ASLAH 2025: Was Racial Slavery Illegal Under English Law?

In this lecture created for the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASLAH) conference in 2025, Larry Kenneth Alexander, Founder and President of the Ida B. Wells Center on American Exceptionalism and Restorative Justice, joined by Dr. Walter Greason of Macalester College, interrogates a question long obscured in U.S. historiography: Was racial slavery ever legal under English law?

Drawing on the Magna Carta, English common law, the English Bill of Rights (1689), the American Colonies Act (1766), and Lord Mansfield’s Somerset decision (1772), Alexander demonstrates that racial slavery in colonial America was not sanctioned by English law but was instead an extralegal system built on corruption, graft, and power.

This forensic recovery of history exposes the paradox at America’s founding—while the Patriots declared liberty, they upheld a system already abolished under English law, denying 500,000 Afro-Englishmen their birthright freedoms

Transcript:

Hello. I am Larry Kenneth Alexander, the Founder and President of the Wells Center on American Exceptionalism and Restorative Justice.
I have the honor of being allowed to present two presentations at the 110th Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History … September 24 through 28, 2025, in Atlanta Georgia.

My first presentation will be on September 24, and the second one, on September 25, 2025. In both instances, I am joined by Dr. Walter D. Greason, the Dewitt Wallace Professor of History at Macalester College in Saint Paul Minnesota. Here, I am addressing the question, “Was Racial Slavery Illegal Under English Law?” An academic lecture on English law, colonial America and the Founding Paradox.

We … at the Wells Center, a public policy institute using forensic principles and methodologies want to recover Black America’s history accurately. Forensic historical recovery is a specialized approach to revisiting and reinterpreting the past that borrows methods and standards from  forensic investigation. And in doing so use our recovery of that history to set the direction of Afrofuturism.

A forensic historical recovery approach asks: … is this narrative supported by law and evidence at the time? Such is the nature of my interrogation of the question …. was racial slavery illegal under English law. We at Wells Center believe that the evidence, when tested under forensic scrutiny, compels a revision and correction: as racial slavery in the American colonies was indeed illegal under English law.

This slide provides a brief bio on the two of us.
Moving on…

The story Americans are taught about our origins is cast as a heroic tale of freedom. It is the story of a people who, feeling oppressed by imperial overreach, declared independence in 1776, in the name of liberty, the Magna Carta, and the English rule of law. … Yet beneath this inspiring narrative lies a deeper truth that, if acknowledged, would have reshaped the nation’s course: at the very moment independence was proclaimed, some 500,000 Afro-Englishmen—legally free under English law—were denied fundamental due process and thrust into bondage.

For them, the Revolution did not bring liberty but cemented decades of slavery, exploitation, and systemic discrimination—a legacy that continues to reverberate 250 years later.

The orthodox account of American history holds that racial slavery in the thirteen British colonies was a lawful institution. … According to this narrative, colonial legislatures enacted valid slave laws and Negro codes, approved by the imperial government, and racial slavery was an institution lawfully inherited from British rule. … Yet a forensic, closer analysis of colonial America’s history and a review of the English constitutional framework of parliamentary sovereignty— the Magna Carta (1215), English common law, the supervening English Bill of Rights (1689), and later Parliament’s American Colonies Act (1766) and the Somerset decision
in 1772— reveals this orthodoxy to be a legal fiction and ahistorical.

Racial slavery was extralegal. … Colonial American assemblies lacked the authority to legislate on matters of British sovereignty without Parliament’s assent. At no point did the English parliament enact a statute in the American colonies that authorized racial slavery. … Further,
colonial America’s racial slave laws were repugnant to English law and were abolished ten years before the United States declared independence on the Fourth of July 1776. … In short, this imperial governmental legislative sweep of colonial America’s laws in 1766 extinguished the supposed legality of racial slavery in the American colonies under English law “in all cases whatsoever”. This presentation examines England’s constitutional underpinnings of parliamentary sovereignty, the defined limits of colonial legislative authority, the rise of extralegal colonial American slave laws and Negro codes, and then the supervening imperial
governmental laws, in particular, the English Bill of Rights (1689), Parliament’s American Colonies Act (1766) and the Somerset decision in 1772, three years before the American  Revolution began in 1775.

