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By Root 7649 0

to a notion that the chief duty of women was to bear and raise sons for service to the republic. But while it seemed to endow their work with new public significance, what came to be called Republican Motherhood essentially compelled women to return to the “sphere” of family and household. For women of the white laboring classes, republican patriarchalism could have still more calamitous consequences. War heroine Elizabeth Burgin, finding herself penniless, wrote General Washington directly: “I am now Sir very Desolate without Money without Close or friends to go to,” she explained, as “helping our poor preseners Brought Me to Want Whitch I dont Repent.” Her plea brought results, but it was an isolated success: few women who worked for the army, or widows of enlisted men, ever received equitable assistance. Poor women, moreover, could hardly afford to devote their lives to childrearing and found the new standard of republican motherhood virtually impossible to meet—which to men and women of property became prima facie evidence of irresponsibility and moral depravity. Although propertylessness brought poor men too under increased suspicion, they at least could derive some small measure of comfort from knowing that the republic belonged to men.

EMANCIPATION

Within a year of the Treaty of Paris, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Connecticut—all of the northern states, that is, except New York and New Jersey—had either abolished slavery outright or adopted programs for its gradual abolition. When Gouverneur Morris and John Jay tried to insert a clause into the 1777 state constitution “recommending” the eventual abolition of slavery, they ran into a wall of resistance; Morris himself admitted that “it would at present be productive of great dangers to liberate the slaves within this state.” In 1781 the legislature did agree to manumit slaves who had taken up arms against the British, but this was a grudging response at best to General Clinton’s offer of freedom to slaves who remained loyal to the crown. When the Society of Friends took steps to free all slaves owned by the state’s Quakers, their example inspired little or no imitation. (The appropriateness of indentured servitude was another matter. In 1784 a group of citizens purchased the freedom of a parcel of servants, observing that “the traffick of White People” was contrary “to the idea of liberty.”)

Slaves in and around the city grew increasingly restless after the war, stirred by the ideals of the Revolution as well as by local traditions of resistance and rebellion. For Jupiter Hammon, a slave who had published occasional religious verses and essays while serving three generations of the Lloyd family in Queens, this new mood was profoundly troubling. In An Address to the Negroes of the State of New-York (1787), the seventy-year-old Hammon urged his fellow bondsmen not to dwell upon the idea of freedom and not to forget their duty to obey their masters. Many slaves had nonetheless already rejected that advice. Some pressured their masters for improved treatment, occasionally even extracting written promises of freedom. Large numbers of others simply disappeared—so large, in fact, that runaway notices filled local papers and gangs of white “blackbirders” were able to make a living as free-lance slavecatchers.

In January and February 1785, frustrated by the state’s foot-dragging on abolition and alarmed by a recent attempt to seize free blacks for sale as slaves, thirty-two prominent citizens of widely divergent political views—radical Whigs, conservative Whigs, even the odd Tory or two—met at the Coffee House to organize the New York Manumission Society. Among those present were Governor George Clinton, Alexander Hamilton, Egbert Benson, Mayor James Duane, Melancton Smith, and a strong contingent of Quakers (including Robert Bowne and John Murray). John Jay was elected president of the society, notwithstanding the fact that he owned five slaves—no disqualification, to be sure, considering that at least half the society’s founders