Venture Smith and the Business of Slavery and Freedom

Foreword

· ix · Foreword THE STORY of Venture Smith is an important part of American history . In many ways, it is an American story of the struggle for freedom. Yet Venture struggled against a powerful American institution, the institution of slavery. The capture and enslavement of this one African in eighteenthcentury America before the North American British colonies began their own freedom struggle, which led ultimately to national independence, illustrate the young nation’s most fundamental contradiction. American patriots explained their revolution against the British monarchy as a natural result of their dedication to human rights and human liberty. But by holding tens of thousands of Africans as slaves, the new United States of America diminished much of its moral authority in the eyes of the world. In its Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson, a Virginia slaveholder with 150 bound people in his possession when he penned the words, the nation asserted its commitment to the basic, God-given human rights of “life, liberty , and the pursuit of happiness.” The irony of slaveholders publicly declaring their commitment to human freedom did not go unnoticed at home or abroad. As founding father John Adams worked to establish American liberty, his wife, Abigail, pointed forcefully to the contradiction. In a letter to her husband in 1774 she reflected on the state of freedom in America. “It always appeard a most iniquitous scheme to me,” she wrote, “to fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.”1 The British writer Samuel Johnson directly challenged the American argument for its independence. In his 1775 pamphlet Taxation No Tyranny, Johnson defended the right of the king to rule over his American subjects, and then posed a stinging question: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of [N]egroes?”2 Foreword· x · Venture and the other African slaves held in this emerging free nation could not have agreed more. In 1773 and 1774 Massachusetts slaves confronted colonial authorities with the question of their freedom. In a petition to the state legislature they declared, “We expect great things from men who have made such a noble stand against the designs of their fellow men to enslave them.” They demanded that they be allowed one day a week to labor for their own benefit so they might accumulate funds to purchase their freedom. This petition was refused, but others followed, each carefully worded to highlight the parallels between the slaves’ cause and the colonists’ desire for a “free and Christian country.”3 Yet as America struggled for its national independence , slavery remained a vital institution, not only in the southern and middle Atlantic regions of the young nation, but also in much of New England. In Vermont, where slaveholdings were never large, slavery was abolished altogether in its constitution of 1777. In Massachusetts, with a much larger and more economically significant slave presence, the supreme court of the commonwealth ruled, in 1783, that slavery was illegal under the constitution of 1780. Still, in Connecticut, where Venture Smith spent more than half his life, slavery was a powerful institution in the eighteenth century. By 1774, New London County had become the greatest slaveholding section of New England, with almost twice as many slaves as the most populous slave county in Massachusetts. As the Revolution approached, Connecticut had more than six thousand slaves, the largest number of any colony in New England.4 Venture was sold from master to master until 1760, when he was able to strike a deal that allowed him to buy his freedom on a time payment plan. Five years later he had worked his way out of slavery, taking on a variety of jobs and seizing what little opportunity was available to black people in revolutionary America. On the eve of the revolution that would bring liberty to white Americans, Venture Smith was able to purchase the freedom of his wife and three children, bringing his entire family out of bondage. As the American colonies waged their freedom struggle against British power, Venture purchased a farm in the small Connecticut village of Haddam, on the Connecticut River. There he would live the rest of his life as a prominent landowner and businessman. As the nation matured through its revolutionary years, slavery was gradually ended in most of the northern states, and Venture and his family settled into a more...