18 African Americans and the Rhetoric of Revolution
18 African Americans and the Rhetoric of Revolution
African Americans and the American Revolution
African Americans and the Rhetoric of Revolution
Thomas Jefferson, and other leaders of the Revolution, studied and borrowed ideas of natural rights from European Enlightenment philosophers such as John Locke. They then incorporated natural rights theory into documents like the Declaration of Independence that not only justified the Revolution but served, in Jefferson’s words, as “an expression of the American mind.” Natural rights, such as the right to be free and pursue one’s own “happiness,” are rights all human beings possess that are not granted by government and cannot be revoked or repealed. As it says in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, natural rights are “truths” that are “self-evident” and “unalienable” such as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
How could a group of people feel so passionate about these unalienable rights, yet maintain the brutal practice of human bondage? Somehow slavery would manage to survive the revolutionary era despite fervent arguments about its incompatibility with the new nation’s founding ideals.(5) Nevertheless, black people in particular seized on the rhetoric of the American Revolution to highlight the contradiction between the colonists’ cries for freedom and liberty from British oppression and the existence of racial slavery in the colonies. (1)
African Americans, both slave and free, immediately jumped into the fray when white colonists began to protest British colonial rule for the first time in 1765 in response to the Stamp Act, which imposed a tax on newspapers, pamphlets, and legal documents. Many colonists viewed the act as an arbitrary tax designed only to generate revenue to pay down debt Britain accrued during the French and Indian War, which colonists helped the British win in the 1750s and 1760s. Colonists also resented that this tax was imposed on them without having a voice in Parliament, which led to cries of “No taxation without representation!”
In Charleston, South Carolina, slaves saw white protesters take to the streets and chant, “Liberty! Liberty! And stamp’d paper.” The issue of taxation, of course, mattered far less to slaves than the language whites used in their protests. Soon after Charleston’s white residents protested the Stamp Act, some of the city’s slaves responded with their own chants of “Liberty! Liberty!,” which shocked and frightened white residents. “If most slaves were illiterate,” writes historian David Brian Davis, “white leaders knew or soon discovered that the slaves’ networks of communication passed on every kind of news almost as quickly as horses could gallop.” (Davis, 2006, p.144–146)
African Americans, and some whites opposed to slavery, also recognized the curious irony of statements made by some white colonists that characterized British policies as a conspiracy that threatened to turn free white people into “slaves,” that is, people