The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution 1770-1823
Sheehan, Bernard W.
Book Review/Bernard W. Sheehan Slavery and the Simplisms of Reform Much of the recent writing on American Negro slavery has tended to describe it from the inside, to treat the slave system as an...
...In treating the revolutionary age, Davis is more concrete...
...Contractual agreements are never pristine...
...The tension was not between the individual and a rational order constituted on the basis of a volitional contract but between a traditional ordering of life and those few individuals who like the Quakers believed it possible to abstract themselves from social experience...
...Not until the second quarter of the nineteenth century did opposition take the highest ground...
...The Quakers "helped to create a moral climate in which a highly ethical purpose could disguise the effects of power...
...Moreover, historians lacking any impulse to approve the slave regime have found themselves describing it as a remarkably resilient and even successful social formation...
...None of them awakened in their followers a firm attachment to existing institutions...
...The tendency in all of these movements was reductionist, a distinct drift away from the concrete and tentative toward the abstract and absolute...
...At the same time that it formed the lives of great numbers of human beings, it was perceived as the profoundest of social conundrums...
...The density of social formations in Europe created a less fertile ground for the cultivation of equalitarianism...
...Interpreted in this way, a threat to the slave system became a threat to the social order itself, for all social arrangements implied subordination...
...As significant as these historiographical developments may be for revealing the nature of human slavery and elucidating the variety of human institutions, they fail to account for one salient characteristic of slavery in she Western experience...
...Slavery imposed a terrible burden on many Africans, but it also supplied the conditions for the creation of a genuine black society...
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...Rather they brought together people whose traditional attachments had been greatly abused but who sought to renew those formations as human beings invariably do...
...The answer, it seems, can be gleaned from the paradox itself...
...he does not question the fundamental validity of eighteenth-century humanitarianism...
...He invariably defines freedom as external to social order...
...Although no issue brought forth a more compelling ideological commitment from those who took it up, Davis shows in considerable detail and with unerring skill that the problem of slavery provoked a variety of responses...
...This troubles Davis...
...The Problem of Slavery in the Age ofRevolution 1770-1823 by David Brion Davis Cornell University Press $17.50 "Truth," he writes, "is always framed in ambiguity...
...Any sort of order, even that posited on the freely made decision of the individual, is bound to impinge upon the sovereignty of the separate entities making it up...
...Freed slaves were driven from their homes in the South, and in the cities they kept to themselves...
...Indeed they are encouraged...
...One can sympathize with the frustrations of reformers charged with the task of obliterating human society, and one can understand the fears of those who suspected that they might succeed...
...In eighteenth-century thought the nexus between the sovereign individual and an ordered society can be found in the idea of contract...
...By indirection the Constitution sanctioned it in the three-fifths clause, and it took twenty years to haltthe slave trade...
...They were movements of opposition and slavery was only one of the evidences of social organization against which they set their full force...
...The perfectionist sects saw the hierarchical arrangements of historical institutions as the antithesis of God's kingdom...
...The famous Somerset case of 1772 did less than abolish slavery in the British Isles...
...In timeslavery came to be the major object of their attentions because it was easiest to see in that institution the deprivation of freedom that was apparent in virtually all social arrangements...
...As a consequence slavery assumed the burden borne by the corrupt world in sectarian thinking...
...Davis finds the origins of antislavery in the familiar places: the religious perfectionism of such fringe sects as the Quakers, the rationalist libertarianism that descended from Locke, and the ethic of the benevolent man of feeling that later matured into romanticism...
...Davis is adept at showing how the totalist ideas of the reformers suffered qualification in the face of an obdurate institution...
...please print Name Address City State Zip College or University Year Studies End This is a ^ new ^ renewal subscription L - - Please use this form or a reasonable facsimile — — The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1975 21 indeed he was...
...Freedom could be defined only in opposition to society and hence black slavery became symbolic for the thralldom that society imposed on all men...
...Few blacks became Quakers...
...Jefferson was a slaveholder who had known the subordination of the black man all his life...
