by Mary Grabar
In fact, the campaign to abolish slavery was a Western thing, and a relatively new thing at the time. As the late great Orientalist historian Bernard Lewis put it, “The institution of slavery had . . . been practiced from time immemorial. It existed in all the ancient civilizations of Asia, Africa, Europe, and pre-Columbian America. It had been accepted and even endorsed by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as other religions of the world.”15 And it was not only African peoples who were enslaved. Slavery was “a ubiquitous institution” in the early modern period, writes Allan Gallay. “Contemporary to the rise of African slavery in the Americas, millions of non-African peoples were enslaved.” These included “over a million Europeans . . . in North Africa, and perhaps more in the Ottoman Empire,” as well as the European settlers taken in captivity in the New World by Indians—not to mention the enslavement of Indians by Indians of other tribes.16
The Civil War not only led to the emancipation of American slaves but inspired leaders in the slave-holding nations of Cuba and Brazil to take steps to end slavery and avoid a similar outcome.17 The Civil War also had an impact in Europe, where it brought “the issue of slavery sharply before European opinion.” It “coincided with a renewed and determined British effort, by both diplomatic and naval action, to induce Muslim rulers in Turkey, Arabia, and elsewhere to ban, and indeed suppress, the slave trade,” writes Lewis.18
A People’s History does not provide such historical and global context. Instead, Zinn’s reader gets the impression that American capitalism produced the cruelest slavery in the world—and that Americans invented racism. Zinn blames “the new World” for the development of racial hatred, which he pretends did not exist before the discovery of America. “Slavery,” he claims, “developed quickly into a regular institution, into the normal labor relation of blacks to whites in the New World. With it developed that special racial feeling—whether hatred, or contempt, or pity, or patronization—that accompanied the inferior position of blacks in America for the next 350 years—that combination of inferior status and derogatory thought we call racism.”19
In fact, racism is not an invention of Western culture. Let’s consider Zinn’s pseudo-philosophical claim: “This unequal treatment, this developing combination of contempt and oppression, feeling and action, which we call ‘racism’—was this the result of a ‘natural’ antipathy of white against black?” This is a rhetorical question. Zinn suggests that if “racism can’t be shown to be natural, then it is the result of certain conditions, and we are impelled to eliminate those conditions.” So, Zinn claims, “All the conditions for black and white in seventeenth-century America were . . . powerfully directed toward antagonism and mistreatment.”
These “conditions” have everything to do with capitalism and class. Zinn tells us, “There is evidence that where whites and blacks found themselves with common problems, common work, common enemy in their master, they behaved toward one another as equals.” He cites Kevin Stampp’s claim that “Negro and white servants of the seventeenth century were ‘remarkably unconcerned about the visible physical differences.’ Black and white worked together, fraternized together. The very fact that laws had to be passed after a while to forbid such relations indicates the strength of that tendency.”20 So once the proletariat—black and white—unite again, racism will be eliminated.
Histories in the Soviet Union airbrushed certain facts, as they did certain personages from photographs. Zinn does the same thing, airbrushing out evidence that contradicts his claims. But the facts show that racism has existed all over the world, not only in the West, and that it was not only in the West that blacks were singled out for slavery of the most demeaning kind. Nor was racism only directed against those with darker skins.
The Muslim role in slavery and the slave trade is ignored by Zinn, but, in fact, it was “through the Moslem countries of North Africa” that” black slaves were imported into Europe during the Middle Ages.”21 By “the end of the eighteenth century,” the Islamic Middle East held “the majority of the world’s white chattel slaves.”22 Whites to the north and blacks to the south were both seen as inferior and therefore legitimate slave material. As Bernard Lewis points out, “The literature and folklore of the Middle East reveal a sadly normal range of traditional and stereotypical accusations against people seen as alien and, more especially, inferior. The most frequent are those commonly directed against slaves and hence against the races from which slaves are drawn—that they are stupid; that they are vicious, untruthful, and dishonest; that they are dirty in their personal habits and emit an evil smell.”
The Arabs, like many in the West, held stereotypes about black men and women as highly sexed.23 When blacks appear in Islamic illustrations of “court life, domestic life, and various outdoor scenes,” they are depicted doing the lowly tasks assigned to them—“carrying a tray, pushing a broom, leading a horse, wielding a spade, pulling an oar or a rope, or discharging some other subordinate or menial task.”24 Slaves had limited rights under Islamic law,25 but it did not mean that they had equal opportunities—even within the institution of slavery itself.
