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The American Revolution began in Massachusetts not the large slave colonies in the South. Court cases against slavery were even being held in Massachusetts while the American Revolution was still going on. Pennsylvania also began abolishing slavery during the American Revolution and most of the Northern states abolished slavery within the next 20 years. And in 1787, Congress outlawed slavery altogether in the future Great Lake States.
The British only abolished slavery for the British Empire in 1833, so instead of the American Revolution being caused by slavery in the conspiracy theory you propose, the Revolution actually helped end slavery faster in the Northern half of the United States.
Last edited by mensaguy; 11-24-2017 at 06:41 PM..
Reason: Quoted post nixed
The American Revolution began in Massachusetts not the large slave colonies in the South. Court cases against slavery were even being held in Massachusetts while the American Revolution was still going on. Pennsylvania also began abolishing slavery during the American Revolution and most of the Northern states abolished slavery within the next 20 years. And in 1787, Congress outlawed slavery altogether in the future Great Lake States.
The British only abolished slavery for the British Empire in 1833, so instead of the American Revolution being caused by slavery in the conspiracy theory you propose, the Revolution actually helped end slavery faster in the Northern half of the United States.
Good points. I might add that the so-called protections for slavery in the US Constitution were put there not because the authors favored slavery, but rather because the Southern states would likely not have ratified the Constitution without them. The main Federalist support came from the Northern states, whereas the anti-Federalists were mainly in the South. Any attempt to put language in the Constitution to interfere with slavery would have almost certainly resulted in the South not ratifying the Constitution.
The "protections" are rather weak anyway. Mainly, they recognize the existence of slavery and prohibited any interference with the slave trade for 20 years. The Constitution is silent on the slavery question after the year 1808. The Founders were hopeful at the time that slavery would die off naturally in that time period, so they basically punted the question down the road in order to achieve ratification. That actually was looking like a good possibility until the cotton gin was developed and cotton plantations utilizing slave labor became hugely profitable.
Bear with me, it's been a while. If you're angling for info for a high school or college paper, you'll need to double-check the following.
After winning the Seven Year's War, Great Britain had a large debt which needed to be paid off. The debt was £140,000,000, 50% of which was incurred by the war. Parliament looked for a way to raise taxation in order to pay this debt. Additionally, Parliament didn't shrink its army after the war, as that would releasing the sons of lords from their positions as officers in the army. For a good number of such officers, the military was their only occupation and their only source of income. Shrinking the army meant that the gentry would need to reabsorb their second and third sons, paying their expenses. And officers needed men to command, so the non-commissioned soldiers were also kept in service; after all, there was an empire to maintain.
Due to the situation of extensive debt to be paid down and large standing armies to be maintained, Britain needed to raise taxes. The opinion in the British Parliament people in Great Britain were already heavily taxed, but that the colonists in North America had never really been taxed. Because of an inadvertent benign negligence on the part of the British Crown, the various colonies were mostly left to fend for themselves and their colonial assemblies taxed themselves to provide for most governmental services and for raising and keeping militias to protect themselves from the Native Americans. There were occasional larger wars that had side theaters in North America, but in those cases, the colonial parliaments raised taxes on their own to help pay for the military expenses incurred in North America, after some prolonged prodding by the British Crown, of course.
The British Parliament began raising taxes on the colonials in North America. The French Canadians, newly acquired, had no issues with paying direct taxes to the Crown. Neither did the British colonies in the Caribbean, as they had always been more reliant on British military protection, being comprised of wealthy sugar plantations coveted by other European powers.
But the British colonies in North America had existed for at least a century, with their own governmental assemblies making the decisions regarding taxation. They felt that their assemblies had the exclusive power to approve or deny direct taxation upon their own people, derived from the Magna Carta. Only representatives elected by the people had the power to raise direct taxes upon those people.
The British Parliament, of course, believed that they, the Parliament in Great Britain, spoke for all of the people of the British Empire through a concept known as virtual representation, and thus had the power to enact taxes for all British subjects. Parliament didn't need to have members specifically from North America any more than they needed to have members specifically from Leeds, England. Parliament spoke for all British subjects, whether those subjects had a voice in the election of members of Parliament or not.
That's the reason - a difference in the opinion of where the power lay that allowed for the raising of direct taxes upon the populace. It snowballed from there to economic boycotts, destruction of property, suspension of colonial assemblies, military occupation, resistance by colonials, powder raids upon local citizens armories, and eventual armed conflict.
The United States Constitution as originally drafted protected the "property rights" of slave owners whose "property" fled, providing for the return of said property to the owner, even in those states wherein slavery would eventually be outlawed. It was a provision that encountered no debate during the Constitutional Convention or during the subsequent ratification conventions in the various states.
