In recent years the study of slavery in the United States has concentrated on the independent culture that men and women from Africa were able to preserve or create in America, despite their forcible dislocation and subjection. Studies have shown their success in a variety of ways: maintaining family ties that were subject to dissolution at the whim of their owners; African ways of dancing, singing, and bodily adornment; the creation of new and of hybrid forms of music; the building of a pan-African culture or cultures from the many disparate peoples thrown together in a strange land. The success of Afro-Americans in maintaining a life of their own has dictated a recognition that slavery is always a negotiated relationship. Human beings find ways of asserting their humanity despite all efforts to reduce them to mere animals without a will of their own. Slavery can never be as absolute as slaveowners might claim it to be and wish it to be and legislate it to be.
While studies of slavery have thus disclosed the history of a rich black culture in America, dating back to the first settlements, other studies of American separation from Great Britain have shown the development of expanded ideas of freedom among the free. As colonists of the British Empire, free Americans had accepted a limited control of their activities by governors sent from Britain under laws passed by the British Parliament. Their own governments had derived their authority from the King of England. When they dissolved the connection and rested government on the consent of the governed, they opened the doors to freedom wider than they realized at the time. They recognized the apparent contradiction between their proclamations of equality and liberty and their continuing possession of slaves, and hoped at some undesignated time in the future to resolve it. In the end, of course, it required a Civil War.
It required a civil war because slavery and freedom are irreconcilable opposites. The negotiated relationship between master and slave never approached a negotiation between equals. The slave might be able to win privileges by behavior beyond the master’s control that would reduce work done and profit gained: feigned (or real) sickness, running away for a time, deliberate clumsiness, what today would be called sabotage. Some slaves may even have won eventual freedom in return for a number of years of truly conscientious labor. There could be grades of status within slavery, some slaves winning more privileges than others. But there was no halfway house between slavery and freedom, no set of steps that led progressively from one to the other.
Within the ranks of the free there could be much wider variation of status. The rich could always command the services of the poor. Freedom might be the only thing they had in common. But whatever powers the rich might exercise, however dependent the poor might become upon them, no one mistook poverty or dependence for slavery. There were, as we shall see, proposals for enslaving the poor, but the proposals themselves were a recognition that the poor were not slaves, in fact or in law.
What, then, was the relationship between slavery and freedom? Our own society demonstrates that there need be no relationship. The gradations among us include the presence of the extremely rich alongside the extremely poor. We have no slavery recognized by law. But we once did. And human relations among us still suffer from the former enslavement of a large portion of our predecessors. Indeed the freedom of the free, the growth of freedom experienced in the American Revolution, depended more than we like to admit on the enslavement of more than 20 percent of us at that time. How republican freedom came to be supported, at least in large part, by its opposite, slavery, is the subject of this book.