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Ryan Reynolds
Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same Premium Wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do@mintmobile.com
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Martin
See full terms@mintmobile.com history as it happens it's April 14, 1775, five days before the Battles of Lexington and Concord, and there's a small gathering inside the Sun Tavern in Philadelphia. As Sean Wilentz writes in no Property in Man, organized anti slavery politics originated in America. On that day in April 1775, ten Philadelphians, seven of them Quakers, found, founded the first anti slavery society in world history. The group disbanded during the war, but in 1784 the Revolution won. It reorganized as the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, and by the end of 1790 at least seven more statewide anti slavery societies had appeared from Rhode island to as far south as Virginia. When the Federal Convention met in Philadelphia in 1787, Wilentz writes five northern states as well as the Republic of Vermont. It either effectively banned slavery outright or passed gradual emancipation laws, commencing the largest emancipation of its kind to that point in modern history. This is the sixth installment in my America 250 series. The semi quincentennial is less than two weeks away and this episode's about an underappreciated aspect of the American Revolution, a war fought for fundamental human rights as articulated in the Declaration of Independence. I mean, everyone knows the names Washington and Jefferson, but what about the early abolitionist Anthony Benezet? Or Mum Bett? Or Kwok Walker? Or Samuel Hopkins? Sean Wilentz teaches history at Princeton University. He is one of the great historians in our country, the the author of the aforementioned no Property in Man and the Rise of American Democracy, and he's now writing a book about this subject. Sean Wallent, welcome back to the podcast. It has been too long.
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Sean Wilentz
Been too long. Great to be here.
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Martin
Mark America 250 on the way. Before we get to that, I want to ask you to share your thoughts on Gordon Wood.
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Sean Wilentz
Yes, Gordon Wood. So a great loss, if any. There was an untimely death of a 92 year old. It was Gordon because he was very much active out there. I Just did a gig at the New York Public Library with Daniel Allen, who's got a new book out. And the very first blurb is from, is from Gordon talking about how wonderful the book is. Look, he was one of the great historians ever of the United States, certainly the premier historian of the year of the American Revolution for a long time. And he was still going strong. You know, sometimes when, when senior scholars pass on, when they die, that's, you know, you want to honor everything they've done. What I'm missing is all the stuff that Gordon was still going to do that we're going to miss out on. So. And he was also a great, what should we say? He stood up at various times in recent years, not only saw the 1619, but a bunch of stuff with great fortitude and knowing more in his little finger than most of his adversaries will ever know forever. For all of these reasons, it's a, it's a terrible blow. And I, and I mourn his death.
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Martin
And we'll get to some of those issues because they do concern what we're going to discuss here about anti slavery in the American Revolution. But one other question about Gordon. How did he influence your work?
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Commercial Announcer
Gordon?
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Sean Wilentz
Well, I mean, look, you couldn't have come up when I came up in the 1970s, 1980s, for that first reading Creation of the American Republic. And it was, you know, it was an astounding piece of work. It rearranged our whole way of thinking of where American Revolution came from, what its ideas were, especially in terms of political theory and political ideas and the Constitution as well. It was the great book of that period. And then he writes radicalism, which reclaimed, I mean, in funny ways, Creation ends on a kind of Thermidorian note in the sense that the Constitution kind of undid a lot of what the revolution was about. But with radicalism, you really got the sense of his reclaiming what a previous generation had denied, which was the radicalism of the Revolution. For a long time, historians were saying that he revolution was essentially a conservative affair, that it was trying to conserve English liberties taken away from them, that it was not really a social revolution or any shape, manner of form. Gordon said that it was a social revolution, not a social revolution like the French Revolution, not a social revolution the way that some people thought about it, but that it was a transformative event in the history of the Western world in terms of overthrowing ideas about monarchy and aristocracy that had been around forever. So in terms of my work, I came in from a different angle than Gordon. Gordon was, you know, was mostly interested in what was going on at the top in politics. And when I started out, I was interested more in what was going on towards at a different level in politics. At first it didn't have as much to do with my specific work as it did with my general view of things. But then when radicalism came out and I started working more at the, at a different level of studying American politics, you know, it kind of conjoined much more. We didn't agree about everything, but we agreed about a lot.
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Martin
The Rise of American Democracy by one Sean Wilentz. It is my favorite American history book. It totally changed the way I think about democracy.
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Ryan Reynolds
Wow.
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Sean Wilentz
Well, that's strong praise coming from you, Martin. And. But, you know, but I got more to do too. So, you know, am I allowed to ask 25 years ago, let's keep going.
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Martin
Am I allowed to ask about the next book? You know, C SPAN just did an hour long special with Robert Caro. That was great. One of the first questions the reporter got out of the way so they can get on the interview was asking Robert Carroll when the final volume of the LBJ series will be out. There was no answer forthcoming. Sean Wilentz, you're working on this. Great.
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Sean Wilentz
Oh, I'm a little bit different than Bob Carroll. You never promised to do something and then, you know, and then take a long time to do it, which he promised a long time ago. I never promised to write this volume, but I now, I suppose I'm stuck with it. I'm trying to finish it off this year, the year off, to do it. And I'm well into it. It's called the Fall of American Slavery into the companion volume to the Rise of American Democracy. You know, it's the story of how slavery in this country, but then of course, elsewhere, but mostly in this country, went from being a institution that was taken for granted, that was implanted by the Stewart monarchy, in particular, how it, how it came undone on the course of US 150 years.
