The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation

by David Brion Davis

  There was increasingly a strong interconnection between this research, my writing, and my teaching. In both lecture courses and high-level new seminars, I distributed hundreds of pages of Xeroxed primary sources—often material that placed slavery within a broad context of antebellum American culture. Above all, I learned a great deal from seminar discussions and student papers, and was very pleased by the way many of my NEH-grant student researchers received personal intellectual benefits by basing some of their own papers on this same research. Unfortunately, given the passage of time I apologize that I cannot begin to thank by name everyone who contributed, including the students whom Joan Binder was able to recruit.

  It is crucial to understand that most of this book was written after the publication in 2006 of Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. The path that led to Inhuman Bondage was related to my new and long professional relationship, beginning in 1994, with the philanthropists Richard Gilder and Lewis E. Lehrman. My founding of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, and the annual summer courses I taught for New York City high school teachers, sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, helped me create a new lecture course at Yale on the origins and significance of New World slavery. My work at the center, the summer courses, and the new Yale lecture course then led to my book Inhuman Bondage.

  There is much in the acknowledgments of Inhuman Bondage, as in Slavery and Human Progress, which also applies to The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation. Here I will only mention the international libraries listed in Slavery and Human Progress. And once again I express my eternal gratitude to Stanley L. Engerman, probably the world’s leading expert on comparative slavery, who carefully read all three of my books in manuscript, including this one, and penned in invaluable corrections and suggestions.

  Turning to the final phase of production of this volume, I am most grateful to Patricia Dallai, executive director of Yale’s Henry Koerner Center for Emeritus Faculty, for helping me receive an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Emeritus Fellowship, which helped pay for indispensable research assistance as I wrote seven new chapters of the book and revised those already completed. I am also very appreciative of the annual research fund of my Sterling Professorship that supplemented the Mellon grant. I am extremely grateful to the librarians at Yale who gave such effective help to my research assistants.

  I briefly benefited from the excellent help of Joseph Yannielli and Christopher Bonner, graduate students at Yale. My immense thanks to Philipp Peter Ziesche, who as a graduate student had been a major contributor to my work on Inhuman Bondage, and for this volume continued to play a leading role tracking down materials and offering his own insights. Even after receiving a Ph.D., publishing his own book, and working full-time as a top editor of the Benjamin Franklin Papers project, he helped me update the older chapter on the Haitian Revolution. Immense thanks also go to Christopher Allison, now a doctoral student at Harvard, who for years not only found crucial sources for this project at every step of the way but had such an imaginative grasp of the material that he was able to help me plan and envision the arguments of many of the chapters.

  I am immensely grateful to the following historians for reading and commenting on parts of this book: Harold Brackman, Peter Hinks, David P. Geggus, David Blight, Michael G. Kammen, Seymour Drescher, Malick Ghachem, and Matt Spooner. As so often in the past, I am especially indebted to John Stauffer, Steven Mintz, Sean Wilentz, and William Casey King, former students and now distinguished historians and friends who provided essential comments and corrections on all or parts of the book.

  Since my work on this book began so long ago, I fear I have inevitably omitted the names of some of the people who gave me important help, an error for which I deeply apologize. It is also crucial to exempt everyone named from any blame for any errors, misconceptions, and omissions—shortcomings for which I take full responsibility.

  Finally, let me emphasize my indebtedness to my literary agent, Wendy Strothman, who in 2007 arranged a publishing agreement with Alfred A. Knopf and who continued to advise and assist me. My thanks to my superb editor at Knopf, Andrew Miller, who improved my prose, who continued to give me encouragement, and who in countless ways facilitated the publication of this book. Thanks also to his able assistant, Mark Chiusano, who helped with countless details.

  Since the completion of this trilogy, at age eighty-six, in many ways marks the fulfillment of a career, it is appropriate to emphasize the central parts of a life that balance and compensate for a career. I am immensely grateful to such close personal friends as Howard and Sylvia Garland, Mal and Jane Rudner, and Sam and Judy Sprotzer because they enhance and deepen my life. When they express real interest in how my book is coming along, it is because we are deeply interested in one another’s lives, not because they are historians.

