Slavery and the Limits of Revolutionary Liberty

The American Revolution exposed a glaring contradiction: colonists demanded liberty while about one in five people in the colonies was enslaved. The British writer Samuel Johnson mocked the colonists in 1775 for raising the loudest 'yelps for liberty' while holding people in slavery. The Revolution had mixed effects on slavery. Northern states began to end it, Pennsylvania through gradual abolition in 1780 and Massachusetts through court rulings by 1783, and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 banned slavery in the Northwest Territory.

Thousands of enslaved people escaped to British lines after Lord Dunmore's 1775 proclamation, while several thousand Black soldiers served in Patriot forces. Yet the Constitution protected slavery through the three-fifths clause and by shielding the Atlantic slave trade until 1808. In comparison, the Haitian Revolution destroyed slavery outright, showing how much depended on who led a revolution.