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Martin
Do Americans know this story well enough? Why don't they know this story? Why?
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Commercial Announcer
Why?
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Sean Wilentz
Most studies, the American Revolution didn't talk about slavery very much for a very long time. You know, it was, it was a familiar story or unfamiliar story, but the characters tended to be the same no matter what you thought about them. And it was the, you know, the founders and the revolutionaries and the patriots and it was Sam Adams and was all that stuff. Slavery was kind of put to the side. And then of course, when slavery studies recommenced or took a different direction. Rather, in starting in the 50s and 60s, there was a great you and cry about why the revolution didn't do more about slavery than it, some people thought it could have done. How could you have a revolution that was predicated in the idea that all men are created equal and still have slavery persist? So slavery was thought of as a great contradiction. And indeed many said that slavery, the continuation of slavery, was the revolution's darkest legacy. And then some have said in fact more recently that the American Revolution was essentially pro slavery. So it's taken time for those two things to catch up with each other. In other words, to see how the radicalism of the American Revolution in fact included the, the beginnings of the first anti slavery political movement in the history of the world. It wasn't the same thing as the American Revolutionary cause by any means. It was hand in hand with it.
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Martin
We'll get to slavery's place during the war on all sides of the conflict. Patriots, Tories, the British. We'll get to that in a minute. I mean you write here on page 25 of no Property in Man. Organized anti slavery politics. Again, organized anti slavery politics. You don't say anti slavery sentiment or attitudes. Organized politics originated in America. In 1775, five days before Lexington and Concord, 10 Philadelphians, seven of them Quakers, founded the first anti slavery society in world history, the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage. I heard they had trouble fitting all that on a, on a business card. But let's talk though, let's wind the clock back just a little bit. Before the Revolutionary War, if there weren't a politics, what would you call it? Criticisms of slavery. Who were these people? What was it?
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Sean Wilentz
Well, there actually were politics beforehand, but not in that sense of there being an organized society or something that was the first of its kind in the modern history, as far as I know, certainly in the history of the Atlantic world. But there were politics going on. I mean, back up even further. I mean there were politics inside the Quaker connection going back to the 1680s. And there were attempts, fitful attempts by Quaker abolitionists to get at least the Quaker connection to drop its association with slavery, which in fact succeeded. It took a while. There are important moments in that history. In 1758 there was an important decision by the Philadelphia yearly meeting. By 1776, Quakers have denied, have broken their connection with slavery. There you cannot be a good Quaker and be a slaveholder at the same time. So in that very narrow but nevertheless influential, important stream, there was antislavery politics of a kind going on. People like John Woolman, Anthony Benezet, somewhat later on were spreading ideas, but were getting into action as well, at least within the Quaker connection. By the time we get to the 1760s, there actually is, within the colonial assembly in Massachusetts in particular, there was debate over the getting rid of slavery altogether. There were petitions being delivered by actually by enslaved people in Boston in 1773, 74, even before the Revolution breaks out. So there's a kind of politics, but it doesn't get as much notice and think because it is, it's restricted to particular colonies as it would have had to have been in this period. There's also agitation against the slave trade, and that is much more colony wide. Most of the colonies come up with petitions, one kind or another, petitioning the Crown to end the slave trade. And of course the Crown denies that because the Crown thinks the slave trade just great. So I don't want to make it sound as if there isn't activity and political activity. There is political activity before the Revolution, but there's something that happens in 1775 which is going to take it in a different direction.
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Martin
What's inspiring this early activity? Is it Enlightenment philosophy? Is it religious belief?
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Sean Wilentz
Both all, you know, the Quakers obviously have the reputation justly for having been in the vanguard of all of that. You know, we can go back even further if you want to, and maybe I should. In 1652, the very first abolitionist ordinance in the Atlantic world is passed in Providence, Rhode Island. Providence Plantation, overseen by a man named Samuel Gorton. Gorton, who was an English revolutionary who came over, a very radical guy, very radical, egalitarian. And a lot of these ideas are actually being debated inside the English revolution in the 1640s and 1650s, you know, because after all, slavery was a monarchical institution. It's only going to become more so after the overthrow of Cromwell and the beginnings of the commencement of the Stuart monarchy. There's lots going on in terms of ideas and even political efforts. Now, that ordinance in Providence lasted all of about six months, and Rhode island is going to become the biggest slave trading colony in British North America. So there's irony to all of that. And it doesn't happen all of a sudden by any means, but you know, there are these efforts. You can see it there fairly early on, much earlier on than I think most Americans understand. That said, the religious strain in Gordon's case, he was an English radical of no particular connection. He was a religious radical, but he wasn't a Quaker or anything. The Quakers come out of the radicalism of the English Revolution. They toned themselves down somewhat in the 1670s after the, you know, after the Restoration. But nevertheless the anti slavery strain is there. And then it really takes off in the, in the American colonies, first in the 1680s. So there's a religious aspect to that. The Quakers believe that the inward light dictates that, you know, no person can own another person. It is simply man stealing and it is blasphemous and it is, you know, something that they cannot sustain on religious terms. And it has a very heavy religious aspect to it.