  I have dedicated this book to my sons Adam and Noah and their wonderful families because they and their future lives are far more important to me than any books I write. When I read to little Jonah or Tola, or hold baby Elena in my arms, I am forming a connection with a beloved family that will hopefully last long after my death. My profound love and interest in the lives of Adam and Noah and their families, and their love for me, forms part of a center that has given enormous meaning to my life.

  Throughout the past forty-four years my wonderful and beloved wife, Toni Hahn Davis, has helped create that balancing center, and I am above all indebted to her. She has not only read and improved much of my work, supported my efforts as a teacher and writer, but has really made possible my continuing career as a historian. Above all else, she has enriched my life in infinite ways.

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Laurent Dubois, Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006); Madison Smartt Bell, Toussaint Louverture: A Biography (New York: Pantheon, 2007); Julius S. Scott, “The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1986); Robert L. Paquette, Sugar Is Made with Blood: The Conspiracy of La Escalera and the Conflict between Empires over Slavery in Cuba (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 15, 26, 36,42, 76–77, 123–24, 211; Alfred N. Hunt, Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988); Douglas R. Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), ix, 45–48, 160–61, 168–72. For simplicity I use here the term “free blacks,” but there was often a significant division between free blacks like Toussaint Louverture and the lighter-skinned “free coloreds” or mulattoes.

  2. Bryan Edwards, The History Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, 4 vols. (Philadelphia, 1806), IV, 68–80, 98. Edwards went to Saint-Domingue shortly after the slave insurrection of 1791 and later gathered much information from the British expeditionary force that made extensive use of black troops. By “Philanthropy” he means the antislavery movement.

  3. James Madison to the Marquis de Lafayette, November 25, 1820, Gilder Lehrman Collection, New-York Historical Society.

  4. William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), Part III.

  5. [Leonard Bacon], Christian Spectator, 5 (Oct. 1, 1823), 544; [Bacon], “Report to the Committee appointed February 18, 1823, to inquire respecting the black population of the United States,” in Memoirs of American Missionaries, Formerly Connected with the Society of Inquiry respecting Missions, in the Andover Theological Seminary…(Boston, 1823), 300–301. For more on Bacon, see chapter 6.

  6. David Brian Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 177
0–1823 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 303. As George M. Fredrickson has pointed out, with respect to race and racism, in a culture dedicated to the ideal of equality, a particular group like blacks can be denied the prospect of equal status “only if they allegedly possess some extraordinary deficiency that makes them less than fully human.” Racism: A Short History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 12.

  7. From 1780 to 1804, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, and New Jersey enacted laws for the gradual emancipation of all slaves. Largely because there were so few slaves in northern New England, Vermont was able to outlaw slavery with a constitution of 1777; in Massachusetts and New Hampshire judicial decisions had a somewhat similar effect in the 1780s, although a few slaves remained in New Hampshire for many decades.

  8. Despite the continuing fluctuations between “nature” and “nurture,” these hereditary and environmental versions of dehumanization would sometimes seem to merge.

  9. [Theodore Dwight Weld], American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1839), 110.

  10. Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2009), 182. Quoted from Darwin’s Journal of Researches (1845; repr., 1860).

  11. Henry Highland Garnet, A Memorial Discourse; by Rev. Henry Highland Garnet, Delivered in the Hall of the House of Representatives, Washington City, D.C. on Sabbath, February 12, 1865, with an introduction by James McCune Smith, M.D. (Philadelphia, 1865), 69–74. I am grateful to Seth Moglen for calling this work to my attention.

  It should be noted that chattel slavery has not always been the worst form of human oppression, even though slaves have usually occupied the lowest rung of social hierarchies. In addition to genocidal death camps and twentieth-century gulags and prison farms, there are such examples as the Chinese “coolies” shipped in the mid-nineteenth century to the coast of Peru, where they died in appalling numbers from the lethal effects of shoveling seabird manure for the world’s fertilizer market. What distinguished slaves was the fact that their subjugation—their vulnerability to nearly unchecked power and lack of familial support—arose from their being owned (like domestic animals), a status that could often provide at least a degree of protection. Moreover, most slaves became slaves involuntarily, whereas many other forms of coerced labor involved a degree of initial choice.

