Slavery, Emancipation, and Freedom

Comparative Perspectives

Stanley L. Engerman

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9780807168622
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

It is beyond dispute that slavery has always been abhorrent and, wherever it still exists, should be abolished. Where most scholarly writing on slavery in the past has concentrated on examining slaves as victims, recent writings have taken a more nuanced view of slavery in focusing on the slaves themselves and their cultural and psychological accomplishments in captivity. Also, studies of the system's profitability have shown that, from an economic perspective, slavery worked for the slaveholders and their society. In Slavery, Emancipation, and Freedom, the distinguished scholar Stanley Engerman succinctly synthesizes current scholarship and addresses questions that are critical to understanding the nature of slavery: Why did slavery arise, and how, why, where, and when did it legally end? What impact did slavery have on the enslaved? Was the impact lingering or was it reversed by the provision of freedom?Engerman begins his study by discussing slavery from a global perspective. He reminds us of the ubiquity of slavery throughout the world, challenging the stereotype that it was only the American South's "peculiar institution." Using the same broad comparative and temporal approach to discuss emancipation, he shows how emancipation in the southern states, several decades after it began in other parts of the world, both differed from and mirrored abolition around the globe. Slavery, Emancipation, and Freedom is an important confrontation with America's and the world's past and present. Both the breadth and depth of this brief, incisive treatise demonstrate why Engerman is considered one of America's most insightful and respected scholars.

One

SLAVERY IN WORLD PERSPECTIVE

THIS IS THE SIXTY-SEVENTH in the series of Fleming Lectures. They were established in 1936 in honor of an LSU history professor, most noted for his pro-southern work on Reconstruction. His publications include a still very important two-volume collection of documents on the history of Reconstruction in its “political, military, social, religious, educational and industrial” aspects. These were first published in 1906 and 1907.¹ Fleming’s studies dealt with Reconstruction’s effects on both whites and blacks, and he spent considerable time examining the links between the antebellum and postbellum eras (or as some call it, a replacement of one form of slavery by another). This link still seems not to have been given the attention it deserves for the understanding of slavery. Appropriately, most of the Fleming Lectures have dealt with southern history—generally with slavery, Reconstruction, and its aftermath.²

I

Slavery, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was first referred to as the South’s “peculiar institution” in 1852, and of course this term has become widely applied in subsequent years, being, for example, the title of the major 1956 history of southern slavery by Kenneth Stampp. According to the Oxford English Dictionary “peculiar” has overlapping but somewhat differing meanings: “independent; particularly individual; strange; odd; distinctive.” A Times Literary Supplement essay by Moses Finley in 1976 argued that, historically, free labor not slavery was the peculiar institution. The different definitions of “peculiar” featured in a response by Carl Degler, who claimed that the relevant meaning of “peculiar” for the antebellum South was “distinct and different” (having characteristics differentiating it from the North) but not necessarily strange or odd.³ Whatever the outcome of this (generally ignored) linguistic debate, it seems to me that Finley’s claim is very useful to historians, since it is meant to suggest the U.S. South, and antebellum slavery there, were not strange and odd, or deviant by standards of those times, as it certainly is by our twentieth- and twenty-first-century standards. “Slavery” has now become a term with no favorable connotations; it is used to indicate a wide range of always distasteful and abhorrent behaviors and is frequently applied to major abuses of human and labor rights today, whether permitted by law or not.

I want to begin by looking at the “peculiar institution” of the U.S. South from a context somewhat akin to Finley’s—one stemming from the question of how unusual by historical and contemporary standards was slavery in the American South. This also relates to long-standing debates about the exceptionalism of American society, whether that exceptionalism is meant to present the United States as unusually good or unusually bad by world standards. This comparison is done not in an attempt to evaluate relative degrees of evil in different societies but rather to use the history of slavery to try to understand what most people of the times—slave owners, slaves, and non-slaveholding whites and blacks, South and North—understood about the presence of slavery and how they dealt with it, politically, culturally, and economically.

Slavery has existed in just about all parts of the world over just about all times.⁴ Most societies have either been enslaved or enslavers at some time in the past, sometimes both at the same time. In the Americas, slavery existed among Native Americans and European settlers through the nineteenth century; in Europe, it was early on allowed for whites and it was acceptable to enslave other Europeans until about 1400; in both Asia and Africa, it was practiced before, during, and after the years of European colonial domination. In parts of the world such as Australia and the Pacific Islands, where slavery did not exist—at least slavery imposed by Europeans—it was because of the late date of settlement relative to the success of the Western antislavery movements as well as the availability of other forms of labor that could be coerced, such as indentured labor, convicts, or aborigines, to obtain the workers desired for settlement and production. Generally, as argued in 1900 by the Dutch ethnographer H. J. Nieboer, in most societies in which slavery did not exist this was not based on any moral grounds but pertained because labor productivity was so low that there was no surplus to be gained by enslaving others.⁵ For Nieboer, societies with slavery had to have had a higher level of income than mere subsistence, and freedom at a subsistence level was not necessarily an economic or social gain to the formerly enslaved.

