The
following was written in April of 2014 for Professor Aviva Chomsky’s Modern
Latin America course at Salem State University.
Introduction
Since the nineteenth century, slavery has been regarded as illegitimate by increasing numbers of people. As a consequence, whereas as much as five percent of the world population was enslaved in the seventeenth century, less than .005 percent of the world population is enslaved today.[1] Slavery is at least nominally illegal in all parts of the world, an unprecedented development that took most of the twentieth century to unfold.
Slaves have resisted and revolted for as long as there has been slavery. The historical record provides little evidence, however, that the illegitimacy of slavery as an institution occurred to significant numbers of even the enslaved before the late seventeenth century. The advocacy of abolitionism by slaves, former slaves, and free people alike was unprecedented. On the other hand, it was Europeans and people of European descent who were in positions of formal power in most of the Western Hemisphere, and who were at greatest liberty to influence people in positions of power. The legal demise of slavery in the Western Hemisphere required that they make the choice to abolish it. Their opposition to slavery is all the more striking insofar as they were regarded by their societies as unenslavable. This paper will look at some of the explanations of the advocacy of the abolition of slavery and the slave trade among Europeans and people of European descent in position of power and influence.
Historians do not debate whether or not the events and developments surrounding the abolition of slavery in the Western Hemisphere took place, or whether or not the people involved existed and did the things they are recorded as having done. Among the facts agreed upon are that slavery has been practiced for millennia. It was ubiquitous in the Mediterranean world in the centuries before Columbus, and Europeans were at this time as likely to be its victims as its perpetrators.[2] The plantations established in the New World were modeled on the sugar plantations of the Mediterranean world and the Atlantic islands off the coast of Africa. In the New World, large numbers of Native Americans were enslaved, large numbers of Europeans lived as indentured servants, and millions of Africans and their descendants were enslaved. Capital accumulated in the hands of European bankers and industrialists as new classes emerged and urban populations increased. Philosophies of natural rights gained currency, and so did ideologies that identified people of African descent as legitimately enslavable. Slaves resisted and revolted. In Haiti they succeeded in abolishing the institution to which they and many of their ancestors had been subjected. Britain and the United States abolished the slave trade by 1808. Brazil’s abolition of slavery in 1888 would mark the final demise of the legal recognition of slavery—though as hinted at above, it is worth keeping in mind that nominal illegality has never been indicative of the absence of either slavery or institutions that highly approximate it, and slavery has always represented the extreme end of a spectrum of repressive, exploitative relationships.
Historians debate the relationships between these events, developments, and people. Was the abolition of slavery a consequence of a moral impulse ignited by Enlightenment ideals coupled with an expanded sense of causal relationships brought about by participation in markets? Was the abolition of slavery a consequence of changes in the economic and political interests of powerful Europeans brought about by urbanization, industrialization, and the accumulation of capital in Europe? Was the abolition of slavery a consequence of the actions of slaves and former slaves? Were all of these factors essential in bringing about the legal demise of the slave trade and slavery?
The Saints School
The earliest school of historians of abolitionism took for granted that the abolitionists were motivated by moral outrage.[3] Their early dominance of the historiography was establish the very year of British abolition of the slave trade with Thomas Clarkson’s 1808 History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishments of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament. Scholars who can usefully be assigned to this school include Frank Klingberg, author of the 1926 The Anti-Slavery Movement in England: A Study in English Humanitarianism, and Reginald Coupland, author of the 1964 The British Anti-Slavery Movement. Since the latter half of the twentieth century scholars such as Seymour Drescher, Thomas Haskell, and Roger Antsey have likewise identified moral outrage as the motivation of abolitionists.[4]
What defines the Saints School is their assignment of little weight to the economic and political interests of the abolitionists or the actions of the enslaved in motivating abolitionists. Doubtful they would assign no weight to these variables in particular instances. However, for the Saints School, most abolitionists were primarily motivated by sincerely felt moral outrage that was independent of their economic or political interests.
