The resulting Northwest Ordinance created the largest slave-free area in the world. In 1787, about the time Benjamin Franklin proposed the first affirmative action plan, negotiations over a new Constitution ground to a halt until the southern states agreed to allow the prohibition of slavery north of the Ohio River. Thomas Jefferson relied on this understanding when carefully crafting the stirring words of the Declaration of Independence. As Eleanor Holmes Norton explains in her introduction, “The price of freedom from England was bondage for African slaves in America. In 1774, at the First Continental Congress John Adams promised southern leaders to support their right to maintain slavery. To ensure the preservation of slavery, the southern colonies joined the northerners in their fight for “freedom” and their rebellion against England. It did result in some slaves freeing themselves. The predominantly southern slave-owners feared that this decision would cause the emancipation of their slaves. This decision eventually reached America and terrified slaveholders in the collection of British colonies, subject to British law.
In 1772, a judge sitting in the High Court in London declared slavery “so odious” that it could not exist at common law and set the conditions which would consequently result in the freedom of the 15,000 slaves living in England. The book begins with a novel explanation about the impact of the Somerset Case on the founding of the republic.
This carefully documented, chilling history presents a radically different view of the profound role that slavery played in the founding of the republic, from the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution through the creation of the Constitution.
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