 Hello. I want to begin by thanking the National Archives for having me here, for allowing me to speak to you all today. I have made great use of the National Archive over my career as a historian. In there many times, I enjoyed the facilities and I've also made use of the founders online, which is an amazing resource of the National Archives. And I'm more than happy to return the favor by discussing my new book on this, their YouTube podcast. Now, a little about myself to explain the book. I am an American cultural and intellectual historian and liberty is an idea. And so this book is about liberty. I have many books about American political history, especially in the early years of the country. And this one covers politics of the Revolutionary Era. And I am a lawyer and property law professor. Slavery is a legal institution that deals with property rights in people. Now, the Revolutionary Era, which I date from the Stamp Act crisis, 1765, through the first Washington administration about 1795, witnessed a complex and intricate interaction between the formative American idea of liberty, so foundational to the formation of the United States and an interaction of that with the established fact of an American shadow slavery, which when the Revolutionary Era began existed in every, all 13, every color. Now, using a narrative framework, my book attempts to recreate that interaction. Now, there's way too much to tell from the book in one short interview or podcast. So allow me rather than to try to cover the whole book. There are lots of other things in the book. And allow me instead to string together some bits of pieces from across the book, a reading, as it were, from parts of the book that seem to me these parts strung out seem to fit together to tell a minor theme from the book. So what I'm going to say deals with one, but only one underlying question of the day that was addressed in the book, or to use the pronoun they would have then used, what is an American in that Revolutionary Era? So let me turn to reading these parts, which I tried to pull together coherently. In the beginning, all the world was America. So wrote the gaunt, sharp-nosed English philosopher John Locke in his 1689 Second Treatise of Government about a place he never saw, but played a major role in shaping. This one sentence encapsulated Locke's theory that people originally found nature vacant and uncullivate and made it their property by occupying and improving. Locke's allusion to America drew on the view ascended in Britain at the time that because Native Americans held land in common and did not improve it, Britons could make America theirs through occupation and cultivation. An influential English Whig theorist who, like other Whigs of his era, championed parliamentary supremacy over royal rule, Locke wrote his treatise in opposition to the claim that God gave absolute authority to the monarch. Under his theory, at some point in the distant past, people voluntarily formed governments to protect life, liberty, and property. Laws to use his own words. Laws ought to be designed for no other and ultimately the good of the people, he declared. And governments, again using his words, must not raise taxes on the property of the people without the consent of the people. Individuals can choose to become enslaved, cannot choose to become enslaved because it violates the natural rights of liberty, Locke reasoned. And in a like manner, people have a duty to revolt against governments enslaving them by taking their property or liberty without their consent or the consent of their representatives. Being like other English Whigs really used the word slavery as a metaphor for a lack of political agents. Where people generally held in perpetual bondage, the metaphor might seem excessive or even outrageous when applied to less onerous impositions like taxation without representation. Still, it had the rhetorical force to engage and persuade. And potentially change the way people viewed burdens placed on them by the king or by Harlem. Now actual slavery existed. In fact, over two million enslaved Africans were shipped to the Americas for sale by 1700. And as an investor in the slave trading royal African company, Locke profited from it. In his treatise, Locke noted that conquerors could enslave captives. He termed this quote, the perfect condition of slavery. Further, as secretary to one of the founding proprietors of the Carolinas, Locke drafted the colony's initial 1669 Constitution, which established black slavery there by positive law. Quote, every freeman of Carolina, it stated, shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves. For Locke in the late 1600s, America offered an example of embryonic processes of political formation happening in real time. By the late 1700s, Americans saw his treatise and in his treatise, the sanction to take those processes to their logical end in revolution and independence. On shadow slavery, they could take what they wanted from this mis-messaging about slavery. Britons will never be slaves, citizens of the United Kingdom sang in the refrain of rural Britannia, a popular anthem from 1740. But those same British colonists, at least in the colonies, if not in England itself, might enslave others. Well, if Britain could not become slaves, then who could? Long before Europeans reached the Americas, slavery had persisted in the Western Mediterranean, which divided Christian Europe from Islamic North Africa. In that region, Christians captured and enslaved Muslims, and Muslims captured and enslaved Christians, and both trafficked in black Africans. Locke knew this. By the 1500s, traders from the two principal Catholic nations engaged in this process, Portugal and Spain, started shipping enslaved blacks directly from Africa to their New World colonies and, a century later, to the English, Dutch, and French colonies there. Unrestrained by religion, local custom, or natural law, these European Americans created a form of chattel slavery for blacks