The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism As a Problem in Historical Interpretation - Rilegato

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ISBN 10: 0520066391 ISBN 13: 9780520066397

Casa editrice: Univ of California Pr, 1992

Riassunto

This volume brings together one of the most provocative debates among historians in recent years. The center of controversy is the emergence of the antislavery movement in the United States and Britain and the relation of capitalism to this development.

The essays delve beyond these issues, however, to raise a deeper question of historical interpretation: What are the relations between consciousness, moral action, and social change? The debate illustrates that concepts common in historical practice are not so stable as we have thought them to be. It is about concepts as much as evidence, about the need for clarity in using the tools of contemporary historical practice.

The participating historians are scholars of great distinction. Beginning with an essay published in the American Historical Review (AHR), Thomas L. Haskell challenged the interpretive framework of David Brion Davis's celebrated study, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. The AHR subsequently published responses by Davis and by John Ashworth, as well as a rejoinder by Haskell. The AHR essays and the relevant portions of Davis's book are reprinted here. In addition, there are two new essays by Davis and Ashworth and a general consideration of the subject by Thomas Bender.

This is a highly disciplined, insightful presentation of a major controversy in historical interpretation that will expand the debate into new realms.

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Informazioni sull?autore

Thomas Bender is University Professor of the Humanities and Professor of History at New York University. John Ashworth is Lecturer in American Studies at the University of East Anglia. David Brion Davis is Sterling Professor of History at Yale University. Thomas L. Haskell is Professor of History at Rice University.

Dalla quarta di copertina

"The marrow of the most important historiographical controversy since the 1970s."—Michael Johnson, University of California, Irvine

"A debate of intellectual significance and power. The implications of these essays extend far beyond antislavery, important as that subject undoubtedly is. This will be of major importance to students of historical method as well as the history of ideas and reform movements."—Carl N. Degler, Stanford University

Dal risvolto di copertina interno

"The marrow of the most important historiographical controversy since the 1970s."Michael Johnson, University of California, Irvine

"A debate of intellectual significance and power. The implications of these essays extend far beyond antislavery, important as that subject undoubtedly is. This will be of major importance to students of historical method as well as the history of ideas and reform movements."Carl N. Degler, Stanford University

Estratto. © Ristampato con autorizzazione. Tutti i diritti riservati.

The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation

By Thomas Bender, editor

University of California Press

Copyright © 1992 Thomas Bender, editor
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520066391
Chapter 1
What the Abolitionists Were Up Against

"The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture": The Argument Summarized

The concept of chattel slavery, which must be distinguished from historical varieties of servitude and dependence, has always embodied a profound though subtle contradiction. Since man has a remarkable capacity to imagine abstract states of perfection, he very early imagined a perfect form of subordination. Plato compared the slave to the human body, the master to the body's soul. Slaves incarnated the irrationality and chaos of the material universe, as distinct from the masterlike Demiurge. There was thus a cosmic justification behind Aristotle's dictum that "from the hour of their birth, some men are marked out for subjection, others for rule." The true slave, according to Aristotle, could have no will or interests of his own; he was merely a tool or instrument—the extension of his owner's physical nature.

But even metaphysics had to recognize the slave as a conscious being. Aristotle allowed the bondsman a lower form of virtue, consisting, as one might expect, in the perfect fulfillment of his assigned function. The slave could affirm his consciousness, in other words, by partaking of his master's consciousness and by becoming one with his master's desires. The perfect slave, therefore, would be a paradigm of that ideal submission never quite approximated by the most obedient children, wives, subjects, students, or patients: he would be the automatic agent of his creator's will (not an autonomous Adam free to disobey).

At this point we arrive at the root of the "problem" of slavery. The more perfect the slave, as Hegel later observed, the more enslaved becomes the master. For the master's identity depends on having a slave who recognizes

him as master: the truth of the master's independent consciousness lies in the dependent and supposedly unessential consciousness of the bondsman.1

This psychological paradox was not unknown to the ancient world. "It would be absurd," Diogenes of Sinope reportedly said, when his own slave had run away, "if Manes can live without Diogenes, but Diogenes cannot get on without Manes." When pirates captured Diogenes and took him to a slave market in Crete, he pointed to a spectator wearing rich purple robes and said, "Sell me to this man; he needs a master."

