The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

Discovering Animalization

Some Evidence of Animalization

EPILOGUE

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

A Note About the Author

Other Books by This Author

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 Berkeley 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.