abolishing slavery thesis statement

Introductory Essay: Slavery and the Struggle for Abolition from the Colonial Period to the Civil War

How did the principles of the Declaration of Independence contribute to the quest to end slavery from colonial times to the outbreak of the Civil War?

• I can explain how slavery became codifed over time in the United States.
• I can explain how Founding principles in the Declaration of Independence strengthened anti-slavery thought and action.
• I can explain how territorial expansion intensified the national debate over slavery.
• I can explain various ways in which African Americans secured their own liberty from the colonial era to the Civil War.
• I can explain how African American leaders worked for the cause of abolition and equality.

Essential Vocabulary

Slavery and the struggle for abolition from the colonial period to the civil war.

The English established their first permanent settler colony in a place they called Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. Early seventeenth-century Virginia was abundant in land and scarce in laborers. Initially, the labor need was met mostly by propertyless English men and women who came to the new world as indentured servants hoping to become landowners themselves after their term of service ended. Such servitude was generally the status, too, of Africans in early British America, the first of whom were brought to Virginia by a Dutch vessel in 1619. But within a few decades, indentured servitude in the colonies gave way to lifelong, hereditary slavery, imposed exclusively on black Africans.

Because forced labor (whether indentured servitude or slavery) was a longstanding and common condition, the injustice of slavery troubled relatively few settlers during the colonial period. Southern colonies in particular codified slavery into law. Slavery became hereditary, with men, women, and children bought and sold as property, a condition known as chattel slavery . Opposition to slavery was mainly concentrated among Quakers , who believed in the equality of all men and women and therefore opposed slavery on moral grounds. Quaker opposition to slavery was seen as early as 1688, when a group of Quakers submitted a formal protest against the institution for discussion at a local meeting.

Anti-slavery sentiment strengthened during the era of the Revolution and Founding. Founding principles, based on natural law proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and in several state constitutions, added philosophical force to biblically grounded ideas of human equality and dignity. Those principles informed free and enslaved blacks, including Prince Hall, Elizabeth Freeman, Quock Walker, and Belinda Sutton, who sent anti slavery petitions to state legislatures. Their powerful appeal to natural rights moved legislators and judges to implement the first wave of emancipation in the United States. Immediate emancipation in Massachusetts, gradual emancipation in other northern states, and private manumission in the upper South dealt blows against slavery and freed tens of thousands of people.

Slavery remained deeply entrenched and thousands remained enslaved, however, in states in both the upper and lower South , even as northern leaders believed the practice was on its way to extinction. The result was the set of compromises the Framers inscribed into the U.S. Constitution—lending slavery important protections but also preparing for its eventual abolition. The Constitution did not use the word “slave” or “slavery,” instead referring to those enslaved as “persons.” James Madison, the “father” of the Constitution, thus thought the document implicitly denied the legitimacy of a claim of property in another human being. The Constitution also restricted slavery’s growth by allowing Congress to ban the slave trade after 20 years. Out of those compromises grew extended controversies, however, the most heated and dangerous of which concerned the treatment of fugitive slaves and the status of slavery in federal territories.

The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 renewed and enhanced slavery’s profitability and expansion, which intensified both attachment and opposition to it. The first major flare-up occurred in 1819, when a dispute over whether Missouri would be admitted to the Union as a slave state or a free state generated threats of civil war among members of Congress. The adoption of the Missouri Compromise in 1820 quelled the anger for a time. But the dispute was reignited in the 1830s and continued to inflame the country’s political life through the Civil War.

A cotton gin on display at the Eli Whitney Museum by Tom Murphy VII, 2007.

“U.S. Cotton Production 1790–1834” by Bill of Rights Institute/Flickr, CC BY 4.0

Separating the sticky seeds from cotton fiber was slow, painstaking work. Eli Whitney’s cotton gin (gin being southern slang for engine) made the task much simpler, and cotton production in the lower South exploded. Cotton planters and their slaves moved to Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama to start new cotton plantations. Many planters in the Chesapeake region sold their slaves to cotton planters in the lower South. This created a massive interstate slave trade that transferred enslaved persons through auctions and forced marches in chains and that also broke up many slave families.

In 1831, in Virginia, a large-scale slave rebellion led by Nat Turner resulted in the deaths of approximately 60 whites and more than 100 blacks and generated alarm throughout the South. That same decade saw the emergence of a radicalized (and to a degree racially integrated) abolitionist movement, led by Massachusetts activist William Lloyd Garrison, and an equally radicalized pro slavery faction, led by U.S. Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina.

The polarization sharpened in subsequent decades. The Mexican-American War (1846–1848) brought large new western territories under U.S. control and renewed the contention in Congress over the status of slavery in federal territories. The complex 1850 Compromise, which included a new fugitive slave law heavily weighted in favor of slaveholders’ interests, did little to restore calm.

A few years later, Congress reopened the Kansas and Nebraska territories to slavery, thereby undoing the 1820 Missouri Compromise and rendering any further compromises unlikely. The U.S. Supreme Court tried vainly to settle the controversy by issuing, in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), the most pro-slavery ruling in its history. In 1858, Abraham Lincoln, a rising figure in the newly born Republican Party, declared the United States a “house divided” between slavery and freedom. In late 1859, militant abolitionist John Brown alarmed the South when he attempted to liberate slaves by taking over a federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. He was promptly captured, tried, and executed and thereupon became a martyr for many northern abolitionists.

Watch this BRI Homework Help video: Dred Scott v. Sandford for more information on the pivotal Dred Scott decision.

Leaders such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Tubman, and James Forten all worked for the cause of abolition and equality.

As the debate over slavery continued on the national stage, formerly enslaved and free black men and women spoke out against the evils of slavery. Slave narratives such as those by Frederick Douglass, Solomon Northrup, and Harriet Jacobs humanized the experience of slavery. Their vivid, heartbreaking accounts of their own enslavement strengthened the moral cause of abolition. At the same time, enslaved men and women made the brave and dangerous decision to run away. Some ran on their own, and others used the Underground Railroad, a network of secret “conductors” and “stations” that helped enslaved people escape to the North and, after 1850, to Canada. The most famous of these conductors was Harriet Tubman, who traveled to the South about 12 times to lead approximately 70 men and women to freedom. Free blacks faced their own challenges. Leaders such as Benjamin Banneker, James Forten, David Walker, and Maria Stewart spoke out against racist attitudes and laws that sought to limit their political and civil rights.

This map shows the concentration of slaves in the southern United States as derived from the 1860 U.S. Census. The so-called “Border states”—Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and after 1863, West Virginia—allowed slavery but remained loyal to the Union. Credit: Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

By 1860, the atmosphere in the United States was combustible. With the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in November of that year, the conflict over slavery came to a head. Since Lincoln and Republicans opposed the expansion of slavery and called it a moral evil, seven slaveholding states declared their secession from the United States. And in April 1861, the war came. The next five years of conflict and bloodshed determined the fate of enslaved men, women, and children, and of the Union itself.

Reading Comprehension Questions

• What actions were taken to oppose slavery in the colonial period and Founding era?
• Why did the Constitution not use the words “slave” or “slavery”?
• The invention of the cotton gin
• The Mexican-American War
• Dred Scott v. Sandford
• The election of Abraham Lincoln as president
• How did formerly enslaved and free black men and women fight to end slavery?

27f. The Southern Argument for Slavery

Those who defended slavery rose to the challenge set forth by the Abolitionists. The defenders of slavery included economics, history, religion, legality, social good, and even humanitarianism, to further their arguments.

Defenders of slavery argued that the sudden end to the slave economy would have had a profound and killing economic impact in the South where reliance on slave labor was the foundation of their economy. The cotton economy would collapse. The tobacco crop would dry in the fields. Rice would cease being profitable.

Defenders of slavery argued that if all the slaves were freed, there would be widespread unemployment and chaos. This would lead to uprisings, bloodshed, and anarchy. They pointed to the mob's "rule of terror" during the French Revolution and argued for the continuation of the status quo, which was providing for affluence and stability for the slaveholding class and for all free people who enjoyed the bounty of the slave society.

Defenders of slavery argued that slavery had existed throughout history and was the natural state of mankind. The Greeks had slaves, the Romans had slaves, and the English had slavery until very recently.

Defenders of slavery noted that in the Bible, Abraham had slaves. They point to the Ten Commandments, noting that "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, ... nor his manservant, nor his maidservant." In the New Testament, Paul returned a runaway slave, Philemon, to his master, and, although slavery was widespread throughout the Roman world, Jesus never spoke out against it.

Defenders of slavery turned to the courts, who had ruled, with the Dred Scott Decision , that all blacks — not just slaves — had no legal standing as persons in our courts — they were property, and the Constitution protected slave-holders' rights to their property.

Defenders of slavery argued that the institution was divine, and that it brought Christianity to the heathen from across the ocean. Slavery was, according to this argument, a good thing for the enslaved. John C. Calhoun said, "Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually."

Defenders of slavery argued that by comparison with the poor of Europe and the workers in the Northern states, that slaves were better cared for. They said that their owners would protect and assist them when they were sick and aged, unlike those who, once fired from their work, were left to fend helplessly for themselves.

James Thornwell , a minister, wrote in 1860, "The parties in this conflict are not merely Abolitionists and slaveholders, they are Atheists, Socialists, Communists, Red Republicans, Jacobins on the one side and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other."

When a society forms around any institution, as the South did around slavery, it will formulate a set of arguments to support it. The Southerners held ever firmer to their arguments as the political tensions in the country drew us ever closer to the Civil War.

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Slavery, Abolition, Emancipation and Freedom

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Civil War, 1861-1865

Jonathan Karp, Harvard University Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, PhD Candidate, American Studies

The story of the Civil War is often told as a triumph of freedom over slavery, using little more than a timeline of battles and a thin pile of legislation as plot points. Among those acts and skirmishes, addresses and battles, the Emancipation Proclamation is key: with a stroke of Abraham Lincoln’s pen, the story goes, slaves were freed and the goodness of the United States was confirmed. This narrative implies a kind of clarity that is not present in the historical record. What did emancipation actually mean? What did freedom mean? How would ideas of citizenship accommodate Black subjects? The everyday impact of these words—the way they might be lived in everyday life—were the subject of intense debates and investigations, which marshalled emerging scientific discourses and a rapidly expanding bureaucratic state. All the while, Black people kept emancipating themselves, showing by their very actions how freedom might be lived.

Self-Emancipation

The Emancipation Proclamation, in 1863, and the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, abolished slavery in the secessionist Confederate states and the United States, respectively, but it is important to remember that enslaved people were liberating themselves through all manners of fugitivity for as long as slavery has existed in the Americas. Notices from enslavers seeking self-emancipated Black people were common in newspapers throughout the Americas, as seen in this 1854 copy of the Baltimore Sun .

The question of how formerly enslaved people would be regarded by and assimilated into the state as subjects was most obviously worked out through the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was meant to support newly freed people across the South. Two years before the Bureau was established, however, there was the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission. Authorized by the Secretary of War in March 1863, the Inquiry Commission was called in part as a response to the ever-increasing number of refugees—who were still referred to at the time as “contraband”—appearing at Union camps. The three appointed commissioners—Samuel Gridley Howe, James McKaye, and Robert Dale Owen—were charged with investigating the condition and capacity of freedpeople.

Historians are still working to understand the scale of refugees’ movements during the Civil War. Abigail Cooper estimates that by 1865 there were around 600,000 freedpeople in 250 refugee camps. Many of the camps were overseen by the Union, while others were established and run by freedpeople themselves. Conditions in the camps could be brutal. In 1863, the Inquiry Commission heard that 3,000 freedmen had fortified the fort in Nashville for fifteen months without pay. Rations were slim. In spite of these conditions, the camps were also sites where Black people profoundly restructured the South by their very movement and relationships.

Port Royal Experiment

During the Civil War, the U.S. government began an experiment in the Sea Islands of South Carolina. Plantation owning enslavers had abandoned their lands, leaving behind over 10,000 formerly enslaved Black people. With the help of abolitionist charities from the North, these Black farmers cultivated cotton for wages in the same places they had formerly been held in bondage. Their work was so successful that it inspired international calls for support, like this letter published in Manchester, England. The short-lived success of this experiment was largely ended at the government's hands, when the lands were returned to White ownership.

The Inquiry Commission, a large portion of whose records are held at Harvard, focused many of their efforts on the camps. It was not clear how, exactly, they should go about their work. The Commission was established before the field of sociology emerged with its institutionalized tools for the supposedly scientific study of populations. A federal body had never before been responsible studying people who were or had been enslaved. The commissioners travelled across the American South and Canada, observing and interviewing freedmen. They sent elaborate surveys to military leaders, clergy, and other White people who interfaced with large numbers of people who had escaped slavery. Through this work, the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission made Black people into subjects of the United States’ scientific gaze. Their records are an invaluable record of life under slavery; they also reinscribed underlying racial logics.

Slavery, Abolition, Emancipation, and Freedom has a collection of 189 objects related to the Commission’s inquiry . The vast majority of them are responses to their survey, written by White people the Commission identified as having special knowledge of freedmen. The view of slavery from this vantage point is limited. Most if not all of the respondents recount conversations with people who were or had been enslaved, but these accounts are all mediated by their authors and the Commissioners. There’s no telling what the quoted enslaved people would or wouldn’t have shared with these people, or why. If some shape of life under slavery emerges from reading these survey responses, it is a necessarily distorted one. The American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission is emblematic of a style of scientific discourse that set its sights on Black people and the cultural meanings of race without concern for the views of Black people. In this field, Whiteness was necessary for expertise.

The surveys are most revealing as records of how these agents of the federal government conceived of the question of freedom—what they called, “one of the gravest social problems ever presented a government.” What kinds of questions did they ask? The forms had forty-two questions. Some asked for geographic and population data. Others asked for information about life before emancipation: did freedmen carry signs of previous abuse (they did) and did their masters have an effect on enslaved peoples’ families (they invariably did)? The vast majority of the questions, however, asked for the respondent’s opinions and general observations of the formerly enslaved refugees. The Commission wanted to know about these peoples’ strength, endurance, intellectual capacity, attachments to place, as well as their religious devotion, their general disposition, work ethic, and ways of domestic life. The list ended with the most important question, which the previous ones had apparently prepared the respondent to answer to the best of their abilities: “In your judgement are the freedmen in your department considered as a whole fit to take their place in society with a fair prospect of self-support and progress or do they need preparatory training and guardianship? If so of what nature and to what extent?”

Slow Stretching Emancipation

The Emancipation Proclamation was widely celebrated by enemies of slavery, though it did not emancipate all enslaved Black peoples. Celebrations were held in Northern cities like Philadelphia and Boston . News of emancipation was slow moving, even in areas that were covered by the proclamation. In areas under Union control, like Port Royal, Black people were informed of their new legal status on January 1st, but in areas under Confederate control the proclamation was often kept secret from enslaved people or entirely ignored. In his memoir, Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington described his experience learning of the proclamation:

After the reading we were told that we were all free, and could go when and where we pleased. My mother, who was standing by my side, leaned over and kissed her children, while tears of joy ran down her cheeks. She explained to us what it all meant, that this was the day for which she had been so long praying, but fearing that she would never live to see. Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery: An Autobiography, pg. 21

From the questions the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission asked, it is clear that they imagined the freemen’s “fitness” to hinge on their ability to work for wages, own land, and maintain standard familial structures. The surveys asked whether freedmen “seemed disposed to continue their domestic relations or form new ones.” They asked whether, under slavery, enslaved children were taught to respect their parents. Commissioners wished to know if family names were common, and, if so, how they travelled through generations. The question about laboring for wages, which appeared towards the end of the questionnaire, was deeply connected to the question of what should come after slavery. If wages would not be successful in turning freedmen into laborers, a system of apprenticeship might be considered. The commissioners’ fixation on land was a result of the longstanding connection in the United States between citizenship and landowning. It was also a response to fears of Black migration. In all, the surveys show that the question of freedmen’s fitness was one of their assimilation into the intertwined relations of the capitalist wage and the family, as recognized by the state and church.

While the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission went about their work, freedpeople made their lives in ways that both answered the Commission’s questions and exceeded them. Some people found their way to camps to join the war effort; others went in search of family and still others made homes where they were. Washington Spradling, for example, told the Commission in 1863 how freedpeople in Kentucky pooled resources to pay for funerals and buy their relatives out of slavery, all under the oppression of new police powers. Across the South, as the Civil War raged, Black people brought about emancipation. They could not wait for the state’s commissions and reports. However, shades of their experiments in freedom are visible in the reports of the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission.

Encyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Humanities

A Dissertation on Slavery: With a Proposal for the Gradual Abolition of It, In the State of Virginia (1796)

A Dissertation on Slavery: With a Proposal for the Gradual Abolition of It, In the State of Virginia (1796), is an essay by St. George Tucker . When he submitted it to the General Assembly in 1796, Tucker was a law professor at the College of William and Mary and a judge on the bench of the General Court. In A Dissertation on Slavery , he discusses the history of slavery, the Virginia slave code, and the morality of slaveholding, and presents a plan for ending slavery. He wrestles with the tensions between the natural rights philosophy of the American Revolution (1775–1783) and the continued existence of slavery. Tucker’s attempt to resolve this tension had little immediate effect—the House of Delegates tabled his proposal and Tucker believed that many of the assembly’s members refused even to read it—but it did point to a society that somewhat resembled late nineteenth and early twentieth century Virginia. In his essay, Tucker proposed that enslaved African Americans be freed, but, for various reasons, should not enjoy the full rights and privileges of citizenship. Some historians have since pointed out that this circumstance actually came to pass, if not in precisely the manner that Tucker had prescribed.

Tucker was born and raised in Bermuda, where half the population was enslaved. He moved to Virginia in 1772, around age nineteen, to attend the College of William and Mary and study law under the direction of George Wythe , one of the colony’s foremost legal minds. (Wythe had also tutored Thomas Jefferson in the law .) During the American Revolution, Tucker brought salt and gunpowder from Bermuda for the troops and served in the Virginia militia. He set up a legal practice in Petersburg after the war and was appointed to the General Court in 1788. In 1790, he took up Wythe’s law professorship while maintaining his position on the bench.

Tucker began to research and write his Dissertation in 1795, and it took him more than a year to complete. He began by corresponding with Jeremy Belknap of the Massachusetts Historical Society, a clergyman and historian whom Tucker hoped could tell him how Massachusetts had managed the peaceful abolition of slavery . Belknap passed along the professor’s questions to a number of prominent correspondents. Several of them noted that the end of slavery came not with a formal decree, but with the interpretation—or in the view of one correspondent, James Winthrop, the “misconstruction”—of the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780. That document declares: “All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights, among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties.” Belknap synthesized these various responses into a report.

In replying to this report, Tucker in effect provided a draft for his Dissertation on Slavery . He included in his response a plan of abolition that he thought his fellow Virginians might accept. By proposing a slow-moving course of action, Tucker hoped that he could convince the world—as he wrote in a letter to Belknap in 1795—”that the existence of slavery in this country is no longer to be deemed a reproach to the present generation.”

Tucker begins the essay by noting the “incompatibility” of slavery with the natural rights principles of the American Revolution. He therefore finds it impossible to justify the enslavement of black people “unless we first degrade them below the rank of human beings, not only politically, but also physically and morally.” Unwilling to take this step, Tucker argues that the time had come to accept the “moral truth” of the wrongness of slavery.

This assertion of modern natural rights seems a singularly inauspicious ground from which to defend slavery, but Tucker manages to do just that. He begins with an appeal to the right of self-preservation. The “recent history of the French West Indies”—referring to the slave revolt that began in Haiti in 1791 and led to Haitian independence in 1804—indicated the disastrous results that might follow large-scale emancipation. Employing the information he acquired from his correspondence with members of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Tucker notes that mass abolition had only proven successful in those states with a low ratio of slaves to free people. According to Tucker, Virginia had too high a ratio of slaves to free people. In some parts of the state “it is probable that there are four slaves for one free white man.” He argues that under such conditions, full-scale emancipation would produce famine at best and race war at worst.

With these considerations in mind, Tucker sets forth a very complicated plan of gradual emancipation. He pitches it as a revised version of gradual emancipation plans used in several northern states. First, all females born to slaves would serve twenty-eight-year indentures, after which their employers would give them twenty dollars and two suits of clothes. Children born to those serving such indentures must “be bound to service by the overseers of the poor, until they shall attain the age of twenty-one years.” This same agency would receive 15 percent of their wages when hired out for the short term, and 10 percent of their wages if they received an apprenticeship lasting for a year or more. If the master refused to pay freedom wages upon the arrival of the twenty-eighth year, he would have to pay the court a five-dollar fee.

Tucker’s plan denied freed slaves their basic civil liberties, including the right to keep weapons, to serve on juries, to testify against or marry white people, or even to write a will. Tucker justifies this course of action in the same way he had justified the continuance of slavery: by employing natural rights arguments and by noting the dangers created by the Haitian Revolution. Tucker argues that when dealing with people entering “into a state of society,” those already in the society have a right to “admit or exclude” anyone they wish. Thus he finds it consonant with natural rights to deny freed slaves the basic rights of citizens. He argues that the “recent scenes transacted” in Haiti “are enough to make one shudder with the apprehension of realizing similar calamities in this country.” Finding it impossible to propose a plan of emancipation that does not “either encounter, or accommodate [it]self to prejudice,” Tucker proposes a course that would negotiate what he saw as an acceptable mean between the evils of slavery and a mass emancipation that would “turn loose a numerous, starving, and enraged banditti upon the innocent descendants of their former oppressors.”

By restricting the civil liberties of freed slaves, Tucker hoped that he might encourage them to leave the state. “There is an immense unsettled territory on this continent more congenial to their natural constitutions than ours,” he writes, “where they may perhaps be received upon more favourable terms than we can permit them to remain with us.” Tucker saw the right to property as a natural right, but he doubted that the slave owner had a property right to an unborn child; besides, he argues, the planter would get at least fourteen years of good labor out of every slave born on his plantation. Tucker thought that his plan would win over skeptical slave owners. He enumerates the most surprising features of it: “the number of slaves will not be diminished for forty years after it takes place; that it will even increase for thirty years; that at the distance of sixty years, there will be one-third of the number at its first commencement; that it will require above a century to complete it; and that the number of blacks under twenty-eight, and consequently bound to service, in the families they are born in, will always be at least as great, as the present number of slaves.”

Contemporary Reception

Tucker, who published his 106-page essay in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, submitted a copy to the General Assembly in 1796. The House of Delegates quickly tabled it. Members of the Senate, having no power to propose legislation, saw the essay as less of a threat, and responded with a polite letter noting that they had received it. In a letter to Belknap in 1797, Tucker cites “mistaken self-interest and prejudice” as the primary enemies of the plan, and he tried “to elude, rather than invite, their attacks.” The effort failed; his essay remained virtually unknown. “Nobody, I believe has read it,” he complained to Belknap; “nobody could explain its contents.” Even if they had read it, Tucker doubted that anyone in the assembly would have been willing to take a stand on its behalf. That body was “split into factions, debating upon federal politics, and neither side probably wished to weaken its own influence by a division of sentiment among its partizans on any point whatever.”

Tucker also sent a copy of the Dissertation to Thomas Jefferson. The future president agreed with Tucker on both the means of emancipation and the urgency of the question. According to Jefferson, history would decide the question of emancipation for itself, regardless of the answer given by the slave owners. Jefferson believed that the consequences of failing to plan for emancipation would be disastrous. He saw all of America and Europe as ripe for insurrection, but he noted that only the southern states had to concern themselves with slave uprisings, which “a single spark” could produce at any time. If such an uprising were to come, Jefferson held out little hope that the other states would be of any assistance in putting it down.

Modern Reception

Many scholars have emphasized the connection between Tucker’s Dissertation and the ideology of natural rights. In All Honor to Jefferson? The Virginia Slavery Debates and the Positive Good Thesis (2008), Erik S. Root sees Tucker’s essay as evidence of the seriousness and consistency with which the Founding Fathers took these ideas. Similarly, the historian Phillip Hamilton, in an article published in 1998, argued that, “Tucker sought a middle ground on which to reconcile liberalism’s twin beliefs in basic human equality and the sanctity of all property.” In other words, Tucker wanted to find a way to end slavery without defrauding any creditors. Hamilton also places Tucker’s Dissertation in the context of a movement away from landed property as the basis of elite power in Virginia. Instead of this traditional mode of social organization, Tucker tried to base his independence on professional training for himself and his children.

In an article published in 2006, the legal historian Paul Finkelman assigns both praise and blame to Tucker’s Dissertation . On the one hand, “No other southerner of his generation offered a concrete proposal for ending slavery.” On the other hand, Tucker presented “a recipe for creating a permanent peasantry that Virginia’s landowners could exploit perpetually.” Tucker did so, however, in the hope that his proposal would “make Virginia a white person’s state in the long run.” Finkelman argues that if Tucker had followed this ideology through to conclusion he would have realized that a black peasantry also presented a threat to the self-preservation of white Virginians. “The peasants would provide more expensive labor but would not provide much greater safety.” Specifically, Virginia elites would find it easier to control slaves than they would to control a dispossessed class of free people.

Historians have long noted other ironies of this type surrounding the Dissertation . Winthrop Jordan, for instance, recognized Tucker’s essay as “startlingly portentous.” Tucker had called for a plan of emancipation that would take one hundred years. “A century later the Negro was free,” Jordan wrote in White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro (1968), “and in many areas of the South in a condition which, in an informal way, materially resembled the one he proposed.” Tucker thus made the point that natural rights do not always lead to civil rights, a lesson that has proved a bitter pill for Americans. Similarly, the historian Gordon S. Wood has noticed the unintended consequences of the natural rights critique of slavery. It forced those who defended slavery to couch their position in racial terms. In Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (2009), Wood argues, therefore, that, “The anti-slavery movement that emerged out of the Revolution inadvertently produced racism in America.”

• African American History
• Colonial History (ca. 1560–1763)
• Curtis, Michael Kent. “St. George Tucker and the Legacy of Slavery.” William and Mary Law Review IL (2006), 1157–1212.
• Finkelman, Paul. “The Dragon St. George Could Not Slay: Tucker’s Plan to End Slavery.” William and Mary Law Review IL (2006), 1213–1243.
• Hamilton, Phillip. “Revolutionary Principles and Family Loyalties: Slavery’s Transformation in the St. George Tucker Household of Early National Virginia.” William and Mary Quarterly 55, no. 4 (October 1998), 531–556.
• Hamilton, Phillip. The Making and Unmaking of a Revolutionary Family: The Tuckers of Virginia, 1752–1830 . Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003.
• Root, Erik S. All Honor to Jefferson? The Virginia Slavery Debates and the Positive Good Thesis . New York: Lexington Books, 2008.
• Jordan, Winthrop. White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968.
• Wood, Gordon S. Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 . New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
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Emancipation Proclamation

By: History.com Editors

Updated: March 29, 2023 | Original: October 29, 2009

On September 22, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which declared that as of January 1, 1863, all enslaved people in the states currently engaged in rebellion against the Union “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”

Lincoln didn’t actually free all of the approximately 4 million men, women and children held in slavery in the United States when he signed the formal Emancipation Proclamation the following January. The document applied only to enslaved people in the Confederacy, and not to those in the border states that remained loyal to the Union.

