Review / Books:
WEEKEND JOURNAL
Review / Books: The Wealth That Came From Wrong
By Fergus M. Bordewich
1218 words
24 March 2006
The Wall Street Journal
W4
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.
---
Mr. Bordewich is the author of "Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad
and the War for the Soul of America."
