Slavery and the American Revolution

Historian Sean Wilentz wrote in 2019 about the contradictory political impulses toward slavery involved in the American Revolution. (1) He was addressing a concern that he raises about an argument made as part of the 1619 Project that highlights the history of slavery in North America, which was that an major impulse for the Revolution was to defend slavery against British abolitionism.

The American Revolution is a key founding myth of the United States. Interpretations of it vary, of course, both in academic discussions and in popular political understandings of it. From the beginning, there were more conservative adherents and more radical ones. Paul Revere and Thomas Paine could be taken as symbols of those two poles, respectively.

And over time, there have been interpretations made from a range of ideological and partisan viewpoints. On the academic side of the discussion, a lot of the differences are related to how “revolutionary” the American Revolution was, in the sense of how drastically it altered fundamental social and class relations, how much it democratized governance, and what the sources of it were. And the status of slavery is a key issue in those perceptions, as is the question of to what extent the Constitution represented the democratic impulses of the Revolution.

Back in the days when Calvin Coolidge was in the White House, the historian J. Franklin Jameson shook up the dominant academic narrative with a series of lectures published in 1926 as The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement. The conservative consensus regarded the Revolution as basically a war of independence against Britain but not as a social revolution.

Jameson was one of several prominent historians who were emphasizing the Revolution’s social dimension, including Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., Carl Becker, and Charles Beard. Beard depicted the creation of the Constitution as a kind of sleazy backroom deal made by rich men to scam the system to the benefit of their own pocketbooks in his An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of The United States (1913). The stodgy-but-reliable Britannica is a bit more generous in describing it in its article on Beard:

In this book he claimed that the Constitution had been formulated by interest groups whose motivations were just as much personal financial ones as they were political ones. Although American politicians were generally outraged at the implications of material interests embodied in the Constitution by the Founding Fathers, the book was received by academicians as an innovative study on motivational factors among socioeconomic groups. (2)

This was generally taken to be a “left” version and Beard was counted as a Progressive historian. He became one of the founders of the left-leaning New School of Social Research in 1919. But his view of the Constitution and the purposes of the men who had led the Revolution also lent itself to a kind of everybody’s-in-it-for-themselves viewpoint which was more laissez-faire individualist dogma than a left view. And Beard’s turn later in life to what can reasonably be described as a crackpot rightwing isolationist viewpoint that he expressed in President Roosevelt and the Coming of War, 1941 (1948) certainly makes it reasonable to wonder to what extent his view earlier in his career was consistently “left”.

Similar ambiguity can be encountered with ethno-nationalist historical narratives of the American Revolution. They can be rhetorically similar to left perspectives in terms of looking at the dark, undemocratic, inhumane, anti-egalitarian realities of American history. But they can also play into a rightwing narrative which argues, for instance, that white racism is as American as apple pie and it pointless and un-American to challenge it. In fact, for people who are looking to shift their image from very left to very right, that kind of argument is a natural.

Wilentz defines a common historical view in more recent times of the American Revolution that proceeds from this assumption, “The American Revolution may not have overthrown the institution of slavery but its egalitarian principles were at least implicitly antislavery.”

He describes a problem he sees with this comfortable interpretation:

One problem with this familiar view is that it obscures how new, how radical, antislavery politics were during the revolutionary era, and how, for many patriots, American slavery and American freedom were perfectly compatible. I’m referring here not to those slaveholders with troubled consciences like Jefferson and James Madison, Virginians who perceived slavery as an intolerable offense yet who (at least after the 1780s, in Jefferson’s case) lifted not a finger toward ending it - critics of slavery who continued owning, buying, and selling human beings until the day they died. I’m referring instead to stridently proslavery figures like that young South Carolina grandee and signer of the Constitution, Charles Pinckney - a patriot who served as an officer in the revolutionary militia and who, as a delegate at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, asserted “if slavery be wrong, it is justified by the example of all the world.” I am also referring to those white Northerners, as well as most white Southerners, who believed that the Declaration’s egalitarian principles were perfectly sound but that they categorically did not apply to blacks, slave or free. Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney attempted finally to enshrine this racist egalitarianism in American national law in his notorious ruling on the Dred Scott case in 1857.

