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God’s Justice: The Sin of Slavery

Indians and all other peoples … should not be deprived of their liberty or of their possessions … and are not to be reduced to slavery, and whatever happens to the contrary is to be considered null and void.

—Pope Paul III (June 2, 1537)

Just as science arose only once, so, too, did effective moral opposition to slavery. Christian theology was essential to both.

This is not to deny that the early Christians condoned slavery. It is to recognize that of all the world’s religions, including the three great monotheisms, only in Christianity did the idea develop that slavery was sinful and must be abolished. Although it has been fashionable to deny it, antislavery doctrines began to appear in Christian theology soon after the decline of Rome and were accompanied by the eventual disappearance of slavery in all but the fringes of Christian Europe. When Europeans subsequently instituted slavery in the New World, they did so over strenuous papal opposition, a fact that was conveniently “lost” from history until recently. Finally, the abolition of New World slavery was initiated and achieved by Christian activists.

These are the principal themes to be developed in this chapter, but two other very important matters will be dealt with as well. First, the excesses of political correctness have all but erased awareness that slavery was once nearly universal to all societies able to afford it, and that only in the West did significant moral opposition ever arise and lead to abolition. Unfortunately, the typical discussion of slavery, especially in textbooks, gives the impression that it was a peculiarly European and especially American vice, and no notice is taken of the extent of slavery in times past, or of the substantial amount of slavery that continues in many parts of the non-Christian world.1 Indeed, among the several thousand books on slavery currently in print,2 there are virtually no scholarly general histories or comparative studies of substantial scope. Instead, nearly all of the studies are limited to slavery in the New World, and most are further restricted to one colony or state—many authors concerned themselves with only one town, county, or plantation. Consequently, to assemble this chapter, I was forced to do a great deal of synthesizing.

A second reason I wrote this chapter is that an amazingly influential group of historical revisionists has attempted, not only to deny that religion played the primary role in sustaining the antislavery movement, but to claim that it really played no role at all—that the religious rhetoric of the abolitionists was either “false consciousness” or a mask for economic self-interest.

What follows is an attempt to put the record straight. A sketch of the overall history of slavery will enable me to examine the connection between various religions and slavery in a variety of eras to show why it was that, except for several early Jewish sects, Christian theology was unique in eventually developing an abolitionist perspective. I then examine the social enactment of the theological opposition to slavery into effective social movements. As a revealing contrast, I outline the inability of the irreligious and antireligious philosophers and moralists of the “Enlightenment” to effectively oppose slavery. Finally, I dispatch claims that it was simple economics that killed slavery, and that all the talk about God and sin was irrelevant.

A BRIEF SURVEY OF SLAVERY

A slave is a human being who, in the eyes of the law and custom, is the possession, or chattel, of another human being or of a small group of human beings. Ownership of slaves entails absolute control, including the right to punish (often including the right to kill), to direct behavior, and to transfer ownership. The primary ways people become slaves are by birth, by capture, by being sold by parents or relatives, or by judicial proceeding—criminals and debtors have often been sentenced to slavery.

As will be seen, not only has slavery been a nearly universal feature of “civilization”; it was also common in a number of “aboriginal” societies that were sufficiently affluent to afford it—for example, slavery was very prevalent among the Northwest Indians.³ The existence of slavery is a function of human productivity. When the average person can produce sufficient surplus that it becomes profitable for someone to own him or her—when the costs of maintaining and controlling slaves are more than offset by their production—there will be a demand for slaves. In the plantation economies of the New World as in the ancient world, slaves were quite literally the fundamental tools of production. However, when some members of societies are sufficiently affluent, slavery can also exist primarily as a form of consumption, wherein slaves are utilized mainly in nonproductive roles as personal servants, concubines, entertainers, and even bodyguards. “Consumption slavery” was the typical form in Islam.

The word “slave” is a corruption of the word “Slav,” because Slavic peoples were a common source of European slaves (the Arabic word for slave is also a corruption of the Arabic word for Slav). That fact is of far more than etymological significance, causing us to recognize that often slavery has not involved racial differences. Historically, most slaves have been racially identical with their masters, although usually members of some other community or ethnic group. Thus most Chinese slaves were Chinese, and the rest were Asians. The ancient Athenians mainly enslaved Greeks from other city-states or “foreigners” of similar ethnic stock, and slaves among the North Coast Indians mostly came from nearby tribes—although after the arrival of Europeans in North America, a few of them ended as slaves to the Makah and the Mowachaht.4

Although slavery is far older than the pyramids, it has taken similar forms even in very remote societies, because there is an inherent logic to the conditions imposed on slaves.⁵ To display the basic aspects of slavery, it seems useful to begin this survey with an assessment of slavery among the tribes of the Northwest Coast of North America.

