Existing comment:
At the time of the American Revolution, chattel slavery was an accepted institution from Canada to South America and practiced by all thirteen American colonies. However, contemporary movements in moral philosophy and literature and changing religious views had already sparked new perspectives on the topic of human bondage; even successful plantation owners whose livelihood depended on enslaved Africans recognized the hypocrisy it posed in light of the impending war for independence. Northern Quakers were the first organized group to take action in abolishing slavery by purging their own sects of slave owners in the middle of the 1700s, and later other denominations including Presbyterians, Methodists and Baptists followed.
Despite this growing realization of the inhumanity and degradation of slavery, the culture clash created by the importation of enslaved Africans beginning in the last decades of the 1600s had created a nearly unbreachable racial chasm. Deeply ingrained prejudices towards Africans spurred on a belief among many colonial Americans that once freed, people of African descent would be incapable of integrating into society and instead become an economic burden. At the beginning of the American Revolution Virginia's British governor, Lord Dunmore, played upon these fears as well as the vulnerability of many southern slaveholders by offering the enslaved freedom in exchange for their loyalty in combat. As a result, several hundred enslaved Africans took up arms against the colonial rebels at the Battle of Great Bridge in 1775.
By the turn of the 19th century, most northern states had banned the slave trade an established laws that allowed them to be freed. By 1782, at the persuasion of the Quakers, Virginia passed legislation that removed restrictions on manumission, or the freeing of those in bondage, and over the next decade hundreds of enslaved Africans were freed in Virginia alone. However, many owners chose instead to increase their wealth by selling enslaved blacks "down the river" to plantations in the Deep South.
The Battle of Lexington
For liberty each Freeman strives
As it's a Gift from God
And for it, willing yield their Lives
And Seal in with their Blood.
Twice happy they who thus resign
Into the peaceful Grave
Much better those in Death Consign
Than a Surviving Slave
-- Lemuel Haynes, April 1776
Lemuel Haynes (1753-1833)
Believed to be the first African American ordained by the Protestant church in the United States. |