University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER VII
REVOLUTION AND REACTION

AFTER the whole group of colonies had long been left in
salutary neglect by the British authorities, George III
and his ministers undertook the creation of an imperial
control; and Parliament was too much at the king's command for
opposing statesmen to stop the project. The Americans wakened
resentfully to the new conditions. The revived navigation.
laws, the stamp act, the tea duty, and the dispatch of redcoats to
coerce Massachusetts were a cumulation of grievances not to be
borne by high-spirited people. For some years the colonial
spokesmen tried to persuade the British government that it was
violating historic and constitutional rights; but these efforts had
little success. To the argument that the empire was composed
of parts mutually independent in legislation, it was replied that
Parliament had legislated imperially ever since the empire's beginning,
and that the colonial assemblies possessed only such
powers as Parliament might allow. The plea of no taxation without
representation was answered by the doctrine that all elements
in the empire were virtually represented in Parliament. The
stress laid by the colonials upon their rights as Britons met the
administration's emphasis upon the duty of all British subjects
to obey British laws. This countering of pleas of exemption
with pronouncements of authority drove the complainants at
length from proposals of reform to projects of revolution. For
this the solidarity of the continent was essential, and that was to
be gained only by the most vigorous agitation with the aid of the
most effective campaign cries. The claim of historic immunities
was largely discarded in favor of the more glittering doctrines
current in the philosophy of the time. The demands for local
self-government or for national independence, one or both of
which were the genuine issues at stake, were subordinated to the

claim of the inherent and inalienable rights of man. Hence the
culminating formulation in the Declaration of Independence:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created
equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable
rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness." The cause of the community was to be won under
the guise of the cause of individuals.

In Jefferson's original draft of the great declaration there was
a paragraph indicting the king for having kept open the African
slave trade against colonial efforts to close it, and for having violated
thereby the "most sacred rights of life and liberty of a distant
people, who never offended him, captivating them into slavery
in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their
transportation thither." This passage, according to Jefferson's
account, "was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and
Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of
slaves and who on the contrary still wished to continue it. Our
Northern brethren also I believe," Jefferson continued, "felt a little
tender under these censures, for though their people have very
few slaves themselves, yet they have been pretty considerable
carriers of them to others."[1] By reason of the general stress
upon the inherent liberty of all men, however, the question of
negro status, despite its omission from the Declaration, was an
inevitable corollary to that of American independence.

Negroes had a barely appreciable share in precipitating the
Revolution and in waging the war. The "Boston Massacre" was
occasioned in part by an insult offered by a slave to a British soldier
two days before: and in that celebrated affray itself, Crispus
Attucks, a mulatto slave, was one of the five inhabitants of Boston
slain. During the course of the war free negro and slave
enlistments were encouraged by law in the states where racial control
was not reckoned vital, and they were informally permitted
in the rest. The British also utilized this resource in some degree.
As early as November 7, 1775, Lord Dunmore, the ousted
royal governor of Virginia, issued a proclamation offering freedom

to all slaves "appertaining to rebels" who would join him
"for the more speedy reducing this colony to a proper sense of
their duty to his Majesty's crown and dignity."[2] In reply the
Virginia press warned the negroes against British perfidy; and
the revolutionary government, while announcing the penalties for
servile revolt, promised freedom to such as would promptly desert
the British standard. Some hundreds of negroes appear to
have joined Dunmore, but they did not save him from being
driven away.[3]

When several years afterward military operations were transferred
to the extreme South, where the whites were few and the
blacks many, the problem of negro enlistments became at once
more pressing and more delicate. Henry Laurens of South Carolina
proposed to General Washington in March, 1779, the enrollment
of three thousand blacks in the Southern department.
Hamilton warmly endorsed the project, and Washington and
Madison more guardedly. Congress recommended it to the
states concerned, and pledged itself to reimburse the masters and
to set the slaves free with a payment of fifty dollars to each of
these at the end of the war. Eventually Colonel John Laurens,
the son of Henry, went South as an enthusiastic emissary of the
scheme, only to meet rebuff and failure.[4] Had the negroes in
general possessed any means of concerted action, they might conceivably
have played off the British and American belligerents to
their own advantage. In actuality, however, they were a passive
element whose fate was affected only so far as the master race
determined.

