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Necessary but Not Sufficient Revolutionary Ideology and Antislavery Action in the Early Republic Matthew Mason For decades, scholars have debated what effect the ideology of the American Revolution had on slavery. For some, the Revolutionary ideals of universal liberty and equality presented a fundamental and straightforward challenge to slavery. Bernard Bailyn, for instance, has posited that the ideology of the Revolution touched off a ‘‘contagion of liberty’’ that struck down entrenched institutions like slavery, as previously oblivious white revolutionaries became aware of the contradictions between their yelps for liberty and the continued bondage of African Americans. Their unease touched off a ‘‘movement of thought that was rapid, irreversible, and irresistible.’’∞ The best evidence of these ideas’ effectiveness came when majorities in a succession of Northern states abolished slavery within their limits between 1777 and 1804. Winthrop Jordan summed up the thinking of this group of scholars when he wrote that for American revolutionaries ‘‘it was an easy step’’ from vindicating their rights as Englishmen to ‘‘the universalist assertion that all men had a right to be free.’’≤ Scholars who ascribe less causal power to ideas have run in the opposite direction. Gary Nash has led this charge. He grants that the Revolution enlightened the minds of some white patriots on the issue of slavery, but in his narrative that enlightenment was woefully short-lived. Indeed, ‘‘abolitionist sentiment was already receding’’ by the time the Founders met in Philadelphia in 1787 to draft the new nation’s constitution. That document’s protection of slavery constituted a ‘‘tragic failure’’ to realize the Revolutionary moment’s opportunity to abolish slavery throughout the land—a gratuitous capitulation on the part of the North to the Southern disunionist bluff. When push came to shove, Northerners rather 12 Matthew Mason easily let their ‘‘economic interests’’ trump their shallow antislavery commitment .≥ Nash’s writings build on the work of other scholars who likewise insist that when it came to American slavery, the ideology of the Revolution had a superficial impact on both white Northerners and white Southerners.∂ Given the pounding the Revolution and its Founding Fathers have been taking at the hands of recent scholarship, the Nashian interpretation seems to be winning. Recent studies of Northern abolition have challenged the role of egalitarian ideas in this process by accenting its glacial pace and the hostile racial environment that freed black Northerners faced.∑ The antislavery commitment of the supposedly abolitionist Founders, other historians have argued, has been overrated.∏ Recent books detailing the blows the British army struck for black freedom during the Revolutionary War, and depicting ‘‘the vaunted war for liberty’’ as ‘‘a war for the perpetuation of servitude,’’ have reached large audiences .π Still other literature has examined the halting response of white Southerners to the Revolutionary challenge to slavery. In one such study, Eva Sheppard Wolf has revised the number of slaves manumitted by Virginia’s Revolutionary generation downward.∫ Meanwhile, James McMillin has revised the figures for the volume of the post-Revolutionary foreign slave trade upward.Ω In an influential article, François Furstenburg has drawn out the proslavery implications of the Revolutionary notion that those who would be free must fight for their own freedom.∞≠ Paul Finkelman’s argument that the Constitution constituted a capitulation to slaveholders has deeply influenced both scholarly and popular literature on the Founding.∞∞ Taking the story beyond 1787, a growing number of scholars have shown just how implicated the new republic’s government was in protecting and even expanding human bondage.∞≤ In the face of this scholarship, one is left to wonder if the ideas of the American Revolution made any significant or lasting contribution to antislavery in the new American nation. That contribution was at once more and less than the historiography suggests. On the one hand, Revolutionary ideas clearly nourished antislavery activism in the United States. Indeed, only in the age of the American Revolution did scattered and vague discomfort with slavery become organized action against the institution.∞≥ And it seems extraordinarily cynical to dismiss the constant reference to those ideals within antislavery discourse as mere window dressing. But on the other hand, far more people professed antislavery sentiment than acted on that sentiment. This has misled many scholars into dismissing ideas as incapable of producing the meaningful historical change that they could and often did foster. The distinction between belief and action—between individuals passively lamenting slavery and group initiatives against slavery—offers an alternative to the stark choices in this historiography. It...

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