But although it was presented chiefly as a military measure, the proclamation marked a crucial shift in Lincoln’s views on slavery. Emancipation would redefine the Civil War , turning it from a struggle to preserve the Union to one focused on ending slavery, and set a decisive course for how the nation would be reshaped after that historic conflict.

Abe Lincoln's Developing Views on Slavery

Sectional tensions over slavery in the United States had been building for decades by 1854, when Congress’ passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened territory that had previously been closed to slavery according to the Missouri Compromise . Opposition to the act led to the formation of the Republican Party in 1854 and revived the failing political career of an Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln, who rose from obscurity to national prominence and claimed the Republican nomination for president in 1860.

Lincoln personally hated slavery, and considered it immoral. "If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that 'all men are created equal;' and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man's making a slave of another," he said in a now-famous speech in Peoria, Illinois, in 1854. But Lincoln didn’t believe the Constitution gave the federal government the power to abolish it in the states where it already existed, only to prevent its establishment to new western territories that would eventually become states. In his first inaugural address in early 1861, he declared that he had “no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with slavery in the States where it exists.” By that time, however, seven Southern states had already seceded from the Union, forming the Confederate States of America and setting the stage for the Civil War.

First Years of the Civil War

At the outset of that conflict, Lincoln insisted that the war was not about freeing enslaved people in the South but about preserving the Union. Four border slave states (Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri) remained on the Union side, and many others in the North also opposed abolition. When one of his generals, John C. Frémont, put Missouri under martial law, declaring that Confederate sympathizers would have their property seized, and their enslaved people would be freed (the first emancipation proclamation of the war), Lincoln directed him to reverse that policy, and later removed him from command.

But hundreds of enslaved men, women and children were fleeing to Union-controlled areas in the South, such as Fortress Monroe in Virginia, where Gen. Benjamin F. Butler had declared them “contraband” of war, defying the Fugitive Slave Law mandating their return to their owners. Abolitionists argued that freeing enslaved people in the South would help the Union win the war, as enslaved labor was vital to the Confederate war effort.

In July 1862, Congress passed the Militia Act, which allowed Black men to serve in the U.S. armed forces as laborers, and the Confiscation Act, which mandated that enslaved people seized from Confederate supporters would be declared forever free. Lincoln also tried to get the border states to agree to gradual emancipation, including compensation to enslavers, with little success. When abolitionists criticized him for not coming out with a stronger emancipation policy, Lincoln replied that he valued saving the Union over all else.

“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union and is not either to save or to destroy slavery,” he wrote in an editorial published in the Daily National Intelligencer in August 1862. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”

From Preliminary to Formal Emancipation Proclamation 

At the same time however, Lincoln’s cabinet was mulling over the document that would become the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln had written a draft in late July, and while some of his advisers supported it, others were anxious. William H. Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state, urged the president to wait to announce emancipation until the Union won a significant victory on the battlefield, and Lincoln took his advice.

On September 17, 1862, Union troops halted the advance of Confederate forces led by Gen. Robert E. Lee near Sharpsburg, Maryland, in the Battle of Antietam . Days later, Lincoln went public with the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which called on all Confederate states to rejoin the Union within 100 days—by January 1, 1863—or their slaves would be declared “thenceforward, and forever free.”

On January 1, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which included nothing about gradual emancipation, compensation for enslavers or Black emigration and colonization, a policy Lincoln had supported in the past. Lincoln justified emancipation as a wartime measure, and was careful to apply it only to the Confederate states currently in rebellion. Exempt from the proclamation were the four border slave states and all or parts of three Confederate states controlled by the Union Army. 

Impact of the Emancipation Proclamation

As Lincoln’s decree applied only to territory outside the realm of his control, the Emancipation Proclamation had little actual effect on freeing any of the nation’s enslaved people. But its symbolic power was enormous, as it announced freedom for enslaved people as one of the North’s war aims, alongside preserving the Union itself. It also had practical effects: Nations like Britain and France, which had previously considered supporting the Confederacy to expand their power and influence, backed off due to their steadfast opposition to slavery. Black Americans were permitted to serve in the Union Army for the first time, and nearly 200,000 would do so by the end of the war.

Finally, the Emancipation Proclamation paved the way for the permanent abolition of slavery in the United States. As Lincoln and his allies in Congress realized emancipation would have no constitutional basis after the war ended, they soon began working to enact a Constitutional amendment abolishing slavery. By the end of January 1865, both houses of Congress had passed the 13th Amendment , and it was ratified that December.

"It is my greatest and most enduring contribution to the history of the war,” Lincoln said of emancipation in February 1865, two months before his assassination. “It is, in fact, the central act of my administration, and the great event of the 19th century."

HISTORY Vault: Abraham Lincoln

A definitive biography of the 16th U.S. president, the man who led the country during its bloodiest war and greatest crisis.

The Emancipation Proclamation, National Archives

10 Facts: The Emancipation Proclamation, American Battlefield Trust

Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010)

Allen C. Guelzo, “Emancipation and the Quest for Freedom.” National Park Service . 

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History Resources

Historical Context: The Constitution and Slavery

By steven mintz.

On the 200th anniversary of the ratification of the US Constitution, Thurgood Marshall, the first African American to sit on the Supreme Court, said that the Constitution was "defective from the start." He pointed out that the framers had left out a majority of Americans when they wrote the phrase, "We the People." While some members of the Constitutional Convention voiced "eloquent objections" to slavery, Marshall said they "consented to a document which laid a foundation for the tragic events which were to follow."

The word "slave" does not appear in the Constitution. The framers consciously avoided the word, recognizing that it would sully the document. Nevertheless, slavery received important protections in the Constitution. The notorious three-fifths clause—which counted three-fifths of a state’s slave population in apportioning representation—gave the South extra representation in the House of Representatives and extra votes in the Electoral College. Thomas Jefferson would have lost the election of 1800 if not for the Three-fifths Compromise. The Constitution also prohibited Congress from outlawing the Atlantic slave trade for twenty years. A fugitive slave clause required the return of runaway slaves to their owners. The Constitution gave the federal government the power to put down domestic rebellions, including slave insurrections.

The framers of the Constitution believed that concessions on slavery were the price for the support of southern delegates for a strong central government. They were convinced that if the Constitution restricted the slave trade, South Carolina and Georgia would refuse to join the Union. But by sidestepping the slavery issue, the framers left the seeds for future conflict. After the convention approved the great compromise, Madison wrote: "It seems now to be pretty well understood that the real difference of interests lies not between the large and small but between the northern and southern states. The institution of slavery and its consequences form the line of discrimination."

Of the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention, about 25 owned slaves. Many of the framers harbored moral qualms about slavery. Some, including Benjamin Franklin (a former slaveholder) and Alexander Hamilton (who was born in a slave colony in the British West Indies) became members of anti-slavery societies.

On August 21, 1787, a bitter debate broke out over a South Carolina proposal to prohibit the federal government from regulating the Atlantic slave trade. Luther Martin of Maryland, a slaveholder, said that the slave trade should be subject to federal regulation since the entire nation would be responsible for suppressing slave revolts. He also considered the slave trade contrary to America’s republican ideals. "It is inconsistent with the principles of the Revolution," he said, "and dishonorable to the American character to have such a feature in the constitution."

John Rutledge of South Carolina responded forcefully. "Religion and humanity have nothing to do with this question," he insisted. Unless regulation of the slave trade was left to the states, the southern-most states "shall not be parties to the union." A Virginia delegate, George Mason, who owned hundreds of slaves, spoke out against slavery in ringing terms. "Slavery," he said, "discourages arts and manufactures. The poor despise labor when performed by slaves." Slavery also corrupted slaveholders and threatened the country with divine punishment, he believed: "Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgment of heaven on a country."

Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut accused slaveholders from Maryland and Virginia of hypocrisy. They could afford to oppose the slave trade, he claimed, because "slaves multiply so fast in Virginia and Maryland that it is cheaper to raise than import them, whilst in the sickly rice swamps [of South Carolina and Georgia] foreign supplies are necessary." Ellsworth suggested that ending the slave trade would benefit slaveholders in the Chesapeake region, since the demand for slaves in other parts of the South would increase the price of slaves once the external supply was cut off.

The controversy over the Atlantic slave trade was ultimately settled by compromise. In exchange for a 20-year ban on any restrictions on the Atlantic slave trade, southern delegates agreed to remove a clause restricting the national government’s power to enact laws requiring goods to be shipped on American vessels (benefiting northeastern shipbuilders and sailors). The same day this agreement was reached, the convention also adopted the fugitive slave clause, requiring the return of runaway slaves to their owners.

Was the Constitution a proslavery document, as abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison claimed when he burned the document in 1854 and called it "a covenant with death and an agreement with Hell"? This question still provokes controversy. If the Constitution temporarily strengthened slavery, it also created a central government powerful enough to eventually abolish the institution.

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Slavery and the Abolition of Slave Trade Essay

Many historians pay close attention to the reasons why slavery persisted for a long time in some parts of the United States. Moreover, much attention is paid to the reasons why so many southerners defended this social institution, even though they did not belong to the so-called plantation aristocracy.

To a great extent, this outcome can be attributed to such factors to the influence of racist attitudes, the fear of violence or rebellion, and economic interests of many people who perceived the abolition of slavery as a threat to their welfare. To some degree, these factors contributed to the outbreak of the American Civil War that dramatically transformed the social and political life of the country. These are the main details that should be examined.

The persistent defense of slavery can be partly explained by the widespread stereotypes and myths which were rather popular in the South. For instance, one can mention the belief according to which the living conditions of slaves were much better, especially in comparison with European workers or those people who lived in the northern parts of the United States. These arguments were expressed by John Calhoun who regarded slavery as “a positive good” (1837). This statement implied that black people could even be satisfied with their subordinate status.

He said that under the rule of white people, slaves could enjoy more prosperity (Calhoun, 1837). These are some of the details that should not be disregarded. To some degree, this justification of slavery was based on the belief that black people were not self-sufficient. Therefore, one should not neglect the impact of racism on the worldviews and attitudes of many southerners who did not always question the propaganda which was imposed on them.

Overall, pro-slavery politicians such as John Calhoun believed the abolition of slavery could produce only detrimental results on various stakeholders, including black people. These are some of the main details that should be distinguished. One should keep in mind that many people living in the South did not pay much attention to the experiences of black slaves. They did not reflect on the cruel treatment of black people who were often dehumanized.

Additionally, it is important to examine the experiences of people who did not belong to the upper classes of the Southern society. Many of these people were farmers, and they were adversely affected by the competition with slave owners (Davidson et al., 2012). In many cases, their farms could be ruined in the course of this struggle. Moreover, many of them could not even afford a slave (Davidson et al., 2012). Nevertheless, they did not object to the existence of slavery as a social institution.

They believed that that the emancipation of slaves could eventually threaten their own existence. In particular, many of them were afraid of violence or rebellion. This is one of the reasons why they did not support the abolitionist movement. So, they could reconcile themselves with slavery, even though their own interests were significantly impaired. Secondly, they did not perceive black people as human beings who could deserve empathy or compassion. As a result, many of these people defended slavery and even fought for the interests of slave owners. This is one of the details should not be overlooked because it is important for understanding the cause of the civic conflict in the United States.

It should be noted that trans-Atlantic slave trade was abolished long before the Civil War in the United States (Oldfield, 2012). Moreover, they could prohibit slave trade within a state. Nevertheless, policy-makers could not easily abolish slavery as an institution, even though many people believed that this practice violated every ethical law. There were many interest groups that did not want to abolish slavery. These people believed that their investments in commerce, agriculture, or industry could be harmed by the abolition of slavery (Davidson et al., 2012).

Moreover, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were many people who owned hundreds of slaves. They believed that slavery had been critical for their economic prosperity. As a result, there was no legal support of the abolitionist movement in some parts of the United States. This tendency was particularly relevant if one speaks about the South in which the use of slave labor was often required. This is one of the details that should be distinguished.

On the whole, this discussion indicates that there were several barriers to the abolition of slavery in the South. Much attention should be paid to the influence of racist attitudes of many people who were firmly convinced that slaves could be deprived of their right to humanity. In their opinion, this practice was quite acceptable from an ethical viewpoint. Additionally, it is vital to remember about the influence about the use of propaganda that shaped the attitudes of many people. Finally, one should not forget about the economic interests of many people who regarded the abolitionist movement as a threat to their financial security. These are some of the major aspects that can be identified.

Reference List

Calhoun, J. (1837). Slavery a Positive Good .

Davidson, J., Delay, B., Herman, B., Leigh, C., & Lytle, M. (2012). US: A Narrative History Volume 1: To 1877 . New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Higher Education.

Oldfield, J. (2012). British Anti-slavery . Web.

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IvyPanda. (2020, April 30). Slavery and the Abolition of Slave Trade. https://ivypanda.com/essays/slavery-and-the-abolition-of-slave-trade/

"Slavery and the Abolition of Slave Trade." IvyPanda , 30 Apr. 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/slavery-and-the-abolition-of-slave-trade/.

IvyPanda . (2020) 'Slavery and the Abolition of Slave Trade'. 30 April.

IvyPanda . 2020. "Slavery and the Abolition of Slave Trade." April 30, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/slavery-and-the-abolition-of-slave-trade/.

1. IvyPanda . "Slavery and the Abolition of Slave Trade." April 30, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/slavery-and-the-abolition-of-slave-trade/.

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IvyPanda . "Slavery and the Abolition of Slave Trade." April 30, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/slavery-and-the-abolition-of-slave-trade/.

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1.2: The Slavery Controversy and Abolitionist Literature

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Learning Objectives

After completing this section, you should be able to:

• Summarize the ways that Africans resisted slavery, the impact of that resistance, who was involved in anti-slavery movements, and the arguments they used to advance their cause
• Explain how slavery related to ideas of manifest destiny, the Western expansion, and the Mexican-American War
• Define the key abolitionist arguments of Garrison, Walker, and Mott, and distinguish their approaches from one another
• List the chief features of the slave narrative as a literary genre
• Distinguish similarities and differences between Douglass' and Jacobs' slave narratives, analyzing the roles gender and genre play in those distinctions
• Identify key turning points in Douglass' account of achieving freedom
• Outline the ways that Jacobs appealed specifically to women readers in the North
• Describe Stowe's appeal to her readers in  Uncle Tom's Cabin  and formulate hypotheses to explain its incredible popularity despite stereotypical representations of women and African Americans
• Analyze the role of Christianity, motherhood, and racialist representations in the antislavery arguments of  Uncle Tom's Cabin

Slavery and the Debate over Abolition

Resistance and abolition.

Consider these questions as you read: In what ways did Africans resist slavery, and what was the impact of this resistance? Who was involved in anti-slavery movements, and how did the sentiment spread? What arguments did anti-slavery movements use to advance their cause?

Resistance to slavery came in many forms, all of which contributed to the abolition of slavery as an institution in the Americas in the second half of the nineteenth century. There were two main arms of resistance: that of slaves themselves and that of abolitionists, whose calls for the end of slavery became louder and more forceful beginning in the last two decades of the eighteenth century.

Africans resisted slavery in several ways. First, they adopted defensive measures in their own villages to elude capture by slavers. Second, they launched attacks on the crews aboard slave ships. Slavers' reports document over 400 such attacks, but scholars believe there were many more. Third, once ashore, Africans ran away, sometimes establishing Maroon communities. Maroon communities, such as those in Suriname and Jamaica, and the Republic of Palmares in Brazil, warred with white settlers throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Fourth, African slaves revolted on the very lands on which they were enslaved. The first slave revolt in the Americas we know of occurred in 1522 on the island of Hispaniola. This revolt, like most that would follow in the next 250 years, was quickly put down. During the late eighteenth century, however, the Americas saw an increase in slave revolts, especially in the French Caribbean. The French and Haitian Revolutions, which began in 1789 and 1791 respectively, largely inspired these revolts. Both revolutions were fought in the name of natural rights and the equality of men, ideas not lost on those who remained enslaved in the French colonial world. The French revolutionary government even abolished slavery in its colonies, although this did not last for very long, as slavery was soon reinstated during the reign of Napoleon. Slave revolts continued into the nineteenth century in British and Spanish Caribbean colonies. A revolt on the British-controlled island of Barbados in 1816 involved 20,000 slaves from over seventy plantations.

In 1831, a slave revolt in Virginia led by Nat Turner, although small in comparison with other slave revolts of the same period, became a symbol for slaveholders in the U.S. of the danger posed by abolition. For others, however, two decades of increased slave unrest supported calls for the end of slavery. These were the individuals involved in anti-slavery movements, which began gaining substantial ground with public opinion beginning in the 1780s. The anti-slavery movement was perhaps strongest in Britain, where member of Parliament William Wilberforce led anti-slavery campaigns from the 1780s onwards. Evangelical Protestant Christians joined him. These campaigns led to thousands of petitions to end slavery between the 1780s and 1830s. The slave trade was anti-slavery's first target and in 1787 the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was established in Britain. Wilberforce and evangelical Protestants saw slavery and slaveholders as evil. So, too, did the Quakers (or the Society of Friends). On both sides of the Atlantic, Quakers attacked slavery as immoral and prohibited their members from owning slaves or being involved in any part of the slave trade.

In addition to these moral attacks on slavery, Enlightenment thinkers attacked slavery on philosophical grounds. French Enlightenment philosophers such as Montesquieu argued that slavery went against the natural rights of man. During the French Revolution, members of the Society of the Friends of Blacks, which originated among Enlightenment thinkers, joined with free blacks from the Caribbean colonies living in France, who organized the Society of Colored Citizens, to advocate for equal rights for free people of color and the end of slavery. The anti-slavery movement scored a victory in 1807 when the United States and then Britain signed bills to end their nations' involvement in the slave trade. Many in the anti-slavery movement believed this was the first step to abolishing slavery as an institution.

The Library of Congress: "Abolition, Anti-Slavery Movements, and the Rise of the Sectional Controversy"

To better understand abolition, antislavery movements, and the rise of the sectional controversy, read this text, which provides a short overview of abolition with related images from the Library of Congress.

Black and white abolitionists in the first half of the nineteenth century waged a biracial assault against slavery. Their efforts proved to be extremely effective. Abolitionists focused attention on slavery and made it difficult to ignore. They heightened the rift that had threatened to destroy the unity of the nation even as early as the Constitutional Convention.

Although some Quakers were slaveholders, members of that religious group were among the earliest to protest the African slave trade, the perpetual bondage of its captives, and the practice of separating enslaved family members by sale to different masters.

As the nineteenth century progressed, many abolitionists united to form numerous antislavery societies. These groups sent petitions with thousands of signatures to Congress, held abolition meetings and conferences, boycotted products made with slave labor, printed mountains of literature, and gave innumerable speeches for their cause. Individual abolitionists sometimes advocated violent means for bringing slavery to an end.

Although black and white abolitionists often worked together, by the 1840s they differed in philosophy and method. While many white abolitionists focused only on slavery, black Americans tended to couple anti-slavery activities with demands for racial equality and justice.

Anti-Slavery Activists

Christian arguments against slavery.

Benjamin Lay, a Quaker who saw slavery as a "notorious sin", addresses this 1737 volume to those who "pretend to lay claim to the pure and holy Christian religion". Although some Quakers held slaves, no religious group was more outspoken against slavery from the seventeenth century until slavery's demise. Quaker petitions on behalf of the emancipation of African Americans flowed into colonial legislatures and later to the United States Congress.

Plea for the Suppression of the Slave Trade

In this plea for the abolition of the slave trade, Anthony Benezet, a Quaker of French Huguenot descent, pointed out that if buyers did not demand slaves, the supply would end. "Without purchasers", he argued, "there would be no trade; and consequently every purchaser as he encourages the trade, becomes partaker in the guilt of it". He contended that guilt existed on both sides of the Atlantic. There are Africans, he alleged, "who will sell their own children, kindred, or neighbors". Benezet also used the biblical maxim, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you", to justify ending slavery. Insisting that emancipation alone would not solve the problems of people of color, Benezet opened schools to prepare them for more productive lives.

The Conflict Between Christianity and Slavery

Connecticut theologian Jonathan Edwards, born 1745, echoes Benezet's use of the Golden Rule as well as the natural rights arguments of the Revolutionary era to justify the abolition of slavery. In this printed version of his 1791 sermon to a local anti-slavery group, he notes the progress toward abolition in the North and predicts that through vigilant efforts slavery would be extinguished in the next fifty years.

Sojourner Truth

Abolitionist and women's rights advocate Sojourner Truth was enslaved in New York until she was an adult. Born Isabella Baumfree around the turn of the nineteenth century, her first language was Dutch. Owned by a series of masters, she was freed in 1827 by the New York Gradual Abolition Act and worked as a domestic. In 1843 she believed that she was called by God to travel around the nation--sojourn--and preach the truth of his word. Thus, she believed God gave her the name, Sojourner Truth. One of the ways that she supported her work was selling these calling cards.

Ye wives and ye mothers, your influence extend-- Ye sisters, ye daughters, the helpless defend-- The strong ties are severed for one crime alone, Possessing a colour less fair than your own.

Abolitionists understood the power of pictorial representations in drawing support for the cause of emancipation. As white and black women became more active in the 1830s as lecturers, petitioners, and meeting organizers, variations of this female supplicant motif, appealing for interracial sisterhood, appeared in newspapers, broadsides, and handicraft goods sold at fund-raising fairs.

Harriet Tubman--the Moses of Her People

The quote below, echoing Patrick Henry, is from this biography of underground railroad conductor Harriet Tubman:

Harriet was now left alone, . . . She turned her face toward the north, and fixing her eyes on the guiding star, and committing her way unto the Lord, she started again upon her long, lonely journey. She believed that there were one or two things she had a right to, liberty or death.

After making her own escape, Tubman returned to the South nineteen times to bring over three hundred fugitives to safety, including her own aged parents.

In a handwritten note on the title page of this book, Susan B. Anthony, who was an abolitionist as well as a suffragist, referred to Tubman as a "most wonderful woman".

Increasing Tide of Anti-slavery Organizations

In 1833, sixty abolitionist leaders from ten states met in Philadelphia to create a national organization to bring about immediate emancipation of all slaves. The American Anti-slavery Society elected officers and adopted a constitution and declaration. Drafted by William Lloyd Garrison, the declaration pledged its members to work for emancipation through non-violent actions of "moral suasion", or "the overthrow of prejudice by the power of love". The society encouraged public lectures, publications, civil disobedience, and the boycott of cotton and other slave-manufactured products.

William Lloyd Garrison--Abolitionist Strategies

White abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, born in 1805, had a particular fondness for poetry, which he believed to be "naturally and instinctively on the side of liberty". He used verse as a vehicle for enhancing anti-slavery sentiment. Garrison collected his work in Sonnets and Other Poems (1843).

During the 1840s, abolitionist societies used song to stir up enthusiasm at their meetings. To make songs easier to learn, new words were set to familiar tunes. This song by William Lloyd Garrison has six stanzas set to the tune of "Auld Lang Syne".

Popularizing Anti-Slavery Sentiment

Slave stealer branded.

Massachusetts sea captain Jonathan Walker, born in 1790, was apprehended off the coast of Florida for attempting to carry slaves who were members of his church denomination to freedom in the Bahamas in 1844. He was jailed for more than a year and branded with the letters "S.S." for slave stealer. The abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier immortalized Walker's deed in this often reprinted verse: "Then lift that manly right hand, bold ploughman of the wave! Its branded palm shall prophesy, 'Salvation to the Slave!'"

Abolitionist Songsters

George W. Clark's, The Liberty Minstrel, is an exception among songsters in having music as well as words. "Minstrel" in the title has its earlier meaning of "wandering singer". Clark, a white musician, wrote some of the music himself; most of it, however, consists of well-known melodies to which anti-slavery words have been written. The book is open to a page containing lyrics to the tune of "Near the Lake", which appeared earlier in this exhibit (section 1, item 22) as "Long Time Ago". Note that there is an anti-slavery poem on the right-hand page. Like many songsters, The Liberty Minstrel contains an occasional poem.

Music was one of the most powerful weapons of the abolitionists. In 1848, William Wells Brown, abolitionist and former slave, published The  Anti-Slavery Harp  , "a collection of songs for anti-slavery meetings", which contains songs and occasional poems. The  Anti-Slavery Harp  is in the format of a "songster"--giving the lyrics and indicating the tunes to which they are to be sung, but with no music. The book is open to the pages containing lyrics to the tune of the "Marseillaise", the French national anthem, which to 19th-century Americans symbolized the determination to bring about freedom, by force if necessary.

Suffer the Children

This abolitionist tract, distributed by the Sunday School Union, uses actual life stories about slave children separated from their parents or mistreated by their masters to excite the sympathy of free children. Vivid illustrations help to reinforce the message that black children should have the same rights as white children, and that holding humans as property is "a sin against God".

Fugitive Slave Law

North to canada.

In the wake of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which forced Northern law enforcement officers to aid in the recapture of runaways, more than ten thousand fugitive slaves swelled the flood of those fleeing to Canada. The Colonial Church and School Society established mission schools in western Canada, particularly for children of fugitive slaves but open to all. The school's Mistress Williams notes that their success proves the "feasibility of educating together white and colored children". While primarily focusing on spiritual and secular educational operations, the report reproduces letters of thanks for food, clothing, shoes, and books sent from England. This early photograph accompanied one such letter to the children of St. Matthew's School, Bristol.

The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850

This controversial law allowed slave-hunters to seize alleged fugitive slaves without due process of law and prohibited anyone from aiding escaped fugitives or obstructing their recovery. Because it was often presumed that a black person was a slave, the law threatened the safety of all blacks, slave and free, and forced many Northerners to become more defiant in their support of fugitives. S. M. Africanus presents objections in prose and verse to justify noncompliance with this law.

Anthony Burns--Capture of A Fugitive Slave

This is a portrait of fugitive slave Anthony Burns, whose arrest and trial in Boston under the provisions of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 incited riots and protests by white and black abolitionists and citizens of Boston in the spring of 1854. The portrait is surrounded by scenes from his life, including his sale on the auction block, escape from Richmond, Virginia, capture and imprisonment in Boston, and his return to a vessel to transport him to the South. Within a year after his capture, abolitionists were able to raise enough money to purchase Burns's freedom.

Growing Sectionalism

Antebellum map showing the free and slave states.

The growing sectionalism that was dividing the nation during the late antebellum years is documented graphically with this political map of the United States, published in 1856. Designed to portray and compare the areas of free and slave states, it also includes tables of statistics for each of the states from the 1850 census, the results of the 1852 presidential election, congressional representation by state, and the number of slaves held by owners. The map is also embellished with portraits of John C. Fremont and William L. Dayton, the 1856 presidential and vice-presidential candidates of the newly organized Republican Party, which advocated an anti-slavery platform.