Some of the politicians who championed the doctrine of liberty
inherent and universal used it merely as a means to a specific
and somewhat unrelated end. Others endorsed it literally
and with resolve to apply it wherever consistency might require.
How could they justly continue to hold men in bondage when
in vindication of their own cause they were asserting the right of

all men to be free? Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Edmund
Randolph and many less prominent slaveholders were disquieted
by the question. Instances of private manumission became frequent,
and memorials were fairly numerous advocating antislavery
legislation. Indeed Samuel Hopkins of Rhode Island in
a pamphlet of 1776 declared that slavery in Anglo-America was
"without the express sanction of civil government," and censured
the colonial authorities and citizens for having connived in the
maintenance of the wrongful institution.

As to public acts, the Vermont convention of 1777 when claiming
statehood for its community framed a constitution with a bill
of rights asserting the inherent freedom of all men and attaching
to it an express prohibition of slavery. The opposition of
New York delayed Vermont's recognition until 1791 when she
was admitted as a state with this provision unchanged. Similar
inherent-liberty clauses but without the expressed anti-slavery application
were incorporated into the bills of rights adopted severally
by Virginia in 1776, Massachusetts in 1780, and New
Hampshire in 1784. In the first of these the holding of slaves
persisted undisturbed by this action; and in New Hampshire the
custom died from the dearth of slaves rather than from the natural-rights
clause. In Massachusetts likewise it is plain from
copious contemporary evidence that abolition was not intended
by the framers of the bill of rights nor thought by the people or
the officials to have been accomplished thereby.[5] One citizen,
indeed, who wanted to keep his woman slave but to be rid of her
child soon to be born, advertised in the Independent Chronicle of
Boston at the close of 1780: "A negro child, soon expected, of
a good breed, may be owned by any person inclining to take it,
and money with it."[6] The courts of the commonwealth, however,
soon began to reflect anti-slavery sentiment, as Lord Mansfield
had done in the preceding decade in England,[7] and to make
use of the bill of rights to destroy the masters' dominion. The

decisive case was the prosecution of Nathaniel Jennison of
Worcester County for assault and imprisonment alleged to have
been committed upon his absconded slave Quork Walker in the
process of his recovery. On the trial in 1783 the jury responded
to a strong anti-slavery charge from Chief Justice Cushing by
returning a verdict against Jennison, and the court fined him
£50 and costs.

This action prompted the negroes generally to leave their masters,
though some were deterred "on account of their age and
infirmities, or because they did not know how to provide for
themselves, or for some pecuniary consideration."[8] The former
slaveholders now felt a double grievance: they were deprived of
their able-bodied negroes but were not relieved of the legal obligation
to support such others as remained on their hands. Petitions
for their relief were considered by the legislature but never
acted upon. The legal situation continued vague, for although
an act of 1788 forbade citizens to trade in slaves and another
penalized the sojourn for more than two months in Massachusetts
of negroes from other states,[9] no legislation defined the
status of colored residents. In the federal census of 1790, however,
this was the only state in which no slaves were listed.

