Revolutionary War – American History to 1877

February 19, 2014

Revolutionary Freedom

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America was formed on the basis of freedom for all. One new bit of information that I learned from reading Davis’ Inhuman Bondage was that the “white colonists rose in revolt against what they perceived as British effort to ‘enslave’ them” (144). This being said, there is a double standard in how the revolutionaries perceived their oppression and how they oppressed their own slaves. How it is that men who so desperately wanted to be free were able to “own” another human being as property? Isn’t that what the whole point of what the revolution was about, so that Great Britain could not “own” the colonists anymore? As our classmate brought to our attention in “Freedom at Last?” how could we as a new nation base our constitution on freedom for all men, when slavery still existed and was such a large part of the economy? All of these questions are ones that I would have loved to ask to out forefathers and revolutionaries.

During the revolution, slaves were often entrusted with weapons and enlisted to fight. Or, slaves would manage to escape during the wartime and were enlisted to fight against their previous owners. Some owners who enlisted their own knew that their slaves would not want to fight for their owners freedom when they in turn would not get their own. Some owners went as far as promising their slaves their freedom if they chose to fight for their masters’.

I thought Davis did an excellent job in depicting how slaves were treated and their feelings during the Revolutionary War. I was surprised but enlightened at the fact that the revolution, based on the idea of freedom for all, was not in fact “freedom for all”.

February 19, 2014

The Paradox of the Revolutionary War

Both in chapter 7 of Inhuman Bondage by Davidson Brion Davis and chapter 1 of The Rise of American Democracy by Sean Wilentz, the authors outlined the struggle and strife in the colonies during the Revolutionary War. Calling out for freedom, British colonists fought for freedom under the oppressive British rule and started forming democratic ideas for the future. As Wilentz describes in his chapter, it was not an easy transition from a split social system to equal democracy for all.

During the Revolutionary War when colonists cried for liberty from England, and while yeomen, artisans, and elites were struggling to find a balance in democracy, slaves were watching and observing these political movements. Learning from the people who were subjugating them to slavery, African Americans learned to fight for their own freedom and liberty. The paradoxical nature of this time period puts into motion the ideas that would lead to the Civil War. Many of the freed colonists realized contradiction of keeping slaves, especially after they too had just fought for their own freedom. Davis’ story about the slave named Prince was the perfect example of this paradox. Having served under George Washington during the Revolutionary War, Prince told his master that it was unfair that the colonists could go to war for their liberty but Prince and other slaves did not have any liberties.

Like Mike talks about in his blog post titled, “Democracy and Slavery,” Davis points out that the United States were too weak to be able to abolish slavery without the destruction of the Union. The South was economically dependent on the use of slaves in fields, and slavery was such a big issue that if the United States were to abolish it at this point in history, the Union might not have formed. Although slavery would last for a few more decades, the Revolutionary War and its aftermath acted as a catalyst for the war by showing the inconsistency in the ideas of the American people.

February 19, 2014

Freedom at Last?

Chapter 7 in Inhuman Bondage discusses the impact of slavery in the American Revolution. Whenever I think of the American Revolution, I think of the colonists and Britain. This chapter helped to gain a new insight- the plight of the slaves. One key point the author was trying to make in this chapter is that the colonists were rebelling against Britain for feeling like they were being enslaved, but yet they were enslaving others. “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” (144) I never thought of it this way. It is ironic that the colonists felt that their rights are being infringed upon, when they enslaved Africans. This point truly is one of the most important in the entire chapter, and it drives the entire revolution. It is really persuasive because America is supposed to represent freedom and a new life, yet it doesn’t.

Warfare is a time of chaos for slaves. Slaves can rebel against their owners and escape, or can be enlisted and fight against their enemies. Why would slaves want to fight if in the end they didn’t even receive their liberty? Both sides tried to use slaves in their favor. The colonists didn’t necessarily want the slaves to fight for them, but they were in need of numbers. Britain tried to get slaves to leave their masters and join them. They said that “all slaves captured while they were serving the rebels were to be sold for the benefit of their captors; but all slaves who deserted the rebels were given an assurance that was hardly clear.” (150) Slaves took this as emancipation, and thousands took advantage of it, leaving Georgia’s economy in ruin.

