Featuring: Larry Kenneth Alexander
Transcript:
Slavery in colonial America was not codified by English law. It was an extralegal institution that clashed with principles announced in the English Magna Carta of 1215, England’s common law, and Parliament’s English Bill of Rights of 1689. In the early days of colonial America, racial tyranny, government corruption, and the unchecked despotism of colonial rule gave rise to the practice of slavery. Under English law, liberty was a personal right. This inalienable personal right at birth was anchored in the English rule of law, which required that laws be applied fairly and equally, ensuring that no individual or government official could put an English subject below English law.
One of the earliest foundations for a liberty right in English law is the Magna Carta of 1215. This historic document curtailed the British monarch’s limitless powers and safeguarded individuals from capricious imprisonment. Later, Parliament passed the English Bill of Rights in 1689, enshrining a British subject’s right to have protection against illegal imprisonment. Yet, beneath this reality lay a striking contradiction. Slavery at birth for individuals of pronounced African ancestry was the practice and norm within the American colonies. The concept of jus soli, the right of the soil, had long been embedded in the British tradition, granting automatic British subjecthood to every child born on colonial American soil. Birthright subjecthood was untouchable, an inalienable right that could not be reshaped, erased, or undermined by any colonial legislature.
The colonial charters outlined that the governing bodies were bicameral, with the monarchy heading the upper house, and both the crown and the colonial assembly, the lower house, had to agree to any pretended law to bind the colony. No matter how they tried, colonial assemblymen did not have the power to redefine British subjecthood or enact a valid colonial hereditary slave law. As the shadows of hereditary slavery spread across the American colonies, they did so in defiance of the legal foundation upon which the kingdom itself stood. The truth was plain: liberty was not just a right, but an unshakable principle, and any effort to erode it was an act of profound illegitimacy. Yet, due to racial tyranny and the corruption of colonial government, for hundreds of thousands of colonial people born into bondage, the inalienable right of freedom, though codified into law, remained a distant dream.
The American Colonies Act, also known as the Declaratory Act, abolished colonial America’s slave statutes and Negro laws in 1766 for all purposes whatsoever because these colonial laws denied and questioned Parliament’s supreme legislative authority throughout the kingdom, parliamentary sovereignty, 10 years before the Declaration of Independence in 1776. In the waning days of the American Revolution, as negotiations with Britain were winding down, a clear and profound legal truth hung over the newly independent nation: the disposition of the 500,000 Black colonials. These men, women, and children were British subjects by birth and, despite being enslaved in the 13 colonies, were protected by the legal framework of the kingdom they had been born into.
This was no mere technicality. It was a matter of English law, a point Britain’s military commander in North America, General Guy Carleton, made crystal clear to General George Washington. This caused each nation to generate a registry, the Book of Negroes, to address their legal fates under the Treaty of Paris of 1783. America’s copy is preserved at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Please share and visit our website at Wells Center on American Exceptionalism and look for future videos in this series.