Racial slavery was an extralegal regime, abolished by the British imperial government. … It was fraudulently reintroduced in the United States as a colonial inheritance, and has been sustained by systemic corruption, violation of international norms, and an ideology of racial superiority. … This thesis exposes the paradox at the heart of America’s founding: while Patriots denounced imperial tyranny in the name of the rule of law, they simultaneously were profiting and upholding  a corrupt colonial governmental scheme itself a flagrant violation of English constitutional principles and Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence and English law, which grievously our U.S. Congress imported into the United States, fearing possible disunification of the Republic by America’s slaveholding states.

In 1611, in the Case of Proclamations, Sir Edward Coke of the Court of Common Plea, who later became Chief Justice of the King’s Bench (1613-1616) confronted King James the First’s claim of “divine right of Kings” and the notion that royal proclamations could restrict new building construction in London and restrict the manufacture of new starches, made from wheat and certain new inventions, he deemed harmful or wasteful.

The legal question was: could England’s King, by his royal prerogative, enforce these  proclamations as if they were law, even though had not been enacted by Parliament? … Chief Justice Coke rejected King James’s claim outright; he found: “The King hath no prerogative but that which the law of the land allows him.” This judicial ruling was historic and decisive. … It subordinated the British Crown to law and confirmed that only statute law … enacted by Parliament had supreme legal force in the Kingdom. … No British monarch, and indeed no lesser colonial American legislative assembly … which was conferred defined municipal legislative power and authority by way of a Royal charter from the British monarch could invent new laws outside this constitutional framework. … This was a judicial recognition of
parliamentary sovereignty, … which was codified by way of the English Bill of Rights (1689). … In Blackstone’s Commentaries (1765) it declared that Parliament’s power was absolute and without limit.

Importantly, this judicial determination by England’s Court of the King’s Bench in 1611 represented the controlling constitutional acknowledgment of Parliament’s supreme legislative power in the Kingdom. … The ruling of 1611 necessarily altered the legal understanding of colonial charters by negating any suggestion of a grant of legislative authority derived solely from securing the assent of King James or any future British monarch. … In constitutional terms
…. Coke’s ruling in 1611 reaffirmed that Parliament possessed the exclusive and supreme power of enacting legislation, a power which extended throughout the Kingdom.

Colonial assemblies were thus placed on legal notice that their legislative structure was not purely bicameral with the monarch serving as the upper House, instead circumscribed by English law. Henceforth, any enactment of colonial legislatures were valid only insofar as they conformed to the statutes and constitutional traditions of Parliament, rather than by virtue of royal delegation alone. Further, in the classic treatise Commentaries of the Laws of England authored by Sir William Blackstone wrote, “if Britain colonized an uninhabited or infidel territory, then English law automatically applied in this territory from the moment of colonization.” … Under English common law, foreigners had legal rights. … As slavery was not authorized on British soil, such was the reason why the first 19 kidnapped Africans who arrived in the colony of Virginia in 1619 were indentured servants, not slaves. …

Indentured servitude was deadly and challenging work, and many people died well before their terms of indenture were to expire. … But indentured servitude was temporary, with a beginning and an end. … Afterwards, Africans, no different from European immigrants became British subjects when they completed their term of indenture. Additionally, Virginia’s colonial charter and subsequent colonial American charters, granted by the British monarch, compelled adherence to English law and as well, the colonial charters defined the legal status of imported Africans, their right to British ethnicity after indentured servitude ended, and their children’s birthright to British subjecthood, if born in the American colonies. …

Moreover, all these rights were consistent with controlling English law. … Furthermore, the controlling English precedent and the British common law tradition established that a government official’s actions only have the force of law when the person acts within the rule of law nullified the validity of colonial American slave laws, as an English government official acts without the imprimatur of any law, they do so by the sheer force of personal will and power; … which made any pretended colonial American legislative act regarding slavery … a complete nullity. Colonial American charters reinforced this legislative limitation on authority by creating a bicameral legislative structure….

