Page 169 - American Stories, A History of the United States

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wiLLiaM patersOn A New Jersey lawyer, Paterson advanced the so-called New Jersey Plan, which retained
the unicameral legislature in which each state possessed one vote but gave Congress new powers to tax and
regulate trade.

19 persons who called themselves “natives of Africa” reminded legislators that “private
or public tyranny and slavery are alike detestable to minds conscious of the equal dig-
nity of human nature.”
The scientific accomplishments of Benjamin Banneker (1731–1806), Maryland’s
African American astronomer and mathematician, and the international fame of
Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784), Boston’s celebrated “African muse,” made it diffi-
cult for white Americans to maintain that African Americans could not hold their
own in a free society. Wheatley’s poems went through many editions. After reading
her work, the great French philosopher Voltaire rebuked a friend who had claimed
“there never would be Negro poets.” As Voltaire discovered, Wheatley wrote “excel-
lent verse in English.” Banneker enjoyed a well-deserved reputation as a scientist.
After receiving a copy of an almanac that Banneker had published in Philadelphia,
Jefferson concluded “that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to
those of the other colors of men.”
In the northern states, there was no real economic justification for slavery. White
laborers, often recent European immigrants, resented having to compete against slaves.
This economic situation, combined with the acknowledgment of the double standard
slavery represented, contributed to the establishment of antislavery societies. In 1775,
Franklin helped organize in Philadelphia the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes,
Unlawfully Held. John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and other prominent New Yorkers
founded a Manumission Society in 1785. By 1792, antislavery societies were meeting
from Virginia to Massachusetts. In the northern states at least, these groups, working
for the same ends as Christian evangelicals, put slaveholders on the intellectual defen-
sive for the first time in American history.

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