Distribution of Slaves

Although the Southern states were known collectively as the "slave states" by the end of the Antebellum Period, this map provides statistical evidence to demonstrate that slaves were not evenly distributed throughout each state or the region as a whole. Using data from the 1860 census, the map shows, by county, the percentage of slave population to the whole population. Tables also list population and area for both Southern and Northern states, while an inset map shows the extent of cotton, rice, and sugar cultivation. Another version of this map was published with Daniel Lord's  The Effect of Secession upon the Commercial Relations between the North and South, and upon Each Section  (New York, 1861), a series of articles reprinted from The New York Times.

Militant Abolition

John brown's raid.

More than twenty years after the militant abolitionist John Brown had consecrated his life to the destruction of slavery, his crusade ended in October 1859 with his ill-fated attempt to seize the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in western Virginia. He hoped to take the weapons from the arsenal and arm the slaves, who would then overthrow their masters and establish a free state for themselves.

Convicted of treason and sentenced to death, Brown maintained to the end that he intended only to free the slaves, not to incite insurrection. His zeal, courage, and willingness to die for the slaves made him a martyr and a bellwether of the violence soon to consume the country during the Civil War.

Frederick Douglass on John Brown

The friendship of Frederick Douglass and John Brown began in 1848, when Douglass visited Brown's home in Springfield, Massachusetts. Brown confided to Douglass his ambitious scheme to free the slaves. Over the next eleven years, Brown sought Douglass's counsel and support.

In August 1859 Brown made a final plea to Douglass to join the raid on Harpers Ferry. Douglass refused. After Brown's capture, federal marshals issued a warrant for Douglass's arrest as an accomplice. Douglass fled abroad. When he returned five months later to mourn the death of his youngest daughter Annie, he had been exonerated. Douglass wrote this lecture as a tribute to "a hero and martyr in the cause of liberty".

"The Book That Made This Great War"

Harriet beecher stowe's mighty pen.

Harriet Beecher Stowe is best remembered as the author of  Uncle Tom's Cabin , her first novel, published as a serial in 1851 and then in book form in 1852. This book infuriated Southerners. It focused on the cruelties of slavery--particularly the separation of family members--and brought instant acclaim to Stowe. After its publication, Stowe traveled throughout the United States and Europe speaking against slavery. She reported that upon meeting President Lincoln, he remarked, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war".

Uncle Tom's Cabin--Theatrical Productions

This poster for a production of  Uncle Tom's Cabin  features the Garden City Quartette under the direction of Tom Dailey and George W. Goodhart. Many stage productions of Harriet Beecher Stowe's famous novel have been performed in various parts of the country since  Uncle Tom's Cabin  was first published as a serial in 1851. Although the major actors were usually white, people of color were sometimes part of the cast. African American performers were often allowed only stereotypical roles--if any--in productions by major companies.

Module 11: Cotton Is King — The Antebellum South (1800-1860)

Southern pro-slavery arguments, learning objectives.

• Identify the main proslavery arguments in the years prior to the Civil War

Defending Slavery

Figure 1 . John C. Calhoun, shown here in a ca. 1845 portrait by George Alexander Healy, defended states’ rights, especially the right of the southern states to protect slavery from a hostile northern majority.

With the rise of democracy during the Jacksonian era in the 1830s, enslavers worried about the power of the majority. If political power went to a majority that was hostile to slavery, the South—and the honor of White southerners—would be imperiled. White southerners keen on preserving the institution of slavery bristled at what they perceived to be northern attempts to deprive them of their livelihood. Powerful southerners like South Carolinian John C. Calhoun highlighted laws like the Tariff of 1828 as evidence of the North’s desire to destroy the southern economy and, by extension, its culture. Such a tariff, he and others concluded, would disproportionately harm the South, which relied heavily on imports, and benefit the North, which would receive protections for its manufacturing centers. The tariff appeared to open the door for other federal initiatives, including the abolition of slavery. Because of this perceived threat to southern society, Calhoun argued that states could nullify federal laws. This belief illustrated the importance of the states’ rights argument to the southern states. It also showed enslavers’ willingness to unite against the federal government when they believed it acted unjustly against their interests.

As the nation expanded in the 1830s and 1840s, the writings of abolitionists—a small but vocal group of northerners committed to ending slavery—reached a larger national audience. White southerners responded by putting forth arguments in defense of slavery, their way of life, and their honor. Calhoun became a leading political theorist defending slavery and the rights of the South, which he saw as containing an increasingly embattled minority. He advanced the idea of a concurrent majority , a majority of a separate region (that would otherwise be in the minority of the nation) with the power to veto or disallow legislation put forward by a hostile majority.

Calhoun’s idea of the concurrent majority found full expression in his 1850 essay “Disquisition on Government.” In this treatise, he wrote about government as a necessary means to ensure the preservation of society, since society existed to “preserve and protect our race.” If government grew hostile to society, then a concurrent majority had to take action, including forming a new government. “Disquisition on Government” advanced a profoundly anti-democratic argument. It illustrates southern leaders’ intense suspicion of democratic majorities and their ability to effect legislation that would challenge southern interests.

Calhoun’s Defense of Slavery

In this 1837 speech, John C. Calhoun, then a U.S. senator, vigorously defended the institution of slavery and stated the essence of this new intellectual defense of the institution: Southerners must stop apologizing for slavery and reject the idea that it was a necessary evil. Instead, Calhoun insisted, slavery was a “positive good.” He went further, making legal arguments about the Constitution protecting states’ rights to preserve slavery. Calhoun then offered a moral defense of slavery by claiming it to be a more humane method of organizing labor than the conditions wage laborers faced in industrial cities in Europe and the northern United States.

• In what ways does Calhoun use legal arguments to defend the idea that Congress cannot interfere in the institution of slavery?
• How does Calhoun go beyond the traditional legal defenses of slavery and attempt to convince the audience that slavery is, indeed, good for all involved?

Link to Learning

Watch this video from Heimler’s History channel to learn more about some of the main pro-slavery arguments , including the social hierarchy argument, the civilization argument, the economic argument, the racial argument, and the biblical argument.

White southerners reacted strongly to abolitionists’ attacks on slavery. In making their defense of slavery, they critiqued wage labor in the North. They argued that the Industrial Revolution had brought about a new type of slavery—wage slavery—and that this form of “slavery” was far worse than the slave labor used on southern plantations. Defenders of the institution also lashed out directly at abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison for daring to call into question their way of life. Indeed, Virginians cited Garrison as the instigator of Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion.

The Virginian George Fitzhugh contributed to the defense of slavery with his book Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society (1854). Fitzhugh argued that laissez-faire capitalism, as celebrated by Adam Smith, benefited only the quick-witted and intelligent, leaving the ignorant at a huge disadvantage. Enslavers, he argued, took care of the ignorant—in Fitzhugh’s argument, the enslaved persons of the South. Southerners provided enslaved persons with care from birth to death, he asserted; this offered a stark contrast to the wage slavery of the North, where workers were at the mercy of economic forces beyond their control. Fitzhugh’s ideas exemplified southern notions of paternalism.

George Fitzhugh’s Defense of Slavery

George Fitzhugh, a southern writer of social treatises, was a staunch supporter of slavery, not as a necessary evil but as what he argued was a necessary good, a way to take care of enslaved persons and keep them from being a burden on society. He published Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society in 1854, in which he laid out what he believed to be the benefits of slavery to both the enslaved persons and society as a whole. According to Fitzhugh:

[I]t is clear the Athenian democracy would not suit a negro nation, nor will the government of mere law suffice for the individual negro. He is but a grown up child and must be governed as a child . . . The master occupies towards him the place of parent or guardian. . . . The negro is improvident; will not lay up in summer for the wants of winter; will not accumulate in youth for the exigencies of age. He would become an insufferable burden to society. Society has the right to prevent this, and can only do so by subjecting him to domestic slavery. In the last place, the negro race is inferior to the white race, and living in their midst, they would be far outstripped or outwitted in the chase of free competition. . . . Our negroes are not only better off as to physical comfort than free laborers, but their moral condition is better.

What arguments does Fitzhugh use to promote slavery? What basic premise underlies his ideas? Can you think of a modern parallel to Fitzhugh’s argument?

The North also produced defenders of slavery, including Louis Agassiz, a Harvard professor of zoology and geology. Agassiz helped to popularize polygenism , the idea that different human races came from separate origins. According to this formulation, no single human family origin existed, and Black people made up a race wholly separate from the White race. Agassiz’s notion gained widespread popularity in the 1850s with the 1854 publication of George Gliddon and Josiah Nott’s Types of Mankind and other books. The theory of polygenism codified racism, giving the notion of Black inferiority the lofty mantle of science. One popular advocate of the idea posited that Black people occupied a place in evolution between the Greeks and chimpanzees.

Figure 2 . This 1857 illustration by an advocate of polygenism indicates that the “Negro” occupies a place between the Greeks and chimpanzees. What does this image reveal about the methods of those who advocated polygenism?

concurrent majority:  a majority of a separate region (that would otherwise be in the minority of the nation) with the power to veto or disallow legislation put forward by a hostile majority

polygenism:  the idea that Black people and White people come from different origins

• US History. Provided by : OpenStax. Located at : https://openstax.org/books/us-history/pages/12-3-wealth-and-culture-in-the-south . License : CC BY: Attribution . License Terms : Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/us-history/pages/1-introduction
• John C. Calhoun, u201cSlavery as a Positive Good,u201d 1837. Provided by : The Bill of Rights Institute, OpenStax, and contributing authors. Located at : https://cnx.org/contents/[email protected]:iQkwpaR_@8/6-25-%E2%9C%92%EF%B8%8F-John-C-Calhoun-Slavery-as-a-Positive-Good-1837#fs-idm205300544 . License : CC BY: Attribution . License Terms : Download for free at http://cnx.org/contents/[email protected]

Arguments FOR and AGAINST Slavery

Arguments against slavery/Anti-Slavery Arguments Humanitarian

1. Slavery was inhumane and cruel, unjust and the punishment meted out to the slaves was harsh for example the uses of the treadmill. 2. Slaves were not properly provided for, since food, clothing, housing and medical care were inadequate and so the slaves often fell prey to diseases. 3. Slaves were regarded as part of the estate stock and not as humans and so were constantly humiliated and dehumanized. 4. The colonial laws for the control of slaves were repressive and did not provide for their protection. 5. The judicial system was against them since some judges and magistrates were slave-owners, and slaves were not allowed to give evidence in court against a white person. 6. Slaves possessed no legal right to own property or to have a family since family members could be sold for payment of debt or families could be separated. 7. Slaves were people and if they were not freed, they would free themselves and destroy the planters’ property. 8. The Slave Trade led to inter-tribal warfare in Africa and destroyed family and political structures in African societies.

Economic 1. Slavery was uneconomic as provisions had to be made for control of the slaves. 2. These provisions were more expensive than employment of free labour. 3. Investments in slaves were wasted when they died in large numbers from measles, epidemics, or when struck with yaws, scurvy, worms, ulcers, and fevers. 4. There was evidence which indicated that a higher percentage of British sailors than slaves died in the Middle Passage. 5. There was also evidence that the British Government earned more money from custom duties from export of manufactured goods than from the slave trade. 6. British industrial development would be stimulated by free trade. 7. Abolition of slavery would increase the number of customers/consumers in the British Caribbean market thus increasing British exports. 8. Slavery led to monoculture which was dangerous to the economy. 9. The profits of plantation owners were not reinvested in the local economy but just spent abroad. 10. Slavery made the whites lazy and ignorant, William Byrd II, a wealthy Virginian planter, said that ‘’slavery blew up the pride and ruin the industry of the white people who seeing a rank of poor creatures below them, detest work, for fear it would make them look like slaves.’’

Religious 1. Slavery was contrary to the will of God. 2. The system of slavery encouraged hatred rather than love whereas Christianity urges its followers to ‘’love’’ thy neighbour as thyself. 3. Christianity teaches that all men are equal in the sight of God but slaves were subjugated to the will of their master. 4. Missionaries were discouraged from working among slaves, they were persecuted and at the same time the religious education of the slaves was neglected. Social 1. Some whites had ‘’guilt conscience’’ about slavery and preferred to live in a free society. 2. Life in a slave society was unpleasant and uncomfortable for whites surrounded by cruelty and suffering. Downloaded by Freedel Logie ([email protected]) lOMoARcPSD|4890574 3. Slavery brought fear and insecurity. There was danger of slave revolt and massacre ever present. 4. A slave society was inevitably socially restrictive. Arguments for slavery/Pro-Slavery Arguments

Humanitarian 1. Slavery existed in Africa and it was felt that the slaves were treated better in the Caribbean than in Africa. 2. There was a paternalistic relationship between the slaves and their masters, and the slaves’ basic needs of food, clothing, shelter, and their medical needs were taken care of by their masters. 3. Slaves were private property as stated by the English laws. 4. Slaves were being ‘’civilized’’ and they would revert to barbarism without the positive effects of European civilization 5. Times were harsh yet slaves were relatively well-off. They would not put up with harsh treatment and would run away, revolt, or work less.

Economic 1. Blacks were best suited for estate labour in a tropical climate. 2. Slave labour was vital to the survival of the sugar economy as alternative sources of labour like the Amerindians or white indentured servants were not available. 3. Substantial capital was already invested in the sugar industry and slavery. Thus, the value of that investment would be lost without slavery. 4. Loss of investments in sugar estates might injure the British economy. 5. Slave labour was more economically viable than free labour. 6. Slavery promoted the development of a strong navy and merchant marine. 7. Slavery stimulated British industrial development and provided jobs for the British public, and Britain with essential tropical products. 8. The plantation system could lead to diversification in agriculture. Slaves were capable of producing food crops as plantation crops. They were also capable of handling cattle. 9. The plantation system supported British shipping. 10. Those dependent on West Indian sugar would lose commerce, reputation and power

Religious 1. Slavery provided an opportunity for slaves to be converted to Christianity, thus giving them a chance of saving their souls, a privilege not afforded in Africa. 2. Slavery was supported by the Scriptures and was compatible with Christianity. 3. Slaves in the Caribbean could learn from whites how to live a Christian life. Social 1. If slaves were freed, the whites would become a minority. 2. Successful planters could make huge profits and become the leaders of society economically, politically, socially and culturally. 3. Slavery was the means by which small planters could rise in the world and emulate the big planters. 4. Poor whites were committed to slavery and racial superiority theories in order to preserve the little status they had. The threat of free blacks to white privilege made the poor whites hate the blacks more than anyone else. 5. Slavery provided the basis for a superior culture. There had to be a class of slaves to perform the menial duties so that the whites, leisured class could confine itself to government and culture.

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The Problem of Abolition in the Age of Capitalism The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 , by David Brion Davis

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Manisha Sinha, The Problem of Abolition in the Age of Capitalism The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 , by David Brion Davis, The American Historical Review , Volume 124, Issue 1, February 2019, Pages 144–163, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhy578

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This reappraisal essay on David Brion Davis’s The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (1975) examines the significance and legacy of this book and its major arguments. It places the book in the context of Davis’s intellectual biography, his well-known trilogy The Problem of Slavery , and his larger corpus of work on slavery and antislavery. It discusses the historiographical moment when Davis’s book appeared, and its influence on the scholarship of Anglo-American antislavery since it was published. In particular, the essay focuses on the central argument of the book, on the relationship between abolition and the rise of capitalism, the debates that Davis’s thesis has engendered, and how historians today are revisiting this issue. It concludes by pointing to some new directions in the history of abolition and exploring the impact of Davis’s scholarship on his students, innovative historians of abolition in their own right.

D avid B rion D avis’s corpus , comprising his well-known trilogy The Problem of Slavery and numerous other books, has been by any measure foundational to the history of slavery and antislavery in the Western world. 1 The title of Drew Gilpin Faust’s review of the last volume in the trilogy, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation [hereafter Age of Emancipation ], published in 2014, anointed Davis as “The Scholar Who Shaped History.” 2 In particular, the first two volumes, the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966 [hereafter Western Culture ]) and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (1975 [hereafter Age of Revolution ]), have been field-defining. While the former remains an exemplary piece of scholarship on global intellectual history, ranging widely over time and space from antiquity to the early modern period, the latter, as Davis acknowledged, “proved to be far more controversial.” 3

On its publication, though, Age of Revolution garnered uniformly favorable reviews. As the eminent British historian Sir J. H. Plumb put it, “like his first book, this will endure, one of the peaks in the vast mountainous range of the bibliography of slavery.” 4 Its influence on the historiography of Anglo-American antislavery, even after all these years, is indisputable. As with all historical classics, the significance of Age of Revolution lies not so much in establishing a definitive account of early abolition as in opening up new avenues of scholarship and debate. Ten years after its publication, it was the subject of a two-part AHR essay by Thomas Haskell, which elicited responses from John Ashworth and Davis himself and a rejoinder by Haskell. Those essays, along with three chapters from the book, were eventually published as The Antislavery Debate in 1992. 5 The lasting influence of the first two books of the trilogy is also illustrated by the fact that Oxford University Press reprinted them in 1988 and 1999 respectively. From the perspective of abolition studies in the twenty-first century, some of the debates over Davis’s critical second volume, Age of Revolution , particularly his contention that antislavery ideology indirectly legitimized wage work and early capitalism, have cast a long shadow.

T he son of C lyde B rion D avis , a peripatetic journalist and novelist, Davis abandoned his first love, the study of science, for history. His personal experiences as a soldier during the Second World War were crucial. His time in the military was eye-opening—not just his encounter with African American soldiers confined below decks, which he later compared to the holds of a slave ship, but also the attitudes of white soldiers and officers in the then-segregated U.S. Army, who viewed blacks rather than the Germans as aliens and resented the fact that German women dated black men. As he reflected, “Even as a teenager in occupied Germany, I glimpsed the cancerous racial division and exploitation that has festered at the core of American society for well over three hundred years.” 6 As an undergraduate at Dartmouth, Davis majored in philosophy before receiving a doctorate from Harvard’s History of American Civilizations program. His academic training led him to intellectual history, or what he prefers to call the history of ideology and the history of thought. Influenced by the ideas of the leading philosophers and theologians of his college days, Reinhold Niebuhr, William James, and George Santayana, as well as by anthropologists like Talcott Parsons and psychologists such as Erich Fromm, he developed an eclectic interdisciplinary approach that informs much of his historical scholarship. Davis “was taken by the notion of studying concrete human moral problems as a way of tracing, within social and cultural frameworks, broad shifts in beliefs, moral values, assumptions, and ideology,” a perspective that underlay Age of Revolution . 7

At the same time, Davis confronted the poverty of his education in matters relating to slavery and race. No one introduced him to the scholarship of black historians, and the dominant historical works on American slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction that he read were based on outdated racist caricatures. A fortuitous meeting with Kenneth Stampp, whose book The Peculiar Institution (1956) upended the long reign of U. B. Phillips’s American Negro Slavery (1918), led Davis to want to do for the history of antislavery what Stampp had done for slavery. 8 Davis published his first two volumes at a time when the new social history of slavery by John Blassingame, Eugene Genovese, George Rawick, Leslie Owens, Herbert Gutman, and Lawrence Levine was revolutionizing the field. 9 As the prominent historian of Cuban slavery Franklin Knight noted in his review of Age of Revolution , “for the very first time in American historiography, the most eminent scholars and researchers have been focusing on the study of slavery.” What distinguished Davis from these historians of slavery was his attention to intellectual history or the history of ideas about slavery. For Davis, ideas mattered, and abolition as a “change in values and expectations constituted one of the few clear-cut examples in human history of what I won’t hesitate to call genuine moral progress.” 10 In a way, he anticipated the cultural turn in history, even though he is loath to be identified with any particular school of history or theory and averse to what he calls theoretical jargon. Perhaps it is for that reason that his books have been widely read and are influential well beyond the academy.

D avis’s initial project was to write a multivolume history of antislavery thought in the West. In Western Culture , he argued convincingly that despite being the source of considerable tension in Western philosophical and religious traditions, slavery as an institution was broadly unquestioned by European writers and thinkers until as late as the eighteenth century. Not only had philosophers justified the existence of slavery, starting with Aristotle, who argued in Politics that some men were slaves by nature, but slavery had continued to exist in the peripheries of medieval Europe, on the Iberian Peninsula and in Kievan Russia, long after its demise in Greece and Rome. It was not until the emergence of radical dissenting Protestant sects that slavery in Christian thought went from being viewed as a punishment for sin to being perceived as a sin itself. On the secular end, with the exception of the conservative French political theorist Jean Bodin and a few others, Western commentators on law and politics, from Grotius and Pufendorf to Hobbes and Locke, did not condemn slavery, though their arguments departed from orthodox religious and political rationales for it, making the institution more susceptible to criticism. For instance, according to Locke, slavery lay outside the social contract and was an extension of the state of war. For Locke, as Holly Brewer has recently argued, slavery derived its justification from a monarchical conception of government that he sought to critique. 11

At the same time, European commercial and geographic expansion into the New World rested squarely on the African slave trade and the growth of modern racial slavery, the enslavement of Native Americans and African Americans. The plantation complex that we so closely associate with the Americas, Davis showed, originated in the Mediterranean islands, which initially used enslaved Slavic labor (hence the modern term “slave” rather than the original Latin word servus ) before European traders turned to western Africa to supply labor for plantations in the Atlantic islands off the coast of Africa. Slavery in the early modern West was born because of an accident of geography, the growth of plantation economies devoted to producing staple cash crops for the world market, and a preexisting trade in African slaves. A Guggenheim Fellowship that required Davis to spend a research year at the British Library allowed him to trace this remarkable global genealogy of modern racial slavery.

Perhaps not so coincidentally, a growing number of individuals—mainly Quakers and dissenting Protestant clergymen, though Davis also lists early Catholic voices of antislavery—started criticizing the rise of human bondage in the Americas. Davis’s achievement in this first volume was not simply to illustrate the Christian and Enlightenment origins of Western antislavery, some of whose effects he was careful to point out could be contradictory, as in justifying the enslavement of the heathen other or those deemed to be inherently inferior and savage compared to literate, Christian, civilized Europeans. Instead, it is the recovery of long-forgotten early antislavery writers, many of whom anticipated the contours of nineteenth-century Anglo-American abolitionism, that makes Western Culture a significant text still. The book tellingly ends with the early Quaker abolitionist John Woolman’s prophecy of divine vengeance on slave societies. 12

It is somewhat unfortunate, then, that in his second volume, Davis chose not to write about some of the most influential abolitionist figures of the late eighteenth century or to engage with their words and ideas, as he had done in the previous volume. Perhaps in response to criticism from many reviewers that Western Culture was too steeped in intellectual history and ignored political economy, Age of Revolution is a different book than its companion volume. 13 The further caveat here is that Davis tended to ignore abolitionists of African descent. The writings of Phillis Wheatley, Ignatius Sancho, Ottobah Cugoano, and Olaudah Equiano were a crucial part of the Anglo-American movement against the African slave trade. The interracialism of this first wave of abolition lay forgotten as many subsequent historians dismissed this revolutionary phase of abolition as gradualist, conservative, and predominantly white-dominated. The focus of Age of Revolution is, as Knight tellingly put it, on “the process of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-American abolition.” 14

In a sense, Davis has been his own best critic, as his subsequent books reveal a greater appreciation of the interracial nature of abolition. The first modern scholarly appraisal of black abolitionists, by Benjamin Quarles, was published in 1969, but like the early work on pioneering women abolitionists, it had yet to be integrated into the history of antislavery when Davis was writing Age of Revolution . Not surprisingly, Davis paid scant attention to these relatively new histories, an omission he strove to rectify in the last volume of the trilogy, Age of Emancipation. But rather than fashion a new interpretation of abolition, this somewhat disappointing conclusion subsumed black and women abolitionists like David Walker and the Grimké sisters within preexisting interpretations of abolitionists as mainstream religious and moral reformers. For example, Davis’s understanding of Walker’s thought as essentially racial uplift ignores how tightly braided the politics of racial improvement was with that of resistance among African American abolitionists, and his emphasis on the religious inspirations of the Grimké sisters undersells their modern evocations of human rights and gendered oppression. 15

I n   A ge of R evolution , D avis adopted the “Age of Revolutions” framework, illustrating that the revolutionary era problematized the existence of slavery for the first time in Western history. This key insight, widely accepted today, has allowed subsequent historians to extend the conventional chronological parameters of abolition back from the nineteenth century to the eighteenth. Historians of abolition have only recently elaborated on Davis’s pioneering insistence on the importance of early abolitionism. 16 R. R. Palmer, who was perhaps most responsible for developing the Age of Revolutions interpretation, focused on European history, particularly the French and American Revolutions, in his influential two-volume The Age of Democratic Revolutions , but only briefly discussed the Haitian Revolution and the Latin American Wars of Independence. Palmer ignored the work of C. L. R. James, who had cast the Haitian Revolution as a central and defining event in the history of revolutionary abolition. As Jeremy Adelman writes, arguing for a reevaluation of the democratic revolutions thesis as essentially revolutions of empire, “It would be hard to imagine how one would narrate their stories without placing the slave trade, slave labor, and the explosive struggles for emancipation at the center.” 17 This is precisely what Davis did in Age of Revolution .

Davis was the first American historian to pay systematic attention to other revolutions in the Americas that resulted in the destruction of slavery. Besides black scholars such as James and Latin Americanists, U.S. historians had for the most part ignored the influence of the Haitian Revolution and the Latin American Wars of Independence on the growth of abolition. In a “Calendar of Events,” Davis documented the abolitionist repercussions of these revolutions, which by the 1820s had left only three large slave societies in the Americas intact: the U.S. South, Brazil, and Cuba—and, one could add, smaller slave societies in Puerto Rico and Peru, or what scholars today call the second slavery. Davis ended Age of Revolution with an intriguing epilogue; this time Woolman is replaced by the figure of the Haitian revolutionary general Toussaint Louverture, combined with an analysis of Hegel’s discussion of the master-slave relationship in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Louverture’s “achievements had stunned the world,” he wrote, and reverberated in the Atlantic World. Haiti proved for Davis Hegel’s considerations that while the slave ultimately obtained his identity through his labor and became truly free, the master remained dependent for his identity on the slave. This idea was the reverse of Aristotle’s notion of the slave as a mere extension of the master’s will, a talking tool, an instrumentum vocale . It also went beyond the traditional Christian hierarchical acceptance of human bondage as a natural part of the social order. Davis concluded this somewhat philosophical meditation with the valuable intuition that “man’s true emancipation, whether physical or spiritual, must always depend on those who have endured and overcome some form of slavery.” 18

Davis’s conclusion in Age of Revolution is more suggestive than definitive. While acknowledging slave resistance, he does not view it as constitutive of abolition or as defining its nature. Even though in his subsequent writings he would further spell out the importance of the Haitian Revolution, he would also claim that contemporary historians had exaggerated the role of slave revolts in the making of abolition. 19 In terms of the abolition movement, historians have gone further than Davis in recognizing the significance of the Haitian Revolution (the only successful slave rebellion in world history, which birthed the first independent modern black nation) in the black and white abolitionist imagination throughout the Atlantic World. 20 It put slaveholders in the Americas on notice, making them more zealous in their mastery, and the Haitian revolutionary example gave the enslaved a model for liberation, albeit a troubled and divisive one.