Racial antipathy and class antagonism among the whites appear
to have contributed to this result. John Adams wrote in
1795, with some exaggeration and incoherence: "Argument
might have [had] some weight the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts,
but the real cause was multiplication of labouring
white people, who would no longer suffer the rich to employ
these sable rivals so much to their injury. . . . If the gentlemen
had been permitted by law to hold slaves, the common white people
would have put the negroes to death, and their masters too,
perhaps. . . . The common white people, or rather the labouring
people, were the cause of rendering negroes unprofitable servants.
Their scoffs and insults, their continual insinuations, filled
the negroes with discontent, made them lazy, idle, proud, vicious,

and at length wholly useless to their masters, to such a degree
that the abolition of slavery became a measure of economy."[10]

Slavery in the rest of the Northern states was as a rule not
abolished, but rather put in process of gradual extinction by legislation
of a peculiar sort enacted in response to agitations characteristic
of the times. Pennsylvania set the pattern in an act of
1780 providing that all children born thereafter of slave mothers
in the state were to be the servants of their mothers' owners until
reaching twenty-eight years of age, and then to become free.
Connecticut followed in 1784 with an act of similar purport but
with a specification of twenty-five years, afterward reduced to
twenty-one, as the age for freedom; and in 1840 she abolished
her remnant of slavery outright. In Rhode Island an act of the
same year, 1784, enacted that the children thereafter born of
slave mothers were to be free at the ages of twenty-one for males
and eighteen for females, and that these children were meanwhile
to be supported and instructed at public expense; but an amendment
of the following year transferred to the mothers' owners
the burden of supporting the children, and ignored the matter of
their education. New York lagged until 1799, and then provided
freedom for the after-born only at twenty-eight and twenty-five
years for males and females respectively; but a further act of
1817 set the Fourth of July in 1827 as a time for the emancipation
for all remaining slaves in the state. New Jersey fell into line
last of all by an act of 1804 giving freedom to the after-born at
the ages of twenty-five for males and twenty-one for females;
and in 1846 she converted the surviving slaves nominally into apprentices
but without materially changing their condition. Supplementary
legislation here and there in these states bestowed
freedom upon slaves in military service, restrained the import and
export of slaves, and forbade the citizens to ply the slave trade
by land or sea.[11]

Thus from Pennsylvania eastward the riddance of slavery was
procured or put in train, generally by the device of emancipating
the post nati; and in consequence the slave population in that quarter
dwindled before the middle of the nineteenth century to a
negligible residue. To the southward the tobacco states, whose
industry had reached a somewhat stationary condition, found it
a simple matter to prohibit the further importation of slaves from
Africa. Delaware did this in 1776, Virginia in 1778, Maryland
in 1783 and North Carolina in 1794. But in these commonwealths
as well as in their more southerly neighbors, the contemplation
of the great social and economic problems involved in
disestablishing slavery daunted the bulk of the citizens and impelled
their representatives to conservatism. The advocacy of
abolition, whether sudden or gradual, was little more than sporadic.
The people were not to be stampeded in the cause of inherent
rights or any other abstract philosophy. It was a condition
and not a theory which confronted them.

In Delaware, however, the problem was hardly formidable, for
at the time of the first federal census there were hardly nine thousand
slaves and a third as many colored freemen in her gross
population of some sixty thousand souls. Nevertheless a bill
for gradual abolition considered by the legislature in 1786 appears
not to have been brought to a vote,[12] and no action in the
premises was taken thereafter. The retention of slavery seems
to have been mainly due to mere public inertia and to the pressure
of political sympathy with the more distinctively Southern states.
Because of her border position and her dearth of plantation industry,
the slaves in Delaware steadily decreased to less than
eighteen hundred in 1860, while the free negroes grew to more
than ten times as many.

In Maryland various projects for abolition, presented by the
Quakers between 1785 and 1791 and supported by William Pinckney
and Charles Carroll, were successively defeated in the legislature;
and efforts to remove the legal restraints on private manumission

were likewise thwarted.[13] These restrictions, which applied
merely to the freeing of slaves above middle age, were in
fact very slight. The manumissions indeed were so frequent
and the conditions of life in Maryland were so attractive to free
negroes, or at least so much less oppressive than in most other
states, that while the slave population decreased between 1790
and 1860 from 103,036 to 87,189 souls the colored freemen multiplied
from 8046 to 83,942, a number greater by twenty-five thousand
than that in any other commonwealth.

Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1785 that anti-slavery men were
as scarce to the southward of Chesapeake Bay as they were common
to the north of it, while in Maryland, and still more in Virginia,
the bulk of the people approved the doctrine and a respectable
minority were ready to adopt it in practice, "a minority
which for weight and worth of character preponderates against
the greater number who have not the courage to divest their families
of a property which, however, keeps their conscience unquiet."
Virginia, he continued, "is the next state to which we
may turn our eyes for the interesting spectacle of justice in conflict
with avarice and oppression, a conflict in which the sacred side is
gaining daily recruits from the influx into office of young men
grown and growing up. These have sucked in the principles of
liberty as it were with their mother's milk, and it is to them that
I look with anxiety to turn the fate of the question."[14] Jefferson
had already tried to raise the issue by having a committee for
revising the Virginia laws, appointed in 1776 with himself a
member, frame a special amendment for disestablishing slavery.
This contemplated a gradual emancipation of the after-born children,
their tutelage by the state, their colonization at maturity,
and their replacement in Virginia by white immigrants.[15] But a
knowledge that such a project would raise a storm caused even
its framers to lay it aside. The abolition of primogeniture and
the severance of church from state absorbed reformers' energies
at the expense of the slavery question.

When writing his Notes on Virginia in 1781 Jefferson denounced
the slaveholding system in phrases afterward classic
among abolitionists: "With what execration should the statesman
be loaded who, permitting one-half of the citizens thus to
trample on the rights of the other, transforms those into despots
and these into enemies. . . . And can the liberties of a nation be
thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a
conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the
gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath?
Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just;
that his justice cannot sleep forever."[16] In the course of the
same work, however, he deprecated abolition unless it were to be
accompanied with deportation: "Why not retain and incorporate
the blacks into the state . . .? Deep rooted prejudices
entertained by the whites, ten thousand recollections by the
blacks of the injuries they have sustained, new provocations, the
real distinctions which nature has made, and many other circumstances,
will divide us into parties and produce convulsions which
will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the
other race. . . . This unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps
of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of
these people. Many of their advocates while they wish to vindicate
the liberty of human nature are anxious also to preserve its
dignity and beauty. Some of these, embarrassed by the question
'What further is to be done with them?' join themselves in
opposition with those who are actuated by sordid avarice only.
Among the Romans, emancipation required but one effort. The
slave when made free might mix without staining the blood of
his master. But with us a second is necessary unknown to history.
When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture."[17]

George Washington wrote in 1786 that one of his chief wishes
was that some plan might be adopted "by which slavery may be
abolished by slow, sure, and imperceptible degrees." But he

noted in the same year that some abolition petitions presented to
the Virginia legislature had barely been given a reading.[18]

Seeking to revive the issue, Judge St. George Tucker, professor
of law in William and Mary College, inquired of leading
citizens of Massachusetts in 1795 for data and advice, and undaunted
by discouraging reports received in reply or by the specific
dissuasion of John Adams, he framed an intricate plan for
extremely gradual emancipation and for expelling the freedmen
without expense to the state by merely making their conditions
of life unbearable. This was presented to the legislature in a
pamphlet of 1796 at the height of the party strife between the
Federalists and Democratic-Republicans; and it was impatiently
dismissed from consideration.[19] Tucker, still nursing his project,
reprinted his "dissertation" as an appendix to his edition of
Blackstone in 1803, where the people and the politicians let it
remain buried. In public opinion, the problem as to the freedmen
remained unsolved and insoluble.

Meanwhile the Virginia black code had been considerably moderated
during and after the Revolution; and in particular the
previous almost iron-clad prohibition of private manumission had
been wholly removed in effect by an act of 1782. In spite of restrictions
afterward imposed upon manumission and upon the
residence of new freedmen in the state, the free negroes increased
on a scale comparable to that in Maryland. As compared with
an estimate of less than two thousand in 1782, there were 12,866
in 1790, 20,124 in 1800, and 30,570 in 1810. Thereafter the
number advanced more slowly until it reached 58,042, about one-eighth
as many as the slaves numbered, in 1860.