For the Saints School, abolitionists were in fact frequently set back by the actions of the enslaved. For these historians, the Haitian Revolution appears as basically a PR disaster for abolitionists. “For opponents of antislavery,” writes Drescher, “Haiti became a metaphor for dispossession and racial annihilation.”[5] And for governments and elites without a direct interest in slavery, Haiti offered a lesson in the unviability of a post-emancipation slave society. “In the short run,” writes Davis, “the Haitian Revolution seriously damaged the antislavery movement.”[6]
Much the same can be said of a slave insurrection in Barbados in 1816. At this point, the slave trade had already been banned by Britain, but slavery would persist until 1833. In 1816, the enslaved of Barbados rose up in rebellion. They were inspired by rumors that the registration of slaves being proposed in Britain but resisted by their masters was the first step toward their emancipation. Despite the remarkably nonviolent nature of the rebellion, “The Registration Bill was identified as having stimulated a slave uprising on Britain’s most stable Caribbean colony.”[7] Further legislation was postponed for almost a decade.
It probably cannot be said that the Saints School would assign no role to the enslaved. The discontent and resistance of the slaves was a perhaps necessary but insufficient factor in motivating the abolitionists for historians of the Saints School. The enslaved provided constant evidence of their intense dissatisfaction with their enslavement, and, though I have not investigated this point, it seems obvious that this resistance would have been an important ingredient in the moral outrage of abolitionists. Moreover, the Saints School does assign some weight to the influence of enslavable free people. Drescher describes Ottobah Cugano and Olaudah Equiano as “shapers of opinion.”[8] He of course acknowledges the slaves who engaged in insurrections as shapers of opinions of sorts as well, but in discussing Cugano and Equiano there is no hint that their actions inadvertently shaped opinion against their cause.
Slavery had existed for thousands of years without a substantial number of free people finding it morally outrageous. Yet, in response to overwhelming public pressure, in 1807 Britain outlawed the slave trade.[9] What motivated the change of beliefs that the Saints School alleges took place in the nineteenth century?
Thomas Haskell has argued that the moral outrage of abolitionists was motivated by a sense of empowerment and awareness of the distant consequences of one’s actions brought about by participation in markets. “An unprecedented wave of humanitarian reform sentiment swept through the societies of Western Europe, England, and North America in the hundred years following 1750,” notes Haskell, just as participation in markets was expanding in this part of the world. [10] For Haskell, people “have no occasion for feeling causally implicated in the sufferings of a stranger until they possess techniques capable of affecting his condition.”[11] Participation in markets meant “a new consciousness of power to relieve suffering and, correspondingly, unprecedented feelings of guilt and responsibility for evils that had previously seemed remote and irremediable.”[12] For Haskell, participation in markets seems to have exploded a sort of myopia that had permitted people to resign themselves to the existence of slavery until the nineteenth century.
This enhanced sense of responsibility was accompanied by increased information about the world and increased opportunities to influence state policy. “With a relative abundance of newspapers,” Drescher writes of the English, “they shared the most widely diffused communications network in the world.”[13] Public participation in politics was dramatically enhanced as “parliamentary debates and governmental initiatives were now the daily grist of provincial newspaper readers.”[14]
Was the publicly professed moral outrage of unenslavable abolitionists sincere? Plenty of historians have doubted it.
Eric Williams
“Politics and morals in the abstract make no sense,” explained Eric Williams in his 1944 Capitalism and Slavery. “We find the British statesmen and publicists defending slavery today, abusing slavery tomorrow, defending slavery the day after. Today they are imperialist, the next day anti-imperialist, and equally pro-imperialist a generation after. And always the same vehemence.”[15]
Eric Williams, born in Trinidad in 1911, served as prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago from 1961 until his death in 1981, but insisted on a West Indian, as opposed to a Trinidadian, identity. He studied modern history at Oxford in the 1930s, during which time he developed the prototype of what would become Capitalism and Slavery. In this 1944 work he argued that abolitionists were motivated by their own economic and political interests.
Williams provides the example of the English Prime Minister William Pitt, whose professed commitment to abolition of the slave trade Williams calls into question. Over the course of the eighteenth century, sugar produced by slaves in Saint Domingue, controlled by the French, had increasingly displaced sugar produced in Jamaica and Barbados, controlled by the British. This is what turned Pitt into an advocate of an end to the slave trade. “The French were so dependent on British slave traders,” writes Williams, “that even a unilateral abolition by England would seriously dislocate the economy of the French colonies.”[16]
Pitt’s commitment dissipated after the French and Haitian Revolutions. “Pitt could not have Saint Domingue and abolition as well,” argues Williams, but when the planters of Saint Domingue requested that the British intervene to save them, Pitt responded with “expedition after expedition.”[17] Williams argues that the convictions of other abolitionists were demonstrably as contingent as Pitt’s. When the American South seceded from the North, for instance, “the British government nearly recognized the Confederacy,” hardly consistent with a resolute opposition to the practice of slavery.[18]
Most historians seem to accept that abolition of the slave trade and of slavery were more costly than advantageous for European powers. However, David Brion Davis provides a means of connecting sincerely held abolitionist convictions to the economic interests of those same abolitionists.