These proslavery Americans and apologists for slavery and their progeny were no less products of the American founding than the early abolitionists inspired by Woolman and Benezet or the conflicted enlightened Virginians like Jefferson. Plantation slavery grew stupendously in the United States after the Revolution, generating a well-organized slave power that long dominated national politics. Slavery’s defeat was not inevitable. Nor, obviously, did white supremacy die with slavery. Over the century and a half since slavery’s abolition, the racist Americanism of Charles Pinckney and Roger Brooke Taney has survived and flourished in new forms, along with dominating social and political structures that uphold it. Far from vanquished, it has morphed and resurged in ways expected and unexpected, from the bloody overthrow of Reconstruction to the menacing rise of Donald J. Trump. [my emphasis]

But Wilentz also contests an alternative view that the Revolution itself was motivated by the fear of the colonists that Great Britain would abolish slavery. In other words, one of the American Revolution’s central goal, if not the central one, was to preserve slavery. He describes the implication of this view as follows:

The American Revolution, in effect, anticipated the slaveholders’ rebellion eighty-odd years later: the American patriots allegedly declared their independence of Britain in 1776 for the same reason that the Southern states seceded in 1860–1861, to guarantee that slavery would endure. American independence, in this view, was a precursor of Southern secession.

Wilentz continues:

It is worth noting that Jefferson Davis and the rebellious slaveholders also depicted secession as a glorious replay of the American Revolution, although they did not go so far as to claim that the patriots of 1776 fought to protect slavery. Not for the first time, modern critics have concluded that the Confederates were basically correct about American history, whereas Lincoln as well as most abolitionists, above all Frederick Douglass, were wrong—as when Douglass, in his most famous speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?,” excoriated American hypocrisy and white racism but also praised the US Constitution as “a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.”

That dig Wilentz makes about “modern critics” who conclude that the Confederates were basically correct about American history” seems to be mostly casting shade on those like today’s MAGA radicals who operate very much in the spirit of Confederacy, as most dramatically illustrated on January 6, 2021 when Trump sent his violent mob to try to facilitate a coup. But is also makes the point that there were tensions between the emancipatory impulses of the Revolution and considerable amounts of unfreedom, particularly for slaves and for native peoples.

I won’t go further into the controversy in this post. But the cynical perspective implied in Beard’s approach is inadequate to understanding the real historical of democratic and liberal ideals and practices. And any interpretation of the American Revolution that fits with Jefferson Davis’ or John Calhoun’s view of its values and meaning should not be lightly accepted.

I’ll close by noting that a central factual-historical argument that Wilentz makes is to emphasize how rapidly antislavery ideas emerged in a particular time-frame, relying on the eminent historian of slavery David Brion Davis:

Suddenly, in the late 1740s and early 1750s, Western culture reached a turning point, producing what the great modern scholar of slavery and the antislavery movement David Brion Davis called “an almost explosive consciousness of man’s freedom to shape the world in accordance with his own will and reason.” The causes of this moral revolution were manifold and remain much debated, but need not detain us here; what is important is that it brought, in Davis’s words, “a heightened concern for discovering laws and principles that would enable human society to be something more than an endless contest of greed and power.” That concern made slavery appear for the first time - to the un-enslaved - as a barbaric offense to God, reason, and natural rights. [my emphasis]

And Wilentz adds, “Between 1767 and 1775, a wave of antislavery petitions, sermons, pamphlets, and private missives swelled across the colonies, from New England as far south as Virginia - a political outburst unprecedented in the Atlantic world.”

Notes:

(1) Wilentz, Sean (2019): American Slavery and ‘the Relentless Unforeseen’. NYR Daily <https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/11/19/american-slavery-and-the-relentless-unforeseen/>(Accessed: 2019-28-12).

(2) Britannica Editors (2026): Charles A. Beard. Encyclopedia Britannica, 11/23/2025. <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-A-Beard> (Accessed 2026-24-06).