The Ships That Never Sailed Home: What “Independence” Meant Below Deck

On July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence. Twelve colonies signed. New York abstained until July 9.

By that morning in Philadelphia, an estimated twelve thousand Africans were already at sea — chained in the holds of ships flying the same flag the founders had just renounced, and the flags of the empires those founders were negotiating with. The transatlantic slave trade did not pause for the paperwork of independence. In 1776 alone, over sixty-five thousand Africans were transported across the Middle Passage. Independence Day is also a day of that voyage.

Look at the arithmetic.

The Declaration ran to 1,320 words. It named the King of Great Britain twenty-seven times. It named enslaved Africans zero times — Jefferson’s original draft did include a passage condemning the slave trade as a “cruel war against human nature itself,” but South Carolina and Georgia demanded its removal, and it was struck before signing. What survived was the language of natural rights. What was cut was the acknowledgment of who those rights excluded.

So on the fourth of July we mark a document that argued for freedom while its own signatories held title to unfree people, on land taken from Indigenous nations who were not consulted, financed in part by the same maritime trade that carried Africans in chains.

None of this is a secret. It is written in the archive. It is what the ships’ logs say.

The point is not that independence is a lie. The point is that independence is a lever — a word that lifts one people and, when the mechanic isn’t watching, drops another. The Maroons in the mountains of Jamaica understood the mechanic. They didn’t argue for independence. They took sovereignty and refused to trade it back.

Read the Declaration this weekend if you want. Then read the Kingston customs house entries for July 1776. Both are primary sources. Both are true. Only one gets a parade.

— The Editors

(Companion to yesterday’s “Whose Independence? A Note on the Calendar of Freedom.” The Cudjoe Treaty deep-read follows Wednesday.)