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Martin
Yeah, I remember reading Bartolome Las Casas, if I'm getting his name right, during the time.
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Sean Wilentz
Well, that's right. I mean there are, even before the Quakers, you know, Las Casas, there are all these objections to slavery. Although Las Casas thought it was just fine to enslave American Indians and, and not bring the Africans over. You can find bits and pieces, you know, going back a long way.
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Martin
Yeah, I mean these ideas do not originate with Thomas Jefferson's pen. Speaking of Gordon Wood, you know, I just happened to watch a talk he gave on YouTube last year because I did an episode about Gordon. So I was watching some of his recent talks and he mentioned how Jefferson, his ideas were not original in the Declaration, of course, but he was writing what had been conventional wisdom about Lockean natural rights. But you know, there's a difference between criticizing slavery but not attacking the right to own slaves. There were critics like this who thought that slaves should just be treated better. The Quakers were different. Right. They said that there's no good way to own a slave.
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Commercial Announcer
Right?
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Sean Wilentz
Correct. That's correct. You cannot have property in other human beings. That property rights do not extend that far. You go back to John Locke and Locke has very complicated ideas about slavery. He doesn't like slavery, although people think that he did. But once you get to the idea of natural rights in that sense and the egalitarianism of natural rights, it will come into conflict. Rights to property, and this is always a problem for a lot of the so called natural rights theorists about slavery is because you have, these things are in conflict. How can you have secure rights of property at the same time be anti slavery? Because slavery is a form of property that was, you know, what should we say? It was legal at one point. How can you suddenly declare it to be illegal at another point? And that was something that people who didn't like slavery very much had to contest with. There were a lot of other issues as well. I mean, how do you end this institution that's based on violence so suddenly, not expect there to be violence in return? And there's a lot of reasons why people hedge on all of this. It isn't simply a matter of self interest.
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Martin
You know, though, no right is absolute. So yes, I have a right to own property, but it's not an absol. So maybe that's that. One way they attacked when it became
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Sean Wilentz
was whether property in human beings is legitimate or not. It's not a question of the extent of property rights. The question is what is property? And that's really the heart of the matter. You know, sure, you have eminent domain, you have all sorts of ways in which governments can interfere with property rights. Yeah, that's all true, but the nub of the matter is whether you can have any kind of, either on Christian terms or on enlightened terms, whether there is any legitimacy to one person owning another person. And that was the nub of the issue throughout. And the defenses of slavery very much depended upon the property question. They said, look, state voters said, this is our property. How can you take away our property? People who were opposed to them said, well, no, you may think it's your property, but that property is illegitimate, so you cannot continue.
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Martin
It's important that we're going over this because to anyone listening today, well, I shouldn't say anyone, because you never know. But to any sane, decent person today, the idea of owning another person is of course unthinkable, not for most of the human experience.
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Sean Wilentz
Well, there are various kinds of slavery, to be sure. And that kind of domination is, you know, goes back millennia. This is what's so extraordinary about the book. I think the subject of what I'm writing about, which is that slavery was an institution that in one form or another had existed for millennia, including in the classical republics, which is one of the reasons why some of the pro slavery people were able to square, you know, American republicanism with slavery in that stage. Say, well, look, look at Rome, look at the Roman, look at the Greek, you know, all of that, the fact
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Martin
that this has been around for millennia and now it's being challenged all of
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Sean Wilentz
a sudden in the twinkling of Cleo's eye. I mean, you go from a place where slavery is accepted pretty much as a natural state of affairs inside of what should we say, 100 years, 200 years. It goes from being perfectly natural to being, in many people's eyes, perfectly unnatural. In historical terms, that's really quite extraordinary. It's a moral revolution, if you will, a political Revolution, a legal revolution, but also essentially a moral revolution, to my mind, is one of the most extraordinary things in all of history.
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Martin
So how does the American Revolution trigger this sounds like an obvious question, but
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Sean Wilentz
the most obvious thing is that, you know, how can you be fighting for the Declaration of Independence and countenance slavery? And there were some who said you could, but there are many who said you couldn't. In the lead up to the Revolution, there were those like James Otis in Boston and others who were already making this point. They were not yet at the point of declaring American independence, but they nevertheless were fighting against what they thought of as British oppression of one kind or another. And they took the next logical step, which is to say that we cannot talk about attaining our freedom without looking to the freedom that we are denying the enslaved. And by the way, and also not just those people, James Otis and others, but also the enslaved. I mean, as I said, there were these petitions that were coming out as early as the 1770s, before Lexington and Concord. There was a man named Felix Holcomb in Boston who got a bunch of his people to sign petitions to the royal government, to the royal governor in Massachusetts demanding something be done. They were very deferential in many ways, but in some ways they were not. And that strain continues, too, of free blacks and enslaved people also demanding their freedom, saying, in effect, we support the American Revolution. It's all fine, but you have to take the next step as well. That whole strain is something that I think Americans know very little about and they ought to know more about.
