The past is never dead. It’s not even past. -William Faulkner

It’s still hard to wrap my mind around the fact that slavery was legally abolished in the US less than 100 years before I was born. This 1848 auction of 25 fieldhands, 18 women, six girls, 10 boys, and one female cook and seamstress – fellow human beings – occurred just five years before the Emancipation Proclamation. (O’Donald’s Auction House is now the Old Slave Mart Museum, the only facility in Charleston, South Carolina preserved after the Civil War.)

Here’s something to think about on Juneteenth that US Americans don’t learn about in school. You can also think about it on July 4th and whenever you visit Independence Hall in Philadelphia or other historic sites related to the country’s founding. One of the primary motivations for the American Revolution, led mostly by white male slaveowners, was the preservation of slavery.

In 1772, a judge in the High Court in London declared slavery “so odious” that it could not exist as common law and set the legal wheels in motion that “would consequently result in the freedom of the 15,000 slaves living in England. This decision eventually reached America and terrified slaveholders in the collection of British colonies, subject to British law.” The abolition of slavery in England began with the Slave Trade Act of 1807 and culminated in the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. For cultural and economic reasons the US was not ready for Amazing Grace, a Christian hymn written in 1772 and published in 1779.

If you’re interested in learning more, I recommend these books:

The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America by Gerald Horne (2014)

Slave Nation: An Unflinching Look at the Racism that Inspired the American Revolution by Alfred Blumrosen and Ruth Blumrosen (2006)

To a great extent, the American Revolution was about freedom from English interference in colonial affairs and freedom to conduct business as usual with the use of enslaved human beings who represented a low-cost source of labor, a boon to the colonial and later US economy.

Peace, MAA