Context behind the Fairfax Resolves

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Context behind the Fairfax Resolves
(Graphic/Jessica Kim)
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To the editor:

For Alexandria’s Fairfax Resolves semiquincentennial commemoration, the Office of Historic Alexandria penned an Out of the Attic “official history” in the July 18 edition of the Alexandria Times.

Because an official history cannot contradict city hall’s viewpoint, it sugarcoats inconvenient factors and dances around egregious contradictions by insisting that the Resolves “claimed slavery was a burden forced upon the colonists by the British Empire.” Careful reading shows only that the Resolves called for ending the Atlantic slave trade. “Natural increase” in the number of slaves through births to current slaves was sufficient to meet slave labor needs without importation, meaning the Atlantic slave trade – finally outlawed in 1808 – cut into local slaveholders’ profits from selling surplus slaves.

The Resolves contain a stunning self-contradiction: averring loyalty to Great Britain while rejecting what loyalty entails by insisting that their lack of representation in the British parliament exempts them from British taxation and regulation – a faux claim of loyalty to Great Britain, while setting forth conditions which could only lead to separation. King George III and Parliament had repealed all the taxes, except a token one on tea, to maintain the principle of Great Britain’s right to govern its colonies. That the Resolves so vehemently rejected it, even pressing boycotts, could only have proven to the British the colonialists’ intent to separate.

The Fairfax Resolves’ drafters would only recognize their colonial legislatures’ legal authority, not Great Britain’s, to prevent Lord Chief Justice Mansfield’s 1772 ruling, which terrified colonial slaveholders by holding slavery “so odious” it could only be maintained by a specific law authorizing it, from being applied to the colonies. Several Resolves’ drafters “owned the largest number of slaves in Fairfax County.” A few weeks before the Resolves, a Virginia Gazette advertisement asked readers to be on the lookout for an escaped slave whose owner speculated would “attempt to get on board some vessel bound for Great Britain” to take advantage of this ruling. The United States was free of the British empire by the time Britain outlawed slavery 31 years before the U.S. did so.

The Resolves, like their logical, inevitable consequence in the Declaration of Independence, cleverly created a politically efficacious “taxation without representation” straw man. However, the building where the Resolves were drafted – the then-Fairfax County courthouse – relocated after the U.S. Constitution’s aftermath put it into Washington, D.C., whose residents were subject to the same taxes and federal regulations as other Americans. But they were being denied representation in the U.S. Congress – a condition persisting today – showing that the drafters did not really believe what they drafted.

-Dino Drudi, Alexandria

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