Eighty-Eight Years: The Long Death of Slavery in the United States, 1777–1865 by Patrick Rael (review)

Patrick Rael’s new book on the long process of abolition in the United States defies easy characterization. It is at once a synthesis and a challenging theoretical work that grapples with the most complicated and mercurial founding principles: liberty, freedom, and enslavement. “Why did slavery take so much longer to die in the United States than elsewhere?” Rael asks. “And why did it take the Civil War . . . to end U.S. slavery?” (2). Though he employs mostly published primary and secondary sources, Rael’s interpretation and conceptual framework are fresh and nuanced and offer readers a valuable new understanding of the contingent processes that made emancipation in the United States both gradual and immediate.

To understand why it took so long, Rael contends, we must carefully examine the relationship of race, political power, and a global mercantilist system. Slavery in the United States was unique, but it existed in a larger Atlantic context, and the United States’ roots as a colony within the empires of the Atlantic world had profound consequences for the development of American slavery and abolition after the Revolutionary War. The nation declared its independence as a democratic and free country in a new world that was built on the most exploitative coerced labor the world had yet seen, and it incorporated both slavery and freedom into its very foundations. Proponents of both wielded equal political power on the national stage. Under these conditions, Rael contends, only a bloody civil war could bring about slavery’s demise.

Rael draws upon language most familiar to students of world-systems analysis, that of periphery and metropole. In the traditional form and throughout the rest of the Atlantic world, the periphery provided the raw materials and remained politically subordinate to and economically dependent upon a distant and industrialized metropole. In the United States, however, the slaveholding periphery (the South) existed alongside the industrializing, cautiously antislavery metropole (the North). The most important aspect of this unusual relationship was that the periphery, rather than being subordinate to the metropole, “lay within the boundaries of the nation itself and was fully empowered in the political process” (117). Through the three-fifths compromise, the South actually wielded a disproportionate and unprecedented amount of political power at the federal level, and that allowed it to manipulate the government in its own minority interests. It could protect the institution in ways that slave powers in other European empires, dependent on indirect representation at a national level, could not.

Eighty-Eight Years moves chronologically to trace the development of antislavery ideology in the United States, though throughout Rael offers useful comparisons to other emancipating societies in the Atlantic world. New ideas such as antislavery ideology originated in the metropole, but circumstances in the periphery made those new ideas possible. As Rael explains, “The forces that created New World slavery eventually created the possibility of New World slavery’s demise” (47). Slavery in the periphery contributed to the rise of a propertied bourgeois far removed in the metropole; as they began to associate freedom with the ability to hold property, that same bourgeois began questioning the whole idea of people as property. Activists in the metropole used the resistance and revolt of enslaved people in the periphery to shape an antislavery ideology. In turn, this ideology flowed back to the periphery and gave collective meaning to individual acts of rebellion, which activists in the metropole then interpreted for mass public consumption and used to pressure the government into making substantive policy changes.

In the United States, however, this natural confluence of slave resistance in the periphery and antislavery ideology in the metropole was interrupted by the planters’ control of the federal government. To effectively combat the Slave South, the abolition movement had to embrace and incorporate a wide host of strategies and proponents. “In such a contest,” Rael observes, “every asset...