1770: African Ideas of Slavery
Even as the legal system across the French, Spanish, and British colonies moved to deny Africans their rights, Africans themselves retained a vision of resistance that refused to embrace slavery as a permanent institution.
Jessica Millward (2015) noted in her biography of a freed slave,
Africans who lived along the Gold Coast [modern-day Ghana] possessed an entirely different viewpoint of slavery from the one that existed in the New World. Oral tradition passed down from those who survived the Middle Passage held that slavery was not an absolute—it was not permanent, it was not inherited, and in most cases, it was not perpetual. To the Akan peoples, slavery was a status, a consequence of actions or events, not the totality of the person. The enslaved were regarded as human beings who were entitled to certain rights and privileges. (p. 43)
1700s Map of West Africa
Source: Library of Congress
These competing visions of slavery impacted the populations in many ways.
For enslaved Africans, it kept communities close and gave them a reason to continue to resist and assert their rights. Berlin (1998) noted,
The minuet between master and slave, when played to the contrapuntal music of paternalism, was a constant, as master and slave continually renegotiated the small space allotted them. But the stylized movements—the staccato gyrations, the seductive feints, the swift withdrawals, and the hateful embraces—represented just one of many dances of domination and subordination, resistance and accommodation. (p. 4)
African ideas of slavery and labor–of themselves and their worth–fueled their resistance.
However, living in the world of the white man meant living in a world where Black ideas or values did not matter. Definitions of what it meant to be white, Black, slave, or free were written by the dominant culture.
For white men, racial slavery became the backdrop against which they defined their legal and political framework.
Morgan (1975) argued that the enslavement of Blacks directly impacted white men’s development of a political ideology of liberty that protected white status. He notes that the English colonists gained “a special appreciation of the freedom dear to republicans, because they saw every day [in slavery] what life without it could be like” (p. 376). As a result, racialized slavery informed the development of colonial legal structures and informed its enforcement of those laws before, during, and after the American Revolution (Morgan, 1975; Musselwhite, Mancall, & Horn, 2019).