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Martin
Yeah, I mean, to relate to this, we might want to think of any major issue today where moral suasion. Because this begins with moral suasion. Right. Where moral suasion doesn't work. And you're vexed, you're frustrated, you're trying to explain to somebody, to see the light, how can you possibly defend this position? It's immoral, and they just don't want to see it your way. So that was a tough task, dealing with an institution such as slavery that had been around for so long.
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Sean Wilentz
Well, it depended, though, Martin, about what you thought the political possibilities were. If you saw politics as so blocked that it was impossible to imagine that legislators would actually get rid of slavery, which, you know, was not always the case place. But when politics seemed blocked, then the only recourse that you had was to try to persuade others, through the churches in particular, to point out the contradiction, you know, between Christ's message, let alone Jefferson's message, and the institution of slavery.
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Martin
And you Might get an individual, sorry to interject, you might get an individual slaveholder to free his slaves on his own, but you still need the politics right, to get at the base of the institution itself.
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Sean Wilentz
There's a difference between manumission and abolition. You know, you can see manumission as being a step towards abolition that the more slaveholders persuaded through moral suasion or what have you, maybe even economics, to give up on owning their slaves, that would be a step towards making that possible. And in some parts of the country that was important. In 1782 Virginia passes a very much more liberalized manumission law. That some people thought it was a big step towards abolition turned out not to be the case. That's a whole other story. But there's a fundamental difference, yes. Between making it more possible for people to free the enslaved and abolishing slavery altogether. They're two different propositions.
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Martin
Sure. I found this excellent article at AllThingsLiberty.com on anti slavery politics and the initial attack on the slave trade. The article cites a historian we all know, David Bryan Davis. He wrote by the eve of the American Revolution there was a remarkable convergence of cultural and intellectual developments which at once undercut traditional rationalizations for slavery and offered new modes of sensibility for identifying with its victims. New modes of sensibility, well that comes
- [20:01]
Sean Wilentz
from the Enlightenment as well. You know, it's not simply about rationality, it's also about understanding that. Well it goes back to the Golden Rule in some ways which is religious in doing to others as you do unto you. Well, you cannot do unto others and be a Christian, a good Christian, and at the same time enslave them. And you begin to identify in ways that Professor Davis, who indeed was my doctoral advisor, pointed out a new sense of sympathy, of empathy for the slaves that went beyond anything that had happened before. So it's not simply about protecting your own self interest, but it's understanding that the, the interests of humanity are at stake here as well.
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Martin
It's an amazing thing history, how something that could be around for centuries or millennia, but in, in this context, human chattel slavery, race based human chattel slavery in the British colonies was around for a while and now suddenly this thing that had been there for so long just seems to old antiquated. Just to cite this article, this process of anti slavery was advanced by increasing capitalism. As free labor became more common, other labor means, indentured servitude, debt, bondage and slavery came increasingly to appear antiquated and anomalous. So do you agree with that there's a linkage between the rise of capitalism and the end of slavery or the
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Sean Wilentz
sort of, sort of. But I think it's, I think actually David overstated that because a lot of the anti slavery activity is hardly pro capitalist. It's coming from below. It's coming from people who have, you know, who actually don't like, go all the way back to a guy named Benjamin Lay, a dwarf vegetarian agitator in the 1730s. They're not pro capitalist by any means. They are for free labor, but that's not the same thing as capitalism. They don't think that people should be enslaved to others. People should be freed to do their own, make their own independent way in the world. I think of slavery as essentially a monarchical institution rather than anything else. There are two great revolutions that are going on. One is the anti monarchical others the anti slavery. And insofar as slavery is essentially a monarchical institution, it's going to raise all kinds of questions in people's minds about its legitimacy once the anti monarchical revolution gets started. That's a complicated matter, but I see things much more in that light rather than in terms of capitalism and free labor. This is a big argument that historians have all the time. And I don't want to, you know, I don't think you have the time today to go through that entire debate. There are those to be sure, that you can see as protocols, whatever. But I don't see, see that that connection explains as much about the moral revolution that you're talking about as some people think.
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Martin
Sure, anti slavery is the natural position to be in when you're fighting a revolution based on natural rights, getting rid of monarchy. However, we know of course, that many, many, many, many colonists had no intention of ending slavery. They wanted to grow the institution. We have to.
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Sean Wilentz
Some people did. Again, I'm more skeptical of that than others. I mean, I think most people, certainly in South Carolina and Georgia, they had no intention whatsoever of affecting slavery. They wanted to keep slavery. That slavery was perfectly compatible with the idea of the Declaration as long as you didn't include African slaves as being created equal. However, you know what you do see steadily, particularly northern New England at first, but then more gradually, but then in the middle colonies as well. A realization that you cannot have these two things together. And it is not for nothing that the very first abolition laws, you know, in the Atlantic world and legislatively, I think possibly even in the history of, of all humanity, come out of Pennsylvania and then they come out of Connecticut and they come out of Rhode Island. They are not immediate emancipation laws. To be sure. That wasn't in the cards by any means, but nevertheless, something is happening in the United States or what's going to become the United States. That is really quite extraordinary.
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Martin
I want to get to the Northern emancipation in a bit, but finish your point.
