The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (62 page)

10.
J. Philmore [pseud.],
Two Dialogues on the Man-Trade
(London, 1760), 54; David Brion Davis,
The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966), 418. Diderot also defended the right of bondsmen to use any possible means to regain their freedom.

11.
The importance for American blacks of the Haitian Revolution has been explored in much recent scholarship, in particular see White,
Encountering Revolution,
145–46; and the essays in Jackson and Bacon,
African Americans and the Haitian Revolution.

12.
Douglass, “Lecture on Haiti,” 486.

13.
Eugene D. Genovese,
From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), xviii–xx, 82–125. Black slaves staged a massive uprising in Iraq as early as 869 CE and were not suppressed for fourteen years. See Davis,
Slavery and Human Progress,
5–8. But no slaves in history had supplanted their masters and created a state based in principle on universal freedom. Yet, as much as the Haitian Declaration of
Independence positioned Haiti among the “world’s free peoples,” it was clear that its claims of freedom against enslavement were for Haitians. The document officially rejected a “missionary spirit” in spreading the revolution, and shirked from being “the lawgivers of the Caribbean,” or letting their “glory consist of troubling the peace of the neighboring islands.” The other islands, unlike Haiti, the Declaration claimed, had not been “drenched in the innocent blood of its inhabitants … they have no vengeance to claim from the authority that protects them.” “The Haitian Declaration of Independence, January 1, 1804,” in
Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789–1804: a Brief History with Documents,
ed. Laurent Dubois and John D. Garrigus (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006), 188. Despite the assurances in the Declaration, British officials in London and in Jamaica perceived Haiti as a troubling precedent, and worried that a spirit of rebellion would emanate from the island. Julia Gaffield, “Haiti and Jamaica in the Remaking of the Early Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World,”
William and Mary Quarterly
69, no. 3 (July 1, 2012): 583–614. And even for Haitians, the ideal of universal freedom was circumscribed in the new republic—there was no right of public assembly or of association, and the Catholic faith remained the state religion, not to mention the aggressive disciplinary regime set up within the constitution aimed at shoving the new republic back onto the road to prosperity. Carolyn E. Fick, “The Saint-Domingue Slave Revolution and the Unfolding of Independence, 1791–1804,” in
The World of the Haitian Revolution,
ed. David Patrick Geggus and Norman Fiering (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 177, 183–84.

14.
Orlando Patterson has argued that the “
Sambo” stereotype is “an ideological
imperative of all systems of slavery, from the most primitive to the most advanced,” and is “simply an elaboration of the notion that the slave is quintessentially a person without honor,” totally lacking in “manhood.” While rightly insisting, contrary to
Stanley Elkins, that slaves retained “the irrepressible yearning for dignity and recognition,” Patterson seems to underestimate the degree to which many oppressed peoples internalize the standards and values of their oppressors.
Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 96–97. Michael Walzer, drawing on centuries of commentary on Exodus, emphasizes the extreme difficulty of transforming slaves into freemen (the lesson of the forty years in the wilderness), and holds that in Egypt the bulk of slaves “admitted into their souls the degradation of slavery.” He adds, however, that at least some of the Israelite slaves were ready to fight and thought of themselves as free or potentially free.
Exodus and Revolution
(New York: Basic Books, 1985), 43–66. The tension between the slave’s internalized degradation and his “irrepressible yearning for dignity and recognition” has been central to the continuing debate over both slavery and the human condition; it was precisely because so many slaves degraded themselves in order to please their masters that the example of
Haiti was so inspiring to blacks like
Denmark Vesey and David Walker.

15.
There has always been confusion and controversy over the
terms used to designate persons of African and mixed African and European ancestry. In the United States the term “Negro” usually included “colored” persons of mixed ancestry (usually lumped together as “mulattoes”), and there was no widely accepted terminology to denote the varying degrees of racial intermixture or phenotypic distinctions such as lighter skin and Caucasoid hair. In the Caribbean, usage varied from one island to another and was never entirely consistent. In the French colonies, the legal category “free men of color” (
hommes de couleur libres
or
gens de couleur
) included free blacks; some British officials extended the term “free colored” to include blacks as well as browns. But in the Caribbean, both whites and freedmen drew sharp distinctions based on color and accorded higher status to persons with diminishing degrees of African ancestry. As far as possible I will follow the usage that best fits the region being discussed. When referring to the United States, I will use the term “black” or “African American” in general, except where the context indicates a more specific phenotype. When discussing the West Indies, “free coloreds,” “
gens de couleur,
” and “
anciens libres
” will usually refer to people of mixed racial ancestry but will sometimes include, especially in Saint-Domingue, free blacks. Following the practice of recent historians of the Caribbean, I will use the convenient term “freedmen” to refer to African Americans of both sexes, whether colored or black, who were either manumitted or born free.

16.
Lyman L. Johnson, “Manumission in Colonial Buenos Aires, 1776–1810,”
The Hispanic American Historical Review
59, no. 2 (May 1, 1979): 261. Frank “Trey” Proctor III, “Gender and the Manumission of Slaves in New Spain,”
Hispanic American Historical Review
86, no. 2 (May 2006): 309–36.

17.
Roger Norman Buckley,
Slaves in Red Coats: The British West India Regiments, 1795–1815
(New Haven. Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), 79.

18.
Patterson,
Slavery and Social Death,
chapters 8–10.

19.
For a useful comparative survey, see David W. Cohen and Jack P. Greene, eds.,
Neither Slave nor Free: The Freedmen of African Descent in the Slave Societies of the New World
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972).

20.
Elsa V. Goveia,
Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965), 222; Ira Berlin,
Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 89, 95–96. For the evolving responses by white refugees to the causes of the Haitian Revolution while in the United States, see Ashli White, “The Saint-Dominguan Refugees
and American Distinctiveness in the Early Years of the Haitian Revolution,” in Geggus and Fiering,
The World of the Haitian Revolution,
248–58.