  12. Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 232.

  13. Here one thinks, for example, of the modern Sudanese Janjaweed, who have used repeated gang raping and even so-called rape camps for the ethnic cleansing of blacks in Darfur and eastern Chad. It would often be difficult to distinguish this military raping from the gang raping of modern sex slaves, such as the young women in Cambodia who report having been raped by as many as twenty-five men in a row.

  14. The issue is somewhat complicated by the fact that in rare situations, such as Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings, family ties could become quite close over a long period of time. Yet whatever affections Jefferson may have felt for his enslaved chambermaid and her four surviving children, he never failed to include her and her children in his plantation inventory, along with their market value. As Jefferson himself acknowledged:

  The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, and the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submission on the other. Our children see this and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal.… The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.

  Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), passim; Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1955), 162.

  15. Mia Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 119.

  16. Ibid., 127–28.

  17. This remark would seem to be exceptional or at least unusual in view of the nineteenth-century efforts of Southern slave owners to encourage the Christianization of their slaves. But the belief that religion would make slaves more obedient and dutiful did not mean that whites anticipated a racially integrated heaven. Bay’s quotations from ex-slaves show that even household servants were repeatedly denied, like household pets, any sense of communion within the white churches.

  18. Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind, 124, 129–31.

  19. Ibid., 131–32.

  20. See especially Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).

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

  1. Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States, ed. Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. (New York: Modern Library, 1984), 452.

  While I have focused attention in chapter 1 on North America, it is important to stress that the animalization of black slaves was widespread throughout the world. Charles Darwin, for example, was continually shocked by the examples of slavery he witnessed during his time in South America in the early 1830s: “Near Rio de Janeiro I lived opposite to an old lady, who kept screws to crush the fingers of her female slaves. I have stayed in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal.” Olivia Judson, “The Origin of Darwin,” The New York Times, February 12, 2009, A35; see also Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2009), 68–110.

  2. Since surprisingly few scholars have explored this important subject, I want to express my gratitude and admiration for David Livingstone Smith’s Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2011).

  3. Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 335; Hugh Raffles, “Jews, Lice, and History,” in Public Culture: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Transnational Cultural Studies 19, no. 3 (Fall 2007), online. I should emphasize that animalization was only one part of a much broader Nazi, anti-Jewish ideology and culture.

  4. For many examples of genocidal animalization, see Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 357–58, 440, 549, 558–59, 660.

  5. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Experiments in Ethics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 144, 247.

  6. Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 185–86.

  7. Smith, Less Than Human, 25.

  8. In war, combatants often escalate dehumanizing measures by responding to sadistic acts of the other side. In World War II the Japanese invited brutalizing retaliation by starving, bayoneting, beheading, raping, and even vivisecting prisoners of war, according to Evan Thomas’s review of Max Hastings’s Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45, The New York Times Book Review, March 30, 2008, online. But there was also much racism in the Western portrayal of the Japanese; the British general Sir William Slim “captured the mood of the time: the Japanese soldier, Slim said, ‘is the most formidable fighting insect in history.’ ”

  9. I will later try to clarify the relationship between animalization and racism.

  Ironically, the Slavic root for “slave,” rab, as in rabotat, to work, made its way into “robot” (actually the old Czech word for serf). The likening of a slave to a robot or inhuman machine parallels in some ways the comparison of the slave to an animal or a permanent child. My friend Harold Brackman i
nforms me that the current “transhumanist movement” is focusing increasing attention on the ethical implications of such things as implanting micro nanorobots in the brains of Alzheimer patients. It would appear that the issue of humanized machines might well replace in many ways the issue of animalization.

  10. Winthrop D. Jordan imaginatively develops this important theme, with regard to white attitudes toward black Africans and African American slaves, in White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968). According to Jordan, racial slavery as it developed in colonial North America was a system of psychological exploitation, or cultural parasitism, that allowed the whites to achieve a sense of communal solidarity and purpose through the systematic debasement of African Americans. After surveying a vast Anglo-American literature regarding Africans and African Americans, Jordan concluded that American society became functionally based on a rationale of racial superiority.