Featuring: Larry Kenneth Alexander
Hidden in Books Transcript:
Hidden in Books is a series of short videos on colonial American history and the abolition of colonial slave codes and Negro laws before the Declaration of Independence in July 1776. Notably, the first 19 Africans brought to the shores of colonial Virginia in 1619 were indentured servants, not slaves under English law. They became Englishmen, and their descendants born in colonial America were British subjects by birth. By English law, no Englishman could become a slave.
During the English Civil War in the early 1640s, while conflict raged between parliamentarians and royalists in England, colonial assemblies in America enacted slave laws without formal approval from England’s imperial government. Colonial American legislatures were bicameral, with the British imperial government serving as the upper house and colonial assemblies serving as lower houses without the power to pass slavery laws. The corruption of the 13 colonial governments in British America and racial tyranny allowed colonial American slavery to exist and expand.
However, following England’s Civil War, Parliament reasserted its lawful authority with the passage of the English Bill of Rights in 1689, reaffirming Parliament’s exclusive power to legislate on critical matters in the Kingdom. In 1766, the American Colonies Act, known as the Declaratory Act, abolished colonial laws that denied or questioned Parliament’s supreme legislative authority, including colonial slave codes and Negro laws. Then, six years later in 1772, England’s Court of the King’s Bench upheld Parliament’s supreme legislative authority over colonial slavery in the Somerset v. Stewart case. The court declared slavery was not allowed and approved by the law of the kingdom, and that slavery required explicit authorization—positive law—a legislative power solely accorded to Parliament, which it never exercised.
America’s claim to lawful slave ownership is ahistorical, as the 1772 Somerset Decision, three years before the Revolution began, declared. Slavery was not a lawful condition in the kingdom. Rediscovering America’s Declaration of Independence reveals the Founders denouncing England’s King George III for abolishing “our most valuable laws,” which fundamentally altered colonial governments. Books like those behind me refute America’s claim that the 500,000 Black Englishmen living in the 13 colonies were lawfully excluded from the Declaration. They were not owned by white patriots when America’s Revolution began in 1775.
The Somerset Decision bridges back to England’s Magna Carta of 1215 through Parliament’s enactment of the English Bill of Rights of 1689. This act codified habeas corpus protections for all, and as the Smith v. Brown and Cooper case in 1702 declared: “As soon as a Negro comes to England, he is free. One may be a villain in England, but not a slave.”
What does this mean for America’s historiography? It means Black colonials in America, under English law, possessed fundamental liberty rights outlined in the Declaration of Independence. Since most Black colonials were born in the 13 colonies, they were freeborn Englishmen and, by law, crime victims—not legally owned by white colonials. Thus, Black Englishmen had the same legal status and liberty rights as white patriots who declared independence in 1776.
Due to historical revisionism, mythologies, and our own miseducation, we encourage our followers to consider, validate, or discredit our claims with source documents and rely on books like those behind me, as historical facts are truly stubborn. As some may remember from the historic racist joke, causing boisterous white laughter: “If you want to hide something from a ‘Nigger,’ put it in a book—he’ll never find it.”
Please share this message and visit our website at the Wells Center on American Exceptionalism. Look for future videos in this series.