Slavery in the 19th Century US

(I consider this page to be in presentable form now, but it is quite possible that I may come back to make emendations or additions.)

Seen from the perspective of the 21st century, there can be little question that the institution of slavery, that is, ownership of and trafficking in, human beings, in 17th- and 18th-century America and in the 18th- and 19th-century US (abolition was finally ratified only in December 1865, long months after the end of the military hostilities of the Civil War) was profoundly at odds with the egalitarian and libertarian ideals trumpeted in the founding documents, especially in the Declaration of Independence (*), and rates as one of the greatest human rights violations in history. The scars of the conflict it generated are still readily observable in everyday life in the US. Among the many and complex sources of the racial stratification that characterizes US society and the US economy are certainly the residue of beliefs and assumptions that underlay the entirely race-based slavery that flourished in the US 150 and 200 years ago.

The evils of slavery were (and are) many and various:

• First, and most readily observable, is the potential for physical cruelty. The great English novelist Charles Dickens, devoted nearly an entire chapter of the report of his tour of the United States in 1841, American Notes (1842), to classified advertisements from the newspapers, in which the advertisers offered rewards for escaped slaves, most commonly identifiable by flogging scars and missing teeth, toes and fingers. (As a good Victorian, he made only the most veiled allusions to sexual predation, such as is hinted at in Harriet A. Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself.) His point, of course, was that, despite claims to the contrary by defenders of slavery, cruelty and torture were widespread and largely accepted.
• Chattel slavery (i.e., the institution of property [chattel] in human beings) leads necessarily to moral cruelty, because it implies that the various attributes of ownership should be respected, in particular, the decision as to whether to purchase or sell property. "Kind" masters often tried to avoid selling their property, but a crop failure or some other financial reverse could easily put the owner in a situation in which he had little choice but to sell some of his property. He might choose to sell livestock (horses, cows, etc.), but in extreme situations, even "kind" masters might be pushed to sell slaves. Some masters tried to avoid separating families, but financial circumstances might or might not permit. Perhaps the most violent moral cruelty of slavery is the power of the master to sell his slave, and his slave's children, without, needless to say, consulting the slave. (An analogy might be found in pet ownership: a dog owner, even one who loves his dogs, might find he has more puppies than he wants or can care for; he has a number of possible choices, including selling them, but whatever he does, he does not ask the dog's opinion. Similarly, the slave-owner does not ask the slave's opinion.)
• Perhaps less obvious, but more insidious (and undoubtedly more than a little responsible for the physical and moral cruelty typical of the institution), are the moral and psychological effects of slavery, on the slave, of course, but also on the owner:
• The slave's sense of personal identity is necessarily damaged by his/her acceptance, however unwilling, of his/her status as property, and as such at the utter and complete mercy of the owner. Destruction of the slave's sense of personal human identity was of course very much in the interest of the slave-owner; the eradication of African religions and languages among the slaves is only one part of this phenomenon.
• The owner's sense of humanity is of necessity diminished: putting himself in a position in which he might have to break up a family in order to satisfy his own financial creditors means beyond the shadow of a doubt that he has utterly obliterated every possibility of real human emotion. The fact that some masters sold their own children, fathered on their female slaves, is merely the logical consequence of the destruction of the slave-owning father's moral and emotional life.

It is well to remember, however, that the 21st century European's categorical rejection of racism (to which, I hardly need add, I wholeheartedly subscribe) is itself the product of historical events and phenomena (not least of which is the Nazi "Final solution"), and is certainly not a universally shared belief, even today. During the 19th century, it was a commonplace among defenders of slavery to argue that Blacks were congenitally incapable of elevated intellectual activity or achievement, and that slavery, under which the owner provided for the slave's basic needs, such as housing, clothing, and food, was thus beneficial, not only (and obviously) to the slave-owner, but to the slaves themselves.* An uncompromising recognition of Black equality or Blacks' rights was rare even among abolitionists, many of whom held that freed slaves should be returned to Africa (ignoring the indisputable fact that, especially after about 1835, the vast majority of slaves were born in North America and had no more than the most tenuous connections with Africa.) It is thus difficult, from the perspective of 21st century Europe, fully to understand the position of slave-owners. With the benefit of hindsight, even the economic argument that the agricultural economy of the South could not survive the abolition of slavery falls of its own weight: the economic stagnation that characterized the ex-Confederacy even into the 1960s was largely the result of its insistence on maintaining a social, political and economic racial hierarchy that mimicked that of the period before 1865.

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* The Declaration states from the outset, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." [back to text].

* George Fitzhugh's Sociology for the South, or, The Failure of Free Society (1854) provides an extreme example of the position that freeing the slaves would result in misery for the slaves as well as for the masters. [back to text].

Great works of 19th century American anti-slavery literature include, of course, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), and Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845). Less exclusively focused on slavery, but immensely moving in its own way is Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885).