There is no need here to review the history of slave systems or to discuss the sociological gradations between various forms of servitude. It is sufficient to make three brief points about the concept and reality of slavery. First, the ancient ideal of personal subordination was modified by Christianity but continued to influence medieval and early modern thought, even in countries where chattel bondage had disappeared. In medieval England, for example, Bracton identified villeins with Roman slaves, and carefully distinguished them from other kinds of dependent laborers whose rights were protected by the state. Second, insofar as actual forms of servitude approximated the concept of slavery, as elaborated, for example, in Roman law, they represented the extreme example of treating men as objects to be manipulated, humiliated, and exploited. Hence the term "slavery" continued to acquire metaphorical associations implying the ultimate in dependence, disability, powerlessness, sinfulness, and negation of autonomous self-consciousness. Third, the internal contradictions of slavery were not confined to theory, but arose ultimately from historical attempts to keep and govern slaves, a situation which always necessitated compromise. No lawgivers could forget that tools and instruments do not run away, rebel, commit crimes, or help protect the state from external danger. No masters, whether in ancient Rome, medieval Tuscany, or seventeenth-century Brazil, could forget that the obsequious servant might also be a "domestic enemy" bent on theft, poisoning, or arson. Throughout history it has been said that slaves, if occasionally as loyal and faithful as good dogs, were for the most part lazy, irresponsible, cunning, rebellious, untrustworthy, and sexually promiscuous.

The institution of slavery, then, has always given rise to conflict, fear, and accommodation. The settlement of the New World magnified these liabilities, since the slaves now came from an alien and unfamiliar culture; they often outnumbered their European rulers; and many colonial settlements were vulnerable to military attack or close to wilderness areas that

G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, J. B. Baillie, trans., 2d edn. (New York, 1964), 235–37. The other references upon which this section is based can be found in The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, N. Y., 1966).

offered easy refuge. Accordingly, the introduction of Negro slavery to the Americas brought spasmodic cries of warning, anxiety, and racial repugnance. But the grandiose visions of New World wealth—once the Spanish had plundered the Aztecs and Incas—seemed always to require slave labor. The Negro slave thus became an intrinsic part of the American experience.

The economics of slavery have no bearing on the argument at this point. It is obvious that the various colonizing nations, whatever their domestic traditions of servitude, seized upon Africans as the cheapest and most expedient labor supply to meet the immediate demands of mining and tropical agriculture. The institution took on a variety of forms as a result of European cultural differences, the character of the work performed, geographic and ecological conditions, and a host of other variables. But Anglo-American slavery was not unique in defining the bondsman as chattel property endowed with elements of human personality. Nor was Anglo-American society unusual in having to accommodate the underlying contradictions of the master-slave relationship.

The diversities of New World slavery should not blind us to the central point. In the 1760s there was nothing unprecedented about chattel slavery, even the slavery of one ethic group to another. What was unprecedented by the 1760s and early 1770s was the emergence of a widespread conviction that New World slavery symbolized all the forces that threatened the true destiny of man. How does one explain this remarkable shift in moral consciousness if it was not a direct response to an innovation of unparalleled iniquity? Presumably men of the mid-eighteenth century were no more virtuous than men of earlier times, although something might have altered their perceptions of virtue. No doubt the new antislavery opinion drew on the misgivings and anxieties which slavery had always engendered, but which had been checked by the desire for independence and wealth. Yet the slave systems of the New World, far from being in decay, had never appeared so prosperous, so secure, or so full of promise.

The emergence of an international antislavery opinion represented a momentous turning point in the evolution of man's moral perception, and thus in man's image of himself. The continuing "evolution" did not spring from transcendent sources: as a historical artifact, it reflected the ideological needs of various groups and classes. The explanation must begin, however, with the heritage of religious, legal, and philosophical tensions associated with slavery—or in other words, with the ways in which Western culture had organized man's experience with lordship and bondage.

From antiquity slavery has embodied symbolic meanings connected with the condition and destiny of man. For the Greeks (as for Saint Augustine and other early Christian theologians) physical bondage was part of the

cosmic hierarchy, of the divine scheme for ordering and governing the forces of evil and rebellion. For the ancient Hebrews, slavery could be a divine punishment; a time of trial and self-purification prior to deliverance; and the starting point for a historical mission. The literature of Hellenistic and early Christian times is saturated with the paradoxes of human bondage: man was a slave to sin or to his own passions; his incapacity for virtuous self-government justified his external bondage; yet he might escape his internal slavery by becoming the servant of universal reason—or of the Lord. Emancipation from one form of slavery depended on the acceptance of a higher and more righteous bondage.

