11. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation, One Volume Edition, I. Human Nature (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948), 3.
12. Montaigne, Essays, II; Sardanapalus, iv. i., “Sonnet to Chillon.” The dilemma of being human also prompted poets and other writers to satirize human failings by stressing the advantages of being an animal. Thus Walt Whitman: “They do not sweat and whine about their condition; / They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for / their sins; / They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God.”
There is abundant evidence that many people feel far closer to their animal pets than to other humans. In 2008 Leona Helmsley left up to $8 billion in a charitable trust solely for the care and welfare of dogs, and some $12 million for the care and support of her own pet Maltese dog Trouble—far more than she bequeathed to her grandchildren. New York Times, Week in Review, July 6, 2008, 5.
13. As we saw in the introduction, slaveholders could have it both ways. They could enhance their self-esteem by projecting their animalistic attributes on slaves, but white males could also indulge their “Id” by sexually exploiting slave women.
14. David Brion Davis, review of Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black, in William and Mary Quarterly (January 1969): 110–14.
15. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 255–61. Since even free blacks were barred from testifying in court, such laws were obviously difficult to enforce.
16. It is significant that the word had been exterminated well before an African American became president.
17. Williamson, Crucible of Race, 122–30.
18. Margaret Abruzzo’s Polemical Pain: Slavery, Cruelty, and the Rise of Humanitarianism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011) brilliantly shows how an eighteenth-century Anglo-American transformation in public responses to cruelty and pain shaped the nature of the antislavery movements and also contributed to a new sensitivity to animal cruelty.
19. A few examples: gods pictured with animal faces or heads; people wearing animal masks or simulating animal behavior; pretended animals talking like people in folktales or children’s literature; actual animals dressed like people or trained to do human-like actions (often considered cute, or comic, or wondrous); various forms of animal sacrifice, sometimes as a substitute for human sacrifice; bestiality, in the sense of human sex with animals, and legends of mixed offspring.
20. Laurence Urdang, The Oxford Thesaurus, American Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 14; Webster’s Dictionary of Synonyms, 1st ed. (New York: G. & C. Merriam, 1942), 53; Free Online Thesaurus, www.thefreedictionary.com/animalization.
21. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 40–41.
22. http://www.emory.edu/LIVING_LINKS/ourinnerApe/pdfs/anthropodenial.html; http://asc.nhc.rtp.nc.us/2007/conference/session_one.html; Frans de Waal, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).
23. Genesis 1:20–28 (King James Version). My italics.
24. Ibid., 2:19–20; 8:20; 9:2–3.
25. Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 15–21.
26. Paul Freedman, Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), 35.
27. Seymour Drescher reminds me that the Eastern religions did not condemn human slavery or organize movements to abolish it. He raises the interesting question whether a much earlier Western equation between animal and human rights would have increased or diminished the abolitionist appeal.
28. Thomas, Man and the Natural World, pp. 33–35. Of course there are numerous examples of animals arousing sympathy and romantic feeling, or becoming a vantage point for criticizing human folly.
But David Hume said that some animals were endowed with thought and reason, and Montesquieu made the fairly common point that animals knew nothing of our hopes and fears, especially the fear of death. According to Voltaire, “they don’t hear the clock strike.”
29. Paul Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 133–73, 300–303. Because peasants were an indispensable, food-producing majority of the population, writers often balanced the serfs’ or rustics’ alleged filth, stupidity, and bestiality with occasional tributes to their piety, simplicity, and closeness to God.
30. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, in Oxford Quotations, 111,14; On the other hand, when Thomas Jefferson was living in France in the 1780s, he could speak of “the cloven hoof” of the aristocracy Jefferson in France sees Elkins & McKitrick, 315.
31. Yvon Garlan, Slavery in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd, rev. ed. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), 46.
32. Leviticus 25:44–46. I have used a modern translation that gives a more accurate translation of the Hebrew. The King James Bible generally avoids the word “slaves,” using instead “bondmen” and “bondmaids” who will nevertheless remain “bondmen for ever.”
33. Jean Barbot, a French slave-ship captain, claimed that he had observed the Golden Rule and that other traders should treat African slaves the way they would want to be treated if captured by Algerians. A Description of the Coasts of North and South-Guinea…, in John Churchill, A Collection of Voyages and Travels, vol. 5 (London, 1732), 47, 100.
34. Even in medieval and early modern Russia, where slaves and serfs belonged to the same ethnic group as their masters, some Russian noblemen invented a theory claiming a separate historical origin, in effect making these subalterns “outsiders.” Like slaves in other cultures, serfs were said to be intrinsically lazy, childlike, licentious, and incapable of life without authoritative direction. It was even said that they had black bones! Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 170–73.
