slaves – U.S. to 1877

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Sherwood Callaway

HIS 141, Blog Post 9

The “coffin handbill” that Roediger describes acknowledges an incongruity between the spirit of ’76 and the persistence of slavery—something that my classmates and I have been hung up on since the pre-revolutionary period.

The journeyman tailors who wrote this handbill use the language of slavery to describe their condition, although there are certain fundamental differences between workers and slaves that they do not acknowledge. The tailors are afforded a wage, while the slaves are not. The tailors are free not to work, should they wish, while the slaves are not. Furthermore, the tailors are not bound and whipped and abused like slaves. So why make the comparison?

These are not the parallels that the journeyman tailors are trying to make, when they said “freemen of the North are now on a level with the slaves of the South” (319). These “freemen” sought to demonstrate the deprivation of their freedom, above all else. Roediger writes: “They were cast as slaves not because they were “hirelings” but because the state had deprived them of the freedoms necessary for defending their rights” (319). In order to manipulate peoples’ liberal sensibilities, this document acknowledges the incongruity between the spirit of ’76 and the persistence of slavery. America was founded to protect our freedoms, right?

The level of comfort with which the tailors treat this incongruity is new and astounding, but it doesn’t necessarily imply that slavery was out of fashion. The tailors were not so inclined to make a full comparison between themselves and slaves, because they weren’t abolitionists; they probably didn’t have a problem slavery, and were definitely used to it being around. The journeyman tailors, like other wage laborers, used only half the analogy and ignored the rest.

Of course, it didn’t take much longer for people to fill in that other half. The language of wage labor movements questioned the ethics of forced labor, and “chattel slavery stood as the ultimate expression of the denial of liberty” (319).

What struck me most in reading chapters 7 and 11 in American Colonies were some of the vast differences between the British’s Chesapeake colonies (mainly Virginia) and Carolina during the late 1600’s through the mid 1700’s. Differences are prevalent in the economies, social life, slave labor, politics and so on.

In chapter 7, Taylor discusses the Chesapeake colonies from 1650-1750. We learn that the colonies were essentially governed by “competitive, ruthless, avaricious, crude, callous and insecure men” (p. 139) who abused their power and reaped big rewards while a much larger lower class struggled to keep up. So overbearing and controlling was the ruling class that it even caused rebellion in the colonies. It’s also noted that the colonists in Virginia worked almost year round because of the time and attention tobacco required. Rest was scarce for working men in Virginia as they built an economy off of hard work and tobacco production. Things in Carolina were very different. While Carolina was also ruled by a select group of powerful men, their control and corruption was not nearly as widespread as in Virginia; allowing for a greater sense of balance and fairness amongst the colonists. An economic dependency on rice rather than tobacco and a more widespread, harsher use of slaves were also differences amongst the colonies. Virginia used slaves but the Carolinians adopted the West Indian slave system (after slave revolts), which treated slaves worse and got more labor out of them. The bottom paragraph of the top blogpost in this link gives a solid description of how slavery varied from Virginia and Carolina– ( http://sites.davidson.edu/his141/author/systrauss/ ). It started off worse in Virgina but after slave rebellion in South Carolina and stricter racial lines drawn throughout English colonies, it became much worse further south. This created a society that feared what potential uprisings from slaves. It also created a culture that was far more relaxed than that of Virginia. Taylor describes Carolina elite as “more gracious, polite, genteel, and lavish than the gentlemen of Virginia” (p.238).

To me, it was interesting to learn that even though the inhabitants of these colonies had originally came from the same country, each colony had created an identity that was solely its’ own. I think Taylor highlights these differences as a way to show that even though the original settlers of each of these colonies had at one time considered themselves Englishmen, their identity was now more heavily tied to what colony they belonged to. By 1750 a colonist in Virginia was more of a Virginian than an Englishman. I have to believe that these type of changes in social identity were a key part in kickstarting the American Revolution.

Tag: slaves

MPIAH, David R. Roediger: The Language of Liberty

Blog Post #4- Differences in English Colonies (Chapter 7 and 11)