David Brion Davis
In Europe, novel forms of production were emerging in the eighteenth century. For Davis, abolitionists were motivated by the desire to provide justification for these new forms of production and to divert attention from the harm these new forms of production inflicted on many of those who participated in them.
Davis focuses on the Quakers. The Quakers had been barred from participation in traditional forms of wealth and power, and so involved themselves in banking, commerce, and industry. Indeed, “English Quakers were in the vanguard of the industrial revolution.”[19]
Quakers played an important role not only in the emerging capitalist order, but in the nascent abolitionist movement. “It would be difficult to exaggerate the central role Quakers played in initiating and sustaining the first antislavery movements,” writes Davis.[20]
Why this correspondence? For Davis, “The antislavery movement…reflected the needs and values of the emerging capitalist order.”[21] The moral outrage of abolitionists was sincere and served their economic interests. Davis relies on Antonio Gramsci’s ideas regarding hegemony to argue that “ideological hegemony is not the product of conscious choice and seldom involves insincerity or deliberate deception.”[22] For Davis, abolitionism provided a tool by which an emerging capitalist elite diverted attention from the harm their own mode of production was inflicting. It also comported with an ideology that justified the relationships that mode of production was based on. However, Davis does not argue, as Williams seemed to, that ideology was a deliberately deceptive means of manipulating others. For Davis, people are sincerely drawn to ideologies that rationalize their interests but not necessarily consciously so.
Claudius Fergus
Williams had noted that historians had given little attention to the actions of the enslaved. “Most writers on this period have ignored them,” he wrote.[23] However, while Williams did provide a chapter on the resistance of slaves, he does not assign them a central role in motivating abolitionists. “The Negroes had been stimulated to freedom by the development of the very wealth which their labor had created,” he cryptically concluded.[24] For Williams, the abolitionists were motivated by their short-term political and economic interests, and the enslaved were motivated to revolt in response to the agitation of the abolitionists, not vice versa.
“Williams is typical of many historians who are either ambivalent or noncommittal on the impact of revolutionary emancipation on abolition legislation,” writes Claudius Fergus in his 2014 Revolutionary Emancipation.[25] Fergus explicitly reverses Williams’s causation. Fergus contends that British abolitionists were motivated by fear of Africans in their abolition of the slave trade and fear of people of African descent in their abolition of slavery.
For Fergus, abolitionists were motivated by “psychopathological unease” about Africans, or “Afrophobia.”[26] Following a slave revolt in Guadeloupe, in 1791 English Prime Minister William Pitt “argued that if the enslaved population were allowed to increase naturally, it could provide the answer to endemic insecurity.”[27] When abolition of the slave trade finally arrived, it was because “Haiti’s decisive defeat of France and the sequel in political independence underscored the warnings [of abolitionists] that immediate measures be adopted to preempt the advance of revolutionary emancipation.”[28] Abolitionists, in other words, were motivated by fear of Africans and fear of insurrection. The actions of the enslaved were crucial factors in instilling that fear into abolitionists.
Resistance to enslavement persisted following the abolition of the slave trade. It was this persistent resistance that was the most important factor in persuading the abolitionists that abolition of slavery itself was necessary. “The ferocity of revolts in the post-abolition period,” writes Fergus, “compelled a belated acknowledgement that the real cause of insurgency was slavery itself.”[29] While, as we’ve seen, historians often portray revolutionary activity amongst the enslaved as setting back the abolitionist cause, Fergus portrays the Jamaica Baptist War of 1831 as adding to the momentum of the cause. Indeed, “Members of Parliament made no move toward emancipation until the first reports of the Baptist War.”[30]
Northern Europe and the American North
Frederick Douglass claimed that before the Haitian Revolution “no Christian nation had abolished Negro slavery.”[31] There are two misleading dimensions to this claim. The first is the status of slavery within northern Europe before the Haitian Revolution; the second is the abolition of slavery in the American North before the Haitian Revolution.
In northern Europe, writes Drescher, “By the beginning of the sixteenth century, servile obligations that had succeeded slavery had yielded to contractual systems of labor.”[32] In France, courts “routinely declared slaves free” after being brought by West Indian planters onto French soil.[33] Similarly, “There was no slave law in Britain.”[34] While the enslaved did not unequivocally achieve freedom merely by stepping onto northern European soil, there is an ambiguity to the status of the institution of slavery in northern Europe that precedes European participation in the Atlantic slave trade and establishment of the vast New World plantation systems, and thereby precedes the Haitian Revolution by centuries.