35. Charles Verlinden, “L’Origine de ‘sclavus—esclave,’ ” Archivum latinitatis medii aevi, XVII (1943), 97–128.
36. In the 1580s, Sir Francis Drake found and freed Turks, North African Moors, and even a few Frenchmen and Germans among the Spanish galley slaves in Santo Domingo and Cartagena, the great center of trade and transshipment of African slaves in what is today Colombia. Michael J. Guasco, “The Idea of Slavery in the Anglo-Atlantic World before 1619,” p. 26, Working Paper No. 00–28, International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, 1500–1800, Harvard University, August 17, 2000. I am much indebted to Dr. Guasco for letting me cite his paper.
37. A fascination with the black African’s penis extended from ancient times to later European explorers and scientists. In 1799, the English geologist Charles White wrote: “That the Penis of an African is larger than that of a European has I believe been shown in every anatomical school in London. Preparations of them are preserved in most anatomical museums, and I have one in mine.” Charles White, An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man, and in Different Animals and Vegetables; and from the Former to the Latter (London, 1799), 237. See also Jordan, White Over Black, 30, 34–35, 158–59, 163, 464, 501.
38. Jordan, White Over Black, 29–35.
39. As I will soon note, an exception can probably be made for at least parts of later fifteenth-century Iberia, where Muslim racist traditions coincided with Portugal’s importation of large numbers of slaves from West Africa.
40. John Hunwick, “Arab Views of Black Africans and Slavery,” paper given at Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center Conference on Collective Degradation: Slavery and the Construction of Race, November 7, 2003, 10–12. Ibn Khaldu¯n, who found similar defects in Slavs and other “northern Europeans,” attributed this inferiority to zones of climate, but also affirmed, like many ancient and medieval writers, that such traits were in effect hereditary. He did later admit that some West Africans were more civilized, and could be redeemed by Islam. Ibid., 14–15.
41. Gernot Rotter, Di
e Stellung des Negers in der islamisch-arabischen Gesellschaft bis zum XVI. Jahrhundert (Bonn: Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, 1967), 162–63; Bernard Lewis, Race and Color in Islam (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 38.
42. Over the ages, Jews, Muslims, and Christians engaged in highly imaginative efforts to interpret the enigmatic “Curse” in Genesis 9:18–27, and the increasing enslavement of black Africans totally transformed biblical interpretation. In the Bible, Ham views and perhaps mocks his naked, drunken father, Noah, who upon waking curses Ham’s son Canaan and condemns him and his descendants to the lowest form of slavery. While the Canaanites were the enemies of the ancient Israelites, there was long no mention of skin color. Medieval Arabs tended to shift attention from Canaan to Ham, who eventually came to be seen as the ancestor of black Africans. Despite continuing confusion over Ham’s sin and the fact he was not cursed, the story provided many nineteenth-century Americans with divine sanction for racial slavery. See David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 64–70.
43. Lewis, Race and Slavery, 57–58. It should be noted that Ahmad Baba felt it necessary to make this eloquent point in order to contest an opposite view.
44. It should be stressed that while Muslim corsairs enslaved hundreds of thousands of Christians by raiding the coasts of Europe and capturing ships, Christians and Jews living under Muslim rule were defined as “protected persons” (dhimmīs) who could not legally be enslaved unless they violated the terms of the contract that defined their status. Ibid., 7.
45. James H. Sweet, “The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., vol. 54, “Constructing Race” (Jan. 1997): 159, 166. Imanuel Geiss makes essentially the same point in Geschichte des Rassismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1988), 84–88. I have written in more detail concerning the Iberian origins of antiblack racism, stressing the importance of the originally anti-Semitic concept of “purity of blood,” in Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 70–73.
46. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), passim.
47. Marcel Trudell, L’Esclavage au Canada français; histoire et conditions de l’esclavage (Québec: Presses Universitaires Laval, 1960), 20–35. Of course, slave labor was not the major source of economic growth in New York and New England, but it was more important than many historians have realized.
48. George M. Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 6.
49. These and many similar antiblack and anti-Semitic quotations can be found on the Web, geocities.com/ru00ru00/racismhistory/18thcent.html.
50. Ironically, Linnaeus’s classification of human types along with all animals overturned the effect of Adam’s biblical naming of the animals. By including humans as part of the animal kingdom, he also inadvertently opened the way to a theory of polygenesis.
