During the 1760s and 1770s when powerful slaveholders such as George Washington talked of liberty, natural rights, and hatred of enslavement, African Americans listened. Most of them had been born in America, they had absorbed English culture, they were united as a people, and they knew their way in colonial society. Those who lived in or near towns and cities had access to public meetings and newspapers. They were aware of the disputes with Great Britain and the contradictions between demanding liberty for oneself and denying it to others. They understood that the ferment of the 1760s had shaken traditional assumptions about government, and many of them hoped for more changes. The greatest source of optimism for African Americans was the expectation that white Patriot leaders would realize their revolutionary principles were incompatible with slavery. Those in England who believed white Americans must submit to British authority pointed out the contradiction. Samuel Johnson, the most famous writer in London, asked, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” But white Americans made similar comments. As ++early as 1763, James Otis of Massachusetts warned that “those who every day barter away other mens[’] liberty, will soon care little for their own.” Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet Common Sense rallied Americans to endorse independence in 1776, asked them to contemplate “with what consistency, or decency they complain so loudly of attempts to enslave them, while they hold so many hundred thousands in slavery; and annually enslave many thousands more.” Such principled misgivings among white people about slavery helped improve the situation for black people in the North and upper South during the war, but African Americans acting on their own behalf were key. In January 1766 slaves marched through Charleston, South Carolina, shouting “Liberty!” In the South Carolina and Georgia low country and in the Chesapeake, slaves escaped in massive numbers throughout the revolutionary era. So many slaves fled in the South that between 1770 and 1790 the percentage of black people in South Carolina’s population dropped from 60.5 percent to 43.8 percent, and in Georgia from 45.2 to 36.9.
Throughout the southern colonies, rumors of slave uprisings were everywhere. However, it was in New England—the heartland of anti-British radicalism—that African Americans formally made their case for freedom. As early as 1701, a Massachusetts slave won his liberty in court, and there were eleven similar suits before 1750. As the revolutionary era began, such cases multiplied. In addition, although slaves during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries had based their freedom suits on contractual technicalities, during the revolutionary period, they increasingly sued on the basis of principles of universal liberty. They did not always win their cases—John Adams, a future president, was the lawyer who defeated one such case in Boston in 1768—but they set precedents. African Americans in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Connecticut also petitioned their colonial or state legislatures for gradual emancipation. These petitions indicate that the black men who signed them were familiar with revolutionary rhetoric. African Americans learned this rhetoric as they joined white radicals to confront British authority. In 1765 black men demonstrated against the Stamp Act in Boston. They rioted against British troops there in 1768 and joined Crispus Attucks in 1770. Black Minutemen stood with their white comrades at Lexington and Concord. In 1773 black petitioners from Boston told a delegate to the colonial assembly, “We expect great things from men who have made such a noble stand against the designs of their fellow-men to enslave them. . . . The divine spirit of freedom, seems to fire every human breast.”
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