If Plato and Aristotle provided an ideology for masters, the Cynics, Sophists, and Stoics provided an ideology for slaves. Externally, the servant might be the instrument of his master's will, but internally, in his own self-consciousness, he remained a free soul. And he could affirm the truth of this subjective reality by denying the importance of the world of flesh and human convention. Physical constraint could never bar a man from true virtue. Hence the master, imagining himself to be free and omnipotent, might well be the true slave—at least in the eyes of the slave.

This transvaluation had profound and enduring consequences when absorbed by Christian theology. The early Church Fathers, living in a slave society, accommodated the institution's contradictions by synthesizing Greek and Hebrew notions of freedom. No human master could usurp God's role and demand absolute and unconditional submission from another man. The only slavery that mattered was slavery to sin, from which no man was exempt. Christianity thus harbored a negative equalitarianism, proclaiming that God was no respecter of persons, that lords and servants were equally subject to His wrath and forgiveness. For masters, paradoxically, a submission to God could mean a lessening dependence on their slaves' acceptance of lordship. Christianity also recognized the grievances and longings of slaves, but sublimated them into another realm of time and space. Any man might become truly free, but only by becoming an unconditional slave to the only true Master. The lowliest slave could look forward to emancipation, but only in another life. In this life, "he that was called in the Lord being a bondservant, is the Lord's freeman: likewise he that was called being free, is Christ's bondservant." Slaves should therefore bear their worldly condition for the glory of God, obeying their masters "with fear and trembling, in a singleness of your heart, as unto Christ." In one sense, the Epistle to the Ephesians gave an ingenious solution to the problem posed by Aristotle: a slave could be virtuous by conforming to his master's will, but only if he served the master "as unto Christ."

The early Christian view of slavery was of central importance in recon-

ciling the masses to the existing social order. It constituted the core of an ideology that encouraged hope, patience, endurance, and submission, while reminding the powerful of their own fallibility. It would be a mistake to think of an immanent Christian equalitarianism that was certain to develop, on the analogy of a seed or root, into an unequivocal denunciation of physical slavery. Christianity represented one means of responding to the contradictions of lordship and bondage, and it wove those contradictions into its fundamental views of man and the world. Thus Saint Thomas Aquinas could affirm that slavery was contrary to the first and highest intent of nature, and yet insist that it conformed to the second intent of nature, which was adjusted to man's limited capacities. He could therefore suggest that slavery was a necessary part of the governing pattern of the universe, speak of the slave as the physical instrument of his owner, and find scholastic justifications for the Roman rule that the child of a free man and bondwoman should be a slave. Neither Luther nor Calvin, one may note, had any notion that Christian liberty could alter the fact that some men are born free and others slaves. Indeed, as a result of the verdict of many centuries, one could not begin to assert the universal sinfulness of slavery without questioning the doctrine of original sin and challenging the entire network of rationalization for every form of subordination.

The first groups to denounce the principle of slavery, and all that it implied, were the perfectionist and millennialist sects who sought to live their lives free from sin. In essence, their ideal involved a form of mutual love and recognition that precluded treating men as objects, even as objects with souls. The sectarians, whatever their distinctive beliefs and practices, looked for a form of authentic service, or selflessness, which could not be used as a lever for exploitation. For us their importance does not lie in the transmission of ideas, but in their attempts to realize a mode of interpersonal life that was the precise antithesis of chattel slavery. To the social order, of course, the sectarians were an intolerable affront. They were thus either annihilated or reduced to spiritualistic withdrawal.

The notable exception was the Society of Friends, which early found the means of compromise and thus survival. The Quakers not only contained and stabilized their quest for a purified life, but institutionalized methods for bearing witness to their faith. In other words, the Quakers achieved a dynamic balance between the impulse to perfection and the "reality principle." They also acquired considerable economic and political power, and were the only sect to become deeply involved with Negro slavery.

At the outset, it appeared that the Quakers would accommodate the contradictions of slavery much as Catholics and Protestants had done before them. By the early eighteenth century there were Quaker planters in the

West Indies and Quaker slave merchants in London, Philadelphia, and Newport. But partly because of the Friends' testimony against war, slaveholding occasioned moral tensions that were less common among other denominations. For critics and deviants within the sect, the wealthy masters and slavetrading merchants presented a flagrant symbol of worldly compromise and an ideal target for attack. For a variety of reasons the Seven Years' War brought a spiritual crisis for the Society of Friends, resulting in much soul-searching, attempts at self-purification, and a final commitment to disengage themselves, collectively, from the Atlantic slave system.

