America 250

How the Slaveholding Founders Really Felt About Slavery

Angst, guilt, and more self-awareness than you might expect

Timothy Sandefur | 5.5.2026 1:20 PM

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(Nathaniel Currier/Metropolitan Museum of Art)

The Declaration of Independence accused the king and Parliament of Great Britain of "exciting domestic insurrections" among the half-million people enslaved in the American colonies. This was a reference to the November 1775 proclamation by Virginia's royal governor, Lord Dunmore, that he would free "all indentured servants, Negroes, or others, (appertaining to rebels)" who were "able and willing to bear arms" against the American revolutionaries.

Today's readers often consider it hypocritical that the Founders denounced Britain for offering black Americans the same freedom for which they were themselves fighting. Some of the revolutionary era's readers thought the same thing. In 1776, the London writer John Lind published a pamphlet responding line by line to the Declaration, and in it he ridiculed the patriots: "Is it for them to complain of the offer of freedom held out to these wretched beings? of the offer of reinstating them in that equality which, in this very paper, is declared to be the gift of God to all?"

What Lind overlooked was that Americans did not deny that it was self-contradictory for them to hold slaves while proclaiming liberty to be every person's birthright. On the contrary, their embarrassment over that inconsistency had been particularly glaring when Virginians drafted their Declaration of Rights in June 1776. Thomas Jefferson went even further, admitting that slaves were justified in violently rebelling against their oppressors. The thought that God's "justice cannot sleep forever" made him "tremble," he said.

But the real story of the "domestic insurrections" passage is more complicated than modern readers typically realize. The best point to begin understanding it is October 1769, when a poor man named Samuel Howell approached Jefferson, then a 26-year-old lawyer practicing in Williamsburg, to ask for help in defending his freedom against the claim that he was a slave.

Howell's great-grandfather was a black man who'd had a baby girl with a white woman. Under Virginia laws of that time, the daughter was bound to servitude until the age of 31, and during those years, she gave birth to Howell's mother. She, too, was enslaved until the age of 31, and during that time, she gave birth to Howell himself. The owner of Howell's mother and grandmother, thinking that Virginia law also rendered Howell a slave until the age of 31, then sold him.

Two Virginia laws governed Howell's situation. The first provided that if "any woman servant" or "free Christian white woman" were to "have [a] bastard child by a negro," the resulting child would be "a servant until it shall be thirty-one years of age." The second provided that if a "female mulatto…obliged to serve till the age of thirty or thirty-one years shall, during the time of her servitude, have any child…such child shall serve the master…until it shall attain the same age the mother of such child was obliged by law to serve unto." The first condemned Howell's grandmother to servitude, and his mother probably qualified as a "female mulatto." Howell was born during her period of servitude, so he too would be bound to serve until the age of 31.

Nevertheless, Jefferson agreed to argue for Howell's freedom. His anti-slavery sympathies were well known; during the 1760s, he took six "freedom cases," including Howell's, charging nothing for his services as he sought to defend the accused against the charge that they were slaves. In Howell's case, he first argued that the fact that Howell's purported owner had sold him rendered the servitude mandate void. "Bond servants" (that is, temporary as opposed to lifetime slaves) were not salable, he asserted, because they were properly classified as a kind of apprentice rather than property. The reason for the 31-year rule, he continued, was actually to ensure that the parents of illicit mixed-race children cared for them instead of abandoning them. Allowing people to sell "bond servants" would give parents a way to evade the law and escape their paternal responsibilities. And because bond servants could not be sold, the attempted sale voided Howell's bondage status and rendered him free.

It was a creative argument. But Jefferson's second argument was even more audacious. He claimed that the two statutes governed only the cases of Howell's grandmother and mother, not Howell himself. Although they might seem to apply to every succeeding generation automatically, they could not actually do so because that would violate natural law. "Under the law of nature, all men are born free," he told the court. "Everyone comes into the world with a right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will. This is what is called personal liberty, and it is given him by the law of nature, because [it is] necessary for his own sustenance." The statute enslaving the grandmother was bad enough, but to inflict bondage on generation after generation of innocent children was untenable. And the Virginia legislature must have realized this, he added, because the very fact that it had passed the second act, specifying that children "shall be bond or free according to the conditions of their mothers," proved that lawmakers never believed that the first act would inflict slavery on every descendant of the initial liaison. "It remains for some future legislature," Jefferson concluded, "if any shall be found wicked enough, to extend [slavery] to the grandchildren."

Jefferson's case was idealistic, even naive, and it did not impress the judges. When the opposing lawyer, Jefferson's mentor George Wythe, rose to present the counterargument, they waved him back into his seat. They did not need to hear what he had to say. They had already made up their minds. With a bang of the gavel, they declared that Howell would remain in servitude.

It was a humiliating lesson: Slavery's evils might be an interesting subject for coffeehouse debate, but colonial authorities were not prepared to upset a century and a half of economic policy. Still, as biographer Willard Sterne Randall observes, the Howell case marked "the first time Jefferson had spoken........

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