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Sean Wilentz
Well, my point is simply that if you were standing in 1760, you would imagine that as much would be done in terms of anti slavery by 1790 as actually happened, quite apart from the achievement of American independence. You would have been astounded. You know, Anthony Benezette is struggling to get this together in 1760 or so. He's a great Philadelphia Huguenot emigre abolitionist who's kind of the one man band in some ways, but he gets people connected all across the Atlantic world to oppose slavery. You know, if you had told him that by 1780 the place that he was living, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania would have passed a gradual emancipation law, he would have been very happy, but he would have been somewhat surprised. This all happened really quite rapidly. I think. It's more interesting to me in fact that there was as much anti slavery in the American colonies as there was pro slavery. Given what we talked about before the suddenness with which slavery suddenly becomes illegitimate. That is the unusual thing, not the fact that America tolerates slavery and keeps it going for a very long time. To me the anti slavery revolution is much more impressive.
- [24:42]
Martin
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- [25:00]
Ryan Reynolds
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- [25:59]
Martin
We'll get to your essay you wrote in the New England Quarterly A couple of years ago, the radicalism of northern abolition to talk about why it was so important the slave trade in the 1770s. How important is the transatlantic slave trade to the maintenance, the continuation of slavery in the colonies?
- [26:16]
Sean Wilentz
The colonists don't want to have the slave trade anymore. In fact they get rid of it in 1774 when they finally begin the move towards independence. As part of the anti importation business with Britain they suspend importation of slaves as part of everything else, as part of the grand boycott. So there's a great deal of resistance in the slave trade. Not in South Carolina, not in Georgia, but even in Virginia. Virginia petitions the crown to stop the slave trade. Why? Because a they don't they think they have enough enslaved people anyway and they think it's not always humanitarian reason bringing more Africans over is increase the likelihood of insurrection. So there's that reason. But there are those who also say that the slave trade is the most beastly aspect of the institution of slavery. The kidnapping of untold millions of Africans and bringing them across in the way that they did, to suffer in the way they did, only to be sold off to the highest bitter that this was something that they could not stomach. Even people who could abide slavery cannot abide the slave trade. So the feeling was that we have enough enslaved people here already. We don't need the slave trade anymore. And so you do get these petitions and the colonies really want to try to end it. There is opposition within the United among the colonists to be sure, is by no means uniform. The reason it doesn't get stopped primarily is because the British crown doesn't think it's a very good idea.
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Martin
I mentioned this article before@allthings liberty.com it was written by Christian McBurney. He says here in the course of four centuries, British merchants carried an astounding number of Africans across the Atlantic estimated at 3.2 million. You mentioned Samuel Hopkins I believe before, who is a congregationalist minister. Yeah. He and his fellow anti slavery people thought the first thing or one of the first things they should go after was the slave trade itself.
- [27:57]
Sean Wilentz
Yeah, I mean look, it's not for nothing that the slave trade is ended in 1807, 1808 in the United States, as it is in Britain, decades before slavery itself. There was a feeling, there was a feeling among some that if you managed to halt the slave trade that slavery would follow. And in some of the colonies indeed that made sense. And well, let me back up again. I mean understand that the vast majority of the British imports, if that's the right word of enslaved Africans was being sent not to the British North American colonies, but to the West Indies. Then again, Brazil was the great recipient of large numbers of enslaved Africans. So by comparison, the numbers that are coming to British North America are fairly small.
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Martin
And the Portuguese.
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Sean Wilentz
That's not any way to exonerate what's going on in North America. Simply to say that the. The balance of the trade was going elsewhere and Britain was after, especially after 1712 or so, was the great slave trading nation on earth. No question about it. They were making a lot of money. Individual slave traders were making a lot of money off of that. And it was a very powerful interest. But in terms of. Yes, many people thought that if you ended the slave trade, that slavery would follow. Now, that turned out to be not true. I mean, as it happens in history, things unintended consequences, but also unforeseen event, events will change the nature of things. So that the United States ended the slave trade with Africa, the transatlantic slave trade, and there's still smuggling going on. I don't want to make a sound as if it all ended, but the law ended the slave trade in 1808. And yet, as we know, slavery only flourished in the southern United States. Thereafter, that could not be foreseen, in part because the Cotton Revolution wasn't foreseen and what some Estonians call the second slavery, that slavery was kind of reinvented towards the end of the 18th century was going to mean that simply ending the slave trade itself was not going to be slavery's death. Now, certainly not in the United States.
- [29:41]
Ryan Reynolds
No.
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Martin
There were, what, 4 million slaves by the eve of the Civil War in a country of roughly 30 million people. So it's understandable why so many abolitionists, such as William Lloyd Garrison, got so frustrated with the political system, he burned a facsimile of the Constitution. We've talked about Garrison in the past. So during the Revolutionary War itself, this is where there's been so much confusion lately, caused in large part by the 1619 Project's erroneous claim, tendentious claim that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery. So I know that we've discussed this before. I don't really want to have to re litigate this all over again, but I think it's important because not everyone, you know, listens to every episode. And this is still out there. You can still see this out there.
- [30:26]
Sean Wilentz
Yeah.
- [30:27]
Martin
In Virginia, the Dunmore Proclamation, that was done to try to restore order in a colony that had already gone the way of revolution is that your position?
- [30:36]
Sean Wilentz
Correct.
