The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (2 page)

As for subject matter, this book begins with an extensive discussion of the issue of dehumanization and its implications—the treatment of slaves as if they were domesticated animals and the continuing need of African Americans to confront and counteract the kind of white psychological exploitation that deprived them of the respect and dignity needed for acceptance as equals in a white society. I have long interpreted the problem of slavery as centering on the impossibility of converting humans into the totally compliant, submissive, accepting chattels symbolized by Aristotle’s ideal of the “
natural slave.” Throughout the book, I devote much attention to the views of
free blacks and former slaves who refute the belief that blacks are in some way subhuman but who also deplore the fact that extremely brutal treatment sometimes leads slaves to act like compliant “brutes.” This perceived “
animalization,” implied by the language of such figures as David
Walker and Frederick Douglass, took a different form when whites expressed fear of vicious, noncompliant, animal-like blacks intent on rebellion and revenge, as exemplified by the Haitian Revolution.
Or when prominent Northern clergymen attacked slavery but insisted that the “Irremediable Degradation” of slaves required the “colonization” of free
blacks outside the United States. These issues of black inferiority reached one kind of climax in Britain, as we see in the last chapter, when the lecturing of
African American
abolitionists helped to destroy
British support for the American Colonization Society and when the lecturers expressed amazement over the lack of
racism and basked in the public recognition of their full humanity. As Walker had predicted, despite his frequent despair, “Treat us like men, and there is no danger but we will all live in peace and happiness together.”

Free blacks, I argue, provided the key to slave emancipation. Frederick
Douglass, a former slave and the most prominent African American of the nineteenth century, replied to a question posed by
Harriet Beecher Stowe by stressing that slaveholders benefited most from the low condition of the American free colored population and that “The most telling, the most killing refutation of slavery, is the presentation of an industrious, enterprising, thrifty, and intelligent free black population.” One crucial chapter of the book describes how black leaders, aided by white men and women abolitionists, struggled to achieve this goal, and how a few blacks, like Dr.
James McCune Smith, attained the highest standards of education and success. Another chapter counters widespread misinterpretations and shows how free blacks played the main role in sustaining antislavery agitation in the 1820s, overcoming the colonizationists and launching the radical “
immediatist” movement of the 1830s.

As we see in the chapter on
Haiti, free blacks like
Toussaint Louverture played a central part in the
Haitian Revolution, which showed that blacks could defeat the seasoned armies of
Napoleon as well as the British. The Haitian Revolution continued to inspire and be celebrated by free African Americans. But the international response to Haiti helped to create a picture of national ineptitude and incompetence as well as a genuinely impoverished nation that replaced what had been the richest and most productive colony in the New World. The chapter on the impact of Haiti is followed by a set of chapters on the
colonization movements in America, which were strongly influenced by the fear of a Haitian-like revolution in America (and in the 1820s, thousands of American free blacks accepted
the Haitian government’s invitation to migrate to Haiti, much to the regret of most everyone).

The issues of
colonization and migration are extremely complex and have generally been misunderstood. From the time of Jefferson until and including that of Lincoln, most
American leaders, to say nothing of a large majority of whites, believed that any total ending of American slavery would require an extensive system of colonizing freed slaves in Africa, the Caribbean, or Central America. Given the increase and persistence of racism and the deplorable conditions that African Americans faced, a succession of
black leaders from
Paul Cuffe in the early nineteenth century to
Marcus Garvey in the 1920s promoted their own plans for emigration to a promised land. For this reason I devote some attention to the influential biblical
Exodus narrative of
Israelite slaves escaping from
Egypt, to historical examples of migration and expulsion, to the history of
Liberia, and even to Garvey’s leadership of a true mass movement as “the final act” in a long play.

But, as I have already mentioned, it was free African Americans who took the leadership in counteracting and checking the colonization movement and in convincing white abolitionists that it was a racist cause. As black writers and journalists contributed to an evolving black culture, it contained a genuine pride in the way African American workers had helped create the United States and how African American ancestors had fought in the American Revolution and the War of 1812. This patriotism underlay the crucial goals of elevating and improving the free black population and freeing its members from subservience, dishonor, and persecution simply because of their color.