However, the expectation of nearly all of the members of the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia was that slavery was a fading institution which would eventually be outlawed by the various state governments. Only the delegates from South Carolina and Georgia sought to extend the practice of slavery. Being newer, the delegates from those two states argued that the plantation owners in their states needed further importation of slaves in order to properly achieve the development and wealth of older states such as Virginia. The compromises struck on the issue of slavery by the Founding Fathers was that the international slave trade would be allowed for a specified period of time to allow Georgia and South Carolina the "right" to economically develop in the manner of the other older states, and that slave owner "property rights" in all states were protected by the Constitution to allow slave owners the right to retrieve their runaway "property" from within the entire width and breadth of the nation.
There is an interesting side bar regarding this right to retrieve slaves. George Washington, when President, resided in the nation's capital of Philadelphia and had brought some of his household slaves along with him. In 1780, Pennsylvania passed the Gradual Abolition Act, which freed slaves who had reached 28 years of age and had lived in the states for at least 6 months. Washington, afraid that his slaves would become aware of the law and demand their freedom due to them under the Pennsylvania law, rotated his household staff every 5 months, sending them back to Mount Vernon in Virginia and bringing back up to Philadelphia other slaves to take their places in his household staff. The man who presided over the 1787 US Constitutional Convention understood that the Fugitive Slave clause of the United States didn't actually extend the institution of slavery to those states wherein the practice had been outlawed.
John of Canada is not exactly correct when he says that the USA was created to protect slavery. The US Constitution had protections for slavery, but these were added as compromises. Without such compromises, the convention delegates would never been able to complete the Constitution. The assumption was that the future of the institution of slavery was to be decided by the various states and that the institution itself would gradually die out.
John is wrong when he says that the USA "stopped protecting" slavery in 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation was a war-time executive order, didn't apply in those states and areas of states not in rebellion to the United States federal government, and would have returned all temporarily emancipated slaves to bondage after the war had ended. It's why Lincoln pushed so hard for the 13th Amendment to the Constitution (ratified by the states in 1865) - he knew that it was the only way to enact permanent and legal nation-wide emancipation.
'Just' offering representation wasn't a simple option. Parliament was a complicated and messy organization, with tension between it and the monarchy over control of power and changing demographics that created inequities in representation. The American colonies were not one entity to grant representation to but 13, not to mention the potential for requests for representation from other English colonies, as stated previously. The logistics of recasting Parliament would have been enormous, and members would not have been eager to dilute the influence they had.
For many on the American side, representation was more a slogan than a desire. What they wanted was free reign to move west of the proclamation line and dismantle what was left of the mercantile system, which had as its goal the enriching of the home country by way of the resources of the colonies. As more generations of colonists felt further and further removed from England, economic self-interest drove the Americans. Representation in Parliament would not necessarily bring about different results, as Americans would have a fairly limited number of representatives.
Slavery and its preservation was certainly a major part of American economic self-interest. While the revolution began in the New England colonies, it was Dunmore's Proclamation that helped tip the Southern colonies towards rebellion. The prospect of having formerly persecuted Africans with weapons was a powerful motivator. What later appeared in the Constitution is a red herring to this thread though, as it did not create the original national government.
Comrade, you do know the 13 colonies were part of the British Empire and not part of England?
Slavery ended sooner than 1833 in the most of the northern United States. Northern states like Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and the future Vermont actually began to abolish slavery while they were still fighting the British in the Revolution. So the American Revolution actually speeded up the end of slavery in the North.
Last edited by mensaguy; 11-24-2017 at 06:42 PM..
Reason: Quoted post deleted
You WAY WAY overstate the importance of the Somerset ruling regarding slavery, almost to the degree or history revisionism, as it clearly did not impact the colonies. The origins of the American Revolution started way before 1772, the seeds of it actually in the previous century but more accurately in 1764 and 65 protests started with various tax acts imposed by British Parliament.
The Somerset case perhaps brought some southern colonist over to the cause who did not understand it's limited scope, but I would say the impact was insignificant as both the slave trade and slavery continued in not only the US, but the British Colonies in the carribean and in India...and continued to exist for decades afterwards with England (Somerset ruling or not) being one of the largest slave traders in the world. Of course, the division of slave and free states, dividing between the agricultural south and manufacturing north, was an issue even during the writing of the US constitution, and it was a careful compromise that never got settled until the US Civil War.
I see it as actually an inverse cause and effect - England lost the agricultural based southern colonies and thus lost the profit from maintaining a slave-based economy. How many cotton fields are in England? There was no value in slaves in England. With that loss, outlawing slavery became an easy decision. The fact remains, many northern US states outlawed slavery BEFORE the UK officially did it in 1833 (and of course, there being profit with slaves in India, slavery continued there by the East India Company). The US abolished the slave trade that same year as England - 1808.
