Key terms
- Anthony Benezet
- 1713–1784; *Observations*, 1759
A French-born Quaker teacher in Philadelphia whose pamphlet Observations on the Inslaving, Importing and Purchasing of Negroes argued that the slave trade and slavery itself harmed enslaved and enslaver alike.
Benezet and other Quakers attacked slavery decades before the Revolution, giving the antislavery movement religious roots older than the Patriots' natural-rights arguments.
- No taxation without representation
- From 1765; Dartmouth petition, February 10, 1780
The Patriot principle that only the colonists' own elected assemblies could tax them, as the Stamp Act Congress argued against Parliament.
The argument that justified independence also gave Americans who could not vote a case against their own state governments.
- Coverture
- English common law; Blackstone, 1765
The English common-law rule, which Blackstone described in 1765, that a husband's legal identity covered his wife's. He controlled her property and wages, and she generally could not sue or sign contracts.
The new states kept coverture, which is why New Jersey's women voters were mostly widows and single women.
- Daughters of Liberty
- 1760s–1770s
Patriot women who spun homespun at public spinning bees and gave up British tea and cloth, especially during the boycott of the Townshend duties.
Boycotts made shopping and spinning political acts, which drew women into the resistance even though they could not vote.
- Freedom petitions
- Massachusetts, 1773–1777
Petitions in which Black Massachusetts residents asked lawmakers to end slavery. The best known, from Prince Hall and seven other Black men in January 1777, cited natural rights and the Patriots' cause.
The petitioners turned the Patriots' own case against Britain into a case against slavery in Massachusetts.
- Pennsylvania Abolition Society
- Founded April 14, 1775; revived 1784; reorganized 1787
America's first antislavery society, which mostly Quaker Philadelphians founded days before the war began. Benjamin Franklin later served as its president and signed its 1790 antislavery petition to Congress.
Its members went to court under Pennsylvania's 1780 abolition law and won freedom for Black people whom owners held illegally.
- Abigail Adams
- 1744–1818; letter of March 31, 1776
A Massachusetts Patriot who wrote to her husband, John Adams, in March 1776, urging him to “Remember the Ladies” and not put “unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands.”
She held the Patriots to their own fear of unlimited power, but John Adams answered that he could only laugh.
- State constitutions
- 1776–1780
Written plans of government that most former colonies adopted as they became states, many opening with a bill of rights. They usually put power in elected legislatures and kept governors weak.
Americans who had clashed with royal governors distrusted executive power, and the same distrust shaped the weak Articles of Confederation.
- New Jersey suffrage
- Constitution July 2, 1776; restricted November 16, 1807
A clause in New Jersey's 1776 constitution that let all adult inhabitants worth £50 vote. It named neither sex nor race, so some propertied women and free Black men voted.
When an 1807 law limited voting to free white male citizens, democracy in New Jersey moved backward.
- Declaration of Independence
- Independence voted July 2; text adopted July 4, 1776
Congress's statement of July 4, 1776, which based government on natural rights and the consent of the governed, charged George III with a long list of abuses, and declared independence.
Its promise of equality freed no one, yet Black petitioners and foreign revolutionaries invoked it to claim rights for themselves.
- Property qualifications
- Kept, and in some states lowered, after 1776
Rules in most state constitutions that let a man vote only if he owned property or paid taxes, and set a higher bar to hold office.
As states lowered property tests, more farmers and artisans won seats, and wealthy men held a smaller share of the legislatures.
- Gradual emancipation (gradual abolition)
- Pennsylvania 1780; Connecticut, Rhode Island 1784; New York 1799; New Jersey 1804
Northern state laws that freed children born to enslaved mothers after a set date, but only after years of service. Pennsylvania's 1780 act, the first, made them serve until age 28.
Because people already enslaved generally stayed enslaved, slavery died slowly in the North, lasting in New York until 1827.
- Elizabeth Freeman (Mum Bett)
- Died 1829; jury verdict August 1781
An enslaved woman known as Mum Bett who, with a man named Brom, sued their Massachusetts enslaver, John Ashley. A county jury freed them, and she took the name Elizabeth Freeman.
Without waiting for lawmakers, enslaved people like Freeman went to court, and Massachusetts juries began to side with them.
- Quock Walker case
- 1781–1783; Cushing's jury charge, April 1783
Massachusetts court cases over Quock Walker, an enslaved man whom Nathaniel Jennison beat for leaving him. In 1783 Chief Justice William Cushing told the jury slavery was inconsistent with the state constitution.
After Cushing's charge, Massachusetts courts stopped upholding slavery, though the state never passed an abolition law.
- Republican motherhood
- 1780s–1790s
The ideal that women served the republic by raising their children to be virtuous citizens. It justified more schooling for girls but gave women no vote and left coverture in place.