- [30:36]
Martin
Did any significant number of colonists change sides or get off the fence and go to the revolutionary side, the patriot cause, because of Dunmore?
- [30:45]
Sean Wilentz
It might have been some. There's some evidence that people are so angry at the British for having done this that they switched their allegiances or they became more in favor of independence. They might have been, they might have been on the fence about independence. There's some evidence about that, but that doesn't mean that they're fighting the revolution in order to preserve slavery. And there was no question that what Dunmore was doing had nothing to do with abolishing slavery. There was a military aspect. You freely enslaved in order to get at the people that you want to get at. Who, in the case of the, in Virginia, were the Virginia patriots to try? It's a last ditch effort to try to turn things around. You're going to tell all of the enslaved people of patriots, not of Loyalists, Loyalists could keep their slaves, but of patriots that you were going to free them and they were going to turn against you. You now, it worked up to an extent. I mean, look, if you're an enslaved person in Virginia and someone's offering you freedom, you're going to take advantage of it, no matter who it is. Dunmore elicit his Ethiopian regiment and they fought somewhat disastrously, but, you know, nevertheless they fought. But the idea that this had anything to do with the future of slavery itself as an institution is preposterous. You know, it was a military, very cynical military move on the part of the British who were in desperate shape. I mean, look, this point, Lord Dunmore is no longer. He's on a boat outside of Norfolk trying to run the, the colony and trying to restore order to the colony. This is a desperate move. He'd already started along these lines some months before, but nevertheless, this was his desperate move. Now it ticked a lot of people off and you can find a lot of people saying, this is a horrible thing, we hate the British for doing this, blah, blah. But that is not as if they're trying to preserve slavery. They had no question that slavery was going to continue, at least in the short run. It wasn't that the British were threatening it. There was not much abolitionism in Britain per se anyway, at this point.
- [32:25]
Martin
And in Virginia, Virginia had already revolted.
- [32:29]
Sean Wilentz
Yeah, but Virginia was out of control. That's why desperate steps were taken in order to try to preserve it. You know, it's not as if this was the cause of the Virginia revolt. The Virginia was in revolution already.
- [32:39]
Martin
Yeah, I'VE heard the argument that this is how the Revolutionary War got to the south. That without this the war would never have reached the southern colonies. I don't know if that's right, but I think the British.
- [32:49]
Sean Wilentz
I don't know where you've heard that
- [32:51]
Martin
the British turned to the south because the campaign in the northern colonies, middle colonies failed.
- [32:57]
Sean Wilentz
I understand they went to the south because of Saratoga. They went to the south because, you know, they could not defeat. They were hoping they could use a pincer movement between Canada and New York and they cut the colonies off. New England cut off in the middle colony.
- [33:08]
Ryan Reynolds
It didn't work.
- [33:08]
Sean Wilentz
They lost.
- [33:09]
Martin
And they also thought there'd be more Tories in the South. That didn't turn out to be the case.
- [33:12]
Sean Wilentz
Well, that turned out to. There are a lot of reasons why things turned out in the south the way they did. But it's not as if all of a sudden they wanted to free the slaves. I mean that's crazy. The military history of the Revolution is pretty straightforward about this. The idea that somehow the south wasn't part of the Revolution before 1780, whatever it was, or 1770 rather, whenever, before Saratoga, that's crazy. In my view, when I say insane. I'm not a psychiatrist. I'm not going to stigmatize anybody in quite those long. It's simply at odds with the facts.
- [33:39]
Martin
How did the Revolutionary War leave the institution of slavery?
- [33:44]
Sean Wilentz
The Revolutionary War itself, the fighting ravaged the south. The South, Carolina in particular, New Jersey actually was the so called cockpit of the Revolution. As Ken Burns latest contribution with the American Revolution thing that he did a little while ago showed it was a very, very serious war and wars deranged everything and it certainly deranged the southern economy in many ways. However, look, if you look at from a somewhat broader standpoint, by 1784 three of the, well now new states have passed abolition laws. This is not the case in 1776. By the time we get to 1784, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Rhode island have passed legislatively abolition laws. Slavery is going to be more or less gone. Massachusetts almost immediately by 1783 and then New Hampshire in 1784. Vermont in 1777 had passed the first constitution in modern history which abolished slavery for all adults. In effect, slavery is in retreat in large portions of the colonies by the end of the Revolution. It's not to say that it's over with. It's not to say that these laws are perfect, but it is in retreat. It has not been before. To see that as a sideshow to The Revolution, I think is a mistake. And if you're going to talk about the state of slavery in the revolution, you have to take that into account. So in that sense, you know, slavery is weakened by the Revolution. It is quite true that this Constitution, that the slaveholders at the Constitutional Convention managed to find ways to, you know, reinforce their power or to at least prevent the anti slavery sentiments that were growing up in the north from having a national expression that protect slavery in various ways. But even there they are compromises rather than outright victories. Is slavery stronger than it was? I don't know that. It was stronger in part because some of the things that the south was having to do, the southern delegates are having to do, is in response to northern emancipation.
- [35:29]
Martin
When you say stronger, you mean politically, politically stronger.
