INHUMAN BONDAGE: THE RISE AND FALL OF SLAVERY IN THE NEW WORLD
By David Brion Davis
(Oxford University Press, 440 pages, $30)
SLAVERY WAS once the cornerstone of America's future. In 1860, as investment capital, the value of the nation's slaves far exceeded the cash value of all the farms in the South and represented three times the cost of constructing all the railroads that then existed in the U.S. At the time, the South grew more than 60% of the world's cotton, supplying mills and markets from Manchester to Moscow and making not only Southern planters but also Yankee bankers, insurers, commission agents and shipowners very rich. Meanwhile, since 1800 the number of enslaved African-Americans had quadrupled, from one million to four million. As late as 1863, a North Carolina railroad executive could optimistically assure his stockholders that the price of slaves would double by the end of the Civil War, which he confidently expected the South to win.
In "Inhuman Bondage," David Brion Davis masterfully navigates the long history of slavery from ancient times to its abolition in the 19th century. Mr. Davis, the former director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale, succeeds heroically in wrestling a vast amount of material from diverse cultures. The result is a sinewy book that combines erudition and everyday detail into a gripping, often surprising, narrative.
The view is global, and appropriately so. The African slave trade "was an integral and indispensable part of European expansion and the settlement of the Americas," Mr. Davis writes. "American slavery can no longer be understood in parochial terms or simply as a chapter in the history of the U.S. South." He notes that the maritime powers and their New World colonies, not to mention Africa itself, helped to create "the world's first system of multinational production for what emerged as a mass market -- a market for slave-produced sugar, tobacco, coffee, chocolate, dye-stuffs, rice, hemp, and cotton."
Slavery may in early times have been modeled on the domestication of animals. With humans, Mr. Davis suggests, ownership involved "exaggerating the so-called animal traits that all human beings both share and fear," while denying the rational and spiritual qualities that set human beings apart. Until very recent times, the logic of slavery seemed self-evident. Aristotle, for instance, declared matter-of-factly that "it is clear that there are certain people who are free and certain who are slaves by nature, and it is both to their advantage, and just, for them to be slaves." Antebellum proslavery ideologues like Dr. Josiah C. Nott of Alabama asserted that blacks were the result of a separate Creation and thus a separate species, not really human beings at all.
The paradigmatic American image of slavery is probably that of a slave stooping to pick cotton on a Southern plantation. But slavery took varied forms, as Mr. Davis makes clear. In sixth-century B.C. Mesopotamia, enslaved people might own their own slaves and become wealthy, yet they could still be sold by their masters. The Tupinamba of pre-conquest Brazil treated slaves with great kindness, then murdered them in an elaborate ritual that climaxed with cannibalism. In Africa, slaves were the principal symbol of private wealth, and their owners readily retailed them to European traders.
Transatlantic slavery was big business for entrepreneurs on both sides of the ocean. By 1820, nearly 8.7 million slaves had departed from Africa for the New World, the vast majority to the West Indies and Brazil. (Only about 6% were sold to buyers in British North America.) In much of the New World, slaves were tragically expendable. In Brazil, a planter could double his investment in a slave in just five years -- if the slave survived. Slave mortality was so high in the West Indies that it was actually cheaper to work slaves to death and buy replacements from Africa than to support them from infancy to maturity.
In North America, however, a unique combination of temperate climate and an abundance of foodstuffs produced a steady natural increase in the population of the enslaved. American politicians could congratulate themselves on their "humanitarianism" when they voted to terminate the transatlantic slave trade in 1808 because they knew that the local supply would replenish itself.
Mr. Davis makes a compelling case that "black slavery was basic and integral to the entire phenomenon we call `America.'" It was the larger Atlantic slave system, he writes, "that prepared the way for everything America was to become. Thus vital links developed between the profit motive, which led to inhuman efforts to dehumanize African slaves, and the conception of the New World as an environment of liberation, opportunity, and upward mobility."
Emancipation first took root among Quakers, initially in England, and then among their coreligionists in colonial America. Quakers held it as an article of faith that all individuals possessed a divine inner light that made slavery a sin against God. The American Revolution pointed up for many other Americans the embarrassing contradiction of white men proclaiming their "natural right" to independence while holding hundreds of thousands of human beings in lifetime bondage.
Many also realized that the heroism of black troops -- who made up about 25% of Washington's force at Yorktown -- had made nonsense of the myth that blacks lacked courage and discipline. Others embraced abolitionism when they realized that their own basic rights were being compromised to protect slavery. In the South, the U.S. mail was censored to bar antislavery literature. Antislavery speakers were assaulted. Even congressmen who attempted to debate slavery were silenced under a gag rule in the 1830s and 1840s. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was for many the last straw, when it required ordinary citizens to collaborate in capturing fugitives. In the disgusted words of one Ohio newspaper, "now we are all slave catchers."
Mr. Davis's story does not quite end with the American Civil War. He goes on to describe the collapse of slavery in Brazil and its abolition there in 1888. But he rightly treats the Civil War as the true climax to New World slavery. "Few wars in history have led to such a radical outcome as the liberation of some four million slaves," he writes. Indeed, the economic revolution wrought by the war is often submerged by the battlefield perspective that dominates writing about the period.
In 1860, the total value of slaves in the U.S. was $3.5 billion -- the equivalent of $68.4 billion today. Mr. Davis observes stunningly: "A more revealing figure is the fact that the nation's gross national product in 1860 was only about 20 percent above the value of slaves, which means that as a share of today's gross national product, the slaves' value would come to an estimated $9.75 trillion." About 360,000 Union soldiers died, in part, to set slaves free. In the process, they also overthrew the traditional -- and morally repellent -- underpinning of the nation's economy.
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Mr. Bordewich is the author of "Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America."
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