Stanley L. Engerman
The ending of legal slavery and the freeing of the ex-slaves have long been proclaimed as a major step forward for mankind and one of the great moral triumphs of societies over a very long-standing evil institution. Whether we accept the evaluation of the ending of modern slavery by Lecky or by Williams, it is generally regarded as a victory for the “good guys,” ending a system that could be, and was, regarded as theft.1 The recent celebration of the two hundred year anniversary of the ending of the British slave trade and the more recent one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States, indicate the landmark status accorded certain key events. We should notice, however, that these policies were somewhat limited in scope and had quite different impacts on those both potentially or actually enslaved. In 1808 the British ended the slave trade from Africa but nowhere ended slavery in the Americas or in Africa, while the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation by Lincoln freed the slaves only in the Confederate States while, presumably, for military reasons, did not deal with slavery in the Union states, most importantly Kentucky.2
It is interesting to contrast this earlier slow pace of the movement from slavery to freedom with what we now would expect to occur in the response to today’s evils. Now we would anticipate a call for an immediate cessation of the evil institution, with penalties imposed on the perpetrators of the evil, and with, probably, some form of compensation paid to the sufferers. Tracing the steps toward the ending of slavery in the New World and elsewhere we find that the past presented a quite different pattern. The final ending of slavery was generally a quite gradual process, with a number of steps along the way in terms of different legislative and other policy actions, and a long delay in freeing individuals even after slavery was declared to be terminated. Further, in all but a few cases, emancipation occurred with some form of compensation paid to slave owners, in the form of cash, bonds, or labor time, and with no compensation paid to freed slaves. Compensation was seldom called for until the recent discussion of reparations for past enslavement.3 In the absence of such payments for past sins, we now get only, at most, apologies made by former slaveholding nations to the descendants of the enslaved. Similarly, the ending of serfdom in Europe, often at the same time as the ending of New World slavery, while more complex because of the nature of landownership institutions, involved more frequent net payments to the lords, not to the freed serfs.4 The returns to slave owners and to those controlling serfs reflected the firm Western belief at that time in the importance of the preservation of property rights.
The gradual nature of early antislavery actions is demonstrated by the various actions taken to ease the burden of enslavement without threatening the continued existence of slavery. In the United States, there were some pre–Revolutionary War restrictions on slave imports in several colonies, but they were not major in effect. These restrictions were seldom introduced by the major slaveholding states, and, even where these restrictions existed, they seem to have not been effectively carried through.5
Attempts to ameliorate the Middle Passage as well as the conditions of servitude had long been introduced by most slave-trading and slave-holding nations. Regarding the slave trade these usually were concerned with the number of slaves to be carried on slave-trading vessels, based generally on ship tonnage or dimensions, as well as setting the magnitude of provisions and water to be carried, based upon expectations of sailing time. These restrictions would serve to raise the costs to slave traders, as well as provide some possibly small benefits to those slaves in transit. Several measures ameliorating slavery were introduced by the British in the first third of the nineteenth century, some such as slave registration to ensure the closing of the international slave trade and to provide important demographic information, others to provide for better care and treatment, including limiting punishment of the slaves.6 Similar policies were introduced by the French and other slave powers, including also various states of the US South.7 The British and French introduced a policy of compulsory manumission, by which a slave who could pay a price set by a legal procedure was able to obtain manumission and freedom. The practice posed some problems in agreeing on the price to be paid to the owner by the slave, but it was believed to give some hope to slaves, making the slave condition more bearable.8 As seen in the British celebrations in 2008, the first major triumph was in ending the international slave trade. This, however, did not touch directly the institution of slavery where it existed. Indeed those arguing for ending the slave trade often argued that this would not lead to a renewed attack on slavery.9
Clarkson argued for the political distinction between ending the slave trade and ending slavery when weighing which to attack. He argued that the probabilities of success were much higher if trying to end the slave trade first, rather than initially going after slavery in place:
The evil of the Slave-trade, in consequence of which many thousand persons were every year fraudulently and forcibly taken from their country, their relations, and friends, and from all that they esteemed valuable in life. The second was the evil of slavery itself, in consequence of which the same persons were forced into a situation, where they were deprived of the rights of men, where they were obliged to linger out their days subject to excessive labour and cruel punishments, and where their children were to inherit the same hard lot.10
He argued that the attempt to end both at the same time would entail too much and “by doing this we might lose all.” He pointed out that to achieve the desired ends “it did not matter where they began.” He further claimed that ending the slave trade would, by raising the price of slaves, mean that slaveholders “must treat those better.” If laws to treat slaves better were introduced, then with the growth in the slave population “the Slave-trade would in time be no longer necessary to them, and it would die away as an useless and a noxious plant.”11 This, however, would take a prolonged time, and it was uncertain when it would lead to the end of the slave trade.