Slavery among the Northwest Coastal Indians

Generations of anthropologists dismissed slavery among the Northwest Coastal Indians as insignificant and, to the extent that it existed at all, quite unlike “real” slavery such as that of blacks in the American South. Franz Boas noted that “the tribes of the Pacific Coast are divided into a nobility, common people, and slaves,” but chose to omit slaves from his analyses “as they do not form part and parcel of the clan.”⁶ Edward Curtis allowed that slavery “was firmly established among the Coast Salish,” but denied that “the harrowing pictures which that word brings before our mind have [any] connection with the institution as it existed among the Indian tribes of this region.” He went on to claim that “they labored no more strenuously than the free members of the lower classes,” and that “in general it may be said that slaves were very well treated.”7 More recently, Morton Fried⁸ argued against applying the word “slave” in this context, it being more accurate to refer to these people as “captives,” for “the status called ‘slavery’ in the Northwest Coast cultures bears little resemblance to that associated with stratified societies.”⁹ Moreover, these “captives” were “few” in number and consisted mainly of “women and children.” Finally, Ronald and Evelyn Rohner had this to say about slavery in their lengthy monograph on the Kwakiutl: “At one time the Kwakiutl also had slaves who were usually war captives from other tribes. Slaves contributed little to the traditional social system except to give prestige to their owners; we give them no further attention.”¹⁰

These glib assurances dominated the conventional wisdom on the subject for so long and to such an extent that no mention of slavery was included in undergraduate textbooks¹¹ on North American Indians, or in The Smithsonian Book of North American Indians published in 1986. Fortunately, from earliest days some scholars told the truth about slavery among various Northwest Coastal tribes: that it was real slavery in all respects, imposing brutal conditions on a substantial number of people.¹² By 1990 even the Smithsonian was ready to acknowledge that the Northwest Indians had real slavery, and to disdain “the standard view … that slaves were merely prestige goods” and “lived as well as their masters.”¹³ Then, in 1997, came the definitive general study, Aboriginal Slavery on the Northwest Coast of North America, by Leland Donald. This impressive work documented the following facts.

As for being few in numbers, slaves made up a third of the population in some villages and ranged from 15 to 25 percent in many others. Rather than being of little or no economic significance, “their labor power was important in many subsistence activities,” and slave-trading played a substantial role in the economy of some tribes. In all of these Indian cultures, slavery was “regarded as shameful and degrading.” Rather than being limited to merely a few captives, slave status was hereditary—“the children of slaves were slaves”—and only very rarely did an owner free a slave. When Boas so imperiously dismissed slaves from his study because they did not belong to any clan, he failed to reveal that for this very reason slaves had no rights or privileges of any kind. They were often traded or given away. “Masters exercised complete physical control over their slaves, and could even kill them if they chose.” And they often did choose to kill the old and sick, as well as the rebellious. Finally, slaves were often killed as ritual sacrifices, especially during their master’s funeral to provide him with slaves in the next world and to exhibit his wealth to those remaining behind.14

So much, then, for efforts to exonerate the “noble savages” of the Northwest. Rather, as enumerated above, all of the fundamental features of slavery were here. As to the economic basis of slavery in these societies, in his classic study H. J. Nieboer argued with eloquence and force that it rested on high levels of natural abundance.¹⁵ Subsistence was very easy to come by along the Northwest Coast, where it required little effort to obtain more food than anyone could eat,¹⁶ where forests of immense cedar trees provided easily shaped logs for boats and dwellings, where the woods and ocean abounded in fur-bearing mammals, and where the climate was mild all year long. As a result of these conditions a slave could be highly productive, and some people could easily afford “consumption slaves.”

