The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (58 page)

In the present volume I have stressed that even many abolitionists recognized two major barriers to any “
immediate” emancipation. Since for millennia slaves had been defined as private property, freeing them without some form of compensation to owners would set a dangerous precedent in societies in which property rights had become transcendent. Second, before the sudden rise of “immediatism” among British and American abolitionists around 1830, it was taken for granted that slaves would need some kind of “preparation” for freedom. Contrary to the wishes of the leading radicals, the famous British emancipation act of 1833 provided for both generous compensation to owners and a period of “apprenticeship” for freed slaves. Earlier, five of the Northern American states had enacted emancipation measures that freed only the children born of slaves, in their twenties, thus combining some supposed preparation with compensation through youthful labor. Various forms of gradual emancipation followed the Spanish American wars of independence.

Holland and some other countries followed Britain’s example, but as I have strongly emphasized in this volume, white Americans, who thought they faced the prospect of living together with millions of freed blacks who were totally “unprepared” for equal citizenship, clung to the “solution” of colonization as the only possible route to slave emancipation. This white consensus about the exile of blacks evoked a powerful response on the part of free African Americans who were determined to counter racism and launch a radical abolition movement as well as elevate and uplift their own population. Such figures as
Frederick
Douglass and
James McCune Smith exemplified some success in achieving respect, dignity, and acceptance as equals in a white society.

Douglass’s response to
Chartism and so-called
wage slavery in Britain illustrates the complexity of comparing
chattel slavery with
other forms of exploitation and servitude. Because slavery has long epitomized the most extreme form of domination and oppression, it has served as a metaphor for rejecting almost every deprivation of freedom (including “enslavement” to sex, greed, drugs, ignorance, and even ambition). More important, as with Douglass’s acceptance of the Chartists’ assault on local bondage, despite his insistence on the uniqueness of chattel slavery, the comparison has provided a way of extending the historically successful moral condemnation of slavery to other forms of coerced labor and exploitation, ranging from the traditional sexist oppression of women to modern human trafficking.

While the historical ownership of slaves as property meant that even a highly privileged slave could suddenly be sold as a field hand, the fact that property in slaves represented a financial investment provided a certain protection totally lacking among workers in modern concentration camps. When we read of a highly privileged slave in charge of boiling
sugar on a
Jamaican sugar plantation, a head man who reports only to an overseer and attorney, or an enslaved Mississippi River boatman who hires free workers as he transports cotton to
New Orleans, we realize that a few New World chattel slaves were considerably better off than the millions of coerced laborers in Nazi and Soviet camps, or even many modern sex slaves.
²⁹

Careful historical comparisons could modify the view that chattel slavery was a wholly unique social evil and also draw on the strong positive legacies of Anglo-American abolitionism. From the 1890s to the 1930s, radical American reformers like
Daniel DeLeon,
Eugene Debs,
Jack London,
Upton Sinclair,
Clarence Darrow, and members of the
Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW) continually expressed their indebtedness to the abolitionists, who had also been treated as public enemies but who had found ways to mobilize and transform public opinion. “We are the modern abolitionists,” exclaimed the Wobbly leader
James Thompson, “fighting against wage slavery.”
³⁰
Somewhat similar tributes to the abolitionist model were made by feminists and black leaders of the
NAACP.

The issue of legacies is complex. Despite the dismal failure of American
Reconstruction, the succeeding century of
Jim Crow discrimination, and the legacy of racism even in the Caribbean and South America, Anglo-American emancipation had a profound influence on the freeing of slaves in the French, Dutch, and Danish colonies, and especially in
Cuba and
Brazil. We should also note
that in the twentieth century the legacy of New World emancipation extended, thanks in part to the
League of Nations and the
United Nations, to the outlawing of chattel slavery throughout the world.

When thinking of the earlier Age of Emancipation as a model for the future, one can of course point to the extraordinary contingency I have emphasized, especially involving the American Civil War and the goals of an independent Confederacy, as well as what Seymour Drescher has termed the amazing “reversion” to mass forced labor in Nazi and Soviet Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. Yet when viewed in retrospect, influenced by today’s public opinion and social values, many people would no doubt regard the outlawing of New World and even global slavery as inevitable. But I would conclude, given the overall findings of my trilogy, that the outlawing of New World slavery was both astonishing and, at times, even foreseeable. Astonishing in view of the institution’s antiquity and modern economic strength, resilience, and importance. Foreseeable, if not from what I term the revolutionary shift in moral perception, then from the time in the early 1830s when British abolitionists, having triumphed in their mobilization of public opinion, began demanding the “immediate” ending of bondage around the world, and in 1833 achieving a compromise that soon led to the freeing of 800,000 colonial slaves. If even New World slave emancipation might have required another fifty years or more, one is also impressed by how limited in time the Soviet and Nazi “reversion” really was.