The benefits of attacking the slave trade first, abolitionists argued, were that “they were [not] meddling with the property of the planters, and letting loose an irritated race of beings, who, in consequence of all the vices and infirmities, which a state of slavery entails upon those who undergo it, were unfit for their freedom.” Moreover, the government “had an indisputable right to regulate or abolish any of its branches of commerce; whereas it was doubtful, whether it could interfere with the management of the internal affairs of the colonies,” or if such decisions were to be left to the colonial legislatures. Further, enforcement of the abolition of the slave trade was feasible by “ships of war and command [of] its custom-houses,” while actions in the “heart of the islands” would be of doubtful success.
The outcome of these discussions was the formation in June 1787 of the Committee for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, indicating that they could thus “answer the objection, which was afterwards so constantly and so industriously circulated against them, that they were going to emancipate the slaves.” Clarkson concluded by declaring that attacking the slave trade was the wise decision, “and that the other object would have meant that they could not for years to come, if ever, have succeeded in their attempt.”12
Clarkson’s analysis is important for evaluating the eventually successful attack on slavery and asking whether the slow, gradual process was a necessary piece of political expediency given the temper of the times, the composition of Parliament, and the apparently limited appeal to much of the British population then of the antislavery movement.13 Given the long lag in most nations between the ending of the slave trade and the final ending of slavery, there remained a perceived distinction between the two evils. After ending their slave trade, the British then found it possible to limit or hopefully eliminate the Portuguese and Spanish slave trades, by payments, in 1815 and 1817, even where there were minimal discussions of the ending of slavery or of the slave trade in their Iberian colonies.14
The general pattern in almost all cases was for the ending of the slave trade to occur some quarter century before the legislation to end slavery (see table 10.1). Some argued that ending the slave trade would bring about forces leading to a voluntary ending of slavery, with there being an optimistic and pessimistic version of this ending. The pessimistic variant was based on the demographic declines in the British Caribbean, so that the dying out of all the slaves, in the distant future, caused by slave mortality and the ending the slave trade, would lead to the dying out of slavery. The optimistic variant was based on the argument that the increasing scarcity of the slaves would raise prices and lead to better care and treatment of slaves, with freedom being considered the most effective economic incentive. The British limited movement of slaves to the newly acquired areas of Trinidad and British Guiana, as a basis to speed—by however little—the decline of slavery.15 Wilberforce estimated the time lag between the ending of the slave trade and of slavery would be more than two hundred years for the British colonies, based on calculations of the actual land-labor ratios.16 While ending the slave trade could be regarded as the first major step of an antislavery onslaught, it was not generally seen to be part of a policy of immediatism.
The compensation granted to slave owners once slavery was finally ended could take several forms. In addition, in all major cases, the slave owners were permitted to keep their land and other assets, so that ex-slaves received what has been described as “nothing but freedom.”17 Compensation could take the form of cash payments, payment in the form of bonds, or, most frequently, labor time by the ex-slaves as part of a scheme of
Table 10.1. The timing of the ending of slave trade and slavery
* Haiti, by 1804, is a special case.
