This obiter dictum was disputed by equally learned justices. Justice McLean said in his opinion:
“Our independence was a great epoch in the history of freedom; and while I admit the Government was not made especially for the colored race, yet many of them were citizens of the New England States, and exercised the rights of suffrage when the Constitution was adopted; and it was not doubted by any intelligent person that its tendencies would greatly ameliorate their condition.”74
Justice Curtis also said:
“It has been often asserted, that the Constitution was made exclusively by and for the white race. It has already been shown that in five of the thirteen original States, colored persons then possessed the elective franchise and were among those by whom the Constitution was ordained and established. If so, it is not true, in point of fact, that the Constitution was made exclusively by the white race. And that it was made exclusively for the white race is, in my opinion, not only an assumption not warranted by anything in the Constitution, but contradicted by its opening declaration, that it was ordained and established by the people of the United States, for themselves and their posterity. And, as free colored persons were then citizens of at least five States, they were among those for whom and whose posterity the Constitution was ordained and established.”75
After the Revolution came the series of state acts abolishing slavery, beginning with Vermont in 1777; and then came the pause and retrogression followed by the slow but determined rise of the Cotton Kingdom. But even in that day, the prophets protested. Hezekiah Niles said in 1819: “We are ashamed of the thing we practice;... there is no attribute of Heaven that takes part with us, and we know it. And in the contest that must come, and will come, there will be a heap of sorrows such as the world has rarely seen.”76 While the wild preacher, Lorenzo Dow, raised his cry from the wilderness even in Alabama and Mississippi, saying: “In the rest of the Southern States the influence of these Foreigners will be known and felt in its time, and the seeds from the HORY ALLIANCE and the DECAPIGANDI, who have a hand in those grades of Generals, from the Inquisitor to the Vicar General and down.... The STRUGGLE will be DREADFUL! The CUP will be BITTER! and when the agony is over, those who survive may see better days! FAREWELL!”77 Finally, came William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown.
3. Insurrection
It may be said, and it usually has been said, that all this showed the natural conscience and humanity of white Americans protesting, and eventually triumphing over, political and economic temptations. But to this must be added the inescapable fact that the attitude, thought and action of the Negro himself was in the largest measure back of this heart searching, discomfort and warning; and first of all was the physical force which the Negro again and again and practically without ceasing from the first days of the slave trade down to the war of emancipation, used to effect his own freedom.
We must remember that the slave trade itself was war; that from surreptitious kidnapping of the unsuspecting it was finally organized so as to set African tribes warring against tribes, giving the conquerors the actual aid of European or Arabian soldiers and the tremendous incentive of high prices for results of successful wars through the selling of captives. The captives themselves fought to the last ditch. It is estimated that every single slave finally landed upon a slave ship meant five corpses either left behind in Africa or lost through rebellion, suicide, sickness, and murder on the high seas. This which is so often looked upon as passive calamity was one of the most terrible and vindictive and unceasing struggles against misfortune that a group of human beings ever put forth. It cost Negro Africa perhaps sixty million souls to land ten million slaves in America.
The first influence of the Negro on American Democracy was naturally force to oppose force—revolt, murder, assassination—coupled with running away. It was the primitive, ancient effort to avenge blood with blood, to bring good out of evil by opposing evil with evil. Whether right or wrong, effective or abortive, it is the human answer to oppression which the world has tried for thousands of years.
Two facts stand out in American history with regard to slave insurrections: on the one hand, there is no doubt of the continuous and abiding fear of them. The slave legislation of the southern states is filled with ferocious efforts to guard against this. Masters were everywhere given peremptory and unquestioned power to kill a slave or even a white servant who should “resist his master.” The Virginia law of 1680 said: “If any Negro or other slave shall absent himself from his master’s service and lie, hide and lurk in obscure places, committing injuries to the inhabitants, and shall resist any person or persons that shall by lawful authority be employed to apprehend and take the said Negro, that then, in case of such resistance, it shall be lawful for such person or persons to kill the said Negro or slave so lying out and resisting.”78
In 1691 and in 1748, there were Virginia acts to punish conspiracies and insurrections of slaves. In 1708 and in 1712 New York had laws against conspiracies and insurrections of Negroes. North Carolina passed such a law in 1741, and South Carolina in 1743 was legislating “against the insurrection and other wicked attempts of Negroes and other slaves.” The Mississippi code of 1839 provides for slave insurrections “with arms in the intent to regain their liberty by force.” Virginia in 1797 decreed death for any one exciting slaves to insurrection. In 1830 North Carolina made it a felony to incite insurrection among slaves. The penal code of Texas, passed in 1857, had a severe section against insurrection.79
Such legislation, common in every slave state, could not have been based on mere idle fear, and when we follow newspaper comment, debates and arguments and the history of insurrections and attempted insurrections among slaves, we easily see the reason. No sooner had the Negroes landed in America than resistance to slavery began.
As early as 1503, the Governor of Hispaniola stopped the transportation of Negroes “because they fled to the Indians and taught them bad manners and they could never be apprehended.” In 1518, in the sugar mills of Haiti, the Negroes “quit working and fled whenever they could in squads and started rebellions and committed murders.” In 1522, there was a rebellion on the sugar plantations. Twenty Negroes from Diego Columbus’ mill fled and killed several Spaniards. They joined with other rebellious Negroes on neighboring plantations. In 1523, many Negro slaves “fled to the Zapoteca and walked rebelliously through the country.” In 1527, there was an uprising of Indians and Negroes in Florida. In 1532, the Wolofs and other rebellious Negroes caused insurrection among the Carib Indians. These Wolofs were declared to be “haughty, disobedient, rebellious and incorrigible.” In 1548, there was a rebellion in Honduras, and the Viceroy Mendoza in Mexico writes of an uprising among the slaves and Indians in 1537.80 One of the most remarkable cases of resistance was the establishment and defense of Palmares in Brazil, where 40 determined Negroes in 1560 established a city-state which lived for nearly a half century, growing to a population of 20,000 and only overthrown when 7,000 soldiers with artillery were sent against it. The Chiefs committed suicide rather than surrender.81
Early in the sixteenth century and from that time down until the nineteenth, the black rebels, whom the Spanish called “Cimarrones,” and whom we know as “Maroons,” were infesting the mountains and forests of the West Indies and South America. Gage says between 1520 and 1530: “What the Spaniards fear most until they get out of these mountains are two or three hundred Negroes, Cimarrones, who for the bad treatment they received have fled from masters in order to resort to these woods; there they live with their wives and children and increase in numbers every year, so that the entire force of Guatemala (City) and its environments is not capable to subdue them.” Gage himself was captured by a mulatto corsair who was sweeping the seas in his own ship.82
The history of these Maroons reads like romance.83 When England took Jamaica, in [1655], they found the mountains infested with Maroons, whom they fought for [nearly] ten years and finally, in 1663, acknowledged their freedom, gave them land and made their leader, Juan de Bolas, a colonel in the militia. He was killed, however, in the following year and from 1664 to 1778 some