As noted in earlier posts, enslaved Africans were brought to the English colonies in the Americas as early as 1619 (Virginia) and this practice continued and spread throughout the colonies during the 17th Century including places we often think of as free-states, like Massachusetts (earliest slaves in Mass. around 1638).
Senator Tom Cotton recently called slavery a necessary evil in describing conditions in the American colonies. This is an argument that has been made long before the senator's recent comment, as slavery in the colonies is still often attributed to a shortage of necessary labor. In other words, it was difficult for the rich proprietors of the colonies to turn a profit from the colonies for the English Crown without forcing people into free labor.
To describe it as a "necessary evil" is however a radical simplification and discounts movements which started in the 17th Century which questioned the morality of slavery and can be seen as the roots abolitionism.
We'll start this exploration by revisiting William and Hannah Penn's colony, Pennsylvania. William Penn was a Quaker and had founded Pennsylvania as a haven, but while being a Quaker haven the colony allowed slavery. In 1688 a group of Quakers puts together a religious argument against slavery (I call out a religious argument because we are also entering the Enlightenment, a time when humanist arguments are used to describe the state of man and society) noting that the Africans:
"are brought hither against their will and consent, and that many of them are stolen. Now, they are black, we can not conceive there is more liberty to have them as slaves as it is to have other white ones. There is a saying, that we shall do to all men like as we will be done ourselves, making no difference of what generation, descent or color they are." - 1688 Germantown Friends Protest Against Slavery
The Quakers are able to draw on the Gospel teaching of "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" here. And having endured persecution and feeling that their religious liberties and rights as people had been trampled upon, these Quakers did not see how they could justify doing worse. The argument is made in plain language, that those who have suffered persecution in Europe, certainly can't rightly be a part of oppression in the colonies and still consider themselves Christians.
"But to bring men hither, or to rob and sell them against their will, we stand against. In Europe, there are many oppressed for conscience sake; and here there are those oppressed are of a black color...Ah! Do consider well this thing, you who do it, if you would be done at this manner? And if it is done according to Christianity?"
This is 70 years after the first enslaved Africans were brought to the American colonies. It would another almost 100 years after this that Pennsylvania would become a free-state and almost 200 years before slavery was abolished in the United States.
That's not to say that there weren't efforts, some of which moved from paper and out onto the streets. Less than 40 years later, in New York (formerly New Amsterdam), there was a slave revolt. Like Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, New York is often a place we do not associate with slavery, but by 1711 an official slave market was built by the city and the local government collected sale tax revenues from the slave trade. On April 6, 1712 a group of 23 slaves, "Armed with swords, knives, hatchets and guns, the group sought to inspire the city’s slaves to rise up against their masters by staging a dramatic revolt." A militia is sent out to quell the revolt and capture the slaves, and after being captured "the majority were sentenced to brutal, public executions, including being burned alive and being hung by chains in the center of town."
Less than 30 years later, in South Carolina, slaves marched "down the road, carrying banners that proclaim "Liberty!". They shout out the same word. Led by an Angolan named Jemmy, the men and women continue to walk south, recruiting more slaves along the way. By the time they stop to rest for the night, their numbers will have approached one hundred."
The Stono Revolt, as it's known, comes at a time of escalating tension between England and Spain, with a quick note that Spain still held significant lands in the Americas, including nearby Florida with a colony at St. Augustine. White colonists at the time were required to carry firearms even on Sundays while at church, On their march, "The slaves went to a shop that sold firearms and ammunition, armed themselves, then killed the two shopkeepers...the few whites whom they now encountered were chased and killed, though one individual, Lieutenant Governor Bull, eluded the rebels and rode to spread the alarm." It's not long before armed white colonists are able to respond in kind, "By dusk, about thirty slaves were dead and at least thirty had escaped. Most were captured over the next month, then executed.
In 1733, six years before the Stono Revolt, James Oglethorpe founds Georgia as a free-state, a place for English debtors to work, and Oglethorpe believes slavery will lead to idleness. Oglethorpe also had a moral stance against slavery after hearing about "Job" (the Senegambian - Muslim merchant turned slave in Maryland who I referred to in an earlier post on religion in the colonies). "In December 1732, Job’s distant benefactor (Oglethorpe) sold his stock in the Royal African Co. and severed all ties with British slaving corporation. The precocious prince arrived in London during the spring 1733 while Oglethorpe was establishing the Georgia colony". Oglethorpe feeling terrible about what had happened to Job, purchases Job's freedom and goes about establishing a colony free of slavery. It's hard for us, living after the Civil War, to imagination a time when New York and Massachusetts allowed slavery but Georgia did not.
The empathy expressed by the Quakers in Pennsylvania and the ideas behind Georgia's founding make it clear that slavery wasn't a given. Moral arguments were made by the Quakers in the light of their own persecution, and Oglethorpe presented his case in opposition as a case against white idleness; he expected his white colonists to work. To assume then that slavery was a "necessary evil" is to ignore that not long after it's institution, white settlers in the colonies were questioning it. And it ignores that the enslaved Africans were marching, fighting and dying to assert their own liberties since at least the early 18th Century.
Over time, pleas which start on paper in 1688 evolve into small revolts like 1712 in New York and escalate into bigger revolts like Stono in 1739. These are moments of opportunity to stop and do something different, to recognize a series of escalations and to make reforms as suggested by the Quakers or Oglethorpe. Instead of pursuing the cause of the liberty, the colonies instead become more oppressive and crackdown on African slaves. Codified oppression takes hold in a number of the colonies. One example is the Negro Act of 1740 in South Carolina. This act establishes that:
"all Negroes and Indians....shall hereafter be, in this province and all their issue and offspring, born to be born, shall be, and they are hereby declared to be, and remain forever hereafter, absolute slaves"
And then goes on to detail other things which will sound more like the institution of slavery, which we imagine when thinking about the Civil War. Slaves shall not leave their towns or plantations and if they do then they shall receive 20 lashes. Any slave who assaults or strikes a white person will be punished by death. Any assembly or meeting of slaves will be dispersed. Acts like this are designed specifically to ensure that the enslaved African community cannot rebel against their enslavement, and once in place many of these laws will effectively stand until the end of the Civil War. To be sure, the abolition movement isn't dead as result of these laws, but it is pushed to the background throughout much the 18th Century. As we get closer to the framing the US Constitutions we'll revisit the progress abolitionism is able to make in the 18th Century.
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