harsher than any known precedent. Slavery, by this time, had died out in England. It had been outlawed since post-Roman times, and no laws defined the status of enslaved person in British North America. By the time of the founding of South Carolina, however, in 1670, Barbados had emerged as the richest and most populated English colony in the New World. Sugar and slavery were the base, wind base, of its prosperity. Barbados dealt with its influx of black labor by adopting a series of statutes, making it the first English domain in the world to authorize chattel slavery. In slayed blacks and their descendants through the mother became the absolute property of their masters. For Britons, who remember, will never be slaves, to accept these laws, they must have viewed blacks differently from whites because no such statutes ever applied to any whites, not even the much maligned Irish. And in Barbados, such laws, applying only to blacks, appeared almost spontaneous upon the arrival of Africans. Now, all this mattered for South Carolina because casting about for settlers to populate their new colony and hoping to create a plantation economy, its proprietors recruited British Barbatan smallholders, pushed off their land by the expansion of sugar plantation. Enticed by Locke's constitution, which assured each of them, quote, absolute power over his negro slaves, and promises of extra land for everyone they brought, black or white, these white Barbatans began arriving in South Carolina with their enslaved blacks and slave code experience as early as 1680. At the time, no one even knew what plantation crop could thrive in the marshy low country around Charlestown. By 1690, they had found it in rice, which proved as brutalizing to produce as sugar and similarly dependent on enslaved labor. That year, Carolina enacted a slavery code model on Barbatan law. From South Carolina, those laws spread to other colonies in the American south. Even as a number of enslaved Africans reaching British North America surged during the three decades leading up to the American Revolution, immigrants poured in the colonies from Germany, from Ireland, from Scotland, and Wales. Prior to 1700, except for pockets of mainly Dutch settlers around New York, most white colonists came from England. Thereafter, immigration to the 13 mainland colonies became more ethnically diverse, at least with respect to people of white Western European ancestor. Early in the 1770s, the French American writer Saint John de Cravica took up the ethnic diversity of America by posing the question, what is an American? He was asked, is either a European or descendant of a European, hence the strange mixture of blood which you will find in no other country, Cravica answered. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations. He is an American who, leaving behind all of his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new one from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. Cravica published these words in a book of made-up letters from a fictional Pennsylvania farmer named James to an anonymous English correspondent. Capturing the simple pleasures of life in a new land, the book became a literary class with these sense, the ones I have just read, its best known passage. Even though one letter depict Native Americans, their numbers reduced by old world diseases and their lives degraded by alcohol abuse, living alongside white colonists and others have mentioned James' own enslaved Negroes as he calls them. Cravica identified only Europeans and their descendants residing in the colonies as Americans, members of an all-white melting pot. The affable saiyan of a Norman nobility with aspirations of becoming an author and writer himself. Cravica went to Canada as a French army map maker during the French and Indian wars and stayed on as a surveyor in New York, Hudson River Valley after the French lost. He married into an English-American loyalist family before returning to Europe with book manuscript in hand after the ongoing American Revolution made the borderland between British occupied New York City and the rebel held upstate unsafe, especially for a loyalist like him. Stopping in London, Cravica arranged in 1781 for the publication of his Letters from an American Farmer. Reflecting a viewpoint widely shared by Enlightenment era Europeans and Americans alike, Cravica's letters contrasted the liberty of ordinary Americans with the quasi-slavery of European peasants. Here a man is free as he ought to be, Cravica said of whites in America. We are strangers to those feudal institutions which have enslaved so many. The change came from moving to America, he wrote, where cheap farmland abounded. From being the slave of some despotic prince to becoming a free man invested with lands to which every municipal blessing is attached, it is in consequence of that change that he, this transplanted European, becomes an America. Now despite having never visited the American South, perhaps while in England seeking a publisher, Cravica added a sensationally, purportedly first person account of chattel slavery in South Carolina to his already written letter, an added letter as it were. In it he wrote, while all enjoyed festivity and happiness in Charlestown, who would imagine the scenes of misery over spreading the country? He wrote in that new letter about whites living in the capital of what he called the richest province in North America. Quote, their ears by habit are become death, their hearts are hardened, they neither see ear nor feel for the woes of their poor slaves, from whose painful labors all their wealth proceeds. He incorporated graphic depictions of extreme cruelty that many read as eyewitnesses account, even though they were not. By this time, Britain had focused its efforts to suppress the revolution. We're talking early 1780s, they had refocused their efforts to suppress the revolution on those southern colonies and sought to discredit the appeals to liberty of southern patriots by highlighting