The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation

by David Brion Davis

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2014 by David Brion Davis

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House Companies.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Portions of chapter two were originally published in “The Impact of the Haitian and French Revolutions” from Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press, U.S.A.

  Portions of chapters three and four are taken from a Tanner Lecture on Human Values by the author delivered at Stanford University in 2006. Reprinted by permission of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values, a Corporation, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Davis, David Brion.

  The problem of slavery in the age of emancipation / by David Brion Davis.—First edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-307-26909-6 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-385-35165-2 (eBook)

  1. Slavery—United States—History—19th century. 2. Slaves—Emancipation—United States. 3. Free African Americans—History—19th century. 4. Antislavery movements—United States—History—19th century. 5. Antislavery movements—Great Britain—History—19th century. 6. African Americans—Colonization—Africa. 7. American Colonization Society. I. Title.

  E449.D24 2014

  306.3’62097309034—dc23 2013032893

  Cover images © Dimitar Todorov/Alamy

  Cover design by Chip Kidd

  v3.1

  To my beloved sons, Adam and Noah,

  And their wonderful families

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  INTRODUCTION

  Discovering Animalization

  Some Evidence of Animalization

  1 SOME MEANINGS OF SLAVERY AND EMANCIPATION: DEHUMANIZATION, ANIMALIZATION, AND FREE SOIL

  The Meaning of Animalization, Part I

  The Meaning of Animalization, Part II

  The Search for the Animalized Slave

  Domestication and Internalization

  2 THE FIRST EMANCIPATIONS: FREEDOM AND DISHONOR

  Self-Emancipation: Haiti as a Turning Point

  Freedmen and Slaves

  Freedmen’s Rights

  Loss of Mastery

  The “Horrors of Haiti”

  3 COLONIZING BLACKS, PART I: MIGRATION AND DEPORTATION

  The Exodus Paradigm

  Precedents: Exiles

  Precedents: The Displaced

  4 COLONIZING BLACKS, PART II: THE AMERICAN COLONIZATION SOCIETY AND AMERICO-LIBERIANS

  Liberating Liberia

  5 COLONIZING BLACKS, PART III: FROM MARTIN DELANY TO HENRY HIGHLAND GARNET AND MARCUS GARVEY

  Nationalism

  6 COLONIZATIONIST IDEOLOGY: LEONARD BACON AND “IRREMEDIABLE DEGRADATION”

  Bacon’s “Report” of 1823

  The Paradox of Sin and “Irremediable Degradation”

  Some Black Response

  7 FROM OPPOSING COLONIZATION TO IMMEDIATE ABOLITION

  Paul Cuffe and Early Proposals for Emigration

  James Forten and Black Reactions to the American Colonization Society

  The Search for Black Identity and Emigration to Haiti

  Russwurm, Cornish, and Walker

  Blacks and Garrison

  8 FREE BLACKS AS THE KEY TO SLAVE EMANCIPATION

  Recognition of the Issue

  Abolitionist Addresses to Free African Americans

  David Walker and Overcoming Slave Dehumanization

  James McCune Smith and Jefferson’s “What further is to be done with these people?”

  9 FUGITIVE SLAVES, FREE SOIL, AND THE QUESTION OF VIOLENCE

  Frederick Douglass as a Fugitive

  The Underground Railroad and Runaway Slaves

  Harriet Jacobs as a Female Fugitive

  Fugitive Slaves and the Law

  10 THE GREAT EXPERIMENT: JUBILEE, RESPONSES, AND FAILURE

  An Eschatological Event and America’s Barriers

  The Enactment of British Emancipation

  Some American Responses to British Emancipation

  From Joseph John Gurney to the Issue of Failure

  11 THE BRITISH MYSTIQUE: BLACK ABOLITIONISTS IN BRITAIN—THE LEADER OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND CENTER OF “WAGE SLAVERY”

  Frederick Douglass Confronts the World

  African Americans Embrace the Mother Country

  The Problems of Race, Dehumanization, and Wage Slavery

  Joseph Sturge, Frederick Douglass, and the Chartists—the Decline and Expansion of Antislavery in the 1850s

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  A Note About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Preface

  During the decades it took to write this trilogy on “The Problem of Slavery”—this volume was preceded by The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966) and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (1975)—people repeatedly asked me, “What led to your great interest in race and slavery?” It therefore seems appropriate to begin this final volume with a fairly brief reply.

  Given the national racial segregation of my childhood and youth, it is not surprising that while I and my parents made eight interstate moves across the country, and I attended five high schools in four years, I never shared a classroom with an African American. After turning eighteen, in early 1945, I became exposed to the appalling racism of the Jim Crow South, where I received months of combat training for the invasion of Japan. After the war unexpectedly ended, I found myself on a large troopship bound for Europe. Though seasick, I was ordered to take a club, go down into the hold, and keep the “jiggaboos” from gambling. In this highly segregated army, I had never dreamed there were any blacks on the ship. But after descending a long winding staircase, I came upon what I imagined a slave ship would have looked like. Hundreds and hundreds of near-naked blacks jammed together, many of them shooting craps. After answering the question “What you doin’ down here, white boy?,” I hid in the shadows for four hours until relieved of “duty.”

