This paper provides an analytical evaluation of Gary Nash's Race and Revolution, a work drawn from the Merrill Jensen Lectures in Constitutional Studies. The paper examines Nash's central arguments about why the abolitionist movement failed during and after the American Revolution, focusing on the culpability of Northern leaders, the economic motivations of slaveholders, and the political compromises that allowed slavery to persist. It also surveys the broader history of slavery in North America — from its origins in the colonial period through the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment — and highlights the contributions of free Black leaders to the abolitionist cause.
We are frequently taught in high school that colonial society was largely unaware of the dreadfulness of slavery, and that enslaved people themselves were too isolated to understand the broader world around them. Gary Nash's Race and Revolution directly challenges this misconception. The book reveals a great deal of truth about slavery during the era of the American Revolution. Nash demonstrates that Americans — particularly their leaders — lost their will to meaningfully emancipate enslaved African Americans. Much of this culpability, he argues, falls upon Northern leaders. Nash also examines how enslaved people responded to the hostility of white Americans who refused to recognize them as equals in the new nation. The arguments in the book are presented in essay format, inspired by the Merrill Jensen Lectures in Constitutional Studies delivered at the University of Wisconsin.
Race and Revolution addresses a subject that has troubled American society — politically and socially — virtually since the first colonists arrived on these shores four centuries ago. Slavery has been a contentious subject across many domains of life for well over a century. Most Americans, as Nash observes, focus on the Revolutionary era when examining slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, because these are the periods emphasized in higher education. Nash, by contrast, focuses on the decade leading up to and the decades following the Revolutionary War. Was it Northern leaders — less dependent on enslaved labor than their Southern counterparts — who perpetuated the institution of slavery? Or was it political leaders more broadly, who fought so vigorously to free the colonies from British imperial control while refusing to extend that same freedom to the enslaved?
In his second essay, Nash examines his proposed reasons for the failure of the abolitionist movement at the very moment when success seemed most attainable. A central focus of his argument concerns where responsibility for the sudden decline in anti-slavery sentiment should be placed. Was it the South, with its entrenched dependence on forced agricultural labor as its primary source of income? The economic challenge was certainly significant: how would slaveholders be compensated if compelled to surrender their "property," and what would be the financial impact of emancipation on the Northern colonies? Because enslaved people had been legally acquired, they were considered personal property, and in the newly written articles of freedom, the question arose of how government could seize personal property without compensation.
It is clear throughout the book that the North missed numerous opportunities to forge a workable plan for emancipation. The contradiction was glaring: the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that "all men are created equal" and "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights" including "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," yet the nation that made this claim against Great Britain continued to enslave its own people (Pearson, 2009).
The northern states eventually began to prohibit the importation of enslaved people, as did most Southern states, and they began to emancipate some of the enslaved persons within their borders around the 1840s. Yet significant hypocrisy remained. Benjamin Rush — a prominent humanitarian physician — purchased an enslaved man named William Grubber in 1783, and while still holding Grubber as an indentured servant, he joined the Pennsylvania Abolition Society in 1784 and refused to grant Grubber his freedom. It remains debated whether Rush was aware of the hypocrisy of his position or whether he had more calculating motives for joining the abolition society.
Just three years later, in 1787, Rush had a deeply troubling dream after reading Thomas Clarkson's Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, which had been inspired by Benezet's Historical Account of Guinea. In his dream, Rush stood on a beautiful sandy shore with Africans conducting religious services. When they saw him — a white man — they fell into fear and began recounting to one another the horrors of slavery and how their homes had been taken by white men. This dream stirred "remorse" in Rush, and from that point forward he committed himself more earnestly to "supporting the ending of slavery." He wrote the Pennsylvania Abolition Society's constitution in 1787 and served as its Secretary. Despite his guilt and his public advocacy, however, he kept Grubber enslaved for seven more years.
In the third and concluding essay of Race and Revolution, Nash examines the role of African Americans themselves in the abolitionist movement of the era. He highlights numerous exceptional free men of the period and the steps they took to establish Black churches and community institutions, while simultaneously advancing the cause of emancipation at the national political level. The final portion of the book — comprising more than half its pages — is devoted to primary source documents: chronological essays, articles, and additional records that illuminate the arguments presented in the three main essays.
Nash emphasizes throughout the book that many individuals who publicly supported the liberation of enslaved people were themselves slaveholders who hypocritically refused to free their own enslaved workers — figures like Benjamin Rush and Allison, the latter of whom transferred the rights to his enslaved workers to his heirs on his deathbed. Two persistent concerns troubled both the political and social communities: how slaveholders would be compensated if emancipation were mandated, and how formerly enslaved people would be able to sustain themselves after liberation. A powerful deterrent was also the anticipated secession of South Carolina and Georgia from the newly formed union if emancipation were imposed — a theory well supported by historical documentation.
It is recorded that Pennsylvania was the first state to legislate against slavery, doing so in 1780. Leaders such as Jupiter Hammon, James Forten, Prince Hall, and Richard Allen established themselves as genuine pioneers in a society dominated by a white majority. Nash also notes how enslaved Africans compared their own suffering to that of the Children of Israel under Pharaoh's rule in Egypt, drawing on the biblical story of Exodus and the deliverance of Moses as a source of spiritual sustenance and hope for liberation.
The American Revolution made plain the profound contradiction between a slave labor system — whether administered by slaveholders or slave traders — and the ideals that had inspired the struggle against British rule. Historians have long grappled with this tension. History has frequently overlooked the nascent anti-slavery sentiment that existed during the Revolutionary period. Historians of an earlier era were more preoccupied with the construction of a republican political system than with confronting the slavery question. The historian Max Farrand even excused the founding fathers for failing to abolish slavery. His documentary treatment of the founders was standard reading for more than two generations. Some historians argued that the South's failure to eliminate slavery rested on the fragility of post-war political unity, while others suggested that Georgia and the Carolinas might have refused to join the union if compelled to abandon slavery at that time. The fear was that further failures to achieve union might have produced a "war of the races or terrible coercion of the slaves," which would have been even more damaging to the enslaved.
In 1790, at the second session of the first Congress, the North encountered an opportunity to confront the slavery problem directly. The Mid-Atlantic Quakers and the Pennsylvania Abolition Society petitioned Congress on February 11th and 12th, calling on it to exercise its powers as directed in the Preamble of the Constitution to "expand the blessings of liberty without regard to color to all descriptions of people" (Nash, 1990). The Petition of the Society of Friends also emphasized the atrocious and tyrannical nature of slavery and called for remedies against it. The Pennsylvania Abolition Society pressed Congress to take further steps toward abolishing slavery. South Carolina's representative warned that if the petition were endorsed it would tear the nation apart. "Representative James Jackson of Georgia declared that if the petition were taken seriously it would 'completely blow the trumpet of civil war'" (Nash, 1990). Nevertheless, by a vote of 43 to 11, a committee was established with the support of Maryland and Virginia. The key considerations before the committee included private petitions from the Quakers and the Pennsylvania Abolition Society and the question of Congress's authority to regulate slavery.
"Quaker petitions, congressional votes, and Tucker's plan"
"Lincoln, the Civil War, and formal abolition of slavery"
"Colonial origins, the slave trade, and daily conditions"
Nash, G. B. (1990). Race and revolution: Merrill Jensen lectures in constitutional studies. Rowman & Littlefield.
Pearson. (2009). [Source referenced in text regarding Declaration of Independence quotation].
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