When white slaves were available—before the Russians put up barriers—black slaves usually held positions below them. The Ottoman Empire had at first acquired slaves from Central and Eastern Europe and by raiding “the Caucasians—the Georgians, Circassians, and related people.” These sources dried up when Russia annexed Crimea in 1783 (a shipping off point for the slaves) and conquered the Caucasus in the early nineteenth century. The Ottomans then went to Africa, and by the nineteenth century that continent provided “the overwhelming majority of slaves used in Muslim countries from Morocco to Asia.”26 Once white slaves were no longer available, black slaves sometimes “were given tasks and positions which were previously the preserve of whites.”27
Some of the worst suffering came when Arab slave traders transported slaves, as Thomas Sowell notes in Ethnic America: A History. The “massive commercial sales of Negro slaves began after the conquest of northern Africa by the Arabs in the eighth century,” when “Arab slave traders penetrated down into the center of Africa and on the east coast.” With the “cooperation” of local tribes, “they captured or purchased slaves to take back with them across the Sahara Desert, which eventually became strewn with the skeletons of Negroes who died on the long march. . . .” Sowell comments, “The Arabs were notable as the most cruel of all slave masters.”28 The suffering continued into the nineteenth century as slave traders went into more remote areas as “scrutiny” by the Ottoman Empire and European powers increased. In 1849, sixteen hundred black slaves died of thirst as they were driven from Bornu to southern Libya.29
In the nineteenth century, it was Africa that provided highly prized slave eunuchs. Between one hundred to two hundred boys between the ages of eight and ten were castrated “every year at Abu Tig in Upper Egypt, on the slave caravan route from the Sudan to Cairo.” The castrated boys could be sold at twice the normal price. As Louis Frank wrote in 1802, “it is this increase in price which determines the owners, or rather usurpers, to have some of these wretches mutilated.”30 These atrocities took place thousands of miles from American shores.
Muslim nations’ adherence to Islamic law, which sanctions slavery (except of free Muslims), made it more difficult to eliminate. As Bernard Lewis explains, “From a Muslim point of view, to forbid what God permits is almost as great an offense as to permit what God forbids—and slavery was authorized and regulated by the holy law.” Most Muslim states did not enact slavery abolition until the years between the World Wars. Yemen did so only when it became a “newly established republican regime” in 1962; that same year, Saudi Araba did, as well, “by royal decree.” The last Muslim country to abolish slavery was Mauritania in the year Zinn’s book came out, 1980.31
Zinn chose not to include such information, but instead limited his discussion to earlier centuries of the Atlantic slave trade. He does admit that slaves we
re captured “in the interior” of Africa—frequently by blacks. Yet the African slave traders are absolved of responsibility. They were “caught up in the [Atlantic] slave trade themselves.”32 And yet, Bernard Lewis quotes a ninth century writer who observed that “the black kings sell blacks without pretext and without war.”33
Far from being hapless victims lured into a new kind of commerce, the Africans’ legal system actually “fueled the Atlantic slave trade,” according to Boston University professor John Kelly Thornton in Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1680, published by Cambridge University Press.34 And while slaves in America and Europe “typically had difficult, demanding, and degrading work, and they were often mistreated by exploitative masters who were anxious to maximize profits,” in Africa a slave could be arbitrarily sacrificed on an altar.35
Although the English colonies, and then the United States, accounted for a relatively small percentage of the purchases of African slaves in the New World, they “held the largest number of slaves of any country in the Western hemisphere—more than a third of all the slaves in the hemisphere—in 1825.” The reason was that it was “the only country in which the slave population reproduced itself and grew by natural increase. In the rest of the hemisphere, the death rate was so high and the birthrate so low that continuous replacements were imported from Africa.”36
The life of a slave was full of uncertainty, subject to the owner’s whims and circumstances, to be sure. Cruel punishment was meted out arbitrarily and family members could be sold without warning, as Thomas Sowell acknowledges. Yet he also states that conditions were “generally more brutal in other countries” than in the United States (in contrast to Zinn’s claim of the opposite). Thornton provides some sample cases—including the Ridgley estate in mid-seventeenth-century Maryland—where slaves could raise crops on a portion of the estate and sell them in exchange for some of the profits. Virginia slave John Graweere raised pigs and sold them for “one half the increase.”37
American slaves were sometimes given their legal freedom or partial freedom, such as the “half freedom” of Dutch areas. “In these situations, clearly, slaves had some mobility and could form families and socialize their children. That they might not choose to forget their African background is revealed in the fact that one of the most successful of these small-holding former slaves, Anthony Johnson, named his farm ‘Angola,’ ” according to Thornton. Their culture was changed, to be sure, partly because slaves from various African cultures were thrown together. There is evidence that even on slave ships and during the Middle Passage new cultural relationships were formed between Africans of different societies. The result was a new culture, with “the many and varied African cultures” serving as “building blocks” and European culture providing “linking materials.”38
Many slaves adopted the ideals of Western culture, including Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist. Zinn quotes Douglass several times—but as is to be expected, selectively. The discussion of Douglass’s autobiography comes on the heels of that of another black abolitionist, David Walker, the “son of a slave” from whose pamphlet, Walker’s Appeal, Zinn quotes extensively, adding his own comment, “There was no slavery in history, even that of the Israelites in Egypt, worse than the slavery of the black man in America, Walker said.”39 While we might sympathize with Walker’s cause, we should also remember that he was writing not history, but polemic.
