David Brion Davis
INHUMAN BONDAGE
The rise and fall of slavery in the New World
352pp. Oxford University Press. £17.99 (US $30).
0 19 514073 7
Within fifty years of Columbus’s arrival in the New World, the native population of Hispaniola had fallen from around 500,000 to less than 500. Elsewhere, the collapse was scarcely less dramatic. In Mexico and Peru, it was hastened by the brutal regimens imposed by the conquistadores. Yet, as far away as the Great Plains of North America, people were sickening and dying. Had the Spanish and Portuguese embarked on a policy of deliberate genocide they could not have wreaked a fraction of the havoc caused by the pathogens they had introduced. Unable to comprehend what was happening, they stood amazed as the thriving communities they had conquered evaporated before their very eyes. Within a century of the Europeans’ arrival, roughly 90 per cent of the population of the Americas perished.
What would have happened to Native Americans had they proven less susceptible to Old World disease may be inferred from the fate of the 12.5 million Africans imported to take their place. Africa had been a source of slave labour since ancient times. Over the centuries it is likely that as many slaves had been marched northward across the Sahara as would be shipped westward across the Atlantic. Some were employed as household servants, others as eunuchs and concubines. Many, however, laboured on the sugar plantations that, from the time of the Crusades onward, advanced steadily westward from Palestine to Cyprus, Majorca, the Iberian Peninsula and thence out into the Atlantic. Well before Columbus’s first American voyage, Madeira had become a wealthy sugar colony employing largely African slave labour.
From there it was only a short step to the New World. Although less familiar with slavery, Northern Europeans had few qualms about following in the footsteps of the Spanish and Portuguese. They, too, wanted a share in America’s riches and were not overly scrupulous about whether they got it by buccaneering, slave trading, or becoming planters themselves. The wealth in question came principally in the form of sugar, coffee, tobacco, chocolate, rice, hemp and cotton, all of which required heavy labour to produce. Labouring long hours in the tropics was not a task Europeans relished. In theory, had all of Europe’s criminals, vagrants and prisoners of war been designated hereditary chattel slaves and shipped to the Americas, a labour force adequate to the task might have been assembled. Europeans, however, although prepared to do appalling things to other Europeans, drew the line at making them hereditary chattel slaves. Africans, on the other hand, being racially and culturally different, were seen as fair game.
The notion that Europeans simply went on shore and seized Africans is nonsense. Quite apart from their susceptibility to diseases in Africa, Europeans lacked the military force required. In practice, they relied on African suppliers, shrewd traders adept at playing off Europeans against one another. Those who invested in the trade hoped to make a profit. Such transactions, therefore, called for accurate book-keeping.
As a result, historians have been able to arrive at fairly precise figures regarding the trade’s scale and profitability, the slaves’ places of origin, and trans-Atlantic mortality rates. As planters were also adept at bookkeeping, we also know a good deal about the profitability of various crops and the relative efficiency of different modes of production – in fact, about practically everything a modern businessman would want to know about the entire enterprise. On the basis of these findings it is claimed that slaves were capable of performing the tasks assigned to them more efficiently and cheaply than free labourers. Not everyone has been prepared to countenance these claims. Some have questioned the methods used, others the propriety of treating undertakings that involved the degradation and death of millions, as if they were ordinary businesses. Nevertheless, out of these “slave wars” there has emerged a body of knowledge that greatly enhances our understanding of slavery and New World development generally.
David Brion Davis, probably best known for his Pulitzer Prizewinning book, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966), is neither a quantifier nor a neo-abolitionist but an intellectual historian. However, as Sterling Professor of American History at Yale University, and Director of the Gilder-Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery there, he has long been regarded as the dean of slavery studies in the United States. Written with the general reader in mind, Inhuman Bondage provides a masterly overview of what scholars in the field have achieved over the past fifty years.
The story Davis tells is strikingly at odds with traditional accounts. Those used to thinking of New World settlement in terms of a widening of horizons and a breaking free from European constraints will be surprised to learn that, before 1820, African slaves outnumbered European settlers by a ratio of more than five to one. This is not to deny that some Europeans did find the experience liberating, although it is worth remembering that many of them arrived themselves as indentured servants or transported criminals, and so were hardly in a position to feel liberated. The picture is certainly very different from that painted by those who like to think of early America either as a refuge for the oppressed or a gigantic adventure playground. If numbers are what count, the “typical” American settler was neither a swaggering conquistador nor a Bible-quoting Puritan but a miserable African slave toiling on a sugar plantation.
