The Founders' Contradiction: Slavery and the Declaration of Independence

The Declaration of Independence accused the king and Parliament of Great Britain of "exciting domestic insurrections" among the half-million people enslaved in the American colonies. This was a direct reference to Lord Dunmore’s November 1775 proclamation, in which Virginia’s royal governor offered freedom to "all indentured servants, Negroes, or others, (appertaining to rebels)" who were "able and willing to bear arms" against the American revolutionaries.

Modern readers often view this passage as hypocritical, given that the Founders fought for freedom while denying it to enslaved Black Americans. Some contemporaries agreed. In 1776, London writer John Lind published a pamphlet dismantling the Declaration line by line, mocking the patriots:

"Is it for them to complain of the offer of freedom held out to these wretched beings? of the offer of reinstating them in that equality which, in this very paper, is declared to be the gift of God to all?"

Lind missed a critical point: the Founders did not deny the contradiction of holding slaves while proclaiming liberty as a universal right. Instead, their discomfort with this inconsistency was especially evident in June 1776, when Virginians drafted their Declaration of Rights. Thomas Jefferson went further, arguing that enslaved people were justified in violently rebelling against their oppressors. The fear that "God's justice cannot sleep forever" left him "trembling," he admitted.

The "domestic insurrections" passage in the Declaration is more complex than modern interpretations suggest. To understand it, we must begin in October 1769, when a poor man named Samuel Howell approached Jefferson—a 26-year-old lawyer in Williamsburg—for help in proving his freedom. Howell’s great-grandfather was a Black man who had a daughter with a white woman. Under Virginia law at the time, the daughter was bound to servitude until age 31. She later gave birth to Howell’s mother, who was also enslaved until 31. Howell himself was born into servitude and sold by the owner of his mother and grandmother, who assumed Virginia law applied to him as well.

Two Virginia laws governed Howell’s case. The first stated that if a "free Christian white woman" bore a child with a "negro," the child would be "a servant until it shall be thirty-one years of age." The second law specified that if a "female mulatto…obliged to serve till the age of thirty or thirty-one years" had a child during servitude, that child would serve the master "until it shall attain the same age the mother of such child was obliged by law to serve unto." The first law condemned Howell’s grandmother to servitude, and his mother likely qualified as a "female mulatto." Howell was born during her enslavement, making his legal status a subject of dispute.