their embrace of chattel slavery. As augmented, Cravica's manuscript supported this Tory narrative. Unfortunately, the book did not come out to 1781 after the unexpected American victory at York Town derailed British efforts to conquer the south. The appended letter remained in the text. Read with the others, it created a contrast between the British treatment of enslaved blacks in the American south with the idyllic, but equally fictional, lot of those in the north. About his own enslaved blacks and others like them in the north, for example, Cravica wrote, in health and sickness, they are tenderly cared for by their masters and are truly speaking a part of the family. Still, Cravica did not account even these northern blacks, whether enslaved or free, made him born or not, among the people he called Americans. Indeed, as much as he might bemoan their treatment under chattel slavery in the south, he accepted the enslavement of blacks at least in the north, where, as he put it, quote, they participate in many of the benefits of our society without being obligated to bear any of its burdens, like political agency. To Cravica, they simply were not Americans. By this point, the intellectual ability of blacks, which Cravica in his book Disparaged, had emerged as an issue in revolutionary era debates over slavery. Slavery chattel slavery, the enslavement of blacks, had become a major issue during the revolutionary era, with the north mostly turning against slavery, resulting in the first great emancipation, actually in world history, but the south had doubled down on the institution. In his dialogue concerning slavery, the abolitionist-minded New England theologian of the era, Samuel Hopkins, probably the most influential minister and theologian of his era, complained that white Americans, viewed blacks as, and I'm quoting here, fit for slavery because we, he wrote, as whites, have been used to look on them not as our brother, or as in any degree on a level with us, but as quite another species of animal. Slavery would end, he promised, if we only the vested ourselves of these strong prejudice, which have insensibly fixed on our mind and consider blacks as by nature and by right on a level with us. On the other side of this emerging debate over slavery in states fighting for liberty, some American supporters of slavery had begun to make the case for enslaving blacks on an objective sounding evidence of inborn racial inferiority, often drawing on the arguments of the then well-known Scottish philosopher, David Hume. Quote, I am apt to suspect the negroes to be naturally inferior to whites. There never was an individual black eminent either in action or speculation. Hume wrote in his xenophobic 1753 essay on nationality traits. Continuing the quote, such a uniform and consistent difference could not happen in so many countries and ages if nature had not made an original distinction between these breeds of men. Now such reasoning slew in the face of traditional biblical beliefs of common descent from a divinely created first human pair, Adam and Eve. But that would not bother a religious skeptic like Hume. His pro-slavery American followers embraced the same religious heresy to defend their enslavement of Africa. Following a long but specious recitation of the relative mental, emotional, and physical attributes of whites Thomas Jefferson reached a similar conclusion in his 1785 book, Notes on the State of Virginia. Comparing them by their facilities of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me that in memory blacks are equal to whites and reason much inferior in that in imagination, they are dull. Jefferson wrote, Never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration. A litany of such observations led to his supposition, Jefferson's supposition, quote, the blacks, whether originally a distinct race or may distinct by time and circumstances are inferior to whites. They are following Hume in Jefferson's mind, a different species. Coming from a hero of the American Revolution, these widely read comments spurred American abolitionists. And there were many of them by then white and black on a search for black exceptionalism. They could not lead Jefferson's view of inborn black inequality unchallenged if they hope as they did to abolish slavery. If they could refute them, however, they felt that the logic of the proclaimed truth of human equality and the rights of all men to liberty in Jefferson's Declaration of Independence assured their eventual success in the abolition of slavery in America. New England, New Jersey abolitionist David Cooper, for example, wrote in 1783, if these solemn truths, those in the Declaration, if these solemn truths are self-evident unless they, that is the supporters of slavery, unless they can show that the African race are not men, words can hardly express the amazing which naturally arises on what thing that the very people who make those pompous declarations of liberty are slaveholders. Abolitionists had Jefferson's polygenism in their crosshair. Princeton theologian Samuel Stanhope Smith, a critic of slaveholding, took aim at polygenism in a 1787 address to the American Philosophical Society published under the title of essays and the causes of variation of complexity and aimed directly to refute Jefferson's notes on Virginia. Marshalling far more observations of human types than Jefferson ever Marshall, Smith defended the biblical doctrine of one race as he called it by arguing that skin color and other racial traits derived solely from environmental causes primarily heat and sunlight with blacks being as he put it of the tropical hue. Moreover, Smith declared these superficial traits remain mutable. Africans removed to a temperate climate already existed some physical transition he claimed and those well fed and living in humane conditions change the most. Mental capacity, mistrust, which is as various as climate and as personal appearance is equally with the latter susceptible of change and improvement. Environmentalism, if accepted, demolished the scientific case for race based slavery. Opponents of slavery had long touted the enslaved Boston poet Phyllis Wheatley as an example of black literary ability. Indeed abolitionists had arranged arranged for the publication of her poetry but Jefferson in his notes on the state of Virginia had dismissed her from consideration as a counter example to his thesis. Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Wheatley he had misspelled her name but it could not produce a poet he sneered. The compositions published under her name, this is Jefferson's view, are below the dignity of criticism. Well now, without accepting the inferiority of the race, given their treatment, some blacks did indeed feel like aliens in America. We have no country a black petitioner named Felix Holbrook exclaimed on behalf of many slaves as he put it through the Virginia Massachusetts legislature in 1773, a powerful plea for liberty. For her part, Wheatley regularly referred to herself as quote an African rather than as an American even though she had lived for decades in America. For example in one poem she wrote of evangelist George Whitefield preaching in America to quote Americans and to Africa. In another she wrote of English blood flowing through American veins even when embracing American ways Wheatley recognized her outclass steps. Casting for other examples of African American intellectual ability, White abolitionists found Benjamin Banneker. In 1791 Banneker, a free black farmer and albinac maker from rural Maryland near the District of Columbia, assisted the Quaker land surveyor Andrew Ellicott in surveying the new federal district. Banneker lived near Indicott's family grisness and Andrew Ellicott Hudson had encouraged Banneker's talent, innate talent, developed talent for computing the local times for sunrises or sunsets and other celestial phenomena. When Banneker sent a table of his calculations for 1792 through Andrew Ellicott who also made such calculation. Ellicott forwarded it to Pennsylvania abolition society president James Pemberbrook who shared it with Philadelphia astronomers and mathematicians as evidence of the reasoning ability of black people. At age 60 with the first publication of his calculations in an albinac for 1792, Banneker became the American abolition movement's prime example of native black intellectual ability. His distinctive attribute involved the skill and inclination to compute the future local times for regular celestial phenomena that is those caused by cyclical patterns of the moon and planets as observed from a particular place on earth which daily rotated on a tilted axis and annually revolved in an eclipse around the sun. Complex mathematical problems in a day before computers. Like any mathematical computations making these tables took skill but at a time when people relied almost exclusively on the sun and moon for light and farming and fishing remained principal locations these specific calculations had practical value. People typically accessed at reach them, obtained them in annual albinacs keyed to particular places because these would be different for different longitudes and lads latitude. Benjamin Franklin had published a widely read albinac for Richards from 1732 until he moved to London in 1757 and reap great profits from the enterprise. The immediately popular New England albinac farmers later known as old farmers first appeared in 1792 the same year as Banneker's appeared for the Chesapeake Bay region. The embryonic American abolitionist movement stood behind Banneker's albinac from conception to completion. In 1791 after Banneker cast his calculations for 1792 and sent them to Ennecott which led to its circulation among Philadelphia abolitionists. Leaders of the movement supported its publication in an albinac for 1792. How much they helped with the overall project remains unclear because there are many things in an albinac besides the calculations but they professed that the calculations themselves of celestial and tidal phenomena were Banneker's alone. The editor's purpose held the albinac as and I'm quoting here an extraordinary effort of genius by a stable descendant of Africa who by this specimen of ingenuity evinces through demonstration that mental powers and endowment are not the exclusive excellence of white people. The introductory introduction of the book of the albinac itself the published introduction carried testimonies to the accuracy of Banneker's calculations from American philosophical society president David Rittenhouse the great astronomer and of course the American philosophical society was a leading intellectual society in the country at the time and in that introduction Rittenhouse wrote every instance of genius among the Negroes is worthy of attention because their oppressor seemed to lay great stress on their supposed inferior mental abilities. Rittenhouse was an abolitionist he was making this point. The manuscript of his albinac completed by August of 1791 Banneker sent a copy to Jefferson with a letter making his case for the rights of blacks to liberty quote we are a race of beings who have long labored under the abuse and censure of the world Banneker wrote and have long been considered rather as brutish than human and scarcely capable of mental endowments. Then he continued in this letter to Jefferson having heard that you are a man far less inflexible in sentiments of this nature than many others Banneker addressed Jefferson with a mixture of deference and assertiveness I apprehend you will readily embrace every opportunity to eradicate that train of abuse and false opinion which show generally prevailed with respect to us meaning black Banneker offered his albinac as evidence of the reasoning facility of blacks such a work and I'm using his words Banneker's work such a work by a member of the African race should show that one universal thought has given beings to all of us and endowed us with the same facility about blacks and whites in America Banneker added however variable we may be in society or religion however diversified in situation or color we are all of the same family we are all American he as much as said and I am as much as an American as you it is letter to Jefferson then the sitting secretary of state Banneker then made his case against slavery third he wrote jettison any pretense of deference suffer me to recall to your mind that time in which the arms and tyranny of the British crown were exerted with every powerful effort in order to reduce you to a state of servitude Banneker continued this sir speaking to Jefferson this sir was a time when you clearly saw into the injustice of the state of slavery and publicly held for it there's true and invaluable doctrine we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights that among these are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness you were then impressed with the proper ideas of the great valuation of liberty Banneker went on yet at the same time Banneker charge you meaning jefferson you persist in detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brother and under groaning captivity and cruel oppression and remain guilty of that most criminal act which you professively detested in others with respect to yourself Banneker closed this portion of his letter with an admonition drawn drawn from the biblical job put your souls in their souls then he implored jefferson regarding his enslaved blacks thus shall your heart be enlarged with kindness and benevolence toward them and thus shall you need neither the direction of myself or others in what manner to proceed herein Banneker had made his cape for liberty to a white america still in frail with black slavery within 10 days of receiving Banneker's letter jefferson replied with a courteous or a sentence no but never changed his behavior he persisted in holding people in slavery and as president defended state sanctioned slavery the supposedly scientific debate or monogenism or the common ancestry of all peoples that Banneker was upholding and written house and smith versus polygenism the view of hume and jefferson intensified in antebellum america with the spread of slavery in the south and southwest and the rise of abolitionism in the north and upper midwest as a rule anti-slavery scholars took one side pro-slavery scholars took the other polarization over the issue reigned in american science as much as it did over slavery in american society when the matter of geographic the geographical spread and containment of slavery reached congress with the missouri compromise in 1820 which admitted missouri as a slaveholding state but otherwise barred slavery in federal territories north of the new state's southern border jefferson called it quote a fire bell in the night he warned a geographical line coinciding with a marked principle moral and political once conceived and held up to the angry patients of passions of men will never be obliterated and every new irritant will mark it deeper with the enslavement of over 1.5 million blacks in the south by 1820 jefferson wrote quote we have the wolf by the ear and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go sanctioning slavery jefferson wrote quote is the exclusive right of every state which nothing in the constitution has taken from them as he saw the missouri compromise sounded the death knell of the union agreeing with jefferson that a republic based on liberty could not survive a sharp factional divide over slavery ibrahim lincoln thought the prospects for union differently than jefferson quote a house divided against itself cannot stand lincoln quoted from scripture in its speech launching his campaign for the united states senate from illinois in 1858 i believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free i do not expect the union to be dissolved i do not expect the house to fall but i do expect it'll cease to be divided it will become all one thing or all the other lincoln's celebrated house divided speech represented his prophetic response to the 1857 supreme court decision in dread scott versus stanford versus sanford where chief justice robert tony asked quote anna negro whose ancestors were imported into this country and sold their slaves become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the constitution of the united states to answer the question he added quote we must inquire who at the time were recognized as the people or citizen of a state in line with jefferson tony concluded neither the class nor person who had been imported as slaves mourn their descendants whether they had become free or not were then acknowledged as part of the peak those are tony's and so he ruled it remained it remains a through dread scott decision blacks were not america and congress could not outlaw slavery anywhere including in the territories where it had been previously banned by either the northwest ordinance or the missouri compromise at this point 25 out of 31 states bar barred all blacks freer enslaved from voting as lincoln predicted the union did survive the abolition of slavery it took a four year civil war costing over 600 000 lives even that war was not enough unraveling a constitution compromised by slavery required ratification of the 13th amendment in 1865 three years later the 14th amendment reversed the dread scott decision by adding quote all persons born in the united states are citizens of the united states and the states wherein they reside this included those born in slay then in 1870 the 15th amendment guaranteed all citizens black or white the right to vote or at least barred any from writing the right to vote didn't include women of course that would come later but it did not allow barring voting rights on basis of race the question of what is an america thus as this account portrayed remained a part of the american heritants long after the revolutionary war ended thank you and i thank the national archives for giving me this opportunity to speak