| In the post-revolutionary period in the United States, the existence of slavery remained a serious issue, emphasizing what some leaders of the Republic saw as a failure of the Revolution. Individual reactions to the question of abolition, such as those of Robert Carter III and Henry Laurens, reflect both the national dilemma and the national failure to end slavery.;Though Enlightenment ideas and the ideas of the revolution, as well a popular religious beliefs, paid lip service to the belief that all men should be free, America's slave society found ways to accommodate their ideas to continued ownership of black slaves. The war caused considerable disruption in America's slave society, altering master slave relationships, inducing large numbers of slaves to run away, and this disruption ultimately offered an opportunity to limit or end slavery, which some states and individuals accepted, while others resisted.;Robert Carter and Laurens both supported the revolution to different degrees, and both expressed their abhorrence of slavery. Their backgrounds offer insights to their opinions, in their heritage, their personal and public lives, their exposure to ideas from outside their home lands, and their economic activities. Laurens, the more prominent and vocal revolutionary leader, would seem the one likely to free his slaves, yet he did not. Carter, more the old line patriarch, did, liberating an estimated 450 to 600 slaves. The differences lie in their personal disparities, but also in that Carter was a Virginian, while Laurens lived in South Carolina, where the slave culture had far more support, at least publicly, than in Virginia. Their differing reactions to personal and wartime experiences also meant differing responses to the issue of manumission.;These responses were complex, with financial considerations, the needs of their heirs, the reactions of their communities and their political, religious and philosophical beliefs all playing a role. I believe the main consideration was race, weighting not only each man's personal decisions relating to slavery, but resulting in a climate which endorsed Laurens' decision to continue slavery, while it trivialized efforts like Carter's, which offered an alternative. A racially mixed society was unthinkable except with blacks as slaves, and Carter's plan, as in fact did all actual manumission in the United States, integrated blacks into existing society. Such plans had to fail, and slavery had to remain intact, until Civil War forced emancipation. |