The global outlawing of chattel slavery has already become an important precedent for abolishing human trafficking and other forms of coerced labor—as we read the shocking estimates of the number of women and men held today in different kinds of bondage. But as for any inevitable moral “progress,” when we view the present state of the world with respect to human nature, there is less cause for optimism. Many humans still love to kill, torture, oppress, and dominate. Moral progress seems to be historical, cultural, and institutional, not the result of a genetic improvement in individual human nature. One needs only to note what happened in a highly “civilized” country like
Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. If we imagine a worst-case scenario in which future climate change or nuclear war breaks up modern nations as we know them, antimodernists and ultraconservatives might well restore chattel slavery on a large scale, especially in the
Middle East.
³¹
If my friends and I were suddenly
stripped of our twentieth-century conditioning and plummeted back to Mississippi in 1860, we would doubtless take for granted our rule over slaves. So an astonishing historical achievement really matters. The outlawing of chattel slavery in the New World, and then globally, represents a crucial landmark of moral progress that we should never forget.

This project concludes a three-volume scholarly enterprise that began in 1958 when a Guggenheim Fellowship supported my initial research in Britain that led to my book
The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture
(1966). This prefatory volume explores the historical background that provided a framework for the great struggles over slavery in modern times. It is addressed essentially to a problem of moral perception—why it was that at a certain moment of history a small number of men and women not only saw the full horror of a social evil to which people had been blind for centuries, but felt impelled to attack it through personal testimony and cooperative action.

The next volume,
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823
(1975), moves on to the social, economic, and political contexts that shaped an antislavery ideology and which defined the implications and consequences of early antislavery protests in Britain, France, and the United States. Like the preceding work, the second volume suggests that any serious challenge to slavery carried momentous implications precisely because slavery had long symbolized the most extreme model of treating human beings as exploitable objects. To question such a model of domination that had been accepted for millennia could lead to the questioning of most forms of domination and submission.

During the long period between the publication of the second volume and the completion now of this third volume of the trilogy, I wrote nine other books, many of them on related topics involving slavery and emancipation. From the very start I realized that this final volume of the project, on the “Age of Emancipation,” would present the most formidable problems of
coverage, selectivity, organization, and method. Accordingly, when I began envisioning the third volume, soon after the publication of the second, I decided to first write an exploratory pilot study that would put the “Age of Emancipation” within a broad historical survey of slavery and antislavery from antiquity to the modern United Nations. Therefore, when I was awarded a priceless National Endowment for the Humanities–Henry E. Huntington Library Fellowship in 1976, I concentrated my efforts on the pilot study, or what would become
Slavery and Human Progress
(1984). While I had earlier done research for the second volume of the trilogy at the wonderful Huntington Library in San Marino, California, I was now able to make use of the library’s invaluable resources for both
Slavery and Human Progress
and
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation.

As I explained in a report to the National Endowment for the Humanities, my goal at that time was to use history as a source for disciplined moral reflection on the ironies, achievements, tragedies, and unintended consequences of human idealism and self-interest, unraveling some of the complex historical ties between human exploitation and liberation, ties that give a multitude of meanings to notions of human “progress.” In many ways
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation
benefited from the discoveries and decisions I made when writing
Slavery and Human Progress.
And as I have indicated in the preface to this volume, both
Slavery and Human Progress
and then
Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World
(2006) helped to free me from trying to cover too much material in the final volume of the trilogy.

Much of my writing on slavery during the past third-of-a-century was made possible by the assistance of further generous research grants to Yale University from the National Endowment of the Humanities, beginning in 1980. While the grants were primarily intended for
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation,
the invaluable research also made it possible to treat British West Indian emancipation and related subjects in much greater depth in
Slavery and Human Progress.

Since I had agreed to teach and hold the first chair in American Civilization at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris for the academic year 1980–81, I was fortunate as the project director in having Loueva F. Pflueger, an administrative assistant in the Yale Department of History, oversee the budget and work with Joan Binder, a full-time associate in research who managed the project in the United States while I was abroad. Ms. Pflueger and Ms. Binder also worked with Dr. Fiona E. Spiers, my full-time, highly experienced researcher in Britain. I could not be more
grateful to Joan Binder and Fiona Spiers for the outstanding work they did in gathering, sorting, and organizing a vast collection of largely primary source materials. While I was in Paris, Ms. Binder also did research on her own from Boston to Washington and supervised the work of quite a few student researchers, including Amy Dru Stanley and Donna Dennis. Dr. Spiers, whom I visited many times from Paris when I did research in Britain, examined primary sources in Dublin, London, Glasgow, Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester, Leeds, Hull, and Durham. When I returned to Yale to teach in the academic year 1981–82, Joan Binder presented me with enormous well-organized files of source material.

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.