In Age of Revolution , however, Davis had at least drawn attention to the abolitionist nature of the Haitian Revolution and portrayed Louverture rather than Thomas Jefferson as a revolutionary antislavery icon. Jefferson, Davis acutely argued, had far more in common with the proslavery “ philosophes of the Caribbean,” such as Bryan Edwards and Moreau de Saint-Méry, than with the abolitionists of his day, Anthony Benezet and the Abbes Raynal and Gregoire. 21

Davis also brought a transnational perspective to the study of antislavery in Age of Revolution , long before it was fashionable to do so, which accounts to a certain extent for the book’s staying power. Before its publication, the dominant historical writing on abolition was confined to national boundaries and shaped by simple, Whiggish ideas of moral progress. In Britain, the work of Sir Reginald Coupland even justified imperialism as an antislavery enterprise. 22 In the United States, the history of the abolition movement tended to ignore the revolutionary era that Davis focused on in Age of Revolution . Hundreds of books on rival abolitionist factions—the followers of the preeminent antebellum abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison versus evangelical and political abolitionists, or represented regionally as eastern Garrisonians versus western abolitionists—dominated the historiography, with the authors at times uncritically adopting the positions of their subjects. 23

When Davis embarked on his project to write a comprehensive history of Anglo-American antislavery, unsympathetic views of abolitionists were dominant in American historiography, with the exception of a few short-lived studies written in the shadow of the civil rights movement. Stanley Elkins’s book Slavery , known for its “Sambo” thesis, which provoked a whole generation of slavery historians to challenge it, also portrayed abolitionists as irrational and fanatical anti-institutionalists, transcendentalist intellectuals from New England who were armchair philosophers with no well-thought-out program for emancipation. For David Donald, in a scholarly update of slaveholders’ criticisms of northern abolitionists, they were a declining New England elite suffering from status anxiety. Davis himself flirted with a crude psychological argument to explain the rise and nature of American abolition in The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style (1969), which he thankfully dispensed with in Age of Revolution . 24

Davis employed, as is commonly overlooked, a more sophisticated psychological explanation for the rise of British abolition in Age of Revolution , despite the fact that he deemed the individual motivations of abolitionists irrelevant. Age of Revolution was shaped by psychological theories in vogue when it appeared. Davis relied on the theory of transference to explain abolitionists’ concern for the enslaved in remote colonies. (The quintessential abolitionist here is of course white and in the metropolis, which in itself is a problematic construction.) In the book’s preface, Davis expressed admiration for Erik H. Erikson’s muckraking Gandhi’s Truth (1969) and his use of the Freudian concept of transference to elucidate “the origins of Gandhi’s militant nonviolence” in sexual repression. Davis applied the psychoanalytic concept of transference to explain the origins of British abolitionist ideas, even though this was not a major aspect of his argument. “Ironically,” he observed, “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.” 25

Abolition could be viewed as a psychological device that transferred worries from nearby evils to distant ones. But Davis did not offer a psychobiography of abolitionists. The problems with subjecting historical subjects to psychological analysis or psychohistory are too numerous to elucidate here, but suffice it to point out that they rarely provide us with convincing explanations of historical change. A recent defense of the field of psychohistory, which lists Erikson, alongside others who are not historians, as a founder, acknowledges that it does not enjoy the currency that it did in the 1970s, when Davis wrote Age of Revolution . 26 Davis, however, continued to dabble in psychohistory for his last volume, in which he speculated that African Americans had internalized notions of dehumanization in slavery and struggled to overcome “self-contempt.” This argument led Eric Foner to accuse Davis of “practicing psychiatry without a license” in an otherwise favorable review of Age of Emancipation . 27

W hat defines   A ge of R evolution , though , is Davis’s seminal interpretation of the emergence of antislavery and its relationship to British capitalism. Rejecting simplistic as well as instrumentalist explanations of abolition in Britain as either a triumph of moral virtue or a result of the changing economic interests of its ruling classes, Davis situated his argument for the emergence of revolutionary abolition in political economy, social transformations, and, as noted above, psychological imperatives. Writing in the shadow of Eric Williams’s classic Capitalism and Slavery (1944), Davis was careful to avoid Williams’s deterministic account of the rise of British abolition as an essentially economic decision to shift investment from increasingly unprofitable slave societies to industry. Williams’s description of abolition as merely a reflection of the economic interests of British elites also ignored what James, in his critique of Williams, called the self-liberating actions of the enslaved, the continuing profitability of slavery, and the important place of slavery in the emergence of industrial capitalism in England. 28

If Williams’s argument on the central role of slavery and the slave trade in the rise of early capitalism has stood the test of time, his thesis on abolition has not withstood historical scrutiny. As Seymour Drescher and others have illustrated, the British Caribbean slave societies were highly profitable, particularly after the collapse of Haitian slavery, at the time of abolition. In her recent award-winning book Freedom’s Mirror , Ada Ferrer shows that the destruction of plantation agriculture in Haiti proved to be a windfall for Cuban slavery and sugar plantations. Much like slavery in the U.S. slave South on the eve of the Civil War, slavery in the Caribbean was an economically expansive institution rather than a declining one at the moment of its destruction. Williams also counterposed colonial slavery in the Caribbean to industrial capitalism in Britain, an opposition that recent historians of slavery and capitalism have rejected. For the latter, industrial capitalism was dependent on slavery rather than its economic competitor. 29

As Davis pointed out, “The continuing economic strength and vitality of slavery actually reinforced my thesis regarding the central importance of ideas, moral perceptions, and public opinion.” 30 While he rejected Williams’s reductionist account of the rise of abolition, Davis argued that antislavery had the ironic ideological consequence of legitimizing the rise of wage labor and a new industrial social order in Britain. According to Davis, this was precisely the reason why abolition went from being the cause of a few reformers to a successful movement in the nineteenth century that managed to abolish the slave trade and eventually get rid of slavery. Davis’s argument about the hegemonic role of antislavery ideology in justifying capital accumulation and labor discipline proved to be not only the most debated aspect of Age of Revolution but also the most influential.

Davis’s ideological explanation of the success of abolition was clearly influenced by the history of slavery that was in vogue when he wrote Age of Revolution . One obvious influence was the late Eugene D. Genovese, who portrayed the slave South as a pre-modern, pre-capitalist society and its critics as bourgeois reformers. The notion that hypocritical abolitionists critiqued slavery while remaining blind to the sufferings of the working poor closer to home had of course originated with southern defenders of slavery, whom Genovese quixotically admired as conservative critics of capitalism. As fellows at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, Genovese and Davis wrote their respective magnum opuses, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974) and Age of Revolution , in conversation with each other. It is quite likely that Genovese learned about the Hegelian idea of the master-slave relationship from Davis, although Hegel’s argument is the polar opposite of Genovese’s on slaveholders’ ideological hegemony. Genovese’s book, of course, became one of the most important works ever written on American slavery, its central ideas criticized but unchallenged until very recently. 31 While Genovese’s influence is apparent in Age of Revolution , Davis’s theoretical inspirations did not come from Marxism; they lay elsewhere.

The most obvious model for Davis’s pivotal fifth chapter, “The Quaker Ethic and the Antislavery International,” is Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905). In his first volume, Davis had noted that many of the early Quaker abolitionists—Elihu Coleman, a Nantucket carpenter; John Hepburn, an indentured servant; Benjamin Lay, a sailor; Woolman, who began his working life as a tailor; and Benezet, a teacher—were men of humble origins. They, like the Quaker founder George Fox, subsumed their criticism of slavery under a broader critique of commerce, warfare, wealth-making, and empire, and in the case of Woolman, also the human and environmental costs of early industrialization in Britain. 32 But here in the subsequent volume, Davis argued that Quakers had perfected values that were conducive to the rise of capitalism, and that their critique of slavery had the important side effect of legitimizing wage labor. In this respect, Davis’s argument was compatible with those of some contemporary labor historians, who contended that antislavery acted as a mechanism of social control in the northern states and distracted labor from its quest for economic democracy. Recent labor historians have argued instead for considerable overlap between early labor and antislavery radicalism, reviving Betty Fladeland’s interpretation of Anglo-American abolition. The war actually accelerated working-class activism rather than dampened it. 33

The quintessential antislavery Quakers in Age of Revolution were the Barclay and Lloyd banking families, the mercantile elite, and manufacturers—in short, a newly emergent industrial bourgeoisie. As Davis put it, “The very embodiment of the capitalist mentality, the English Quakers were in the vanguard of the industrial revolution” and “The Quakers engaged in the antislavery cause were also deeply concerned over domestic problems of labor discipline.” If in Western Culture Quaker abolitionists were lineal descendants of the radical dissenting sects of the English Civil War, in Age of Revolution they became the progenitors of England’s haute bourgeoisie. In fact, Quaker elites, many of whom were slaveholders, had to be dragged kicking and screaming down the path of abolition. As Davis himself pointed out, abolitionists were the most activist segment of the antislavery movement. By his own definition, the Barclays and Lloyds can hardly be called abolitionists. Abolitionists succeeded despite rather than because of political and economic elites, many of whom were complicit in the political economy of slavery and would spend a lot of time containing abolition’s reach after emancipation. But in Age of Revolution , Davis explained the triumph of antislavery in British society as the triumph of capitalism: “by defining slavery as a unique moral aberration , the [antislavery] ideology tended to give sanction to the prevailing economic order.” As he concluded, “The antislavery movement, like Adam Smith’s political economy, reflected the needs and values of the emerging capitalist order.” 34

Genovese had appropriated Antonio Gramsci’s notion of the ideological hegemony of the bourgeoisie in advanced twentieth-century capitalist democratic societies to explain slaveholders’ rule in the South, which one might counter relied far more on brute force than on institutional legitimacy. Davis used Gramsci to argue for the allegedly hegemonic function of antislavery ideology in industrializing Britain. He contended that antislavery in Britain was ultimately “a vehicle for social control.” 35 Davis was careful to limit his use of ideological hegemony to British abolition, but John Ashworth extended it to mid-nineteenth-century American abolition and the free labor ideology of the Republican Party. For Ashworth, abolitionists were indeed “bourgeois reformers,” and he sought to uncover the connection between abolition and “the emerging capitalist order of the North” in a manner that mirrored Davis’s argument. Even more than Davis, Ashworth developed a functionalist argument for abolition, tying it to the emergence of wage labor as well as the cult of domesticity and true womanhood. His view of American abolition would find it difficult to account for the emergence of the women’s rights movement from abolition or the untoward sympathy of northern bankers, manufacturers, and merchants for southern slaveholders, to whom they were tied by complementary political, ideological, and economic class interests. In his description of the relationship between the antislavery Republican Party and capitalism, while noting that it would be “an error therefore to assume that Republicans were uniformly complacent about the northern social order” and that their “antislavery crusade was in any way intended to divert attention from the social problems of the north,” Ashworth nonetheless concluded that they were “apologists for northern society and the northern labour system.” 36

Davis’s interpretation of the connection between antislavery and the rise of capitalism became fodder for historiographical debate with the publication of Thomas Haskell’s essays on the relationship between the growth of humanitarianism and capitalism. Davis himself had given humanitarianism an important role in the rise of antislavery sentiment in his first volume, but for him humanitarianism was part and parcel of the many new ways of thinking that we associate with the Enlightenment. Haskell, on the other hand, assigned the rise of “humanitarian sensibility” to the growth of the world market, which he argued expanded “the conventional limits of moral responsibility” and established its “cognitive precondition[s].” Even the market language of contract, long vilified by Marxists for its false imposition of formal legal equality between the powerful and the powerless, in Haskell’s telling bolstered “promise keeping” and hence humanitarian action. Haskell’s argument drew swift responses from Davis and Ashworth, who faulted his definition of capitalism as market society instead of wage relations. Ashworth remained impressed by Davis’s description of abolitionists’ alleged “selectivity of concern” and, as in his book, added bourgeois notions of family and individual conscience to explain abolitionist ideology. 37

In his rejoinder, Davis restated his argument accusing Haskell of confusing his position on the origins of antislavery, which he had discussed in his first volume, with the purported success of antislavery in Britain, which he described in the second book. The onus here shifts, then, from abolitionists themselves to the British government and society at large. Davis acknowledged that some “radical Garrisonians and labor reformers . . . could assert that both distant and nearby evils arose from a common cause.” He also referenced the role of black radicals like Robert Wedderburn (albeit in a footnote that downplayed the mutual admiration between Wedderburn and the politically cautious William Wilberforce) and women in abolition, hardly your stereotypical dominant segments of society. In a separate article, Davis had brought to light the fact that the British Quaker abolitionist Elizabeth Heyrick was the first to issue the call for immediate abolition in the Anglo-American world. One might add that Heyrick, like many abolitionists of the Jacobin stripe, including Thomas Clarkson, also defended slave rebellions and was a champion of labor and women’s rights. Haskell, too, used the example of Wendell Phillips, showing that Phillips considered slavery a greater enormity than wage labor before the Civil War and yet took up the cause of labor after the war. Davis’s conclusion here was also more nuanced, as he reframed his argument in terms of “not . . . any rigid or mechanical notion of social control but . . . the broad moral, political, and cultural transformations that accompanied the triumph of capitalism.” 38

In his last rebuttal, which he aptly titled “The Perils of Doing History by Ahistorical Abstraction,” Davis went further from his original argument in Age of Revolution , acknowledging again that “I also knew that in both Britain and the United States, antislavery acquired truly radical characteristics, spawning or serving as a model for other movements that challenged inequalities and prevailing forms of domination.” But he still concluded that “the growing power of antislavery in early industrial Britain was at least partly a function of the fit between antislavery ideology and the interests of an emergent capitalist class,” and that “the growth and triumphs of antislavery had the long-term effect, regardless of the abolitionists’ intentions, of legitimating and morally sustaining the new industrial capitalist order.” This was, to say the least, ideological hegemony run amok, where motivation and action, human agency, have little explanatory power. Davis reiterated this idea in the last volume of his trilogy: “British abolitionism could exercise this dual character, both promoting broader moral progress and unintentionally supporting the status quo.” For all his vaunted claims about the ideological affinity between antislavery and capitalism in his second volume, Davis perceptively noted that Friedrich Engels borrowed “the conceptual framework of the abolitionists” for his exposé The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), calling it “one of the greatest antislavery tracts.” 39 Indeed, the parliamentary hearings on child and factory labor in the nineteenth century that this agitation evoked were modeled after the hearings on the slave trade in the eighteenth century that abolitionist protest engendered. The real ideological affinity lay not so much between abolitionists and capitalists, one could easily conclude, as between abolitionists and critics of capitalism.

In the end, one is struck less by the differences between Haskell, Ashworth, and Davis than by the essential similarities in their methods and interpretations, albeit from very different political and historical perspectives. Davis was correct to allude to the highly abstract nature of the debate, which at times paid very little attention to troublesome historical facts. Perhaps intellectual history is not the only mode for unpacking the nature and effects of a social movement as long-lasting and diverse as abolition. More importantly, Davis and Haskell shared a fundamental assumption that antislavery was a byproduct of the rise of capitalism, no matter how differently each defined capitalism and the differing value that each put on it. And all of them failed to explain why the Dutch, whose engagement with early capitalism matched that of the British, did not develop a robust antislavery tradition. Not only does The Antislavery Debate then have the quality of a clash of tin swords about it, but the essential premise of all the contributors—that abolition was a function of capitalism, whether to legitimate class relations in free labor societies or the humanitarian product of the expansion of the market—is untenable in light of recent scholarship on the relationship between slavery and capitalism. Modern slavery, in this reading, not only was integral to capitalist development but was itself a form of capitalism. As Ashworth also asked Haskell, why did the slave South, which had a well-developed market in human beings and cash crops, not give birth to humanitarian sensibility and antislavery? 40

If slavery lies at the heart of the development of Anglo-American capitalism, as some recent historians contend, then surely the movement to abolish it can be seen as, at the very least, its obverse, and anti-capitalist in its very premise, the emancipation of labor. 41 The first scholar to make this claim was W. E. B. Du Bois in his Marxist phase. Du Bois characterized emancipation, especially his notion of a “general strike” by the enslaved during the Civil War, as a revolt of labor against capital, and the Reconstruction of American democracy after the Civil War as “a dictatorship of the proletariat.” 42

The new history of slavery and capitalism is forcing us to rethink pristine narratives of Western capitalism that have ignored their unseemly complicity in modern racial slavery, the second serfdom of Eastern Europe, and the colonization of the rest of the world. Despite its not inconsiderable number of critics, this work has resulted in a paradigm shift in the historiography of American slavery. To parse this shift out as “minimalist,” apparently acceptable, or “maximalist,” apparently objectionable, misses the point. 43 It represents a fundamental break from Genovese’s view of southern slavery as pre-capitalist and his later iteration of the slave South as in but not of the world market. For Genovese, slavery in the Caribbean and later Cuba was capitalist, but the American South and Brazil, he contended, were more “seigneurial,” pre-modern, and semi-feudal. 44 Similarly, to argue that modern racial slavery was an integral part of the capitalist world is not the same as saying that capitalism is slavery, for the simple reason that the legal regime of the former has long outlasted the latter. But historians of slavery and capitalism today do not view slavery as antithetical to capitalism, and in fact trace many features of capitalism, commodification, management techniques, technological innovations, international credit flows, and the creation of financial instruments to plantation slavery. In uncovering the deep global connections between the expansion of slavery, unfree labor, and empire and the growth of capitalism, these historians have linked the history of capitalism to not just the coercions of the invisible hand of the marketplace and bourgeois legal fictions as it had been done conventionally for so long. They have implicated capitalism in its complicity with militarism, imperialism, racism, dispossession, torture, and enslavement. What slavery represented was an extreme in the exploitative tendency of capital to oppress labor, a point that the emerging class of wage workers and labor leaders recognized by referring to their condition as “wage slavery.” 45

Slavery, in my opinion, can be viewed as a monstrous hybrid that combined the brutality of an archaic labor system with the rapacious efficiencies of modern capitalism. Karl Marx, who was actually alive and composing his works on the overt and hidden oppressions of labor at this time, recognized that modern racial slavery represented the ultimate degradation of labor, and lauded both abolitionists and antislavery politicians such as Garrison, Phillips, Gerrit Smith, and Abraham Lincoln as champions of the working class. The American labor movement, he wrote in the first volume of Das Kapital (1867), “was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” 46 In these short sentences, Marx clearly pointed to the anti-capitalist nature of abolition. Like most abolitionists, Marx argued that the liberation of black slaves was the essential precondition for the rise of any labor movement in the United States, which he saw embodied in the postwar eight-hour day movement. Unlike many subsequent historians of slavery and labor, Marx viewed the enslaved as part of the American working class. In short, Marx himself, pace his many followers, was not wedded to the idea that societies that were not based on free labor were not capitalist, but he did predict that capitalism would ultimately develop into wage labor societies. These were not just throwaway remarks. They were precisely what led Genovese to critique Marx’s understanding of the slave South and refer to himself as not a Marxist but a Marxian, one who adopted Marx’s theories but not his understanding of modern racial slavery as capitalist, unlike slavery in antiquity. 47

Oddly enough, most historians of slavery and capitalism persist in viewing abolitionists as champions of free trade and the free market, the default position of most southern slaveholders, with the exception of the sugar planters, who were dependent on a tariff. Nonetheless, their scholarship points toward a long-overdue reevaluation of the relationship of antislavery to the emergence of capitalism and of Davis’s thesis in Age of Revolution , a paradigm shift that parallels the one in slavery and capitalism studies. Many abolitionists critiqued the economics of slavery and the oppressive nature of early capitalism. Some flirted with utopian socialism and labor and land reform movements. In my own reading, the abolitionist international of the nineteenth century, which included radical republicans, communitarians, feminists, pacifists, and anti-imperialists, was far removed from the bourgeois antislavery Quaker international described by Davis in Age of Revolution . This point is easy to miss when, instead of fully engaging abolitionist archives, we describe antislavery in broad, systemic terms, where abolitionism becomes merely a subset of imperialism and capitalism rather than a radical, vibrant, interracial social movement of ordinary men and women, blacks and whites. We can trace this method for understanding abolition, which many still continue to find compelling, to the interpretive scaffolding first erected by Age of Revolution . As Plumb noted in an otherwise highly favorable review of the book, Davis should have included “[a] chapter on the social background of abolition.” 48

This is not to develop an exclusive definition of who was an abolitionist, but rather a historically accurate one. In American historiography, the standard definition of an abolitionist has always been someone who not only opposed the existence of slavery but also demanded African American citizenship. In contrast, antislavery could include a range of positions against slavery and no necessary commitment to black equality, even though most antislavery politicians were more open to the possibility of black civil and political rights than their peers. Moreover, the free labor ideology of the antebellum Republican Party was not so much a vindication of wage labor as it harked back to the world of economically independent male republican proprietors, a vision that would become obsolete with the industrial takeoff in the United States from 1870 to 1920. 49

Davis’s thesis domesticated antislavery radicals and Jacobins, some of whom were of working-class origins, and it also had the unintended effect of confusing abolition, the radical social movement, with the British state, government, and society. Some historians have come to see abolition as the progenitor of not just British capitalism but also imperialism, paying scant attention to abolitionists’ anti-imperialist views. It is a factual and analytical mistake to conflate the British state and its colonial functionaries, even after it adopted antislavery as a justification for empire, with the grassroots social movement that was abolition. One must then distinguish abolition as a diverse social movement from industrial capitalism, the British government, and empire, whatever antislavery rationale it adopted for imperialist policies. According to Richard Huzzey, antislavery ideology long outlived the abolition movement and its organizations as “antislavery imperialism.” Ironically, it was Coupland who had originally equated British imperialism with antislavery, though in his opinion the empire was a positive force for moral uplift and civilization. As in the Davis-Haskell debate, in which opponents operated from the same premise, contemporary scholars of British antislavery imperialism share Coupland’s faulty logic, though unlike him, they are no apologists for empire. And as in the antislavery and capitalism debate, one could argue more accurately that the enslavement of labor, racial subordination, and expropriation remained the actual engines of British imperialism rather than the weak façade of any antislavery motives. In the United States, black and white abolitionists schooled for years against the proto-imperialist, civilizationist, and missionary rhetoric of the American Colonization Society were early critics of British imperialism despite being enamored with British abolitionists. 50

For British abolition, which primarily concerned Davis in Age of Revolution , it is particularly important to maintain the distinction between the state and the social movement. Only a few abolitionist parliamentarians, like Wilberforce, occupied official positions, though they did not necessarily have access to political power. The long and tedious road to slave-trade abolition after over twenty years of agitation reveals the relative political weakness of abolitionists rather than their strength. The British elite tended to be either indifferent or actively proslavery, as the debates and votes on bills to regulate, restrict, and abolish the slave trade amply illustrate. According to Christopher Brown, the British government moved on the abolition of the African slave trade after the American Revolution, despite many years of gestation of early British antislavery thought, which he carefully delineates, to accrue “moral capital” in the face of military defeat. The virtue in Brown’s accounting—which he ends with a discussion of Benezet, the adept tactician of the first wave of organized Anglo-American abolition—is precisely in detailing early antislavery thought and state policy and why they intersected at a particular moment. As Drescher has recently pointed out, the impetus for abolition came from the movement and not the government. No contemporary historian does a better job of capturing the nature of British abolition as a popular social movement than J. R. Oldfield, whose books are steeped in abolitionist archives rather than in oft-repeated generalizations and apocryphal stories with thin or no evidentiary basis. Emancipation, as regulated by the British state, was a process that many abolitionists found piecemeal, including compensation to slaveholders and long periods of apprenticeship that condemned former slaves to a liminal state between slavery and freedom. 51

In American historiography, the Civil War and Reconstruction were long described as imperialist ventures by Progressive historians, where northern industry under the guise of antislavery reduced the agrarian South to the position of an internal colony. This incorrect economic narrative ignored not only the centrality of slavery to the Civil War but also the predominantly agrarian nature of the northern economy on the eve of the war. It should finally be put to bed by recent scholarship that has highlighted the complementary rather than competitive nature of the relationship between northern industry and southern slavery, what economists call the theory of comparative advantages. The notion of the Civil War as a “bourgeois revolution” cannot explain the radical nature of emancipation, the only large uncompensated expropriation of private property (with the exception of abolition in the District of Columbia) in American history, and the attempt to create an antislavery state during Reconstruction. 52 Some historians have tried to revive Cedric Robinson’s notion of “racial capitalism” to highlight the centrality of slavery and racial subordination in the development of American and Western capitalism. African American scholar-activists like Du Bois long espoused an intersectional notion of labor oppression in the history of capitalism, one that Lenin argued for on a global scale in his theory of European imperialism as “the highest stage of capitalism.” 53 If anything, emancipation signaled a setback for global capitalism, albeit a short-lived one, as new forms of labor coercion and the hunt for new lands and resources inaugurated the era of empire and capital.