Women gained a political job inside the home, raising the republic's future citizens, while voting and office stayed with men.
- French Revolution
- 1789–1799; fall of the Bastille, July 14, 1789
The revolution that overthrew France's monarchy. Its 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man said men “are born and remain free and equal in rights,” much as Americans had.
American ideas shaped France's rights declaration, and Lafayette, a veteran of the American war, drafted an early version with Jefferson's advice.
- Judith Sargent Murray
- 1751–1820; essay published 1790
A Massachusetts writer whose On the Equality of the Sexes, which she wrote in 1779 and published in 1790, blamed unequal schooling for any gap between women's and men's minds.
Murray claimed women's intellectual equality, going further than republican motherhood, which valued girls' schooling mainly for their children's sake.
- Benjamin Banneker
- 1731–1806; letter to Jefferson, August 19, 1791
A free Black mathematician and almanac maker from Maryland whose 1791 letter reminded Thomas Jefferson that he had declared all men equal yet held people in slavery.
By quoting the Declaration back to its author, Banneker exposed the contradiction between American equality and slavery.
- Haitian Revolution
- Began August 1791; independence January 1, 1804
A revolt of enslaved people in France's sugar colony of Saint-Domingue. They ended slavery there, defeated Napoleon's army, and in 1804 founded Haiti, the first Black-led nation in the Americas.
Haiti's armed revolt terrified U.S. slaveholders, who kept the United States from recognizing Haiti until 1862.
- Latin American independence movements
- c. 1810–1826; Haitian aid to Bolívar, 1816
Wars in which most of Spain's American colonies won independence by the mid-1820s. Simón Bolívar led the fight in northern South America, with weapons and money from Haiti's president, Alexandre Pétion.
The American and Haitian revolutions inspired these wars, and at Pétion's urging Bolívar promised freedom to enslaved men who joined his army.
Big questions
In what ways did slavery change in the late 1700s?
Revolutionary ideals led some Americans to call for the abolition of slavery, but only Northern states moved to end it. Black freedom petitions used the Patriots' natural-rights arguments, Pennsylvania began gradual emancipation in 1780, and the Quock Walker case ended slavery in Massachusetts. In the South, slavery kept growing, especially after the 1793 cotton gin made upland cotton profitable.
What was the immediate impact of the American Revolution on women?
The Revolution raised women's standing in civic life but left their legal status unchanged. The Daughters of Liberty boycotted British goods, and women raised money and supplies for the army. Afterward, republican motherhood gave mothers the job of raising virtuous citizens and justified new schools for girls, yet coverture still put a married woman's property in her husband's hands.
How did the American Revolution change who held power in the new state governments?
The Revolution spread political power to white men of modest means. Republican ideals valued merit over birth, and lower property qualifications let more farmers and artisans vote and win seats in legislatures that the new state constitutions made the strongest branch. Women could vote only in New Jersey, and only until 1807.
Explain how the ideals of the American Revolution influenced France, Haiti, and Latin America.
The claim of equal natural rights in the Declaration of Independence inspired revolutions abroad. The French Revolution echoed it in 1789, enslaved people in the Haitian Revolution claimed it for themselves and founded Haiti, and Latin American independence movements followed in the 1810s. At home, the French Revolution split Federalists from Democratic-Republicans in the 1790s.
Common mistakes
MistakePrince Hall's 1777 freedom petition led to the end of the Atlantic slave trade.
In factIts ideas fed Northern gradual emancipation laws, and the U.S. ban on slave imports came only in 1808 and freed no one.
MistakeMany women fought as soldiers in the Continental Army.
In factMost women aided the war by collecting money, food, and medicine or by running farms; disguised soldiers like Deborah Sampson were rare.
MistakeRepublican motherhood called for women to vote and hold office.
In factIt praised women for raising virtuous citizens at home and left politics to men, though New Jersey let some women vote until 1807.
Transcript
Ask Missis
1781
For years, an enslaved woman named Bett worked in John Ashley's house in Sheffield, a town in western Massachusetts. One day, Ashley's wife raised a red-hot oven shovel to strike a girl named Lizzy, and Bett took the blow on her arm. She never covered the wound, and when anyone asked about her arm in front of her mistress, she answered:
Bett · remembered in 1853 ask missis!
In May 1781, Bett and a man named Brom sued Ashley, a wealthy local judge, for their freedom. According to later accounts, their lawyers argued that the new Massachusetts constitution, which declared all men “born free and equal,” made them free.
The Answer Was Laughter
1776–1780
In the spring of 1776, Abigail Adams ran the family farm in Braintree, Massachusetts, while her husband, John, served in the Continental Congress.