...but no matter, the irony is nicely put...
...The Christian touched by the immediate infusion of grace or the Quaker transfixed by the inner light could assert his new liberty by championing the cause of the oppressed...
...In this second offering, he examines the phenomenon in the period of the democratic revolution...
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...No other social arrangement could supply better evidence for this modern attitude than slavery...
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...Book Review/Bernard W. Sheehan Slavery and the Simplisms of Reform Much of the recent writing on American Negro slavery has tended to describe it from the inside, to treat the slave system as an institution that exercised a profound influence on the lives of those who lived within its limits and hence deserves analysis as an important historical phenomenon...
...The promise of autonomy offered none of the social necessities of human existence...
...I=1 22 The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1975...
...The Quakers did not, as Davis seems to contend, employ sovereign individuals in their factories...
...Support for this new arrangement of life did not contradict the individualist assumptions that formed the root of modern industrialism...
...Any state short of that pristine condition would necessarily lend credence to what Davis calls "less visible modes of human bondage...
...The insight he offers into the dim recesses of reformist thought is at least in part attributable to the intensity of his own belief...
...Quaker industrialists took a major role in dismantling the old order, 20 The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1975 and then they became rich by organizing the human wreckage into an orderly and productive population...
...Had it been possible to detach human beings totally from traditional associations, no problem would have arisen in organizing the industrial system...
...Davis relies on the ideas of Edmund S. Morgan to explain the success of the slave regime in the new nation and the failure of the Revolution to change the course of history...
...But this was not possible, and the new order had always to combat the tendencies of past social arrangements to persist and new ones to form in patterns that proved detrimental to efficient production...
...They are always encrusted with legal and customary meaning...
...Slavery persisted into the nineteenth century in the New World and the English abolished it in the empire only when it could no longer claim economic justification...
...Davis is on the side of freedom and antislavery, though he does manifest a certain discomfort in dealing with the simplism of reform...
...Although the founding generation worried much over the problem, slavery advanced into the nineteenth century with a brighter future than it had possessed for more than a generation...
...The first volume swept across many centuries, yet one felt the immediacy of the problem...
...One might question Davis' assumptions about the nineteenth-century labor market or the brutality of British imperialism...
...For man to be other than a thing required that he assume the burden of self-justifying autonomy...
...Davis has done more than any other historian to explain the intellectual origins of the antislavery movement...
...To exact the full logic of his Declaration would be to ask him to deny the deepest affinities of a Virginia planter...
...It became the primary evidence of worldly corruption...
...Slavery was the antithesis of the self-sovereignty that should have supplied the motivating force for the new industrial society...
...He could always sound like the most enlightened savant of his day...
...good and evil are always colored by human ambivalence...
...The slave system has always been in some sense a "problem...
...Still the consequences of Christian perectionism were ambiguous...
...It should not be surprising that the same people who opposed the slave system worried about work discipline and efficiency in the factory system...
...Although eighteenth-century Quakers were not responsible for the consequences of a nineteenth-century free labor market—or for the consequences of British efforts to stamp out the slave trade in the heart of Africa—they unwittingly drew distinctions and boundaries which opened the way, under guise of moral rectitude, for unprecedented forms of oppression...
...Even when he came to see faintly the desirability of ridding the country of slavery, he did not think it possible to act unless he could maintain his credibility among men of similar status...
...He concedes that "history is filled with moral ironies...
...David Brion Davis began his analysis of this question in 1966 with the publication of The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, which carried the story into the late eighteenth century...
...Yet he affirms that we are the beneficiaries of the reformers of the past who called upon the "collective conscience" and broke the "proprieties of the present...
...Yet the failure of the revolutionary generation can be attributed to a more concrete set of historical circumstances...
...Calvinism had long sought social correlations to man's sinfulness, and by the late eighteenth century Quakerism had become a vehicle for the more subversive ideas of Enlightenment reform...
...In fact his book is an effort to explain that life is more complicated than most of the characters he treats would have dared believe...
...The major impulse toward antislavery arose from Christian messianism...