In the more southerly states condemnation of slavery was rare.
Among the people of Georgia, the depressing experience of the
colony under a prohibition of it was too fresh in memory for
them to contemplate with favor a fresh deprivation. In South
Carolina Christopher Gadsden had written in 1766 likening slavery

to a crime, and a decade afterward Henry Laurence wrote.
"You know, my dear son, I abhor slavery. . . . The day, I hope
is approaching when from principles of gratitude as well as justice
every man will strive to be foremost in showing his readiness
to comply with the golden rule. Not less than twenty thousand
pounds sterling would all my negroes produce if sold at public
auction tomorrow. . . . Nevertheless I am devising means for
manumitting many of them, and for cutting off the entail of
slavery. Great powers oppose me—the laws and customs of my
country, my own and the avarice of my countrymen. What will
my children say if I deprive them of so much estate? These are
difficulties, but not insuperable. I will do as much as I can in
my time, and leave the rest to a better hand. I am not one of
those . . . who dare trust in Providence for defence and security
of their own liberty while they enslave and wish to continue
in slavery thousands who are as well entitled to freedom as themselves,
I perceive the work before me is great. I shall appear
to many as a promoter not only of strange but of dangerous doctrines;
it will therefore be necessary to proceed with caution."[20]
Had either Gadsden or Laurens entertained thoughts of
launching an anti-slavery campaign, however, the palpable hopelessness
of such a project in their community must have dissuaded
them. The negroes of the rice coast were so outnumbering
and so crude that an agitation applying the doctrine of inherent
liberty and equality to them could only have had the effect of
discrediting the doctrine itself. Furthermore, the industrial prospect,
the swamps and forests calling for conversion into prosperous
plantations, suggested an increase rather than a diminution of
the slave labor supply. Georgia and South Carolina, in fact, were
more inclined to keep open the African slave trade than to relinquish
control of the negro population. Revolutionary liberalism
had but the slightest of echoes there.

In North Carolina the prevailing lack of enterprise in public
affairs had no exception in regard to slavery. The Quakers
alone condemned it. When in 1797 Nathaniel Macon, a pronounced
individualist and the chief spokesman of his state in
Congress, discussed the general subject he said "there was not a
gentleman in North Carolina who did not wish there were no
blacks in the country. It was a misfortune—he considered it a
curse; but there was no way of getting rid of them." Macon put
his emphasis upon the negro problem rather than upon the question
of slavery, and in so doing he doubtless reflected the thought
of his community.[21] The legislation of North Carolina regarding
racial control, like that of the period in South Carolina, Georgia,
Tennessee and Kentucky, was more conservative than liberal.

The central government of the United States during the Revolution
and the Confederation was little concerned with slavery
problems except in its diplomatic affairs, where the question was
merely the adjustment of property in slaves, and except in regard
to the western territories. Proposals for the prohibition of
slavery in these wilderness regions were included in the first
projects for establishing governments in them. Timothy Pickering
and certain military colleagues framed a plan in 1780 for
a state beyond the Ohio River with slavery excluded; but it was
allowed to drop out of consideration. In the next year an ordinance
drafted by Jefferson was introduced into Congress for
erecting territorial governments over the whole area ceded or to
be ceded by the states, from the Alleghanies to the Mississippi
and from Canada to West Florida; and one of its features was a
prohibition of slavery after the year 1800 throughout the region
concerned. Under the Articles of Confederation, the Congress
could enact legislation only by the affirmative votes of seven state
delegations. When the ballot was taken on the anti-slavery