Granted, some colonists realized the ironic nature behind their resentment of Britain. “The period from 1765 to the early 1790s produced countless numbers of tracts, pamphlets, broadsides, sermons, speeches, and editorials that challenged the basic core of slavery: the belief that human beings could be ‘animalized.’ (156) Because of this, the revolutionary war can be seen as the precursor of the Civil War. The North generally was against slavery, and many states even made it illegal. The South was dependent on it. They needed the slaves for their economies, and it even mentioned they would start a war if the government tried to make slavery universally illegal. It was only a matter of time before the two conflicting sides battled again. In my classmate’s post below Democracy and Slavery, they made a very interesting point that the Civil War could possibly have been avoided if the 1784 Continental Congress outlawed slavery in Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Ohio. While this is an interesting point, I can’t help but disagree because the other regions of the south were so explicit on their desire for slavery, and that is stated within the text.

February 19, 2014

The Revolutionary War as a Precursor to the Civil War?

In Chapter 7: “The Problem of Slavery in the Revolution” of Inhuman Bondage, David Brion Davis adds a new dimension to how Americans understand the American Revolution. Davis analyzes the Revolution through the lens of the institutionalization of slavery in America, arguing that enslaved Africans were acutely conscious of the hypocrisy that the colonists’ rebellion presented with respect to their own enslavement. Slaves recognized colonists’ battle for liberty from the British as evidence of slavery’s injustice, and used the American Revolution as a platform to encourage and attain freedom.

The colonists, however, considered the enslavement of Africans to be a necessary facet of the American economy. While colonists’ opinions regarding slavery differed along regional lines, the Founding Fathers recognized that targeting the slave system would marginalize the South at a time when the unification of America was crucial to its survival. Thomas characterizes Northern concessions to slavery as an essential compromise of democracy, which “manifested itself in the form of Northern ‘protection’ of Southern slavery in order to protect unity.” This system of compromise perpetuated the institutionalization of slavery. Although it is not wise to read history backwards, we know that the “compromise for democracy” was limited. The annexation of new territories in the mid-1800s reintroduced slavery to the forefront of political discussion, eventually escalating into the Civil War.

In addition to our U.S History course, I am enrolled in the 300-level history course, Civil War and Reconstruction. This course has sparked my interest in studying the development of slavery in America and identifying the point when Civil War was inevitable (if it ever was). I believe that the constitutional arguments regarding slavery, particularly slaves as property, shaped the slavery debate and served as a justification for Southern states’ secession and Lincoln’s decision to abolish slavery. Davis’s reading corroborated my claim, as he outlined how both the British and colonists manipulated the slave’s status as property to benefit their respective causes. Specifically, both sides contemplated the use of slaves as soldiers in the war. The Continental Congress enlisted and armed 3,000 slaves from South Carolina and Georgia under the pretext that the British army would utilize the slaves if they did not. The slaves were considered property of their slave-owners, and the Congress feared that seizing property would undermine the rule of law and cause dissention among slave-owners (Davis, 148).

The arming of slaves during the American Revolution mirrors the Civil War, in which thousands of fugitive slaves escaped into Union territory seeking freedom. This brought the question of slaves as property to a head. If slaves were indeed considered property under the Constitution, then it was imperative that the Union returned slaves to their rightful owners. Since the South was a “belligerent nation,” many Unionists argued that Southern slaveholders’ constitutional rights as American citizens were void, and their slaves should not be returned. Similar to the fears of colonists during the Revolutionary War, Unionists recognized that returning slaves would ultimately aid the Confederate’s war effort, as slaves would be used for the Confederate cause. General Benjamin Butler named fugitive slaves to be “contrabands of war,” who would remain in the Union so as not to benefit the Confederates. In order to legitimize Butler’s action, Congress passed the Confiscation Act of 1861, which ordered that “confiscated” slaves were not to be returned to their owners but had to participate in the Union war effort. Again concerned with the notion of slaves as property, President Lincoln clarified that slaves from border-states were exempt from the Confiscation Act, recognizing that marginalizing the border states would impel them to join the Confederacy. The similarities between the use of slaves in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, particularly with respect to slaves as property, illustrates the political complexity of slavery in America. The Revolutionary War had enormous influence on the institutionalization of American slavery, and as a result, in-depth study of the war is necessary to understand the causes of the Civil War.

Davis, David Brion. Inhuman Bondage. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

**Information also taken from Dr. Sally McMillen’s lectures in History 346: Civil War and Reconstruction.