Was the American Revolution Abolitionist?

No. But some people still can't stop trying to make it so.

Mother Church

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Yet again I’ve been exposed to the happy notion that the American Revolution, far from being fought, for one thing, to preserve the institution of African slavery—as the 1619 Project claims—was instead closely associated with early efforts to abolish the vile institution. I heard this Revolution-abolitionism connection advanced, most recently, during a roundtable discussion among some scholars and journalists held by the National Constitution Center earlier this year and released as a podcast the other day.

The official question up for discussion at that event was “Should We Break Up with the Founders?” That formulation piggybacks on a move by the monologuist Heidi Schreck, creator of “What the Constitution Means to Me,” who went to the room at the Constitution Center where statues of the signers are displayed and announced her breakup with them, which I find pretty funny, and makes her point, but doesn’t necessarily provide a strong basis for a supposedly serious debate. To the evident frustration of the panel’s moderator, participants wisely largely avoided giving the goofy question a straight answer.

But late in the discussion, the famous constitutional scholar Akhil Reed Amar, defending the founding as a racially progressive force, located the origins of American abolitionism in the movement that led to American independence. That claim took me back to those dim and distant days of 2021, when a group of scholars criticizing the historian Woody Holton’s defense of the 1619 Project made the same claim. The scholars presented a key example of the supposedly abolitionist spirit of the American Revolution, an example now re-deployed by Amar.

I ran the example down in 2021. It’s total bunk.

I should clarify that unlike Woody Holton (a scholar whose work has been important to mine), and unlike the editorial and corporate-branding staff of The New York Times and many others, I don’t think “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery,” to quote the 1619 Project. That’s the edited version of a broader claim the project originally made, and I do think demanding the correction was nothing but nitpicking. Nobody ever really thought the project originally meant literally every colonist; I also think the claim is wrong even as edited.

(Also, while you’re revising, how about getting rid of “the reason . . . was because”? But I suppose that kind of magazine-editing looks pretty trivial nowadays, when there’s so much taking-a-weird-position-on-complicated-historical-motivations to be done!)

I’m clarifying my position contra “the Revolution was to protect slavery” not to make a case for that position today but just to show that my criticizing “the Revolution began abolition” has nothing to do with defending the 1619 Project. “The Revolution began abolition” has its own issues.

I’m also aware that you may have grown tired of my forever running down the great Yale scholar Akhil Reed Amar. Sorry, if so. I can’t fully control what comes at me to inspire these posts—and if, on the other hand, you’ve missed my earlier thoughts on Amar’s cringe-inducing approach to argument, here you go!

At around 00:45:55 on “founder breakup” podcast—you’ll find the link in “Further Reading,” below—Amar launches into a flight of silver-tongued oratory. Amid a host of related scattershot remarks that make no sense, which I’ll note further below, he trots out this old friend to aid his case for the racially progressive nature of the Revolution:

The world’s first abolition society—the world’s first—is formed in a place called Philadelphia—interesting! “what a coincidence”—in 1775.

But that’s not true.

It’s the same incorrect claim made in 2021—far more carefully—by the group of historians who wrote to The Washington Post. They were criticizing Woody Holton’s Post essay on the impact of the relationship between British officialdom and enslaved people as the imperial crisis began coming to a climax. In an effort to refute Holton’s extrapolating from the undeniable fury of white American colonials over a British offer to free slaves to fight their enslavers a major motivation of colonists to break from Britain, and in order to push the letter-writers’ own idea that, on the contrary, abolition of slavery was enmeshed in the American Revolutionary fabric, they wrote:

The Revolution also became a major event in the history of antislavery in the Western world. Not only did the first society with antislavery aims in modern history originate in Revolutionary Philadelphia in 1775 . . .

That’s the same organization Amar’s talking about. It was a Quaker society, indeed founded in Philadelphia, in 1775.

Regarding the first sentence I just quoted: Sure, maybe. If you want to look at things that way. Or, just as easily, maybe not—I don’t care. For me, the interesting issue has to do with funky uses of evidence. That’s what it seems to me so much of the fighting over the 1619 Project comes down to. The letter-writers follow their big, general statement about the Revolution as a key moment in the history of antislavery with what they flag as a host of supporting evidentiary statements. I mean, there’s “not only” this thing about a Quaker organization in Philadelphia, but also . . . !

But we’ll stop on the Quaker organization.