D avis’s influence on the field, however, ranges beyond the abolition and capitalism debate engendered by the publication of Age of Revolution. His long professional tenure, his training of some of the leading figures not just in abolition studies but in American social and cultural history, and his founding of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University have ensured that subsequent generations of historians will not confront the paucity of historical scholarship on slavery and antislavery that he did as a student. Davis’s mentees, some of them leading historians of abolition themselves, have done much to unpack its nature. Lewis Perry’s book on Garrisonian abolition and radical anarchism and Amy Dru Stanley’s book on gender, emancipation, and the market built on Davis’s approach to understanding antislavery through the lens of intellectual history and political economy. John Stauffer’s work on radical interracialism and empathy in American abolition effectively addresses questions of abolitionist motivation raised by Davis’s critics. Two festschrifts written in Davis’s honor contain some of the best essays on abolition by Perry and Stanley, highlighting the pivotal intellectual and tactical roles of African Americans in the abolition movement. 54

The field of abolitionist historiography has recently been invigorated by some new ways of understanding the transnational movement to destroy slavery. Current work on the connections between abolition and the early labor movement, Native American rights, women’s rights, the emergence of abolitionist print culture as a counter-public to a capitalist printing industry, the cosmopolitan nature of transnational abolitionist networks of protest, and global histories of abolition point in this direction. The comparative turn in abolitionist historiography should draw attention to later trajectories and antislavery in Brazil and Cuba. 55 This work fundamentally questions the all too common top-down depiction of abolition as white, bourgeois, and conservative, with blacks, women, and radicals ghettoized and contained, playing no role in determining the overall nature, ideology, and tactics of this oppositional movement in which the disfranchised themselves played an outsized role. New social histories of abolition, especially of the abolitionist underground and fugitivity, long dismissed by academic historians as the realm of myth and memory, point to ways in which we can reconceptualize the movement and tease out its radical implications. 56

Perhaps the most important recent development in abolition studies has been the shift from the nineteenth-century language of moral and religious reform for understanding abolition to unearthing its forgotten history as a radical social movement, a progenitor to our modern conceptions of human rights and citizenship. Amy Dru Stanley’s recent work on the nineteenth-century antislavery origins of human rights reimagines it as a far broader and more inclusive concept than its Enlightenment antecedents and twentieth- and twenty-first-century framing within Western history. Robin Blackburn has also documented the broader legacy of abolition in originating modern notions of human rights, even though he claims that abolitionists did not widely use the term. Jenny Martinez has documented the first systematic use of the term “human rights” among opponents of the slave trade. In my book on abolition, I find that American abolitionists and feminists continuously evoked the concept of human rights and even named a journal Human Rights . The vast interdisciplinary scholarly literature on human rights is wide-ranging but relentlessly presentist. As in conventional histories of abolition, these works tend to ignore the contributions of the disfranchised in Western societies as well as the role of those outside the West (the rest) as co-creators as well as interlocutors of concepts of democracy, citizenship, social justice, and human rights. 57

Like the system of enslavement it opposed, the movement to abolish slavery must also be understood as a hybrid, composed of old-fashioned religious moralizers as well as modern exponents of human rights. Abolition, then, especially if we take it as a starting point for a radical and alternative discourse of human rights that questioned the sanctity of liberal property rights, was a triumph of democracy, not capitalism. The history of capitalism illustrates that it has rarely marched in lockstep with democracy. The fraught relationship between capitalism and democracy is characterized more by contestation. If we understand abolition as a radical democratic movement that questioned the enslavement of labor and the property regime of slavery, it appears as essentially anti-capitalist. Not surprisingly, though, its promise was contained, attenuated, and eventually overthrown in the Age of Capital. 58 While one may then construct a very different narrative of the relationship between antislavery and capitalism from that outlined in The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution , nearly all historians of abolition must still begin with Davis’s initial attempt to delineate it. In that sense and many others shown above, the historiographical legacy of Age of Revolution is enduring.

Manisha Sinha is the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (University of North Carolina Press, 2000) and The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (Yale University Press, 2016). She is currently writing a book on the “Greater Reconstruction” of American democracy and capitalism.

The author wishes to thank Amy Dru Stanley, Eric Foner, Alex Lichtenstein, James Oakes, John Stauffer, and the many anonymous AHR readers for their comments.

For some of Davis’s other important works on slavery and antislavery, see David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York, 1984); Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery (Cambridge, Mass., 2003); and Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York, 2006).

David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (New York, 2014); Drew Gilpin Faust, “The Scholar Who Shaped History,” New York Review of Books , March 20, 2014, 8–11.

David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1966); Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (1975; repr., New York, 1999); Davis, “Re-examining the Problem of Slavery in Western Culture,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 118, no. 2 (2008): 247–266, here 263.

J. H. Plumb, “The Beginning of the End,” New York Times , February 9, 1975, sec. VII, 1–2, here 1.

Thomas L. Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 1,” American Historical Review 90, no. 2 (April 1985): 339–361 (reprinted in Thomas Bender, ed., The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation [Berkeley, Calif., 1992], 107–135); Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 2,” American Historical Review 90, no. 3 (June 1985): 547–566 (Bender, 136–160); David Brion Davis, “Reflections on Abolitionism and Ideological Hegemony,” American Historical Review 92, no. 4 (1987): 797–812 (Bender, 161–179); John Ashworth, “The Relationship between Capitalism and Humanitarianism,” American Historical Review 92, no. 4 (October 1987): 813–828 (Bender, 180–199); Thomas L. Haskell, “Convention and Hegemonic Interest in the Debate over Slavery: A Reply to Davis and Ashworth,” American Historical Review 92, no. 4 (1987): 829–878 (Bender, 200–259). For the mostly positive reception of Age of Revolution , see also reviews by Peter Wallenstein in Business History Review 49 (Autumn 1975): 401–402; August Meier in American Historical Review 81, no. 2 (April 1976): 443–444; and James W. St. G. Walker in Canadian Journal of African Studies 9 (1975): 383–386.

Davis, “Re-examining the Problem of Slavery in Western Culture,” 249.

David Brion Davis, “Intellectual Trajectories: Why People Study What They Do,” Reviews in American History 37, no. 1 (2009): 148–159, here 154, emphasis in the original.

Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-bellum South (New York, 1956); Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Régime (New York, 1918).

John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York, 1972); George P. Rawick, The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography , Series One, vol. 1: From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community (Westport, Conn., 1972); Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974); Leslie Howard Owens, This Species of Property: Slave Life and Culture in the Old South (New York, 1976); Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York, 1976); Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York, 1977).

Franklin Knight, review of The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 , by David Brion Davis, and Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies , edited by Stanley L. Engerman and Eugene D. Genovese, Journal of Social History 10, no. 1 (1976): 109–115, here 109; Davis, “Re-examining the Problem of Slavery in Western Culture,” 266.

Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture . It is worth mentioning that Bodin was inspired by a runaway slave. Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, Conn., 2016), 10; Holly Brewer, “Slavery, Sovereignty, and ‘Inheritable Blood’: Reconsidering John Locke and the Origins of American Slavery,” American Historical Review 122, no. 4 (October 2017): 1038–1078.

Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture , 483–493.

See, for example, Howard Temperley’s review of The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture in Journal of American Studies 1, no. 2 (1967): 289–291, here 291. See also the review of the book by M. I. Finley, “The Idea of Slavery,” New York Review of Books , January 26, 1967, 7–10.

Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution , 16; Knight review, 110. For a similar critique, see James A. Rawley’s review of Age of Revolution in the International Journal of African Historical Studies 9, no. 1 (1976): 118–119.

Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York, 1969); Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels against Slavery (Boston, 1967); Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation . For the vast literature on African American and women abolitionists since, see Manisha Sinha, “Coming of Age: The Historiography of Black Abolitionism,” in Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John Stauffer, eds., Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism (New York, 2006), 23–40; Shirley J. Yee, Black Women Abolitionists: A Study in Activism, 1828–1860 (Knoxville, Tenn., 1992); Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998); Beth A. Salerno, Sister Societies: Women’s Antislavery Organizations in Antebellum America (DeKalb, Ill., 2005); Stacey M. Robertson, Hearts Beating for Liberty: Women Abolitionists in the Old Northwest (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2010).

Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006); Richard S. Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2002); Sinha, The Slave’s Cause , pt. 1; Julie L. Holcomb, Moral Commerce: Quakers and the Transatlantic Boycott of the Slave Labor Economy (Ithaca, N.Y., 2016); Brycchan Carey, From Peace to Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American Antislavery, 1657–1761 (New Haven, Conn., 2012); Paul Polgar, Standard Bearers of Equality: America’s First Abolitionists (Chapel Hill, N.C., forthcoming 2019); Sarah Gronningsater, The Arc of Abolition: The Children of Gradual Emancipation and the Origins of National Freedom (Philadelphia, forthcoming 2019).

R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolutions: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800 , 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J., 1959); C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York, 1938). On the erasure of the Haitian Revolution from history, see Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, 1995); Jeremy Adelman, “An Age of Imperial Revolutions,” American Historical Review 113, no. 2 (April 2008): 319–340, here 321.

Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution , 557–564, quotes from 564.

David Brion Davis, Revolutions: Reflections on American Equality and Foreign Liberations (Cambridge, Mass., 1990); Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation; Davis, “Re-examining the Problem of Slavery in Western Culture,” 266. On slave resistance and abolition, see Merton L. Dillon, Slavery Attacked: Southern Slaves and Their Allies, 1619–1865 (Baton Rouge, La., 1991); Sinha, The Slave’s Cause .

Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 2004); Matthew J. Clavin, Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution (Philadelphia, 2011); Maurice Jackson and Jacqueline Bacon, eds., African Americans and the Haitian Revolution: Selected Essays and Historical Documents (New York, 2010); Sinha, The Slave’s Cause , 53–64. For an opposing argument, see Mitch Kachun, “Antebellum African Americans, Public Commemoration, and the Haitian Revolution: A Problem of Historical Mythmaking,” Journal of the Early Republic 26, no. 2 (2006): 249–273, also reprinted in Jackson and Bacon, African Americans and the Haitian Revolution , 93–106.

Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution , 177, 184–195.

Sir Reginald Coupland, The British Anti-Slavery Movement (London, 1933). Davis, however, acknowledged his debt to Roger Anstey, the prominent historian of British slave trade abolition, who published his book the same year. Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution , 20; Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760–1810 (London, 1975).

Much of this work remains useful. Gilbert Hobbs Barnes, The Antislavery Impulse, 1830–1844 (New York, 1933); Aileen S. Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834–1850 (New York, 1969). For some early syntheses, most of which concentrated on the antebellum period, see Louis Filler, The Crusade against Slavery, 1830–1860 (New York, 1960); Dwight Lowell Dumond, Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1961); James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (New York, 1976); Ronald Walters, The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism after 1830 (Baltimore, 1976).

See some of the essays in Martin Duberman, ed., The Antislavery Vanguard: New Essays on the Abolitionists (Princeton, N.J., 1965), for the portrayal of abolitionists as predecessors of civil rights activists. Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago, 1959), chap. 4; David Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered: Essays on the Civil War Era (New York, 1956), chap. 2; Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 1960); David Brion Davis, The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style (Baton Rouge, La., 1969).

Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution , 18, 350, 379.

Paul H. Elovitz, The Making of Psychohistory: Origins, Controversies, and Pioneering Contributors (New York, 2018).

Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation , xvi, 225; Eric Foner, “Slavery in the Modern World: Davis Brion Davis’s Pathbreaking Study of the Problem of Slavery,” The Nation , January 29, 2014, https://www.thenation.com/article/slavery-modern-world/ . In contrast, see Nell Irvin Painter’s evocative “Soul Murder and Slavery: Toward a Fully Loaded Cost Accounting,” chap. 1 in Painter, Southern History across the Color Line (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2002), 15–39.

Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1944); Heather Cateau and S. H. H. Carrington, eds., Capitalism and Slavery Fifty Years Later: Eric Eustace Williams—A Reassessment of the Man and His Work (New York, 2000); Barbara L. Solow and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy of Eric Williams (Cambridge, 1987); Manisha Sinha, “Reviving the Black Radical Tradition,” in Deborah Chasman and Joshua Cohen, eds., Race, Capitalism, Justice (Cambridge, Mass., 2017), 66–71, here 71.

Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh, 1977); Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, 2014). On the continuing profitability of slave-grown sugar, see also William A. Green, British Slave Emancipation: The Sugar Colonies and the Great Experiment, 1830–1865 (Oxford, 1976); and James Walvin’s recent Sugar: The World Corrupted—From Slavery to Obesity (New York, 2018). For an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to revive Williams’s thesis on abolition, especially since it is limited to the period of slave trade abolition, see David Beck Ryden, West Indian Slavery and British Abolition, 1783–1807 (Cambridge, 2009).

Davis, “Re-examining the Problem of Slavery in Western Culture,” 265.

Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974). On Genovese’s long reign over the historiography of slavery, see my “Eugene D. Genovese: The Mind of a Marxist Conservative,” Radical History Review , no. 88 (Winter 2004): 4–29.

Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture , chap. 10. On early Quaker abolitionism, see Sinha, The Slave’s Cause , 12–24; Marcus Rediker, The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist (Boston, 2017); Gary B. Nash, Warner Mifflin: Unflinching Quaker Abolitionist (Philadelphia, 2017); Geoffrey Plank, John Woolman’s Path to the Peaceable Kingdom: A Quaker in the British Empire (Philadelphia, 2012); Maurice Jackson, Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism (Philadelphia, 2009).

See, for example, Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 (New York, 1978); Alan Dawley, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge, Mass., 1976). On whiteness and the working class, see David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London, 1991); Gunther Peck, Race Traffic: Historicizing the Global Origins of Whiteness and Resistance to It (Chapel Hill, N.C., forthcoming 2019); Betty Fladeland, Abolitionists and Working-Class Problems in the Age of Industrialization (Baton Rouge, La., 1984); Bruce Laurie, Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform (Cambridge, 2005); Mark A. Lause, Free Labor: The Civil War and the Making of an American Working Class (Urbana, Ill., 2015).

Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution , 233, 252, 254, 350, emphasis in the original. Roger Anstey criticized Davis’s argument, because “the new commercial and industrial classes” were not “in the vanguard of antislavery.” See his review of Age of Revolution in English Historical Review 91, no. 358 (1976): 141–148, here 144. Robert McColley made the same point in his review in Agricultural History 50, no. 2 (1976): 439–440. John Ashworth also notes the proslavery sympathies of northern factory owners; “The Relationship between Capitalism and Humanitarianism,” 828 n. 40. See also Philip S. Foner, Business and Slavery: The New York Merchants and the Irrepressible Conflict (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1941); Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (London, 1986).

Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution , 379.

John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic , vol. 1: Commerce and Compromise, 1820–1850 (Cambridge, 1995), 125, 127, 144; and vol. 2: The Coming of the Civil War, 1850–1861 (Cambridge, 2007), 292. On the mutual interdependence of the various sectors and regions of the U.S. economy, see the original framing by Douglass C. North in The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790–1860 (New York, 1966).

Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 1,” 356; Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 2,” 553–559, 560, 563; Ashworth, “The Relationship between Capitalism and Humanitarianism,” 815, 828; Haskell, “Convention and Hegemonic Interest in the Debate over Slavery,” 862–863.

Davis, “Reflections on Abolitionism and Ideological Hegemony,” 800, 806–807 n. 15, 812; Haskell, “Convention and Hegemonic Interest in the Debate over Slavery,” 872–878; David Brion Davis, “The Emergence of Immediatism in British and American Antislavery Thought,” Journal of American History 49, no. 2 (1962): 209–230; Sinha, The Slave’s Cause , 179–180, 197–198.

David Brion Davis, “The Perils of Doing History by Ahistorical Abstraction: A Reply to Thomas L. Haskell’s AHR Forum Reply,” in Bender, The Antislavery Debate , 290–309, here 306, 308, 308–309; Davis, “Reflections on Abolitionism and Ideological Hegemony,” 800, 806; Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation , 304; Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution , 467, 468.

John Ashworth, “Capitalism, Class, and Antislavery,” in Bender, The Antislavery Debate , 263–289, here 264. For studies of the Dutch Empire and early capitalism, see the work of Wim Klooster, especially his recent The Dutch Moment: War, Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World (Ithaca, N.Y., 2016).

Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York, 2014); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York, 2014); Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, Mass., 2013); Calvin Schermerhorn, The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815–1860 (New Haven, Conn., 2015); Jeff Forret and Christine E. Sears, eds., New Directions in Slavery Studies: Commodification, Community, and Comparison (Baton Rouge, La., 2015); Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Philadelphia, 2016); Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (Boston, 2017); Caitlin Rosenthal, Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (Cambridge, Mass., 2018).

W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York, 1935), chap. 4, 307; Andrew Hartman, “W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction and the New (Marxist) Historiography,” Society for U.S. Intellectual History, November 1, 2017, https://s-usih.org/2017/11/w-e-b-du-boiss-black-reconstruction-and-the-new-marxist-historiography/ .

John J. Clegg, “Capitalism and Slavery,” Critical Historical Studies 2, no. 2 (2015): 281–304; Scott Reynolds Nelson, “Who Put Their Capitalism in My Slavery?,” Journal of the Civil War Era 5, no. 2 (2015): 289–310; James Oakes, “Capitalism and Slavery and the Civil War,” International Labor and Working-Class History 89 (Spring 2016): 195–220; Amy Dru Stanley, “Histories of Capitalism and Sex Difference,” Journal of the Early Republic 36, no. 2 (2016): 343–350; Charles Post, “Slavery and the New History of Capitalism,” Catalyst 1, no. 1 (2017): 172–193; Stephanie McCurry, “Plunder of Black Life: The Problem of Connecting the History of Slavery to the Economics of the Present,” Times Literary Supplement , May 17, 2017, 23–24, 26.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (New York, 1983); Eugene D. Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation (New York, 1969).

Jonathan Glickstein, “The Chattelization of Northern Whites: An Evolving Abolitionist Warning,” American Nineteenth Century History 4, no. 1 (2003): 25–58; Eric Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (New York, 1980), chap. 4; Philip S. Foner and Herbert Shapiro, eds., Northern Labor and Antislavery: A Documentary History (Westport, Conn., 1994); Bernard Mandel, Labor, Free and Slave: Workingmen and the Anti-Slavery Movement in the United States (New York, 1955); Joseph G. Rayback, “The American Workingman and the Antislavery Crusade,” Journal of Economic History 3, no. 2 (1943): 152–163. For an excellent study of the early labor movement, see Alex Gourevitch, From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2015).

Karl Marx, Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production , ed. Frederick Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York, 1889), 287.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Civil War in the United States , ed. Andrew Zimmerman (New York, 2016), 194–195; Robin Blackburn, An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln (London, 2011); August H. Nimtz, “Marx and Engels on the US Civil War: The ‘Materialist Conception of History’ in Action,” Historical Materialism 19, no. 4 (2011): 169–192. On German socialist abolitionists, but positing a dichotomy with New England immediatists, who were also opposed to the property regime of slavery, see Andrew Zimmerman, “From the Rhine to the Mississippi: Property, Democracy, and Socialism in the American Civil War,” Journal of the Civil War Era 5, no. 1 (2015): 3–37; Eugene D. Genovese, In Red and Black: Marxian Explorations in Southern and Afro-American History (New York, 1971).

Sinha, The Slave’s Cause , chap. 11; Plumb, “The Beginning of the End,” 2. Knight makes the same point in his review, 113; as do David Grimsted in his review in William and Mary Quarterly 33, no. 3 (1976): 531–534; and Howard Temperley in his review in Journal of American Studies 10, no. 1 (1976): 111–113.

For a recent overview that defines antislavery ideology in a similar broad, systemic manner, see W. Caleb McDaniel, “The Bonds and Boundaries of Antislavery,” Journal of the Civil War Era 4, no. 1 (2014): 85–104; Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York, 1970); James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (New York, 2013); Oakes, The Scorpion’s Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 2014); Corey M. Brooks, Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politics (Chicago, 2016); Sinha, The Slave’s Cause , chap. 14; Eric Foner, “The Civil War and Slavery: A Response,” Historical Materialism 19, no. 4 (2011): 92–98.

Richard Huzzey, Freedom Burning: Anti-Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain (Ithaca, N.Y., 2012); Trevor Burnard and Richard Follett, “Caribbean Slavery, British Anti-Slavery, and the Cultural Politics of Venereal Disease,” The Historical Journal 55, no. 2 (2012): 427–451; Padraic X. Scanlan, Freedom’s Debtors: British Antislavery in Sierra Leone in the Age of Revolution (New Haven, Conn., 2017). For the conflation of antislavery with proslavery imperialism, see Christopher M. Florio, “From Poverty to Slavery: Abolitionists, Overseers, and the Global Struggle for Labor in India,” Journal of American History 102, no. 4 (2016): 1005–1024. See also Sasha Turner, Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica (Philadelphia, 2017); Brooke N. Newman, A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica (New Haven, Conn., 2018); Sinha, The Slave’s Cause , 371–380.

Brown, Moral Capital; Seymour Drescher, “The Shocking Birth of British Abolitionism,” Slavery and Abolition 33, no. 4 (2012): 571–593; J. R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery: The Mobilisation of Public Opinion against the Slave Trade, 1787–1807 (Manchester, 1995); Seymour Drescher, This Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (New York, 2002); Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore, 1992); Nicholas Draper, The Price of Emancipation: Slave-Ownership, Compensation and British Society at the End of Slavery (Cambridge, 2010).

Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization , 2 vols. (New York, 1927). On the Civil War as a capitalist, democratic revolution, see Barrington Moore Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston, 1966), chap. 3; Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic , 2: 647.

Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London, 1983); V. I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline (1917; revised trans., Moscow, 1934); Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital: A Contribution to an Economic Explanation of Imperialism (1913), https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1913/accumulation-capital/index.htm .

Marc Parry, “The Long Reach of David Brion Davis,” Chronicle of Higher Education , February 3, 2014, https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Long-Reach-of-David-Brion/144287 ; Lewis Perry, Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and the Government of God in Antislavery Thought (1973; repr., Knoxville, Tenn., 1995); Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge, 1998); John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, Mass., 2002). The essays by Lewis Perry and Amy Dru Stanley are in Karen Halttunen and Lewis Perry, eds., Moral Problems in American Life: New Perspectives on Cultural History (Ithaca, N.Y., 1998); Steven Mintz and John Stauffer, eds., The Problem of Evil: Slavery, Freedom, and the Ambiguities of American Reform (Amherst, Mass., 2007).

See essays by Joseph Yannielli, Natalie Joy, Sean Griffin, and Peter Wirzbicki in The Future of Abolition Studies , Special Issue, Journal of the Civil War Era 8, no. 2 (June 2018); Michaël Roy, Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, and Claire Parfait, eds., Undoing Slavery: American Abolitionism in Transnational Perspective, 1776–1865 (Paris, 2018); J. R. Oldfield, Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Revolution: An International History of Anti-Slavery, c. 1787–1820 (Cambridge, 2013); W. Caleb McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform (Baton Rouge, La., 2013); Rebecca J. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860–1889 (Princeton, N.J., 1985); Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999). See the essays in Rebecca J. Scott, Seymour Drescher, Hebe Maria Mattos de Castro, George Reid Andrews, and Robert M. Levine, The Abolition of Slavery and the Aftermath of Emancipation in Brazil (Durham, N.C., 1988); Josep M. Fradera and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, eds., Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire (New York, 2013); Celso Thomas Castilho, Slave Emancipation and Transformations in Brazilian Political Citizenship (Pittsburgh, 2016). For an earlier period, see Bianca Premo, The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire (New York, 2017).

Graham Russell Gao Hodges, David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2010); Matthew J. Clavin, Aiming for Pensacola: Fugitive Slaves on the Atlantic and Southern Frontiers (Cambridge, Mass., 2015); Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of America’s Fugitive Slaves (New York, 2015); Sinha, The Slave’s Cause , chaps. 12, 13, and 15; R. J. M. Blackett, The Captive’s Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the Politics of Slavery (Cambridge, 2018); Andrew Delbanco, The War before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War (New York, 2018).

Amy Dru Stanley, “Instead of Waiting for the Thirteenth Amendment: The War Power, Slave Marriage, and Inviolate Human Rights,” American Historical Review 115, no. 3 (June 2010): 732–765; Robin Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights (London, 2011); Jenny S. Martinez, The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law (New York, 2012); Sinha, The Slave’s Cause , 53–64. See also Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York, 2008). For twentieth-century and modern readings of human rights as a nationalist and neoliberal exercise that constricts rather than expands emancipatory possibilities, see Eric D. Weitz, “Self-Determination: How a German Enlightenment Idea Became the Slogan of National Liberation and a Human Right,” American Historical Review 120, no. 2 (April 2015): 462–496; Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, Mass., 2010); Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Cambridge, Mass., 2018).

On democracy and capitalism, see Charles Post, The American Road to Capitalism: Studies in Class-Structure, Economic Development, and Political Conflict, 1620–1877 (Leiden, 2011), 254–277; Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (London, 1995); Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London, 2000); Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London, 1985), especially chap. 4; Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York, 1942); Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848–1875 (New York, 1975).

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University Statement

February 16, 2024

Dear Members of the Yale Community,

Several years ago, we embarked on a journey to understand better our university’s history—specifically Yale’s formative ties to slavery and the slave trade. We chose to do this because we have a responsibility to the pursuit of truth and the dissemination of knowledge, both foundational to the mission of our university. Confronting this history helps us to build a stronger community and realize our aspirations to create a better future.

Today, on behalf of Yale University, we recognize our university’s historical role in and associations with slavery, as well as the labor, the experiences, and the contributions of enslaved people to our university’s history, and we apologize for the ways that Yale’s leaders, over the course of our early history, participated in slavery. Acknowledging and apologizing for this history are only part of the path forward. These findings have propelled us toward meaningful action to address the continued effects of slavery in society today.

Since October 2020, members of the Yale and Slavery Research Project have conducted intensive research to provide a clearer and more comprehensive understanding of the university’s past. The Research Project included faculty, staff, students, and New Haven community members, and it was led by David W. Blight, Sterling Professor of History and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale. Members of the group shared their results publicly as they did their work, and the university has steadily launched programs and initiatives in response.

The full findings from this project are now published by Yale University Press in a scholarly, peer-reviewed book authored by Professor Blight and members of the Yale and Slavery Research Project. Key findings and the full book are available to all online .

Yale and Slavery Research Findings

The Yale and Slavery Research Project has deepened greatly our understanding of our university’s history with slavery and the role of enslaved individuals who participated in the construction of a Yale building or whose labor enriched prominent leaders who made gifts to Yale. Although there are no known records of Yale University owning enslaved people, many of Yale’s Puritan founders owned enslaved people, as did a significant number of Yale’s early leaders and other prominent members of the university community, and the Research Project has identified over 200 of these enslaved people. The majority of those who were enslaved are identified as Black, but some are identified as Indigenous. Some of those enslaved participated in the construction of Connecticut Hall, the oldest building on campus. Others worked in cotton fields, rum refineries, and other punishing places in Connecticut or elsewhere, and their grueling labor benefited those who contributed funds to Yale.

We also know that prominent members of the Yale community joined with New Haven leaders and citizens to stop a proposal to build a college in New Haven for Black youth in 1831, which would have been America’s first Black college. Additional aspects of Yale’s history are illuminated in the book’s findings, including the Yale Civil War Memorial that honors those who fought for the North and the South without any mention of slavery or other context.

Our Forward-Looking Commitment

Today, we announce actions based upon the Research Project’s findings and our university’s history by focusing on systemic issues that echo in our nation’s legacy of slavery—specifically, increasing educational access and expanding educational pathways for local youth in the New Haven community. These build on the initiatives and programs we have launched throughout the past few years as members of the project shared their research.

The new work we undertake advances inclusive economic growth in New Haven. Aligned with our core educational mission, we also are ensuring that our history, in its entirety, is better reflected across campus, and we are creating widespread access to Yale’s historical findings. We highlight some of our commitments below. The full details of the university’s response are available on the Yale and Slavery Research Project website .

Increasing Educational Access and Excellence in Teaching and Research

The lost opportunity to build a college for Black youths in New Haven in 1831 prompts us to strengthen our partnerships with Historically Black Colleges and Universities ( HBCU s) across the country today and expand educational pathways for young scholars in our home city.