The second ambiguity in the claim that Haiti was the first nation to abolition slavery is that slavery was abolished either by judicial decision, constitutional amendment, or legislative action within several polities of North America before the Haitian Revolution. The Vermont constitution of 1777 expressly banned slavery, making Vermont “the first region in the New World to outlaw slavery.”[35] Pennsylvania, in 1780, “became the first state in the world to abolish racial slavery by a duly deliberated legislative act.”[36] A 1783 judicial ruling legally ended slavery in Massachusetts, albeit with ambiguity. In the same year, New Hampshire adopted a constitution, provisions of which were interpreted as banning slavery. In 1784, Rhode Island and Connecticut adopted laws that emancipated (eventually) the children of slaves.[37]
“The rejection of revolutionary emancipationism as the primary agency in the abolition of the slave trade,” writes Fergus, “enjoys a curious consensus among historians.”[38] Something similar might be said of the relative brevity with which abolition in the American North is generally treated by historians. Davis, for instance, devotes sixteen of the three hundred thirty-one pages of his Inhuman Bondage to a discussion of the abolition of slavery in the American North, a single paragraph of which recounts the timelines of abolition in Northern states.[39] Treatments are often preoccupied with establishing the gradual nature of abolitionist laws in the North; the minimal economic disruption experienced by the North in abolishing slavery; and the deep racism that shaped the experiences of African Americans both before and after the abolition of slavery in the North. By “curious consensus,” explaining this extraordinary and unprecedented development is consistently deferred in favor of preempting triumphalism.
Not only did abolition in the North precede the Haitian Revolution, but 98% of the population of Vermont, the first polity in the New World to abolish slavery, lived on farms as late as 1850.[40] Can the increased consciousness of causal relationships that Haskell claims results from participation in markets, or the necessity of justifying novel economic relationships that Davis points to explain the abolition of slavery under such circumstances? Perhaps Northerners of the Revolutionary era were simply uneasy about practicing slavery while advocating universal rights. However, republicanism and slavery have frequently coexisted historically.
CONCLUSION
This paper has sought to identify the leading explanations for the appeal of antislavery among free people in the nineteenth century. It identified the focal point of debate to be the motivation of abolitionists.
Some historians identify sincere moral outrage, with no necessary relationship to economic interest, to have been the motivation of abolitionists. Others argue that abolitionists were motivated by political and economic interests of which they were conscious. Others have argued that abolitionists were motivated by sincere moral outrage, but that that moral outrage was framed by ideologies to which abolitionists were unconsciously drawn because they served their economic interests. Finally, Fergus has argued that abolitionists were motivated by fear of the costs which the enslaved threatened to continue to inflict upon those who sought to maintain their enslavement.
None of the works discussed in this paper treat the American North in depth. This is unfortunate, because it provides an obvious counter example to each explanation put forth in these works of the motivation of abolitionists and deserves further investigation.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bender, Thomas. The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation. (Berkeley, Cailfornia: University of California Press, 1992).
Davis, David Brion. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
-----The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.
Drescher, Seymour. Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Introduction
Since the nineteenth century, slavery has been regarded as illegitimate by increasing numbers of people. As a consequence, whereas as much as five percent of the world population was enslaved in the seventeenth century, less than .005 percent of the world population is enslaved today.[1] Slavery is at least nominally illegal in all parts of the world, an unprecedented development that took most of the twentieth century to unfold.
Slaves have resisted and revolted for as long as there has been slavery. The historical record provides little evidence, however, that the illegitimacy of slavery as an institution occurred to significant numbers of even the enslaved before the late seventeenth century. The advocacy of abolitionism by slaves, former slaves, and free people alike was unprecedented. On the other hand, it was Europeans and people of European descent who were in positions of formal power in most of the Western Hemisphere, and who were at greatest liberty to influence people in positions of power. The legal demise of slavery in the Western Hemisphere required that they make the choice to abolish it. Their opposition to slavery is all the more striking insofar as they were regarded by their societies as unenslavable. This paper will look at some of the explanations of the advocacy of the abolition of slavery and the slave trade among Europeans and people of European descent in position of power and influence.