Greece and Rome: Slave Societies

Chapter 1 sketched how, beginning in about the fifteenth century, the Humanists longed for the glories of Greece and Rome. In asserting the superiority of classical times, most Humanists seemed indifferent to the fact that these were slave societies. Edward Gibbon did call being a slave in Rome “an unhappy condition” but suggested that “cruel treatment” was “almost justified by the great law of self-preservation” in the face of frequent slave “insurrections.”¹⁷ Even more revealing is that, in his thousands of pages on Roman history, Gibbon devoted only “a few decorous paragraphs to the subject of slavery.”¹⁸ Indeed, to the extent that they acknowledged the existence of slavery at all, most famous Humanists regarded it as the price that had to be paid for the splendor of Greco-Roman culture, a judgment with which Friedrich Engels concurred, writing in 1878 that “without slavery, no Greek state, no Greek art and science.”¹⁹ This view persisted among Humanists well into the twentieth century. The influential Joseph Vogt accepted ancient slavery as a necessary evil: “Slavery was essential to the [Greek] … devotion to spiritual considerations … Slavery and its attendant loss of humanity were part of the sacrifice which had to be paid for this achievement.”²⁰

It wasn’t only the Humanists who shrugged at ancient slavery. Aside from the remark that the cultural legacies of Greece were inseparable from slavery, Engels was far more concerned with recent times. Similarly, “Marx paid little attention to slavery as such” and virtually none to ancient slavery, other than to agree that it was an “indispensable instrument of production” in the Greco-Roman economies. For that reason Marxist historians ignored the topic too, “as acknowledged by Soviet ancient historians of the early 1960s.”21 As will be seen, the reason Marxists lacked interest in slavery per se is that they considered all labor done for others, including that done for pay, as “slavery”—except, of course, for those employed in socialist enterprises. In any event, study of ancient slavery has been very intermittent and often disfigured by “polemical ferocity.”²²

All early civilizations—including Sumer, Babylon, Assyria, Egypt, China, and India—involved extensive use of slave labor. But, as M. I. Finley explained, the Greeks and Romans achieved the first truly “slave societies,” becoming highly dependent upon “the large-scale employment of slave labour in both the countryside and the cities.”²³ It will be helpful to sketch the character and extent of classical slavery.

In Greece and Rome, slaves became the primary basis of production as well as a major form of consumption. The reliance on slaves was the result of frequent military victories that “flooded the slave markets of the Mediterranean” with captives.²⁴ The enclosures at the major Roman markets in Capusa and Delos were capable of handling 20,000 slaves a day and often ran at full capacity.²⁵ Because of the influx of slaves, small family farms were displaced by large plantations (the Romans called them latifundia) worked by huge crews of slaves.

Agricultural slaves were mainly men, and because their owners feared them (since many had been enemy soldiers), they were often kept chained even during work and spent the night in underground prisons. By current American standards, the latifundia were not very large—typically ranging from 60 to 150 acres, while the average American farm has nearly 500 acres (an acre is about the size of a football field). But the family farm of this era covered only about 5 acres. Farms were small because, for lack of machinery, Roman and Greek agriculture was extremely labor-intensive. It was estimated that a 60-acre olive orchard required 16 slaves plus additional help during harvest.²⁶ Over time, however, the latifundia got larger, many of them exceeding a thousand acres and some said to be as large a “kingdom.” Pliny the Elder (ca. 23–79) reported an estate that, at the start of the first century, had 4,117 slaves and 7,200 oxen.²⁷ In his famous treatise on farming (De agricultura) Cato the Elder (234–149 B.C.E.) advised that more careful attention be given oxen than slaves, since the latter were better able to care for themselves. Slaves should be well fed so as to maintain their strength, but when they became old or weak, they should be left to perish. Cato also advised against allowing slaves to have wives, because women and children were not worth their upkeep—it was far cheaper to buy a new male slave than to raise one from infancy.28 Thus the “great hordes” of slaves “dwindled and in large part perished without leaving descendants or trace.”²⁹

Slaves not only provided Greece and Rome with farm labor but did nearly all of the mining—Athens had more than thirty thousand at work in its silver mines, and Rome maintained hundreds of thousands in its many mines, scattered from Britain to Egypt. Mining consumed slaves at an appalling rate. The Roman historian Diodorus (?–21 B.C.E.) wrote that in the mines the slaves were “all in chains, all kept at work continuously day and night … there is no indulgence, no respite … [they are] kept at their labor by the lash, until overcome by hardships, they die in torments. Their misery is so great that … death is welcomed as a thing more desirable than life.”³⁰ As Mary L. Gordon put it in her brilliant essay on the nationality of Roman slaves, “the growth of the empire had a background of human suffering which is unimaginable in its degree and extent … [and] if such labour killed [slaves] prematurely, the Roman master of Republican times might say with the concise brutality of Tacitus, uile damnum: there were plenty more.”³¹

Greek and Roman slaves were also extensively employed in manufacturing and construction. Although there were no factories in this era, there were large shops devoted to making various goods: cooking utensils; armor, shields and weapons; textiles; and the like. And it was primarily slaves who built the famous public buildings such as the Coliseum and the Parthenon.