Slavery was clearly not peculiar—or unique—to the descendants of European settlers in the American South in the nineteenth century. It had existed in all areas of the Americas, both before and after European arrival, characterizing many of the Native American societies, with both large and small populations. The earlier existence of Native American enslavement of other Native Americans, generally war captives, made the transition to European settler enslavement of Native Americans easier, as the basis for the trade was already there.⁶

As late as 1820, there were still over ten thousand slaves in New York State (to be freed in 1827 as a result of legislation passed in 1817), and in 1830 some twelve of thirteen northern states still had some slaves listed in the federal census—ranging from one in Massachusetts to 2,254 in New Jersey. In 1860 there were still “18 colored apprentices for life in New Jersey,” listed in the slave column of the census compendium.⁷ And, lest some northerners see this limited number of slaves as providing some moral high ground, it was, by historical standards, relatively recently that slavery had been legal in all North American colonies, including those in the North. The reason for limited slavery in the North seemed based more on economic factors than on any moral reservations. And, when slavery in the North was to be ended, it was only by the most gradual of measures. Adam Smith had cynically suggested regarding “the late resolution of the Quakers in Pennsylvania to set at liberty all their [N]egro slaves” that it “may satisfy us that their number cannot be very great.”⁸ To Smith the demand curve for morality was downward sloping, a hypothesis that also provides a reasonable explanation for the time pattern of later slave emancipations. Smith, it might be noted, was not optimistic that slavery would ever be abolished on political grounds, since those who would legislate on the legality of slave ownership were often the owners of slaves; nor did he anticipate a voluntary ending on economic grounds.

The first northern state to abolish slavery (in 1777), Vermont, had a constitutional provision allowing for a period as “servants, slaves, or apprentices” until age twenty-one for males or eighteen for females. The next two, New Hampshire and Massachusetts, did have immediate (subject to judicial decisions) un-compensated emancipation, but these three states freed very few slaves. In the five northern states (Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey) that had emancipation legislation passed between 1780 and 1804, it applied only to those born after a certain date, thus freeing none of the existing slaves and leaving the numbers of slaves unchanged. Those born after that date were apprenticed to their mothers’ owners for varying periods of time, from fifteen to thirty years, depending on the state, and sometimes varying with gender, a policy that was to make it financially worthwhile for owners to raise these children while imposing minimal costs on taxpayers. It also provided what many thought necessary, a period of training and education for the freed blacks.⁹

Further, before the Civil War, most northern states maintained, or had newly imposed, strict limits on free black voting and education. Prohibitions on the right to enter and settle existed in several states, sometimes persisting even after the start of the Civil War.¹⁰ These schemes of northern emancipation, freeing none of those presently slaves but only, after some delay, the after-born, were to be a most frequent means of emancipation throughout the Americas, and also elsewhere. It was applied in most South and Central American nations, including Cuba (in 1870, made retroactive to 1868) and in Brazil (1871), where it was called the “law of the free womb.” The important debate on immediate versus gradual emancipation, based on the presumed effects of enslavement, was to be a long-standing and contentious one, and one which, some argued, pointed to the advantage of a gradual process, both in terms of numbers freed and the length of time until an individual’s freedom was achieved.

Within the Americas, slavery remained an ongoing and expanding institution well past 1860, with the final ending of legal slavery in the Dutch colonies coming in 1863 (and ex-slave apprenticeship ending in 1873), in Puerto Rico in 1873 (with apprenticeship ending in 1876), in Cuba in 1886 (where the Moret Law, a variant of the “free womb” law, was passed in 1870 and applied to births after 1868), and in Brazil in 1888 (after the “law of the free womb” was introduced in 1871).¹¹ Cuba and Brazil had received large numbers in the transatlantic slave trade long after the United States and Britain ended their slave trades in 1808, with the trade to Brazil ending in 1851 and that to Cuba in 1867. The ending of the slave trade was due more to British political pressure than to any economic decline in the area. The numbers of slaves arriving in the Americas in the 1830s and 1840s were close to the numbers that arrived before 1808.¹² Even where slavery itself had ended in the Caribbean colonies before the American Civil War, it was generally only recent—the 1830s for the British colonies and the late 1840s for the Swedish, Danish, and French. The one exceptional case, St. Domingue, later Haiti, had constitutionally ended slavery in 1804, after its successful slave uprising. This ending was two years after the French, having previously ended slavery in their other Caribbean colonies in 1794, had reintroduced slavery there in 1802. Several of the newly independent Spanish areas of South and Central America also provided compensation, via cash payments and apprenticeships, when ending slavery after the 1820s, although the process of emancipation was not completed in the last emancipating nation until the 1860s.¹³ These emancipations throughout the Americas (and, it should be noted, the roughly simultaneous ending of serfdom in Europe), generally occurred with compensation to the owners with the exceptions of, initially, Haiti, several Latin American countries, and the United States.¹⁴ Haiti later did pay compensation to France. Compensation for emancipation could take the form of cash, bonds, or labor time paid to the slave owners, who were also allowed to keep their land. The freed slaves and serfs everywhere generally received no economic benefits but the crucial one of freedom.