Historians do not debate whether or not the events and developments surrounding the abolition of slavery in the Western Hemisphere took place, or whether or not the people involved existed and did the things they are recorded as having done. Among the facts agreed upon are that slavery has been practiced for millennia. It was ubiquitous in the Mediterranean world in the centuries before Columbus, and Europeans were at this time as likely to be its victims as its perpetrators.[2] The plantations established in the New World were modeled on the sugar plantations of the Mediterranean world and the Atlantic islands off the coast of Africa. In the New World, large numbers of Native Americans were enslaved, large numbers of Europeans lived as indentured servants, and millions of Africans and their descendants were enslaved. Capital accumulated in the hands of European bankers and industrialists as new classes emerged and urban populations increased. Philosophies of natural rights gained currency, and so did ideologies that identified people of African descent as legitimately enslavable. Slaves resisted and revolted. In Haiti they succeeded in abolishing the institution to which they and many of their ancestors had been subjected. Britain and the United States abolished the slave trade by 1808. Brazil’s abolition of slavery in 1888 would mark the final demise of the legal recognition of slavery—though as hinted at above, it is worth keeping in mind that nominal illegality has never been indicative of the absence of either slavery or institutions that highly approximate it, and slavery has always represented the extreme end of a spectrum of repressive, exploitative relationships.
Historians debate the relationships between these events, developments, and people. Was the abolition of slavery a consequence of a moral impulse ignited by Enlightenment ideals coupled with an expanded sense of causal relationships brought about by participation in markets? Was the abolition of slavery a consequence of changes in the economic and political interests of powerful Europeans brought about by urbanization, industrialization, and the accumulation of capital in Europe? Was the abolition of slavery a consequence of the actions of slaves and former slaves? Were all of these factors essential in bringing about the legal demise of the slave trade and slavery?
The Saints School
The earliest school of historians of abolitionism took for granted that the abolitionists were motivated by moral outrage.[3] Their early dominance of the historiography was establish the very year of British abolition of the slave trade with Thomas Clarkson’s 1808 History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishments of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament. Scholars who can usefully be assigned to this school include Frank Klingberg, author of the 1926 The Anti-Slavery Movement in England: A Study in English Humanitarianism, and Reginald Coupland, author of the 1964 The British Anti-Slavery Movement. Since the latter half of the twentieth century scholars such as Seymour Drescher, Thomas Haskell, and Roger Antsey have likewise identified moral outrage as the motivation of abolitionists.[4]
What defines the Saints School is their assignment of little weight to the economic and political interests of the abolitionists or the actions of the enslaved in motivating abolitionists. Doubtful they would assign no weight to these variables in particular instances. However, for the Saints School, most abolitionists were primarily motivated by sincerely felt moral outrage that was independent of their economic or political interests.
For the Saints School, abolitionists were in fact frequently set back by the actions of the enslaved. For these historians, the Haitian Revolution appears as basically a PR disaster for abolitionists. “For opponents of antislavery,” writes Drescher, “Haiti became a metaphor for dispossession and racial annihilation.”[5] And for governments and elites without a direct interest in slavery, Haiti offered a lesson in the unviability of a post-emancipation slave society. “In the short run,” writes Davis, “the Haitian Revolution seriously damaged the antislavery movement.”[6]
Much the same can be said of a slave insurrection in Barbados in 1816. At this point, the slave trade had already been banned by Britain, but slavery would persist until 1833. In 1816, the enslaved of Barbados rose up in rebellion. They were inspired by rumors that the registration of slaves being proposed in Britain but resisted by their masters was the first step toward their emancipation. Despite the remarkably nonviolent nature of the rebellion, “The Registration Bill was identified as having stimulated a slave uprising on Britain’s most stable Caribbean colony.”[7] Further legislation was postponed for almost a decade.
It probably cannot be said that the Saints School would assign no role to the enslaved. The discontent and resistance of the slaves was a perhaps necessary but insufficient factor in motivating the abolitionists for historians of the Saints School. The enslaved provided constant evidence of their intense dissatisfaction with their enslavement, and, though I have not investigated this point, it seems obvious that this resistance would have been an important ingredient in the moral outrage of abolitionists. Moreover, the Saints School does assign some weight to the influence of enslavable free people. Drescher describes Ottobah Cugano and Olaudah Equiano as “shapers of opinion.”[8] He of course acknowledges the slaves who engaged in insurrections as shapers of opinions of sorts as well, but in discussing Cugano and Equiano there is no hint that their actions inadvertently shaped opinion against their cause.
