Thomas Jefferson wrote about 30 grievances against King George III in his draft of the Declaration of Independence. Congress adopted 27.
One of the cut grievances accused the British king of waging cruel war against human nature itself, trafficking enslaved Africans across the Atlantic, forcing slavery onto unwilling colonists, and then inciting those same enslaved people to rise up and murder their enslavers.
Was Jefferson right? Was the British Crown truly to blame for slavery in the American colonies?
Or was this a strategic sleight of hand, a revolutionary generation willing to pin a system it had built, demanded, and profited from onto a monarch it wanted to leave behind?
Brooke Newman, Associate Professor of History at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of The Crown’s Silence: The Hidden History of the British Monarchy and Slavery, joins us to find out.
This episode was made possible with support from the Massachusetts Historical Society, the first historical society in the United States.
Ben Franklin’s World is a podcast about early American history.
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Ben Franklin’s World is a podcast about early American history.
It is a show for people who love history and for those who want to know more about the historical people and events that have impacted and shaped our present-day world.
Episode Summary
Brooke Newman is an Associate Professor of History at Virginia Commonwealth University and a historian of the British Atlantic World. Her research expertise is in the histories of slavery, the abolition movement, and the British royal family.
Her first book, A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica, received a gold medal for world history and was a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize. Her second book, The Crown’s Silence: The Hidden History of the British Monarchy and Slavery, traces the monarchy’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade from Queen Elizabeth I through emancipation.
During our conversation, Brooke reveals:
-
- How the British Crown launched England into the transatlantic slave trade over two centuries through monopoly charters, personal investments, naval protection, and customs revenue
- Why Jefferson’s cut grievance from the Declaration of Independence was strategically shrewd but historically misleading
- What George III’s private commonplace notebooks reveal about his personal ambivalence toward slavery, and why, as a constitutional monarch, he could not have abolished slavery even if he had wanted to
What You’ll Discover
- Why Jefferson wrote a 28th grievance for the Declaration of Independence about slavery
- How Queen Elizabeth I first entangled the English Crown in the transatlantic slave trade
- Why England was a political and financial “backwater” in the 1490s
- How the Royal African Company gave Charles II and James, Duke of York, personal financial stakes in the transatlantic slave trade
- What “the Crown” means as an institution
- How the Royal Navy protected slave trade shipping lanes for two centuries before pivoting to abolition enforcement in the 19th century
- What George III’s private commonplace notebooks reveal about his early views on slavery
- Why George III believed the British Crown had made an unbreakable promise to colonial property rights
- Virginia’s 1772 petition to limit the transatlantic slave trade
- What Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation of 1775 actually was
- Why Brooke concludes that Jefferson’s grievance was strategically shrewd but historically misleading
- What might have happened if George III had tried to abolish slavery before the American Revolution
Links to People, Places, and Publications
Time Warp Question
What might have happened if King George III had tried to abolish slavery before the American Revolution? Do you think the Revolution would have happened?
Complementary Episodes
🎧 Episode 141: A Declaration in Draft
🎧 Episode 206: Christian Slavery
🎧 Episode 351: Wealth and Slavery in New Netherland
🎧 Episode 360: Slavery & Freedom in Massachusetts
🎧 Episode 394: The Pursuit of Happiness
🎧 Episode 438: The American Revolution and the Fate of the World
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