clause the six states from Pennsylvania eastward voted aye:
Maryland, Virginia and South Carolina voted no; and the other
states were absent. Jefferson was not alone in feeling chagrin at
the defeat and in resolving to persevere. Pickering expressed his
own views in a letter to Rufus King: "To suffer the continuance
of slaves till they can be gradually emancipated, in states already
overrun with them, may be pardonable because unavoidable without
hazarding greater evils; but to introduce them into countries
where none already exist . . . can never be forgiven." King
in his turn introduced a resolution virtually restoring the stricken
clause, but was unable to bring it to a vote. After being variously
amended, the ordinance without this clause was adopted.
It was, however, temporary in its provision and ineffectual in character;
and soon the drafting of one adequate for permanent purposes
was begun. The adoption of this was hastened in July,
1787, by the offer of a New England company to buy from
Congress a huge tract of Ohio land. When the bill was put to
the final vote it was supported by every member with the sole
exception of the New Yorker, Abraham Yates. Delegations from
all of the Southern states but Maryland were present, and all of
them voted aye. Its enactment gave to the country a basic law
for the territories in phrasing and in substance comparable to the
Declaration of Independence and the Federal Constitution.
Applying only to the region north of the Ohio River, the ordinance
provided for the erection of territories later to be admitted
as states, guaranteed in republican government, secured in the
freedom of religion, jury trial and all concomitant rights, endowed
with public land for the support of schools and universities,
and while obligated to render fugitive slaves on claim of
their masters in the original states, shut out from the regime of
slaveholding itself.[22] "There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary
servitude in the said territory," it prescribed, "otherwise
than in punishment of crimes whereof the party shall
have been duly convicted." The first Congress under the new
constitution reënacted the ordinance, which was the first and
last antislavery achievement by the central government in the
period.

By this time radicalism in general had spent much of its force.
The excessive stress which the Revolution had laid upon the liberty
of individuals had threatened for a time to break the community's
grasp upon the essentials of order and self-restraint.
Social conventions of many sorts were flouted; local factions resorted
to terrorism against their opponents; legislatures abused
their power by confiscating loyalist property and enacting laws
for the dishonest promotion of debtor-class interests, and the central
government, made pitiably weak by the prevailing jealousy of
control, was kept wholly incompetent through the shirking of
burdens by states pledged to its financial support. But populism
and particularism brought their own cure. The paralysis of
government now enabled sober statesmen to point the prospect of
ruin through chaos and get a hearing in their advocacy of sound
system. Exalted theorising on the principles of liberty had
merely destroyed the old régime: matter-of-fact reckoning on
principles of law and responsibility must build the new. The
plan of organization, furthermore, must be enough in keeping
with the popular will to procure a general ratification.

Negro slavery in the colonial period had been of continental
extent but under local control. At the close of the Revolution,
as we have seen, its area began to be sectionally confined while
the jurisdiction over it continued to lie in the several state governments.
The great convention at Philadelphia in 1787 might
conceivably have undertaken the transfer of authority over the
whole matter to the central government; but on the one hand
the beginnings of sectional jealousy made the subject a delicate
one, and on the other hand the members were glad enough to lay
aside all problems not regarded as essential in their main task.
Conscious ignorance by even the best informed delegates from
one section as to affairs in another was a dissuasion from the
centralizing of doubtful issues; and the secrecy of the convention's

proceedings exempted it from any pressure of anti-slavery
sentiment from outside.

On the whole the permanence of any critical problem in the
premises was discredited. Roger Sherman of Connecticut "observed
that the abolition of slavery seemed to be going on in the
United States, and that the good sense of the people of the
several states would by degrees compleat it." His colleague
Oliver Ellsworth said, "The morality or wisdom of slavery are
considerations belonging to the states themselves"; and again,
"Let us not intermeddle. As population increases poor laborers
will be so plenty as to render slaves useless. Slavery in time
will not be a speck in our country." And Elbridge Gerry of
Massachusetts "thought we had nothing to do with the conduct
of states as to slaves, but ought to be careful not to give any
sanction to it." The agreement was general that the convention
keep its hands off so far as might be; but positive action was
required upon incidental phases which involved some degree
of sanction for the institution itself. These issues concerned the
apportionment of representation, the regulation of the African
trade, and the rendition of fugitives. This last was readily
adjusted by the unanimous adoption of a clause introduced by
Pierce Butler of South Carolina and afterward changed in its
phrasing to read: "No person held to service or labour in one
state under the laws thereof escaping into another shall in
consequence of any law or regulation therein be discharged from
such service or labour, but shall be delivered up on claim of the
party to whom such service or labour may be due." After some
jockeying, the other two questions were settled by compromise.
Representation in the lower house of Congress was apportioned
among the states "according to their several members, which
shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free
persons . . . three fifths of all other persons." As to the foreign
slave trade, Congress was forbidden to prohibit it prior to the
year 1808, and was merely permitted meanwhile to levy an import
duty upon slaves at a rate of not more than ten dollars each.[23]

