The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation

by David Brion Davis

  Whereas Northern Democrats were still making a full-scale defense of slavery in June 1864, Republicans drew on a tradition going back to Jefferson’s failed bill of 1784 banning slavery from all the western territories. Like the authors of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, banning slavery north of the Ohio River, they used Jefferson’s words in the amendment: “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime” before ending with “shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Since the Republicans dominated the Senate, they easily approved the amendment, 38 to 6. But on June 15, Democrats won the necessary one-third of the votes in the House of Representatives to block the measure, to the dismay of Lincoln and the Republicans.

  In the November election Republicans gained more than enough seats in the House of Representatives to secure passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in the next Congress. But that would be many months away and Lincoln and his associates feared that an impending Union victory would remove a major justification for the amendment—the wartime need to suppress a slaveholder rebellion. As a result, they saw the need for an intense lobbying campaign in the final lame-duck session of the Thirty-Eighth Congress. After much arm-twisting, bribing, and patronage, Republican leaders succeeded on January 31, 1865, in converting enough Border State and Democratic congressmen (a change of three votes would have reversed the outcome). The House erupted in jubilation; spectators wept and danced. In a speech the next day Lincoln stressed that slavery was the only thing that ever threatened to destroy the Union and praised the Thirteenth Amendment for freeing all slaves, everywhere, for all future time, “a King’s cure for all the evils” that had not been cured by the Emancipation Proclamation.

  But of course the measure could not become part of the Constitution until three-fourths of the states had ratified it. Despite bitter Democratic opposition, by February 3, New York, Illinois, Rhode Island, Michigan, Maryland, and West Virginia had ratified the amendment, and eleven more state legislatures followed by the end of the month. But after Lincoln’s assassination on April 14, progress slowed considerably and it was not until December 18 that Secretary of State Seward officially certified that the requisite twenty-seven states had ratified the amendment—the same day that Delaware and Kentucky finally abolished slavery. This meant that during most of the year 1865, slavery was still legal in most of the Southern states and that more slaves may have been freed in December 1865 than in the four preceding years of war. But, by the year’s end, freedom was truly “national.”

  While the implementation of the amendment and the meaning of freedom would long be problematic, this culmination of Anglo-American emancipation had been totally unforeseen and unanticipated at the beginning of the war. Even more astonishing, from a prewar perspective, was the award of citizenship and suffrage by the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 and the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870. And while major attention has long and rightly focused on the failure of Reconstruction and the emergence of a Southern penal system that was “worse than slavery,”26 few slave emancipations in history have been followed by anything equivalent to America’s first civil rights legislation and the Constitutional amendments that for a limited time in the Reconstruction Era led a significant number of African Americans to vote, to serve in state legislatures, and even to serve in the U.S. Senate (two) and House of Representatives (twenty).27

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  In 1788, the first French abolitionist society (the Société des Amis des Noirs) was formed and entered into correspondence with the recently established abolitionist societies in London, Philadelphia, and New York. At that time Vermont and Massachusetts, containing very few slaves, were the only places in the New World that had taken effective steps to outlaw the kind of racial slavery that extended from Canada to Chile and Argentina. A century later, in 1888, Brazil celebrated the immediate and uncompensated emancipation of the only slaves remaining in the hemisphere, concluding an extraordinary century of emancipation. Since most of this abolition of the Atlantic slave trade and chattel slavery was contrary to economic self-interest,28 it probably stands, despite the U.S. Civil War and other heavy costs, as the greatest landmark of willed moral progress in human history.

  In all three volumes of my Problem of Slavery trilogy I have addressed both slavery and its abolition as essentially moral issues while of course recognizing the economic functions of the institution. The very concept of chattel slavery has always embodied a profound moral contradiction, exemplified in this volume by my emphasis on the efforts to dehumanize and animalize fellow human beings. The true slave, as Aristotle put it, could have no will or interests of his own; he was merely a tool or instrument who could only affirm his consciousness by partaking of his master’s consciousness and by becoming one with his master’s desires. Yet, as Hegel later observed, the master’s identity depends on having a slave who recognizes him as master: the truth of the master’s independent consciousness lies in the dependent and supposedly unessential consciousness of the slave. And while some freed slaves like David Walker and Frederick Douglass agreed that slaves sometimes internalized their master’s desires, no masters, whether in ancient Rome, medieval Tuscany, or seventeenth-century Brazil, could forget that the obsequious servant might also be a “domestic enemy” bent on theft, poisoning, arson, or rebellion.

  My first volume, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, dealt with this “problem” first by analyzing the ways in which Western culture explained and rationalized slavery as part of a necessarily imperfect social system. The book then explored the cultural heritage that provided the framework for a profound transformation in moral perception in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that led a growing number of Europeans and Americans to see the full horror of a social evil to which mankind had been blind for centuries. This attack on the most extreme form of labor exploitation was related to the “discovery” and celebration of free labor, which was virtually unknown outside of Western Europe during most of history.