Colonial American assemblies could propose ordinances, but final assent rested with the Crown and its Parliament. … They were never coequal legislatures. Further, in Dr. Bonham’s Case (1610) … Chief Justice Coke established the maxim survived in Anglo-American jurisprudence as a rule against validating unconstitutional or ultra vires acts by long usage. American courts later cited this reasoning when rejecting the idea that unconstitutional statutes could “ripen into validity” simply because they had gone unchallenged; …”the passage of time does not make a void act legal.” In 1675, economic resentment, political exclusion, and frontier insecurity exploded into Bacon’s Rebellion. Nathaniel Bacon, a wealthy outsider, rallied poor whites, indentured servants, and enslaved Africans into a coalition against Virginia’s colonial Governor William Berkeley’s elite regime. …

For a moment, racial lines collapsed in favor of class solidarity. Although the rebellion was suppressed, it had a profound effect and legacy, as Virginia’s planter class and slaveholders were terrified of such solidarity, and they hardened racial categories. … Poor whites were elevated, all Black colonials were degraded, and class unity was shattered. … Extralegal laws were rewritten to make race the dividing status line and black colonials were placed below the rule of English law. … Thus, Virginia’s elite created the narrative that being black equated to being a slave, and the rule of law did not protect them. … Such actions caused the creation of the so-called “white race,” the ideology of white supremacy, and white privilege. Virginia’s colonial government did so extralegally to support and further their criminal scheme of racial, life-long slavery. The creation of this caste system in the American colonies was a turning point, as the laboring white colonials had previously shown little interest in a “white identity.” …

However, white colonials embraced this caste system as they were given white privilege. … Furthermore, Theodore W. Allen, in his two-volume study, The Invention of the White Race, revealed that the word “white” was not used in any official colonial American records until 1691. This mask of legality made slavery appear natural in the American colonies, even though it was, at its core, an illegal caste system. After the Revolution, that system did not vanish … it was reintroduced into the new Republic. For generations, colonial America had been guided by European values and assumptions. Most colonists came from Europe’s peasant classes, where darker-skinned people were already associated with hard labor and life under the elements. … When Afro-Englishmen grew in numbers on British American soil, those prejudices found new expression. …

They hardened into a racial hierarchy that ordered society and became woven into colonial law and its institutions. What started as a scheme became a system, and what became a system became the enduring structure of colonial American life. Bacon’s Rebellion … what began as a rebellion against class oppression in 1676 became the reason for white supremacy dogma and systemic racial repression in the American colonies…. The unity of the oppressed—poor whites and Black laborers—was totally dismantled. … In its place, a new system emerged, one that entrenched racial divisions and set the stage for centuries of inequality. … Moreover, over time, Virginia’s policy of racial division and the narrative of white identity grew to influence social, political, and labor systems throughout Atlantic World societies. Nonetheless, colonial American racial laws and their facile legitimacy evaporated once placed against the backdrop of supervening English legislation, and Parliament’s exercise of its supreme legislative authority in 1689. The English Bill of Rights exposed the fragility of colonial America’s racial slave laws and Nego codes. Undeniably, the English Bill of Rights of 1689 was a supervening imperial governmental law that nullified colonial America’s racial slave laws and Negro codes. It codified habeas corpus and declared that the suspension or dispensing of English laws without Parliament’s approval was unlawful throughout the kingdom. Moreover, habeas corpus ensured that no person could be detained without lawful cause shown before a court of record. …

A black person claimed as property at birth was a precise class of Englishmen entitled to demand release under habeas corpus, exposing the conflict between colonial America’s racial slave laws and English constitutional guarantees. … Furthermore, the English Bill of Rights established that colonial American legislatures could not extinguish or undermine liberty or derogate fundamental due process rights of people in the realm without parliamentary authorization.

