7.3.1 The Reaction of the Legislators

First, there was an important similarity between all countries under discussion. As a domestic principle of law, slavery was not revived. This is easy to explain. If not much was left of personal unfreedom around the middle of the seventeenth century, even less of it remained in the next century and a half.

Second, the reaction of legislators can also serve as an example to further my claim that the “roots” of the freedom principle were stronger in France and the Low Countries than in England. The earliest governmental decisions in France, as well as the 1775 report of the States of Holland and the 1733 advice of the Geheime Raad prove that the highest authorities of the state at the least took note of the freedom principle.¹¹ At the same time, early (aborted) attempts in England to make legislation on black slaves present in England seemingly did not refer to the freedom principle, and the idea we get is that at least parts of Parliament considered slavery to be legal in England.¹²

Only two of the countries under discussion, namely France and the United Provinces, effectively made legislation to regulate the status of blacks in their country. The reaction of the French legislature was the most elaborate. Before 1716, various decisions recognised the freedom principle. In 1716, the freedom principle was restricted for the first time, although the “default condition” remained freedom. The approach partially changed in 1738. The freedom principle was completely abrogated, as the default condition in case the procedural requirements of the declaration of 1738 were not met, was the reshipment of the slave to the colonies au profit du roi. In 1777, the French legislature switched its approach, as race was used instead of status, in an attempt to rid the country of its black presence.

Contrary to what one would expect, the Dutch States General or the particular States did not seem to uphold the freedom principle in the earliest stages of the black presence in the Dutch Republic. Although the “roots” of the freedom principle were comparable to France, I have found less of an early tug between colonists taking slaves with them, and the Dutch authorities declaring these slaves to be free, although the Dutch Cape Colony sources confirm that the notion of the freedom principle was known by some colonists. The difference is notable, but much work on the Dutch archives remains to be done to ascertain this difference. The Dutch legislator only intervened in 1776, at the height of the black presence in the United Provinces. The result, the placaet of 1776, was similar to the French edict of 1716 and the declaration of 1738. Exceptions to the freedom principle were created, although the default condition in case the requirements of the law were not respected remained freedom.

There were some other similarities between the Dutch and French legislation. For example, when it came to stowaways, both countries were harsh: the edict of 1716 and the placaet of 1776 confirmed that stowaways could not get their freedom simply by coming to the metropolis. Finally, the actors pushing for legislation were eerily similar in the French and Dutch case. Certainly in an early period, the influence of the Atlantic cities, Nantes in particular, was clear in the legislative restrictions on the French freedom principle. Likewise, Holland, the province with the biggest financial stake in the Dutch colonies, clearly pushed through restrictions on the Dutch freedom principle mostly on its own.

More interesting than the content of these legislative measures, which we discussed in full in the relevant chapters, is the following question: why did France and the United Provinces legislate on the issue in the first place, and why did this not happen in the Southern Netherlands and England?

Explaining why the authorities in the Southern Netherlands did not issue legislation, is the easiest part: there simply was no reason to do so.

This explanation does not hold true for England. The Atlantic slave trade was economically important, and there was a virulent colonial lobby to be found in England as well. Seymour Drescher has tried to address the reasons for this lack of legislation.¹³ According to him, the difference lay in the political context. He believed that the French monarchy could draft legislation unilaterally, without having to consult the wider public opinion. For this reason, the French monarchy was accessible to highly organized domestic elites (read: the plantation lobby), which could ask for laws drafted in their favour. As the English Parliament had to take a wider range of interests into account, Drescher held that “the masters utterly failed to win support for legislation affirming their property rights”.¹⁴

I will not contend with Drescher’s statement but rather qualify it. My contention would be that, in contrast to France or the United Provinces, there was less of an incentive for any pro-slavery lobby to appeal to Parliament and ask for legislation in the first place. I would explain this by using an analogy which Peabody also made in her There Are no Slaves in France. When describing the approach of the French government to the issue of black slavery, she noted that “The government moved the issue of blacks in France to the back burner only to return it when it occasionally boiled over. Nobody found a way to remove the pot from the stove”.¹⁵ She used this analogy to explain that the French government only intervened with the issue of black slaves in France at moments when the problems connected to this black presence came to the fore.

In France, we find three such moments. The first one was in 1715–1716, when the early confirmations of the French freedom principle clashed with the attempts of colonists to take slaves to France. Planter interests, exemplified by Nantes’ GĂ©rard Mellier, managed to have legislation in their favour passed. In 1738, there was the highly publicised case of Jean Boucaux, which brought to light many violations of the edict of 1716, and triggered the government to impose stricter limits. Finally, right before the declaration of 1776, we noted how various scholars described clashes between slavery and the freedom principle: the tensions between the Admiralty of France and royal orders, another well-known case (Pampy and Julienne v. Mèndes France) and liberty given to the slave of a well-connected owner. All these examples explain why the issue of black slaves received governmental attention again.

Likewise, the States General only intervened when there was a “moment of crisis”. In this case, the crisis was a creation of its own. The States General had given liberty to some individual slaves in the early 1770s, but the way in which its resolutions were drafted apparently convinced several other slaves that a stay in the Republic had given them their freedom. At this point, the States of Holland jumped in. Not only were their colonial interests at stake (given their role in the Sociëteit van Suriname), domestic Amsterdam creditors could suffer from liberty being given to mortgaged slaves as well. As a result, Holland drafted legislation to crackdown on the idea of the freedom principle, and to limit the damage the States General had done.

My contention is that there was no such crisis in England, or at least not before 1772. In the early stages, unlike France, we do not find a government granting freedom to slaves arriving in the country.