  The second volume, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823, deals with the consequences of this revolution in moral perception, centered in the Enlightenment and evangelical revivals, at a time when any serious attack on slavery carried momentous implications, since the institution was not only thriving economically in this period but had long been interwoven with other widely accepted forms of domination and submission. After reviewing “what the abolitionists were up against,” the book analyzes the early history of antislavery movements in Britain and America, and ends with a discussion of legal and theological issues, and an imaginary confrontation between Napoleon and the black Haitian leader Toussaint Louverture.

  In the present volume I have stressed that even many abolitionists recognized two major barriers to any “immediate” emancipation. Since for millennia slaves had been defined as private property, freeing them without some form of compensation to owners would set a dangerous precedent in societies in which property rights had become transcendent. Second, before the sudden rise of “immediatism” among British and American abolitionists around 1830, it was taken for granted that slaves would need some kind of “preparation” for freedom. Contrary to the wishes of the leading radicals, the famous British emancipation act of 1833 provided for both generous compensation to owners and a period of “apprenticeship” for freed slaves. Earlier, five of the Northern American states had enacted emancipation measures that freed only the children born of slaves, in their twenties, thus combining some supposed preparation with compensation through youthful labor. Various forms of gradual emancipation followed the Spanish American wars of independence.

  Holland and some other countries followed Britain’s example, but as I have strongly emphasized in this volume, white Americans, who thought they faced the prospect of living together with millions of freed blacks who were totally “unprepared” for equal citizenship, clung to the “solution” of colonization as the only possible route to slave emancipation. This whi
te consensus about the exile of blacks evoked a powerful response on the part of free African Americans who were determined to counter racism and launch a radical abolition movement as well as elevate and uplift their own population. Such figures as Frederick Douglass and James McCune Smith exemplified some success in achieving respect, dignity, and acceptance as equals in a white society.

  Douglass’s response to Chartism and so-called wage slavery in Britain illustrates the complexity of comparing chattel slavery with other forms of exploitation and servitude. Because slavery has long epitomized the most extreme form of domination and oppression, it has served as a metaphor for rejecting almost every deprivation of freedom (including “enslavement” to sex, greed, drugs, ignorance, and even ambition). More important, as with Douglass’s acceptance of the Chartists’ assault on local bondage, despite his insistence on the uniqueness of chattel slavery, the comparison has provided a way of extending the historically successful moral condemnation of slavery to other forms of coerced labor and exploitation, ranging from the traditional sexist oppression of women to modern human trafficking.

  While the historical ownership of slaves as property meant that even a highly privileged slave could suddenly be sold as a field hand, the fact that property in slaves represented a financial investment provided a certain protection totally lacking among workers in modern concentration camps. When we read of a highly privileged slave in charge of boiling sugar on a Jamaican sugar plantation, a head man who reports only to an overseer and attorney, or an enslaved Mississippi River boatman who hires free workers as he transports cotton to New Orleans, we realize that a few New World chattel slaves were considerably better off than the millions of coerced laborers in Nazi and Soviet camps, or even many modern sex slaves.29

  Careful historical comparisons could modify the view that chattel slavery was a wholly unique social evil and also draw on the strong positive legacies of Anglo-American abolitionism. From the 1890s to the 1930s, radical American reformers like Daniel DeLeon, Eugene Debs, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Clarence Darrow, and members of the Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW) continually expressed their indebtedness to the abolitionists, who had also been treated as public enemies but who had found ways to mobilize and transform public opinion. “We are the modern abolitionists,” exclaimed the Wobbly leader James Thompson, “fighting against wage slavery.”30 Somewhat similar tributes to the abolitionist model were made by feminists and black leaders of the NAACP.

  The issue of legacies is complex. Despite the dismal failure of American Reconstruction, the succeeding century of Jim Crow discrimination, and the legacy of racism even in the Caribbean and South America, Anglo-American emancipation had a profound influence on the freeing of slaves in the French, Dutch, and Danish colonies, and especially in Cuba and Brazil. We should also note that in the twentieth century the legacy of New World emancipation extended, thanks in part to the League of Nations and the United Nations, to the outlawing of chattel slavery throughout the world.

  When thinking of the earlier Age of Emancipation as a model for the future, one can of course point to the extraordinary contingency I have emphasized, especially involving the American Civil War and the goals of an independent Confederacy, as well as what Seymour Drescher has termed the amazing “reversion” to mass forced labor in Nazi and Soviet Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. Yet when viewed in retrospect, influenced by today’s public opinion and social values, many people would no doubt regard the outlawing of New World and even global slavery as inevitable. But I would conclude, given the overall findings of my trilogy, that the outlawing of New World slavery was both astonishing and, at times, even foreseeable. Astonishing in view of the institution’s antiquity and modern economic strength, resilience, and importance. Foreseeable, if not from what I term the revolutionary shift in moral perception, then from the time in the early 1830s when British abolitionists, having triumphed in their mobilization of public opinion, began demanding the “immediate” ending of bondage around the world, and in 1833 achieving a compromise that soon led to the freeing of 800,000 colonial slaves. If even New World slave emancipation might have required another fifty years or more, one is also impressed by how limited in time the Soviet and Nazi “reversion” really was.

