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Chapter 4. Racial Beliefs 85
of thinking was taken over from feudal and post-feudal Europe. The
historical literature on this early period also records that the imported
Negroes—and the captured Indians—originally were kept in much the
same status as the white indentured servants.^ When later the Negroes
gradually were pushed down into chattel slavery while the white servants
were allowed to work off their bond, the need was felt, in this Christian
country, for some kind of justification above mere economic expediency
and the might of the strong. The arguments called forth by this need
were, however, for a time not biological in character, although they later
easily merged into the dogma of natural inequality. The arguments were
broadly these: that the Negro was a heathen and a barbarian, an outcast
among the peoples of the earth, a descendant of Noah’s son Ham, cursed
by God himself and doomed to be a servant forever on account of an
ancient sin.^
The ideas of the American Revolution added their influence to those
of some early Christian thinkers and preachers, particularly among the
Quakers, in deprecating these arguments. And they gave an entirely new
vision of society as it is and as it ought to be. This vision was dominated
by a radically equalitarian political morality and could not possibly include
slavery as a social institution. The philosophical ideas of man’s natural
rights merged with the Golden Rule of Christianity, ‘‘Do unto others as
you would have them do unto you.”
How it actually looked in the minds of the enlightened slaveholders
who played a prominent role in the Revolution is well known, since they
were under the urge to intellectual clarity of their age, and in pamphlets,
speeches, and letters frequently discussed the troubles of their conscience.
Most of them saw clearly the inconsistency between American democracy
and Negro slavery. To these men slavery was an “abominable crime,” a
“wicked cause,” a “supreme misfortune,” an “inherited evil,” a “cancer
in the body politic.” Jefferson himself made several attacks on the institu-
tion of slavery, and some of them were politically nearly successful. Later
in his life (1821) he wrote in his autobiography:
... it was found that the public mind would not bear the proposition [of gradual
emancipation], nor will it bear it even at this day. Yet the day is not far distant
when it must bear it, or worse will follow. Nothing is more certainly written in the
book of fate than that these people are to be free.®
It was among Washington’s first wishes “. . . to see a plan adopted for the
abolition of it [slavery] 5
but there is only one proper and effectual mode
by which it can be accomplished and that is by legislative authority. . .
In this period the main American religious denominations also went on
record to denounce slavery.
Even in terms of economic usefulness slavery seemed for a time to be
a decaying institution. Slave prices were falling. Public opinion also was
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