Slavery to Describe the Condition

¶ … slavery" to describe the condition of the colonies before Independence is an affront to the Africans held in bondage throughout the bulk of American history. Yet, as Foner points out, the term "slavery" was invoked repeatedly in political and popular literature and permeated the public discourse of pre-Revolutionary America. Up to the Revolution, the colonists perceived themselves as being mavericks and beacons of Enlightenment liberties. The politics espoused by landowning Europeans in the New World was the same ideology that forms the basis of the United States government today. Freedom, independence, and liberty were the new ideals of democracy that spawned the new nation. Beneath the idealism of American ideology, though, rested the vivid beast of slavery. Slaves were not considered to be human enough to count. Slaves did not form part of the American discourse. Slaves were the forgotten people on American soil. Slavery and liberty coexisted in a sinister way throughout the Revolutionary years. Freedom from Great Britain was achieved at the same time that slavery was enhanced as an American institution.

Freedom and slavery coexisted in a seemingly peaceful way in American political discourse prior to the Revolution. As Foner states, the word slavery was invoked almost as often as the word liberty in the "legal and political literature" of the eighteenth century (p. 29). Slavery was a "political category" that referred to the way the Crown controlled the colonies and its people (p. 29). The trans-Atlantic slave trade was envisioned as something entirely different. Africans did not count because they were not considered on par with Europeans. Therefore, the colonists could invoke the word slavery without self-consciousness or embarrassment.

Anti-slavery rhetoric that referred only to freedom from Great Britain was ironically voiced the loudest in the American South, where real slaves actually outnumbered slave owners. Foner suggests that the juxtaposition between abject slavery and its counterpart of physical, social, and political freedom is what made liberty an impassioned appeal for Southerners. In other words, liberty was a sign of social status in the South more so than it was elsewhere in the colonies. Because of the way Southern whites encountered their freedom in relation to their chattel, southern whites championed American independence with particular strength.

Furthermore, slavery became an eerily ironic sign of liberty for the white colonists. Foner notes that Americans worshipped liberty "while profiting from slavery" (p. 31). Slaves were what gave the Americans the ability to be self-sufficient and to reasonably separate from the motherland. Similarly, the imagined "freedom to enslave others" was a Christian myth but one that perpetuated the peculiar institution (p. 31). Interestingly, European observers of pre-Revolutionary America were aware and critical of the hypocrisy inherent in proclaiming "liberty for all" while championing the right to own slaves. In an age during which property ownership was the hallmark of independence, self-rule, and freedom, "The sanctity of property rights impeded emancipation" (Foner p. 35).