20 The Impact of the Revolution on Slavery
The Impact of the Revolution on Slavery
The American Revolution generated unprecedented debates about morality of slavery and its compatibility with the founding creeds of the new nation. Though the Revolution did not lead to abolition of slavery, it set off a process of both immediate and gradual emancipation in northern states. The South’s slave system suffered because of the war, which resulted in a decline in production and a loss of thousands of slaves to the British. Though a small number of slaveholders, particularly in Virginia, emancipated their slaves after the Revolution, slavery remained entrenched in the southern states and would only become more profitable and spread further to the west and south during the late eighteenth and into the nineteenth century.
In 1775, the year the Revolutionary War began, Quakers founded the world’s first antislavery society in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Quakers, also known as the Society of Friends, are a pacifist Christian sect that believe all humans possess an inner light, that God dwells inside everyone. Consequently, most Quakers have espoused historically controversial ideas of racial and gender equality, and viewed slavery as an immoral and dehumanizing institution, despite the fact that some Quakers still owned slaves before the Revolution. Following the Quaker’s example, at least thirteen of anti-slavery societies came into existence in America by 1788. (5)
The fight for liberty led some American slaveholders to free their slaves, and most northern states soon passed gradual emancipation laws. (2) In 1777, Vermont created a new state constitution that outlawed slavery making it first place in the New World to do so. Six years later, Massachusetts and New Hampshire also outlawed slavery through judicial decisions. Further to the south, Pennsylvania passed a law outlining a process of gradual emancipation that said that the children born after March 1, 1780 to mothers who were slaves would be considered indentured servants and be completely free from their masters when they turned 28. New York and New Jersey, where slavery was more prevalent, did not pass gradual emancipation laws until 1799 and 1804, respectively. (Davis, 2006) While the state of Delaware would not abolish slavery until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, 31 percent of its African American population were free by 1790 because of the anti-slavery activism of Quakers and Methodists. (Carson, 2019)
Some manumissions also occurred in the Upper South, most notably in Virginia. In 1782, near the end of the Revolution, the Virginia Assembly passed a law that removed restrictions on masters to free their slaves. The next year, the Assembly freed any slaves who had fought on behalf of the Continental Army during the war. These new laws led to the rapid growth of Virginia’s free black population. In 1780, there were 2,800 free black people and by 1810 there were 30,000 living in Vi