The Quakers' growing anguish coincided with four complex and interrelated developments in Western culture, particularly the culture of British Protestantism. First, the emergence of secular social philosophy necessitated a redefinition of the place of human bondage in the rational order of being. With the exception of Jean Bodin, the great political theorists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries all found justifications for chattel slavery. On the other hand, by appealing to utility and social order, and by divorcing the subject from theological conceptions of sin, they narrowed the grounds of sanction. Thomas Hobbes, for example, gave his blessings to a form of bondage so absolute that a master could kill his servant with impunity. But by reducing the relationship to fear, power, and self-interest, Hobbes removed any ethical basis for condemning a successful revolt. He also swept away traditional distinctions based on natural merit and assigned status, and thus undermined both the classical and Christian justifications for unquestioned dominion. Because John Locke celebrated the importance of natural liberty, he had to place slavery outside the social compact, which was designed to protect man's inalienable rights. Locke thus imagined slavery as "the state of War continued, between a lawful Conquerour, and a Captive. " Even by the 1730s such arguments were beginning to appear absurd to a generation of English and French writers who had learned from Locke to take an irreverent view of past authority and to subject all questions to the test of reason. It was Montesquieu, more than any other thinker, who put the subject of Negro slavery on the agenda of the European Enlightenment, weighing the institution against the general laws or principles that promoted human happiness, and encouraging the imaginative experiment of a reversal of roles in a world turned upside down. And by the 1760s the arguments of Montesquieu and Francis Hutcheson were being repeated, developed, and propagated by the cognoscenti of the enlightened world. John Locke, the great enemy of all absolute and arbitrary power, was the last major philosopher to seek a justification for absolute and perpetual slavery.

A second and closely related transformation was the popularization of an

ethic of benevolence, personified in the "man of feeling." This ideal first appeared as an answer to the Calvinist and Hobbesian views of man's incapacity for virtue. The insistence on man's inner goodness, identified with his power of sympathy, became part of a gradual secularizing tendency in British Protestantism, a tendency awkwardly designated as "latitudinarianism." Ultimately, this liberal spirit led in two directions, described by the titles of Adam Smith's two books: The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations . If there were unresolved tensions between sympathetic benevolence and individual enterprise, both theories condemned slavery as an intolerable obstacle to human progress. The man of sensibility needed to objectify his virtue by relieving the sufferings of innocent victims. The economic man required a social order that allowed and morally vindicated the free play of individual self-interest. By definition, the slave was both innocent and a victim, since he could not be held responsible for his own condition. The Negro's enslavement, unlike the legitimate restraints of society, seemed wholly undeserved. He represented innocent nature, and hence corresponded, psychologically, to the natural and spontaneous impulses of the man of feeling. Accordingly, the key to progress lay in the controlled emancipation of innocent nature as found both in the objective slave and in the subjective affections of the reformer. The latter's compassion would evoke compassion in the slave, and the reciprocal love would slowly free the world from corruption and illicit self-seeking. The slave would be lifted to a level of independent action and social obligation. The reformer would be assured of the beneficence of his own self-interest by merging himself in a transcendent cause. These results, at least, were the expectation of philanthropists who increasingly transformed the quest for salvation from a sinful world into a mission to cleanse the world of sin.

A third source of the antislavery impulse was the evangelical faith in instantaneous conversion and demonstrative sanctification. One must hasten to add that many Methodists, Anglican Evangelicals, and American revivalists subscribed to the traditional Christian justifications for human bondage. Leading Anglican Evangelicals, like Bishop Beilby Porteus, came to see the African slave trade as an unmitigated sin but recoiled from condemning any form of servitude so clearly sanctioned by Scripture. Yet the evangelical movement, traditional in overall theology and world view, emphasized man's burden of personal responsibility, dramatized the dangers of moral complacency, and magnified the rewards for an authentic change of heart. And by 1774 John Wesley had not only made it clear that the sins of the world would soon be judged, but that every slaveholder, slave merchant, and investor in slave property was deeply stained with blood and guilt. John Newton, who as a sailor had seen the full horrors of slave ships and West

Indian plantations, could testify that "inattention and interest" had so blinded him to sin that he had never doubted the legitimacy of Negro slavery even after his religious conversion. Newton's decision to denounce slavery as a crime and to confess his former depravity became a model, for his pious admirers, of authentic sanctification.

