The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation

531 Pages·2014·3.31 MB·English

by  David Brion Davis

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2014 by David Brion Davis
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a
division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random
House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House Companies.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of
Random House LLC.
Portions of chapter two were originally published in “The Impact of the
Haitian and French Revolutions” from Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and
Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press,
2006). Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press, U.S.A.
Portions of chapters three and four are taken from a Tanner Lecture on
Human Values by the author delivered at Stanford University in 2006.
Reprinted by permission of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values, a
Corporation, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Davis, David Brion.
The problem of slavery in the age of emancipation / by David Brion
Davis.—First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-307-26909-6 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-385-35165-2 (eBook)
1. Slavery—United States—History—19th century. 2. Slaves—
Emancipation—United States. 3. Free African Americans—History—
19th century. 4. Antislavery movements—United States—History—19th
century. 5. Antislavery movements—Great Britain—History—19th
century. 6. African Americans—Colonization—Africa. 7. American
Colonization Society. I. Title.
E449.D24 2014
306.3’62097309034—dc23 2013032893
Cover images © Dimitar Todorov/Alamy
Cover design by Chip Kidd
v3.1
To my beloved sons, Adam and Noah,
And their wonderful families
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
INTRODUCTION
Discovering Animalization
Some Evidence of Animalization

1 SOME MEANINGS OF SLAVERY AND EMANCIPATION: DEHUMANIZATION,
ANIMALIZATION, AND FREE SOIL
The Meaning of Animalization, Part I
The Meaning of Animalization, Part II
The Search for the Animalized Slave
Domestication and Internalization

2 THE FIRST EMANCIPATIONS: FREEDOM AND DISHONOR
Self-Emancipation: Haiti as a Turning Point
Freedmen and Slaves
Freedmen’s Rights
Loss of Mastery
The “Horrors of Haiti”
3 COLONIZING BLACKS, PART I: MIGRATION AND DEPORTATION
The Exodus Paradigm
Precedents: Exiles
Precedents: The Displaced

4 COLONIZING BLACKS, PART II: THE AMERICAN COLONIZATION SOCIETY AND
AMERICO-LIBERIANS
Liberating Liberia

5 COLONIZING BLACKS, PART III: FROM MARTIN DELANY TO HENRY HIGHLAND GARNET
AND MARCUS GARVEY
Nationalism
“
6 COLONIZATIONIST IDEOLOGY: LEONARD BACON AND IRREMEDIABLE
”
DEGRADATION
Bacon’s “Report” of 1823
The Paradox of Sin and “Irremediable Degradation”
Some Black Response

7 FROM OPPOSING COLONIZATION TO IMMEDIATE ABOLITION
Paul Cuffe and Early Proposals for Emigration
James Forten and Black Reactions to the American Colonization
Society
The Search for Black Identity and Emigration to Haiti
Russwurm, Cornish, and Walker
Blacks and Garrison

8 FREE BLACKS AS THE KEY TO SLAVE EMANCIPATION
Recognition of the Issue
Abolitionist Addresses to Free African Americans
David Walker and Overcoming Slave Dehumanization
James McCune Smith and Jefferson’s “What further is to be done
with these people?”

9 FUGITIVE SLAVES, FREE SOIL, AND THE QUESTION OF VIOLENCE
Frederick Douglass as a Fugitive
The Underground Railroad and Runaway Slaves
Harriet Jacobs as a Female Fugitive
Fugitive Slaves and the Law
10 THE GREAT EXPERIMENT: JUBILEE, RESPONSES, AND FAILURE
An Eschatological Event and America’s Barriers
The Enactment of British Emancipation
Some American Responses to British Emancipation
From Joseph John Gurney to the Issue of Failure
11 THE BRITISH MYSTIQUE: BLACK ABOLITIONISTS IN BRITAIN—THE LEADER OF THE
“ ”
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND CENTER OF WAGE SLAVERY
Frederick Douglass Confronts the World
African Americans Embrace the Mother Country
The Problems of Race, Dehumanization, and Wage Slavery
Joseph Sturge, Frederick Douglass, and the Chartists—the Decline
and Expansion of Antislavery in the 1850s
EPILOGUE
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
A Note About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Preface
During the decades it took to write this trilogy on “The Problem of
Slavery”—this volume was preceded by The Problem of Slavery in Western
Culture (1966) and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (1975)
—people repeatedly asked me, “What led to your great interest in race
and slavery?” It therefore seems appropriate to begin this final volume
with a fairly brief reply.
Given the national racial segregation of my childhood and youth, it is
not surprising that while I and my parents made eight interstate moves
across the country, and I attended five high schools in four years, I never
shared a classroom with an African American. After turning eighteen, in
early 1945, I became exposed to the appalling racism of the Jim Crow
South, where I received months of combat training for the invasion of
Japan. After the war unexpectedly ended, I found myself on a large
troopship bound for Europe. Though seasick, I was ordered to take a
club, go down into the hold, and keep the “jiggaboos” from gambling. In
this highly segregated army, I had never dreamed there were any blacks
on the ship. But after descending a long winding staircase, I came upon
what I imagined a slave ship would have looked like. Hundreds and
hundreds of near-naked blacks jammed together, many of them shooting
craps. After answering the question “What you doin’ down here, white
boy?,” I hid in the shadows for four hours until relieved of “duty.”
Months later, as a member of the army’s Security Police in Germany, I
witnessed armed and bloody conflicts between white and black
American troops, mainly evoked by white fury over the sight of black
soldiers dating and dancing with German girls. I also heard incredibly
racist speeches from American officers, including General Ernest N.
Harmon, who came from New England but denounced the government
for ever sending black soldiers to Europe.
These experiences had a strong and lasting effect on my mind when I
went on to attend Dartmouth College and graduate school at Harvard.
Because of what I saw in the army, I read and was especially impressed
by the Nobel Laureate Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma: The Negro
Problem and Modern Democracy, which influenced the landmark 1954
decision Brown v. Board of Education, and by President Truman’s
Committee on Civil Rights’ 1947 report, To Secure These Rights. While I
failed to become actively involved in the civil rights movement, I
became deeply shocked by the discovery that slavery and racism had
been largely ignored in my undergraduate and graduate courses. I owed
this discovery to Kenneth M. Stampp, who came to Harvard from
Berkeley as a visiting professor the year before the publication in 1956
of his landmark book The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum
South. Since, happily, he lived close to me, we became friends and had
enlightening discussions on the subject of his book.
When I was lucky enough to become an assistant professor of history
at Cornell the next year, I was determined to emphasize the importance
of slavery in my teaching and to write a book that would provide an
antislavery counterpart to the work of Stampp. But after studying some of
the writings of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, I turned to the
intellectual and international “background” of responses to slavery in
Western culture. This expanded vision was partly the result of my
undergraduate concentration on the history of political thought and
philosophic views of human nature (I majored in philosophy). My
decision to write The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture also owed
much to a Guggenheim Fellowship that allowed me to do a significant
amount of my initial research in Great Britain.
The three volumes of this trilogy differ from one another in very
important ways, so it is essential at the start to describe the goals and
scope of this book. Since I began writing The Problem of Slavery in the Age
of Emancipation by 1980, my publication of other books, particularly
Slavery and Human Progress in 1984 and Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and
Fall of Slavery in the New World in 2006, radically changed the book’s
plan and freed me from doing a broad “survey” of slavery and