Thus, the habeas corpus provision in the English Bill of Rights, by its enactment in 1689, rendered racial slavery in the American colonies unsustainable within English dominions absent explicit statutory authorization, which none of the colonies had. The American Colonies Act (1766) went further as tensions between the British imperial government and the British American colonies escalated, as the imperial government once again asserted its supreme legislative authority. …

This act, also known as the Declaratory Act, proclaimed parliamentary sovereignty and that it “had, hath, and of right ought to have, full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America … and it declared that Parliament had full power “in all cases whatsoever” to bind the American colonies and that any colonial law repugnant to this sovereignty was “utterly null and void.” This sweeping language extinguished any residual inference that colonial American assemblies possessed coequal legislative power. …

Importantly, the American Colonies Act… legislatively abolished all colonial enactments “repugnant” to Parliamentary sovereignty, rendering them “utterly null and void.” … Under English law, colonial America’s so-called racial slave laws and Negro codes, devised by colonial American assemblies, were stripped of every pretense of legality. … And due to English constitutional doctrine, as such colonial enactments had no legal force, the status of Black Englishmen in the American colonies reverted to the status quo ante, and the protections owed to them under English law. In one stroke, Parliament abolished racial slave laws and Negro codes and deemed them “utterly null and void” in “all cases whatsoever,” which left no subject matter exempt: taxation, trade, political governance, and by logical extension, any colonial enactments on slavery. … This Act of Parliament in 1766 reaffirmed the rule of English law and Parliament’s legislative supremacy when it declared all colonial American laws “repugnant” to Parliament’s supreme legislative authority were “utterly null and void.” …

Furthermore, the American Colonies Act extinguished any lawful basis to continue to claim that racial slavery in the American continued to be legal under English law. This chain of supervening imperial law was judicially confirmed in the case of James Somerset v. Charles Stewart in 1772. James Somerset, a black individual enslaved in Virginia and brought to England, escaped and was recaptured. … His allies and supporters petitioned for habeas corpus. Lord Mansfield, Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, ruled: slavery is “so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law.” … Somerset was discharged because Parliament had never enacted such a law, slavery was unsupported in England; colonial enactments stood as being repugnant to English law and deemed void once tested against the legislative supremacy of Parliament and the Bill of Rights. Somerset did not innovate. … It restated constitutional principles entrenched since 1215 and reaffirmed in 1611 and 1766: only Parliament could authorize a regime of slavery in the Kingdom, and since it never did, racial slavery lacked legal foundation under English law throughout the Kingdom and its dominions. Four years later, the American Patriots declared independence in July 1776, and out of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, three-quarters of these white men had enslaved black people at some point.

But within this cohort, was Massachusetts Patriot John Adams. Adams was a practicing lawyer, who became the second president of these United States. He never owned a slave, resisted using slave labor and supported his legislative assembly’s attempt to enact colonial legislation to abolish slavery in the colony of Massachusetts in 1773 and again in 1774, after the Somerset decision declared slavery was unconstitutional on English soil. Moreover, the Declaration of Independence’s preamble proclaimed that: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” was endorsed by Adams, along with the other 55 Enlightened men of the Eighteenth century, who nearly half were trained as lawyers and who understood and did formally adopt Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence and English law over Thomas Jefferson’s strident objections. In its eighteenth-century Anglo-American context, the phrase “all men are created equal” echoed the established legal rights of colonial Englishmen — the protection of the English Magna Carta … the English Bill of Rights, and the codification of habeas corpus as a fundamental safeguard of liberty.

When the Declaration asserted that “these truths were self-evident,” it invoked what was understood as the inured birthrights of English subjecthood to colonial born individuals and their inalienable equality under English law: a status rooted in the rule of law and guaranteed by centuries of constitutional development and colonial charters. By that same measure, the 500,000 Afro-Englishmen living in the American colonies were, as a matter of English law, equally entitled to these legal protections, however violently denied in practice. In the Declaration of Independence’s grievance section, the Patriots accused England’s King George III of overreach: “He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation.”