While many chapters focus on race as the major barrier to slave emancipation, the book rests on the premise that the Age of Emancipation depended on the Anglo-American abolition movements. I wholly endorse the economists and historians who have emphasized the economic strength and vitality of the slave system and who reject any theory that it was on the road to natural
extinction. As the historian
Seymour Drescher has argued, the
Nazis and
Soviets restored a huge and highly profitable slave regime in the 1940s.

As I have tried to demonstrate in my trilogy, the abolition of slavery depended on a fundamental change in the Western moral perception
of the institution, followed by the rise of antislavery movements in Britain, America,
France, and eventually Brazil. Accordingly, this book devotes much thought to abolitionism, especially in Britain, where it achieved the most dramatic results. Yet by the 1850s there was a broad consensus that Britain’s emancipation act had been an economic failure, even if the freed slaves were better off. This issue directed more attention to the outcome of antislavery in the United States, where I turn to such questions as
fugitive slaves,
free soil, and the acceptance of violence.

The discussion of abolitionism in Britain also leads to the vital question of whether this particular reform, challenging a form of private property and an institution that had been globally accepted from biblical times onward, could become a model for other kinds of protest and radical change. Most American
abolitionists were proud of America’s political democracy and strongly supported democratic movements abroad. Ironically, abolitionism reached its first great success, especially in mobilizing a large part of the total population, in a monarchic and aristocratic nation that also led the way in the
Industrial Revolution, with its exploitation of countless men, women, and children in factories and mines. I therefore give some attention to the growing ties between
British abolitionists and the radical
Chartist movement against “
wage slavery,” an issue that visiting American abolitionists such as
William Lloyd Garrison and
Frederick Douglass had to confront. In the Epilogue I also continue to consider the Age of Emancipation, as a model for other reforms and as probably the greatest landmark of willed moral progress in human history.

But the epilogue also stresses the extraordinary fortuity and contingency of this outcome, which owed much to the highly unpredictable nature of the American
Civil War. Surprisingly, despite Britain’s global leadership in antislavery, the British government, press, and upper classes took a very hostile view of the Northern cause early in the war. This was partly the result of complex historical relations between the two countries, reinforced by widespread misunderstanding of the constitutional limitations on
Lincoln’s government, to say nothing of British dependence on Southern
cotton and aristocratic fear of democratic reforms. The British government, prodded by France, came close to recognizing the Confederacy’s independence and to intervening to stop the war. Many leading newspapers even denounced Lincoln’s
Emancipation Proclamation, though the public
increasingly celebrated this turning point and finally responded with enthusiasm to the
Thirteenth Amendment’s liberation of all slaves.

But I also argue, in the epilogue, that if the Southerners had achieved independence by winning or avoiding the war, or by
British and French intervention, it is clear that slavery would have continued well into the twentieth century. By 1860, two-thirds of the wealthiest Americans lived in the South, where the value of slaves continued to soar along with a major export economy. Moreover, many slaveholders dreamed of annexing an expanding tropical proslavery empire ranging from Cuba to Central America, and it is conceivable that an independent Confederacy might have moved in that direction. In 1857 a prominent Southerner even briefly became president of
Nicaragua and restored both slavery and the African slave trade. The Southern goal of presenting a wholly “modernized” version of racial slavery would have been reinforced by the shocking rise and spread of “
scientific racism,” in Britain and Europe as well as America.

But there were many contingent events that seemed almost “providential,” such as Union general
William T. Sherman’s great victory at the
Battle for Atlanta, which ensured Lincoln’s defeat of the almost proslavery Democratic candidate,
George B. McClellan, in the presidential
election of 1864 (Lincoln had earlier doubted whether he could win). This opened the road to the possible enactment of the Thirteenth Amendment, something inconceivable at the beginning of the war. While much can be said about the later failure of Reconstruction, the following century of Jim Crow discrimination and segregation, and the persistence of various forms of penal servitude and human trafficking, I conclude by viewing the Thirteenth,
Fourteenth, and
Fifteenth Amendments as the culmination of the Age of Emancipation—the award not only of liberation but of citizenship and the right to vote to the most oppressed class of Americans for well over two hundred years.