Slavery had existed for thousands of years without a substantial number of free people finding it morally outrageous. Yet, in response to overwhelming public pressure, in 1807 Britain outlawed the slave trade.[9] What motivated the change of beliefs that the Saints School alleges took place in the nineteenth century?
Thomas Haskell has argued that the moral outrage of abolitionists was motivated by a sense of empowerment and awareness of the distant consequences of one’s actions brought about by participation in markets. “An unprecedented wave of humanitarian reform sentiment swept through the societies of Western Europe, England, and North America in the hundred years following 1750,” notes Haskell, just as participation in markets was expanding in this part of the world. [10] For Haskell, people “have no occasion for feeling causally implicated in the sufferings of a stranger until they possess techniques capable of affecting his condition.”[11] Participation in markets meant “a new consciousness of power to relieve suffering and, correspondingly, unprecedented feelings of guilt and responsibility for evils that had previously seemed remote and irremediable.”[12] For Haskell, participation in markets seems to have exploded a sort of myopia that had permitted people to resign themselves to the existence of slavery until the nineteenth century.
This enhanced sense of responsibility was accompanied by increased information about the world and increased opportunities to influence state policy. “With a relative abundance of newspapers,” Drescher writes of the English, “they shared the most widely diffused communications network in the world.”[13] Public participation in politics was dramatically enhanced as “parliamentary debates and governmental initiatives were now the daily grist of provincial newspaper readers.”[14]
Was the publicly professed moral outrage of unenslavable abolitionists sincere? Plenty of historians have doubted it.
Eric Williams
“Politics and morals in the abstract make no sense,” explained Eric Williams in his 1944 Capitalism and Slavery. “We find the British statesmen and publicists defending slavery today, abusing slavery tomorrow, defending slavery the day after. Today they are imperialist, the next day anti-imperialist, and equally pro-imperialist a generation after. And always the same vehemence.”[15]
Eric Williams, born in Trinidad in 1911, served as prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago from 1961 until his death in 1981, but insisted on a West Indian, as opposed to a Trinidadian, identity. He studied modern history at Oxford in the 1930s, during which time he developed the prototype of what would become Capitalism and Slavery. In this 1944 work he argued that abolitionists were motivated by their own economic and political interests.
Williams provides the example of the English Prime Minister William Pitt, whose professed commitment to abolition of the slave trade Williams calls into question. Over the course of the eighteenth century, sugar produced by slaves in Saint Domingue, controlled by the French, had increasingly displaced sugar produced in Jamaica and Barbados, controlled by the British. This is what turned Pitt into an advocate of an end to the slave trade. “The French were so dependent on British slave traders,” writes Williams, “that even a unilateral abolition by England would seriously dislocate the economy of the French colonies.”[16]
Pitt’s commitment dissipated after the French and Haitian Revolutions. “Pitt could not have Saint Domingue and abolition as well,” argues Williams, but when the planters of Saint Domingue requested that the British intervene to save them, Pitt responded with “expedition after expedition.”[17] Williams argues that the convictions of other abolitionists were demonstrably as contingent as Pitt’s. When the American South seceded from the North, for instance, “the British government nearly recognized the Confederacy,” hardly consistent with a resolute opposition to the practice of slavery.[18]
Most historians seem to accept that abolition of the slave trade and of slavery were more costly than advantageous for European powers. However, David Brion Davis provides a means of connecting sincerely held abolitionist convictions to the economic interests of those same abolitionists.
David Brion Davis
In Europe, novel forms of production were emerging in the eighteenth century. For Davis, abolitionists were motivated by the desire to provide justification for these new forms of production and to divert attention from the harm these new forms of production inflicted on many of those who participated in them.
Davis focuses on the Quakers. The Quakers had been barred from participation in traditional forms of wealth and power, and so involved themselves in banking, commerce, and industry. Indeed, “English Quakers were in the vanguard of the industrial revolution.”[19]
Quakers played an important role not only in the emerging capitalist order, but in the nascent abolitionist movement. “It would be difficult to exaggerate the central role Quakers played in initiating and sustaining the first antislavery movements,” writes Davis.[20]
Why this correspondence? For Davis, “The antislavery movement…reflected the needs and values of the emerging capitalist order.”[21] The moral outrage of abolitionists was sincere and served their economic interests. Davis relies on Antonio Gramsci’s ideas regarding hegemony to argue that “ideological hegemony is not the product of conscious choice and seldom involves insincerity or deliberate deception.”[22] For Davis, abolitionism provided a tool by which an emerging capitalist elite diverted attention from the harm their own mode of production was inflicting. It also comported with an ideology that justified the relationships that mode of production was based on. However, Davis does not argue, as Williams seemed to, that ideology was a deliberately deceptive means of manipulating others. For Davis, people are sincerely drawn to ideologies that rationalize their interests but not necessarily consciously so.