• New Haven School Teachers: New Haven, as well as the rest of the country, is dealing with an acute and ongoing teacher shortage; in our city, there were eighty teaching positions that went unfilled during the last academic year. There are many reasons for this shortage, including the high costs of acquiring certification and a Master’s in Teaching degree, compared to the relatively modest compensation in the profession. We are partnering with the New Haven Public School system, New Haven Promise, and Southern Connecticut State University to design and implement a new residency fellowship program to provide funding to aspiring teachers, so they can attain a Master’s in Teaching degree in exchange for a commitment of at least three years of service in the New Haven Public School system. Once launched, this fellowship program aims to place 100 teachers with master’s degrees into the city’s schools in five years. 
• Yale and Slavery Teachers Institute Program: Yale is launching a four-year teacher’s institute in summer 2025 to foster innovation in the ways regional history is taught. This program will help K-12 teachers in New England meet new state mandates for incorporating Black and Indigenous history into their curricula. Each year, a cohort of teachers will engage with partners within and outside of the university community to study content and methods related to a particular theme, using the book Yale and Slavery: A History as a springboard. The first year of the program will focus on Indigenous history, followed by slavery in the north, and Reconstruction and the Black freedom struggle. Led by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at the Yale MacMillan Center, the program will provide a platform for teachers in New England to co-develop curricular materials, in collaboration with scholars, public historians, Native communities, and other groups. The pedagogical materials and methods created through the program will be disseminated broadly for the benefit of students, educators, and the general public throughout the region.
• HBCU Research Partnerships: We continue to expand our research partnerships with HBCU s across the country with pathways programs for students, opportunities for faculty collaboration, and faculty exchange programs. The university will announce a significant new investment in the coming weeks.
• New Haven Promise Program: In January 2022, Yale expanded its contribution to New Haven Promise , by 25 percent annually, from $4 million to $5 million, and extended its commitment through June 2026. New Haven Promise has supported more than 2,800 New Haven Public School students through scholarships and career development programs.
• Pennington Fellowships: In December 2022, Yale launched a new scholarship to support New Haven high school graduates to attend one of our partner HBCU institutions (Hampton University, Howard University, Morehouse College, Morgan State University, North Carolina A&T State University, and Spelman College). The program is designed to help address historical disparities in educational opportunities for students from New Haven and will grow to include forty to fifty Pennington scholars at any given time, supporting students in their academic, financial, and career entry success.
• Law School Access Program: Yale Law School’s pipeline program serves first-generation, low-income, and under-represented students from New Haven. The program invests in a class of up to twenty fellows who are passionate about uplifting their local communities in New Haven and Connecticut. Yale began centrally co-funding the program with the Law School in 2024 to ensure its long-term stability.
• K-12 Educational Outreach in New Haven: Yale supports many programs for youth in New Haven and surrounding communities, and thousands of public school children take part in Yale-funded academic and social development programs . These include Yale’s Pathways to Science and Yale’s Pathways to Arts and Humanities programs.

Advancing Inclusive Economic Growth in New Haven

We remain committed to partnering with our home city of New Haven to create vibrant shared communities with increased economic opportunities. This builds on our ongoing work with the New Haven community, which includes increasing what was already the largest voluntary payment by a university to its host city in the country to approximately $135 million over six years and the creation of a new Center for Inclusive Growth to develop and implement strategies to grow the city economically.

• Dixwell Plaza: Yale recently signed a ten-year letter of intent for space at Dixwell Plaza to support the development of a state-of-the-art mixed-use retail, residential, and cultural hub in Dixwell’s historically Black community center that is rooted in restorative economic development. Yale is working on this initiative with the Connecticut Community Outreach and Revitalization Program (ConnCORP), a local organization whose mission is to provide opportunities to New Haven’s underserved residents.
• Community Investment Program: Yale’s community investment program works with independently owned retail businesses. Most recently, University Properties has supported a growing number of locally owned brick-and-mortar businesses, including restaurants and retail clothing stores. This program brings jobs to New Haven residents and expands the city’s tax base.

Acknowledging Our Past

The research findings make clear that Yale’s foundations are inextricably bound with the economic and political systems of slavery. That history is not fully evident on our campus, and we are working to ensure that our physical campus provides members of our community with a more complete view of the university’s history.

• Transforming Connecticut Hall: Connecticut Hall, constructed in the mid-eighteenth century using in part the labor of enslaved people, is being reconstituted as a place of healing and communion as the new home of the Yale Chaplaincy. The Yale Committee for Art Representing Enslavement will make recommendations for how the building’s history with slavery can be acknowledged and made evident through art. The renovated building is currently slated to be reopened in summer 2026.
• Civil War Memorial: Yale’s Civil War Memorial, located in Memorial Hall and dedicated in 1915, is a “Lost Cause” monument. However, the purpose and meaning of the memorial are largely unknown to most who walk past it. Recently, an educational display was installed near the memorial to inform visitors about its history and provide additional resources.
• Committee for Art Recognizing Enslavement: In June 2023, we launched the Yale Committee for Art Recognizing Enslavement , which includes representatives from both the Yale and New Haven communities. The committee is working with (and soliciting input from) members of the campus and New Haven communities to commission works of art and related programming to address Yale’s historical roles in and associations with slavery and the slave trade, as well as the legacy of that history.
• M.A. Privatim degrees: In April 2023, the Yale board of trustees voted to confer M.A. Privatim degrees on the Reverend James W. C. Pennington (c. 1807-1870) and the Reverend Alexander Crummell (1819-1898). Both men studied theology at Yale, but because they were Black, the university did not allow them to register formally for classes or matriculate for a degree. On September 14, 2023, the university held a ceremony to honor the two men and commemorate the conferral of the degrees.

Creating Widespread Access to Historical Findings

Yale and Slavery: A History provides a more complete narrative of Yale’s history and that of New Haven, Connecticut, and our nation. Aligned with our core educational mission, we will provide opportunities for communities within and beyond Yale’s campus to learn from the findings.

• New Haven Museum Exhibition: Today, we open a new exhibition at the New Haven Museum, created in collaboration with the Yale University Library, Yale and Slavery Research Project, and the Museum. On view through the summer, the exhibition complements the publication of Yale and Slavery: A History and draws from the research project’s key findings in areas such as the economy and trade, Black churches and schools, the 1831 Black college proposal, and memory and memorialization in the 20th century and today. The exhibition has a special focus on stories of Black New Haven, including early Black students and alumni of Yale, from the 1830s to 1940. There is no admission fee for viewing the exhibition.
• Book Distribution: We are providing copies of the book, Yale and Slavery: A History to each public library and high school in New Haven, as well as the local churches and other community organizations. We also have subsidized a free digital version that is available to everyone.
• DeVane Lecture in Fall 2024: Professor Blight will teach the next DeVane Lecture in the fall 2024 semester. Students can take the course for credit, and the lectures are free to attend for New Haven and other local community members. His course will cover the findings of the Yale and Slavery Research Project and other related scholarly work. The lectures will be filmed and made available free online in 2025.
• App-Guided Tour: A new app includes a map of key sites on campus and in New Haven with narration, offering users the opportunity to take a self-guided tour. The nineteen points of interest on the tour start with the John Pierpont House and end at Eli Whitney’s tomb in the Grove Street Cemetery.
• Campus Tours: With a more accurate understanding of Yale’s history, we are updating campus tours so that they include the key findings from the Yale and Slavery Research Project, particularly concerning the Civil War Memorial and Connecticut Hall.

Working Together to Strengthen Our Community

Our commitments are ongoing, and there remains more to be accomplished in the years ahead. We have established the Committee on Addressing the Legacy of Slavery to seek broad input from faculty, students, staff, alumni, New Haven community members, and external experts and leaders on actions the university can take to address its history and legacy of slavery and create a stronger and more inclusive university community that pursues research, teaching, scholarship, practice, and preservation of the highest caliber. Secretary and Vice President for University Life Kimberly Goff-Crews will chair this committee.

We invite members of the Yale and New Haven communities to read the book and share with us their comments . The Committee on Addressing the Legacy of Slavery will review all input and consider future opportunities—with New Haven, other universities, and other communities—to improve access to education and enhance inclusive economic growth. The committee will report to the president. In the coming weeks, the committee will host listening sessions for faculty, students, staff, and alumni. The Committee for Art Recognizing Enslavement will also host forums for members of the community. These sessions will be posted on the Belonging at Yale calendar and the Yale and Slavery Research Project’s community input webpage . 

The Yale and Slavery Research Project has helped us gain a more complete understanding of our university’s history. The steps and initiatives Yale has established in response to the historical findings build on our continued commitments to the New Haven community and our ongoing Belonging at Yale work to enhance diversity, support equity, and promote an environment of welcome, inclusion, and respect.

Today, we mark one milestone in our journey to creating a stronger and more inclusive Yale and to confronting deeply rooted challenges in society to do our part in building “the beloved community” envisioned by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Our work continues, and we welcome your thoughts and hope you will engage with our history.

Peter Salovey, ’86 PhD President Chris Argyris Professor of Psychology Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health, Management, and Sociology

Josh Bekenstein, ’80 BA Senior Trustee, Yale Corporation  

African Scarification and Slavery: From Anthropology to Allegory

• First Online: 22 May 2024

Cite this chapter

• Michael Janis 2  

Senegalese author and director Ousmane Sembène, as a socialist and contributor to the pervasive legacy of social realism in African literate, followed a political program of littérature engagée in his approach to depicting history in fiction and film. His short story “Le Voltaïque” (1962), translated as “Tribal Scars,” chronicles two time periods in West Africa: the era just after independence and the era of the European slave trade. Allegories of slavery and modernity intertwine to present readers with powerful metaphors of scarification—the aesthetic designs of tradition as well as the scars of history and trauma—as transformative marks of resistance, unity, and Pan-Africanism. Sembène’s nouvelle is examined against the backdrop of a growing body of Africanist anthropological and photographic perspectives on slavery and scarification, comparing African literary contexts to current scholarship on the “neo-slave narrative” and to Paul Gilroy’s concept of the “slave sublime,” or “ineffable trauma,” in The Black Atlantic . The treatment of slavery in African fiction opens a vital dialogue on the relations between history and fiction, aesthetics and politics, the West and Africa.

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Ousmane Sembène, “Tribal Scars or the Voltaïque,” Tribal Scars and Other Stories , translated by Len Ortzen (London: Heinemann, 1974), pp. 102–116 (hereafter abbreviated “LV”). The translation by Orzen will be used here with the significant exception of the addition of the last line of the story, inexplicably left out: “Readers, what do you think?” [“Lecteurs, qu’en pensez-vous?”]. Ousmane Sembène, “Le Voltaïque,” Le Voltaïque, la Noire de—: nouvelles (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1962), pp. 189–216. Although he uses the word “tribu” in the story, Sembène does not employ the term “tribal scars.” The term today evokes the controversy of the colonialist use of “tribe” and stereotypes of primitivism. For decades the term etnie, ethnic group, has become the norm in Francophone Africa. A common word, like cicatrice , usually designates “scar” or “scarification” (which I employ to signify intentional scaring in this context), while the word belafre, employed by Sembène, has a rather obscure origin in Old French leffre and balèvre . The story employs terms such as “négrière” [slaver] and “esclave” [slave]. This paper frequently uses the words “slavery” and “slave,” as do the sources cited here; however, the terms “enslaved or enslaved person” are also employed to respect the humanity of individuals, as opposed to generic references.

“Griot,” a term that evolved in Francophone Africa, may be defined, according to specific cultures and roles, as traditional praise-singer, sage, storyteller, poet, historian, royal linguist, etc. French dictionaries trace the word to the seventeenth-century term “ guiriot ,” of uncertain origin. Essentially every West African culture has specific terms for these important figures, from the Mandé term djéli to Wolof term géwél to the Twi (Akan) term okyeame . For an investigation of the origins and cultures of the griot in West Africa, see Thomas Hale, “From the griot of Roots to the roots of griot : A new look at the origins of a controversial African term for bard.” Oral Tradition 12, no. 2 (1997): 249–278.

Key titles on the neo-slave narrative and slavery in African American literature may be referenced in Yogita Goyal, Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery (New York: New York University Press, 2019).

Achille Mbembe, “The Subject of the World,” in Facing Up to the Past: Perspectives on the Commemoration of Slavery from Africa, the Americas and Europe , ed. Gert Oostindie (London: James Curry, 2002), p. 25: “[T]here is, strictly speaking, no African memory of slavery […] At most, slavery is experienced as a wound whose meaning resides in the domain of the psychic unconscious.”

The relationship between slavery and the history of anti-Black racism—from Gomes Eanes de Zurara’s Crónica do descobrimento e conquista da Guiné (1453) to the invention of hierarchies and pseudoscientific categories by thinkers such as Linnaeus, Buffon, Blumenbach, Morton, Gobineau, etc.—has been documented in many studies, including Ibram X. Kendi’s recent Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Bold Type Books, 2017). For primary documents of the racism of European philosophers in the era of Enlightenment, in which philosophers promulgated equality for Europeans and slavery for Africans, see Emmanuel Eze, Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1997).

Among recent efforts to excavate primary documents from African sources, see Alice Bellagamba, Sandra E. Greene, and Martin A. Klein, eds., African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade , Vols. 1 & 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, 2016).

See, for example, Edward M Bruner, “Tourism in Ghana: The Representation of Slavery and the Return of the Black Diaspora.” American Anthropologist 98, no. 2 (1996): 290–304; Brempong Osei-Tutu, “The African American Factor in the Commodification of Ghana’s Slave Castles,” Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana 6 (2002): 115–133; Jennifer Hasty, “Rites of Passage, Routes of Redemption: Emancipation Tourism and the Wealth of Culture.” Africa Today 49, no. 3 (2002): 47–76; Sandra L. Richards, “What Is to Be Remembered?: Tourism to Ghana’s Slave Castle-Dungeons.” Theatre Journal 57, no. 4 (2005): 617–637.

Ella Keren, “The Transatlantic Slave Trade in Ghanaian Academic Historiography: History, Memory, and Power.” The William and Mary Quarterly 66, no. 4 (2009), p. 976.

Akosua Adoma Perbi, A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana (Accra, Ghana: Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2004), p. 62.

In the period between 1640 and 1840, “the most brutal and inhumane system of slavery in Ghana’s history,” European slavers abducted approximately 1,209,000 captives. Rebecca Shumway, “Ghana and the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” in Slavery and its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora, ed. Rebecca Shumway and Trevor R. Getz (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), pp. 29, 31. Despite its significance as coastal center of trade, the Gold Coast was not the leading source in the transatlantic trade. See Patrick Manning, “The Slave Trade and the Demographic Evolution of Africa,” in From Chains to Bonds: The Slave Trade Revisited, ed. Doudou Diène (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, and Paris: UNESCO Publishing, 2001) p. 109: “We are all well acquainted with the powerful images of slaves being embarked on ships from castles along the Gold Coast, or from factories on Gorée. In contrast to these images, it appears that the great majority of those who made the middle passage across the Atlantic started their crossing from other points along the coast. The greatest numbers came, in order, from Angola, the Bight of Benin, Loando (Central Africa north of the Congo River), and the Bight of Biafra.”

Anderson Cooper, Interview with President Barack Obama. CNN. 19 July 2009. “President Obama in Ghana at the Cape Coast Dungeons.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gmDoon_yC0 . See also Wayne Drash, “Obama on slavery: ‘Capacity for cruelty still exists.’” CNN. 19 July 2009. http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/07/17/obama.slavery/# .

John F. Harris, “Clinton Says U.S. Wronged Africa.” The Washington Post. 25 March 1998. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1998/03/25/clinton-says-us-wronged-africa/ca090cd0-bdb8-4e33-9dfc-e66fdc2e59b6/ . While United Nations International Law recognizes an apology as an official path to legal action for violations of human rights, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, accused of stopping short of apologizing for Britain’s significant role in the slave trade, followed his statements with an apology on the 200th anniversary of British abolition. Reuters staff. “Blair says ‘sorry’ for slavery.” Reuters. 20 March 2007.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-blair-slavery-idUSMOL06003620070320 . The most rhetorically sophisticated, epideictic act of contrition of an American president came in the form of George W. Bush’s 2003 speech on Gorée, written by speechwriter Michael Gerson. The White House. “President George Bush Speaks on Gorée Island in Senegal.” 8 July 2003.

https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/07/print/20030708-1.html .

For a critique of the manipulative rhetoric of the speech, which included references to numerous Black abolitionists and intellectuals, see Walter Johnson, “Slavery, Reparations, and the Mythic March of Freedom,” Raritan XXVII, no. 2 (Fall 2007), p. 42: “Standing on the spot where thousands were herded from stinking pens across a small wooden bridge to be packed into the holds of ships set to make a Middle Passage that many would not survive, the President of the United States—remarkably, brazenly, outrageously—described the slave trade as part of God’s ‘Providence.’ Through their struggles against injustice, he explained, ‘the very people traded into slavery helped to set America free.’ Bush thus subordinated the history of slavery to the history of ‘freedom.’”

Bayo Holsey, “Charged Memories: The Slave Trade in Contemporary Political Discourse,” in Slavery and its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora , p.234.

See Akosua Perbi, “The Legacy of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana,” in Slavery and its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora , pp. 202–218. Perbi examines the effects of slave ancestry in modern interpersonal relations and legal decisions since abolition by colonial authorities in 1874 (extended to Asante and the northern region in 1908). Given that the 1992 Constitution of Ghana recognizes customary law, Perbi conducted interviews on traditional institutions such as chieftaincy in all of the administrative regions of the country, finding that on average 75% of respondents stated that a person of slave ancestry could not assume the office of chief. Family status and the legacy of slavery continue to profoundly affect “traditional political institutions, land tenure, issues of inheritance, and social affairs” (217). For another example, the case of Bénin, see the comments of Professor Olabiyi Babalola Joseph Yai: “This is still a country divided between the families of the enslaved and the slave traders. But the elite don’t want to talk about what happened here.” Kevin Sieff, “An African country reckons with its history of selling slaves.” The Washington Post. 29 January 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/an-african-country-reckons-with-its-history-of-selling-slaves/2018/01/29/5234f5aa-ff9a-11e7-86b9-8908743c79dd_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.80bb6e5b46ff .

Author’s notes at Cape Coast Castle, taken in the summer of 2009.

Opoku-Agyemang, Cape Coast Castle: A Collection of Poems (Accra: Afram Publishing, 2004). See also Kwesi Brew, The Return of No Return, and Other Poems (Accra, Ghana: Afram Publishing, 1995). Written in Fante, the first poem on the castle and slavery retains a place of enduring importance in Ghana’s literary history: Gaddiel Acquaah, Oguaa Aban (Mfantsipim: Cape Coast, Ghana, 1938).

Ama Ata Aidoo, “Of Forts, Castles, and Silences,” in Facing Up to the Past: Perspectives on the Commemoration of Slavery from Africa, the Americas and Europe , ed. Gert Oostindie (London: James Curry, 2002), p. 30.

The destructive economic and political impact of the slave trade, preceding the eventual European conquest of powerful polities and colonization of the continent, cannot be underestimated. From the Empire of Dahomey, rulers from the mid-eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries, from King Tegbesu to King Angonglo to King Adandozan, sent delegations to Salvador de Bahia and Lisbon to ensure exclusive markets of slavery with Brazil and Portugal. See Ana Lucia Araujo, Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), pp. 22–29. In contrast, in 1526, King Mvemba a Nzinga of Kôngo, famously wrote to King João III that the Portuguese “in order to satisfy their voracious appetite, seize many of our people, freed and exempt men,” asking that, in place of men engaged in pillage, he send doctors and others of good will. The letter is reproduced in Basil Davidson, The African Slave Trade (Boston: Atlantic-Little Brown, 1961), p. 147. Regardless of the response to the slave trade, European military dominance ensued, whether the seventeenth-century Portuguese conquest of the Kingdom of Kôngo or the nineteenth-century Belgian and French colonization of Congo and Dahomey, respectively—the same fate, in the most famous example, that would befall the Asante, after decades of the Anglo-Asante Wars, defeated by the British in 1900.

Diadie Ba, “Senegal’s Wade Calls Slavery Reparations Absurd.” Independent Online . South Africa. 11 August 2001. https://www.iol.co.za/news/africa/senegals-wade-calls-slave-reparations-absurd-71782

See Note 12. Reuters, “Blair says ‘sorry’ for slavery.”

Néciphore Soglo, “Foreword,” From Chains to Bonds , p. xiv.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Ending the Slavery Blame-Game,” New York Times . 23 April 2010.

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/opinion/23gates.html . In his speeches and interviews during the 2009 visit to Ghana, President Obama made it clear that he would continue the neoliberal economic stance of his predecessors when he asserted that he was “a big believer that Africans are responsible for Africa,” and that he objected to “excuses about corruption or poor governance” that connected Africa’s problems to the colonial legacy or to neocolonialism. Quoted in Holsey, “Charged Memories,” 233.

Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings , edited by Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin Books, 2003): 39–40.

National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, “Setting the Record Straight: A Response to Henry Louis Gates, Jr.” No date. http://ncobra.org/events/ReplyToGates.html . For an overview of the movement for reparations, see Ana Lucia Araujo, Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade. For diverse perspectives on reparations, see Should America Pay? Slavery and the Raging Debate on Reparations , edited by Raymond A. Winbush (New York: HarperCollins, 2003).

Wole Soyinka, The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 89.

Bayo Hosley, “Owning Up to the Past?” Transition 105 (2011): 76.

On “racial capitalism” in the making of modernity, see Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1983). For a new engagement with the capitalist production of “racial subjects,” see Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, translated by Laurent Dubois (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2017) p. 129: “But to understand the Black slave in the first era of capitalism, we must return to the figure of the ghost. A plastic subject who suffered a transformation through destruction, the Black Man is in effect the ghost of Modernity. It is by escaping the slave-form, engaging in new investments, and assuming the condition of the ghost that he managed to endow such transformation by destruction with a significance for the future.” Mbembe departs from the radical tradition’s reliance on Marxian models in “The Subject of the World,” in Facing Up to the Past , pp. 21–28: Starting with an apparent effort to point to the simultaneous validity and philosophical poverty of the major theoretical approaches to slavery and exploitation of Africans—from “deracination” (i.e., Aimé Césaire’s Discours sur le colonialisme ) to “disappropriation” (i.e., Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa ) to “degradation” (i.e., Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death ), even as the latter would seem to have influenced Mbembe’s subsequent investigations into “necropolitics”—he then criticizes nativist and nationalist approaches that rely upon “the idea of a unique African cultural identity founded on membership to the black race” (23), as well as the revolutionary application of Marxian theory, which he finds the most damaging because he believes it inevitably relies upon violence to achieve national liberation, dependency on an overdeveloped state, and the rejection of liberal democracy. Sembène the revolutionary would have disagreed vehemently with the critique of socialist revolution, but he held similar views on race, stating that “my solidarity is not based on race” and “mine is a class struggle,” which he also applied to the question of solidarity between Africa and the Diaspora. See Samba Gadjigo, Ousmane Sembène: The Making of a Militant Artist , translated by Moustapha Diop (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010), p. 141.

Ousmane Sembène, “Interview with Ousmane Sembène by Olivier Barlet.” (Paris, 1998) 27 August 2007. http://africultures.com/interview-with-ousmane-sembene-by-olivier-barlet-6843/ . Like all responsible scholars of Africa, Sembène points out the differences between domestic slavery and the European trade. Samba Gadjigo et al., Ousmane Sembène: Dialogues with Critics and Writers (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 103: “We were the first slavers. Whenever there was a war, members of the defeated group or community were enslaved […] Traditional slavery differs from the slave trade in that the slave trade was based on money and profit. Traditionally the slaves had a representative who participated in the debates during the community meetings. Sometimes the representative was even very close to the king.” Note: Sembène’s original French responses in these interviews are also available online or in the publications.

Ousmane Sembène, Man is Culture [bilingual text]. Hans Wolff Memorial Lecture. March 5, 1975. African Studies Program (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University, 1975), p. 3.

Like Négritude writers whose philosophy he challenged, Sembène came of age as a writer in France—where he met intellectuals from Aimé Césaire to Jean-Paul Sartre to Richard Wright—having lived in Marseille, in what he called a French “little Harlem,” where he wrote Le Docker noir . In “Ousmane Sembène: artiste postcoloniale?,” Savrina Parevadee Chinien writes, “L’œuvre d’Ousmane Sembène est didactique et ‘engagée,’ inséparable d’une élaboration idéologique et politique,” Africultures. 5 April 2009. http://africultures.com/ousmane-sembene-artiste-postcolonial-8521/ . The engaged writer should be “engaged in what? Defending freedom.” See Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature?, translated by Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949), pp. 64–65: “I demand of all freedoms that they require the liberation of the colored peoples from the white race.” For an overview of the development of his work in fiction and film, see Samba Gadjigo, Ousmane Sembène: The Making of a Militant Artist.

Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings , pp. 32–33.

Regarding the controversy of a baptismal record showing Equiano was born in South Carolina, which could undermine the story of his African birth, capture, and experience of the Middle Passage, Lovejoy presents some possibilities for a forged baptismal record (without denying its possible authenticity), and points to key aspects of Equiano’s life that evince an African birth, not the least of which was his lack of English in his early years in Barbados and England. See Paul E. Lovejoy, “Autobiography and Memory: Gustavus Vassa, alias Olaudah Equiano, the African.” Slavery and Abolition 27, no. 3 (December 2006): 317.

Elizabeth Odachi Onogwu, “Between literature, facts, and fiction: perspectives on Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative ”; Dorothy Chinwe Ukaegbu, “Igbo sense of place and identity in Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative ,” in Olaudah Equiano and the Igbo World: History, Society, and Atlantic Diaspora Connections, ed. Chima J. Korieh (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2009), pp. 153, 106.

Elizabeth Allo Isichei, Igbo Worlds: An Anthology of Oral Histories and Historical Descriptions (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1978), p. 34.

Mariama Bâ, So Long a Letter , translated by Modupé Bodé-Thomas (Oxford: Heinemann International Publishing, 1981), 49; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (New York: Anchor Books, 2006), 532.

J.E. Casely Hayford, Ethiopia Unbound: Studies in Race Emancipation (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1969), 171.

Elechi Amadi, The Slave . (London: Heinemann, 1978).

See Modupe Olaogun, “Slavery and Etiological Discourse in the Writing of Ama Ata Aidoo, Bessie Head, and Buchi Emecheta.” Research in African Literatures 33, no. 2 (2002): 171–193.

Murphy, Metaphor and the Slave Trade in West African Literature (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2012) , p. 179.

Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi, “Chinua Achebe and the Uptakes of African Slaveries.” Research in African Literatures 40, no. 4 (2009): 28.

Yaw Boateng, The Return (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), p. v.

Ayi Kwei, Armah, The Healers (Popenguine, Sénégal: Per Ankh, 2000), p. 340.

See Kwame Ayivor, “The Golden Image of the Akan Negated: A Reading of Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Healers .” English in Africa 27, no. 2 (2000): 59–84.

Ayi Kwei Armah, Two Thousand Seasons (Chicago: Third World Press, 1980), p. 5.