Source: Stanley L. Engerman, “Emancipation in Comparative Perspective: A Long and Wide View,” in Fifty Years Later: Antislavery, Capitalism and Modernity in the Dutch Orbit, ed. Gert Oostindie (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1995), 227.
gradual emancipation. One imaginative proposal made by the Dutch, though not part of the final legislation, was to have the ex-slaves work for wages and use their earnings to repay masters for the costs of their freedom.18 The general methods of having the slaves pay masters for their freedom were more subtle and indirect. One way in which this could take place was rather than having emancipation be immediate—as it was in only a few cases, although at times with financial compensation—having it deferred for a number of years. During this time, the slaves were to work for their masters, as in the British apprenticeship period, in Puerto Rico, and in the Dutch West Indian colony of Surinam. Such deferred periods were discussed by the French and Danish but because of unrest were not implemented.19 The additional years of compelled labor supplied the masters with additional income, with the slaves providing them with their compensation, not as would be the case when it was paid for by the government, meaning the taxpayers. The United States was unusual in its ending of slavery due to the Civil War, being both immediate and uncompensated.
Yet the most frequent form of ending slavery was that to be later described by the Brazilians as the “law of the free womb,” a rather unusual form of gradual emancipation. As tables 10.2–10.4 indicate, this type of legislation was introduced in five Northern US states between 1780 and 1804, by many of the Latin American nations early in the nineteenth century, and later by the Spanish and Brazilians after the middle of the nineteenth century.20 While some of the details differed, the basic provisions were that no one currently a slave would be freed, although in some cases this was done at a later time by separate legislation, and that any child born to a slave mother after a specified date would be considered to be a free person but would be required to work for the mother’s owner for some fifteen to thirty years, varying with state or country and, sometimes, gender.21 This length of time generally differed by country, and it reflected an estimate of how long it would take to recover the costs of raising an infant to a productive age.22 This form of gradual emancipation had the effect of having newborns pay, via laboring, for their own rearing costs and emancipation, compensating the owner with minimum imposition on the taxpayers for funds. The political popularity of this policy was quite clear, since it would reduce the complaints of the population about ending slavery and the time lag would help solve the problem of how to educate ex-slaves for freedom and effective labor. An interesting variant of this policy was contained in the British emancipation act of 1833. It considered children under six as free, thus requiring their costs of rearing be paid by the ex-slaves rather than the masters, although the government would provide if the parents were unable to do so but would then subject these children to a prolonged apprenticeship.23
The explanation for both the delay in antislavery measures and, even after the recognition of the evils of slavery, the gradual measures chosen, is no doubt due to the political and ideological conditions at the times. With limited suffrage, legislative bodies were dominated by wealthy whites and often included slave owners as members. And, to increase the political difficulty of emancipation, it was often believed that the benefits of slavery were widespread, as slave-grown commodities provided employment to many.24 For those more conservative nations where monarchy was still important, their inherently elite beliefs meant that slave emancipation was a low-priority item.25
How widespread was the belief in the overall population that black slavery should be ended is not obvious, whether due to the influence of racist beliefs or some other reasons. While Lincoln is now, appropriately, in great favor for ending slavery in the United States, it is useful to look at how his beliefs on this issue changed over time. In 1858, while proclaiming slavery to be an evil that should be ended, his basic argument was to not touch slavery where it existed but rather to not let it expand into the new territories. Then, he argued, the increasing ratio of labor to land would drive down the prices of slaves until ultimately the price would approach zero, and the owners would be willing to free the slaves. This, he estimated, would, however, take some one hundred years, and he further argued that it would be the best way to end slavery, being peaceful and voluntary.26 In late 1861 and 1862 Lincoln was still searching for a means to induce the Northern slave states to end slavery. His proposal for Delaware included compensation, a provision that would end slavery in 1893, with apprenticeship for minors to run for at least another twenty-one years, thus ending coerced labor in 1914, in time for the start of World War I.27 Only in 1863, as a wartime measure, did Lincoln advocate the ending of Southern slavery but not yet ending slavery in the states that fought with the Union. Yet he had continued to discuss proposals to have slaves removed to other parts of the Americas or to Liberia, a policy that was supported as a way to solve some of the expected problems of emancipation, particularly its racial effects.28
Table 10.2. Slavery laws in the Northern United States
Source: Engerman, “Emancipation in Comparative Perspective,” 228.