This was a complaint concerning the American Colonies Act (1766). However, parliamentary sovereignty was constitutionally authorized which made the suggestion that Parliaments’ acts were “pretended legislation” … totally baseless. History supports … England’s Chief Justice Coke in the 1611 Case of Proclamation declared that the monarch was subordinate to the law and that Parliament was the supreme legislative authority in the Kingdom, a judicial decree that pre-dated nearly all of the colonial American charters.

Moreover, parliamentary sovereignty was codified in the English Bill of Rights (1689) as the British monarch lost the English Civil War of 1642 … and the monarchy was suspended, … then reconstituted as a constitutional monarchy with Parliament in 1689. Furthermore, colonial American assemblies were not sovereign in the way Parliament was and its legislature was bicameral with the British monarch serving as the Upper House, while colonial assemblies were the lower House and could not codify any laws or Negro codes without the British monarch’s assent.

Additionally, the Patriots called England’s King George III, who ascended to the British throne as a constitutional monarch in 1765, … a “tyrant” “For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws; and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments.” Here lies the paradox: All colonial American charters mandated strict adherence to English law … racial slavery … their “most valuable Laws” violated each colonial charter and as well … English law, the English Bill of Rights (1689) and slavery was deemed not “allowed and approved by the law of this Kingdom” by Lord Chief Justice Mansfield. Additionally, Mansfield declared … slavery could only be deemed a lawful practice if it was authorized by a “positive law,” … a legislative authority that vested solely with Parliament, … which it had not exercised.

Thus, the Patriots were defending the extralegal colonial slave laws and Negro codes, which were constitutionally foul, and had been both legislatively and judicially struck down by the British imperial government. … Yet, they accused the King of tyranny for abolishing racial slavery and “altering fundamentally the Forms of our Government”, which was colonial American slavery … the product of colonial governmental corruption and graft. The Declaration’s assertion of equality, when situated within the framework of controlling English law, admitted of no exception: liberty was the common birthright of all everyone born in the realm. … All colonial American efforts to exclude Black Englishmen was a legal fiction without foundation… as racial slavery originated in derogation of their colonial charter … was never lawfully authorized and had been rendered void by Parliament’s sovereign authority in 1766 and judicially affirmed by Lord Chief Justice Mansfield in the Somerset decision in 1772 before the American Revolution.

Colonial American assemblies exercised delegated legislative authority by royal charters or proprietary grants. Furthermore … colonial statutes were valid … only so far as they were “not repugnant to the laws of England” and had imperial governmental assent. This repugnancy clause appeared explicitly in Virginia’s 1606 Charter and Massachusetts Bay’s 1629 Charter. This created judicial restraint: … and if a colonial American law contradicted English law or violated its colonial charter … it could be struck down or disallowed by a court of competent jurisdiction. By the late 17th century … The Magna Carta had become a foundational constitutional guarantee of English liberties: No taxation without consent … Due process and protection of property rights were central protections to everyone in the realm. Moreover, colonial Americans understood Magna Carta and the English Bill of Rights (1689) as constitutional constraints binding their assemblies, colonial governors, and even the Crown. Colonial courts and pamphleteers in the American colonies routinely cited Magna Carta and the English Bill of Rights as limiting arbitrary power. Colonial American slavery was not authorized under the rule of English law … it was extralegal because it violated the English Bill of Rights (1689) and in 1702, Lord Chief Justice John Holt of England’s the Court of the King’s Bench ruled in Smith v. Browne and Cooper, … “As soon … as a Negro … comes to England … he is free: … one may be a villain in England … but not a slave.” Moreover, the next year, in 1703, the same court ruled in Ashby v. White, that “a void act does not become good with the passage of time.” This precedent meant that all repugnant colonial American slave laws and Negro codes passed by colonial American assemblies without the monarch assent or violative of established English law never acquired the force of law as they had only delegated legislative authority based upon colonial charters; thus were void ab initio and could never become valid.