In the state conventions to which the Constitution was referred
for ratification the debates bore out a remark of Madison's at
Philadelphia that the real difference of interests lay not between
the large and small states but between those within and without
the slaveholding influence. The opponents of the Constitution at
the North censured it as a pro-slavery instrument, while its advocates
apologized for its pertinent clauses on the ground that
nothing more hostile to the institution could have been carried
and that if the Constitution were rejected there would be no
prospect of a federal stoppage of importations at any time. But
at the South the opposition, except in Maryland and Virginia
where the continuance of the African trade was deprecated,
declared the slavery concessions inadequate, while the champions
of the Constitution maintained that the utmost practicable advantages
for their sectional interest had been achieved. Among
the many amendments to the Constitution proposed by the ratifying
conventions the only one dealing with any phase of slavery
was offered, strange to say, by Rhode Island, whose inhabitants
had been and still were so active in the African trade. It reads:
"As a traffic tending to establish and continue the slavery of the
human species is disgraceful to the cause of liberty and humanity,
Congress shall as soon as may be promote and establish such laws
as may effectually prevent the importation of slaves of every
description."[24] The proposal seems to have received no further
attention at the time.

In the early sessions of Congress under the new Constitution
most of the few debates on slavery topics arose incidentally and
ended without positive action. The taxation of slave imports was
proposed in 1789, but was never enacted: sundry petitions of antislavery
tenor, presented mostly by Quakers, were given brief
consideration in 1790 and again at the close of the century but
with no favorable results; and when, in 1797, a more concrete
issue was raised by memorials asking intervention on behalf of
some negroes whom Quakers had manumitted in North Carolina
in disregard of legal restraints and who had again been reduced

to slavery, a committee reported that the matter fell within the
scope of judicial cognizance alone, and the House dismissed the
subject. For more than a decade, indeed, the only legislation
enacted by Congress concerned at all with slavery was the act of
1793 empowering the master of an interstate fugitive to seize him
wherever found, carry him before any federal or state magistrate
in the vicinage, and procure a certificate warranting his
removal to the state from which he had fled. Proposals to supplement
this rendition act on the one hand by safeguarding free
negroes from being kidnapped under fraudulent claims and on
the other hand by requiring employers of strange negroes to
publish descriptions of them and thus facilitate the recovery of
runaways, were each defeated in the House.

On the whole the glamor of revolutionary doctrines was passing,
and self interest was regaining its wonted supremacy. While
the rising cotton industry was giving the blacks in the South new
value as slaves, Northern spokesmen were frankly stating an
antipathy of their people toward negroes in any capacity whatever.[25]
The succession of disasters in San Domingo, meanwhile,
gave warning against the upsetting of racial adjustments in the
black belts, and the Gabriel revolt of 1800 in Virginia drove the
lesson home. On slavery questions for a period of several
decades the policy of each of the two sections was merely to prevent
itself from being overreached. The conservative trend,
however, could not wholly remove the Revolution's impress of
philosophical liberalism from the minds of men. Slavery was
always a thing of appreciable disrelish in many quarters; and
the slave trade especially, whether foreign or domestic, bore a
permanent stigma.