“The anti-slavery movement did not,” historian Alexander Tsesis writes, “a creation of the Revolution.” However, the ideology of the revolution was “inspirational enough to encourage Black petitioners, soldiers and litigants to oppose the resilience of hereditary slavery”. And within that movement, as well as the movements it spawned, the Declaration of Independence, in the words of historian David Brion Davis, will stand as a “testingstone” and “sacred bible” for those anti-slavery.
There are many examples of using this Statement. As early as 1776 we had a pamphlet by Lemuel Haynes, a Free Negro Congregation minister in Vermont, titled “Freedom extends further: Or liberal thoughts on the illegality of keeping slaves.” Haynes begins by quoting the Declaration of Independence and then, using the language of natural rights, goes on to assert that “an African” has “an undeniable right to his Freedom: Therefore, the practice of Slavery, which abounds in this Land, is illegal.
Although not directly quoting the Declaration, the author of “Lecture on the current state of American and British affairs” — who identified himself only as “A Black Whig” — seems to echo the American independence document of 1781 when he wrote: “Besides life is freedom, and when oppression and violence become violent force, they cause the oppressed parties to resist, leave them weak forever.” From here, he asked the American revolutionaries to continue their own struggle for freedom with the emancipation of slaves. “And now, my virtuous citizens, let me beg you that, after you are freed from the yoke of the British, you will also free those who have suffered all their lives. slave.”
White abolitionists and other anti-slavery opponents also used the Declaration in their legal and rhetorical attacks on human slavery.
“It has been declared many times in Congress, in the language and sentiments of all these States, and by other men’s public authorities, ‘that we take these facts for granted, that all men was created Equality,’” Written author pseudonym Crito (after Socrates’ ancient Athenian companion) in 1787. “Africans, and the enslaved Negroes among us, are actually included in these assertions as much as we ourselves,” he continued. “And if we do not allow them to enjoy these inalienable rights, then we commit the evil, absurd and contradictory crime.”
