as a combination of prior black military service, individual abolitionist petitions for emancipation, and related actions by abolitionist societies pushed Northern legislatures either to end slavery within their jurisdictions or to provide for its gradual abolition. By 1784, with the exceptions of New York and New Jersey, every Northern state had enacted gradual emancipation laws.20
The institution of slavery remained an integral part of New York’s economy even after the Revolution, as shipbuilding, slave insurance, and slave labor fueled multiple related businesses. Not surprisingly, the government of New York, whose constituency included slaveholding interests with political influence, resisted full emancipation until 1827. New York City had served as the principal entrepôt for the Northern slave trade up until 1775. With over twenty thousand slaves in New York in the final decade of the late eighteenth century generating profits for their masters, elected officials were slow to abolish the institution outright, opting to pass gradual laws instead, first in 1799 and then again in 1817.21
Prolonging the nation’s “peculiar institution” were the actions of the federal government at the founding of the republic. Slavery in the “land of liberty” was reconciled—codified and militarily enforced—under the combined political leadership of the Federalists and the anti-Federalists, the latter formally establishing themselves as the Democratic-Republican Party in 1792. As it were, the more popularly supported revolution of 1776, with its anticolonial activities having been more democratically organized (in the form of decentralized protests and armed rebellion), was usurped by a centralized revolution of the elite. While the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, passed by the Congress of Confederation, prohibited slavery in territories north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi, and two years later a provision was made in the U.S. Constitution that permitted the outlawing of the Atlantic slave trade after 1807, two other clauses in the Constitution significantly entrenched slavery: Article Four affirmed the right of slavemasters to recover runaway slaves, and, more damaging still, Article One provided that three-fifths of the slave population was to be counted for purposes of taxation and representation in the House of Representatives.22 The Constitution would thus guarantee slaveholders political power in national affairs far exceeding their actual numbers. It would also constitute the first among a number of major compromises between the two major parties at the expense of African Americans, to be followed by the Missouri Compromise of 1820 (permitting slavery to continue in the new state, even while slavery was banned in almost all remaining federal territories), the Compromise of 1850 (introducing a powerful fugitive slave law), the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 (which opened land previously closed to slavery), and the Compromise of 1877 (ending Reconstruction and national support for freedmen). Other compromises followed in the twentieth century.23
The advent of the cotton gin and the westward expansion of the nation at the turn of the nineteenth century brought economic incentives, spurring the further development of plantation agriculture. In the North, African Americans continued petitioning and suing for their emancipation. Meanwhile, in the South, slave artisans, boatmen, and dockworkers—conveyers of information between black populations across the Mason-Dixon line—inspired antislavery action with news of the massive slave uprising on the French island colony of Saint-Domingue.24
In 1791, within a few days’ journey from the port of New Orleans, tens of thousands of free and enslaved black men and women had taken up arms. Not only would the black West Indians of Saint-Domingue overthrow slavery in the French colony, but by 1804 they would establish the first free republic in the world. The black republic of Haiti would serve as particular inspiration for (and focus for the fear of) black liberation across the Americas.25 The black republic, whose constitution abolished slavery, was in the unique position to call on the leaders of other newly emerging nations to link their struggles for national independence with the abolition of slavery. In 1815, in return for military assistance, Simón Bolívar—the George Washington of South America—promised Haiti’s republican president Alexandre Pétion that he would abolish slavery should his own independence struggle against Spain succeed. Like Dunmore before him and Lincoln after him, Bolívar would also offer emancipation to slaves who joined his army; thousands eventually served, many of whom formed some of the earliest free black communities in South America.26
As petitioning efforts in the United States continued in the early nineteenth century, so would slave rebellions, although on far smaller scales than in Haiti, where the demographics were significantly different (over 90 percent of the island’s population was black; by contrast, the black population in the U.S. never reached more than 20 percent). The use of violence by slaves to gain freedom was, besides suicide itself, the most extreme measure they could take; most often, it was suicidal in itself, since proslavery forces were highly organized and armed, ever vigilant for insurrection. African Americans leading armed rebellions would use the same language of freedom in justifying their actions as did those who petitioned for emancipation.
Late in 1800, a Virginian slave artisan named Gabriel Prosser began to amass a slave army. Prosser, a blacksmith, had fashioned weapons from iron tools and scrap metal while he planned a rebellion to seize control of Richmond. On the eve of the attack, however, those set to strike were stalled by a torrential downpour, which inundated the area and washed out key roads and bridges. Later that night Prosser was betrayed and then captured. The slogan Prosser had fashioned for the uprising, “Death or Liberty,” was to be carried by an estimated two thousand slaves recruited from the area. The slogan linked the struggle for black emancipation to the fight for national independence. As one of Prosser’s lieutenants declared at the sentencing trial: “I have nothing more to say in my defense than what General Washington would have had to offer had he been taken and put to trial. I have ventured my life … to obtain the liberty of my countrymen, and I am a willing sacrifice in their cause.”27
Prosser’s conspiracy, combined with the example of free black Haiti, prompted fear among planters not only in Virginia but across the South. Surveillance of the Southern black population was intensified, and some free African Americans were even deported.28 Within a decade, the “colonization” of free African Americans to Africa was being considered by both proponents of slavery and those against the institution, both groups believing that the free black population would ultimately not be able to assimilate into the dominant white society. The American Colonization Society (ACS), founded in 1816, numbered among its members white philanthropists, politicians, and businessmen including Henry Clay, John Randolph, Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, and Justice Bushrod Washington (a relative of George Washington). The organization would dedicate itself to promoting the manumission of slaves and the settlement of free African Americans in the colony of Liberia. African Americans from Richmond, where Prosser’s conspiracy continued to loom large, however, responded to the formation and colonization goal of the ACS by declaring: “[We] prefer being colonized in the most remote corner of the land of our nativity, to being exiled to a foreign country.”29
Within weeks of the formation of the ACS, three thousand black men and women, including prominent community leaders such as James Forten (a Revolutionary War veteran who had vigorously opposed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793) and Bishop Richard Allen (founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church), convened at Bethel Church in Philadelphia. While scattered abolitionist activities had been taking place among African Americans since the late eighteenth century, black conventions starting in Philadelphia and Richmond in 1817 would form the precursor to a long series of annual and semiannual meetings beginning in the 1830s. The “Negro Conventions,” meeting statewide and nationally, continued through the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction. They were, along with the black churches, the first set of nationally established black organizations of the nineteenth century in which the pursuit of independent politics was discussed and planned.30
As the nation’s domain continued to expand, driving indigenous populations to the edges of the western and southern frontiers, crises arose between pro- and antislavery political forces over the extension of slavery into
