The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution 1770-1823 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS The Problem of Shvery in the Age of Revolution 1770-1823. By David Brion Davis. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975. Pp. 576. $17.50.) The history of slavery in modern times has attracted some of the most creative and perceptive historians of the last fifteen years. This dazzling new volume in David Brion Davis's series on antislavery thought in western culture still stands apart as a magnificent contribution . Davis was able to draw upon an impressive array of recent scholarship and integrate it with his own to shed fresh light on the opponents of slavery and the cultural and economic world of which they were a part. Yet this is not simply a book about slavery or antislavery ; it is also a profound analysis of the intellect during the great liberal revolutions and the emergence of industrial capitalism. Davis begins with an overview of slavery in the western world between 1770 and 1823 and ends with a discussion of slavery, the law and the Bible. The main body of the work details the history of antislavery ideology and activism in America and England as it unfolded in the context of fifty years of political upheaval. Davis denies that the revolutionary era in America was a time of lost opportunity when slavery might have been dealt a final blow. Protests against the slave trade rested as much on the colonists' concern to regulate their imports as on moral outrage. Jefferson, the most influential critic of slavery in the South, was caught in the web of his own plantation class and culture and could only think great deeds, not do them. The Constitution embodied a murky compromise over slavery between North and South which redounded to the South's benefit for years to come; no other plantation culture in the western hemisphere achieved so much political power. Quakers and other antislavery reformers who tested the limits of dissent in the South met with reaction and even expulsion. The real test for southern antislavery, argues Davis, was whether the evangelical churches would, like the Society of Friends, preach antislavery as a tenet of Christian faith. But the evangelicals were proselytizers, not pietists, and to reach thousands of potential converts they downplayed divisive issues. Methodists and Presbyterians who felt uneasy about slavery directed their efforts toward bringing Christian paternalism to masters and Christian submisiveness to slaves. 175 176CIVIL WAR HISTORY The Enlightenment, especially in America, carried a cruel paradox for those who worried over the abuses of slavery but could find no way to eliminate them. The natural rights philosophy and slavery made uneasy bedfellows, but property was the foundation of liberty. The revolutionary generation, moreover, had thrown over the restraints of its mother country and was obsessed with the perils of freedom become anarchy. Davis suggests that the spectre of a huge unlanded class was more powerful than the fear of racial mixture: "Would the freed black fail to show up for work? Would he carouse in taverns with Jack Tar? Would Crispus Attucks, resurrected, lead mobs that defied American troops?" (p. 304) While not always the originators of antislavery doctrine, the Quakers were the first on either side of the Atlantic to align antislavery protest with specific interest groups and to launch coordinated political action. The Friends believed slavery to be morally wrong. They were also outsiders to government and reform movements enabled them to feel socially useful and to exert political influence. They were, moreover, some of the wealthiest new industrialists in the world. Their alliance with the British Utilitarians and evangelicals led to the Parliamentary bill of 1807 which abolished the British slave trade. This book has been hailed in some quarters as a blow to economic determinism. Davis does not think that the death of the slave trade was inevitable, nor is he willing to ascribe all the motives of the antislavery reformers to economic self-interest. He argues that "whatever one believes about historical progress—or the lack of it—we are the beneficiaries of . . . the new and often temporary sensitivities of a collective conscience, and of brave men who thought that the time was right not only for appealing to unfulfilled promises of the...