Thomas Jefferson, 1784
It is an image that goes to the heart of why African Americans have had to declare their own independence: Philadelphia, June 12, 1776. A rebellion has erupted in the British Empire’s Atlantic Seaboard colonies of North America. Thomas Jefferson, a representative in Virginia’s House of Burgesses (founded in the same year that the first group of Africans was brought to the colony of Jamestown), is now a delegate to the Second Continental Congress—a rogue assembly. Talk of liberty has been simmering in Philadelphia since May of the previous year. The thirty-three-year-old planter is charged by a committee of the assembly with the task of writing what will become the Declaration of Independence. Yet one out of every five people living in the colonies are enslaved black men, women, and children.
Jefferson was among the largest and wealthiest slave owners in the colonies. His life, like that of his fellow slave owners who supported American independence, rested on a basic contradiction: endorsing slavery while demanding liberty. The Virginian would include a line in his draft of the Declaration, later removed, denouncing the slave trade as a “cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people.” But he does not denounce slavery itself.2 As he proclaims the “unalienable rights” of all “men” in his document, Jefferson will also see to it that among his hundreds of slaves, only three—one being his own child, through his slave Sally Hemings—are freed during his lifetime. The men and women in his tobacco fields, like Jefferson, are fully aware that their enslavement permits their master’s freedom; they also know that if they will ever gain their liberty, it will have to be through their own efforts.3
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Jefferson’s existence and prosperity depended upon the forced labor of the hundreds of men, women, and children he owned. In a typical year, he owned about two hundred slaves, almost half of whom were under the age of sixteen. In time, however, the master’s words of “equality” and “liberty” would be used by the very people he had purchased to advance their own rights and liberties. As it turns out, both Jefferson (and the colonial elite he represented) and the enslaved men and women on his plantation (and the many more they represented) sought their independence; the former from British tyranny, the latter from the bonds of slavery. However, for Africans and their descendants in the Americas, the struggle for liberation—unlike the struggle for national independence—had begun centuries earlier.
Beginning in the early sixteenth century, the Wolof, Bemba, Fulani, Ndongo, Igbo, Hausa, and Mande, among others, resisted their enslavement by fellow Africans for European trade. These men and women fought their captors in the face of almost constant threats or use of force, including beatings, whipping, rape, branding, and the deprivation of food, water, sleep, and shelter. Slavery had long been a part of many African and Eurasian societies; resistance would come at first point of contact. In West Africa, after capture, rebellions followed along the marches from the continent’s interior to the “factories” herding “cargo” at slaveholding forts and coastal castles such as at El Mina and Cape Coast, where enslaved men, women, and children awaited transport across the Atlantic. The fight often continued aboard merchant ships and upon arrival on the shores of Brazil, Hispaniola, Cuba, New Grenada, and other points of disembarkation in the Americas. Many killed themselves or their loved ones to escape slavery; others went insane in the process. Those who could, ran away, while others destroyed colonial property, took up arms, or formed maroon settlements in swamps or dense forests. Ranging in size from a few dozen people to several thousand, and organized on a military basis, such black-led settlements, monarchies, and even republics were created across the Americas—the Black Seminoles of Florida, the Palenque de San Basilio in Colombia, and the Republic of Palmares in Brazil, among others. Individual and collective efforts to resist, combat, and even overthrow slavery and their colonial drivers, however, resulted in limited success until the nineteenth century.4
African Americans who led the fight against slavery in the United States—a fraction of whom entered the electoral arena in the mid-nineteenth century—were descended from the men, women, and children who were forcibly brought to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. While most of the estimated twelve million African slave captives were taken to Brazil and the Caribbean, at least five hundred thousand were taken directly from Africa to the North American British colonies. Chained aboard slave vessels carrying anywhere from one dozen to five hundred people, Africans were initially brought to supplement indigenous slave labor and European indentured servants, eventually replacing both in the development of colonial plantation economies. Africans and their descendants planted tobacco, sugar, rice, indigo, and cotton, mined silver and gold, and worked as domestic servants and craftsmen. They brought, and in many parts of the Americas maintained, their languages, religions, philosophies, technologies, architecture, hairstyles, scars, clothing, music, and other traditions and cultural practices. They were Muslim, Christian, Kirdi (“pagans”), and animists of various backgrounds; they were artisans, peasant farmers, imams, scholars, military leaders, soldiers, royalty, and poor members of African societies whose own imperial battles fueled the Atlantic slave trade. In the process of the demographic rupture, black slave labor in the Americas would help create the economic basis for modern capitalism. By the mid-eighteenth century, it would also create the wealth that permitted—and helped to prompt—the governing class of one group of thirteen colonies on the Eastern Seaboard of North America to rebel against British imperial rule. The successful outcome of that colonial rebellion turned war for national independence not only ensured the ongoing production of wealth, but led to the formation of the hemisphere’s first white-led republic.5
For African Americans, the founding of the United States of America in the late eighteenth century would usher in a new phase in their struggle for liberation.6 By the time of the American Revolution, one out of every five people living in the colonies was legally enslaved—nearly half a million black men, women, and children. In time, one expression of the collective struggle for black emancipation—which included ongoing and aggressive forms of resistance to slavery—would take place in the electoral arena. There, fugitives and free African Americans alike engaged the two major parties and their proslavery policies through the building of independent politics and third-party movements.
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From almost the beginning, the nation has been dominated by a two-party system. Two early factions, the Federalists and the anti-Federalists, would give rise to the first major political parties to rule the republic: the Federalist Party and the Democratic-Republican Party. The Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton, sought centralized national political and economic control, while their counterparts, led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, favored the concentration of political and economic control at the state level. With few exceptions, both parties, were united in their opposition to popular democracy. However, some among them raised concerns with regard to the kind of partisan power being wielded in the earliest years of the republic. In 1796, upon leaving the presidency, George Washington warned “in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party,” which he said could lead to a “permanent despotism.”7 By that time, however, the parties had already taken over (aided by Washington’s own participation as a Federalist supporter), their “despotism” only beginning. Over the next two centuries, black and white independents—those not affiliated with the two major parties—would work with dissident members of the ruling parties to challenge existing laws—beginning with those that were proslavery.8
Developed in the latter half of the eighteenth century, when talk of “freedom” and “equality” permeated the air, petitioning became the weapon of choice among those seeking civil redress from representative assemblies with regard to slavery. Long before the struggle for national independence began, enslaved African Americans had exercised their autonomy through acts of defiance and sabotage, fleeing, violence, or purchasing their own freedom. However, the Revolutionary War created new possibilities. The war brought forth a language of liberty that could be used