Douglass’s autobiographies, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave first published in 1845, and My Bondage and My Freedom from ten years later, offer not only an account of a firsthand experience of being a slave, but also a more nuanced investigation of the institution. Zinn’s discussion of this classic begins, “Some born in slavery acted out the unfulfilled desire of millions. Frederick Douglass, a slave, sent to Baltimore to work as a servant and as a laborer in the shipyard, somehow learned to read and write, and at twenty-one, in the year 1838, escaped to the North, where he became the most famous black man of his time, as lecturer, newspaper editor, writer.”40 Douglass also described the differences between the treatment of slaves in urban areas and on isolated plantations, where the slave owner was far enough from his neighbors that they did not hear “the cries of his lacerated slave” or see how ill fed or clothed he was.41
In the first edition of the Narrative, Douglass, clearly hoping to inspire antislavery sentiment, described the beatings and hunger he and others endured, the abandonment of his aged grandmother as the property was divided up upon the death of the original owner, and men selling off the children they had fathered with slave women. Douglass was also careful to explain how the institution of slavery transformed inherently good people, like his mistress, who changed for the worse after her husband pressured her to treat the eight-year-old Douglass like a slave, in a dehumanizing manner. The “poison of irresponsible power,” Douglass wrote, “commenced its infernal work. That cheerful eye, under the influence of slavery, soon became red with rage. . . .”42 In his writings and his speeches, Douglass appealed, against the institution of slavery, to the ideals of the Bible and the Declaration of Independence. He repeatedly pointed to the inconsistency between the treatment of slaves and the precepts of Christian charity and the American ideals of liberty and equality. These principles were irrelevant, of course, to the Sultan of Morocco around that same time.
The climactic moment of the Narrative comes when the sixteen-year-old Douglass fights back against Edward Covey. After enduring weekly beatings for six months and facing more punishment for having fainted from overwork, Douglass fought off Covey and an assistant as the infamously cruel “breaker” of slaves was attempting to tie him up. Douglass described the “battle” as the “turning-point in my career as a slave,” because it “rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood.”43
This kind of spirit was not unusual among slaves. Douglass showed incredible will, but many slaves practiced other forms of resistance, with “work slowdowns, sabotage, and running away,” depending upon the circumstances, which varied.44 As the 1960s and 1970s brought greater interest in black history, scholars such as Edgar McManus, in his A History of Negro Slavery in New York, countered the stereotype of “Negroes as a passive mass, harnessed and driven by a white elite.” McManus pointed out that in New Netherland, prejudice was more religious than racial in nature. While Jews could not “own realty” or join the militia, “Negroes could.” Some even “owned white indentured servants” and “intermarried with whites.” Although slaves engaged in domestic and farm work, they were also employed as skilled workers—goldsmiths, naval carpenters, coopers, tanners, and masons.45
As Lorena Walsh points out, the discussions about liberty in the years leading up to and during the War of Independence affected slave owners and slaves. It also affected slave status. Loyalists and Patriots vied for slaves’ allegiance by promising them freedom and had their own authority compromised when they employed slaves.46 Over four thousand blacks “served in the Continental Army, and thousands more in the local militia.” Those serving from New York State enjoyed the prospect of freedom, thanks to a law passed by the New York State Assembly in 1781.47 Nearly all the Revolutionary War leaders were inspired to condemn slavery. In fact, “Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration of Independence contained a sweeping condemnation of the slave trade and England’s refusal to allow legislation ‘to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce.’ ” Washington, Jefferson, and Madison—all slaveholders—expressed support of “gradual emancipation.”48
Zinn acknowledges this passage in the original Declaration, but then casts suspicion upon Jefferson’s motives: “This seemed to express moral indignation against slavery and the slave trade (Jefferson’s personal distaste for slavery must be put alongside the fact that he owned hundreds of slaves to the day he died.)” And Zinn suggests a possible self-serving motive: the fear of slave insurrections. “Because slave
holders themselves disagreed about the desirability of ending the slave trade,” Zinn writes, “Jefferson’s paragraph was removed.” Zinn concludes with dripping sarcasm, “So even that gesture toward the black slave was omitted in the great manifesto of freedom of the American Revolution.”49 As usual, Zinn presents anything short of immediate utopian results as evidence of hypocrisy and greed. Any suggestion that injustices should be cured by changes that are gradual, and lawful—and safe—is taken as evidence of insincerity. No credit is given to such American Founders as John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and Philip Schuyler for their roles in the newly formed New York Manumission Society, organized in 1785, which became the “working organization of the antislavery movement,” keeping the pressure up “on state officials” and “the issue before the public”—and that ultimately succeeded50 in phasing out slavery in New York State. Full abolition was achieved in 1827.
There is still slavery in Africa to this day. “[A]n estimated 9.2 million” Africans “live in servitude without the choice to do so” at “the highest rate. . . . in the world,” according to the 2018 Global Slavery Index. Slavery is “especially prevalent” in Eritrea and Mauritania, countries noted for the collusion of the government in the practice. In Eritrea, the “one-party state of president Isaias Afwerki has overseen a notorious national conscription service” for forced labor. In Mauritania, “the world’s last country to abolish slavery,” “the situation is more acute,” with the “black Haratin group” inheriting its slave status.51