Table 10.3. Slavery laws in Spanish America
Source: Engerman, “Emancipation in Comparative Perspective,” 229; George Reid Andrews, Afro-Latin America, 1800–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 57.
Note: Andrews also lists the dates that these nations ended their slave trades. In most cases the date that the slave trade was ended was the same as the date of the free womb law or else the date of final abolition. The exceptions were Mexico, where the slave trade ended in 1824, and Bolivia, where the slave trade was ended in 1840.
Table 10.4. Slavery laws in the Spanish Caribbean and Brazil
Source: Engerman, “Emancipation in Comparative Perspective,” 229.
In the absence of deportation, there remained general fears about what would happen once emancipation occurred without imposed limitations on ex-slave mobility and place of residence. There are two different types of cases to consider—one where black ex-slaves made up a relatively large percentage of the area’s population, the other, such as the United States, Brazil, and Cuba, where blacks made up between 10 and 50 percent of the overall population, with whites remaining politically dominant. These concerns included the presumed effects of miscegenation and racial intermixture, the threat of race war (with, of course, an expected destructive effect on the “inferior race”), and the economic impact of an increased labor force, lowering white wages and income.29 Despite these anticipated difficulties detailed plans were not often made for the social and economic readjustments in the postemancipation period.30 The rights to vote, to own property, and to be educated were provided in only a few cases.31 Ex-slaves would not often get the full benefits of citizenship in the society in which they were freed. Some of the ex-slave problems were legal, but others were the result of private behaviors irrespective of the laws. More than a century after emancipation in the major slave areas, the social and economic conditions of black ex-slaves remained inferior to those of most whites. The limited attempts to help the freedpeople meant that the achievement of what we might consider “full freedom” or equality was not quickly, if ever, achieved. And, in some cases, such as the United States, any favorable patterns were reversed. The political and economic effects of emancipation would, however, differ based on geographic conditions, and they would also vary over time with the state of the economy.
An indication of the importance of resources and natural conditions influencing responses to legal conditions is seen in the economic changes in the several British West Indies colonies.32 The British Colonial Office introduced similar policies for all the islands regarding labor and related matters, based on the existing British labor codes. Nevertheless, there were several different adjustments, based on the measured land-labor ratio. Densely populated islands, such as Barbados, kept a plantation system and maintained sugar output after slave emancipation and apprenticeship. Once allowed, there was out-migration to elsewhere in the Caribbean and, later, New York City. Underpopulated areas (Trinidad and British Guiana), which attracted labor from other islands, were highly productive, with high and rising slave prices. The outcome of emancipation was for people to leave plantations, and sugar output fell. After a few decades the prospect of future profits from sugar production on plantations led to the attraction of indentured labor under contract mainly from India but also China, Africa, and elsewhere for plantation labor, with the ex-slave population remaining at work on small farms geographically separate from the plantations. The indentured workers on plantations were described as experiencing “a new kind of slavery,” due to the strict regulations concerning work and life.33 A third response included the largest island, Jamaica, and some of the small islands, where sugar output declined and plantations disappeared, with small-scale farming in new areas becoming dominant. Some early attempts to utilize indentured labor were not successful, and some out-migration from Jamaica later occurred. By the middle of the twentieth century, Barbados became the wealthiest of the former British slave colonies.34 These three types of responses to emancipation indicate that while similar legal codes may have set some basic conditions for ex-slaves, the natural resource base had a considerable impact on the resulting economic and social outcomes.
An important example of the impact of changing economic and social conditions for ex-slaves after emancipation can be seen in the US South. In some ways the first thirty years after the Civil War had more favorable conditions for blacks than were to occur after that, until possibly after the 1940s and 1950s.35 In the 1870s there was significant ex-slave voting and elected black political officials, an expansion of black education and land ownership, and a relatively low number of lynchings of blacks compared to whites, as well as probable increases in black incomes and wealth. The end of Reconstruction in the 1870s changed the nature of political power in the South. The patterns of ex-slave improvement were reversed or slowed down in the 1890s, with blacks deprived of the vote, a deterioration in relative black educational expenditures, a slowdown in black landownership, and a sharp increase in the number of blacks lynched.