...But he never separated his ideological proclivities from his loyalty to what Davis calls his class...
...Traditional life dissolved slowly in the age of revolution and never completely disappeared...
...Davis may be no reductionist in his explanations of the origins of antislavery, but his sympathies rest with the terrible simplifications of modern reform...
...Conversion of the slaves often led to Christian resignation and better slaves, not emancipation...
...supporters of the institution found little reason to view it as a problem...
...The Quakers had an ingenious way of combining high principle and utility...
...The Christian freed by God's grace from the burdens of the world and hence released from the obligations of subordination could scarcely support an institution whose very essence was the subjection of one man by another...
...Davis does not make the point, but could it not be argued that this very paradox explains the eagerness of reformers in Britain and in America to equate the slave system with the society of prerevolutionary Europe...
...The book is about antislavery...
...Most poignant of all, freedom for the slaves did not lead to an increase in Christian fellowship between white and black...
...Morgan begins with the fundamental paradox of the American experience: for more than two centuries the nation with the broadest claims to human freedom denied that freedom to a substantial segment of its population...
...Slavery possessed many of the characteristics—hierarchy, deference, coercion, wastefulness—that reformers found unacceptable in the preindustrial world...
...Davis manifests the conventional anticapitalism of modern liberals...
...Yet the history of slavery as a problem has its origins in the beginnings of written discourse...
...Reformers found it more prudent to attack the slave trade than to insist upon the immediate eradication of the system...
...And what better way could the new American nation find to effect its messianic motto, Novus Ordo Seclorum, than to emancipate the slaves...
...It would be destroyed only when the righteousness of American belief took on the sanction of fire and sword...
...Thus the Negro in America served as a surrogate for the historical social accretions that represented oppression to Americans...
...The major ideas of the age of revolution rested on the Lockean conceptions of possessive individualism and a contractual social and political order...
...It was precisely because of the enslavement of the African that Americans believed it possible to avoid the layered, class society of Europe...
...In the United States the revolutionary generation compromised on the issue of slavery...
...Virtually all significant moral change springs from people who are in some sense deviant...
...One might safely wonder, however, whether the tension does not point up the flaw in individualist thinking...
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...They did not create an order from detached individuals who contracted for their labor...
...Whatever the revolutionary generation said or believed, the slave system was imbedded in American society...
...The doctrines of the inner light and the individual experience of conversion had a secular analogue in the principle of self-sovereignty derived from the humanist image of man...
...If this is a gift subscription, please enclose your name and address so we can inform the student of your gift...
...In the United States there proved to be no necessary connection between evangelical revivalism and antislavery...
...These seminal concepts justified the emergence of the industrial society of the nineteenth century, and the Quakers pioneered in its development...
...The messianic drive led as often to quietism as it did to aggressive reform...
...Although the revivals of the early nineteenth century greatly stimulated the American attack on the institution, the consequences for the slaves were not the same as the effect on their benefactors...
...Slavery turned men into things and hence "symbolized the most extreme model of treating men as exploitable objects...
...The principles that led them to oppose slavery were closely related to the attitudes that placed them at the center of the most significant processes of modernization...
...It would be another sixty years before the reformers would have their way...
...It may not have been the centratissue of the age, but it was surely of critical importance...
...The humanitarian ethic required the condemnation of the slightest signs of overt cruelty and was unrelenting in exposing the ways in which society masked its imperfections...
...Davis sees a certain level of tension between the autonomous individual and the rational order constructed on the basis of contract, which may in fact have existed...
...True enough, modern intellectuals have tended to see virtually all human institutions as problems, as obstacles to the achievement of true freedom...
...Moreover, the master-slave relationship could be based on more than force and brutality...
...Among slaveholders it induced a spirit of trusteeship which may have alleviated the immediate plight of the blacks but scarcely contributed to their hope for freedom...
...Once the blacks were securely fixed on a level below all white men, it became possible to view everyone above as equal...
...Davis presents Jefferson as a revealing sample...
Vol. 9 • November 1975 • No. 2
