How would you describe slavery at America's founding?

0:04[MUSIC] In the 18th century at the beginning, there were isolated individuals who criticized slavery and some quakers. But nobody did anything until the American revolution. The states immediately attack slavery, the Northern states. They knew, and many people do, including Southern leaders knew that there was an inconsistency between Americans claim of liberty and the fact that they were holding thousands of slaves. Nobody defended the institution of slavery in the Americans.

0:41They all made excuses for it who didn't want to act on it. But the Northern states began acting, and it's the first example in history of a state that had legalized slavery. To abolish it. Those Northern states, and by 1804, all of the Northern states, eight of the 13 states had legally abolished slavery. Now, sometimes they're grandfathered in because they want to throw people out into the free world without any education or skills, so that it was grandfathered in so sometimes you had slaves in New Jersey as late as the 1840s and 50s. But of course, the big problem was the racial thinking that emerged in the democratic societies that emerged in the states in the antebellum period. There's no doubt that segregation became common. But the revolution is the incident or the event that puts anti slavery on the map. We were the first country in the world to contest slavery, not England.

1:50England wasn't thinking about abolishing slavery in 1776, but the Americans or many of them were. Now, the Southerners, Virginia had some thoughts about it. Jefferson puts a bill into the Virginia legislature in 1760s. It doesn't pass. But a lot of Virginians were eager to get rid of the institution, but didn't quite know how. Because 40% of the population was enslaved. South Carolina, it was 60% of the population was enslaved.

2:23They faced problems that the Northern states where the proportions were much smaller. At the most new New York City did have about 14% of its people slave, but nothing there was no plantation slavery similar to what you had in the South in the North. There were servants for life and it was easier to abolish it and go to paid servants for the Northerners, but they did do it and that's what's important because nobody else in the world was abolishing slavery and for the American revolution is important for that.

2:56That was part of the enlightenment ideas that people like Jefferson had, along with education, and reforming the inheritance patterns, ending primogeniture, and tail, which were legal devices that sustained an aristocracy and religious freedom. These are all efforts by the states to bring their societies into more enlightened status. Anti slavery was an important part of that effort, that enlightenment effort. It's the revolution that makes slavery a problem.

3:30I hadn't been a problem before taken for granted. Taken for granted in the way that people have servants to. They didn't think about it until the revolution for the most part, was not seen as a great evil. It's the revolution that makes it an evil and from that moment on, slaveholders are put on the defensive, and they have to find arguments to defend an institution that they had never had to defend before.