The reason for the changes to worsening conditions for blacks after 1890 remain debated. One argument is that the continued black gains were seen to have posed a threat to whites, particularly to poor whites, and the reversals were made to stop black progress.36 A more plausible explanation is the economic decline of the 1890s, with its particularly sharp collapse of the cotton market. This led to extensive and bloody disputes between white and black cotton growers, now in direct competition. In the postbellum years there was increased cotton production on small farms by whites. These legal and economic difficulties were not reversed on a large scale until after World War II and the 1950s.
There is also a current debate on the relative importance of behavioral patterns developed under slavery compared to the impact of current social and economic conditions in explaining present-day problems that raises further questions. For many years it had been argued that the effect of slavery on the black family had been carried forward for more than a century to account for the present-day difficulties of black families. Yet the number of female-headed households among blacks has about doubled from the publishing of the famed Moynihan Report in 1965 to recent years. This has led to a disagreement between those stressing a long-deferred legacy of slavery and those arguing for the importance of present-day conditions in accounting for the recent very dramatic changes in black family structure.37
Probably one of the major reasons for the limited gains of ex-slaves in economic and political conditions is that in no case, except Haiti, did the slave emancipation occur with a dramatic change in political power between blacks and whites. In most cases the island colonies remained part of the metropolitan empire, while in the large slave nations, ex-slaves attained little political and economic independence. In the case of Brazil, the end of slavery was followed the next year by the triumph of the Republic, with little impact on the ex-slave population. The British colonies did not achieve independence until after World War II, the Danish slave colonies were sold to the United States in 1917, Swedish St. Bartholomew was sold back to France in 1889, Surinam achieved independence in 1975 while several of the small islands remain Dutch today or achieved independence only relatively recently, and the large colonies of France as of 1848 remain part of France today. The only case where the slaves achieved political power was Haiti, where, somewhat perversely, the new regime’s attempts to reintroduce by law the plantation system to produce export crops failed, leaving Haiti a nation of small farms producing foodstuff for domestic consumption. Since independence, Haiti has had frequent uprisings and many changes in presidents. Other New World areas have experienced some unrest in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The few revolutions were a product of the twentieth century, leading at times to dramatic political turnover. The ending of slavery was not soon followed by a granting of independent political power to the ex-slaves.
1. The famous quote from William Lecky, in his History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne, 2 vols. (London: Longmans Green, 1869), 1:161, is, “The unwearied, unostentatious and inglorious crusade of England against slavery may probably be regarded as among the three or four perfectly virtuous pages in the history of nations.” Williams’s famous response was, “The British historians wrote almost as if Britain introduced Negro slavery solely for the satisfaction of abolishing it.” See Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944), 235. On the issue of morality vs. economics, Williams argued, “When British capitalism depended on the West Indies [the capitalists] ignored slavery or defended it. When British capitalism found the West Indian monopoly a nuisance, they destroyed West Indian slavery as the first step in the destruction of the West Indian monopoly” (169). On Lecky and Williams, see Howard Temperley, “Eric Williams and Abolition: The Birth of a New Orthodoxy,” in British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy of Eric Williams, ed. Barbara L. Solow and Stanley L. Engerman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 229–57.
2. On the presumed importance of Kentucky to the Union cause, see Abraham Lincoln, Speeches and Writings, 1859–1865: Speeches, Letters and Miscellaneous Writings—Presidential Messages and Proclamations (New York: Library of America, 1989), 269, where he says, “I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game.” According to Gienapp, Lincoln is reported to have said, “I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky.” See William E. Gienapp, “Abraham Lincoln and the Border States,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 13 (1992): 13–42. In late antebellum Kentucky some proposals for gradual emancipation with apprenticeship were discussed, and all such proposals included mandatory colonization schemes. Some argued that the costs of colonization were to be paid by ex-slave apprentices from their earnings before leaving the country. See Ivan E. McDougle, Slavery in Kentucky, 1792–1865 (Lancaster, PA: New Era, 1918), 110–18.
