The Inescapable Problem

Slavery posed a problem in the colonization and development of the Atlantic World, a problem that sparked contests over freedom, race, and emancipation stretching from New England to Brazil. This statement, which seems so pedestrian today, was far from established when David Brion Davis embarked upon his field-defining trilogy over fifty years ago. To understand the inspiration behind the series that The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation now brings to a close, one must look no further than Kenneth Stampp, whom Davis tells us galvanized him to become a historian of slavery and abolition. Writing against generations of scholars who had depicted slavery as a civilizing and humane institution, Stampp's The Peculiar Institution (1956) revealed the inescapable inhumanity of American slavery. When serendipity brought Stampp to Harvard as a visiting professor just as Davis was finishing up graduate school, the two struck up a close bond. Stampp clearly left an indelible imprint on Davis’ thinking.

Although Davis has provided us with a rich array of analytical insights over the span of ten monographs dedicated to black bondage—including one demonstrating the Atlantic nature of antislavery and another bringing comparative perspective on abolition—the fundamental problem of slavery for Davis has remained remarkably consistent. Put simply, Davis approaches slavery as a “profound moral contradiction” (p. 333) involving “the ultimately impossible attempt to define and treat men as objects.”¹ It is this core tension between what slavery intended to do—turn people into things—and what it could never completely achieve, upon which Davis has premised his entire career. This is the problem of slavery.

Yet, if human bondage carried within itself a profound problem, how slavery came to be seen as problematic and eventually abolished still required explanation. How could Atlantic slavery have gone from being a ubiquitous and accepted institution to a relic of the unenlightened past, with millions of slaves freed, in a little more than a century? Davis first tackled this question in The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Western Culture (1966). He argued that, from the initial era of New World settlement until around the mid-eighteenth century, slavery was couched as a traditionally sanctioned practice supported by the ancient body/soul dualism equation, the theory of the ideal Christian servant, and the biblical themes of the sinful slave and the curse of Ham. Starting in the second half of the eighteenth century, though, through a combination of British Protestant theism, Enlightenment thought, and sentimentalist literature, the traditional arguments for slavery began to give way under the weight of faith in human agency. The corresponding belief that humans could, and should, play an active role in bringing about moral progress suddenly made abolitionism conceivable.

Now that he had accounted for slavery's repositioning as a widely acknowledged problem, Davis faced the formidable task of accounting for how the ideological shifts he surveyed in The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture were translated into social reform. The resulting book, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (1975), offered a more capacious chronicle than its predecessor. Attaching the newly emergent moral and intellectual arguments against slavery to changing ideas of race, labor, politics, and property, Davis found no Whiggish route to abolition. In neither Britain nor the United States did the abolition of the slave trade lead to the end of slavery. Far from it. In the American South, emancipation ran into imposing barriers in the form of white fears of black freedom, the economic centrality of plantation labor in the region, and slaveholder political power. Even the abolitionists, Davis suggested, were blinkered by their own class-driven imperatives of social control. They sought, Davis argued with great subtlety, to transition the emancipated from slavery to capitalist-based free-labor societies. Internal ideas of self-control would stand in for external coercion. Upon finishing this immensely rich tome, the reader is struck by the hurdles to abolition in the Americas...