In Gordon Wood letter to the editor of the New York Times. He wants to correct “factual errors’ ‘ in the 1619 Project and makes claims that there isn’t any evidence in some of the statements said in the project. Something that added to my knowledge was the Somerset decision in England. The decision made slavery unlawful in England. Basically freeing thousands of slaves in England. In my other history classes, I was never told that there was a law that freed slaves in England during the same time colonists started to rebel for their independence.
I have to agree with Gordon Wood. I have never heard that colonists wanted to break free from Britain because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. He adds on that Britain did not want to abolish slavery in the colonies. Also that colonists did not know anything about the Somerset decision till later in the year when slaves were already free in England and colonists started to fight for their independence. When colonists started to “fight back” with their assemblies. These assemblies would have duties like taxing residents and managing the spending of the colony’s revenue. The royal governors wanted to limit their power but it only encouraged the assembly’s power to grow. It seems that Britain just wanted to control the colonies, exploit them and benefit from the taxes the colonists paid. Later we see that Britain’s Stamp Act affected people throughout the colonies. This act is another example of Britain wanting to exploit the colonies and the act is one of many reasons that the colonies wanted their independence. Britain tried to suppress them and exploit them.
A question I had while reading the article was why would ending the Atlantic slave trade have been welcomed by the Virginia planters? Would it not benefit the planters?
It’s great to see you hone in on the Somerset decision, which is a little-known and misunderstood aspect of the history of antislavery. To clarify, however, Somerset affected relatively few enslaved people directly since there were very few enslaved people in England itself at the time—rather, it affected people like James Somerset, an enslaved person purchased in the Americas and brought to England by his master. But its significance lies in its setting a precedent for antislavery law, specifically an idea known as the “free air” principle—that in places where there is no positive law establishing property in man (like England, but not its colonies), claims to hold that property are null and void. (I would love to see a research paper on the Somerset decision, btw)
I agree with you (and Wood) that Somerset probably had little influence on American colonists’ decision to declare independence. But just because you (or Wood) “haven’t heard” that colonists rebelled to protect slavery, does that mean there may not be more subtle, deeply buried ways in which that may have been true, at least for a minority of slaveholding colonists?
As for your last question, that is relatively easy to answer. Slaveholders in Virginia and many other parts of the South welcomed the abolition of the slave trade because they already had more than enough human chattels to reproduce the existing population (although states like S. Carolina kept importing them right until the eve of slave trade abolition on Jan. 1, 1808). After the trade was cut off, in fact, the value of their enslaved chattels often went up. So while slave trade abolition ended the most gruesome part of Atlantic slavery, it also helped pave the way for a “second middle passage” to the cotton states beginning in the 1810s.