...

Chapter 1
Somerset’s Journey Sparks the American Revolution
On June 22, 1772, nearly a century before the slaves were freed in America, a British judge, with a single decision, brought about the conditions that would end slavery in England. His decision would have monumental consequences in the American colonies, leading up to the American Revolution, the Civil War, and beyond. Because of that ruling, history would be forever changed. This book is about that decision and the role of slavery in the founding of the United States.

The story of that British court decision begins with the kidnapping of a nine-year-old boy who was growing up in a West African village. He joined the river of slaves that sailed the infamous Middle Passage to America, arriving in Virginia in March, 1749.1 Along the way he was given his slave name—Somerset. He was healthy and quickly picked up English. These qualities caught the eye of a Scottish born, up-and-coming, twenty-four-year-old merchant and slave trader named Charles Stewart. Stewart’s office and storehouse were in Norfolk, Virginia, a town where many of the Scottish merchants drawn to the tobacco industry had settled.

Dallas Morning News
How slavery helped forge a democracy
Book explores plantation economy and its role in uniting the states
12:51 PM CST on Saturday, February 12, 2005
By CHARLES EALY / The Dallas Morning News
BLACK HISTORY MONTH
Slave Nation is not your typical history of the American Revolution. Rather than revel in the glorious outburst of liberty that is so often stressed to schoolchildren, civil rights lawyers Alfred and Ruth Blumrosen work to show that the preservation of plantation slavery played just as important a role.

After all, "Give liberty to us white people or give us death" isn’t quite a clarion call.
And for some historians, such an approach to the events surrounding 1776 will be anathema. But the Blumrosens document how an English court decision in 1772 sent shock waves through the Southern colonies and ignited what had been only a smoldering desire for freedom. It helped drive Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia to join their Northern brethren in declaring independence.

Specifically, the Blumrosens cite the English case of the American slave James Somerset, who sued his owner, Charles Stewart, during a visit to London and won. The case turned on whether the owner had the right to force Mr. Somerset back to America, where Mr. Stewart planned to sell him. The case has been widely hailed by some historians as the beginning of the end of slavery in England and a key point in the rise of the anti-slavery movement there.

In fact, it’s the focus of Steven M. Wise’s new book, Though the Heavens May Fall: The Landmark Trail That Led to the End of Human Slavery , which is also being released this month. So the Blumrosens aren’t alone in emphasizing the case, even though other historians have downplayed its importance.

But the Blumrosens are more interested in the case’s reverberations in the American South, which feared that British legal developments would lead to the end of slavery here and the ruination of the South’s plantation economy. This was reason enough, the authors argue, to spur Southern slaveholders to join the more rebellious Northern colonies, specifically Massachusetts, in what was at first primarily a tax revolution.

The Blumrosens analyze the role that the slavery question played in the writing of the Declaration of Independence and contend that there would have been no revolution to create one nation if such Massachusetts leaders as John Adams had not accepted the Southern position on slavery.

They also look at the drafting of the Northwest Ordinance, which provided that new American territories north of the Ohio River would be slave-free zones. This meant that the new states of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois would be in the no-slave zone, a crucial development that later helped the North beat the South in the Civil War almost a century later.

With such a focus on the blight of slavery, it would be easy to overlook the positive developments in early American history, and the Blumrosens are clearly aware of the dangers. They acknowledge that the Founding Fathers settled "many principles in their day in ways which we have good cause to applaud. They freed the world from the domination of monarchy, struggled toward a notion of democracy which is still unfolding, embraced principles of intellectual, political, and religious liberty" and helped secure the nation’s future by giving new states equal footing.

But, as the Blumrosens remind us, the Founding Fathers did all this "on the backs of generations of slaves."