Amar calls that society “abolitionist.” The letter-writers call it “antislavery.” They all love the year, 1775, and the location, Philadelphia, because that’s where the Continental Congress met and the year shots were fired between British soldiers and Massachusetts militia. And a 1775 founding probably would make that society the earliest abolition society anywhere. So it all goes beautifully together: “What a coincidence,” as Amar says sarcastically, meaning it can’t be a coincidence; the American Revolution manifestly fostered the beginnings of abolitionism.

Nobody makes any effort to actually show that it was the crisis of 1775, with American resistance centrally organized in Philadelphia, and leading to independence in ‘76, that created conditions for founding an antislavery society. That’s because they can’t. In real life, almost nobody in 1775 saw a declaration of independence coming. It would be at least as easy to argue that the transatlantic Quaker antislavery movement was a product of colonial, not revolutionary conditions. As early as the 1750’s, when nobody was talking about a revolution, the Philadelphia Quaker Yearly Meeting took a formal position against slavery.

And it’s far from clear that Pennsylvania can be called, even as late as 1775, revolutionary: a lot still had to happen in that all-important state to bring about the famous events of early July 1776. Look at the thing clearly for three seconds and a time-and-place abolition-Revolution synchonicity doesn’t hold up at all.

But nobody has to show anything. The trick is to associate, not explicitly link, the first creation of an abolitionist society anywhere on earth to the American ferment that would supposedly lead inevitably to American independence. That’s the magic trick that makes the Revolution abolitionist, and it takes only a few more seconds to expose the man behind the curtain pulling the levers. Exposure demolishes the trick.

But the 1775 society they’re invoking isn’t the first abolition society anywhere on earth anyway. They even have that wrong. Look it up. The society will tell you quite plainly what it is—and it’s not abolitionist.

When founded in 1775, the group was called the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage. Its mission was to help black people who were legally free get out of being held illegally in slavery. That’s a laudable mission, and it’s no doubt fair to say that the members were against slavery, but the group didn't take up the outright abolitionist cause until 1784, in fact quite early in the United States and yet a year later than the London Yearly Meeting of 1783, where British Quakers petitioned Parliament and founded the Committee on the Slave Trade. Which makes the Philadelphia society not the first, and suggests that being an American revolutionary was by no means a factor necessary to starting a push for abolition.

That explains why the Post letter-writers called the Philly org not abolitionist but a “society with anti-slavery aims.” That’s why they say that it “originated” in 1775. They want revolutionary America to beat the Brits on abolition, but they have to be careful—too careful. To give us the impression that in 1775, in supposedly already revolutionary Philadelphia, the first-ever antislavery society was formed, linking the American Revolution to the earliest stirrings of abolitionism anywhere, they avoid telling us the society’s founding name and use the term “originated in,” thus avoiding falsely stating that in 1775 the society was what they’re busy trying to create the false impression it was. When writers are being this careful, start sniffing for bullshit.

Clearly it would be quite easy to support an argument that British Quakers were ahead of the Philadelphia Quakers on abolition—but again, who cares? For the purposes of BAD HISTORY, the issue is that this desperate need to make revolutionary Philly the site of a new birth of racial freedom has drawn some highly informed, well-regarded scholars into a lot of sleazy trimming, and that I, for one, have seen quite enough of that kind of thing.

Amar, by contrast—give him credit for guts—disdains to trim. No wimpy restraints for him. On the podcast, he throws caution to the winds, swings for the fences, and calls the society abolitionist in 1775. That straight-up error (error at best, falsehood at worst) comes wrapped in his trademark mode of seeming to let us in on things we supposedly don’t know, because they’ve been kept from us, but luckily here’s Professor Amar, tough but fair and endlessly patient, to lay some strong doses of reality on us. It’s for our own good.

Unbearably condescending no matter what he’s saying, that mode becomes especially grating when what he’s saying is flat-out wrong. His presumption seems to be that we not only don’t know anything but also lack even the chops to use a search engine to fact-check him.

Amazingly enough, Amar’s mistily cornball fantasia about the Revolution and abolitionism goes even beyond that fake 1775 abolition society. In the same firehose of oratorical narrative, starting at 00:45:55, he says:

. . . you get the Pennsylvania constitution, tracking Locke and his ideas, and then abolition in Pennsylvania, based on the 1776 Pennsylvania constitution, and Ben Franklin presides at that convention, and . . . !

