Generations of Captivity

A ripple of democratic revolutions throughout the Americas and Europe ushered in new ideologies and paths towards freedom, plus vehement efforts by slaveowners to maintain the status quo or expand power.

The chaos of war in the North provided cover for slaves to escape bondage. It also produced ideology. Touting commitments to equality and freedom, white revolutionaries popularized a vocabulary that slaves could readily adopt in their own bids for freedom, aided by evangelical faiths that proclaimed equality in the eyes of God. Many slaveholders “yielded to the logic of the Revolution and freed their slaves” (104). All state legislatures north of the Chesapeake passed plans for gradual emancipation by 1800. Emancipation, however, was delayed, conditional, and usually partial at best. Post-revolutionary society replicated itself on the earlier model: Blacks worked in positions of direct servitude to whites, at the very “bottom of the occupational hierarchy” (107).

In the Chesapeake (or “Upper South”), “slavery […] did not crack under the blows of revolutionary republicanism and evangelical egalitarianism” (111), largely because the region was only ever a peripheral theater of war. It did change significantly, though. A growing slave population enabled an Upper-South-controlled internal slave trade—the “Second Middle Passage” (113). A new economy rooted in several different crops led slaveowners to hire out their slaves to other worksites.