Stamp Act Crisis: Revolutionary Rhetoric of Liberty Exposes Slavery's Core Contradiction

The Stamp Act crisis of 1765 and the escalating colonial rhetoric about 'slavery' to British rule made the actual enslavement of roughly 400,000 African and African-descended people in the colonies an increasingly visible moral contradiction. Colonial newspapers and pamphlets condemned Parliamentary taxation as 'enslaving' free Englishmen — a metaphor that both demonstrated the rhetorical power slavery had as a concept and mocked the hypocrisy of men who owned enslaved people invoking its horror. Samuel Johnson pointedly asked: 'How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?' Enslaved people in the colonies heard and understood the revolutionary discourse; some would invoke it in freedom petitions, and many would act on it when the opportunity arose in 1775-1776. The contradiction between revolutionary liberty and racial slavery was not invisible — it was simply suppressed by colonial leaders who needed the economic and social system that slavery sustained.