3. See the discussion in Stanley L. Engerman, “Apologies, Regrets, and Reparations,” European Review 17 (2009): 593–610.
4. See Jerome Blum, The End of the Old Order in Rural Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).
5. On this subject see Donald L. Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 1765–1820 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 78–80, 296–99; and Henry W. Farnam, Chapters in the History of Social Legislation in the United States to 1860 (Washington: Carnegie Institution, 1938), 195–97. Robinson states that “by 1787 every state from New England to Virginia had prohibited African slaves from being introduced to its jurisdiction” (297). He argues that in the pre-Revolutionary period “some colonies did enact prohibitions against the slave trade, but similar acts had been passed earlier in the eighteenth century,” and “these acts were regularly vetoed by authorities in London” (78–79).
6. See the discussions in Stanley L. Engerman, “Monitoring the Abolition of the International Slave Trade: Slave Registration in the British Caribbean,” in Registering and Recognition: Documenting the Person in World History, ed. Keith Breckenridge and Simon Szreter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 323–33; and William Law Mathieson, British Slavery and Its Abolition, 1823–1838 (London: Longmans, Green, 1926).
7. See Lawrence C. Jennings, French Anti-slavery: The Movement for the Abolition of Slavery in France, 1802–1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 103–64, on France; and Farnam, Chapters in the History of Social Legislation, 180–210, 323–474, on the United States.
8. See the points discussed in Stanley L. Engerman, “Pricing Freedom: Evaluating the Costs of Emancipation and of Manumission,” in Working Slavery, Pricing Freedom: Perspectives from the Caribbean, Africa and the African Diaspora, ed. Verene A. Shepherd (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2002), 273–302.
9. See, for example, some of the debates in Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates (hereafter, Hansard), vol. 29, March 22, 1791 to December 13, 1792 (London: Longman, 1817), 351–54, 1132–34.
10. Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-trade by the British Parliament, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808), 1:283.
11. Ibid., 1:284, 286.
12. Ibid., 1:284–89. The main advantage to slave owners of delayed emancipation (or of compensation) was frequently stated to be respect for the property rights of slave owners. Delay would aid slaves because the nature of slavery meant that slaves were unfit for freedom. To the abolitionist the backwardness of slaves was due to their experiencing slavery. To the proslavery defenders, their backwardness was due to being black Africans.
13. For an argument for a broader, larger share of the population concerned with ending the slave trade and slavery in Britain, see Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
14. See David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 48, 106–10.
15. See the discussion in David Eltis, “The Traffic in Slaves between the British West Indian Colonies, 1807–1833,” Economic History Review, n.s., 25 (1972): 55–64; and Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977), 103–8.
16. For estimates at the time of the ending of the British slave trade, see Wilberforce and Pitt. On Wilberforce, see his Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade Addressed to the Freeholders and Other Inhabitants of Yorkshire (London: T. Cadell & W. Davies, 1807); and Sir Reginald Coupland, Wilberforce: A Narrative (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), 270–74. See also Hansard, vol. 8, December 15, 1806 to March 4, 1807, 657–64; for an estimate of “two or three centuries,” see Seymour Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 45–46. In the United States, some 50 years after ending the slave trade, the general estimate of the time before slavery would end, on economic grounds, was more than 100 years. See Peter A. Coclanis and Stanley L. Engerman, “Would Slavery Have Survived without the Civil War? Economic Factors in the American South during the Antebellum and Postbellum Eras,” Southern Cultures 19 (2013): 66–90. For a curious twentieth-century discussion of how long it would take the United States for slave manumission at about the antebellum rate (three thousand per year) to have slavery disappear, see Farnam, Chapters in the History of Social Legislation, 208. His estimate, probably overoptimistic, was 1,333 years.
17. This is taken from the title of Eric Foner’s book on emancipation, Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007). He attributes this phrase to former Confederate general Robert V. Richardson.
18. See P. C. Emmer, The Dutch in the Atlantic Economy, 1580–1880: Trade, Slavery and Emancipation (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1998), chs. 6 and 10; Augustin Cochin, The Results of Emancipation (Boston: Walker, Wise, 1863), 396–401; Alex van Stipraan, “Surinam and the Abolition of Slavery,” in Fifty Years Later: Antislavery, Capitalism and Modernity in the Dutch Orbit, ed. Gert Oostindie (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1995), 17–141.
19. See Cochin, The Results of Emancipation, 143–53, 389–95; Jennings, French Anti-slavery, 193–284; the essays in Marcel Doringny, ed., The Abolition of Slavery from Léger Félicité Sonthonax to Victor Schoelcher, 1793, 1794, 1848 (Paris: UNESCO, 2003); and N. A. T. Hall, Slave Society in the Danish West Indies: St. Thomas, St. John, and St. Croix (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 208–27.
20. See Engerman, “Emancipation in Comparative Perspective: A Long and Wide View,” in Oostindie, Fifty Years Later, 223–41.
21. An exception was the Spanish legislation, the Moret Law of 1870, which applied to those born after 1868.
22. See the details of this calculation in Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, “The Philanthropy of Bargain Prices: Notes on the Economics of Gradual Emancipation,” Journal of Legal Studies 3 (1974): 377–401. The attempt to achieve this goal of covering rearing costs was well known at the time.
23. The British act had as one provision: children younger than six on August 1, 1834, or a child born to an apprentice after that date would be considered free. If not properly supported by his or her parents the child could be apprenticed to the owner of the mother up to age twenty-one.
24. This argument, of course, was made by Eric Williams in Capitalism and Slavery, a point consistent with that of the contentions of many proslavery defenders.
25. In this period, these would be Spain and Brazil. It is interesting to note the long-familiar argument of Frank Tannenbaum that slave treatment, by several definitions, was more favorable in the Catholic Iberian countries of Spain and Portugal than in Protestant Britain and France, but these were the last two to end New World slavery, and coerced labor persisted in their African possessions into the twentieth century. See his Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York: Vintage, 1946).
26. See Abraham Lincoln, Speeches and Writings, 1832–1858: Speeches, Letters and Miscellaneous Writings—the Lincoln-Douglas Debates (New York: Library of America, 1989), 514–15, 677–78, 753. In these debates Douglas pointed out that Lincoln’s plan would, in effect, “put slavery in the course of ultimate extinction” “by starving them to death.”
27. Lincoln, Presidential Messages and Proclamations, 276–78. See also Patience Essahm, A House Divided: Slavery and Emancipation in Delaware, 1638–1865 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 153–85. Lincoln also had a December 1862 proposal to permit slavery to last until 1900 (Lincoln, Presidential Messages and Proclamations, 400–409) for compensated emancipations.
28. See Lincoln, Presidential Messages and Proclamations, 341, 353–57, 395–96.
29. Lincoln did argue that this later effect would not happen (ibid., 412–13).
30. The Freedmen’s Bureau in the United States and the Stipendiary Magistrates in the British colonies were both intended to aid freedpeople in the labor adjustment, but neither was very long lived and each was accused of functioning on behalf of the masters to control the ex-slaves.
31. Foner, Nothing but Freedom, 3, 46, states that only US ex-slaves were initially granted the right to vote, but this was effectively taken away thirty years later (and not really restored for another seventy years). Similarly, the education given to Southern ex-slaves was greater than that given in other nations.
32. Stanley L. Engerman, “Economic Adjustments to Emancipation in the United States and the British West Indies,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 13 (1982): 191–220.
33. The title of the book on indentured labor by Hugh Tinker: A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830–1920 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974). This term was frequently used at the time, and it has more recently been applied to other cases of coercion.
34. See Peter Blair Henry and Conrad Miller, “Institutions versus Politics: A Tale of Two Islands,” American Economic Review 99 (2009): 261–67. Barbados also had a greater extent of literacy than did the other Caribbean areas.
35. For a summary of this, see Engerman, “Economic Adjustments.” The US South was not the only postemancipation society in which racism had a significant impact. Black-white educational, social, and economic differences remained into the twentieth century in most of Latin America. For a description of the Cuban case, see Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886–1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
36. See Howard N. Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865–1890 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), for this argument.
37. See William J. Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).