THE REVOLUTIONARY CHALLENGE

Throughout most of the colonial period, opposition to slavery among white Americans was virtually nonexistent. Settlers in the 17th and early 18th centuries came from a sharply stratified society in which the upper classes savagely exploited members of the "lower orders"; lacking a later generation's belief in natural human equality, they saw little reason to question the enslavement of Africans. As they sought to mold a docile labor force, these planters resorted to harshly repressive measures that included liberal use of whippings and brandings.

Gradually, as slavery became more entrenched, changes occurred in the way masters looked on their slaves (and themselves). Many second-generation masters, who unlike their parents had grown up with slaves, came to regard them as inferior members of their extended families, and to look upon themselves as kindly patriarchs who, like benevolent despots, ruled their "people" firmly but fairly and looked after their needs. Such slave owners continued to rely heavily on the lash (and other forms of punishment) for discipline, and few slaves saw their owners as the kindly guardians that they proclaimed themselves to be. Still, the most extreme forms of physical abuse became less common over the course the 18th century, at the same time that many slave owners accepted the idea that they should treat their slaves humanely.

Some slave owners went further. The last third of the 18th century saw the first widespread questioning of slavery by white Americans. This questioning was boosted by the American Revolution, which sparked a sharp increase in egalitarian thinking. Many of the Founding Fathers, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, while slaveholders, were profoundly troubled by slavery; leery of rash actions, they initiated a series of cautious acts that they thought would lead to slavery's gradual abolition.

These acts included measures in all states north of Delaware to abolish slavery. A few states did away with slavery immediately. More typical were gradual emancipation acts such as that passed by Pennsylvania in 1780, whereby all children born to slaves in the future would be freed at age 28. Two significant measures dating from 1787 included the Northwest Ordinance, which barred slavery from the Northwest Territory (which included much of what is now the upper Midwest), and a compromise reached at the Constitutional Convention that would allow Congress to outlaw the importation of slaves in 1808. Meanwhile, a number of states passed acts to ease the freeing of slaves by individuals, hundreds of whom—especially in the upper South—set some or all of their slaves free. In addition, tens of thousands of slaves acted on their own, taking advantage of wartime disruption to escape from their masters. As a result, the number of free blacks, which had been tiny before the Revolution, surged during the last quarter of the 18th century.

Nevertheless, the Revolutionary-era challenge to slavery proved successful only in the North, where the investment in slaves was small. The antislavery movement never made much headway in Georgia and South Carolina, where labor-hungry planters rushed to import tens of thousands of Africans before the 1808 cutoff. In the upper South, Revolution-inspired egalitarianism withered in the 1790s and 1800s. And because the American slave population was self-reproducing, the end of slave imports did not undermine slavery as it did elsewhere, or as many of the Founding Fathers expected. The ultimate result of the first antislavery movement was to leave slavery a newly sectional institution, on the road to abolition throughout the North but largely unscathed in the South.