A virtual fellow's forum with Holly Brewer, Burke Chair of American Cultural and Intellectual History and Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland from May 27, 2021. Recording available.
When Thomas Jefferson presented the rough draft of the Declaration of Independence to the Continental Congress it condemned slavery. What seems ridiculous should instead grip our attention. While the three paragraphs were deleted, tracking that debate shows they represented the majority view. These sentences point towards how the British empire helped to embed slavery, legally, in all colonies. The king(s) gave every support to a market—an “execrable commerce” —that made people into things, “where MEN should be bought & sold.” The structure of empire, and the support of the English monarchy, had laid a legal and institutional basis for slavery. Under British law it was those who interfered with the slave trade (not the slavers) who were pirates. The structure of empire supported not only the slave trade, but it enforced a common law that made people into property. It punished those who criticized royal and colonial policy, as slavery officially was between 1660-1776, as seditious. Jefferson’s paragraphs suggest both the ideological consistency of revolutionary principles—that the Declaration really did mean to include all “men” in its claims for equality—but also the fracturing of those ideals on altars of pre-existing laws and norms. Structural racism was deeply embedded into an imperial legal system that was partly retained by the Treaty of Paris of 1783. By focusing attention on power structures and legal systems, it becomes easier to understand the successes and failures of revolutionary reform.
About the Speaker
Holly Brewer is Burke Professor of American History and Associate Professor at the University of Maryland. She is a specialist in early American history and the early British empire as well as early modern debates about justice. Her first book traced the origin and impact of "democratical" ideas across the empire by examining debates about who can consent in theory and legal practice, By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority. Brewer is currently finishing a book that examines the origins of American slavery in larger political and ideological debates, tentatively entitled Slavery & Sovereignty in Early America and the British Empire, for which she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014. She published part of it as "Slavery, Sovereignty and 'Inheritable Blood': Reconsidering John Locke and the Origins of American Slavery" in the American Historical Review (October 2017).
Recorded Program
