The Declaration of Independence
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of the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which were promulgated
in 1669 for the governance of the Carolina colonies, Locke stipulated that
‘‘every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over
his negro slaves.’’ Montesquieu attacked the traditional justifications for
slavery, however, and Burke drafted an elaborate code to make both the
African trade and colonial slavery more humane. The Quakers, followed
by other Christian sects, came to the view that slaveholding was a sin
against God, no matter how benevolent or charitable. Many leaders of
both the American Revolution and the Abolitionist Movement, it is worthy of remarking, were members of the clergy.
The American Revolution probably served as a catalyst for anti-slavery
sentiment by awakening a deeper appreciation of individual liberty. The
debate with England produced a great body of literature on the meaning of freedom and the rights of Englishmen; and it stimulated interest in
older works on political thought, history, and law that helped to justify
the American cause. Above all, the case against the British rested on the
thesis that Americans were entitled to the same rights as Englishmen at
home. This demand for equal rights was the main thrust of the Declaration of Independence, which laid the foundation for the argument
against slavery. Indeed, it was the Declaration of Independence, not the
Constitution or the Bill of Rights, around which many opponents of slavery rallied for support in the nineteenth century. Beginning in the 1830s,
some Abolitionist leaders condemned the Constitution as a ‘‘covenant
with death’’ because, they said, it protected and perpetuated the slavery
system. The Constitution, they charged, had subverted the ideals of the
Declaration of Independence. At an anti-slavery rally in Massachusetts
in 1854, the Abolitionist leader, William Lloyd Garrison, burned a copy
of the Constitution before an angry crowd that had gathered to protest
the capture of a fugitive slave. ‘‘An agreement with hell,’’ he called it. ‘‘So
perish all compromise with tyranny,’’ he cried out as the document went
up in flames. Other anti-slavery leaders contended that the alleged contradiction between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as depicted by some Abolitionists was actually a misreading of the
documents. Slavery had already been abolished by the Declaration of Independence, they reasoned, and the Constitution was being manipulated
by politicians to keep slavery in place.