Between Blood & Gold: The Debates over Compensation for Slavery in the Americas by Frédérique Beauvois (review)

Underlying this book is a pressing question that all historians and social scientists must face, but one that is rarely explored and never satisfactorily answered. Why do standards of morality change over time? Despite their disclaimers to the contrary, most scholars (and indeed, judicial systems) interpret past human behavior in terms of current conceptions of right and wrong. The trigger for Beauvois’ book is the phrase in the subtitle, “compensation for slavery.” Today, almost everyone hearing it for the first time would assume it to be a synonym for “reparations”—payments to rectify past injustice. Two centuries ago, it was almost universally understood as amends to owners of slaves for the loss of their human property. Even the half-million Haitians who freed themselves partially compensated their former owners; the only significant group of slave owners to receive nothing for their loss fought the bloodiest war in U.S. history to avoid such expropriation. Beauvois’ work is a startling illustration of the tectonic shift in attitudes that transformed peoples’ perception of the phrase and the underlying concept.

Beauvois chose her sources for the book with the premise that because abolition was accompanied everywhere (except for the southern United States and the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo) by laws that indemnified slave owners, scholars should examine the debates in the legislatures that decided in favor of them. The debates in the British Parliament and French Assemblies account for 75 percent of the source material. At first glance, this tactic may seem like old hat (it must be seventy years since a book on abolition focused on such material), but the pages of this first full-length comparative study of “slave compensation” sparkle with new insights and arguments. Erudite and measured, it establishes a new typology of abolition for the Americas (in addition to being an intellectual joy to read).

Many decades from now, this book will still be the best source for the various forms that compensation took, the monetary component, who paid the bill, and who were the ultimate beneficiaries. The largest share of compensation that owners received came from the enslaved themselves. Free-womb laws, forced apprenticeships, and emancipation withheld often to the age sixty meant that most of the slaves in the non-U.S. Atlantic world paid for their freedom with unrecompensed labor. Indemnity payments by the state to owners covered, on average, much less than half the value of slave property, with wealthy slave owners receiving much more than their less wealthy counterparts, even on a per slave basis. As noted above, the unfairness of these terms from a modern perspective is overwhelming. For Beauvois, however, “purchased abolition” amounted to a bribe from metropolitan authorities to secure the cooperation of colonial elites. Putting a relatively quick end to slavery would not have been possible without it, given the 800,000 deaths in the St. Domingue revolution and the U.S. Civil War that bracketed the abolitionist era.

Beauvois seriously underestimates the cost of British anti-slavery initiatives after 1807, as well as the dramatic effects of self-purchase in Brazil and, to a lesser effect, the Spanish Americas. These are minor blemishes, however, in a superb piece of scholarship.