Claudius Fergus
Williams had noted that historians had given little attention to the actions of the enslaved. “Most writers on this period have ignored them,” he wrote.[23] However, while Williams did provide a chapter on the resistance of slaves, he does not assign them a central role in motivating abolitionists. “The Negroes had been stimulated to freedom by the development of the very wealth which their labor had created,” he cryptically concluded.[24] For Williams, the abolitionists were motivated by their short-term political and economic interests, and the enslaved were motivated to revolt in response to the agitation of the abolitionists, not vice versa.
“Williams is typical of many historians who are either ambivalent or noncommittal on the impact of revolutionary emancipation on abolition legislation,” writes Claudius Fergus in his 2014 Revolutionary Emancipation.[25] Fergus explicitly reverses Williams’s causation. Fergus contends that British abolitionists were motivated by fear of Africans in their abolition of the slave trade and fear of people of African descent in their abolition of slavery.
For Fergus, abolitionists were motivated by “psychopathological unease” about Africans, or “Afrophobia.”[26] Following a slave revolt in Guadeloupe, in 1791 English Prime Minister William Pitt “argued that if the enslaved population were allowed to increase naturally, it could provide the answer to endemic insecurity.”[27] When abolition of the slave trade finally arrived, it was because “Haiti’s decisive defeat of France and the sequel in political independence underscored the warnings [of abolitionists] that immediate measures be adopted to preempt the advance of revolutionary emancipation.”[28] Abolitionists, in other words, were motivated by fear of Africans and fear of insurrection. The actions of the enslaved were crucial factors in instilling that fear into abolitionists.
Resistance to enslavement persisted following the abolition of the slave trade. It was this persistent resistance that was the most important factor in persuading the abolitionists that abolition of slavery itself was necessary. “The ferocity of revolts in the post-abolition period,” writes Fergus, “compelled a belated acknowledgement that the real cause of insurgency was slavery itself.”[29] While, as we’ve seen, historians often portray revolutionary activity amongst the enslaved as setting back the abolitionist cause, Fergus portrays the Jamaica Baptist War of 1831 as adding to the momentum of the cause. Indeed, “Members of Parliament made no move toward emancipation until the first reports of the Baptist War.”[30]
Northern Europe and the American North
Frederick Douglass claimed that before the Haitian Revolution “no Christian nation had abolished Negro slavery.”[31] There are two misleading dimensions to this claim. The first is the status of slavery within northern Europe before the Haitian Revolution; the second is the abolition of slavery in the American North before the Haitian Revolution.
In northern Europe, writes Drescher, “By the beginning of the sixteenth century, servile obligations that had succeeded slavery had yielded to contractual systems of labor.”[32] In France, courts “routinely declared slaves free” after being brought by West Indian planters onto French soil.[33] Similarly, “There was no slave law in Britain.”[34] While the enslaved did not unequivocally achieve freedom merely by stepping onto northern European soil, there is an ambiguity to the status of the institution of slavery in northern Europe that precedes European participation in the Atlantic slave trade and establishment of the vast New World plantation systems, and thereby precedes the Haitian Revolution by centuries.
The second ambiguity in the claim that Haiti was the first nation to abolition slavery is that slavery was abolished either by judicial decision, constitutional amendment, or legislative action within several polities of North America before the Haitian Revolution. The Vermont constitution of 1777 expressly banned slavery, making Vermont “the first region in the New World to outlaw slavery.”[35] Pennsylvania, in 1780, “became the first state in the world to abolish racial slavery by a duly deliberated legislative act.”[36] A 1783 judicial ruling legally ended slavery in Massachusetts, albeit with ambiguity. In the same year, New Hampshire adopted a constitution, provisions of which were interpreted as banning slavery. In 1784, Rhode Island and Connecticut adopted laws that emancipated (eventually) the children of slaves.[37]
“The rejection of revolutionary emancipationism as the primary agency in the abolition of the slave trade,” writes Fergus, “enjoys a curious consensus among historians.”[38] Something similar might be said of the relative brevity with which abolition in the American North is generally treated by historians. Davis, for instance, devotes sixteen of the three hundred thirty-one pages of his Inhuman Bondage to a discussion of the abolition of slavery in the American North, a single paragraph of which recounts the timelines of abolition in Northern states.[39] Treatments are often preoccupied with establishing the gradual nature of abolitionist laws in the North; the minimal economic disruption experienced by the North in abolishing slavery; and the deep racism that shaped the experiences of African Americans both before and after the abolition of slavery in the North. By “curious consensus,” explaining this extraordinary and unprecedented development is consistently deferred in favor of preempting triumphalism.