In a startling and necessary book, one of the most important publications on the topic of black history to appear this season, the authors, both law professors with backgrounds in civil rights, chart a bold course through the history of the revolutionary period in American history and arrive at nontraditional but effectively expressed and well-defended conclusions. Their basic premise is that slavery cast its shadow over the founding of the republic, not simply the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention. The Blumrosens peer further back than that convocation in Philadelphia, convened to revise the union of former colonies, and discover within the early provenance of the movement toward revolution—the movement toward one united nation free and independent, that is—the southern colonies’ fear that Britain would outlaw slavery and the northern colonies’ acceptance of the continuation of slavery where it previously existed. Although this work is not for the casual reader, the serious student of history will come away informed and challenged. See also Steven Wise’s Though the Heavens May Fall (below) for another historical account of the issue of slavery within the British Empire.


Two law professors make slavery the motor driving the Revolutionary period in this provocative if not always convincing study. Southern colonists, they contend, feared that British court rulings against slavery in the motherland and newly assertive British claims of legislative supremacy over the colonies meant that Britain would restrict or abolish slavery in America; they therefore took the lead in pushing for outright independence and demanded assurances from Northern colonies that slavery would be protected in the new nation. Slavery also dominated the Constitutional Convention, which only succeeded, the authors argue, because of an informal grand compromise giving the South the three-fifths clause (counting slaves toward a state’s House representation) in exchange for the Northwest Ordinance banning slavery north of the Ohio River—and implicitly permitting it to the south. Blaming spotty records and backroom deal making, the authors often build their case on speculation, circumstantial evidence and interpretations of Revolutionary slogans about "liberty" and "property" as veiled references to slavery; they must often argue around documentary evidence showing Revolutionary leaders’ preoccupation with other controversies that did not break down along North-South fault lines. Their reassessment of the centrality of slavery during the period is an intriguing one, but many historians will remain skeptical.


“Alfred W. and Ruth G. Blumrosen’s forthcoming book, Slave Nation: How Slavery United the Colonies and Sparked the American Revolution, is a radical, well-informed, and highly original reinterpretation of the place of slavery in the American War of Independence. This study deserves close attention and critical examination by all historians of the American Revolution and New World Slavery.”

“The Blumrosens have uncovered powerful circumstantial evidence that a major trigger of the American Revolution was something far more fundamental than such a relatively minor irritant as British taxation. It was the fear of Southern colonists that new legal doctrines emerging in Britain would inevitably reach the colonies and undermine the Southern way of life by abolishing slavery.”



Civil rights lawyers Alfred and Ruth Blumrosen use the Somerset case of 1772, which freed all slaves in Britain, to illustrate how the price of freedom from English rule ensured continued bondage for slaves in the American South. The Blumrosens argue that Southerners feared that the ruling might be extended to the entire empire and therefore joined the move to win independence from Britain. Many of the Founding Fathers, most notably John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, were willing to compromise their principles to assure support from the Southern colonies. The Blumrosens systematically review some of the most important documents of the revolutionary period, including the Virginia Resolution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Articles of Confederation, to discuss the political maneuverings and subtle revisions and rewordings that protected slavery without appearing hypocritical to the world. Although the authors occasionally get off track,
this well-researched book is sure to be controversial. Recommended for libraries with an interest in the revolutionary period and slavery.


The Southerners smirked and pointed fingers, but, of course, their turn would come. In "Slave Nation: How Slavery United the Colonies and Sparked the American Revolution" (Sourcebooks, 328 pages, $24.95), Arthur and Ruth Blumrosen trace the role slavery played in the debates from the 1770s to the 1790s. They maintain that slavery did not just become a hot issue after 1820, as is generally believed, but that it was a pressing matter from the time that Lord Mansfield famously announced, in 1772, that slavery was odious to English principles and that nobody in Britain could be a slave.

That declaration, this book says, sent shivers down the spines of Southern slave owners and was greatly responsible for the desire of Southerners for independence. Once free from Britain, the political leaders of the Southern states made sure that slavery was safe in their region, even if it meant giving up any claims for its expansion north of the Mason-Dixon line or the Ohio River.

This thesis is pursued with a determination that few historians would accept, but the sense of conflict over slavery is vividly presented. Jefferson does not look the same now as he did in the past. In this book, as in Garry Wills’ recent work on the election of 1800, Timothy Pickering is a hero.