Slave Nation (5 page)

During those “quiet years,” John Adams of Massachusetts and Thomas Jefferson of Virginia had not yet met each other. Even so, they had much in common. They were well-educated, thoughtful, and successful lawyers who had entered the political arenas of their respective colonies.
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They were both concerned with perceived British intrusions into colonial life and economy.

There were also sharp differences between them, both in appearance and background. Jefferson, the younger of the two, was a tall, thin, soft-spoken aristocrat; a wealthy man by inheritance and marriage, owning about two hundred slaves. He was not a strong public speaker, but the clarity and style of his prose was recognized by all.

Adams was short, stout, and talkative; the product of generations of Massachusetts farmers, his modest wealth was the result of his successful law practice and farming. He frequently spoke at length, seeking to persuade others through reasoning of what he thought was obvious. He was direct rather than diplomatic.

Regardless of these differences in culture and background, Jefferson and Adams were both disappointed that the colonial revolutionary movement had collapsed in 1770.

Jefferson wrote in his autobiography:

Nothing of particular excitement occurring for a considerable time, our countrymen seemed to fall into a state of insensibility to our situation; the duty on tea not yet repealed, and the Declaratory Act of a right in the British Parliament to bind us by their laws in all cases whatsoever still suspended over us.
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At nearly the same time, Adams wrote about the apathy of the people outside of Massachusetts: “Still quiet at the southward; and at New York they laugh at us.”
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By the end of the year, he was also worried about the people of Massachusetts. On December 31, 1772, he wrote to a friend, reporting that his health had returned and he had resumed his law practice.

The prospect before me, however, is very gloomy. My country is in deep distress and has very little ground of hope that she will soon, if ever, get out of it. The system of a mean and merciless administration, is gaining ground upon our patriots every day.
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During the calm, both men went about their personal, political, and professional affairs. In 1770, John Adams was elected a representative to the Massachusetts legislature. Adams moved to Boston from Braintree where he had been born. Riding circuit, he became one of the best lawyers in Massachusetts. In 1772, Abigail had their fifth and last child. The growing Adams family spent long days on the farm.
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However, John also managed to appear in more than two hundred cases ranging from animals straying into a neighbor’s yard to complex commercial matters. He also became more active in political matters. In 1773, when Governor Hutchinson of Massachusetts argued to the colonial legislature that there was no middle ground between parliamentary supremacy and independence, Adams framed an answer that, since Britain never intended the colonials to be slaves, they must be free.
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During the calm, Jefferson also lived the full life of a young lawyer. In 1770, his family home Shadwell was accidentally destroyed by fire, burning his books and papers. But he was already at work developing his new house at Monticello, and had begun courting the young widow Martha Shelton, whom he would marry on New Year’s Day, 1772.
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Their first child was born in late September of the same year. He was elected to the House of Burgesses and he handled complex cases, including a divorce case that challenged the supremacy of British divorce law over colonial legislation.

This case crystallized Jefferson’s thinking about the relation between Britain and the colonies. Jefferson had been preparing an argument to uphold a colonial legislative divorce. In this effort, he reviewed the basis for the English law concerning divorce.
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His preparation was aborted by the death of one of the parties. The issue of parliamentary control of divorce matters continued to brew in Pennsylvania, and was finally resolved that same year, against the colonial power.
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The research was not lost; Jefferson relied on it in developing his argument for independence published as his “Summary View” in 1774.
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His argument paralleled that of John Adams in the debate with Governor Hutchinson.
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It was a difficult argument because Britain had long claimed authority over the actions of the colonies under the original charters of the colonies. The colonial charters that gave each colony the power to adopt legislation contained clauses limiting that power to laws that were not repugnant to the laws of Britain. After the
Somerset
case, there was a prospect that Parliament might tax or abolish the “odious” institution.

The Declaratory Act of 1766 in which Parliament claimed total power over “all cases whatsoever” in the colonies was far more intrusive into colonial authority than the principle that the government could void laws repugnant to British law. This was the state of legal affairs that Jefferson considered a sword of Damocles suspended over the colonies.

Thus the reliance on the “rights of Englishmen” that had emerged during the Stamp Act controversy could not prevail under the Declaratory Act. Furthermore, the southern colonists knew that the senior spokesman for the British colonial administration during the Stamp Act crisis had been none other than Lord Mansfield, who had just declared the basis of their society to be “odious.”
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Parliament’s reaction to the
Somerset
proceedings was not reassuring to the colonists. It had refused to consider legislation protecting slavery in England during Somerset’s trial, following Lord Mansfield’s advice, and did not take it up after the trial was over. Presumably the people of England did not wish to legalize slavery there.

This treatment of colonial slave owners was in sharp contrast to that in France, where, despite occasional releases of slaves based on the “freedom principle,” French colonists had requested, and the government had agreed to, legislation which set conditions that allowed the colonists to bring their slaves to France and retain ownership of them.
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In the context of increasing colonial distrust of British actions and motives, and the growing belief that the British would not understand their need to be secure in their property, this turn-down by Parliament when compared to the French response on the same issue led many slave owners to make their slaves sign indentures, classifying them as servants, before taking them to England.
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Thus both the Court of King’s Bench and Parliament rejected the merchant’s demands for a decision protecting colonial slavery. To many thoughtful southern colonials, this was the last straw in a decade-long effort by Britain to usurp colonial autonomy. The following year, Adams would argue vigorously and successfully to base the colonists’ claims on “natural law” rather than on existing rights of Englishmen under British laws or colonial charters.