History supports… colonial courts could invalidate colonial laws inconsistent with English law and colonial charters… And colonial slave laws should have been invalidated as they violated established English law. … Colonial courts succumbed to graft and governmental corruption … as the slaveholding elite paid courts and the Privy Council over colonial courts, which had first-line appellate authority … to look away and not enforce English law. However … the Court of the King’s Bench was the common-law guardian, overseeing principles like habeas corpus, due process, and the supremacy of Parliament over colonial statutes. In furtherance of judicial restraint, in the Somerset case … Lord Chief Justice Mansfield uttered … “Let justice be done, although the heavens fall” and in a habeas trial he declared colonial American slave laws was not “positive law” and therefore, disallowed colonial American slave laws and Negro codes, as only a “positive law” could authorize slavery in the Kingdom. Under English law… Parliament was the only legislature in the Kingdom empowered to enact a “positive law,” which it had not done.

No Founding Father embodied the paradox of racial slavery more deeply than Thomas Jefferson. … Publicly, he proclaimed ownership of enslaved persons and defended the plantation system that sustained his wealth and political stature. Privately, his life revealed the irreconcilable tension between his professed allegiance to the rule of law—anchored in Magna Carta and the English constitutional tradition—and the legal principles he chose to disregard. … Jefferson fathered multiple children with Sally Hemings, his mixed-race, teenage sister-in-law, whose very existence laid bare the fragility and odious character of colonial America’s racial slavery’s foundations. Hemings was born in Virginia in 1773, after Lord Mansfield’s landmark ruling in Somerset v. Stewart (1772), which disallowed colonial American slave laws and Negro codes which violated the English Bill of Rights and were abolished by Parliament’s American Colonies Act (1766) and his ruling that slavery could only exist in the Kingdom by virtue of a “positive law,” which did not exist. … Further, because Parliament abolished repugnant and extralegal racial slave laws and Negro codes because they conflicted with the English Bill of Rights, Hemings, as an English subject born after Somerset, was legally free. … Her enslavement, which Jefferson knew was not lawful underscores both the extralegal nature of hereditary racial slavery in the American colonies and Jefferson’s personal complicity in perpetuating a system that lacked a lawful foundation. … Jefferson’s public writings, such as his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), reveal a man deeply conflicted about slavery’s morality, yet unwilling to relinquish its privileges. In this contradiction—between revolutionary declarations of universal equality, the settled principles of English law, and his own household practices—Jefferson personified the unresolved hypocrisy at the heart of America’s founding.

In his Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774), Jefferson denounced the authority of the imperial government as tyranny. … Yet he must have known that Parliament possessed supreme legislative authority throughout the kingdom, and that colonial assemblies had never been granted plenary power to establish hereditary bondage. … Indeed, in the Declaration of Independence itself, the Founders repeatedly charged that the imperial government had withheld “its Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good,” and in addition, complained that the imperial government had “abolished our most valuable Laws.” During the Revolution, Jefferson lamented that Congress had “mangled” his draft of the Declaration. … He acknowledged, in part, the difficulty of constructing a virtuous democratic republic while still tethered to English legal traditions, and he resented the suppression of his sharper critique of prominent Englishmen and the imperial government for their role in advancing the Atlantic slave trade. … In his view, the rebellion thereby forfeited its philosophical compass. … Jefferson’s frustration only deepened when the imperial government, through wartime proclamations, extended liberty to all Black colonials enslaved in America, underscoring the moral and political contradictions of the revolutionary cause.

The paradox of America’s Revolution sharpened for Jefferson in June 1779, when the British imperial government issued the Phillipsburg Proclamation. … Issued by Sir Henry Clinton, Commander-in-Chief of British forces, under the plenary authority of the Crown, it declared that all enslaved persons of rebel masters who reached British lines were immediately free. … Unlike earlier proclamations, such as Lord Dunmore’s of 1775, the Phillipsburg decree extended to all enslaved Black colonials, regardless of military service. This was a direct exercise of imperial plenary authority during the war. It effectively emancipated hundreds of thousands of Afro-Englishmen as a matter of English law. … In so doing, it exposed the Revolution’s most profound contradiction. … While the Patriots claimed to fight tyranny in the name of liberty, the very government they resisted granted liberty to those they enslaved. When the revolutionary war ended, Congress ratified the Treaty of Paris (1783), conceding that Britain had exercised plenary authority during the Revolution. … By that concession, Congress retrospectively acknowledged the full constitutional weight of the Phillipsburg Proclamation. … Legally, therefore, Afro-Englishmen in the American colonies had been fully emancipated under English law in June 1779. Yet the new Republic refused to accord fundamental due process of English law to these five hundred thousand Afro-Englishmen. Instead, America enslaved those whom the rule of law deemed free and the imperial government had declared free. … This was not only a betrayal of English constitutional law but also a violation of treaty obligations and international norms.