Many women had joined the fight against Britain as Daughters of Liberty, boycotting British goods and spinning homespun cloth to replace them. During the war, women kept farms and shops running and raised money, food and medicine for the army.
Abigail Adams I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors.
Abigail Adams we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.
John Adams As to your extraordinary Code of Laws, I cannot but laugh.
He wrote that the struggle had already made children, apprentices, students, Native people and enslaved people defy those above them, and now women too.
John treated it as a joke, but Abigail was describing a real legal system called coverture. Under coverture, a wife's property and wages belonged to her husband, and she could not sue or sign contracts in her own name.
After independence, nearly every state wrote a new constitution, and John Adams drafted most of the one for Massachusetts. Town meetings approved it in 1780, and its first article read:
Public reading · Massachusetts, 1780 All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights;
Congress had declared all men “created equal.” Massachusetts said they were “born free and equal,” and enslaved people took that literally.
The Same Argument
1777–1783
Black people in Massachusetts had been saying the same thing for years. In January 1777, Prince Hall, a free Black leather worker in Boston, and other Black men asked the Massachusetts legislature to free the enslaved.
Prince Hall · petition performed Every Principle from which Amarica has Acted in the Cours Of their unhappy Deficultes with Great Briton
Prince Hall · petition performed Pleads Stronger than A thousand arguments in favowrs of Your petioners
The argument against British power was now an argument against American slavery.
In 1780, Paul and John Cuffe, free men of African and Wampanoag descent in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, paid taxes but could not vote.
Paul Cuffe · petition reading having no vote or influence in the election of those that tax us,
Patriots had made the same complaint against Parliament: no taxation without representation. The brothers refused to pay their taxes, and in December 1780 they were jailed for it.
The legislature sent Hall's petition to a committee and drafted a bill against slavery, but then set it aside. So in Sheffield, Bett and Brom took a different path and went to court.
Two Plaintiffs
1781–1790
Bett went to a Sheffield lawyer, Theodore Sedgwick, and in his daughter Catharine's later account, she told him:
Bett · remembered in 1853 Sir, I heard that paper read yesterday, that says, all men are born equal, and that every man has a right to freedom.
Bett · remembered in 1853 I am not a dumb critter; won't the law give me my freedom?
In August 1781, a jury at the county court in Great Barrington decided the case, and its verdict survives:
Reading of the jury’s finding · 1781 the aforesaid Brom & Bett are not and were not at the time of the purchase of the original writ
Reading of the jury’s finding · 1781 the legal Negro servants of him the said John Ashley during their life
The jury awarded thirty shillings in damages, and Ashley appealed but soon dropped the appeal.
Bett walked out free, and she took a new name: Elizabeth Freeman. Brom won his freedom too, but one county jury's verdict did not end slavery across Massachusetts.
That same year, in Worcester County, an enslaved man named Quock Walker left Nathaniel Jennison, who claimed to own him, to work for neighbors. Jennison seized and beat him, and Walker sued, arguing that he had been promised his freedom.
In 1783, Jennison was tried for assault, and Massachusetts Chief Justice William Cushing told the jury:
William Cushing I think the idea of slavery is inconsistent with our own conduct and Constitution
Massachusetts never passed a law abolishing slavery; instead, enslaved people sued, juries sided with them, and after 1783 courts would not enforce it. By 1790, the first federal census counted no enslaved people in Massachusetts.
Packing to Go
1780–1799
In 1796, Ona Judge, a young woman in her early twenties, was enslaved in President Washington's household in Philadelphia, then the nation's capital. That spring, she learned that Martha Washington planned to give her to a granddaughter as a wedding present.
Ona Judge · remembered in 1845 Whilst they were packing up to go to Virginia, I was packing to go, I didn't know where;
Ona Judge · remembered in 1845 for I knew that if I went back to Virginia, I should never get my liberty.
In 1780, Pennsylvania had passed the nation's first gradual abolition law. Quakers such as Anthony Benezet had attacked slavery for decades, and in 1775 Philadelphians founded the first American antislavery society.
Move the child's birth date across March 1, 1780, then look at the mother.
Under the law, children born to enslaved mothers after it passed served until age twenty-eight, and people already enslaved stayed enslaved.
With help from free Black Philadelphians, Ona slipped out during dinner on May 21, 1796, and sailed to Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
A 1793 federal law, the Fugitive Slave Act, let enslavers seize people who had escaped to another state. Washington tried twice to get her back, and she later told a reporter what she said the second time:
Ona Judge · remembered in 1845 I am free now and choose to remain so.
Virginia took a different path: a 1782 law let owners free enslaved people by will or deed, and thousands were freed. But freedom depended on each owner's choice, and the number of enslaved Virginians kept growing. Washington's 1799 will promised freedom to the people he owned, but Ona belonged to the estate of Martha's first husband, and she had freed herself.
