The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation

by David Brion Davis

  But I also argue, in the epilogue, that if the Southerners had achieved independence by winning or avoiding the war, or by British and French intervention, it is clear that slavery would have continued well into the twentieth century. By 1860, two-thirds of the wealthiest Americans lived in the South, where the value of slaves continued to soar along with a major export economy. Moreover, many slaveholders dreamed of annexing an expanding tropical proslavery empire ranging from Cuba to Central America, and it is conceivable that an independent Confederacy might have moved in that direction. In 1857 a prominent Southerner even briefly became president of Nicaragua and restored both slavery and the African slave trade. The Southern goal of presenting a wholly “modernized” version of racial slavery would have been reinforced by the shocking rise and spread of “scientific racism,” in Britain and Europe as well as America.

  But there were many contingent events that seemed almost “providential,” such as Union general William T. Sherman’s great victory at the Battle for Atlanta, which ensured Lincoln’s defeat of the almost proslavery Democratic candidate, George B. McClellan, in the presidential election of 1864 (Lincoln had earlier doubted whether he could win). This opened the road to the possible enactment of the Thirteenth Amendment, something inconceivable at the beginning of the war. While much can be said about the later failure of Reconstruction, the following century of Jim Crow discrimination and segregation, and the persistence of various forms of penal servitude and human trafficking, I conclude by viewing the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments as the culmination of the Age of Emancipation—the award not only of liberation but of citizenship and the right to vote to the most oppressed class of Americans for well over two hundred years.

  Introduction

  DISCOVERING ANIMALIZATION

  Long ago, when I began looking for salient features of “the Age of Emancipation”—the century of struggle, debate, rebellion, and warfare that led to the eradication of slavery in the New World—I was struck by the significance of two subjects that have received surprisingly little emphasis from historians: the Haitian Revolution and the American colonization movement.

  The former, which was intertwined in complex ways with the French Revolution and European wars for empire, destroyed from 1791 to 1804 the richest and most productive colony in the New World—French Saint-Domingue. White refugees, their slaves, and black seamen carried news of this first large-scale emancipation of slaves in modern history to the rest of the Caribbean and South America as well as to New Orleans, Charleston, Virginia, Philadelphia, and New York. Even the vaguest awareness that blacks had somehow cast off their chains and founded the new republic of Haiti brought a glimmer of hope to thousands of slaves and free blacks who were the common victims of a remarkably unified Atlantic slave system. The crucial role of free blacks in the revolution, including the great leader Toussaint Louverture, highlighted a group that would continue to have central importance in the Age of Emancipation, especially in their efforts to counteract white beliefs in the slaves’ incapacity for freedom.1

  But the very words “Santo Domingo,” which English-speakers used to refer to the doomed French colony of Saint-Domingue, evoked at least a moment of alarm and terror in the minds of slaveholders throughout the Americas, despite poetic and other tributes to Toussaint Louverture, whose capture and death in a French prison dissociated him from the grimmer consequences of the revolution. Sometimes this example of self-liberation was dismissed as the freakish result of French legislative and military blunders exacerbated by the subversive ideology of British and French abolitionism and the tropical diseases that decimated the British and French armies. Sometimes abolitionists vacillated between a policy of ignoring the explosive subject and warning that insurrections and racial war would be inevitable unless the slaves were peacefully emancipated and converted into grateful free peasants. But whether the Haitian Revolution hastened or delayed the numerous emancipations of the following century, imagery of the great upheaval hovered over the antislavery debates like a bloodstained ghost. No Internet was needed to distribute Bryan Edwards’s unforgettable descriptions of a white infant impaled on a stake, of white women being repeatedly raped on the corpses of their husbands and fathers, and of the fate of Madame Sejourné:

  This unfortunate woman (my hand trembles while I write) was far advanced in her pregnancy. The monsters, whose prisoner she was, having first murdered her husband in her presence, ripped her up alive, and threw the infant to the hogs.—They then (how shall I relate it) sewed up the head of her murdered husband in ———!!! ———Such are thy triumphs, Philanthropy!2

