The research question I decided to pursue was, How Did Slavery Change After the American Revolution? I chose this because I have little knowledge of how the effects of slavery impacted the British colonies. Since I did not know what extent of slavery to expect under British rule and in hopes of finding reliable primary sources to answer my question, I first started by googling “Slavery in The Thirteen Colonies”. This brought up many problems because there were no primary sources, only articles on this topic. I then searched for primary sources in the Library of Congress and to my dismay many instances of the word slavery were brought up to describe Britain’s rule over the colonies. An example of one of these primary sources is a paper titled “To the Free Men of Pennsylvania”, which after the American Revolution had a different stigma with the word ‘freemen’, meaning a free person of color. This absence of direct sources over the topic of slavery leads me to believe that abolition was not as prevalent at this time.
I also needed to know what slavery looked like after the American Revolution. I decided to use the Library of Congress again to search for my primary source. I found the source titled “Observations on the Slaves and Intended Servants in the Navy and the United States”. This covered the resolve of Congress’ importation of slaves and the emancipation of the enslaved after participation in the Revolutionary War. This source goes further into the idea of abolition stemming the war stating, “God forbid, we should act with less generosity on similar occasions!” Proving the idea of certain political enlightenment of the horrors of slavery leading to a stance of abolition in certain parts of the United States.