1-38.
[x] Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History, (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 88.
[xi] Rediker, The Slave Ship, 94.
[xii] Seymour Drescher, “APPENDIX II: Estimating the Sugar, Coffee, and Slave Trades.” In Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition, (The University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 193.
[xiii] Wendy, Warren: New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W.W. Norton & Company, 2016), 16.
[xiv] David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1975), 46.
[xv] Malachy Postlethwayt, The African Trade the Great Pillar and Support of the British Plantation Trade in America, (London: Printed for J. Robinson, 1745), 2.
[xvi] James Murray, Earl of Dunmore, “A Proclamation,” Encyclopedia Virginia, accessed July 14, 2023, https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/lord-dunmores-proclamation-1775/.
[xvii] Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 278.
[xviii] “Washington’s Changing Views on Slavery,” George Washington’s Mount Vernon, accessed July 14, 2023: https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/slavery/washingtons-changing-views-on-slavery/#:~:text=Washington%20initially%20opposed%20allowing%20free,fought%20against%20their%20patriot%20owners.
[xix] Philip D Morgan and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, “Arming Slaves in the American Revolution,” In Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age, edited by Christopher Leslie Brown and Philip D. Morgan, 180-208, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 180.
[xx] “Vermont 1777: Early Steps Against Slavery,” National Museum of African American History and Culture, accessed July 14, 2023: https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/vermont-1777-early-steps-against-slavery#:~:text=Such%20an%20opportunity%20came%20on,rights%20for%20African%20American%20males.
[xxi] Davis, Problem of Slavery, 54.
[xxii] Davis, Problem of Slavery, 52.
[xxiii] Davis, Problem of Slavery, 55.
[xxiv] Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 243.
[xxv] Davis, Problem of Slavery, 103.
[xxvi] Davis, Problem of Slavery, 105.
[xxvii] James Oldham, “New Light on Mansfield and Slavery,” The Journal of British Studies 27, no. 1 (1988): 45–68 and Henry Home Lord Kames, Principles of Equity, edited by Michael Lobban, (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2014), 16-17.
[xxviii] James Oldham, “Insurance Litigation Involving the Zong and Other British Slave Ships, 1780-1807.” Journal of Legal History 28, no. 3 (2007): 299–318.
[xxix] Rediker, The Slave Ship, 68.
[xxx] Davis, Problem of Slavery, 119.
[xxxi] Christer Petley, “Gluttony, Excess and the Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean,” Atlantic Studies 9, no. 1 (January 2012): 85–106.
[xxxii] Davis, Problem of Slavery, 67.
[xxxiii] Davis, Problem of Slavery, 65.
[xxxiv] Marjoleine Kars, Blood on the River: a Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast (New York: The New Press, 2020).
[xxxv] “Stono Rebellion,” South Carolina Encyclopedia, accessed July 14, 2023, https://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/stono-rebellion/
[xxxvi] Vincent Brown, Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020).
[xxxvii] Wim Klooster, Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 49.
[xxxviii] Julius Sherrard Scott and Marcus Rediker, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution(London: Verso, 2018), 20.
[xxxix] Peter Linebaugh and Marcus. Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2013).
[xl] Klooster, Revolutions, 91.
[xli] Wilson, Common Wind, 16.
[xlii] Trevor Burnard and Kit Candlin, “Sir John Gladstone and the Debate over the Amelioration of Slavery in the British West Indies in the 1820s,” The Journal of British Studies 57, no. 4 (2018), 780.
[xliii] Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: from Burke to Eliot (Washington, D.C: Regnery Pub, 2001)
[xliv] A. J. P. Taylor, The Course of German History: A Survey of the Development of Germany Since 1815 (New York: Putnam, 1979)
[xlv] Dale Tomich, “The Second Slavery and World Capitalism: A Perspective for Historical Inquiry.” International Review of Social History, 63, no. 3 (2018): 477–501.
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