From the earliest moments of this identity and its formation, Africans and African-Americans were part of it. Not only were people of African descent, but also, and especially, free Africans were integral to the new concept of “American.”
By 1641, at the latest, free Africans were understood as having a status which was different and separate from enslaved people. The contrast of “free” Africans to enslaved Africans contained within itself the seeds of a powerful anti-slavery movement which would emerge within a decade, as historian Paul Heinegg documents:
When they arrived in Virginia, Africans joined a society that was divided between master and white servant, a society with such contempt for white servants that masters were not punished for beating them to death. They joined the same households with white servants — working, eating, sleeping, getting drunk, and running away together. Some of these first African slaves became free. John Geaween (Gowen), “a negro servant,” was free by 1641. Francis Payne of Northampton County paid for his freedom about 1650 by purchasing three white servants for his master’s use. Emanuell Cambow (Cumbo), “Negro,” was granted fifty acres in James City County in 1667. John Harris, “negro,” was free by 1668 when he purchased fifty acres in York County.
The fact that “free” Africans — and even at this early stage, it is reasonable to speak of them as African-Americans — were able to marry, own land, be named as owners of property in legal documents, and even interact in the larger, English-dominated society, fanned the flames of the abolitionist movement.
The abolitionists pointed to the fact that the free Blacks were acknowledged as having the full legal status of persons. Enslaved Blacks, the abolitionists reasoned, were therefore logically also fully persons in an legal or moral sense, and slavery therefore a violation of their status as persons.
As free Africans grew in number, and further established themselves in society, their very existence was fuel to the anti-slavery movement. Paul Heinegg reports:
A number of men and women of African descent living on the Eastern Shore gained their freedom in the seventeenth century. There were at least thirty-three African Americans in Northampton County in the 1670s who were free, later became free, or had free children. They represented one-third of the taxable African Americans in the county. By the mid-seventeenth century, some free African Americans were beginning to be assimilated into colonial Virginia society. Many were the result of mixed-race marriages. Francis Payne was married to a white woman named Amy by September 1656 when he gave her a mare by deed of jointure. Elizabeth Key, a “Mulatto” woman whose father had been free, successfully sued for her freedom in Northumberland County in 1656 and married her white attorney, William Greensted. Francis Skiper was married to Ann, a African American woman, before February 1667/8 when they sold land in Norfolk County. Peter Beckett, a “Negro” slave taxable from 1671 to 1677 in Northampton County, married Sarah Dawson, a white servant. Hester Tate, an English woman servant in Westmoreland County, had several children by her husband James Tate, “a Negro slave to Mr. Patrick Spence,” before 1690.
Among the thirteen colonies, there were regional variations. While Virginia, generally reckoned to be a “southern” colony, was home to free Blacks by, at the latest, 1641, the northern colonies tended to be more energetic in their abolitionist tendencies than some of the southern colonies, as Paul Heinegg notes:
The history of free African Americans families in colonial New York and New Jersey is quite different from Virginia and North Carolina. Most were descended from slaves freed by the Dutch West India Company between 1644 and 1664 or by individual owners.
The abolitionist movement was not patient. It quickly took action. While seeing themselves as British subjects, the colonists perceived British headway toward ending slavery as too slow. In a truly revolutionary step, Roger Williams, a pastor and theologian, led the Rhode Island colony to abolish slavery, as John Barry explains:
Rhode Island demonstrated that the seeds Williams had planted had taken deep root, and that the plantation believed in freedom as a principle. It outlawed slavery — an extraordinary action, likely the first in the world, and a reflection of the beliefs of both Williams and Gorton. On May 23, 1652, the Rhode Island General Assembly passed the following law.
Roger Williams was involved in a variety of spiritual groups: the Anglican Church, the Puritan Separatists known as Pilgrims, and the Baptists. While he was connected to each of these groups, he was not clearly a member of any of them. Rather, he sought to pursue the clearest form of the Christian faith that he could find.
It was his goal of genuine Christianity that caused Roger Williams to steadfastly oppose slavery. Under his influence, the colony of Rhode Island adopted the following law:
Whereas, there is a common course practiced amongst English men to buy “negers,” to that end they may have them for service or slaves forever; for the preventing of such practices among us, let it be ordered, that no black mankind or white be forced to covenant bond or otherwise to serve any man or his assignes longer than ten years, or until they come to be twenty four years of age if they be taken in under fourteen, from the time of their coming within the liberties of this Colony; and at the end or term of ten years to set them free, as the manner is with the English servants. And that man that will not let them go free or shall sell him away elsewhere to that end that they may be enslaved to others for a longer time, he or they shall forfeit to the Colony forty pounds.
As historian John Barry notes, “the law was never repealed.” More than two hundred years before the U.S. Civil War, before Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and before the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, free Blacks had established themselves as part of North American society, and their presence had energized the abolitionist movement to the point that it outpaced British steps toward ending slavery.
It is a deep historical irony that the North American colonies, and later the United States, had at first moved faster than England toward abolishing slavery. It is ironic because England later achieved this goal ahead of America: England and the British Empire ended slavery decades before the United States did.
In 1815, the Vienna Congress ended slavery in much of territories controlled by Britain and by various European nations. While slavery was not an institution in Britain, and not an institution in Europe, it existed in other parts of the world where Britain and Europe had influence.
So it was that between 1815 and the final actions taken Prime Minister William Wilburforce, slavery was ended in those parts of the world controlled by European or British interests. Wilburforce had led a series of Parliamentary actions against slavery from 1807 to 1834.
Slavery in the United States did not end until the Emanicpation Proclamation of 1863 and the war’s end in 1865.
The end of slavery in the United States motivated other nations to end slavery: Brazil ended slavery in 1888, Cuba in 1886, Madegascar in 1896, Egypt in 1904, China in 1909, Thailand in 1905, Morocco in 1925, and Yemen in 1962.