Kwavuki Azasu, The Slave Raiders (Accra, Ghana: Yamens Publishing, 2004).

Obi O. Akwani’s March of Ages (Enugu, Nigeria, 2003), p. 73.

Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing (New York: Vintage Books, 2018), p. 39.

Nonki Motahane, Oliver Nyambi, and Rodwell Makombe, “Rooting Routes to Trans-Atlantic African Identities: The Metaphor of Female Descendancy in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing .” African Identities 19, no. 1 (2021): 24.

Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing, p. 89. The analogy, extended through fires consuming and haunting the family line in Ghana, is strikingly similar to one made by a scholar focusing on slavery in Ghana. Anne C. Bailey, African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame (New York: Beacon Press, 2006), p. 72: “My preferred analogy, given that a trade in human beings, though marginal, did exist prior to European arrival, is to view the European and American presence as a match that was lit to bits of paper on the African coast. Once lit, it became a fire. If there had been no match, perhaps there would have been no fire.”

When feminist scholar Roxanne Gay called the novel “exceptionally engaging and the strongest case for reparations and black rage I’ve read in a long time,” her review was cited by multiple reviewers and interviewers. Roxanne Gay, Online review of Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing . 23 April 2016. www.goodreads.com/review/show/1618778364 . When asked about her position on reparations, Yaa Gyasi replied, “I’m with Ta-Nehisi Coates in that there is a case for it.” Yogita Goyal and Yaa Gyasi, “An Interview with Yaa Gyasi.” Contemporary Literature 60, no. 4 (2019): 483.

Yogita Goyal and Yaa Gyasi, p. 481.

Notable contemporary works, of various disciplinary approaches, include: Philip Curtin, ed. Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967); Cornelius Oyeleke Adepegba, “A Survey of Nigerian Body Markings and Their Relationship to Other Nigerian Arts.” (Ph.D. Diss., Indiana University, 1976); Arnold Rubin, Marks of Civilization: Artistic Transformations of the Human Body (Los Angeles: University of California, 1988); Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Enid Schildkrout, “Inscribing the Body.” Annual Review of Anthropology 33 (2004): 319–344; Marcos André Torres de Souza and Camilla Agostini, “Body Marks, Pots, and Pipes: Some Correlations between African Scarifications and Pottery Decoration in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Brazil.” Historical Archaeology 46, no. 3 (2012): 102–123; Megan Vaughan, “Scarification in Africa: Re-reading Colonial Evidence.” Journal of the Social History Society 4, no. 3 (2015): 385–400; Roland Gavre and Mariam Gavre et al., “Scarification in sub-Saharan African: social skin, remedy and medical import.” Tropical Medicine 22, no. 6 (2017): 708–715; Adair Rodrigues, “African Body Marks, Stereotypes and Racialization in Eighteenth-Century Brazil. Slavery & Abolition 42, no. 2 (2021): 315–344. Research on scarification represented in African arts, such as sculptures and masks, is also extensive, for example: Joseph Nevadomsky and Aisien Ekhaguosa Aisien, “The Clothing of Political Identity: Costume and Scarification in the Benin Kingdom.” African Arts 28, no. 1 (1995): 62–100. See note 61 on Yoruba practices.

Paul E. Lovejoy, “Scarification and the Loss of History in the African Diaspora,” in Slavery in the Global Diaspora of Africa , ed. Paul E. Lovejoy (London and New York: Routledge Press, 2019), p. 221–249.

Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

Exposing aspects of slavery and domination under Islam in West Africa and the Sahel region in particular, Sembène’s film Ceddo (1977), banned after its release by the Senegalese government, evokes a comparison with slavery in the U.S.: after the ceddo (outsiders, non-Muslims) perform their own religious rites during Muslim prayers, the soundtrack shifts to American Gospel music at the moment their Muslim oppressors are shown selling slaves to a European merchant. See Amkpa, Awam, and Gunja SenGupta. “Picturing Homes and Border Crossings: The Slavery Trope in Films on the Black Atlantic,” in Paths of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Interactions, Identities, and Images , ed. Ana Lucia Araujo (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2011), pp. 359–387. A work often considered West Africa’s most controversial novel also deals with a taboo depiction of Islamic domination and Arab slavery: In a complex satire drawing on Sufi theology and intertextual collage, Yambo Ouologuem’s Le Devoir de violence (1968) portrays the centuries of violence in the Western Sudan wrought by Islam since the Songhay Empire, and by French colonialism and Christianity.

Christiana Oware Knudsen, The Patterned Skin: Ethnic Scarification in Developing Ghana (Højbjerg, Denmark: Intervention Press, 2000), p. 20.

A notable colonial-era source on the Gold Coast is R. S. Rattray’s The Tribes of the Ashanti Hinterland Vols I, II. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), which includes various illustrations on scarification and classification of societies in a region that endured centuries of slave raiding and extensive slave markets (including the largest, Salaga). Among the most widely known field workers of the early twentieth century, Rattray attributes to powerful Muslim slavers such as Babatu the practice of marking peoples bound for slavery to the point that “whatever once may have been the value of tribal marks as a means of distinguishing tribes or clans, tattooing, with certain exceptions, is now a somewhat uncertain criterion by which to judge such matters” (229). On the shortcomings of the nonetheless indispensable work of Rattray, see McCaskie, T. C. “R.S. Rattray and the Construction of Asante History: An Appraisal.” History in Africa 10 (1983): 187–206.

Terence S. Turner (2012 [1980]). “The Social Skin.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2 (2): 503.

Joana Choumali, Hââbré: The Last Generation (Johannesburg: Fourthwall Books, 2016). Eleven of the book’s photographs are published in large format in a feature review online, which highlights the perspectives of West Africans in the “last generation”: Brooks, Catherine, “This Is The Last Generation Of Scarification In Africa.” Huffington Post . 6 December 2017. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/scarification_n_5850882 .

Wole Soyinka. Aké: The Years of Childhood (New York: Vintage, 1983), p. 146.

Oluranti Edward Ojo and Israel Abayomi Saibu, “Understanding the Socio-Cultural Identity of the Yoruba in Nigeria: Reassessing Cicatrix as Facial Marks, Scarification and Tattoo.” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 27 (2018): 145, 150. The literature on Igbo and Yoruba practices is extensive. Recent detailed studies of the latter include: Olatunji Ojo, “Beyond Diversity: Women, Scarification, and Yoruba Identity.” History in Africa 35 (2008): 347–374; Ọlanikẹ Ọla Orie, “The Structure and Function of Yoruba Facial Scarification.” Anthropological Linguistics 53, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 15–33. Orie also concludes that “the culture of marking facial stripes is fast disappearing among the Yoruba,” mentioning federal and local bans on the practice (30–31).

On the life and career of Anton Wilhelm Amo, see Paulin Hountondji, African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1983), pp. 111–130.

Alluding to Plato’s ideal of philosophers as leaders in the Republic , the phrase reflects the advanced degrees and intellectual accomplishments of several African postcolonial presidents, borrowed from Ali Mazrui, “On Poet-Presidents and Philosopher-Kings.” Research in African Literatures 21, no. 2 (1990): 13–19.

Annette Busch and Max Annas, eds. Ousmane Sembène: Interviews (Oxford, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2008), p. 52–53. On French neocolonialism, see Françios-Xavier Verschave, Françafrique: La plus longue scandale de la République (Paris: Stock, 1998); Pascal Airault and Jean-Pierre Bat, Françafrique: Opérations secrètes et affaires d’État (Paris: Éditions Tallandier, 2019).

Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi, “Chinua Achebe and the Uptakes of African Slaveries,” p. 28.

David Murphy , Sembène: Imagining Alternatives in Film and Fiction (Oxford: James Curry; Trenton: Africa World, 2000), p. 42. Two other articles briefly discuss “Le Voltaïque”: V.S. Boafo, “‘Voltaïque’ d’Ousmane Sembène. Commentaires et observations.” Présence francophone 15 (1977): 11–30; Denise Brahimi, “L’anthropologie factice de Sembène Ousmane dans ‘Le Voltaïque.’” Bayreuther Beiträge Zur Literaturwissenschaft (1987): 203–209. Brahimi correctly suggests, without analysis of the relevant aspects of the story, that “Le Voltaïque” departs from the ethnographic approach of Africanists.

In the preface to a novel first published in 1964, Sembène compares the griot and the modern novelist. Ousmane Sembène, “Avertissement,” L’Harmattan (Paris: Éditions Présence Africaine, 1980), p. 9: “In the Africa that we might call the classical age, the griot was not only the dynamic element of his tribe, clan, and village, but also the witness, the recorder of every event. It was he who, under the palaver tree, registered for the community the deeds and gestures of every member. My conception of my work derives from this task: to remain just as close to the real and to the people.” Translation by the author. [[D]ans cette Afrique qui passe pour classique, le griot était non seulement l’élément dynamique de sa tribu, clan, village, mais aussi le témoin, patent de chaque événement. C’est lui qui enregistrait, déposait devant tous, sous l’arbre à palabre, les faits et gestes de chacun. La conception de mon travail découle de cet enseignement: rester au plus près du réel et du peuple.”]. See also Anthère Nzbatsinda, “Le Griot dans le récit d’Ousmane Sembène: entre la rupture et la continuité d’une représentation de la parole africaine.” American Association of Teachers of French 70, no. 6 (1997): 865–872; Mbye Baboucar Cham, “Ousmane Sembène and the Aesthetics of Oral Tradition.” Africana Journal 14, nos. 1–4 (1982): 24–40.

Kwame Nkrumah, Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonization and Development with Particular Reference to the African Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970); Kwame Nkrumah, Two Myths (London: Panaf Books, 1968); on Nkrumah and communalism, see also Hountondji, African Philosophy, pp. 131–155.

Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), pp. 97–144.

David Murphy , Sembène: Imagining Alternatives in Film and Fiction , 46.

Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 106. With respect to the realist history of the politicization of allegory, Fredric Jameson summarizes the “vulgar Marxist practice of reducing characters to mere allegories of social forces, of turning ‘typical’ characters into mere symbols of class.” Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s theory of allegory, he also stresses the ability of allegory, as opposed to symbol, to register historical duration and decay. Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 71–73, 193.

Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 215.

King, Martin Luther. “Eulogy for the Young Victims of the Sixteenth Street Baptist ChurchKing, Martin Luther. “Eulogy for the Young Victims of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Bombing,” in A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Clayborne Carson and Kris Shepard (New York: Warner Books, 2001), p. 96.

Gilroy, The Black Atlantic , p. 216.

Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), pp. 133, 169.

Christopher Wise, “Saying ‘Yes’ to Africa: Jacques Derrida’s ‘Specters of Marx.’” Research in African Literatures 33, no. 4 (2002): 130.

Quoted in Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vantage Books, 1979), p. 25.

Quoted in Yogita Goyal, Runaway Genres, p. 53: “I swore to myself that if I ever wrote another book, no one would weep over it; that it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears,” wrote Richard Wright after the sentimentalism of the reception of his Uncle Tom’s Children . Goyal mentions Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Edward Jones, and Charles Johnson as writers who have to a certain extent followed Wright’s effort to deny readers’ easy identification and sentimentalism in the neo-slave genre.

Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (John Hopkins University Press: Baltimore and London, 2001), p. 23.

Anna Phillips, The ‘Slave Sublime’ (Master’s Thesis, Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London, 2008), p. 38.

See Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime , translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University press, 1994); The Differend: Phrases in Dispute , translated by Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

Paul Gilroy, “Living Memory: A Meeting with Toni Morrison,” Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures (Serpent’s Tail: London, 1993), p. 221.

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Janis, M. (2024). African Scarification and Slavery: From Anthropology to Allegory. In: Hagberg, G.L. (eds) Fictional Worlds and the Political Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52026-6_11

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Thesis Statement (History)

I'm struggling to come up with a thesis statement surrounding slavery, that also connects to the unit question 'What is worth fighting for?'. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Christopher F.

4 Answers By Expert Tutors

Lisa F. answered • 01/01/23

Dedicated writing tutor for English and multiple subjects (PhD)

Hi, Holly, coming up with thesis statements are usually a major step in getting your paper started. Try thinking about the thesis you need to write as the way you would respond to your instructor's prompt or question. In any material you read about slavery, what did you see that was worth fighting for? You could also think about the different groups involved in slavery, both those for it and those opposed to it. What did these different groups feel was worth fighting for? Which group's actions do you feel strongly about? If you create a thesis you feel strongly about, it will help your motivation on the assignment. If you 'd like help on the assignment, I'd be happy to help you. Just message me.

Stephanie B. answered • 01/01/23

English Major Who Loves Literature

Thesis statements can be overwhelming, but try and think of it more as an answer to a question. What might someone ask when it comes to slavery and what is worth fighting for? What might the slaves have been fighting for?

Think of major people or events and what they were fighting for. For example, when Harriet Tubman led slaves to freedom at the risk of her own life. What was she fighting for?

Once you decide that, you can create a thesis statement with supporting points that you will detail further in your paper.

I am happy to work further with you on this—feel free to message me.

Jacob D. answered • 12/31/22

Your personal reading/writing tutor

This question is vague, it would help to understand the context of your research. I would start with something like "The cost of the Civil War and why America needed to pay it."

Cost can be evaluated in many different facets. Do you mean monetary cost? Bloodshed? Dividing the union?

Barbara T. answered • 12/31/22

Experienced Writing Professor / College Prep Coach

You don't say what kind of slavery, who is being enslaved, what gender, class, race, what country you're studying or what time period. But I would assume that stopping slavery in any century or country is definitely worth fighting for.

A thesis can also be called an argument. You're putting together a set of ideas and trying to convince someone (a reader) to see your ideas and understand them. Try to think about what matters to you - what to you is worth fighting for. If having freedoms, not hurting people, not treating them terribly, not physically abusing them, or selling them off to the highest bidder is worth fighting for, then you know what you would want to say about enslaving people or slavery, in general.

Think about what you've learned concerning slavery and what matters to you. Then you need to come up with the WHY of this - why is it important to fight against slavery? Or why was it important in the past to fight against slavery. Or what is the purpose of fighting for the rights of people? Or fighting for people's freedoms? Or their ability to live their lives as they see fit instead of being told how to live their lives under a master? The WHY is your thesis or argument that you will use to discuss further ideas in the body of your paper.

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Slavery, Capitalism, and the Politics of Abolition

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Slavery in America, Brazil, and Cuba relied on capitalist markets, which supplied credit and demand for slave-made goods. The Reckoning , Robin Blackburn’s monumental history, offers a dizzying account of the politics behind this system’s rise and fall.

Heroes of the Colored Race , after a print published in the early 1880s. (Ken Welsh / Design Pics / Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

W. E. B. Du Bois called the rise and fall of slavery in the Americas the “ most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history .” It is a drama that continues to grip the popular imagination, which has its own varying interpretations: slavery as an “original sin” cursing the New World to perpetual racial domination; abolition as a pure moral crusade against a white supremacist regime run by and for a class of cruel slaveholders; slavery as a premodern blight holding back progress; abolition as the historically inevitable forward march of progress; abolition as a historical aberration.

Historians, even those who have embraced these sweeping narratives, have found it helpful to see the drama of New World slavery as occurring in two acts. From the first years of European colonization up through the early nineteenth century there was a “First Slavery,” pioneering the growth of commodity plantations in the Americas under the aegis of imperial protection.

Then, following the Haitian Revolution and the destruction of slavery in much of the Caribbean and Latin America, there emerged a nineteenth-century “ Second Slavery ” centered in America, Brazil, and Cuba (the ABC territories, respectively focused on cotton, coffee, and sugar). In addition to covering new geographic space, this slavery was “more autonomous, more durable and, in market terms, more ‘productive’ . . . capable of withstanding the challenge of the Age of Revolution and meeting the rising demand for plantation produce.” This is the periodization offered by eminent Marxist historian Robin Blackburn in his The Reckoning: From the Second Slavery to Abolition, 1776–1888 .

The Reckoning is the capstone volume to Blackburn’s decades-long project chronicling the rise and fall of slavery in the Americas, finishing off a trilogy that he began with The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 , which considers the emancipation movements in British, French, and Spanish New World colonies. Blackburn then went backward in his next installment, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 , which details the origins of the slave systems upended by the Age of Revolutions. (Two companion volumes from Blackburn supplement these core three — An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln and The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights ).

Completing this series of tomes with a detailed study of nineteenth-century slavery and emancipation in the ABC territories, The Reckoning presents this dramatic tale stripped of national mythologizing and moralistic oppositions of ahistorical good and evil. It sets, and succeeds, at the task of rising above the trite assumptions that too often govern our understandings of bondage and freedom.

In Blackburn’s narrative, the Second Slavery emerges as a messy, ever-shifting, self-contradicting process, governed by conflicting agents with often-shifting loyalties and interests. It was a horrible miracle: a system of absolute domination expanding as old orders crumbled around it, its masters finding new ways to accommodate it to and imbricate it within the nineteenth-century order of liberal capitalism. The Second Slavery was, Blackburn insists, “locked in the orbit of industrial capital” which sustained it by providing markets for the commodities produced through forced labor and credit for a highly speculative market in human beings.

Also central to his telling, though, is an emphasis on this slavery’s historical contingency, and thus political choices — rather than just economic determinants — necessary to both maintain and undermine its dominance. Blackburn remains cognizant of the structural forces of class unique to Marxist history writing, while nonetheless insisting on the way actors’ specific, contextual choices shaped the very possibility of those forces. Slaveholders had to act to make themselves as a ruling class, to defend themselves from “revolutionary events which could have consumed them whole.” Their transient success was no given, and their political maneuvering ultimately faced too many constraints and too much opposition.

In positing nineteenth-century slavery as in and of a kind with contemporary capitalism, there is a danger of both pessimistic determinism that seems unable to explain abolition’s progress (if capitalism always-already appears slave-based, how do we explain something like the US Civil War ?) and sloppy abstraction. It is too easy to say, even if it is true, that capitalist production (regardless of its defining logics of free labor ) often relies on unfree labor in the global periphery. Blackburn avoids these pitfalls; his account reminds us that we can only make such abstractions by first describing particular empirical realities. We must be able to explain why, how, and in what forms certain instances of unfree labor under capitalism maintained themselves and gave way to other arrangements. The Second Slavery was constitutively impermanent, useful in the way it “helped to bridge the gaps” in capitalism’s “uneven and incomplete” nineteenth-century advance. This advance was no “irresistible march of progress,” but was actually a “succession of clear or concealed choices, for-or-against slavery being one of the most important.” “Against slavery” won out — but not without a political struggle.

Political Preconditions of the Second Slavery

In a profound irony, the Second Slavery’s rise was made possible by the success of great world-historic fights for political freedom. “The victories of the American Revolution in 1783 and the Haitian Revolution in 1804,” Blackburn writes, “had highly contradictory impacts.” The former solidified the power of a now politically independent slaveholder class to geographically expand production; the destruction of slavery in Saint-Domingue opened an opportunity for sugar planters elsewhere, as in Cuba, to meet demand.

Downstream political changes around this period also occasioned the advance of the sugar plantation complex on this Spanish island — a so-called Cuban miracle. Metropolitan reforms and global revolutionary war led to a “Cubanization” of commercial production: infrastructure development on the island through the creation of colonial monopolies; a subsequent, free-trade-inflected relaxation of market controls, meant to encourage revenue growth and readily accepted by the nascent planter class; and, crucially, more complete access to supplies, slaves, and buyers as the metropole’s control over trade crumbled during the Napoleonic wars. Similarly, in Brazil, trade liberalization (and, unlike Cuba, political independence in 1822) fostered a “slave-trade bonanza” that “signalled an expansion of Brazil’s productive capacity” between 1780 and 1830.

Meanwhile, as the United States had already achieved independence, the spread of slavery became tied to the project of protecting new political borders. The southern theater of the War of 1812 against the British — and the many Indian removal offensives from the 1780s onward — can thus be understood as projects of security maintenance against “incipient collaboration between the Indians, the blacks, the British and the Spanish” that could threaten newly minted US dominance.

The Second Slavery, Blackburn emphasizes, came to new territories through brute force — that of the state, backing the interests of elite, slaveholding settlers. Settlement was not simply led by small freeholders working their own land, but pioneered by planters’ financial, speculative aim to extract monetary value — through slaves — from the land. The prospect of available land meant that free labor on plantations was effectively ruled out by a frontier political economy dominated by commercial planters eating up the land. In sparsely populated areas, Blackburn notes, planters faced a labor shortage; free European migrants would sooner strike off on their own than submit to labor on a plantation. Yet “banks and cotton factors” were “impatient and eager for a quick profit,” and slavery “enabled land to be quickly cleared and brought into cultivation.”

Colonization required coercion, through the barrel of the gun and the crack of the whip. As Marx himself observed in his section on colonization in Capital , “spontaneous, unregulated” colonization by yeomen would not yield itself to capitalist accumulation. The latter would rather work merely to reproduce their own lives, whereas capitalism relies on the exploitation of labor. Accordingly Marx concluded that “the impulse to self-expropriation on the part of labouring humanity for the glory of capital, exists so little that slavery . . . is the sole natural basis of Colonial wealth.”

Capitalism and Slavery

Capital’s Promethean dynamism and mercurial waves were crucial to the Second Slavery’s distinctive rise. Credit was king. The Cuban sugar boom from the 1780s on was made possible by planters’ newfound access to credit via local merchants; through the course of the nineteenth century, the wealthiest Cuban planters plowed returns from trade and railway building back into agriculture. In Brazil, international commercial establishments in major cities dispensed credit upon which slavery’s development leaned.

American cotton planters (who arrived as settlers “liberally endowed with credit and every commercial facility”) promised their future crop as collateral for the advances they received to buy supplies for cultivation each season. The high market value of their enslaved laborers especially helped unleash the capitalist productivity of their domain. Building upon the work of historian John Clegg , Blackburn notes that US planters took advantage of a holdover British colonial law from 1732 lifting restrictions on what assets could be used as collateral. Planters could therefore put up slaves — like cotton or land — to receive credit, cultivating a financial market in slaves.

Without the colonial mercantile protection of the First Slavery, this expansion of indebtedness was a “goad to produce more and to be more open to innovation,” as it increased planters’ dependence on market profitability (and slave production was, as Blackburn insists, quite profitable) to remain solvent. “[C]redit discipline” was among the “main drivers” of plantation output in the United States, leading planters to become as obsessed with breeding more bountiful cotton strains as with driving their slaves all the harder.

The enslaved were a crucial node in the matrix of planter finance, existing simultaneously as capital investments and exploited laborers — in Marxian terms, their labor power was purchased at once in a lump sum. The chattel principle solidified in the Second Slavery; manumissions decreased in Cuba and Brazil, where they had once been more frequent than in the US South. As slave labor became more valuable, increased slave prices made it harder to self-purchase freedom, while also making slaves an estate’s “most important” financial asset: the alchemy of the market had given these modern representatives of an ancient form of exploitation an “ever-more capitalist character.”

As the value of slaves rose and indebtedness deepened, planters sought to “extract the maximum of continuous labour from their chattels, and in this way make good on their heavy initial investment.” Near-constant forced labor became the norm, whether contributing to commodity production, or to the home manufacture needed to sustain plantation life.

Productivity was maintained by brute violence from the master and overseer, but was further refined by planters’ adoption and fine-tuning of capitalist labor patterns — standardization, quantified records . As Marx remarked in Capital , slave labor’s subsumption into the capitalist world market allowed “the civilised horrors of over-work” to be easily “granted onto the barbaric horrors of slavery.”

Among the achievements of The Reckoning is adding clarity to the long debate over the relationship between slavery and capitalism. Space does not permit a full recounting of these discussions; it is enough to say that Blackburn comes out against interpretations that see nineteenth-century slavery as necessary for, prior to, or generative of the mechanisms specific to capitalist growth in the US North and Britain/Europe.

In previous work he has endorsed a qualified version of the thesis, posited by the historian and politician Eric Williams , that England’s eighteenth-century capitalist rise made possible by the “super-exploitation” of slaves in the Americas. But in the Reckoning , Blackburn asks readers to

turn the Williams thesis on its head, and ask how the rise of capitalism in Europe generated a more thoroughgoing slavery in the New World, one that required . . . the fungible structures of an enterprise dependent on world markets. . . . [I]n the construction of the Second Slavery the planters’ main motive was to make money . . .

The credit markets so key to the Second Slavery had to preexist it in order to be used; the same was true of the industrial demand that provided a home for the goods made on plantations. In other words, the free-labor capitalism of the metropole was not dependent on the Second Slavery, so much as the Second Slavery was dependent on free-labor capitalism.

Slaveholders had a two-sided relationship with the market. Ever-increasing plantation collateral value was only useful so long as the credit bubble didn’t burst (which it did, in cyclical periods of capitalist crisis); even if slave labor was profitable, money invested in it was money not invested in advanced technology, creating a Southern economy that was both incredibly profitable and underdeveloped.

Yet planters’ comparable lack of (non-slave) fixed capital — physical assets like machines and buildings — did not make them any less capitalist. Capitalism is not distinguished by any specific level of technological development so much as by the organization of production around maximized profit, and if this could be achieved by the superexploitation of human beings rather than investment in farming machinery, then so be it. Cotton, sugar, and coffee harvesting were, Blackburn tells us, hard to mechanize, requiring “great precision and intricate hand-eye coordination.” The “mass of field workers had aptitudes which the new machines could not mimic.” Mechanization was “selective,” mostly confined to processing raw cotton, coffee beans, and sugar cane so that more slave labor could be simultaneously allocated to the field.

This dependency on slave labor, paired with plantations’ geographic expansion and the slowing of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, produced some of the worst cruelties of the slave system. In the United States, the Upper South developed into a center for slave “breeding.” There, violently separated family members were sold to the cotton lords further south. A similar dynamic arose in Brazil; the stagnation of the sugar economy of the North led planters to begin selling slaves to coffee planters in the South. US plantations distinguished themselves in cultivating self-reproducing slave populations (families were a cheaper proposition than constant new purchases), while overwork-to-the-death of newly imported Africans, especially on sugar plantations, was more common among US planters’ Latin counterparts.

However different slaveries in the ABC territories were, the demands of capitalist production were universal. Capitalism, Blackburn writes, “brought about a definite homogenization of basic features of the different American slave systems.” The diversity of slave occupations decreased as ever more slaves were forced into agricultural commodity production; labor regimens became measured by the clock; slaves became the most valuable asset for planters. “The success of commoditization required standardization,” Blackburn pithily surmises.

The Class Politics of Abolition

The shared Atlantic context that produced such similar patterns among ABC slaveholders was not just an economic one. A main geopolitical shift undergirding the Second Slavery, in an unlikely suggestion by Blackburn, was the Congress of Vienna following the Napoleonic Wars, where European powers devised terms of continental peace. This restoration was not purely the triumph of Old World reaction, but also a securing of conditions of international cooperation that encouraged the rise of industrial capitalism: more regularized, open trade policies, and a peace that allowed metropolitan consumer demand to grow. Parallel to this economic development was a “bourgeoisification of politics”: propertied franchise, or the expectation thereof, became grounds for government legitimacy.