Given that virtually all the major exports of the Americas were slave-produced and destined for sale on the world market, plantation agriculture was necessarily competitive. Historians should not, therefore, have been surprised to discover that it was also efficient. Had it not been, other ways of satisfying consumer demand would soon have taken its place. Planters were sensitive to market changes, selling, hiring out, or acquiring additional slaves as circumstances required. Professor Davis is unimpressed by arguments based on notions of paternalism. Though planters liked to present themselves as more caring than employers of free labour, their work routines anticipated the assembly-line procedures later adopted by American industrialists.
As Europe’s demand was principally for tropical products, it is hardly surprising that, up to the American War of Independence, the value of exports from the West Indies was ten times that of the colonies north of the Chesapeake Bay. What is surprising is the discovery that a mere 500,000 slaves, 5–6 per cent of the total, went to North America – a figure roughly comparable to the number of West Indians migrating to the United Kingdom over the past fifty years. This contrasts with the 3.5 million who went to Brazil. The difference is largely attributable to the exceptional physical demands of sugar. In Brazil, as in other sugar-producing regions, life expectancy and fertility rates were so low that the only way of maintaining a stable workforce was by shipping in more slaves. When Britain withdrew from the slave trade in 1807, the effect on its colonies’ economy and population was catastrophic. In contrast, the withdrawal of the US from the slave trade, in 1808, had no discernible effect on its slave population, which, being principally employed in tobacco and cotton cultivation, had achieved a rate of natural increase not unlike that of the white population.
While it is easy to account for the rise of American slavery, its abandonment is harder to explain. At first glance the reason may appear obvious. Quite simply, slavery was wicked. The problem, it might be argued, is rather how supposedly Christian societies had put up with it for as long as they did. Yet the fact remains that, up to 1770, not only had it been all but universally accepted, but the Bible had been one of its principal mainstays. Recent revelations regarding the strength and flexibility of slavery make its demise all the more puzzling. Why, if it was so successful, did people turn against it?
Britain’s behaviour is particularly hard to account for. As Davis points out, the British are not thought of as having been particularly humane in other respects, including their treatment of their own working population. He sees the intermittent slave rebellions that shook Britain’s colonies as having been a response to the growing tide of abolitionist feeling rather than its cause. Indeed, on the basis of the available evidence it would appear that Britain’s interests would have been best served by expanding the slave trade and broadening the frontiers of its slave empire. Just as the US expanded its slave system westward along the Gulf Coast into Texas, so Britain could have established new slave regimes in Trinidad, British Guiana and other recently acquired territories. Instead of seeking to suppress the slave trade, it could have dominated it, and in the process outproduced Brazil and Cuba, increased its own wealth, and contributed to the economic growth of the Americas. No wonder Disraeli called abolition “the greatest blunder in the history of the English people”.
In his History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (1869), W. E. H. Lecky describes England’s crusade against slavery as “among the three or four perfectly virtuous acts recorded in the history of nations”. Great powers do not as a rule behave selflessly. Not surprisingly, Lecky’s comment has generally been regarded with scepticism. Now, knowing vastly more than he did about slavery and its abolition, Davis believes Lecky was basically right. Although the American abolition movement came later and assumed a somewhat different character, the same might equally well be said of it. Slaves had never liked being slaves, but the rise of a climate of opinion that objected to slavery on moral grounds was something new. There had been nothing like it in ancient or medieval times or in any other society of which we have record. The upsurge of popular support for abolition both in Britain and the northern USA was unprecedented. Perhaps, David Brion Davis hypothesizes, moral progress is possible.
Whatever lay behind it, the cost of doing away with what up to then had been a resilient, flexible and expanding institution proved formidable. “I thank God”, declared Wilberforce on his deathbed, “that I should have lived to witness a day in which England is willing to give twenty millions sterling for the Abolition of slavery.” In terms of loss of trade, the cost was much greater. The United States, confronted by a far larger problem and lacking a central government capable of solving it peacefully, barely survived the ordeal.