  The idea of deporting or colonizing emancipated blacks outside the North American states or colonies long preceded the Haitian Revolution. But in the United States the specter of Haiti, reinforced by the Virginia slave conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 and the massive Barbadian insurrection of 1816, all of which were influenced by the Haitian Revolution, gave an enormous impetus to the colonization movement. Some advocates understood colonization as a way of making slavery more secure by removing the dangerous (as Haiti had shown) free black and colored population. But colonization was more commonly seen as the first and indispensable step toward the gradual abolition of slavery. In effect, it would reverse and undo the nearly two-century flow of the Atlantic slave ships and by transporting the freed slaves back to Africa would gradually and peacefully redeem America from what James Madison called “the dreadful fruitfulness of the original sin of the African trade.”3 The very thought of shipping from 1.5 to over 4 million black Americans to an inhospitable Africa has seemed so preposterous and even criminal that many historians have tended to dismiss the subject of colonization out of hand (despite the success of white Americans in “removing” Indians to the West and ultimately to “reservations”). This means, however, that historians have never really explained why the coupling of emancipation and colonization appealed to leading American statesmen from Jefferson to Lincoln, why this formula won the endorsement by 1832 of nine state legislatures, and why William Lloyd Garrison, Theodore Weld, the Tappan brothers, Gerrit Smith, James G. Birney, and virtually all the other prominent and radical abolitionists of their generation accepted colonization before finally embracing the doctrine of “immediate emancipation.” The American fusion of antislavery and colonization—what historian William W. Freehling has termed the “conditional termination” of slavery—gave a distinctive stamp to America’s Age of Emancipation and to the abolitionism that suddenly erupted in the 1830s from an almost religious disavowal and repudiation of the colonizationist faith.4

  Later chapters will explore the Haitian and especially the colonizationist models of slave emancipation. However, it was only after I had worked on these subjects for several years that I began to realize that both of them focused attention on the dehumanization of black slaves, a subject that lies at the center of debates over emancipation.

  As seen in the Bryan Edwards quotation, descriptions of the Haitian rebels, especially those transmitted by refugees, accentuated their “vicious” and “animal-like” behavior as they inflicted revenge upon whites and ultimately massacred or expelled most whites from Haiti.

  Leading colonizationists such as Connecticut’s Reverend Leonard Bacon later argued, in assessing slaves’ alleged incapacity for freedom, that whites could only faintly imagine how generations of oppression had degraded the black slave,

  whose mind has scarcely been enlightened by one ray of knowledge, whose soul has never been expanded by one adequate conception of his moral dignity and moral relations, and in whose heart hardly one of those affections that soften our character, or those hopes that animate and bless our being, has been allowed to germinate.

  According to Bacon, who saw slavery as an intolerable national evil, the African American could never be raised “from the abyss of his degradation.” Not in the United States, that is, where the force of racial prejudice was understandably magnified by the fear of a black biblical S
amson “thirsting for vengeance” and bursting his chains asunder. With Haiti obviously in mind, Bacon warned that “the moment you raise this degraded community to an intellectual existence, their chains will burst asunder like the fetters of Sampson [sic], and they will stand forth in the might and dignity of manhood, and in all the terrors of a long injured people, thirsting for vengeance.”5 In this example, having raised blacks from their “abyss” of degradation to the “dignity of manhood,” Bacon clearly rejected any thought of inherent inferiority. Nevertheless, his major argument tied degradation with an incapacity for peaceful coexistence. And the dismal history of black Haiti, whose freedpeople had no way of migrating to Canaanite “free soil,” seemed to underscore their incapacity for economic success and genuine freedom.

  As I concluded in The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, the debate over slavery in the period of the American Revolution had “helped to isolate the Negro’s supposed incapacity for freedom—whether inherent or the result of long oppression—as the major obstacle to emancipation.” Largely because of the widespread enthusiasm for liberty and equal rights, both opponents and defenders of slavery minimized the economic value and importance of the institution and helped make race, a concept which personified “incapacity,” the central excuse for human bondage.6 Slavery might very well be a genuine evil, as the Jeffersons and Madisons acknowledged, but what would be the consequences of suddenly discharging and losing control over hundreds of thousands of “dehumanized” human beings—people whose animal-like bondage had supposedly deprived them of all self-discipline as well as the skills, knowledge, frugality, and moral values needed for responsible participation in society? How would the existing free white population respond to and interact with such “liberated” people? This fear was magnified by the bleak early history of Haiti, a nation shunned by the rest of the world and soon almost bankrupted by reparation payments to France for even the willingness to trade and taking the step of seeking recognition as an independent nation. Hardly less discouraging was the fate of thousands of freed slaves in the Northern United States, who, being barred from schools and respectable employments, quickly sank into an underclass—the first of many generations of African Americans who privately struggled, in a world dominated by whites, with the central psychological issue of self-esteem.

  In short, it was the new possibility of eradicating slavery—which became meaningful only in the late eighteenth century, with the beginning of gradual emancipation in the Northern United States, followed by the Haitian Revolution and France’s revolutionary emancipation act of 1794—that greatly magnified the importance of race.7 And a belief in a people’s dehumanization had become the key to race. The later growth of “scientific racism” reinforced the much earlier speculation of some white travelers and writers that black Africans were inherently inferior and even closer to African apes than to fully human Caucasians. But such views were wholly repugnant to many white Christians, even Southern slave owners, who fervently defended the biblical belief in a common human creation “in the image of God.” Leonard Bacon was far from alone in rejecting any view of inherent black incapacity and in stressing the corrupting and dehumanizing effects of slavery itself.8