By Themselves
1789–1816
By 1789, France was nearly bankrupt, partly from paying for America's war, and that July a Paris crowd stormed the Bastille.
That August, France adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man; Lafayette, who had fought beside Washington, wrote an early draft with Jefferson's advice.
Declaration · French original Les hommes naissent et demeurent libres et égaux en droits.
Its first article said men “are born and remain free and equal in rights,” much as Massachusetts had said nine years earlier.
Those words did not free the nearly half a million enslaved people in Saint-Domingue, France's Caribbean sugar colony, today Haiti. In August 1791, they rose in revolt and began the Haitian Revolution.
Their best-known leader, Toussaint Louverture, had been born enslaved. In 1793, pressed by the revolt, French officials there declared the enslaved free, and in 1794 Paris decreed slavery's end in all French colonies.
In 1802, Napoleon sent an army to retake the colony, and Toussaint was captured and died in a French prison. Yellow fever and the rebels destroyed that army, so in 1803 Napoleon gave up on an American empire and sold Louisiana to the United States.
On January 1, 1804, Toussaint's former lieutenant, General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, declared independence, and a secretary read his proclamation:
Dessalines’s proclamation · read aloud Nous avons osé être libres, osons l'être par nous-mêmes et pour nous-mêmes.
Haiti became the first independent Black republic, and its revolution was the only large slave revolt that ever succeeded.
The United States did not recognize Haiti until 1862, because slaveholding politicians feared its example would spark revolts at home.
Haiti also helped Simón Bolívar, who led South America's revolt against Spanish rule. In 1816, while Bolívar was in exile, Haiti's president, Alexandre Pétion, gave him weapons and money and asked him to free the enslaved.
Back in the United States, the Northern states ended slavery one by one, through constitutions, court rulings or gradual laws. Move from 1790 to 1810 and compare the North with the South.
By 1804, every Northern state had ended slavery or set it on a path to end, but no Southern state did. Eli Whitney's cotton gin of 1793 made cotton far more profitable, and slavery spread south and west. Congress banned the import of enslaved Africans in 1808, but by 1810 the census counted nearly 1.2 million enslaved people.
Mothers and Voters
1787–1807
Back in Massachusetts, Elizabeth Freeman worked for wages in her lawyer's household, helped raise his children, and later bought land of her own.
Because women had helped win the war, and some demanded more, Americans began to give women a civic role, but one inside the home. Mothers, the argument went, would raise virtuous citizens, so girls needed an education.
Benjamin Rush our ladies should be qualified to a certain degree, by a peculiar and suitable education, to concur in instructing their sons in the principles of liberty and government.
Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphia doctor, wanted women educated only to a certain degree, and mainly so they could teach their sons. Historians call this ideal republican motherhood: it opened schools to girls but kept women out of politics. In the 1800s, the idea hardened into the cult of domesticity, the belief that a woman's influence belonged in the home.
Some women pushed further: in 1790, Judith Sargent Murray published an essay arguing that women's minds equaled men's and deserved the same education.
In 1793, Priscilla Mason, a graduating student at the Young Ladies' Academy of Philadelphia, told her audience:
Priscilla Mason The Church, the Bar, and the Senate are shut against us. Who shut them?
Priscilla Mason Man; despotic man, first made us incapable of the duty, and then forbid us the exercise.
The Revolution widened political power for men of modest means: Pennsylvania's 1776 constitution let every free man who paid taxes vote. Several states lowered property requirements, and farmers and artisans won seats once held by wealthy gentlemen.
New Jersey went further: its 1776 constitution gave the vote to all inhabitants who met age, residence and property requirements. Some free Black men and some unmarried women and widows who owned property voted there.
Keep the same two voters and move the law from 1797 to 1807.
In 1807, the New Jersey legislature passed a law that no person could vote
Public reader unless such person be a free, white, male citizen of this state,
With that line, women and free Black men in New Jersey lost a vote some of them had cast for years.
Again and again, people left out of the Revolution's promises held Americans to them, by petition, by escape, by revolt and in court.
One Minute
1776–1829
Historians still debate how radical the Revolution was, and their answers depend on which Americans they study. Sort these developments into what the Revolution changed and what it left in place. For white men of modest means, a lot changed; for women, much less; and for enslaved people, it depended on the state.
Elizabeth Freeman died free in 1829, and Catharine Sedgwick, one of the children she helped raise, remembered what she used to say:
Freeman · remembered in 1853 Any time, any time while I was a slave, if one minute's freedom had been offered to me,
Freeman · remembered in 1853 and I had been told I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it
Freeman · remembered in 1853 just to stand one minute on God's airth a free woman—I would.