But throughout all this time, many white Southerners publicly and privately deplored the growth of black slavery, and some of the most eloquent indictments of the institution came from Southern slave owners, men like Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, James Madison, and George Washington. If there was ever a classic case of economic determinism, it was demonstrated in the growth of the slave system in the South. Humanity, common sense, and long-term self interest all condemned it as morally wrong and socially disastrous, and yet it spread its cancerous cells throughout the whole of the gracious culture on which the South so prided itself.
It is easy to condemn men like Thomas Jefferson for tolerating an institution about whose evils he felt strongly. True, he could have freed his own slaves; it might have given him a great feeling of rectitude and self-righteousness, but it would have turned his slaves into a world in which most of them would have been unable to cope. Moreover, he would doubtlessly have destroyed his own political and social influence in the South, and with it whatever good he might have effected. At the same time, of course, he would not have made the slightest dent into the system itself. As it was, many of the Southerners like Jefferson became literally trapped in a system they openly loathed, and since they were all great believers in the natural law, which dictates that individuals and nations were punished for their sins, they frequently spoke of the retribution that hung over all of them. “Indeed I tremble for my country,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “when I reflect that god is just; that his justice cannot sleep for ever . . .”
The reasons some colonial measures finally attempted to restrict slaves were less out of humane concerns than out of fear, especially where black slaves were numerous or perhaps even the majority of the population. Rumors and reports of slave uprisings were circulated widely through all the colonies, though the actual events were very rare. One such insurrection occurred in New York City in April 1712, when some “Cormentine Negroes to the number of 25 or so and two or three Spanish Indians . . . conspired to murder all the Christians” in the city “to obtain their freedom.” 21 culprits were eventually executed, and six more committed suicide before they could be “broken on the wheele.” One result of this uprising was a colonial act designed for the “Suppressing and punishing the Conspiracy and Insurrection of Negros and other Slaves.” The act also required any master who freed a slave to pay him £20 a year for life because “the free Negroes of this colony are an Idle slothful people and prove very often a charge on the place where they are.”
There were other reports and rumors of such revolts in New York, in Virginia, and in the Carolinas, and even the island of Jamaica began to have chronic and often lurid trouble with runaway slaves which they never managed to bring under control. But such stories, real or imagined, served only to put a keen edge on Southern uneasiness with their own slave population.
Thomas Jefferson’s next-to-last draft of the Declaration of Independence cited England’s callous support of slave traders as one of the many reasons why the colonies withdrew their allegiance. But that clause was not in the final draft – delegates from the Deep South had quickly killed it. But slavery had not as yet assumed anything resembling a political issue; that was still several generations in the future. For now, slavery had simply become a Southern institution, a sacred cow, and the planters were not about to allow any shadow to be cast on their way of life.
The Quakers alone officially discouraged their members from owning slaves, occasionally even going so far as to expel less sensitive members. John Woolman, an itinerant minister of Mount Holly, New Jersey, and Anthony Benezet, who for a time directed a Friends’ school for Negroes in Philadelphia, were the outstanding spokesmen on this issue. Woolman, in his Journal of 1774, openly stated that “the Negroes are equally entitled to the common Priviledges of Mankind,” and he refused to use sugar because it was the product of West Indies slave labor. Benezet agreed with Woolman’s statements; in fact, as early as 1762 he had already proposed that all slaves be freed by law and that they be given homesteads, perhaps in the region beyond the mountains. But that was the full extent of colonial arguments on the rights of all humans. Even when the First Continental Congress met in Philadelphia in 1774 and repeatedly asserted the natural-rights philosophy on behalf of the white race, the delegates, in many cases themselves slave holders, saw no inconsistency in the morals or laws which excluded one-fifth of the American population. The reason was plain: America’s Founding Fathers regarded the blacks as a species of legal property to whom such principles simply did not apply. Nor were the members of the Virginia Convention in May of 1776 any more illogical when they affirmed in their famous Declaration of Rights that “all men are created equally free and independent,” without considering for even a moment that such might apply to the black slaves as well.