The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (3 page)
Read The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation Online
Authors: David Brion Davis
Tags: #History, #United States, #19th Century, #Social History, #Social Science, #Ethnic Studies, #African American Studies, #Slavery
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 Samson “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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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In contrast to
Latin America, Southern planter society officially condemned interracial sexual unions and tended to blame lower-class white males for fathering mulatto children. Yet there is abundant evidence that many slave owners, sons of slave owners, and overseers took black mistresses or in effect raped the wives and daughters of slave families. This abuse of power may not have been quite as universal as Northern abolitionists claimed. But the ubiquity of such sexual exploitation was sufficient to deeply scar and humiliate black women, to instill rage in black men, and to arouse both shame and bitterness in white women.
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Historian
Mia Bay, by thoroughly exploring the vast
WPA narratives of elderly former slaves, has dramatically proved that
Garnet’s animal metaphors were not limited to the highly literate former slave elite. As Bay concludes, after summarizing thousands of pages of testimony: “Identifying not with their masters’ dependent children but with their masters’ four-legged chattel, ex-slaves remembered being fed like pigs, bred like hogs, sold like horses, driven like cattle, worked like dogs, and beaten like mules.”
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Memories of animalization, in other words, largely undercut the slave owners’ pretentions of “paternalism.”
It is important to note that most of the WPA interviewers were white and, in the 1930s, often recently descended from slaveholders. The blacks, surrounded by flagrant racism and
Great Depression poverty, were cautious and seldom criticized slavery as an institution. Nevertheless, the ex-slaves in numerous Southern states repeatedly remembered that like animals they did not know their age or birthdays and as children often even ate like and with animals: “Dey was a trough out in de yard [where] dey poured de mush an milk in[,] an us chillum an de dogs would all crowd ’roun it an eat together … we sho’ had to be in a hurry ’bout it cause de dogs would get it all if we didn’t.” “The white folks et the white flour and the niggers et the shorts,” one woman reported, and “the hogs was also fed the shorts.” Even the few ex-slaves who praised their masters’ generosity mentioned animals.
According to a freedman in South Carolina, “
Master Levi kept his niggers fat, just like he keep his hogs and hosses fat, he did.”
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As Professor Bay points out, the
slaves not only were surrounded night and day by mules, horses, donkeys, and other work animals but, like those domesticated species, their only reason for existence was to perform labor for their white owners in exchange for care and feeding. Yet “what the slaves resented most were slaveowners who treated them like animals rather than workers.”
Josephine Howard recalled that in Texas “Dey wan’t nothin’ de whites don’t do to ’em—work ’em like day was mules an’ treat ’em jes’ like day don’t have no feelin’.” In Oklahoma a white preacher exhorted
Robert Burns and his fellow slaves, “Only white people had souls and went to heaven. He told dem dat niggers had no more soul than dogs, and dey couldn’t go to heaven any more than could a dog.”
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