Jefferson and Adams both knew that the abstract declaration of the right of Parliament to control the colonies was a weapon that could destroy colonial aspirations to self-government and could shred the economy of each colony. They were not alone among those colonists who worried that Britain would treat the colonies as pawns in the international struggle for power with the French and as sources of revenue for Britain, rather than recognizing that the energies of the colonists could enhance the status of the British empire throughout the world.
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But now, after
Somerset,
the threat from the government in London was clearer, and if carried out would undermine the rich and powerful southern society dominated by the lawyerplanter-slave-owner political elite.

The
Somerset
decision, with its slap at the Virginians’ way of life, became the subject of serious discussion in drawing rooms during the fall of 1772. With limited mail service and few newspapers, the social exchanges at plantation houses provided the best occasions for people to talk about politics, exchange social gossip, and explore ideas among friends who shared their basic lifestyles.
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The slave-owner-planter-lawyer political figures met regularly at such affairs. Some visits and parties lasted days.

Slave owners, especially those who owned more than a few slaves, could never be completely at ease. There was an undertone that silently expressed the frustration of most slaves at the futility of their lives. In his book
The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders,
historian James Oakes reviews the manuals developed to help slave owners promote efficiency in production through persuasion, threats, and punishment. He writes:

Loyal house servants and faithful mammies did not disturb the workings of the slave system; hostile slave laborers did, and there can be no question that in terms of the master’s perceptions, hostility prevailed....For the mass of field hands, daily life was a perpetual grind of hard work characterized by nearly universal hatred of the slave system and punctuated by periodic and often sustained acts of resistance. It was the resistance that made its mark.

    Slaveholders complained that their bondsmen were impudent because they
were
impudent; masters complained that their slaves were lazy because they frequently would not work. By deliberate lassitude, by running away, by sabotage, slaves withheld their labor from the master. In effect, they were striking, and to some degree every master succumbed to the slaves’ demands. By planning their individual and collective acts of day-to-day resistance as deliberate responses to particular grievances, the slaves were punishing their masters for mistreatment, neglect, overwork.
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As a result, the planters and their families were always conscious that their security, both personal and financial, was on shaky grounds. Stories of slave revolts, murders, and lesser violence were extensively discussed and dissected. Virginians knew that South Carolina had an 80 percent slave population. They thought that percentage dangerously high and wished to cut off further importation of African slaves, both to increase their own security and to improve their position as sellers of slaves. These insecurities informed their review of Lord Mansfield’s decision that slavery was “so odious” that it could exist only by positive law and was not protected by the common law. That Lord Mansfield would free fifteen thousand slaves in England, leaving the slave owners with no recourse to the courts, and that Parliament showed no interest in the question was appalling to them.
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Some historians have questioned the significance of the
Somerset
decision because in later years Mansfield disavowed the intent to abolish slavery and British courts held that if a slave brought to Britain did return to the colonies, his slavery reemerged and attached to him again.
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However, the decision was in large measure self-executing as slaves walked away from their masters and the masters gave up. Slavery virtually disappeared in England in the early nineteenth century.
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The importance of
Somerset
in the American colonies was the impression that the decision created in the minds of the colonist planter-lawyerpoliticians in late 1772, who could only read the words, not the future.

The attitudes of these men have been examined in depth by historian T. H. Breen. His thesis is that their perceptions of life were influenced by the nature of the planting process: that being known as a successful grower of tobacco was the pinnacle of personal achievement, giving meaning to their lives and assuring what they considered to be their independence.
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A far-off and highly placed judge in Britain had labeled slavery, on which the tobacco culture depended, “so odious” that British law would not recognize it. These planters must have taken his criticism as applying to the process of their lives. These proud and independentminded men were given a double wound: to their honor and to their independence, administered by a stranger who appeared to be ignorant about the fundamentals of life in colonial Virginia.

A deeper issue underlay the uncertainties created by Mansfield’s decision. Mansfield’s statement pointedly emphasized Parliament’s ultimate power over slavery in the colonies under the Declaratory Act of 1766 when he told Stewart that Parliament is the “best and perhaps the only method of settling the point for the future.”
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This statement meant that Parliament’s claim of total power over the colonies “in all cases whatsoever” included the institution of slavery. Thus the refusal of Parliament to consider whether to legalize slavery in Britain during Somerset’s trial, implying a lack of sympathy toward the slave owners, may have been as upsetting to the southern colonies as the
Somerset
decision itself. If Parliament would allow the abolition of slavery at home, without even hearing the plantation interests, how long would it be before Britain would meddle with or abolish slavery in the colonies?
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Lawyers would doubtless think that since Mansfield had declared slavery a disfavored institution, it could be more readily taxed by a regime that was seeking to milk the colonies for the benefit of the homeland. Thus they saw that the attack on slavery involved both colonial control of internal policies and taxation without representation.

In the fall of 1772, the planter-lawyers carried these fears from the drawing rooms to their offices and courthouses where they met. As lawyers pondered the
Somerset
decision published in southern papers, their concern increased. They put together three points of Mansfield’s reasoning in the
Somerset
case: (1) slavery was repugnant to the common law, (2) Parliament had the final say concerning the legality of slavery under the Declaratory Act of 1766, and (3) Parliament had claimed the power to tax the colonies in the same Declaratory Act. They realized that slavery was under a double-barreled threat from Britain, under the repugnancy clause and the Declaratory Act. After
Somerset
, slavery and the colonial life it supported existed at the will of an apparently unfriendly Parliament.
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