The advent of bourgeois democratic norms posed a problem for slaveholders, even as this class actively depended upon the free trade system and property rights undergirding these norms. Across the Atlantic — from the northern United States to Haiti, from the new Latin American republics to the British Empire — the Age of Revolutions was accompanied by the advance of antislavery measures. “From the outset,” Blackburn writes, “the Second Slavery was haunted by its betrayal of the ideals of creole republicanism.” This put the slave system in a situation in which slavers, facing antislavery proponents, “knew that they had to practise politics if they were to survive.”

Given their potentially uncertain political footing — as well as the settler frontier’s volatility — slaveholders had to forge cross-class alliances to maintain power. A perverted republicanism emerged; planter revolutionaries like Thomas Jefferson united with popular classes to ascend to power, with successive political parties cobbling together cross-sectional allegiances around shared, national concerns, like infrastructure.

Blackburn makes clear that the regimes of the Second Slavery in part survived the Age of Revolutions because slaves, however numerous, were in the minority in the ABC polities. This ensured that, in contrast to Haiti, revolt could always be comfortably repressed by militias of nonslaveholders employed by the master class. However, this population distribution produced a profound contradiction: a substantial coalition of classes existed in the ABC countries that were not dependent on chattel slavery. They could thus develop an oppositional politics, given voice in a context of bourgeois democracy. Alliances couldn’t be guaranteed: “A slave regime born in compromise could be destroyed by it too.”

In narrating the dissolution of that compromise, Blackburn reverses the usual left-liberal nostrum that the US Civil War was “caused by slavery.” He suggests instead that it was antislavery that “set alight the sectional blaze.” The difference is key. “Abolitionists were,” Blackburn contends, “the innovators, and slave-holders the defenders of the status quo.”

The Reckoning offers a class analysis of this antislavery milieu. Abolitionism, spearheaded in the 1830s by a variety of often-evangelical small producers, petty bourgeoisie, and professionals organized into groups like the American Anti-Slavery Society, was initially a moralist political response to a sense of dislocation in an increasingly commercial society (a social order dominated by slaveholders, their Northern allies, and a permissive state). This orientation paired with certain Puritanical, conservative concerns — temperance, the sanctity of the family violated by both chattel slavery and urban vice.

Still, given slaveholders’ undue governmental influence and slavery’s economic importance, abolitionism implied a “radical questioning of the political and social order.” It took the next two decades to build a significant mass politics of antislavery that appealed to “organized labour and the land-hungry offspring of northern farmers,” attracting the interest of workers anxious to preserve the dignity labor against slaveholders’ degradations and desirous of Western emigration free of slaveholder encroachment.

Blackburn is particularly adept at highlighting the unforced errors of the proslavery camp. Masses of Northerners who had no truck in ideological abolitionism came to see that the slave power threatened their own sense of political independence: the 1835 “gag rule” tabling congressional petitions related to slavery; the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law requiring escaped slaves in free states to be returned to their masters; the precedent-upsetting Kansas-Nebraska Act that threatened to open free territory to slaveholding settlers; the 1857 Dred Scott decision that effectively declared slavery a nationally recognized institution.

As the national Democratic Party increasingly endorsed proslavery expansionism, the cross-sectional coalitions within the Democratic and Whig parties came undone; the latter ultimately collapsed, paving the way for the antislavery Republicans, composed of Northern defectors from both parties. Regional sectionalism itself had been recast in terms of slavery within political, religious, and civil society organizations — in the words of arch-proslavery-politician John Calhoun, “sundering and weakening the cords” that bound the Union together.

Through the 1850s what Blackburn calls “Radical Abolition,” a movement that was “willing to work within existing political institutions but determined to combine this with direct action against slavery, especially by aiding fugitives,” emerged. This potent force — “the courage of abolitionists, the guile of anti-slavery politicians and reawakened sectional animosity” — had “combined to bring about a sea-change of northern opinion,” delivering antislavery Republican Abraham Lincoln to the White House in the election of 1860. This was a bridge too far for slaveholders.

States For and Against Slavery

The central contradiction that led to the Civil War was, on Blackburn’s telling, the deep tension between slavery and the aspirations of a democratic polity. “Both sections,” Southern slaveholders and their broadly antislavery Northern opponents, “now aimed at a government permanently responsible to their interests.” The underpinning of war for the South, then, was not vulgarly economic, but about keeping the political power necessary to maintain a particular regime of capital accumulation (slavery) that was at odds with the experience and vision of Northern capitalism and democratic civil society — regardless of the important economic ties between the two regions.

Secession emerged out of an abandonment of political attempts to keep slavery alive within the Union. In a word: slaveholders saw the federal state as useful until it wasn’t. It was why they, in Blackburn’s turn of phrase, “bet the farm on such a risky prospect as Secession” despite having amassed considerable power. For them and their peers in Cuba and Brazil, loyalty to the state’s integrity was a virtue that had to be balanced against the preservation of the slave system, and traded for it if need be. But this also meant that quasi-democratic governments could cast slavery as part of a broader politics — inclusive of nonslaveholding citizens — that had at its core the continued existence of the state. Accordingly, Blackburn writes, “abolition came as the result of a conflict between the format and structure of the modern state and the pretentions of the slave-holders.”

In Cuba, slaveholders relied on a state guarantor less at risk of infiltration by antislavery troublemakers: following Spain’s loss of its mainland American colonies in the early 1800s, the faltering empire developed a “new colonial system built around Cuba’s slave plantations” existing in a protected market. With the metropolitan treasury thus dependent, Spanish rulers devised a “ política de atracción ” — conciliation toward the Cuban elite that involved them further in colonial administration and staved off rumblings of independence. Especially following the US Civil War, though, Spanish leaders recognized that maintenance of American slavery was no longer tenable, and thus found themselves in a bind: “In the long run, Spanish rule no doubt required the suppression of slavery. But in the short run, Spanish preparedness to defend slavery helped to reconcile Cuban slave owners to Spanish rule.”

Blackburn paints the Cuban situation as a kind of inversion of the pre–civil war United States, in the constellation of slaveholders, the state, and the politics of separatism and (anti)slavery — in this case, the state gave slaveholders reason to remain loyal. Given that for the time being the state found itself dependent on the slaveholders (unlike in the United States), it was not as obvious that the apparent contradictions would lead to a slavery-fueled conflagration. Slavery’s status could be used by the Spanish state as a carrot or a stick to temper demands for greater Cuban autonomy.

Outright separatists saw this strategic tie between Spanish rule and slavery’s maintenance, even as the política de atracción had given them space to organize. Many of these dissidents were based in the Oriente, less dependent on export-producing slavery than the big slaveholding sugar planters of the west, and thus having no reason to continue tolerating the expenses forced upon them by Spanish taxation and mercantilism. They had no “Faustian pact with slave trafficking”; thus “their patriotic inclinations were not restrained by thoughts of economic interest and security.” An existing “tepid,” moralistic middle-class abolitionism could be compounded by a diverse cross-class coalition of rebels, whose radical wing was encouraged by Northern victory in the United States to “identify itself clearly with abolitionism.”

Thus, when separatist revolt broke out in 1868, its leader Carlos Manuel de Céspedes could declare the necessity of abolition in a free Cuba. Still, given the balance of forces, a “cruel paradox,” reminiscent of that experienced by the Spanish state itself, remained: antislavery separatists had to contend with winning financial and political support from western slaveholders. It was, however, only the material exigencies of war in the 1870s that could resolve this contradiction and translate rebels’ high-minded abolitionist rhetoric into slavery’s end.

Meanwhile, in Brazil, a series of negotiations between proslavery forces, antislavery forces, and an often-ambivalent state unfolded. In raw national numbers, slavery had already been in decline there since 1850, when the British successfully encouraged the end of legal Brazilian slave importations. Crucially, though, the slave population continued to grow during this period in the coffee-producing South, setting up a regional division that would be significant in slavery’s fall.

Politics were crucial in this protracted process, especially given the mutedly emancipationist orientation of the monarchy. Alongside the small minority of politically influential slaveholders was a vast free citizenry, half of whom were people of color; thus “any growth of civic consciousness” (as experienced during the 1865–70 war with Paraguay) could translate into a questioning of slavery. Add to that an influx of European immigrants, and the “wider class struggles of the new social formation undermined both slavery and the Empire which had defended it.” An increasingly heterogenous society pushed against a Second Slavery dependent on systemized homogenization.

The Paraguay war heightened the contradictions of a quasi-emancipationist regime reliant on slaveholder power: even as planters backed and helped finance the war, the monarchy sought to curry favor with external powers and shore up recruitment numbers through military manumission programs allowing slaves to gain freedom through fighting. For both practical and ideological reasons, the Brazilian state saw that it could not maintain legitimacy in victory as “an unrepentant slave power.”

King Pedro II himself proposed the “free womb law” enacted in 1871, decreeing children born to enslaved mothers free when they turned twenty-one, and providing for regional manumission funds. The imperial state, ever ambivalent, “had an interest in implementing the Law in the way least prejudicial to slave-holder interests,” such that the results were only “very modest instalments of emancipation.”

Parallel to this patchwork emancipationism was a deepening north/south economic rift. The competitiveness and high demand for southern coffee exports boosted Brazilian currency value, which hurt the more established sugar and cotton planters in the North, where slave values fell. As in the United States and Cuba (there, between east and west), sectoral and regional resentments arising from divergent paths of development could manifest as antislavery: “If the coffee boom was seen as prejudicing other sectors of the economy, and this boom rested on the continued exploitation of slave labor, then opposition to slavery could seem an appropriate response.”

This sentiment, however present among some Northern elites, was given life by the mass antislavery of the Afro-Brazilian population — “abolitionism was powered by the assertion of Afro-Brazilian identity in a creolized political and social order” — and the ideologically heterogenous petty-bourgeois and professional classes.

The 1880s saw mass abolitionist agitation. But, unlike in the United States, this movement never developed into a national antislavery political party, as the Brazilian Liberal, Conservative, and Republican parties all had their slaveholder loyalties. Further unlike the US North, which saw capitalist support for free laborism, the “abolitionist movement could not embrace the principal forces of capitalist advance in Brazil because the latter were implicated in the slave system.”

The fall of slavery there thus proceeded locally, relying on the contradictions of the regional divide. Beginning with the ban on interregional slave exports and subsequent abolition in the northeastern province of Ceará, emancipation proceeded apace between 1883 and 1885 in various provinces, encouraged by mass abolitionist demonstrations. At the same time, in the South, slavery’s institutional underpinning faltered in the midst of a coffee price depression. Creditors grew wary of lending to slaveowners, given that abolitionist agitation had called slavery’s continuation into question. The capitalist market had propped up slavery; now it was facilitating slavery’s fall.

These abolitionist domino effects put Brazilian slavery in “terminal crisis.” Between various compromise laws of gradual, compensated emancipation and local action, slave numbers had fallen precipitously. Still, proslavery elites held back the national government, prompting even further massive popular agitation. As in the United States and Cuba, popular antislavery partially emerged as the nonslaveholding majority recognized that slaveholders interests oppressed them, too. In this case, the compensated emancipation compromise favored by slaveholders angered citizens who saw their tax burden grow to enrich already-wealthy planters. Slaves, meanwhile, revolted and defected from plantations en masse with the help of free citizens. Finally, the national government had to act, signing into law immediate, unconditional emancipation in 1888.

Emancipation and War

Given the preceding decline of slave numbers in Brazil, legal abolition there had the odd quality of legally recognizing what was, in much of the country, already a fact. This final American emancipation thus demonstrated a pattern likewise present in Cuba and the United States, in the narrative offered by Blackburn: material realities of achieved freedom often outstripped ideological commitments to emancipation and their legal expressions. Leaders thus had to make pronouncements and policy adjustments to play catchup — which at the same time accelerated ongoing processes of emancipation — and be assured of their ultimate moral correctness.

Brazilian emancipation occurred in peacetime, but this pattern was most obvious during war in the United States and Cuba — the exigencies and chaos of conflict undermined slave society. The leaders of Cuban rebellion nodded toward eventual abolition, but “a more consequent commitment to emancipation also emerged within the rebel ranks” as independence and abolitionism became strategically tied. Local rebels effected abolition, obliging slaves to take up arms; eventually over half the rank-and-file soldiers were black or men of color, with numbers “swelled by recruitment among the former slaves.” The rebel army “was feared by large slave owners as a menace to the slave economy.” By the end of the war in 1878, the slave population had declined by 38 percent. This was partially due to an 1870 law freeing children born to slave mothers and slaves over sixty but also, significantly, thanks to rebel invasion or wartime escape.

Spain defeated the Cuban separatists, but wartime slave unrest provided a measure of antislavery progress. A provision to the 1870 law had prohibited further legislation on Cuban slavery until the end of the insurrection; now such a move was back on the table. Slavery’s preservation for the sake of imperial integrity and fiscal security was no longer an excuse once the empire’s existence was, for the time being, assured. The emancipation law finally signed in 1880 escorted slavery out with a “whimper rather than a bang.”

In contrast, the 13 th Amendment abolishing slavery in the United States in 1865 was more of a bang: not only was it the first of the ABC abolitions, inspiring action in Cuba and Brazil, but it also followed four years of devastating warfare that had shown a military path to antislavery political transformation. Blackburn suggests that from the perspective of a Union government struggling in the first two years of fighting, a “new policy towards both slavery and the arming of the blacks” made sense. Reframing the war as one for human freedom — and not mere unionism — helped remedy sagging Northern morale. Hence Lincoln’s redefinition of war aims in December 1862: “In giving freedom to the slaves we assure freedom to the free.” War had radicalized the North.

There was also an eminently practical and strategic reason for this shift — as radical antislavery senator Charles Sumner had noted a year prior, “It is often said that the war will make an end of slavery. This is probable, but it is surer still that the overthrow of slavery will make an end of the war.” To undermine slavery was to undermine the workforce producing the provisions that, as Blackburn points out, were crucial to the Confederate war effort; it was to deprive slaveholders of their capital; it was to negate the very social system that the Confederacy was fighting for. Most of all, it provided hundreds of thousands of potential in situ recruits for the Union army.

Before the US government endorsed this war policy, slaves themselves were bringing it to life, leaving plantations and attaching themselves to Union brigades in what Du Bois famously described in Black Reconstruction as a “general strike.” The extent of this phenomenon and its obvious military benefit — paired with constant radical Republican pressure on Lincoln — brought about explicit legal encouragement through Confiscation Acts offering slaves a path to freedom behind Union lines as contraband “property” of the enemy. The Militia Act went further still, allowing black enlistment. Finally, in 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation declared all slaves of rebel slaveholders free. By the end of the war, the progress of freedom on the ground had initiated a major shift. If in his 1861 First Inaugural Address Lincoln cautiously said that he had “no purpose . . . to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists,” by his 1865 Second Inaugural Address, he spoke with revolutionary fervor of the ongoing antislavery war, which he described as bringing forth “the judgements of the Lord” against slaveholders.

Contradictions and Limits of Freedom

Blackburn is sober and nonidealistic about the revolutionary prospects of postabolition social reconstruction. About the United States, he writes, “The tribunes of anti-slavery had prevailed, yet proved unable to impose terms they claimed should be paramount.” Granted, he hardly discounts the successes of the Reconstruction era, from state constitutions enshrining the black vote, equality before the law, and tax-funded public works and education to the impressive degree of black political representation in the South during the immediate postwar years. But ultimately, he suggests that the class alignments produced by war and emancipation tragically undermined the fearless politics the federal state needed to fulfill the hopes of radical abolitionism.

In abolition’s wake, a variety of labor arrangements replaced slavery, from independent smallholding to waged labor to effective debt peonage on former slave plantations. Freedom in a simple sense meant the freedom to leave a plantation, and also a freedom to work less : the South thus faced a “labor shortage,” not due to a fall in the supply of laborers, but a fall in the supply of labor power they were willing to contribute. The success of Northern capital in the war had ironically destroyed one of the most capitalistically organized labor systems, moving the region from homogenization to greater unevenness and variation.

Still, between relationships of debt and the everyday white terror experienced by freedpeople, one thing was consistent: “extra-economic forms of coercion.” Here was a continuation of the same pattern present in the initial state-backed settlement of the cotton South — when the powers of production were underdeveloped, force decided the form of exploitation. But when that force came from the power of federal agents policing the conditions of free labor for former slaves, even some in the erstwhile antislavery North balked. A conservative wariness of state intervention in labor-capital relations grew, spearheaded by capitalists and their protectors in the Republic Party’s nonradical wing.

The Republicans were indeed fracturing. No longer united by the fight against slavery and the Confederacy, the party of Lincoln had to confront long-simmering internal contradictions. Blackburn notes that before the war, Republican language of free labor — a “protean and innately self-justifying historical force” — and the dignity thereof was plenty attractive to many working-class voters. But what resulted was a cross-class producerist alliance with the Northern bourgeoisie.

The Republican Party offered a defense of the “society of small-scale capitalism” against the depredations of the Slave Power, and thus “assembled a program that appealed to both workers and employers.” But the gap between these classes expanded during and after the war, as capitalists grew richer through the financial demands of wartime production and the mania of railroad expansion: “Republicans had become beholden to conservative propertied interest in a major way,” and could not politically afford to jettison these ties.

With abolition achieved and wartime’s extraordinary demands over, the Radicals no longer had a mandate, and they failed to adapt their petty-bourgeois program favoring freeholders and small producers to the new Northern proletariat. Their hopes for a confiscation bill — enforcing the state appropriation of the estates of seventy thousand “chief rebels” to distribute to black and white smallholders and pay off debts and pensions — failed, as capitalist-sympathetic Republicans thought this would set a “dangerous precedent” of a government favoring labor over capital in a context of rising Northern working-class consciousness.

Moreover, “Northern manufacturers looked forward to a speedy recovery of the plantation economy on the basis of wage labour,” and the destruction and redistribution of estates for the sake of smallholders would be antithetical to the resumption of commodity production. Indeed, as Blackburn argues, the effective destruction of slave capital had “cleared the way to the resulting ascendent capitalist order,” led by Northern capitalists plowing investments into Southern development. The Southern oligarchy was involved, but only as a “junior partner.”

Reconstruction-era Southern state governments were metonymical of the class split in the prewar antislavery coalition. These governments ostensibly aimed to govern in the favor of Southern workers, black and white, but were dependent on the sponsorship of Northern capitalists. Elites kept such administrations, for instance, from raising black militias that could have effectively countered white terror. The Reconstruction governments couldn’t withstand the pressure, and fell from 1869 to 1877. The Freedman’s Bureau, which provided a state infrastructure to support Southern laborers, was disbanded in 1870; planters began returning to their land. Many blacks fell into the debt bondage of sharecropping, their interests diverging from those of even small-scale white farmers who owned their own land; class divisions retrenched along racial lines as cotton production began expanding again. Blackburn’s account sees in this new order a precursor to the systems of racialized inequality that would characterize the first half of the twentieth century:

Towards the end of the [nineteenth] century the South had an essentially capitalist agro-industrial structure whose class positions were allocated by a system of discriminations on the basis of colour, gender and native status.

Roadblocks to radical social transformation were also present in Cuba and Brazil. In the former, the final emancipation law required former slaves to work for their masters for eight years for little pay as “ patrocinados .” This regressive holdover gave way to another form of immiseration relatively quickly, as a recession in the sugar industry led planters to prefer wage laborers whom they did not have to support year-round. This and the influx of foreign capital investments in railroads and plantation equipment saw a greater degree of proletarianization among former slaves than in the United States. People of color in Cuba continued to face everyday indignities; the island itself came to fall under the yoke of US imperialism after throwing off that of Spain.

Granted, in Brazil, abolition had “shaken” the nation, setting indebted planters to ruin; the “‘governability’ of the Empire had been compromised.” A reformist Liberal administration swept to power. Things snowballed: in 1889, a military coup deposed the emperor, and a republic was established. But this swift change did not initiate a revolutionary shift. Planters themselves backed the coup, as they saw emancipation as facilitated by the monarchy (notwithstanding the irony that the republic was the ultimate product of abolitionist foment).

By aligning itself with the new government, this reactionary planter-capitalist class prevented abolition from descending into an all-out social revolution — much as certain of their analogs in the United States did, too. They maintained a near monopoly on the land, and many had indeed preemptively emancipated their slaves to maintain their plantation labor force. Still, as in Cuba, they soon found a preference for more flexible wage labor in the form of masses of immigrants. The republic “did not honour the abolitionist struggle, and allowed racial inequality to flourish.” What was left, in the words of nineteenth-century black Brazilian writer João da Cruz e Sousa, was “a tattered and ridiculous liberty.”

An Unfinished Revolution

The Reckoning concludes by laying out, but not resolving, a paradox: abolition was doubtless a world-historic rupture in the global history of labor exploitation — an achievement of such difficulty that it “usually required two, three or four attempts before it prevailed” — but also a truncated success that was quickly dashed in its most radical potential. “Utopian aspirations” were “brought down to earth.”

In the United States, Brazil and Cuba, this was because of the adeptness of the capitalist class at not only preventing a tidal wave of social revolution that some antislavery activists wanted, but also finding ways to maintain their regime of value extraction: “The wider history of slavery and abolition shows the difficulty of slowing or redirecting — let alone controlling — the juggernaut of capitalist accumulation.”

Here it becomes clear how Blackburn’s core political argument — that the Second Slavery was maintained and destroyed only by the deliberate politicking of opposed classes, and was thus contingent upon the success thereof — fits within wider economic determinations. That capitalism could well continue without the specific form of exploitation that was the Second Slavery, that capitalism was not ultimately dependent on slavery , occasioned the intra- and inter-class political contest surrounding slavery’s survival in the capitalist era. Slaveholders had to fight to keep slavery because the capitalist world could get along once it was gone; conversely, abolitionists had to fight to end it because the capitalist world as it then was did indeed draw so much value from it.

That the abolitionists were so successful at all is, of course, a triumph, notwithstanding that we may wish they were even more successful than they were. But this ought to be taken as a call to arms, rather than a reason for resignation — it is not for nothing that one volume in Blackburn’s series on slavery and abolition is entitled An Unfinished Revolution .

Blackburn’s insistence that the ABC societies were uniquely sculpted for decades (up to today) by the legacy of chattel slavery at first glance seems to rhyme with the pessimistic, du jour liberal belief in slavery and racism as something “in our DNA.” But his account draws an important distinction. By identifying the basic mechanics of capitalist accumulation and exploitation as distinct from the racial slavery they once subsumed, he is able to accomplish two tasks. First, to remain cognizant of the different role post–chattel slavery forms of unfree labor have played in capitalism (whether in the indentured servitude of European empire or the convict labor of the United States). Second, Blackburn’s account makes clear that the persisting inequalities and violence in ABC societies appear not as the phenotypes of slavery’s genes, but as the specific ways that capitalism’s continuing dominance magnified the disparities unaddressed in abolition’s immediate aftermath. (Hence his praise of postrevolutionary Cuba’s successes in countering longstanding racial and class inequalities through the “‘structural’ approach to universal social provision.”)

That is, Blackburn’s “unfinished revolution” can be understood not as a revolution against the slave system, as this revolution has finished, but against capitalism itself. The unique insight of the antislavery movement was twofold. Abolitionists made clear the depravity of bondage in the Americas but, in so doing, also helped reveal the unremitting cruelty of an economic system limited only by a need to generate profit.

The Fourteenth Amendment: a Beacon of Equality in American History

This essay about the Fourteenth Amendment explores its pivotal role in American history, tracing its origins in the aftermath of the Civil War and its enduring impact on concepts of citizenship, equality, and due process. Emphasizing its role in rectifying past injustices and safeguarding fundamental rights, the essay examines how the Fourteenth Amendment continues to shape contemporary legal and social debates. It highlights the Citizenship, Due Process, and Equal Protection Clauses as key provisions that have shaped American jurisprudence and served as a rallying cry for movements seeking justice and equality. Through its analysis, the essay underscores the ongoing relevance and significance of the Fourteenth Amendment in the quest for a more just and inclusive society.

How it works

In the intricate mosaic of American jurisprudence, few legal provisions shine as brightly as the Fourteenth Amendment. Enacted in the crucible of post-Civil War America, this constitutional amendment emerged as a beacon of hope, aiming to mend the fabric of a fractured nation and extend the promise of equality to all its citizens. Rooted in the struggle for civil rights and social justice, the Fourteenth Amendment continues to reverberate through the corridors of power and the halls of justice, leaving an indelible mark on the American legal landscape.

At its essence, the Fourteenth Amendment was conceived to rectify the injustices of the past and forge a more inclusive society. Emerging from the ashes of slavery’s abolition, it sought to enshrine the principles of equal protection and due process into the fabric of American law. Through its Citizenship Clause, the amendment extended the mantle of citizenship to all persons born or naturalized within the United States, regardless of race or creed, laying the groundwork for a more expansive conception of national identity.

Moreover, the Fourteenth Amendment erected formidable barriers against the tyranny of state power and the specter of discrimination. Its Due Process Clause, in particular, has served as a bulwark against arbitrary government action, shielding individuals from the caprices of unchecked authority. Meanwhile, the Equal Protection Clause has emerged as a potent weapon in the fight for civil rights, compelling governments to justify any distinctions based on suspect classifications and ensuring that all citizens are treated with dignity and respect under the law.

Beyond its immediate legal implications, the Fourteenth Amendment embodies the enduring struggle for justice and equality in American society. From the crucible of the Civil Rights Movement to the contemporary battles for LGBTQ+ rights and immigrant justice, its principles have provided a rallying cry for those who seek to dismantle systems of oppression and build a more just and equitable world. Through landmark Supreme Court decisions and grassroots activism alike, the Fourteenth Amendment has been invoked as a lodestar guiding the nation toward a brighter and more inclusive future.

Yet, for all its transformative potential, the Fourteenth Amendment remains a contested terrain, subject to competing interpretations and ideological battles. From debates over affirmative action to challenges to reproductive rights, its clauses have been invoked by a diverse array of actors seeking to advance their own vision of justice and equality. In the hallowed chambers of the Supreme Court and the raucous arenas of public discourse, the legacy of the Fourteenth Amendment continues to be shaped and reshaped by the vicissitudes of history and the imperatives of the present.

In conclusion, the Fourteenth Amendment stands as a testament to the enduring power of constitutional principles to shape the course of American history. Born out of the crucible of emancipation and reconstruction, it embodies the aspirations of a nation striving to live up to its highest ideals. As we navigate the complexities of the modern world, let us heed the lessons of the Fourteenth Amendment and rededicate ourselves to the pursuit of justice, equality, and human dignity for all.

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PapersOwl.com. (2024). The Fourteenth Amendment: A Beacon of Equality in American History . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/the-fourteenth-amendment-a-beacon-of-equality-in-american-history/ [Accessed: 22-May-2024]

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