Last edited by mensaguy; 11-24-2017 at 06:43 PM..
Reason: Quoted post deleted.
You addressed none of my thread. But - the simple response to dismiss the above is that Somersett ruling in 1773 did not impact the colonies because 1.) the scope was limited to the forceable removal of slaves from England, 2.) The colonies were not yet a separate country and the US Constitution not yet written.
We can leave it at that and you are done. But read the response from LINative again. The US colonies had it's own "Somersett" ruling- Quock Walker in 1781 in Massasuchetts. They took it to the ultimate conclusion, as a colony in open rebellion with the crown they defied English authority by declaring slavery unconstitutional.
Read this carefully:
"As to the doctrine of slavery and the right of Christians to hold Africans in perpetual servitude, and sell and treat them as we do our horses and cattle, that (it is true) has been heretofore countenanced by the Province Laws formerly, but nowhere is it expressly enacted or established. It has been a usage – a usage which took its origin from the practice of some of the European nations, and the regulations of British government respecting the then Colonies, for the benefit of trade and wealth. But whatever sentiments have formerly prevailed in this particular or slid in upon us by the example of others, a different idea has taken place with the people of America, more favorable to the natural rights of mankind, and to that natural, innate desire of Liberty, with which Heaven (without regard to color, complexion, or shape of noses-features) has inspired all the human race. And upon this ground our Constitution of Government, by which the people of this Commonwealth have solemnly bound themselves, sets out with declaring that all men are born free and equal – and that every subject is entitled to liberty, and to have it guarded by the laws, as well as life and property – and in short is totally repugnant to the idea of being born slaves. This being the case, I think the idea of slavery is inconsistent with our own conduct and Constitution; and there can be no such thing as perpetual servitude of a rational creature, unless his liberty is forfeited by some criminal conduct or given up by personal consent or contract ..."
Yeah, one can say portions of the US rebelled against England in order to free the slaves!
Again that's a gross oversimplification and misleading, but if you stick to your silly argument, I will stick with mine.
I find it ironic, I must add, that in this thread you are injecting slavery (or, the moral issue of racism) where it does not belong, while in another thread you are ranting against jews ("puppet of the Zionists" is the word you used).
Last edited by mensaguy; 11-24-2017 at 06:43 PM..
Reason: Quoted post deleted.
You WAY WAY overstate the importance of the Somerset ruling regarding slavery, almost to the degree or history revisionism, as it clearly did not impact the colonies. The origins of the American Revolution started way before 1772, the seeds of it actually in the previous century but more accurately in 1764 and 65 protests started with various tax acts imposed by British Parliament.
The Somerset case perhaps brought some southern colonist over to the cause who did not understand it's limited scope, but I would say the impact was insignificant as both the slave trade and slavery continued in not only the US, but the British Colonies in the carribean and in India...and continued to exist for decades afterwards with England (Somerset ruling or not) being one of the largest slave traders in the world. Of course, the division of slave and free states, dividing between the agricultural south and manufacturing north, was an issue even during the writing of the US constitution, and it was a careful compromise that never got settled until the US Civil War.
I see it as actually an inverse cause and effect - England lost the agricultural based southern colonies and thus lost the profit from maintaining a slave-based economy. How many cotton fields are in England? There was no value in slaves in England. With that loss, outlawing slavery became an easy decision. The fact remains, many northern US states outlawed slavery BEFORE the UK officially did it in 1833 (and of course, there being profit with slaves in India, slavery continued there by the East India Company). The US abolished the slave trade that same year as England - 1808.
That raises two interesting questions.
First, like I was suggesting, did the American Revolution speed up the abolition of slavery in the United States? Well in the northern United States we know it did. Several American colonies abolished slavery while they were still fighting for independence and most of the North soon followed the war. However, in the Southern USA, the American Revolution did not lead to the abolition of slavery and it would take a Civil War to do that.
But that adds a second interesting question as you suggest.
What if the American Revolution never happened or even if just the Southern colonies stayed part of the British Empire? As it was, the British only abolished slavery in the Empire in 1833 and even then there were compromises to the slaveholders in the act. You could make a good argument that if the large wealthy Southern colonies were still part of the Empire, there would have been much more pressure to maintain slavery. There may have been even more major compromises to the Slavery Act or it may have happened years later, perhaps decades later.
The constitutional provisions protecting slavery and temporarily the importation of slaves were included at the behest of South Carolina. The framers knew that if not admitted to the union that that state, which had shown during the Revolution that it valued slavery over independence, would revert to the status of a British protectorate and be a toehold for the reconquest of the colonies. Britain never really accepted American independence until the War of 1812.
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