Long ago, when I began looking for salient features of “the Age of Emancipation”—the century of struggle, debate, rebellion, and warfare that led to the eradication of slavery in the New World—I was struck by the significance of two subjects that have received surprisingly little emphasis from historians: the
Haitian Revolution and the American colonization movement.

The former, which was intertwined in complex ways with the
French Revolution and European wars for empire, destroyed from 1791 to 1804 the richest and most productive colony in the New World—French
Saint-Domingue. White refugees, their slaves, and black seamen carried news of this first large-scale emancipation of slaves in modern history to the rest of the Caribbean and South America as well as to New
Orleans,
Charleston,
Virginia,
Philadelphia, and
New York. Even the vaguest awareness that blacks had somehow cast off their chains and founded the new republic of Haiti brought a glimmer of hope to thousands of slaves and free blacks who were the common victims of a remarkably unified Atlantic slave system. The crucial role of free blacks in the revolution, including the great leader
Toussaint Louverture, highlighted a group that would continue to have central importance in the Age of Emancipation, especially in their efforts to counteract white beliefs in the slaves’ incapacity for freedom.
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But the very words “Santo Domingo,” which English-speakers used to refer to the doomed French colony of Saint-Domingue, evoked
at least a moment of alarm and terror in the minds of
slaveholders throughout the Americas, despite poetic and other tributes to
Toussaint Louverture, whose capture and death in a French prison dissociated him from the grimmer consequences of the revolution. Sometimes this example of self-liberation was dismissed as the freakish result of French legislative and military blunders exacerbated by the subversive ideology of British and French abolitionism and the
tropical diseases that decimated the British and French armies. Sometimes
abolitionists vacillated between a policy of ignoring the explosive subject and warning that
insurrections and racial war would be inevitable unless the slaves were peacefully emancipated and converted into grateful free peasants. But whether the Haitian Revolution hastened or delayed the numerous emancipations of the following century, imagery of the great upheaval hovered over the antislavery debates like a bloodstained ghost. No Internet was needed to distribute
Bryan Edwards’s unforgettable descriptions of a white infant impaled on a stake, of white women being repeatedly raped on the corpses of their husbands and fathers, and of the fate of
Madame Sejourné:

The idea of deporting or colonizing emancipated blacks outside the North American states or colonies long preceded the Haitian Revolution. But in the United States the specter of Haiti, reinforced by the Virginia
slave conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 and the massive
Barbadian insurrection of 1816, all of which were influenced by the Haitian Revolution, gave an enormous impetus to the
colonization movement. Some advocates understood colonization as a way of making slavery more secure by removing the dangerous (as Haiti had shown) free black and colored population. But colonization was more commonly seen as the first and indispensable step toward the gradual abolition of slavery. In effect, it would reverse and undo the nearly two-century flow of the Atlantic slave ships and by transporting the freed slaves back to Africa would gradually and peacefully redeem
America from what
James Madison called “the dreadful fruitfulness of the original sin of the African trade.”
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The very thought of shipping from 1.5 to over 4 million black Americans to an inhospitable Africa has seemed so preposterous and even criminal that many
historians have tended to dismiss the subject of
colonization out of hand (despite the success of white Americans in “removing”
Indians to the West and ultimately to “
reservations”). This means, however, that historians have never really explained why the coupling of emancipation and colonization appealed to leading American statesmen from Jefferson to Lincoln, why this formula won the endorsement by 1832 of nine state legislatures, and why William Lloyd Garrison, Theodore
Weld, the
Tappan brothers,
Gerrit Smith, James G.
Birney, and virtually all the other prominent and radical
abolitionists of their generation accepted colonization before finally embracing the doctrine of “
immediate emancipation.” The American fusion of antislavery and colonization—what historian
William W. Freehling has termed the “conditional termination” of slavery—gave a distinctive stamp to America’s Age of Emancipation and to the abolitionism that suddenly erupted in the 1830s from an almost religious disavowal and repudiation of the colonizationist faith.
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