The Price of Slavery

The Price of Slavery

‘The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation,’ by David Brion DavisBy BRENDA WINEAPPLEMARCH 28, 2014
Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story In 1862, when Nathaniel Hawthorne headed south from New England to see the Civil War firsthand, he came upon a group of former slaves trudging northward. “They seemed a kind of creature by themselves, not altogether human,” he wrote, “but perhaps quite as good, and akin to the fauns and rustic deities of olden times.” “Whoever may be benefited by the results of this war,” he added, “it will not be the present generation of negroes.”
Open Book: The End of a Long RoadMARCH 28, 2014 Hawthorne’s stunning comparison of real men and women to half-human creatures, even if kindly intended, gets to the heart of David Brion Davis’s “The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation,” the richly textured final volume in his exceptional trilogy about slavery in the Western Hemisphere. “I have long interpreted the problem of slavery,” he writes in his introduction, “as centering on the impossibility of converting humans into the totally compliant, submissive, accepting chattel symbolized by Aristotle’s ideal of the ‘natural slave.’ ”

An ad posted by the slave trader William F. Talbott of Lexington, Ky., in 1853. Credit Hulton Archive/Getty Images Less a political historian than a moral philosopher, Davis focuses here on 19th-century trans-Atlantic abolitionism and, in particular, the intellectual and theological origins of the antislavery movement in America. Borrowing from Freud and Descartes, he suggests that slaveholders projected onto their chattels the qualities they repressed in themselves. Particularly in America, the black population represented to white people “the finitude, imperfections, sensuality, self-mockery and depravity of human nature, thereby amplifying the opposite qualities in the white race.”

As a consequence, an American dream of freedom and opportunity was inseparable from a white illusion of superiority, bolstered by the subjugation and “animalization” of black people. That is, slaves were considered domesticated savages who would, if given the chance, revert to murder and mayhem. To many whites, particularly pro-slavery Southerners, this seemed the lesson of the violent and ultimately successful Haitian Revolution, which represented, as Davis puts it, “the unleashing of pure Id.”

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But the ironies of history are boundless. Although Haiti’s slaves did win their freedom, a prolonged civil war damaged the country’s economy. Seizing this opportunity, planters elsewhere in the Caribbean and in the American South increased production, which meant they needed to acquire more slaves. In 1803, South Carolina reopened its slave trade, importing 40,000 Africans in the next four years. Yet Great Britain, having lost as many as 50,000 soldiers and seamen in Haiti, responded differently, emancipating 800,000 colonial slaves in 1834 without spilling a drop of blood.
After Haiti, many well-meaning American reformers wanted to expunge the black “Id” peacefully by recolonizing free blacks in Africa. While Davis’s use of such Freudianism may seem overbearing at times, his analysis of the underpinnings of the American Colonization Society, founded in 1816, is subtle, wide-ranging and consistently judicious. Refusing to dismiss colonization out of hand, he places it within the context of the Exodus narrative of deliverance, which he then persuasively connects to American messianism. He also shows that many supporters of colonization did not consider black people to be inherently inferior. Rather, in the first decades of the 19th century, evangelical reformers argued that slavery and prejudice had so completely dehumanized the African-American that he could never escape what the New England clergyman Leonard Bacon termed “the abyss of his degradation” without being relocated to a less corrupt environment.

But, as Davis cogently observes, not only did the pompous style of many colonization speeches reinforce the “self-­justificatory power of the myth of America,” the rhetoric was “so abstract and grandiose that it almost precluded serious discussion of capital investment, technological assistance, labor skills and markets.” Without money or training, how were the new colonists to establish a country, much less a prosperous one? What about the commercial networks they would endanger or the native people they would displace? As Davis makes clear, “the glaring defect in the colonizationist ideology was the refusal to recognize the vital contributions that blacks had made and would continue to make to American civilization.”

Black leaders, understandably resistant to the colonization movement, were crucial to its demise. Except for William Lloyd Garrison’s antislavery newspaper, The Liberator, initially financed by the wealthy black Philadelphian James Forten, for almost 10 years most of the white press refused to print the denunciations of colonization issued by black organizations. But the African-American newspaper Freedom’s Journal roundly criticized the American Colonization Society as perpetuating rather than eradicating slavery. And in 1829, David Walker’s radical “Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World” called on nonwhites to unite, to prove “that we are men, and not brutes, as we have been represented, and by millions treated.” Smuggled into the South, the “Appeal” caused so much consternation that when Walker died of consumption in 1830, it was widely believed that he had been murdered.

Black abolitionists like James Forten, Richard Allen and Samuel Cornish demanded an integrated American society, and by the 1830s the American abolition movement had evolved into an energetic biracial entity. Davis argues that the white abolitionists, however paternalistic, were sincerely inspired by Anglo-American Christianity and by the efforts of religious women. The Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, which first met in New York in 1837, published several significant pamphlets calling for racial and gender equality without any patronizing blather, although by today’s standards their emphasis on the “elevation” of the black population might sound sanctimonious and condescending. That’s part of Davis’s larger argument: Abolitionism was not monolithic in makeup or in motivation. Black emigrationists were not the same as white colonizationists, nor was black nationalism the same as white nationalism.

Additionally, as Davis demonstrates, every movement contains nuances and paradoxes. When British reformers linked abolition to their crusade against wage slavery, Frederick Douglass replied that unlike exploited workers, chattel slaves did not even have “the privilege of saying ‘myself.’ ” Yet a correlation between these forms of bondage, as Davis points out, helps us to extend “the historically successful moral condemnation of slavery to other forms of coerced labor and exploitation,” from Nazi concentration camps to 21st-century sex trafficking.

“Moral progress seems to be historical, cultural and institutional,” Davis concludes, “not the result of a genetic improvement in human nature.” The passage of the Fugitive Slave Law and the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, as well as the South’s increasing belligerence, suggested to many abolitionists that slavery could not be ended without violence. But although the Civil War was truly catastrophic, the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment could not have been predicted at its start — or, for that matter, the subsequent end of slavery in Cuba and Brazil, which resulted partly because of Anglo-American abolition. Moral progress may be historical, cultural and institutional, but it isn’t inevitable. All the more reason this superb book should be essential reading for anyone wishing to understand our complex and contradictory past.

THE PROBLEM OF SLAVERY IN THE AGE OF EMANCIPATION



By David Brion Davis



422 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $30