The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (61 page)

48.
George M. Fredrickson,
Racism: A Short History
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 6.

49.
These and many similar antiblack and anti-Semitic quotations can be found on the Web,
geocities.com/ru00ru00/racismhistory/18thcent.html
.

50.
Ironically,
Linnaeus’s classification of human types along with all animals overturned the effect of Adam’s biblical
naming
of the animals. By including humans as part of the animal kingdom, he also inadvertently opened the way to a theory of polygenesis.

51.
Fredrickson,
Racism
, 56–58.

52.
Jordan,
White Over Black,
499–502.

53.
Politics,
books 1 and 2, in Thomas Wiedemann,
Greek and Roman Slavery
(London: Routledge, 1981), 18–20.
Plato brought the concept of slavery into his cosmology, positing a dualism between the primary cause, which was intelligent and divine, and the mechanical or slave cause, which was irrational, disorderly, and lacking in both freedom and conscious purpose. Like a wise master, the
Demiurge
guided the
ananke
of the material universe toward the good. Gregory Vlastos, “Slavery in Plato’s Republic,”
The Philosophical Review
50 (1941): 289–304. Plato also associated slavery with the unruly multitude as well as the chaotic material world devoid of
Logos.
And he spoke of a “slavish people” who lack the capacity for self-government and higher pursuits of virtue and culture. For Plato, a slavish mind might hold a true belief but could not know the truth of this belief. The human institution of slavery thus reflected basic structures of the universe. Davis,
Problem of Slavery in Western Culture,
67–68.

54.
Gerda Lerner,
The Creation of Patriarchy
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 76–100.

55.
Davis,
Problem of Slavery in Western Culture,
167–73.

56.
Karl Jacoby, “Slaves by Nature? Domestic Animals and Human Slaves,”
Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies
15 (April 1994): 89–97. This article originated as a paper in my graduate seminar at Yale. Keith Bradley, probably the leading expert on Roman slavery, has drawn on the work of Karl Jacoby and myself to show in a brilliant article that “animalization” was a central feature of even nonracial slavery in antiquity: “Animalizing the Slave: The Truth of Fiction,”
Journal of Roman Studies
90 (2000): 110–25.

57.
Jared Diamond,
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
(New York: Norton, 1999), 157–75.

58.
Jacoby, “Slaves by Nature?,” 89–97; Stanley L. Engerman, “Labor Incentives and Manumission in Ancient Greek Slavery,” in
Essays in Economic Theory, Growth, and Labour Markets: A Festschrift in Honor of E. Drandakis,
ed. George Bitros and Yannis Katsoulacos (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2002), 213–17.

59.
Theoretically, Aristotle’s ideal slave, like a genetically engineered subhuman, would be as content and submissive as a trained dog, but better capable of understanding his owner’s ideas and wishes. Aristotle clearly assumed this would lead to relative harmony between the citizens of the city-state and their compliant force of slave workers. But, even aside from the ways humans have exploited domestic animals, there would still appear to be a flaw in the ideal. If the
natural slave became capable of carrying out many of the more skilled and humanly sensitive tasks ordinary slaves were expected to do, they would also be capable of the pride, sensitivity, envy, resentment, and rebellion of human beings. In short, “the problem of slavery” would remain.

60.
Henry Highland Garnet,
Walker’s Appeal, With a Brief Sketch of his Life. By Henry Highland Garnet. And also Garnet’s Address to the Slaves of the United States of America
(New York, 1848), 92.

61.
Orlando Patterson,
Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study
(Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 96–97, 299–333. The quotation describing the Sambo stereotype in the American South comes from
Stanley Elkins,
Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 82. Without implying any biological or hereditary change, Elkins argued that slavery in the United States was so distinctively harsh that it produced a psychological transformation in slaves, similar to that of many inmates in Nazi concentration camps, and thus actually created many Sambos.

62.
Patterson,
Slavery and Social Death,
12, 97, 299–333, 367n41.

63.
John Stauffer,
Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick
Douglass and Abraham Lincoln
(New York: Twelve, Hachette Book Group, 2008), 24.

64.
[Frederick Douglass],
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave,
ed. Benjamin Quarles (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), 66–67, 95;
Waldo E. Martin,
The Mind of Frederick Douglass
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 29.

65.
Terence Collins, “Phillis Wheatley: The Dark Side of the Poetry,”
Phylon,
36 (1975): 80; James Baldwin, “An Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Davis,”
New York Review of Books,
January 7, 1971 (
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/10695
; James Baldwin,
James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son
(New York: Bantam Book, 1964), 4.

66.
Toni Morrison, “Afterword,”
The Bluest Eye
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000).

67.
Barack Obama,
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
(New York: Times Books, Random House, 1995), 177–84. The issue of self-esteem is doubtless related to the fact that more than one-half of all black males still drop out of high school.

68.
Daryl Michael Scott,
Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880–1996
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). Some of the social scientists who focused attention on “the damaged black psyche” were in effect repeating the kind of argument made by
Leonard Bacon, discussed in the introduction, that the “degradation” of slavery had rendered blacks incapable of freedom in America.

1.
Chicago Tribune,
January 3, 1893; Frederick Douglass, “Lecture on Haiti,” in
The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass,
ed. Philip S. Foner, vol. 4 (New York: International Publishers, 1955), 484. The speech recorded in the
Chicago Tribune
differs substantially from the text preserved in the Library of Congress and reprinted by Foner; I have drawn on both versions. The
Tribune
noted that the dedication ceremony, which was planned to commemorate the eighty-ninth anniversary of
Haitian independence, had not been “advertised to any extent” and was apparently attended by only one exposition official, who rushed to the scene just in time to make a speech. Douglass had been involved in an uphill struggle at the exposition to win some recognition of black achievements. See Elliott M. Rudwick and August Meier, “Black Man in the ‘White City’: Negroes and the Columbian Exposition, 1893,”
Phylon
26 (Winter 1965): 354–61; Robert W. Rydell,
All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 52–55.

2.
Douglass, “Lecture on Haiti,” 485–86.

3.
Although Waldo E. Martin Jr. emphasizes the centrality of the Haitian Revolution in Douglass’s mind, he relies on the 1893 Chicago speech and on some passages in a West Indian Emancipation Day address of August 2, 1858.
The Mind of Frederick Douglass
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 50–52, 269, 271. But these passages do not appear in the text that was printed in
Frederick Douglass’s Paper, The New York Times,
the
Rochester Democrat and American,
and other newspapers.
John Blassingame’s edition of Douglass’s speeches and debates from 1841 to 1863 does not
contain a single positive reference to the
Haitian Revolution except for occasional praise of Toussaint Louverture. John W. Blassingame, ed.,
The Frederick Douglass Papers,
Series One,
Speeches, Debates, and Interviews,
vols. 1–3 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979; 1982; 1985). It seems probable that Douglass avoided the subject for tactical reasons, especially when addressing white audiences.

4.
Douglass, “Lecture on Haiti,” 486;
Chicago Tribune,
Jan. 3, 1893. For colonial sources of North Atlantic sugar imports, see Seymour Drescher,
Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburg Press, 1977), p. 48, table 11.

5.
Katherine
Plymley Diaries, 1066/1, book 5: 10–15, County Record Office, Shire Hall, Abbey Fossgate, Shrewsbury.
Clarkson was in close touch with his coworkers Joseph and Katherine Plymley, and kept them fully up-to-date on abolitionist activities. In March 1792, Katherine noted that the abolitionists were being blamed for the bloodshed in Saint-Domingue; the West Indians were complaining that their own slaves were aware of the abolitionist agitation in England and were already showing signs of unrest, although Joseph had obtained a letter from a planter who affirmed that “the Negroes never were more peaceful & quiet, no disturbances of any kind nor the least appearance of a revolt.…” (March 5 to 20, 1792, book 7: 10–11). By November 1793, Clarkson was convinced that the upheavals in the French colonies had convinced even the British merchants that “nothing but ameliorating the condition of the slaves in the other West India islands can save the inhabitants from revolts & insurrections, & the proportion of blacks to whites is now greater than ever” (Nov. 9 to 15, 1793, book 21: 1–2). But Clarkson overestimated this fear and also underestimated the fear on the part of more conservative abolitionists that his sympathies with the French Revolution would harm the cause.

6.
This point was stressed by W. E. B. DuBois in his classic study of 1896,
The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870
(1986; repr., New York: The Social Science Press, 1954), 70–93; it is reaffirmed in more recent works, such as Alfred Nathaniel Hunt, “The Influence of Haiti on the Antebellum South, 1791–1865” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, 1975), 127, published as Alfred N. Hunt,
Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 108–10.A slew of new work has sought to trace the influence of the Haitian Revolution and its figures, such as Toussaint, in the United States. A sampling includes Gordon S. Brown,
Toussaint’s Clause: The Founding Fathers and the Haitian Revolution
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005); Matthew J. Clavin,
Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Maurice Jackson and Jacqueline Bacon, eds.,
African Americans and the Haitian Revolution: Selected Essays and Historical Documents
(New York: Routledge, 2010); Jeremy D. Popkin,
You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Edward Bartlett Rugemer,
The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008); Ashli White,
Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).

7.
Drescher,
Econocide,
167–70. On the arming of slaves by the British, and other European powers in the
West Indies, see Christopher Leslie Brown and Philip D. Morgan, eds.,
Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006).

8.
David Geggus, “The Cost of Pitt’s Caribbean Campaigns, 1793–1798,”
The Historical Journal
26, no. 3 (1983): 699–706; Geggus,
Slavery, War, and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint-Domingue, 1793–1798
(New York: Clarendon Press, 1982), 212, 383. Geggus estimates that from 1793 to 1798 12,695 British troops died in Saint-Domingue, about one-third of the total mortality in the Caribbean theater. His estimate for deaths of seamen ranges from 12,500 to a maximum of 20,000. To this figure he adds 5,740 deaths among foreign regiments in British pay. These estimates have been updated in
Michael Duffy,
Soldiers,
Sugar, and Seapower: The British Expeditions to the West Indies and the War Against Revolutionary France
(Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1987), 366.

9.
See sources cited in David Brion Davis,
The Problem of
Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975), 159–60, 441–43; and Davis,
Slavery and Human Progress
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 173–74, 345; David Geggus, “British Opinion and the Emergence of Haiti, 1791–1805,” in
Slavery and British Society, 1776–1846
, ed. James Walvin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 134–36, 142–49. It is significant that in 1798, when Toussaint finally triumphed over the British in Saint-Domingue, Georgia became the last American state to close off the slave trade and even Southern congressmen agreed to a prohibition of any slave from outside the United States into Mississippi Territory. As a result of the British abolition of the African slave trade and restriction of the intercolonial slave trade, which would otherwise have more than made up for heavy mortality, the slave population of the new sugar colonies, such as
Trinidad,
Dominica,
Saint Vincent, and
Guiana, declined by 25.3 percent between 1807 and 1834. B. W. Higman,
Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807–1834
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 72–85.