Not only did abolition in the North precede the Haitian Revolution, but 98% of the population of Vermont, the first polity in the New World to abolish slavery, lived on farms as late as 1850.[40] Can the increased consciousness of causal relationships that Haskell claims results from participation in markets, or the necessity of justifying novel economic relationships that Davis points to explain the abolition of slavery under such circumstances? Perhaps Northerners of the Revolutionary era were simply uneasy about practicing slavery while advocating universal rights. However, republicanism and slavery have frequently coexisted historically.
CONCLUSION
This paper has sought to identify the leading explanations for the appeal of antislavery among free people in the nineteenth century. It identified the focal point of debate to be the motivation of abolitionists.
Some historians identify sincere moral outrage, with no necessary relationship to economic interest, to have been the motivation of abolitionists. Others argue that abolitionists were motivated by political and economic interests of which they were conscious. Others have argued that abolitionists were motivated by sincere moral outrage, but that that moral outrage was framed by ideologies to which abolitionists were unconsciously drawn because they served their economic interests. Finally, Fergus has argued that abolitionists were motivated by fear of the costs which the enslaved threatened to continue to inflict upon those who sought to maintain their enslavement.
None of the works discussed in this paper treat the American North in depth. This is unfortunate, because it provides an obvious counter example to each explanation put forth in these works of the motivation of abolitionists and deserves further investigation.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bender, Thomas. The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation. (Berkeley, Cailfornia: University of California Press, 1992).
Davis, David Brion. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
-----The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.
Drescher, Seymour. Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Fergus, Claudius K. Revolutionary Emancipation: Slavery and
Abolitionism in the British West Indies. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 2013.
Williams, Eric. Capitalism & Slavery. Chapel Hill:
The University of North Carolina Press, 1994.
[1] Drescher,
Seymour and Stanley L. Engerman editors. A Historical Guide to World Slavery.
New York: Oxford University Press. 1989, 170; global slavery index 2013, the
.005 percent is based on my own rough calculation.
[2] Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2009), 29.
[3] I
use the term school very loosely, but found it useful in organizing the
historiography.
[4] I
am here adopting Fergus’s framework of the historiography of abolitionism in a
fairly uncritical manner.
[5]
Drescher, 180.
[6] David
Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in
the Age of Emancipation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), 50.
Fergus groups Davis with the other “neo-imperialists” of what I am here calling
the Saints School.
[7]
Drescher, 232-3.
[8]
Drescher, 218.
[9]
Drescher, 227. Here and elsewhere Drescher elaborates on the popular appeal of
abolitionism in Britain.
[10] Bender,
Thomas. The Antislavery Debate:
Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation. (Berkeley,
California: University of California Press, 1992), 107.
[11]
Bender, 147.
[12]
Bender, 7.
[13]
Drescher, 208.
[14]
Drescher, 209.
[15] Eric
Williams, Capitalism and Slavery
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 211.
[16] Williams,
146.
[17]
Williams, 147.
[18]
Williams, 176.
[19]
Bender, 45.
[20]
Bender, 29.
[21]
Bender, 71.
[22]
Bender 71.
[23]
Williams, 197.
[24]
Williams, 208.
[25] Claudius
Fergus, Revolutionary Emancipation:
Slavery and Abolitionism in the British West Indies (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 2013), 74.
[26]
Fergus, 3.
[27]
Fergus, 89.
[28]
Fergus, 104.
[29]
Fergus, 180.
[30]
Fergus, 179.
[31]
Quoted in Davis (2006), 158. The source seems to be an 1893 speech in Chicago.
[32]
Drescher, 22.
[33]
Drescher, 94.
[34]
Drescher, 97.
[35]
Davis (2006), 152.
[36]
Drescher (2009), 127-8.
[37]
Melish, 64-66.
[38]
Fergus, xi.
[39]
Davis (2006).
[40] Peter
Temin, Engines of Enterprise: An Economic
History of New England (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,
2000), 75-76.
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