And when a coherent unifying narrative is formed incorporating all of those occurrences, new data are discovered, demanding the formation of a yet more complicated narrative.
In 1652, not even half a century after Jamestown’s founding, the Rhode Island legislative body outlawed slavery in that colony. This achievement was the result of abolitionists, including Roger Williams, who had begun agitating for the abolition of slavery in Rhode Island in 1636. In the same year that this legislation was passed, 1652, Samuel Sewall was born, who carried the abolitionist agenda forward, this time in Massachusetts, authoring anti-slavery texts.
To call the anti-slavery agitators in the 1600s ‘abolitionists’ is somewhat anachronistic, because the word at that time was not often so used. Yet in substance they were exactly that.
Here is, then, a great mystery: Given the vigorous start which the abolitionist movement had by the mid 1600s, and given that more than half the population in each of the thirteen colonies, later thirteen states, was opposed to slavery, why did slavery persist for so long?
Even in the slave states, a majority of the population was not enthusiastic about slavery. Slaveholders and their sycophants defended the institution energetically, but they were less than half of the population in the slaveholding states. While the minority in those states enjoyed an economic advantage from slavery, the free majority understood slavery as undermining economic opportunities. Free men who did not own slaves, but who lived in slaveholding states, saw their income driven downward by the institution of slavery.
Yet slavery persisted.
The slaveholders were perhaps so deftly able to defend slavery because they had disproportionately large economic resources, they mastered the skills of political and legal maneuvering, and they did not eschew the use of violence in pursuing their goals.
A majority of the “founders wanted to abolish slavery,” as Ben Shapiro notes. The slaveholders and their supporters, despite being a distinct minority, found procedural ways to coerce the remainder of the new nation into allowing slavery, as Shapiro writes:
From its founding, the United States attempted to come to grips with slavery and phase it out. The state of Vermont was the first sovereign state to abolish slavery, in 1777. During the debate over the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wanted to include a provision that would have condemned King George III for “wag[ing] cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation hither.” Southern states demanded that this provision be removed in return for joining the revolution. Having no choice, Jefferson removed the clause.
By the time the new Constitution was written in 1787, the situation was still the same. The minority percentage of pro-slavery citizens in the United States refused the majority’s wish that the new government do away with slavery entirely. The abolitionists nonetheless found a way to weaken the pro-slavery bloc: the “three-fifths” clause.
This clause has been debated and misunderstood for over two centuries. The abolitionists refused to give the slaveholding states a one-for-one representation for their slaves in Congress. Why should a slaveholding state have a greater representation in Congress than a free state, when the slaves were not allowed to vote? Should the size of a state’s representation be based on the number of people in that state, or on the number of free people? If a state with slaves were to obtain a larger representation by including the number of slaves in the calculation, then the pro-slavery bloc would have an overwhelming and undefeatable hold on Congress, and slavery could never be abolished. Only by reducing the representation of the slaveholding states could the abolitionist cause find a foothold in the legislative process.
By not reducing the formula to zero, the new Constitution also created an inherent structural instability, a conceptual disequilibrium, which would guarantee that the issue of abolitionism would never go away. It would continually resurface until the matter was resolved once and for all.
John Brown, along with many of his family, was part of an abolitionist network which included David Hudson and a young Ulyses S. Grant.
In 1859, John Brown was instrumental in nudging the abolitionist movement away from its pacifist leanings. If the slaveholders were willing to use violence to defend slavery, John Brown and David Hudson reasoned, then the abolitionists and slaves together might use violence to end slavery, as historian Franklin Benjamin Sanborn wrote in 1878:
Old Squire Hudson, for whom the town so-called in Ohio was named, and who was the leading man in that section where Brown spent his boyhood, was not only an abolitionist fifty years ago, but that he favored forcible resistance by the slaves.
So it was, then, that over two centuries’ worth of abolitionism culminated in the Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and arduous but successful work of implementing that proclamation, along with the three amendments to the Constitution between 1865 and 1870, during the last two years of the Civil War and during the Reconstruction Era.