  But it is crucial to begin by examining the ways in which “being treated like animals” could lead to “being perceived as animalized humans”—and vice versa. This was the central accusation in most antislavery writing from John Woolman and Anthony Benezet to Theodore Dwight Weld and even Charles Darwin. Weld’s classic American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, published by the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1839 and based on voluminous research in Southern sources, illuminates the theme of animalization and deserves to be quoted at some length:

  [The slaveholder] does not contemplate slaves as human beings, consequently does not treat them as such; and with indifference sees them suffer privations and writhe under blows, which, if inflicted upon whites, would fill him with horror and indignation.… [S]laveholders regard their slaves not as human beings, but as mere working animals, as merchandise. The whole vocabulary of slaveholders, their laws, their usages, and their entire treatment of their slaves fully establish this. The same terms are applied to slaves that are given to cattle. They are called “stock.”…[T]he female slaves that are mothers, are called “breeders” till past child bearing.… Those who compel the labor of slaves and cattle have the same appellation, “drivers”; the names which they call them are the same and similar to those given to their horses and oxen. The laws of slave states make them property, equally with goats and swine; they are levied upon for debt in the same way; they are included in the same advertisements of public sales with cattle, swine, and asses; when moved from one part of the country to another, they are herded in droves like cattle, and like them are urged on by drivers.… [W]hen exposed for sale, their good qualities are described as jockeys show off the good points of their horses; their strength, activity, skill, power of endurance &c. are lauded,—and those who bid upon them examine their persons, just as purchasers inspect horses and oxen; they open their mouths to see if their teeth are sound; strip their backs to see if they are badly scarred, and handle their limbs and muscles to see if they are firmly knit. Like horses, they are warranted to be “sound,” or to be returned to the owner if “unsound.”9

  Since I will be focusing on the dehumanization of North American slavery, it is important to recognize that black slaves were treated like animals throughout the hemisphere, as Charles Darwin discovered while living in Brazil and Argentina during the first stage of the long Beagle voyage. Because he had grown to maturity in an ardently antislavery British family, Darwin’s experience solidified his commitment to the belief in a common humanity with a common origin:

  Near Rio de Janeiro I lived opposite to an old lady, who kept screws to crush the fingers of her female slaves. I have lived in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten, and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal. I have seen a little boy, six or seven years old, struck thrice with a horse whip (before I could interfere) on his naked head, for having handed me a glass of water not quite clean.… I will not even allude to the many heart-sickening atrocities which I authentically heard of;—nor would I have mentioned the above revolting details, had I not met with several people so blinded by the constitutional gaiety of the negro, as to speak of slavery as a tolerable evil.10

  As we shall see, the antislavery indictment, exemplified by the accusation that the animal-like coercive “breeding” of slaves explained the unique rapid population growth of American slaves, was confirmed by the abundant testimony of former slaves; dehumanization was absolutely central to the slave experience. Moreover, this aspect of oppression, as suggested by the classic Exodus narrative in the Bible, which was familiar to many American slaves, led white colonizationists and even many blacks at times to conclude that true freedom was impossible in the land of bondage and required a change of place—an eventual movement from cage-like enclosure to “free soil” or even to a promised land.

  Though historians have long recognized dehumanization as an aspect of slavery, they have not—despite the significant clue Aristotle provided when he called the ox “the poor man’s slave”—really explored its bestializing aspects. This neglected point seems to me fundamental, especially for an understanding of slavery and racism in the United States. Former slave Henry Highland Garnet conveyed this message when he addressed Congress in 1865. Garnet praised the Thirteenth Amendment, a consummation of the Age of Emancipation, and bitterly denounced those American leaders who had continued to tolerate an institution that embodied the “concentrated essence of all conceivable wickedness,” “snatching man from the high place to which he was lifted by the hand of God, and dragging him down to the level of brute creation, where he is made to be the companion of the horse and the fellow of the ox.”11

  SOME EVIDENCE OF ANIMALIZATION

  While everyone is
familiar with the casual as well as hostile comparison of human beings to certain animals, I came to see that the more systematic animalizing of African Americans, as a way of denying their capacity for freedom and preventing their “amalgamating” with white society, carried far-reaching and complicated meanings that deserve more careful examination. It was really this form of extreme dehumanization—a process mostly confined to the treatment of slaves and to the perceptions of whites—that severed ties of human identity and empathy and made slavery possible.

  Some historians have argued that white masters and overseers necessarily recognized the full humanity of blacks when they had sex with slave women, an intimate act that would have been condemned and punished as bestiality or “buggery” if the blacks had been seen as “beasts.”12 But military gang raping in the twentieth century should have taught us that sexual intercourse can exemplify the most dehumanizing, degrading, and exploitative act of conquest or warfare, including the infliction of the conqueror’s genes on an enemy group.13