Liberty, Equality & Unequal Revolutionary Outcomes · Grade 7 Social Studies

Part 1 · Twenty thousand decisions

Dunmore's proclamation of 1775 was followed by the broader Philipsburg Proclamation of 1779, offering freedom to any enslaved person who left a rebel master, whether or not they would fight. Escaping was dangerous and often fatal — disease killed many in the crowded British camps, and those recaptured faced savage punishment — and still they came in thousands.

At the war's end the question was whether Britain would keep its word. Washington pressed for the return of escaped people as property under the peace terms. The British commander, Sir Guy Carleton, refused to hand over anyone who had reached his lines on a promise of freedom, and instead compiled the Book of Negroes, a register of about three thousand names, ages and former enslavers, as a record of those evacuated.

Some who left had fought. Black Loyalist units served the British through the war, and others worked as pilots, labourers, cooks and spies for both sides. On the American side too, several thousand Black soldiers served in the Continental Army — Rhode Island raised a regiment in 1778 that promised freedom for enlistment, and by the war’s later years integrated units were common in northern regiments. Black Americans fought on both sides for the same reason: each side was offering something the other was not.

They went to Nova Scotia, where the land promised them was poor and slow in coming, and about twelve hundred later sailed again to found Freetown in Sierra Leone in 1792. Others went to London, the Caribbean and elsewhere. It is among the largest emancipations of the period, carried out by an empire that was simultaneously the world's leading slave trader.

Part 2 · Emancipation in the north, and how slowly

The Revolution's language did real work in the northern states, though mostly gradually. Vermont's constitution of 1777 barred adult slavery outright. Pennsylvania passed a gradual abolition act in 1780: nobody then enslaved was freed, but children born to enslaved mothers afterwards would become free at twenty-eight. Massachusetts ended it through the courts, where Elizabeth Freeman and Quock Walker won freedom suits in 1781 and 1783 arguing from the new state constitution's declaration that all men are born free and equal.

New York, with the largest enslaved population in the north, moved slowly and reluctantly. Its gradual abolition act came in 1799, freeing nobody immediately; final abolition in the state did not arrive until 1827, fifty-one years after the Declaration. Gradual emancipation protected enslavers' property values by making the enslaved wait, and in New York a child born in 1799 could still owe service into the 1820s.

Meanwhile southern slavery grew. The first federal census in 1790 counted nearly 700,000 enslaved people, and the invention of the cotton gin three years later would make the institution more profitable than ever, as the next chapters show. The Revolution set the two halves of the country on diverging paths, which is the deep cause of the crisis seventy years later.

Part 3 · Women, and the law that did not move

Women had sustained the boycotts, run farms and businesses while men served, carried supplies and in some cases fought. The legal result was close to nothing. The doctrine of coverture — under which a married woman's legal personality merged into her husband's, so she could not own property, make a contract or sue in her own name — survived the Revolution untouched in every state.

There was one striking exception. New Jersey's constitution of 1776 gave the vote to all inhabitants worth fifty pounds, and unmarried and widowed women who met the threshold voted for three decades. Married women could not, because coverture meant they owned nothing. The legislature closed the loophole in 1807, and it would be more than a century before women voted there again.

What did emerge was an idea rather than a right: republican motherhood, the argument that a republic depended on virtuous citizens and that mothers raised them, so women needed education. It was a real gain, and it drove the founding of female academies. It was also a justification for teaching women in order to serve their sons, and the women who later met at Seneca Falls in 1848 had grown up inside it.

Part 4 · The clearest losers

Native nations lost most, and lost it in a way that had nothing to do with how they had fought. The Treaty of Paris of 1783 transferred to the United States all British claims east of the Mississippi, and no Native nation was party to the negotiation or mentioned in the text. Nations that had allied with Britain, nations that had allied with the Americans, and nations that had stayed out were treated identically: as inhabitants of territory that had changed owners.

The United States at first asserted it had won the land by conquest. At Fort Stanwix in 1784 commissioners demanded large cessions from the Haudenosaunee, took hostages, and treated with men who lacked authority from the Grand Council. New York State then proceeded to acquire most of the remaining Haudenosaunee land through a series of direct state purchases, despite federal law requiring that such transactions go through Congress — the basis of land claims litigated into the twentieth century.

New York’s acquisitions are the sharpest case because the state knew it was overstepping. The federal Nonintercourse Act required that purchases of Native land be made under the authority of the United States, and New York dealt directly with individual nations anyway, acquiring millions of acres through the 1780s and 1790s. Two centuries later the Oneida brought those transactions before the Supreme Court, which held in 1985 that the state’s purchases had indeed violated federal law.

The Loyalists are the other group displaced. Perhaps 60,000 to 80,000 left, to Canada, Britain and the Caribbean, their property confiscated by state legislatures. Among them were the Mohawk under Joseph Brant, who settled on the Grand River in Ontario, where their descendants remain. A war fought over representation ended by expelling a substantial minority who had chosen the losing side.