  Months later, as a member of the army’s Security Police in Germany, I witnessed armed and bloody conflicts between white and black American troops, mainly evoked by white fury over the sight of black soldiers dating and dancing with German girls. I also heard incredibly racist speeches from American officers, including General Ernest N. Harmon, who came from New England but denounced the government for ever sending black soldiers to Europe.

  These experiences had a strong and lasting effect on my mind when I went on to attend Dartmouth College and graduate school at Harvard. Because of what I saw in the army, I read and was especially impressed by the Nobel Laureate Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, which influenced the landmark 1954 decision Brown v. Board of Education, and by President Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights’ 1947 report, To Secure These Rights. While I failed to become actively involved in the civil rights movement, I became deeply shocked by the discovery that slavery and racism had been largely ignored in my undergraduate and graduate courses. I owed this discovery to Kenneth M. Stampp, who came to Harvard from Berkele
y as a visiting professor the year before the publication in 1956 of his landmark book The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South. Since, happily, he lived close to me, we became friends and had enlightening discussions on the subject of his book.

  When I was lucky enough to become an assistant professor of history at Cornell the next year, I was determined to emphasize the importance of slavery in my teaching and to write a book that would provide an antislavery counterpart to the work of Stampp. But after studying some of the writings of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, I turned to the intellectual and international “background” of responses to slavery in Western culture. This expanded vision was partly the result of my undergraduate concentration on the history of political thought and philosophic views of human nature (I majored in philosophy). My decision to write The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture also owed much to a Guggenheim Fellowship that allowed me to do a significant amount of my initial research in Great Britain.

  The three volumes of this trilogy differ from one another in very important ways, so it is essential at the start to describe the goals and scope of this book. Since I began writing The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation by 1980, my publication of other books, particularly Slavery and Human Progress in 1984 and Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World in 2006, radically changed the book’s plan and freed me from doing a broad “survey” of slavery and emancipation from the Haitian Revolution to the outlawing of slavery in Brazil in 1888. I have instead focused on writing a highly selective study of significant and often neglected aspects of this broad subject, centered especially on Britain and the United States. Yet the basic subject of the book is the incredible moral achievement of the “Age of Emancipation”—the fact that from the 1780s to the 1880s, thanks largely to abolitionist movements, slavery was outlawed from Canada and New England to Chile and Brazil.

  I highlight Britain because of its unprecedented and powerful abolition movement, public mobilization, and peaceful but controversial act of freeing 800,000 colonial slaves. Britain not only provided a model of emancipation in the 1830s but had earlier become a global leader in promoting the abolition of oceanic slave trading.

  I concentrate on America because the nation possessed by far the largest, most productive, and expanding slave population in the New World; because the example of freeing the slaves in all the Northern states raised the central issue of whether and how large numbers of freed blacks could coexist in a white world (quite unlike the West Indies); and because the unexpected Civil War led to the sudden freeing of some 4 million slaves, a critical turning point in the Age of Emancipation that redefined the meaning of British emancipation and exerted a profound influence on Cuba and Brazil.

  As for subject matter, this book begins with an extensive discussion of the issue of dehumanization and its implications—the treatment of slaves as if they were domesticated animals and the continuing need of African Americans to confront and counteract the kind of white psychological exploitation that deprived them of the respect and dignity needed for acceptance as equals in a white society. I have long interpreted the problem of slavery as centering on the impossibility of converting humans into the totally compliant, submissive, accepting chattels symbolized by Aristotle’s ideal of the “natural slave.” Throughout the book, I devote much attention to the views of free blacks and former slaves who refute the belief that blacks are in some way subhuman but who also deplore the fact that extremely brutal treatment sometimes leads slaves to act like compliant “brutes.” This perceived “animalization,” implied by the language of such figures as David Walker and Frederick Douglass, took a different form when whites expressed fear of vicious, noncompliant, animal-like blacks intent on rebellion and revenge, as exemplified by the Haitian Revolution. Or when prominent Northern clergymen attacked slavery but insisted that the “Irremediable Degradation” of slaves required the “colonization” of free blacks outside the United States. These issues of black inferiority reached one kind of climax in Britain, as we see in the last chapter, when the lecturing of African American abolitionists helped to destroy British support for the American Colonization Society and when the lecturers expressed amazement over the lack of racism and basked in the public recognition of their full humanity. As Walker had predicted, despite his frequent despair, “Treat us like men, and there is no danger but we will all live in peace and happiness together.”

