Originally posted by ScottEmerson:
Which northern states had slaves? Where is your documentation that the north was allowed to keep slaves?
EMANCIPATION in the NORTH
The American Revolution was the death knell of Northern slavery. The rhetoric of the rebels, based on the Enlightenment doctrine of "natural rights," immediately ran into the hypocrisy of a slave-owning people crying out for freedom. "To contend for liberty and to deny that blessing to others," John Jay wrote, "involves an inconsistency not to be excused." Nathaniel Niles put it succinctly: "For shame, let us either cease to enslave our fellow-men, or else let us cease to complain of those that would enslave us." James Otis found another thread in the argument when he wrote, "It is a clear truth that those who every day barter away other mens liberty, will soon care little for their own." ["The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved"]
Britain had a large financial stake in the slave trade, so New England resistance to slave importation in the years leading up to the Revolution could express anti-Crown sentiment. As so often happened, morality and economic self-interest flowed the same way, so it is difficult to discern them. It was probably not a coincidence that Massachusetts, where resistance to British authority was greatest, was also the hotbed of agitation against the slave trade. Dr. Jeremy Belknap of Boston recalled that few in the colony had spoken publicly against slavery "till we began to feel the weight of oppression from 'our mother country.' "
There was a religious component to the move toward emancipation in the North. Quakers came later to abolition than many people realize. Not until 1758 did Philadelphia Yearly Meeting condemn not only the slave trade, but slavery itself. Still, the Society of Friends was the most visible of the anti-slavery sects, though somewhat marginalized during the Revolution because many had been Loyalists. They brought varying degrees of pressure to bear in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island. Presbyterians in Pennsylvania and Methodists in the Chesapeake region also preached against slavery.
But the heaviest blow was dealt by the war itself, which was waged for five years all across the North. Both sides competed for the slaves, and whichever side he joined, a slave was likely to end up free. The British offer of liberty to escaped slaves drew in thousands of them. "By the invasion of this state, and the possession the enemy obtained of this city, and neighborhood," George Bryan of Philadelphia wrote in 1779, "[a] great part of the slaves hereabouts, were enticed away by the British army." The large slave populations of Philadelphia and New York were permanently reduced. When the British and the American Loyalists pulled out of New York at the end of the war, some 3,000 blacks left with them. "The number of runaways rose so sharply after 1775 that there can be no doubt that the machinery of control no longer functioned effectively."[1]
The Northern colonies, too, began to offer their slaves manumission or freedom in exchange for military service. Usually this came with some reimbursement to the owner (in 1782 in New York, 500 acres to a master for every slave who enlisted for three years with the master's consent). In the American Revolution, some 5,000 blacks, mostly from the North, fought on the American side. But likely many more went over to the British. The black population of Massachusetts declined in actual numbers during the Revolutionary years, and its ratio to the white population fell from 1:45 in 1763 to 1:80 in 1784. In Rhode Island, the black-to-white ratio had been 1:14 in 1749; in 1783 it was 1:22. In the 15 years after 1771, the white population of New York grew by about 50 percent, but the black population fell by 5 percent.
The result of this convergence of forces was that, between 1777 and 1804, the Northern colonies and states, one by one, set their slaves free. There was a good deal of anti-slavery rhetoric in the early days of the Revolution in the form of petitions and non-binding resolutions. In the North, a few of the former colonies even barred the importing of slaves. But only Vermont, where slavery was practically non-existent, went so far as to ban it outright in 1777. The war came first, most of the Northern leaders decided, and anything that could upset the struggle ought to be, in the words of the New Hampshire legislature in 1780 putting off a petition for freedom from the state's slaves, "postponed till a more convenient opportunity."
Northern slaves, more often than those of the colonial South or other parts of the Americas, had filled skilled positions, working as artisans, especially in the cities. They appear as bakers, tailors, weavers, goldsmiths, and woodcut illustrators. Such status allowed them a certain power to negotiate with their masters, and win certain protections. It also earned them the jealousy of white workers, who petitioned relentlessly against slave competition in Boston from 1660, New York from 1686, and Philadelphia from 1707. But with the end of slavery, the white workers who had sought these jobs for generations soon swept them clean of black incumbents. The freed slaves were excluded from the occupations that would have allowed them to make something of their freedom.
Considering New York, historian Edgar McManus writes, "Upper-class whites were motivated by idealism, and their attitude toward the Negro was philanthropic and paternalistic. Members of the upper class supported Negro charities and schools much more generously than they supported organizations assisting poor whites." This idealism, however, "had no counterpart in the lower classes, among whom could be found neither sympathy for the Negro nor understanding of his problems. From its inception, slavery had been detrimental to the working class. On the one hand, the slave system excluded whites from jobs pre-empted by slaves; on the other, it often degraded them socially to the level of the slaves with whom they had to work and compete in earning a livelihood. Many whites prefered chauvinistic idleness to employment which had come to be identified with slavery. ... Whites of the working class hated slavery as an institution, but they also feared the free Negro as an economic competitor. They supported emancipation not to raise the Negro to a better life but to destroy a system which gave him a fixed place in the economy."[2]
"Emancipation in some ways strengthened the tyranny of race by imposing on blacks new forms of subordination that better served the economic interests of the whites," writes McManus, the historian of Northern slavery. "The historical reality of race relations in the Americas is that whites have never altered their institutions primarily for the benefit of blacks."[3]
Northern prejudice, and the inability of those states to assimilate their former slaves, certainly discouraged efforts toward freeing the slaves in the South. Having inadvertently freed the slaves in the state, the Massachusetts legislature voted to bar interracial marriages and expell all blacks who were not citizens. Boston authorities took action against 240 of them in 1800, most natives of Rhode Island, New York, Philadelphia, and the West Indies. White Philadelphians were rioting against blacks from 1805, driving them from the Fourth of July celebrations on Independence Square. Within a decade, the burning of black churches in the city had begun.
A Virginia judge, observing the North in 1795, wrote, "If in Massachusetts, where the numbers are comparatively very small, this prejudice be discernable, how much stronger may it be imagined in this country ...?"[4]
McManus finds that "abolitionists of the 1780's belonged to the business elite which thirty years before had reaped handsome profits from the slave trade. The precipitous decline of the trade after 1770 apparently sharpened the moral sensibilities of those who had formerly profited. ... The leaders of the abolition movement were honorable men who sincerely regarded slavery as a great moral wrong. But it is also true that they embraced antislavery at a time when it entailed no economic hardship for their class."
Benjamin Rush and the Rev. Francis Allison were among Pennsylvania's prominent, outspoken abolitionists who owned slaves during most of their public careers. In 1785, Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and 30 other New Yorkers formed the Society for Manumission of Slaves. Hamilton, as chair of the Ways and Means Committee, reported a resolution that members begin the work by freeing their own slaves. The resolution failed. Prominent critics of slavery who had difficulty freeing their own slaves sent mixed signals to the South. "
n the manner northern state governments dealt with the abolition of slavery, the South witnessed the central difficulty besetting the revolutionary generation -- how to put into practice beliefs that could be implemented only at personal cost."[5]
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1. McManus, Edgar J., Black Bondage in the North, Syracuse Univ. Press, 1973, p.154.
2. McManus, A History of Negro Slavery in New York, Syracuse Univ. Press, 1966, p.182-3.
3. McManus, op. cit., p.197.
4. Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961, p.15.
5. Gary B. Nash, Race and Revolution, Madison House, 1990, p.31.
--www.etymonline.com/cw/northabol1.htm
God save the South!
, I have posted the following link several times in similar threads.
