On Slavery and Antislavery: An Interview with David Brion Davis

26 Historically Speaking · July/August 2007 On Slavery and Antislavery: An Interview with David Brion Davis* Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa Donald Yerxa: What drew you to the study of slavery? David Brion Davis: When I was just finishing my dissertation at Harvard in the spring term of 1955 (on the subject of homicide in the period roughly from the American Revolution to the Civil War), I had the immense good fortune to meet Kenneth Stampp who was serving as a visiting professor from Berkeley. I think he found Harvard to be a bit cold and unwelcoming . Fortunately I lived quite near Ken's place. He was then finishing his landmark book on slavery, The Peculiar Institution, which was published die next year. And in talking with Ken about this enormously important subject, he made me realize that it had been marginalized and virtually erased in the courses I'd had at Harvard and as an undergraduate at Dartmouth . Even the great Perry Miller, a leading authority on the history of religion in America—especially the Puritans—whom I admired more than any other Harvard professor, said very little about slavery and antislavery in his course on religion in the history of America. In 1965 he published posthumously The Ufe of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War, a very important work that was to be the first volume of a series. I looked through it recently and found mat there's nothing on slavery, antislavery, abolition, Negro, race, or anything of the sort in the index, even though he's dealing with a period when slavery was so extremely important coming up to the Civil War. So Stampp made me realize that this was a horribly neglected subject. And I decided that after my first book was published, I would turn to antislavery and try to do for the subject the sort of thing Stampp had done for slavery. I moved from Harvard to Cornell where I fortunately got tenure in three years. Cornell had a magnificent collection on slavery and antislavery. I also won a Guggenheim Fellowship and came to London in 1958-59 to do research. As I began working in the old British Museum , I saw that this subject was transadantic in nature and that to investigate antislavery one needed to know a lot about slavery. I grew dismayed over the immensity of the subject I was beginning to explore . Fortunately at the British Museum there was a famous American historian getting on in years who reassured me that having tenure freed me from the * Conducted on April 26, 2007 at the Crowne Pla2a St. James Hotel, London. David Brion Davis and Donald A. Yerxa, London, April 2007. Photo by Bill Nichols. burden of getting a book out every year or so. He encouraged me to stick with the subject. So what I had originally planned as a background chapter of a book on antislavery eventually became The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. It won a number of awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, and launched me on the subject of slavery. I never imagined that at age 80 I would still be working on slavery and antislavery , but it's been very worthwhile. Yerxa: What are some of the understandings that emerged -when you investigated slavery in contexts larger than just the American South? Davis: One of my first rather surprising discoveries was that slavery evoked very little, if any, criticism down through the centuries from ancient times. Slavery appeared in virtually every society in every part of the world with the exception of some very primitive hunter-gatherer societies. Wherever you had agriculture, wherever you had any kind of really working society, there were slaves. Slavery is pretty much taken for granted in the Bible and in the works of philosophers and others from the time of Plato and Aristode. But the really amazing thing to me was the lack of much of a tradition of antislavery to draw on. The abolitionists sometimes cited people. Thomas Clarkson, for example, wrote a famous twovolume history of the movement to end the British slave trade 200 years ago. His two-volume work...