Aristocratic Republicanism and Slavery

Republicanism in the South differed significantly from that in the North. Enslaved Africans constituted one-third of the South’s population; their bondage contradicted the new nation’s professed ideology of freedom and equality. “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” British author Samuel Johnson had chided the American rebels in 1775, a point that some Patriots took to heart. “I wish most sincerely there was not a Slave in the province,” Abigail Adams confessed to her husband, John. “It always appeared a most iniquitous Scheme to me — to fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.”