May 22, 2025
By Grace Kostrzebski
Just three weeks after the bloody conflict at Lexington and Concord, the separation of the American colonies from the British Empire continued with the convening of the Second Continental Congress on May 10, 1775. The pitched battles with the British soldiers were cited as evidence that the American colonies must free themselves from rule by London. The effort was framed in clear terms: the British were harsh, cruel authorities and the American colonists needed freedom to pursue their independence.
This new government needed to be justified – to others and to themselves. Listing the many violent offenses done to the colonists by the British soldiers, one American colonist wrote: “These, brethren, are marks of ministerial vengeance against this colony, for refusing… a submission to slavery” (Virginia Gazette, May 26, 1775, 7). Every American colonist understood that using slavery as a rhetorical device indicated that the colonists were subjected unfairly to the British in all aspects of society. For the colonists to be metaphorically enslaved was to live a half-life – not quite fully human in the eyes of the British. Therefore, “we determine to die or be free” writes the same colonist (Virginia Gazette, May 26, 1775, 7). The colonists were determined to be liberated from their position of inferiority and were willing to die for their cause.
These aspirational statements contained a dissonance in beliefs. Benjamin Harrison V served as a delegate for Virginia to the Continental Congress. He signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and later served as governor of the state. His legacy lived on in his family as two presidents descended from his family line. Harrison was also a slave-owner. By the time of his death, Harrison owned 110 enslaved people on the Berkeley Plantation. The same freedom from oppression he desired for Americans to fight for was not extended to the people who provided the labor to upkeep his plantation and lifestyle. A gravestone located along Route 76 in Charles City County that acknowledges Harrison’s legacy as a legislator does not mention his contradiction of beliefs. A historical marker for Berkeley Plantation mentions enslaved people only in reference to those who attempted to escape, but does not acknowledge how the power and privileges of the Harrison family were built on the labor of enslaved people.
The possibilities of freedom in the revolutionary era America began with contradictions. The freedom called for by the American colonists was only an imagined freedom for some. This theme of the contradictions in the revolutionary era are explored in two episodes of the Bike 76 VA podcast: Kimages which discusses plantation slavery in Virginia and its connections to the past and present, and Charlottesville, which examines Thomas Jeffeson’s complicated role as apostle of freedom and owner of enslaved people.
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