Late in the evening yesterday I was reading the Second Continental Congress's "Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms" (1775) and the first few lines caught my attention:
"If it was possible for men, who exercise their reason to believe, that the divine Author of our existence intended a part of the human race to hold an absolute property in, and an unbounded power over others, marked out by his infinite goodness and wisdom, as the objects of a legal domination never rightfully resistible, however severe and oppressive, the inhabitants of these colonies might at least require from the parliament of Great-Britain some evidence, that this dreadful authority over them, has been granted to that body."
Where the Declaration speaks of holding a human race as absolute property, I could not help but think not of British treatment of American colonists, but of the American colonists' treatment of Africans that had been shackled, imported and sold in America for over a hundred years. It beggars my mind, sitting as I am in the 21st century, that someone could write the above and still own literal slaves at the same time. And yet, of the five men who wrote this Declaration--Benjamin Franklin, John Rutledge, William Livingston, John Jay and Thomas Johnson--every single one bar Livingston owned slaves.
In his oration "Give Me Liberty, or Give Me Death" (1775), Patrick Henry likened the struggle between the colonists and London as one between freedom and slavery:
"The question before the House is one of awful moment to this country. For my own part, I consider it as nothing less than a question of freedom or slavery; and in proportion to the magnitude of the subject ought to be the freedom of the debate."
And yet Henry too was a prolific slave owner, and would remain so his entire life.
All of this inspired the question I am now asking. It seems like it would take an extraordinary amount of cognitive dissonance to write perorations denouncing political slavery in one hand while holding the master's whip in the other. Did the authors of the American Revolution ever directly address this hypocrisy, and was there a movement to apply the rhetoric of the Revolution in service of the emancipation of slaves in their lifetime?
Revised answer.
While the aforementioned gentlemen were appointed to draft the document, it's authorship largely rests on two other gentlemen appointed to the committee after the others found themselves preoccupied. Thomas Jefferson took his first stab at bona fide ‘Declaration creation’ with this document. Issued on July 6, 1775 by the Second Continental Congress, this declaration presaged in some ways the Declaration that the same Congress would proclaim on July 4, 1776. Credit for this declaration’s more temperate final version is given to John Dickenson, though he included a considerable amount from Jefferson’s original and more rabble-rousing draft — an opening salvo of sorts against what the colonists felt was British Parliament’s illegal undertaking to assume full jurisdiction over the colonies. While Dickenson, Jefferson’s foil, claims that only the last four paragraphs can rightfully be described as Jefferson’s handiwork, the highly respected Jefferson scholar Julian Boyd differs, and believes far more of the document is imbued with Jefferson’s writing and thinking.
You can find similar statements in Jefferson's next declaration a year later. A committee of five charged with drafting the Declaration of Independence included John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman. The committee was quickly reduced to what Franklin referred to as the majority of three as Livingston and Sherman we're not in Philadelphia at the time. Of the three, the original rough draft of the declaration was the work of Jefferson alone, which includes the following within the list of grievances,
"he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another."¹
This passage laid the guilt of Colonial slavery upon it's British founders and hints at American's willingness to ride themselves of it. The paragraph however was eliminated in committee to galvanize unity, especially with the southern colonies like South Carolina. This was not Jefferson's first time to condemn slavery either for his first actions in public office as a young Burgess were to introduce legislation for manumission², and to second a motion by Richard Bland to introduce a bill which extended legal protections to slaves.³ The following summer a mixed-race man from Virginia, Samuel Howell, brought suit against his master to be freed from indentured servitude. His pro bono lawyer was future president Thomas Jefferson. Known as Howell v. Netherland, during which his arguments written six years before the Declaration of Independence echoed his sentiments on slavery, the brief includes the following statement:
“All men are born free and everyone comes into the world with a right to his own person and using it at his own will. This is what is called personal liberty, and is given him by the author of nature, because it is necessary for his own sustenance.”
Jefferson would use this idea to better effect in 1776; in this case, no one even got the chance to hear it. The judge immediately decided against Howell, cutting Jefferson off in midsentence. (Howell later solved his own problem by running away, aided with money given him by Jefferson.)⁴