American Revolution, Memory of

The American Revolution, at its core, was a marked contradiction. On the one hand, American Revolutionaries claimed inalienable rights to liberty and freedom. On the other hand, they enforced the slavery of hundreds of thousands of African Americans. That incongruity was not always so clear to contemporaries, who often believed that blacks were inferior to whites, from whom they were thought to differ physically, mentally, and morally. Thomas Jefferson's opposition to slavery in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) was undermined by, among other factors, his perception of black inferiority. Still, many in the eighteenth century did see a contradiction between slavery and the ideology of the American Revolution. Samuel Johnson, the famed British lexicographer, remarked in his 1775 political tract Taxation no Tyranny, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” Prominent Americans (such as Samuel Hopkins, James Otis, Thomas Paine, and Benjamin Rush) also recognized this contradiction. Luther Martin, a lawyer and politician, even wrote that slavery was “inconsistent with the genius of republicanism and has a tendency to destroy those principles on which it is supported, as it lessens the sense of the equal rights of mankind, and habituates us to tyranny and oppression.” African Americans who saw this paradox increasingly came to identify the ideology of the American Revolution as a foundation for their demands for freedom from slavery, as evidenced by events not only in the North but also in the middle states, and even in the South.

There was a time when historians did not think to measure the American Revolution against the enslavement of African Americans. However, in current scholarship the topic is debated frequently and fervently. Some portray the American Revolution as a significant step toward ending American slavery. For others, it is an initial, but limited step toward that end. And still others argue that the founders of the Revolutionary era prolonged slavery in America, in part by entrenching it in the U.S. Constitution. Balanced approaches have aimed to see the topic in a historical context and in a long time frame.

During the Revolutionary War and in its immediate aftermath, American slaves in some instances demonstrably benefited from Revolutionary ideology and actions. For instance, the spirit of the times led increasing numbers of slaves to petition, successfully, for freedom. The upheavals of war led to a faltering in the power of slaveholders, allowing slaves temporary relief in chaos or as runaways. In other cases, slaves were enlisted, as soldiers and seamen, in the Continental and British armies. Famously, Lord Dunmore in Virginia actively recruited blacks, forming the so-called Ethiopian Regiment, with promises of freedom. During the American Revolution the number of free blacks increased exponentially, principally as a result of gradual emancipation laws and manumission. A larger community of free blacks was one of the significant and lasting legacies of the American Revolution.

The memory of the Revolution played out in other ways long after the war had ended. Not least of all, it provided a concrete impetus to slaves involved in their own “revolutions” in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Nor were the seemingly inherent paradoxes of the American Revolution lost on the blacks of Frederick Douglass's world. These paradoxes lived on in the memory of many African Americans, such as the Bostonian David Walker. David Walker'sAppeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, first published in 1829, circulated widely in the United States, where it spread a message of black resistance well after Walker's death in 1830. Walker (particularly concerned to challenge Jefferson's assessment of black inferiority) celebrated American freedom as enshrined in the Declaration of Independence but lamented and challenged the fact that blacks were excluded:

"See your Declaration Americans!!! Do you understand your own language? Hear your language, proclaimed to the world … We hold these truths to be self evident—that ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL!! that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness!!"

(Hinks, p. 78)

In Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (1855), William Cooper Nell fought slavery in nineteenth-century America by remembering African American contributions to the American Revolution. Drawing similar lessons to those of Walker and Nell, with whom he was acquainted, Douglass pointed out that for African Americans the American Revolution witnessed “the advent of a nation based upon human brotherhood and the self-evident truths of liberty and equality.”

Bibliography

Berlin, Ira. Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975.
Finkelman, Paul. Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson. 2nd ed. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2001.
Finkelman, Paul, ed. Slavery, Revolutionary America, and the New Nation. New York: Garland, 1989.
Frey, Sylvia R. Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.
Hinks, Peter P. ed. David Walker's “Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World” (1829). University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000.
Nell, William Cooper. Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (1855). New York: Arno, 1968.
Quarles, Benjamin. The Negro in the American Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961.

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