  Free blacks, I argue, provided the key to slave emancipation. Frederick Douglass, a former slave and the most prominent African American of the nineteenth century, replied to a question posed by Harriet Beecher Stowe by stressing that slaveholders benefited most from the low condition of the American free colored population and that “The most telling, the most killing refutation of slavery, is the presentation of an industrious, enterprising, thrifty, and intelligent free black population.” One crucial chapter of the book describes how black leaders, aided by white men and women abolitionists, struggled to achieve this goal, and how a few blacks, like Dr. James McCune Smith, attained the highest standards of education and success. Another chapter counters widespread misinterpretations and shows how free blacks played the main role in sustaining antislavery agitation in the 1820s, overcoming the colonizationists and launching the radical “immediatist” movement of the 1830s.

  As we see in the chapter on Haiti, free blacks like Toussaint Louverture played a central part in the Haitian Revolution, which showed that blacks could defeat the seasoned armies of Napoleon as well as the British. The Haitian Revolution continued to inspire and be celebrated by free African Americans. But the international response to Haiti helped to create a picture of national ineptitude and incompetence as well as a genuinely impoverished nation that replaced what had been the richest and most productive colony in the New World. The chapter on the impact of Haiti is followed by a set of chapters on the colonization movements in America, which were strongly influenced by the fear of a Haitian-like revolution in America (and in the 1820s, thousands of American free blacks accepted the Haitian government’s invitation to migrate to Haiti, much to the regret of most everyone).

  The issues of colonization and migration are extremely complex and have generally been misunderstood. From the time of Jefferson until and including that of Lincoln, most American leaders, to say nothing of a large majority of whites, believed that any total ending of American slavery would require an extensive system of colonizing freed slaves in Africa, the Caribbean, or Central America. Given the increase and persistence of racism and the deplorable conditions that African Americans faced, a succession of black leaders from Paul Cuffe in the early nineteenth century to Marcus Garvey in the 1920s promoted their own plans for emigration to a promised land. For this reason I devote some attention to the influential biblical Exodus narrative of Israelite slaves escaping from Egypt, to historical examples of migration and expulsion, to the history of Liberia, and even to Garvey’s leadership of a true mass movement as “the final act” in a long play.

  But, as I have already mentioned, it was free African Americans who took the leadership in counteracting and checking the colonization movement and in convincing white abolitionists that it was a racist cause. As black writers and journalists contributed to an evolving black culture, it contained a genuine pride in the way African American workers had helped create the United States and how African American ancestors had fought in the American Revolution and the War of 1812. This patriotism underlay the crucial goals of elevating and improving the free black population and freeing its members from subservience, dishonor, and persecution simply because of their color.

  While many chapters focus on race as the major barrier to slave emancipation, the book rests on the premise that the Age of Emancipation depended on the Anglo-American abolition movements. I wholly endorse the economists and historians who have emphasized the economic strength and vitality of the slave system and who reject any theory that it was on the road to natural extinction.
As the historian Seymour Drescher has argued, the Nazis and Soviets restored a huge and highly profitable slave regime in the 1940s.

  As I have tried to demonstrate in my trilogy, the abolition of slavery depended on a fundamental change in the Western moral perception of the institution, followed by the rise of antislavery movements in Britain, America, France, and eventually Brazil. Accordingly, this book devotes much thought to abolitionism, especially in Britain, where it achieved the most dramatic results. Yet by the 1850s there was a broad consensus that Britain’s emancipation act had been an economic failure, even if the freed slaves were better off. This issue directed more attention to the outcome of antislavery in the United States, where I turn to such questions as fugitive slaves, free soil, and the acceptance of violence.

  The discussion of abolitionism in Britain also leads to the vital question of whether this particular reform, challenging a form of private property and an institution that had been globally accepted from biblical times onward, could become a model for other kinds of protest and radical change. Most American abolitionists were proud of America’s political democracy and strongly supported democratic movements abroad. Ironically, abolitionism reached its first great success, especially in mobilizing a large part of the total population, in a monarchic and aristocratic nation that also led the way in the Industrial Revolution, with its exploitation of countless men, women, and children in factories and mines. I therefore give some attention to the growing ties between British abolitionists and the radical Chartist movement against “wage slavery,” an issue that visiting American abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass had to confront. In the Epilogue I also continue to consider the Age of Emancipation, as a model for other reforms and as probably the greatest landmark of willed moral progress in human history.

  But the epilogue also stresses the extraordinary fortuity and contingency of this outcome, which owed much to the highly unpredictable nature of the American Civil War. Surprisingly, despite Britain’s global leadership in antislavery, the British government, press, and upper classes took a very hostile view of the Northern cause early in the war. This was partly the result of complex historical relations between the two countries, reinforced by widespread misunderstanding of the constitutional limitations on Lincoln’s government, to say nothing of British dependence on Southern cotton and aristocratic fear of democratic reforms. The British government, prodded by France, came close to recognizing the Confederacy’s independence and to intervening to stop the war. Many leading newspapers even denounced Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, though the public increasingly celebrated this turning point and finally responded with enthusiasm to the Thirteenth Amendment’s liberation of all slaves.