- [35:32]
Sean Wilentz
Yeah, I mean look, later on things are going to change. 1793 is a big year. And insofar as the invention of the cotton gin is going to matter in terms of the American experience of the second slavery. The invention of the second slavery, well then things that seem to be in, in place in 1787, 88 were going to be very, very different because you're going to be able to have a cotton revolution. You're going to be able to spread slavery to an extent that was impossible to imagine really at the time of the Constitution. But I'm skeptical of the idea that slavery came out. It's taken, I think as an almost an article of faith that slavery came out of the Revolution stronger than ever before. I don't buy it.
- [36:05]
Martin
As you mentioned, a lot of slaves ran off and were emancipated by the British. A British general in the north did something similar to Dunmore late in the war.
- [36:15]
Sean Wilentz
That's true. No, no, that look at the Clinton rule. But a lot of those enslaved people ended up in Nova Scotia where they were given, you know, terrible. They ended up going to Sierra Leone. I mean, that's true, but it was not exactly a happy occasion. And then the loyalist slaves of course ended up in the West Indies. Indeed, Dunmore himself ends up as the governor of Bermuda overseeing a slavery regime.
- [36:34]
Martin
Wait, I thought he was. I thought he was Abraham Lincoln.
- [36:37]
Sean Wilentz
Yeah, right. Okay, look, the enslaved were looking for whatever chance they got to get freedom. Of course, a much smaller number, but some found their best opportunity by enlisting with the Continentals. With the Americans. Much smaller number to be sure. But that's because the war in the south, most of the enslaved were in the south. And the war in the south is where the disruption occurred. And you're going to run to British lines. Makes sense. That's your best opportunity. But then there are those like Lemuel Haynes. I mean, there are lots and lots of very important black abolitionists who were also patriots during the American Revolution. When I say lots, I'm not talking about hundreds, but I'm talking about some very significant figures. So it's not a one way street in terms of loyalty. The question is, where was your best opportunity?
- [37:19]
Martin
What did you think of the Ken Burns documentary? I thought it was good for what it covered, but it didn't cover much more than the war.
- [37:26]
Sean Wilentz
Yeah, I mean, look, Americans needed to be reminded that the war was a war, that it wasn't a political science seminar about independence, that it wasn't just about a group of, many of them slaveholders sitting around deciding to. To free themselves from the British. And I think for that the series succeeded. There are other things that I would have wished the series could have done. The idea that somehow the American government originated with the Iroquois. I don't, I don't quite buy that argument. But for what it did, I thought it was a useful contribution. By all means, you know, and Ken is a. Is a master filmmaker. I mean, it's extraordinary how we can bring to life things. It's harder with the 18th century, of course, because then the Civil War as a civori. The photographs that you could do, burism, which is to focus in on a detail and get things straight. It's harder, you know, if you're dealing with 18th century paintings and so forth. He had challenges, if nothing else than to remind the American public at the 250th anniversary that what was unleashed was a. A bitter and nasty war. That's fine.
- [38:20]
Martin
I had forgotten a lot of the battles that he covered. So that was interesting. But yeah, it was short on ideas. Jack Rao made that criticism.
- [38:27]
Sean Wilentz
It is short on ideas. Now, look, it didn't do everything I would have liked to have done, but I don't have his talents, so I couldn't have made such a thing. I'm not going to, you know, butt in where I can't butt in. Military history is not exactly in good odor these days with American historians because they think of it as, you know, it's. Social history is all the rage still and cultural history is all the rage. And you wouldn't imagine there was such a thing as a military conflict. And you think of it as, I don't know, pro war or something, which is of course not the case or needn't be the case. So by giving, you know, that story a big injection of military history history, you know, I thought that was a good thing.
- [39:00]
Martin
Yeah. The first history books I ever read were military history.
- [39:04]
Sean Wilentz
John Keegan it's of an unending fascination and I think that the general public actually is more interested in that than the academy is. But in the academy, diplomatic history, political history is still around, has to be, but military history is kind of not thought of as such a big deal as it used to be. And I think that at least in terms of reminding everybody the importance of, of fighting the burns thing did a good job.
- [39:30]
Martin
So politics, activism, coalition building, grassroots movements, protest. At some point you have to get it into politics and then eventually comes down to the business of legislating. And in your essay for the New England Quarterly from March 2023 about the radicalism of northern emancipation or northern abolition, you start off by citing none other than Ira Berlin in your first footnote, who while he did recognize the importance of this so called first emancipation, he also said it was a grudging attack on slavery, delayed emancipation for decades, sometimes generations recognized property in man, confirmed the idea that freedom had to be purchased, shifted the cost of freedom to black people, and in some places provided direct compensation to slaveholders. Northern slavery ending with a whimper. Your article was a refutation of that. The fact that for the first time property and slaves could be outlawed.