In his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), written after the Treaty of Paris was ratified by the U.S. Congress in January 1784, Jefferson confronted the corrosive effects of racial slavery. He acknowledged its dubious origins and its destructive influence on both enslaved and enslavers: “There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. … The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. … Our children see this and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal.” Jefferson conceded that slavery debased both the oppressed and oppressor, cultivating tyranny in society itself. He feared this cycle of moral corruption would define future generations: “The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities.” And he trembled for the nation’s fate: “Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever. … The almighty has no attribute which can take sides with us in such a contest.” Jefferson thus recognized slavery’s corrosive effects, even as his own complicity perpetuated them. He personified the contradictions of a nation proclaiming liberty while perpetuating racial slavery and the enslavement of Revolutionary war-era black colonials.

The question with which we began — Was racial slavery illegal under English law? — yields a decisive answer. By every constitutional measure, it was illegal. The Magna Carta (1215) enshrined due process of law in the Kingdom for everyone. … The English Bill of Rights (1689) reaffirmed Parliament’s supreme legislative authority in the kingdom and codified habeas corpus protections for all Englishmen. The American Colonies Act (1766) reasserted Parliament’s legislative supremacy in the Kingdom over the American colonies and abolished their racial slave laws and Negro codes because they conflicted with Parliament’s English Bill of Rights. … In 1772, Lord Mansfield’s Somerset decision determined racial slavery in the Kingdom was unconstitutional, as it required positive law to be authorized, which was a legislative power that only Parliament possessed and had not exercised, and the court ordered Somerset to be discharged. Racial slavery in the American colonies was an extralegal system, enforced not by law but by governmental corruption and power. … Racial slavery was already legislatively abolished when the 13 British colonies declared independence in July 1776, and the Founders knew this was the case as they complained in the Declaration’s grievance section about the American Colonies Act. … And yet, America was founded upon this legal fiction and enslaved and exploited five hundred thousand Afro-Englishmen after the American Revolution ended.

Jefferson, the author of liberty’s creed, simultaneously knew of racial slavery’s illegitimacy and its abolition; yet furthered its perpetuation. … He claimed to tremble for his country and feared that God’s justice would not forever remain asleep. … His fear of its consequences for this nation was prophetic, for the failure of this nation to grant fundamental due process to Revolutionary War-era black colonials has echoed across the centuries: liberty proclaimed while black bondage endured; equality asserted, yet racial inequality under U.S. law remains its enduring, systemic hallmark. The work of history is not only to uncover contradictions, but to allow for reckoning with the legacies they leave behind. … That is why institutions like the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History are indispensable. … They insist that African American history is not a marginal footnote, but the central thread of the American story. … They remind us that legal fictions carry real consequences, and that when the law betrays its first principles, the wound is not temporary—it becomes a festering sore that infects the civil life of a nation. Frederick Douglass’s warning in 1852 remains a cautionary warning still: that the Fourth of July is a day of mourning for those excluded from its promise. … To mourn is not to despair; it is to refuse false consolation and to seek truth. In mourning, we can rediscover the origins of the Republic. … In rediscovering, we demand that the law be reclaimed for justice rather than subjugation. If America is to endure another 250 years, it will not be by clinging to the fictions of the past but by confronting them. … Only by acknowledging that racial slavery was abolished and was not lawfully inherited from British rule — that it was a betrayal of both English law and America’s professed ideals — can we begin to build a Republic that lives up to its founding promise. The task before us is therefore clear: to preserve our struggles, to confront injustice, and to reimagine the history of America, not as a fictional story …. but as a living reality.

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