Common Bondage: Slavery as Metaphor in Revolutionary America (review)

Peter Dorsey's Common Bondage adeptly demonstrates how the metaphor of slavery drove America's rhetorical engine during the Revolutionary era. Used in pamphlets, newspapers, sermons, plays, correspondence, poetry, and public documents by Patriots and Royalists, by blacks and whites, and by men and women, the slavery metaphor powerfully shaped the way people thought about liberty, independence from Great Britain, and the condition of slaves and women. Dorsey contends that before and during the war for independence all sides believed that American independence and emancipation of slaves "were irrevocably joined" (xvii). However, shortly after independence was achieved, Dorsey shows how the universal motivation for emancipation dissipated despite growing efforts of abolitionists in both the North and South.

Patriots used the slavery metaphor to draw upon the Whig political tradition that warned of the danger of unchecked governmental power. The perceived danger to liberty was heightened because of the presence of chattel slavery. Whigs believed that liberty and property were inexorably connected, and that every attempt by government to take property unjustly would end in slavery. It took little time for Britain's new imperial policy initiated after 1763 to be interpreted by Americans as the harbinger of slavery.

Part of the property Americans wanted protected was their slaves, even though virtually everyone saw the inconsistency of staving off British slavery while they themselves owned slaves. While some individuals worked hard to couple their own freedom with abolitionism, others strove to separate the two. The emphasis on property rights helped blurr this inconsistency partly by emphasizing racial distinctions that would lay the foundation for the proslavery rhetoric of the next generation. The postwar secularization of society, with its emphasis on the separation of church and state, also undercut the effectiveness of abolitionists' use of the slavery metaphor.

The slavery metaphor was used in a variety of other ways—to encourage individual and national economic independence, to show that humans were subject to the slavery of sin, to emphasize the importance of manly fortitude as opposed to effeminacy in defending one's rights, by women challenging the patriarchal authority of their husbands, by Royalists discrediting the Patriot cause, and by black ministers and writers (Phillis Wheatley and Benjamin Bannecker to mention two) who pointed to the time (either here on earth or in the hereafter) when roles would be reversed and slaves would become masters and masters would become slaves. In the debate over the newly proposed Constitution in 1787—1788, Antifederalists incorporated the slavery metaphor into their overall strategy, aligning themselves with the principles of the American Revolution and condemning Federalists as advocates of a new oppressive imperial government. Federalists, on the other hand, emphasized compromise, Union, and their own enlightened, rational thinking as opposed to the passion and radicalism of their opponents.

Dorsey has collected a prodigious number of quotations using the slavery metaphor. He divides these topically among his eight chapters and weaves these quotations together in a masterful narrative that captures much of the emotion of the day. He would have felt comfortable as an actual participant in the Revolutionary debates.