Evangelical religion also gave a new thrust to the ancient desire to Christianize human bondage by imbuing both master and servant with a spirit of charity and forbearance. It thus led to sincere and continuing efforts to teach slaves the Christian hopes and virtues, and to persuade their owners that neither profits nor security could be endangered by the true faith. Yet by 1770 the Quakers were not alone in concluding that the institution was invulnerable to reform and exempt from the laws of Christian progress. The Negro's cultural difference commonly served as the justification for his enslavement, reinforcing the myth that he had been rescued from heathen darkness and taken to a land of spiritual light. But to be validated, this argument ultimately required religious conversion and an assimilation of slavery to the Christian model of benign and paternalistic service. As John Woolman pointed out, no master was saintly enough to avoid the temptations of absolute power; slavery, instead of being ameliorated by Christianity, corrupted the wellsprings of true religion.

The Negro's cultural difference, which served as an excuse for the failures at Christianization, acquired a positive image at the hands of eighteenth-century primitivists who searched through travel accounts and descriptions of exotic lands for examples of man's inherent virtue and creativity. I can only touch on a few of the complexities of this fourth source of antislavery sentiment. For the most part, the "noble savage" was little more than a literary convention that conflated the Iroquois and South Sea islander with sable Venuses, dusky swains, and tear-bedewed daughters of "injur'd Afric." The convention did, however, modify Europe's arrogant ethnocentrism and provide expression for at least a momentary ambivalence toward the human costs of modern civilization. It also tended to counteract the many fears and prejudices that had long cut the Negro off from the normal mechanisms of sympathy and identification. There is no evidence that literary primitivism made Americans any more inclined to view blacks as autonomous human beings. But for many Europeans, as diverse as John Wesley and the Abbé Raynal, the African was an innocent child of nature whose enslavement in America betrayed the very notion of the New World as a land of natural innocence and new hope for mankind. By the early 1770s such writers portrayed the Negro slave as a man of natural virtue and sensitivity who was at once oppressed by the worst vices of civilization and yet capable of receiving its greatest benefits.

These cultural transformations by no means explain, by themselves, the appearance of organized efforts to rid the world of slavery. The secular Enlightenment, for example, contained countervailing tendencies which encouraged the defense of Negro slavery on grounds of utility, racial inferiority, ethical relativism, or the presumed rationality of wealth-giving institutions. Christianity, for the most part, continued to distinguish worldly subordination from spiritual freedom, although there were increasing strains in the balanced dualisms that gave sanction to hereditary bondage. I have not been concerned, however, with immediate causation but rather with the conditions which weakened the traditional screening mechanisms of Western culture; which removed slavery from the list of supposedly inevitable misfortunes of life; and which made it easier to perceive—in a moral sense—the inherent contradictions of human bondage.

By the eve of the American Revolution there was a remarkable convergence of cultural and intellectual developments which at once undercut traditional rationalizations for slavery and offered new modes of sensibility for identifying with its victims. It is at this point that The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture concludes: with a rash of antislavery books, sermons, poems, plays, pamphlets; with the economic reassessments of empire occasioned by the Seven Years' War; with the initiative taken by individual reformers in America, France, and England, whose international communication led to an awareness of shared concerns and expectations. But what were the more material considerations which helped both to shape the new moral consciousness and to define its historical effects? If the growth of antislavery opinion signified a profound cultural change, what difference did it make in the end?

There are two sides to such questions. One could take the institution of slavery for granted and look at the impulses behind the antislavery phenomenon, asking how they reflected, either consciously or unconsciously, the social orders from which they emerged. The new hostility to human bondage cannot be reduced simply to the needs and interests of particular classes. Yet the needs and interests of particular classes had much to do with a given society's receptivity to new ideas and thus to the ideas' historical impact. Much of this book will be concerned with the ideological functions and implications of attacking this symbol of the most extreme subordination, exploitation, and dehumanization, at a time when various enlightened elites were experimenting with internalized moral and cultural controls to establish or preserve their own hegemony.

But one cannot ignore a second aspect, which has to do with the strength or vulnerability of slavery itself. There were many planters in Virginia, Jamaica, and St. Domingue who were open to the spirit of the Enlightenment.

They did not, however, decide to give up their slave property after reading Montesquieu, The Virginia Gazette , or The Weekly Magazine or Edinburgh Amusement . The question of abolishing slavery was ultimately a question of power. In the broadest outline, one therefore needs to know what the abolitionists were up against, in the more obvious meaning of the pun. The first antislavery movements arose in an era of war, revolution, and rapid economic change. In what ways did these forces undermine or strengthen the slave systems of the New World? In what ways did shifts in economic, political, or military power help to shape the consequences of moral condemnation?

Continues...

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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Univ of California Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 1992
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0520066391
• ISBN 13: 9780520066397
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 336
• Redattore: Bender Thomas
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile