The men who declared that all men are created equal included many who held other people as property. Jefferson owned more than six hundred people over his lifetime, and Washington more than one hundred. In 1775 about 500,000 enslaved people lived in the thirteen colonies, around one in five of the population, in every colony from New Hampshire to Georgia. How a revolution for liberty coexisted with slavery is one of the hardest questions in American history.

Freedom offered by the enemy

Enslaved people listened closely to the arguments around them. Many had heard of the Somerset case of 1772, in which the English judge Lord Mansfield ruled that a master could not force James Somerset out of England to be sold in Jamaica. The ruling was narrow, but people on both sides of the Atlantic took it to mean that slavery had no footing in English law.

In November 1775 the royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, issued a proclamation that offered freedom to enslaved men of rebel owners who joined the British forces. Hundreds escaped to him and formed what he called the Ethiopian Regiment, some wearing sashes reading "Liberty to Slaves." Dunmore acted to weaken rebel planters, not out of conviction, and he did not free the people held by Loyalists. Later British commanders widened the offer. Thousands of enslaved people fled to British lines during the war, though many died of smallpox and typhus in crowded camps. Dunmore's offer also pushed many white southerners toward independence, since it confirmed their fear that Britain would turn their slaves against them.

Black Patriots

Black men fought on the Patriot side too, from Lexington onward. Washington at first barred them from the Continental Army, then reversed himself as recruits ran short. In 1778 Rhode Island raised a regiment that enlisted enslaved men who were promised freedom for serving, with the state compensating their owners. Historians often estimate that about five thousand Black soldiers and sailors served the Patriot cause, though records are incomplete.

Enslaved and free Black people also used the Revolution's language directly. In 1773 and 1777 Black petitioners in Massachusetts, including the Boston leader Prince Hall, asked the legislature for freedom on the same grounds the colonists claimed against Britain. The poet Phillis Wheatley, enslaved in Boston when her poems were published in London in 1773, wrote that the love of freedom was implanted in every human breast.

Gradual and partial change

The Revolution did start slavery's decline in the North. Vermont's constitution of 1777 banned adult slavery. In 1780 Pennsylvania passed the first gradual abolition act adopted by a state legislature, freeing children born afterward once they reached the age of twenty eight. In Massachusetts, Elizabeth Freeman, known as Mum Bett, won her freedom in court in 1781, arguing that the state's new constitution declared all men born free and equal; a series of cases soon ended slavery there. Connecticut and Rhode Island passed gradual abolition laws in 1784. Virginia eased the rules for freeing slaves in 1782, and thousands were freed. But in the South, where slavery was the foundation of wealth, the institution survived and soon grew.

Why did it survive?

Some founders, Jefferson among them, called slavery wrong while profiting from it. In his Notes on the State of Virginia he wrote, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just," fearing divine punishment for slavery. Historians divide on how to judge this. Some, like Gary Nash, argue that the founders had a real chance to begin ending slavery and lacked the will. Others, like Gordon Wood, stress that the Revolution for the first time put slavery on the defensive, so that it needed justifying where before it had been taken for granted. Both views fit parts of the evidence.

Worked example: the Book of Negroes

In 1783, as the British prepared to leave New York, the American side demanded the return of escaped slaves, citing the peace treaty. The British commander, Sir Guy Carleton, refused to hand back people who had been promised freedom. Instead his officers recorded about three thousand Black Loyalists by name, age and origin in a ledger called the Book of Negroes, a register of Black Loyalists evacuated from New York, so that owners could later seek compensation rather than people. One entry lists Harry Washington, who had escaped from Mount Vernon. Many of these refugees went to Nova Scotia, where they received poor land and broken promises. In 1792 about twelve hundred of them sailed to Sierra Leone in West Africa and helped found Freetown. Harry Washington was among them. Notice the pattern: the empire whose king the Declaration accused of tyranny gave these people their liberty, while the republic of liberty demanded them back. It is hard to tell the story of the Revolution honestly without holding both truths at once.