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After finishing our readings for Tuesday of this week and comparing them with the early chapters of Thomas Slaughter’s, The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution, I noticed contrasts in the use of the word ‘slave’. In the first chapter of Slaughter’s book he states, “During the seventeenth century (in England), opponents denounced the excise tax as ‘the Devil’s remedy’ and the ‘high road to slavery’” (13). Later on when the American protests against the Stamp Act are being discussed Slaughter writes, “Some Americans believed that when Parliament sought ‘to establish stamp duties and other internal taxes’ for the colonies, it threatened to reduce Americans to ‘the miserable condition of slaves’” (21). These quotes, from both English and American men, are very interesting when put looked at next to the very real use of the word slavery in our previous readings.
Almost all of the runaway slave advertisements use the world slave. They are publishing reports of their missing property and referring to them as slaves. Therefore, it is striking that, presumably similar, men would describe their situation involving Parliament and internal taxes as a threat to “reduce them to the miserable condition of slaves”. My first thought is that the men who used slavery to describe tax conditions where simply using hyperbole. They were trying to drum up support against the oppressive government and using the word ‘slave’ was striking enough to grab attention. I figured that this was probably true for most of the situations where the slavery was used in Slaughter’s book.
Mr. Michael Lamoureux, in his blog, discusses how the slaves were described as property and objects. Slave masters described human beings just as I would if I lost a cell phone and described it as an ‘old, white, iPhone’. Michael does a good job discussing the ambiguity found in some of the ads. He makes an excellent point that with some of the ads, it seems very possible that any black man could be returned to an owner for a reward. This could, unfortunately, very well happen to a freed black man. Michael’s thoughtful and creative argument led me to think about the levels and degrees of freedom that we discussed in class on Tuesday.
As I continued to think about our talk in class about ‘unfreedom’ and the Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton article and David Waldstreicher’s piece, I realized that there may have been more to the usage of ‘slaves’ by white men than just hyperbole for effect. We discussed how there were people in America that were not just free or enslaved, instead there were degrees to people’s freedom. Most people were in a constant battle to protect whatever freedoms they had against an ever-infringing society. Using this rationale and line of thinking, it seems more plausible that some Americans truly did believe that losing the right to local internal tax levying could very well lead to a form of slavery. An American, Stephen Hopkins, argued that allowing Parliament all of the central authority would, “threaten the property and hence the freedom of the colonists. They who have no property, can have no freedom, but indeed are reduced to the most abject slavery” (22). It seems that some Americans were afraid to lose money unfairly to a government and in turn property and in turn their freedom. So while it seems ironic and self-centered for a white man to use the term slavery, it is very possible that they were truly afraid of becoming enslaved (to a certain degree) by British Parliament and excise taxes.