The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (60 page)

5.
Kwame Anthony Appiah,
Experiments in Ethics
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 144, 247.

6.
Joel Williamson,
The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 185–86.

7.
Smith,
Less Than Human,
25.

8.
In war, combatants often escalate dehumanizing measures by responding to sadistic acts of the other side. In World War II the Japanese invited brutalizing retaliation by starving, bayoneting, beheading, raping, and even vivisecting prisoners of war, according to
Evan Thomas’s review of
Max Hastings’s
Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45
,
The New York Times Book Review,
March 30, 2008, online. But there was also much racism in the Western portrayal of the Japanese; the British general Sir
William Slim “captured the mood of the time: the Japanese soldier, Slim said, ‘is the most formidable fighting insect in history.’ ”

9.
I will later try to clarify the relationship between animalization and racism.

Ironically, the
Slavic root for “slave,”
rab,
as in
rabotat,
to work, made its way into “robot” (actually the old Czech word for serf). The likening of a slave to a robot or inhuman machine parallels in some ways the comparison of the slave to an animal or a permanent child. My friend
Harold Brackman informs me that the current “transhumanist movement” is focusing increasing attention on the ethical implications of such things as implanting micro nanorobots in the brains of Alzheimer patients. It would appear that the issue of humanized machines might well replace in many ways the issue of animalization.

10.
Winthrop D. Jordan imaginatively develops this important theme, with regard to white attitudes toward black Africans and African American slaves, in
White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968). According to Jordan, racial slavery as it developed in colonial North America was a system of psychological exploitation, or cultural parasitism, that allowed the whites to achieve a sense of communal solidarity and purpose through the systematic debasement of African Americans. After surveying a vast Anglo-American literature regarding Africans and African Americans, Jordan concluded that American society became functionally based on a rationale of racial superiority.

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,
Die 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.