51. Fredrickson, Racism, 56–58.
52. Jordan, White Over Black, 499–502.
53. Politics, books 1 and 2, in Thomas Wiedemann, Greek and Roman Slavery (London: Routledge, 1981), 18–20. Plato brought the concept of slavery into his cosmology, positing a dualism between the primary cause, which was intelligent and divine, and the mechanical or slave cause, which was irrational, disorderly, and lacking in both freedom and conscious purpose. Like a wise master, the Demiurge guided the ananke of the material universe toward the good. Gregory Vlastos, “Slavery in Plato’s Republic,” The Philosophical Review 50 (1941): 289–304. Plato also associated slavery with the unruly multitude as well as the chaotic material world devoid of Logos. And he spoke of a “slavish people” who lack the capacity for self-government and higher pursuits of virtue and culture. For Plato, a slavish mind might hold a true belief but could not know the truth of this belief. The human institution of slavery thus reflected basic structures of the universe. Davis, Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 67–68.
54. Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 76–100.
55. Davis, Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 167–73.
56. Karl Jacoby, “Slaves by Nature? Domestic Animals and Human Slaves,” Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 15 (April 1994): 89–97. This article originated as a paper in my graduate seminar at Yale. Keith Bradley, probably the leading expert on Roman slavery, has drawn on the work of Karl Jacoby and myself to show in a brilliant article that “animalization” was a central feature of even nonracial slavery in antiquity: “Animalizing the Slave: The Truth of Fiction,” Journal of Roman Studies 90 (2000): 110–25.
57. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: Norton, 1999), 157–75.
58. Jacoby, “Slaves by Nature?,” 89–97; Stanley L. Engerman, “Labor Incentives and Manumission in Ancient Greek Slavery,” in Essays in Economic Theory, Growth, and Labour Markets: A Festschrift in Honor of E. Drandakis, ed. George Bitros and Yannis Katsoulacos (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2002), 213–17.
59. Theoretically, Aristotle’s ideal slave, like a genetically engineered subhuman, would be as content and submissive as a trained dog, but better capable of understanding his owner’s ideas and wishes. Aristotle clearly assumed this would lead to relative harmony between the citizens of the city-state and their compliant force of slave workers. But, even aside from the ways humans have exploited domestic animals, there would still appear to be a flaw in the ideal. If the natural slave became capable of carrying out many of the more skilled and humanly sensitive tasks ordinary slaves were expected to do, they would also be capable of the pride, sensitivity, envy, resentment, and rebellion of human beings. In short, “the problem of slavery” would remain.
60. Henry Highland Garnet, Walker’s Appeal, With a Brief Sketch of his Life. By Henry Highland Garnet. And also Garnet’s Address to the Slaves of the United States of America (New York, 1848), 92.
61. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 96–97, 299–333. The quotation describing the Sambo stereotype in the American South comes from Stanley Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 82. Without implying any biological or hereditary change, Elkins argued that slavery in the United States was so distinctively harsh that it produced a psychological transformation in slaves, similar to that of many inmates in Nazi concentration camps, and thus actually created many Sambos.
62. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 12, 97, 299–333, 367n41.
63. John Stauffer, Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (New York: Twelve, Hachette Book Group, 2008), 24.
64. [Frederick Douglass], Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, ed. Benjamin Quarles (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), 66–67, 95; Waldo E. Martin, The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 29.
65. Terence Collins, “Phillis Wheatley: The Dark Side of the Poetry,” Phylon, 36 (1975): 80; James Baldwin, “An Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Davis,” New York Review of Books, January 7, 1971 (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/10695; James Baldwin, James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son (New York: Bantam Book, 1964), 4.
66. Toni Morrison, “Afterword,” The Bluest Eye (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000).
67. Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (New York: Times Books, Random House, 1995), 177–84. The issue of self-esteem is doubtless related to the fact that more than one-half of all black males still drop out of high school.
68. Daryl Michael Scott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880–1996 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). Some of the social scientists who focused attention on “the damaged black psyche” were in effect repeating
the kind of argument made by Leonard Bacon, discussed in the introduction, that the “degradation” of slavery had rendered blacks incapable of freedom in America.
2. THE FIRST EMANCIPATIONS: FREEDOM AND DISHONOR
1. Chicago Tribune, January 3, 1893; Frederick Douglass, “Lecture on Haiti,” in The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, ed. Philip S. Foner, vol. 4 (New York: International Publishers, 1955), 484. The speech recorded in the Chicago Tribune differs substantially from the text preserved in the Library of Congress and reprinted by Foner; I have drawn on both versions. The Tribune noted that the dedication ceremony, which was planned to commemorate the eighty-ninth anniversary of Haitian independence, had not been “advertised to any extent” and was apparently attended by only one exposition official, who rushed to the scene just in time to make a speech. Douglass had been involved in an uphill struggle at the exposition to win some recognition of black achievements. See Elliott M. Rudwick and August Meier, “Black Man in the ‘White City’: Negroes and the Columbian Exposition, 1893,” Phylon 26 (Winter 1965): 354–61; Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 52–55.
2. Douglass, “Lecture on Haiti,” 485–86.
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation Page 45