  The global outlawing of chattel slavery has already become an important precedent for abolishing human trafficking and other forms of coerced labor—as we read the shocking estimates of the number of women and men held today in different kinds of bondage. But as for any inevitable moral “progress,” when we view the present state of the world with respect to human nature, there is less cause for optimism. Many humans still love to kill, torture, oppress, and dominate. Moral progress seems to be historical, cultural, and institutional, not the result of a genetic improvement in individual human nature. One needs only to note what happened in a highly “civilized” country like Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. If we imagine a worst-case scenario in which future climate change or nuclear war breaks up modern nations as we know them, antimodernists and ultraconservatives might well restore chattel slavery on a large scale, especially in the Middle East.31 If my friends and I were suddenly stripped of our twentieth-century conditioning and plummeted back to Mississippi in 1860, we would doubtless take for granted our rule over slaves. So an astonishing historical achievement really matters. The outlawing of chattel slavery in the New World, and then globally, represents a crucial landmark of moral progress that we should never forget.

  Acknowledgments

  This project concludes a three-volume scholarly enterprise that began in 1958 when a Guggenheim Fellowship supported my initial research in Britain that led to my book The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966). This prefatory volume explores the historical background that provided a framework for the great struggles over slavery in modern times. It is addressed essentially to a problem of moral perception—why it was that at a certain moment of history a small number of men and women not only saw the full horror of a social evil to which people had been blind for centuries, but felt impelled to attack it through personal testimony and cooperative action.

  The next volume, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (1975), moves on to the social, economic, and political contexts that shaped an antislavery ideology and which defined the implications and consequences of early antislavery protests in Britain, France, and the United States. Like the preceding work, the second volume suggests that any serious challenge to slavery carried momentous implications precisely because slavery had long symbolized the most extreme model of treating human beings as exploitable objects. To question such a model of domination that had been accepted for millennia could lead to the questioning of most forms of domination and submission.

  During the long period between the publication of the second volume and the completion now of this third volume of the trilogy, I wrote nine other books, many of them on related topics involving slavery and emancipation. From the very start I realized that this final volume of the project, on the “Age of Emancipation,” would present the most formidable problems of coverage, selectivity, organization, and method. Accordingly, when I began envisioning the third volume, soon after the publication of the second, I decided to first write an exploratory pilot study that would put the “Age of Emancipation” within a broad historical survey of slavery and antislavery from antiquity to the modern United Nations. Therefore, when I was awarded a priceless National Endowment for the Humanities–Henry E. Huntington Library Fellowship in 1976, I concentrated my efforts on the pilot study, or what would become Slavery and Human Progress (1984). While I had earlier done research for the second volume of the trilogy at the wonderful Huntington Library in San Marino, California, I was now able to make use of the library’s invaluable resources for both Slavery and Human Progress and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation.

  As I explained in a report to the National Endowment for the Humanities, my goal at that time was to use history as
a source for disciplined moral reflection on the ironies, achievements, tragedies, and unintended consequences of human idealism and self-interest, unraveling some of the complex historical ties between human exploitation and liberation, ties that give a multitude of meanings to notions of human “progress.” In many ways The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation benefited from the discoveries and decisions I made when writing Slavery and Human Progress. And as I have indicated in the preface to this volume, both Slavery and Human Progress and then Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (2006) helped to free me from trying to cover too much material in the final volume of the trilogy.

  Much of my writing on slavery during the past third-of-a-century was made possible by the assistance of further generous research grants to Yale University from the National Endowment of the Humanities, beginning in 1980. While the grants were primarily intended for The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation, the invaluable research also made it possible to treat British West Indian emancipation and related subjects in much greater depth in Slavery and Human Progress.

  Since I had agreed to teach and hold the first chair in American Civilization at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris for the academic year 1980–81, I was fortunate as the project director in having Loueva F. Pflueger, an administrative assistant in the Yale Department of History, oversee the budget and work with Joan Binder, a full-time associate in research who managed the project in the United States while I was abroad. Ms. Pflueger and Ms. Binder also worked with Dr. Fiona E. Spiers, my full-time, highly experienced researcher in Britain. I could not be more grateful to Joan Binder and Fiona Spiers for the outstanding work they did in gathering, sorting, and organizing a vast collection of largely primary source materials. While I was in Paris, Ms. Binder also did research on her own from Boston to Washington and supervised the work of quite a few student researchers, including Amy Dru Stanley and Donna Dennis. Dr. Spiers, whom I visited many times from Paris when I did research in Britain, examined primary sources in Dublin, London, Glasgow, Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester, Leeds, Hull, and Durham. When I returned to Yale to teach in the academic year 1981–82, Joan Binder presented me with enormous well-organized files of source material.