Easy, Prof.

That’s all way, way off.

Via his usual avoidance of argument, Amar conjures innocence on slavery by sheer association. If he means to suggest that the 1776 Pennsylvania constitution abolished slavery, it didn’t. The first legislature operating under that constitution did—it was “gradual abolition,” but still, we can give the legislature credit for that. And Franklin probably really can be called abolitionist by 1776 (at least in his own wishful opinion). But Amar wants to make Franklin’s presiding at Pennsylvania’s constitutional convention the cause of gradual abolition in that state, which happened later and elsewhere. Anyway, scholarship that Amar has to be aware of has long since noted Franklin’s formal chairmanship and actual disengagement from that convention. The great man didn’t just pretend to doze through the sessions, the way he did in the Congress—he actually slept.

Other people wrote the 1776 Pennsylvania constitution, which enabled the legislature to abolish slavery and which didn’t, in its most significant features, “track with Locke’s ideas” at all (as if those ideas were abolitionist anyway!). Amar is erasing the very well-known radically populist and democratic nature of that convention, and of the government it formed, which was driven not by Franklin but by radicals like Thomas Young, and was based not in any special way on Locke but on Thomas Paine’s actively trashing the beloved Whiggish traditions of the upscale revolutionaries—the Pennsylvania constitution actually disconnected rights from property!—to the outright disgust of Amar’s heroes Washington and Hamilton.

To the outright disgust of his hero John Adams, too. Amar seems to think that by catching us up in his inspirational wordcloud he can mingle, via the spurious abolitionism of 1775 Philadelphia, his entirely made-up Franklin-Locke 1776 Pennsylvania constitution and the Massachusetts constitution written under Adams’s aegis in 1780 and make it all a crazy bundle of abolitionist joy. It’s true that Adams was antislavery, also up to a point, though Massachusetts too failed to explictly abolish the institution constitutionally; that was achieved by judicial interpretation. And as Amar must know, Adams flat-out excoriated the Pennsylvania constitution, without any qualification, on its real basis: the democratic radicalism of Paine, whose politics Adams despised, and who despised his. (“Good God!” Adams remarked after reading the Pennsylvania document.) It’s widely known that Adams drafted the Massachusetts constitution in a state of recoil precisely from Pennsylvania’s embrace of democracy for all free white men.

And yet for Amar, an overdetermined project of forging linkage between the founding and abolitionism, fencing the virtuous sheep off from the enslaving goats, leaving the goats far behind, and flowing the whole country toward the Emancipation Proclamation and the post-Civil War amendments leads him to reject Madison and Jefferson out of hand; imply absurdly that Washington’s estrangement from them was over slavery (Washington now good, Madison-Jefferson now bad); and connect the Adams state constitution with the Paine state constitution, when those two constitutions were in direct and explicit mutual opposition.

Nothing about that grand convergence and flow existed. (By the way, political forces that Amar lauds, associated with Hamilton and Washington, overturned the Pennsylvania constitution he’s wrongheadedly praising and clawed back power for elites.) There was only mutual opposition—and it wasn’t decisively over slavery. As presented at the debate, the question “should we break up with the founders” presupposes the familiar notion that aside from its slavery “flaw,” the document was wholly admirable. According to a lot of people (at the time), there was a wealth of other stuff not to like too.

It’s probably worth noting that the British government didn’t begin gradual abolition until 1833. It should be obvious, then, that some American state governments preceded the British government by many years in abolishing slavery, by law; as both Amar and the 2021 Washington Post letter-writers point out, the northern states started going off slavery in the 1770’s and 1780’s. They make the end of slavery in the North sound more sudden and total than it was. But it did happen.

Yet that’s never enough (because obviously it wasn’t enough, not nearly, to end a national-level crime against humanity) for those who keep hoping to smooth over our most intense founding-era internal oppositions and ignore the struggles, pragmatics, and uses of force that have really made critical change. Believers like Amar can satisfy their yearnings only by inventing and reinventing, over and over and out of whole cloth, a progressive ethos on race somehow imprinted in a fundamental, pervasive, essential, forward-moving, founding national spirit of America itself. They may be great scholars, but here they’re just indulging in a mood.

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Further Reading

The 2021 Washington Post letter.

The Constitution Center podcast.

Me on radical founding-era Pennsylvania.

Me on the mutual disdain of Adams and Paine.