Cuba, in the 1850s, had become a booming, flexible economy, shifting crops and plantation locations to become the world’s leading sugar cane producer, and, despite the continued import of slaves from Africa, slave prices reached all-time peaks.¹⁵ So great was the demand for labor, and so limited relative to Cuban needs was the supply of slaves obtained from Africa (due, in part, to the British blockade of the African coast, however limited in effectiveness) that, between 1847 and 1874, the Cubans also imported about 125,000 indentured laborers (almost all male) from China. The end of this flow was owing to Chinese actions ending out-migration, rather than to any limits on arrivals imposed by Cubans.¹⁶ Similarly, the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, almost immediately after slave emancipation, began to import indentured labor from India to permit the continuation of sugar production.¹⁷

The years after the 1840s also saw a rapid expansion and adjustment in the Brazilian economy, with rising prices of slaves, until the onset of the legislation leading to emancipation.¹⁸ Until 1851, Brazil was receiving slaves in the transatlantic trade. The ending of the trade was due to British political and naval pressures, as was also to be the case, about sixteen years later, in Cuba. In neither case was the ending of the international slave trade due to a decline in the demand for export products or for slaves. Brazil was, after the 1820s, readjusting its economy from the dominance of slavery and sugar in the northeast to become the world’s largest coffee exporter, with production on the basis of slave labor taking place in Brazil’s southeast. Ending slavery required legislation, with the “law of the free womb” in 1871 and several interim measures, until final emancipation in 1888.¹⁹

Based on economic developments in Cuba and Brazil, not to mention the U.S. South—the world’s largest producer of cotton at the middle of the nineteenth century—one can understand why slave owners and many others at the time, unlike many today, found it hard to believe that economically slavery was ineffectual and wealth-destroying. Such economic expansion contrasted with areas in which slavery had ended, such as Haiti—once the richest part of the world but now on its way to becoming the lowest income area of the Americas, with considerable and prolonged political instability. Similarly, the British West Indies, in the 1850s, were still stagnating, for the most part. The British Islands were unable to compete in sugar exports with Brazil and Cuba without preferential tariff protection, which was, however, maintained only for a limited period.²⁰ In the 1860s some British colonies in Africa, Asia, and Oceania started to expand sugar production with the use of indentured labor, brought in mainly from China and India, but also from the Portuguese islands, Africa, and elsewhere. This followed the earlier, 1830s attraction of indentured labor from India to the island of Mauritius, which led to a rapid growth there in sugar production. The one British post-emancipation success proclaimed by the antislavery people, Barbados, expanded economically because of high population density and low wages and was soon to start experiencing out-migration to elsewhere in the Caribbean, and later to the U.S. North.²¹

In regard to the United States, many of the arguments made, then and now, for the weakness of the slave economy were more in the form of long-term forecasts to argue for antebellum economic backwardness and decline. These claims often reflected contentions that presumed a rather long time span before the predicted events occurred, and did not suggest any immediate major financial worries. Some pointed to the limits to the economic growth of slavery that would result from a limit on geographic expansion, but this was often presented without a belief that decline was to be soon anticipated. The costs of relative shortfall in southern urbanization and industrialization, even if correct at the time, did not mean that the system was about to collapse. Perhaps the most famous of these economic claims, by the Irish economist John Elliot Cairnes, was based on projections of land-labor ratios. The end of slavery, he argued, was not imminent on economic grounds but was dependent on political events. He argued that while, no doubt, the trend was clear, actual emancipation would occur only “by a gradual but sure process” and “in due time,” with “ultimate extinction” being “at least a quarter of a century” in the future, at least on the basis of economic considerations. In that time period, however, Cairnes feared a strengthening of the South’s political and economic power, which might cause further delays.²² In 1858, Lincoln posited the “ultimate extinction” of slavery in not “less than a hundred years at the least,” but only if there was not allowed any movement of slavery into the territories, and he believed this timing and method was the best way for emancipation to occur, for both slave owners and slaves. Slavery was, he commented in the 1850s, not then declining but was then “in its state of progress as it is now driving, as it has been driven for the last five years.” Lincoln argued that the founding fathers had believed that slavery was placed on the road to an early extinction by the Constitution, but this had not occurred owing to “the invention of the cotton-gin.” He ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Slavery in World Perspective
• 2. Emancipation in World Perspective
• Postscript: Slavery and Its Continuities in the Modern World
• Bibliography