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Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality

University of California Press

The American Revolution launched the debate over the future of blacks in the United States. As long as most blacks had been slaves, law and custom had fixed their place, fastening the institution on colonial America without confronting conscience, save for isolated exceptions. The American Revolution, however, inspired the first wave of emancipations. Republican natural-rights ideology reinforced latent Christian benevolence to abolish slavery everywhere north of Maryland, thereby endowing the new revolutionary order with a glow of moral legitimacy and ideological consistency. The vanguard republic became the vanguard emancipator, at least in half of the new nation.1

Yet the first wave of abolitionism suffered from severe limits. It failed to penetrate those states where slavery was the foundation of the labor and property systems and where the size of the black population made emancipation seem an unthinkable danger. Even in the new "free states," few gave much thought to the status and future of the newly emancipated. In Pennsylvania (1780) and New York (1799), gradual emancipation laws stretched out and blurred the transition from bondage to freedom. In 1800, over half of Philadelphia blacks still resided in white households, and many remained indentured for a term of service. So while legal status had changed, the life experience of many freed people of color remained closely linked with the past.2

Massachusetts abolished slavery in 1784 by judicial interpretation of its new republican constitution, but in 1788, the state sought to

discourage any further settlement of blacks under a warning-out law adopted that year. When hundreds of Bay State blacks expressed interest in African colonization in the 1780s, Samuel Adams, patriarch of the Revolution, favored state assistance. A generation later, Massachusetts whites remained troubled by the influx of free blacks, regarded by many as degraded and dangerous. In 1822, a legislative investigation explored the desirability of halting further growth of the black population, but factional divisions stalled action.3 Elsewhere, too, states made clear that blacks should avoid their territory. Three years after Ohio entered the Union as a free state, it prohibited blacks from settling, but because the law went unenforced, blacks continued to flow north across the Ohio River into Cincinnati. A white backlash erupted in the late 1820s, forcing hundreds of frightened African Americans to find refuge in lower Canada.4

In the slave states, too, the growth of a large free black population triggered a reaction, especially after the bloody events in Haiti in the 1790s and Gabriel's Revolt in Virginia in 1800. In 1806, Virginia repealed the post-Revolutionary manumission law under which conscience-stricken masters had freed nearly thirty thousand slaves. Thereafter, no newly emancipated slave could remain in Virginia for more than one year, at risk of reenslavement. Neighboring Kentucky also excluded free blacks, as did all the new states of the lower South.5

Everywhere, the presence of blacks posed anomalies for white emancipators, who had not thought through the implications, civic or spiritual, of emancipation. The first abolitionist societies formed after the American Revolution affirmed that God had "made no essential distinction in the human race, and that all the individuals of the great family of mankind have a common claim upon the general feeling of natural bounties." Accordingly, the abolitionist societies exhorted whites to aid the freed blacks to raise themselves up, but except for the work of the state societies, especially in providing for schooling, this appeal fell on unreceptive ears. What is the good of "removing the sorrows of slavery," the abolitionists wondered, "if the new made man is relieved from the power of one, only to be sensible of his hopeless inferiority to all?" The abolitionists themselves were a feeble band, made up of a handful of benevolently minded men, some notable, others obscure. Though a few of the state societies displayed some vigor, notably in Philadelphia and New York City, the national meetings never attracted more than twenty-five delegates and sank to as few as nine in attendance during the first eight conventions held between 1794 and 1803. It is doubtful that

such numbers exerted much influence on white opinion, let alone on social policy, despite the earnestness of their appeals.6

Outside these ranks, even among Northerners opposed to slavery, free blacks fared poorly. Support for abolition did not imply belief in racial equality. When Quakers liberated their slaves to conform with the new antislavery ethic that became part of the denomination's discipline after 1750, they did not welcome blacks as members of the faith. Not until 1790 did the bar formally come down, but by then, blacks who had been freed by Quaker masters had found spiritual nourishment elsewhere. In other denominations, blacks were expected to worship with whites, but to occupy segregated spaces in the galleries and far corners, the more out of sight the better. When blacks, denied opportunities to buy pews, no longer could tolerate the humiliation, they withdrew and formed all-black congregations and in time new black denominations.7

When it came to schooling, they were also largely on their own, though a few whites offered help. Eager for educational opportunities, the first generation of free blacks found most public schools closed and their requests for tax revenues for black schools refused. Opportunities in the job market proved equally meager. Freed blacks were anxious to learn a trade, hire on as an apprentice, demonstrate their talents, and work their way up, but few masters could overcome their own prejudices or those of the journeymen to give industrious blacks a chance.8

So unprepared were whites for black citizenship that the suffrage laws enacted during the Revolutionary era failed to specify whites only until a wave of black voting triggered a wave of exclusions, in Maryland in 1783 and again in 1810, in Connecticut in 1814 and in the 1818 constitution, in New York in 1821, in Rhode Island in 1832, and in Pennsylvania in 1838. When a black ran for office in Maryland in the 1790s, the anomalous silence of the law was quickly remedied. Likewise, the militia laws failed to bar blacks, but when patriotic blacks rallied to the flag, they were turned away, in Maryland in 1810 and, a decade later, in Rhode Island, though in times of dire need whites relented to allow blacks to defend the country, for example when the British threatened New York City and assaulted New Orleans during the War of 1812.9

Even those few whites sympathetic to black uplift and integration qualified their commitment to racial equality in crucial ways. Anthony Benezet, the pioneer Quaker antislavery agitator who opened a school for free blacks in the 1780s in his last years, worried whether any pious person could be found to continue the work at the school endowed in his will. Pride and ignorance fostered racial prejudice, even among

Quakers. Perhaps, Benezet thought, some blacks would be better off migrating abroad.10

Samuel Hopkins, the Edwardean theologian and pioneer abolitionist in...