- [40:27]
Sean Wilentz
Well, I mean, first of all, let me say that Ira Berlin was a great historian and I mourn his loss and he taught me a great deal. So you know, you stand on the shoulders of giants and he was a giant and I'm standing on his shoulders. However, when you stand on the shoulders, you can see a little bit further than they may have been able to do. Pygmy though I am, look, what gets missing, I think from that is two things. First of all, that it was a political struggle to going on in the northern states. There was a lot of pro slavery sentiment. It's not that the emancipation or the abolition laws were grudging. You know, it was a fight and it was a fight that the people who were the anti slavery people knew that they were going to get the best out of as they could at the time. And they did. So that's number one. And they didn't think of this as the end of anything. They thought of this as the beginning of a struggle. And in Pennsylvania in particular, where the first abolition law is passed in 1780, very quickly both sides, actually the pro slavery side tries to undo the act and the anti slavery Side tries to extend the act and that's going to continue and continue and continue politics. It's not immediate emancipation, but that was going to happen with the Civil War. You cannot judge what happened in the 1780s on the standard of what happened in the 1860s. A completely different situation. Immediate emancipation, immediate abolition was simply not on the cards. Indeed, even gradual abolition was not necessarily on the cards. It took a very prolonged strong fight by the anti slavery people to get that done. That's number one. So what you're looking at, you're trying to impute to the whole what the outcome was, as if the outcome was the entire story. The outcome was the outcome, but it was only a temporary one. It was one that was going to be contested further. But it was one that came about because of politics, as you say, Martin. It was, it was a conflict. And so you have to look at it as a conflict rather than as near beer or as something that is not, you know, what you wanted it to be.
- [42:10]
Martin
The defenders of slavery certainly took it seriously. They saw what was happening.
- [42:14]
Sean Wilentz
They were furious and they were furious at any kind of abolition. And the key to the second point in that article actually is that even though the abolition was going to be gradual, even though those people who were already enslaved are going to remain enslaved, although that doesn't necessarily justify the idea of property in human beings, it simply says that you cannot do that politically right now for those people. Nevertheless, it cut a very fundamental feature or element of the chattel principle, the idea of chattel slavery. Hold off on racial slavery for a second. Just that chattel slavery exists, that the children of slaves, the enslaved are chattel. They are the property of those who are the owners of their mother. Basically that was broken. That idea was broken. Basically it said the children born of enslaved mothers are not going to be enslaved, saved. They're going to be for a variety of reasons. They're going to be indentured servants for a period before they're free. There are lots of things about it that are not so nice. We would like to have been better. But nevertheless, the chattel principle was broken at its weakest link. And that had to do with the status of children. Now you might say, well, that's, you know, not the whole, no, but you begin somewhere and you always begin in its weakest link. And it meant that in fact, in time there were going to be. The children of enslaved people were going to be able to be free. They weren't going to have a great easy life. They weren't all of a Sudden going to be ordinary citizens, many of them, they would not be able to vote, et cetera, et cetera. The women weren't going to be able to vote at all. But nevertheless, coming out of those laws, coming out of those abolitions, was the growth of large and increasingly sophisticated black communities, most famously in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, of formerly enslaved people who were going to become the fulcrum for the abolitionist movement in the early part of the 19th century. Now, this is all part of the radicalism of northern abolition. To diminish that, I think, is to misunderstand the process of abolition nationwide, but certainly in the North. So if you see that that principle was being broken, that in fact, with the passage of many of these laws, slaveholders saw the writing on the wall, they figured out ways. But, okay, we're going to manumit our slaves. Of course, these are the places where slavery was less established. But what do you expect? You expect the slavery is going to fall in South Carolina before it falls in Massachusetts? Come on. That's how things work in the world.
- [44:36]
Martin
Yeah. The Massachusetts constitution had language that echoed the Declaration of Independence. Mum Bet and Quack Walker, two enslaved people citing the Constitution in their state. Again, that was echoing the declarations. Enlightenment. Soaring Enlightenment language about natural rights. They successfully sued for their freedom. So, yeah, the slaveholders were saying, you're using the government coercion. You're outlawing a form of property that had been lawful before. You can't do that.
- [45:04]
Sean Wilentz
Correct.
- [45:04]
Martin
So this was a huge battle. It's a huge battle.
- [45:07]
Sean Wilentz
And outlawing that principle so that the children of enslaved mothers were not property, that denies the property right that people had taken for granted and assumed that it was case. And they yelled about that. They said, this is no different than if you freed all of the enslaved right away. It's the same principle. The government is coming in taking away our property. And by the way, that argument carried a lot of weight with a lot of people who were not involved in slavery particularly. They sort of said, yeah, that's right. Well, how can you take away a person's property? It was property in the old days. How can you make it not property? A lot of people went along with that. It took some convincing. It took a lot of struggle. But eventually, you know, we got there. But to diminish the success of what they did, both in the. As the case in Mumbad and Kwak Walker, the judicial abolitionists, but also the legislative abolitionists, to diminish that, I think, is to turn things upside down. It's to judge the past on the basis of things that happens later, rather than to understand them as a part of a continuum. All history is a history of struggle. Not necessarily class struggle, but struggle. And unless you see that and see that struggles do not proceed instantaneously, there can be setbacks, and there can be advances and so forth. But unless you understand that over any major issue, then you're dealing in a world of moralistic judgment rather than a world of history.
- [46:22]
Martin
And the next episode of History As It Happens will be the next installment of my America 250 series. As we head toward the semi quincentennial, we're going to be joined by HW Brands and he will talk about his new biography of George Washington. That is next. As we report History As It Happens, make sure to sign up for my free newsletter. Just go to substack and search Search for History as It Happens
- [46:49]
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- [47:19]
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