21.
Robert Stein, “The Free Men of Colour and the Revolution in Saint Domingue, 1789–1792,”
Histoire sociale—Social History
14 (May 1981): 7–28; Davis,
Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution,
137–48.

22.
Jerome S. Handler,
The Unappropriated People: Freedmen in the Slave Society of Barbados
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 80; Berlin,
Slaves Without Masters,
191.

23.
David Geggus, “The Enigma of Jamaica in the 1790s: New Light on the Causes of Slave Rebellions,”
William and Mary Quarterly,
3rd series (April 1987); 288–99. For Toussaint’s status as a freedman, see note 53, infra.

24.
Gad J. Heuman,
Between Black and White: Race, Politics, and the Free Coloreds in Jamaica, 1792–1865
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981), 24; Richard B. Sheridan, “The Maroons of Jamaica, 1730–1830: Livelihood, Demography and Health,”
Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Comparative Studies
6, no. 3 (Dec. 1985): 152–70; Geggus, “Enigma of Jamaica,” 275–85; Ellen Gibson Wilson,
The Loyal Blacks
(New York: Capricorn Books, 1976), 393–97.

25.
Benjamin Quarles,
The Negro in the American Revolution
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), 14–18, 51–67; Donald L. Robinson,
Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 1765–1820
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 114–21; Phillip Morgan and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, “Arming Slaves in the American Revolution,” in Brown and Morgan,
Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 180–208.

26.
Buckley,
Slaves in Red Coats,
passim. Also see the comparative essay of Christopher Leslie Brown, “The Arming of Slaves in Comparative Perspective,” in Brown and Morgan, eds.,
Arming Slaves,
330–53.

27.
Cohen and Greene,
Neither Slave nor Free
; Berlin,
Slaves Without Masters
; Herbert S. Klein and Clotilde Andrade Paiva, “Freedmen in a Slave Economy: Minas Gerais in 1831,”
Journal of Social History
29, no. 4 (July 1, 1996): 933–62. Jerome S. Handler and John T. Pohlmann, “Slave Manumissions and Freedmen in Seventeenth-Century Barbados,”
William and Mary Quarterly
41, no. 3 (July 1, 1984): 390–408.

28.
Population statistics for the early nineteenth century are usually unreliable, especially for the Caribbean, and there are many discrepancies in the censuses and other standard sources. I have used the tables in Higman,
Slave Populations,
77; B. W. Higman,
Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807–1834
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 61–62; Berlin,
Slaves Without Masters,
46–47; Cohen and Greene, eds.,
Neither Slave nor Free,
4, 10, 194; Handler,
Unappropriated People,
18–19; Heuman,
Between Black and White,
7–8; Orlando Patterson,
The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, Development and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica
(London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1967), 95–97; Bureau of the Census,
Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970
, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Printing Office, 1975), 1:22–36; Bureau of the Census,
Negro Population, 1790–1915
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1918), 53–57.

29.
Douglas Hall, “Jamaica,” in Cohen and Greene,
Neither Slave nor Free,
196; Edward Brathwaite,
The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820
(Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1971), 167–75. For the criteria used in listing color in the West Indian slave registrations from 1813 to 1832, see Higman,
Slave Populations,
19–21.

30.
Frederick P. Bowser, “Colonial Spanish America,” in Cohen and Greene,
Neither Slave nor Free,
55; Philip D. Curtin,
Two Jamaicas: The Role of Ideas in a Tropical Colony, 1830–1865
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955), 44–45.

31.
See especially Carl N. Degler,
Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States
(New York: Macmillan, 1971). Stuart B. Schwartz, “The Manumission of Slaves in Colonial Brazil: Bahia, 1684–1745,”
The Hispanic American Historical Review
54, no. 4 (Nov. 1, 1974): 603–35.

32.
White,
Encountering Revolution,
87–123. See also Larry Koger,
Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790–1860
(Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1994); Juliet E. K. Walker, “Racism, Slavery, and Free Enterprise: Black Entrepreneurship in the United States Before the Civil War,”
The Business History Review
60, no. 3 (Autumn 1986): 343–82; Thomas N. Ingersoll, “
Free Blacks in a Slave Society: New Orleans, 1718–1812,”
William and Mary Quarterly
48, no. 2 (April 1, 1991): 173–200.

33.
Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark,
Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 3–29, 127–29.

34.
Handler,
Unappropriated People,
98–99, 190–94, 201–04.

35.
Berlin,
Slaves Without Masters,
passim; Barbara Jeanne Fields,
Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 29–32, and passim.

36.
In the United States, “free black” has replaced “free Negro,” even though the latter term more clearly indicated people of mixed black and white descent. In the Caribbean and elsewhere, “free colored” remains the appropriate term for a population in which people of mixed descent predominated.

37.
Berlin,
Slaves Without Masters,
46–49, 136–37; Bureau of the Census,
Historical Statistics,
1: 8–9, 24–36; Bureau of the Census,
Negro Population,
53–57; Fields,
Slavery and Freedom,
1–15. Leonard P. Curry,
The Free Black in Urban America, 1800–1850: The Shadow of the Dream
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 1–14.

38.
Yvan Debbasch,
Couleur et liberté: le jeu du critère ethnique dans un ordre juridique esclavagiste,
vol. I:
L’affranchi dans les possessions françaises de la Caraïbe, 1635–1833
(Paris: Dalloz, 1967), 80; Geggus,
Slavery, War, and Revolution,
405n3; Cohen and Greene,
Neither Slave nor Free,
4, 6,10, 194, 218–20; Heuman,
Between Black and White,
7. Popkin,
You Are All Free,
12.