This last post in the series on American colonial views of slavery by my mom, Lori Ferguson, considers the views of two Founding Fathers, John Adams and George Washington. The post ends with the conclusion to the series. I hope you enjoyed it and learned as much as I did!
John Adams’ View of Slavery
Unique among the founding fathers, John Adams never owned a slave. He and his wife Abigail always hired free white individuals as household servants and farm help. He made little comment about the issue throughout his political career, mostly not until the 1800s when he fretted about impending social disaster if the problem of slavery were not solved, but how to do so he didn’t know. Adams took a laudable stand in his private life, where his actions were consistent with his principles:
“The turpitude, the inhumanity, the cruelty, and the infamy of the African commerce in slaves, have been so impressively represented to the public by the highest powers of eloquence, that nothing that I can say would increase the just odium in which it is and ought to be held… I have, through my whole life, held the practice of slavery in such abhorrence, that I have never owned a negro or any other slave, though I have lived for many years in times, when the practice was not disgraceful, when the best men in my vicinity thought it not inconsistent with their character, and when it has cost me thousands of dollars for the labor and subsistence of free men, which I might have saved by the purchase of negroes at times when they were very cheap.”
No doubt owing to his other concerns, Adam’s private convictions didn’t translate over into any effort to change the laws concerning slavery.
George Washington’s View of Slavery
Washington is rightly praised for arranging in his will for manumission of his many slaves. However, some historians think that his sentiments (unlike those of Adams) were not so much principled as “practical, economic, and self-interested.” Slavery was of course a huge and integral part of life at Mount Vernon, Washington’s Virginia plantation [pictured at the top of the post], where in 1799 when he died there lived 318 slaves, 123 of which belonged to him and the remainder to his wife Martha.
Washington did consider black people to be intelligent and capable, seeing no problem employing them as overseers, doctors, and soldiers, yet his progress toward believing them deserving of freedom was frustratingly gradual. He was mainly troubled by the economic inefficiencies of slave labour, leading him to abandon the tobacco business in the 1760s, but finding that he had too many slaves to be profitable, he worked on finding better ways to use them rather than free them, even up to the eve of his death in 1799. Granted, Virginia law was such that until 1782 it was legally difficult to liberate slaves, and those that were freed had to leave the state.
For this reason Washington, like Jefferson, insisted that emancipation had to be achieved through legislation. He publicly went on record to that effect in 1786, while simultaneously negotiating to purchase more slaves, as can be seen in his business correspondence. He did not seem to see his way clear to make good any anti-slavery convictions by freeing slaves even when it became quite legal to do so. Many others did do just that during and after the Revolution, some individuals manumitting hundreds of slaves.
Washington, like the Framers of the Constitution, had a concern for national unity that over-rode philanthropy. He confessed himself perplexed how to release his own slaves with minimal disruption to the “thick web of familial connections” among blacks and whites on his own and neighbouring plantations. By this he meant the many marriages where the spouses each had a different owner, or one was white and the other black.
Conclusion
Neither religious revivalism nor political philosophy brought about civil liberty for black slaves before the American Revolution. Indeed, they would wait a very long time for social justice. The Great Awakening died out without having revolutionized Christians’ perception of their moral duty in the public sphere. The ideals of the Enlightenment lived on without having overcome the glaring inconsistency of permitting slavery to continue in the Southern states. It was not until during and after the Revolution, that the northern states one by one legislated the end of slavery, in keeping with libertarian philosophy.
Regrettably, it seems that there was no necessary connection between Christian evangelicalism and social reform in the 18th century. Churches in all denominations became increasingly segregated as time went on. Even in the 1830s and 1840s after the Second Great Awakening and with the rise of abolitionism as a political movement, the official position of northern denominations was that emancipation was a political and not a gospel issue. It remained for individuals rather than churches to work toward the end of slavery in America.