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2. Unfished Revolutions
- Louisiana State University Press
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2 Unfinished Revolutions The Revolutionary War changed everything and nothing for the institution of slavery in New York. The strained, paradoxical equilibrium was captured, perhaps unintentionally, in the essays of Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur. Writing as the emblematic “American Farmer,” the French immigrant to Orange County imagined a “new man” emerging in America. This American archetype would be European in blood lines, always ambitious, and often prosperous. Unlike the English, who “have no trees to cut down, no fences to make, no negroes to buy and to clothe,” white American farmers proudly worked, “careful and anxious to get as much as they can” for themselves.1 In terms that might describe New York or Virginia, New Jersey or Georgia , a bountiful prosperity characterized the life of the fortunate American farmer. Crèvecoeur’s narrator described his own felicitous situation: “Every year I kill from 1500 to 2000 weight of pork, 1200 of beef . . . of fowls my wife has always a great stock: what can I wish more? My negroes are tolerably faithful and healthy.” For this New Yorker, writing more generally as an American, black slaves were emblematic of their master’s and their nation’s good fortune. Crèvecoeur painted a portrait in which citizenship and slavery, self-possessive ambition and the possession of others, all helped to define a world of promise and possibility.2 The timing and circumstances of Crèvecoeur’s publication partook of a reality far more jarring than these passages suggest. In 1778, the transplanted Frenchman departed his beloved Pine Hill estate in war-torn Orange County. Perhaps because of his loyalist sympathies, he chose this moment to seek passage to France, where he hoped to renew ties to his relatives. After passing several difficult months in British-occupied Manhattan, the “American Farmer” made his way to Europe. The prosperity and citizenship of which he optimistically wrote was a thing of the past and perhaps the future, but not the present, when his essays were first published in London in 1782.3 Financially strapped masters struggled to feed and clothe the blacks as well as the whites in their households; moreover, the thousands of blacks who escaped to freedom or fought for the British proved to be not even “tolerably faithful.” Still, Crèvecoeur’s description resonated well enough. At the end of the Revolutionary War, slavery remained ingrained in the state’s economic Unfinished Revolutions 27 and social identity, just as it remained a fundamental part of the new nation’s identity. Descriptions of America’s freedoms clashed with the reality of slavery and the implicit color-coding of national identity.4 The fight to create a new political order while preserving many of the old privileges had been a tempestuous affair with, as Crèvecoeur well knew, many casualties. The tremors that brought revolution to North America’s eastern seaboard colonies also stimulated new thinking about slavery in the Atlantic world. The tidal wave of armed conflict ultimately swept the British from thirteen colonies; while individual slaves sailed off from New York when the conflict fully ebbed, slavery’s foundation remained in place. Yet because the Revolution fundamentally altered the political, economic, cultural, and even moral climate of New York, the seeds of an enduring antislavery discourse were now embedded in that foundation—with unsettling longterm consequences. I. Even as the Atlantic slave trade blended into the stream of colonial life from Albany, New York, to Savannah, Georgia, other transatlantic currents began subtly to erode the acceptance of slavery. The effects of the antislavery undertow were barely detectable for most of the prerevolutionary period. Nonetheless, Anglo-American Quakers and major British intellectual figures raised questions about New World slavery and other institutions embraced by European imperial powers. The spread of potentially subversive ideas helped set the stage for events that would disrupt political life and challenge slavery in New York and throughout mainland North America.5 Specifically, the emerging commitment of Quakers to abolition, the influence of English and Scottish Enlightenment critiques, and the egalitarian impulses of the Great Awakening all had subtle yet profound effects on New York slavery. Prior to 1750 in America, most overt questioning of racial slavery emerged from within Quaker circles. The Society of Friends defined itself as a discrete community striving for moral purity through open-ended self-questioning, a disposition that made Quakers less likely than other groups to accept existing social arrangements. Moreover...