Of course, in construction, agriculture, and manufacturing, if not in the mines, there continued to be free persons working for hire as well as many who were self-employed. But the economies of the great Greek citystates and the Roman Empire rested on the backs of slaves to such an extent that the slaves involved in production also supported an enormous population of domestic slaves. Everyone kept domestic slaves. Even owners of small farms having only two or three acres kept a house slave or two, and each of the lowest-ranking soldiers in the Roman army owned at least one slave servant, and often more.³² It is thought that every household in Athens and Rome had slaves.³³ And as might be expected, “many owned slaves even when they could not afford them.”³⁴ The Greek sophist Libanius (314–393) lamented the severe poverty suffered by the four lecturers in his school—they lived in dreadful lodgings, were deeply in debt and could hardly afford to marry, and were barely able to support three slaves each.³⁵ When asked how many slaves he had, the Greek poet Xenophanes (ca. 560–478 B.C.E.) replied, “Two only and I can hardly feed them.”³⁶

Roman Slave Market. A small-time Roman slave dealer eats his lunch while waiting for someone to buy one or more of the seven slaves he is offering for sale—all wearing tags around their necks describing their better features. Clearly, this dealer specialized in “consumption” slaves for domestic service, as only one of his inventory is a male suited to perform hard labor. © Bettmann/CORBIS.

Domestic slaves were often “productive” vis-à-vis the household economy by doing baking, sewing, and weaving, but they were primarily a form of consumption, as demonstrated by the incredible overstaffing that was typical.37 Pliny the Younger (62–113) had five hundred slaves in his household, and many senators had more than a thousand, including some eunuchs to attend the women and “cripples” to amuse guests. Social standing was often measured by the number of slaves who accompanied a Roman in public.

In addition to domestic service, slaves provided most of the public entertainment in Rome. Nearly all actors were slaves (there were no actresses, men playing the female roles), and so were almost all of the musicians and prostitutes. In similar fashion, slaves provided the great majority of gladiators, thousands of whom died every year to entertain free Romans.38

Finally, these were slave societies in that at least during some periods, slaves outnumbered the free populations in Greece and Rome.

The Decline of Slavery in Christendom

Slavery began to decline in the latter days of the Roman Empire as a direct result of military weakness. No longer were victorious commanders dispatching throngs of prisoners to the slave markets. Since fertility was very low among Roman slaves, owing both to privation and to a lack of women, their numbers rapidly fell, and the shortage of slaves soon caused the conversion of agriculture and industry to reliance on free laborers. As Moses Finley concluded, soon “the world of late antiquity was no longer a slave society … slaves no longer dominated large-scale production in the countryside … [and] slaves no longer provided the bulk of the property revenues of the elites. Only in the domestic sphere did they remain predominant.”³⁹

The “fall” of Rome caused a further decrease in slavery, since it had never been a significant feature of Germanic societies.⁴⁰ Soon, “in most parts of Western Europe slavery declined and then virtually disappeared with the emergence of the feudal system,” persisting “only around the edges of medieval Europe—in Spain, in the vast Moslem world, in the Byzantine Empire, in Kievan Russia.”⁴¹ Although this claim would seem obvious, and is ratified by many celebrated historians (Bloch and Finley among them), some find it controversial for various reasons.

For one thing, it is very difficult to say just when slavery died out in Christian Europe (it having continued in pagan areas). As Adam Smith put it, “The time and manner … in which so important a revolution was brought about, is one of the most obscure points in modern history.”⁴² Most medieval historians have simply ducked the issue by ignoring the phenomenon. The words “slave” and “slavery” barely appear in the eight-volume Cambridge Medieval History (1911–1936). Norman Davies’s huge history of Europe (1996) offers two entries on “slavery” in the index, one fewer than given to Margaret Thatcher, and one more than given to “football” or “Tour de France.” The first of Davies’s entries on slavery is a one-and-a-half-page account of the slave revolt led by Spartacus in 73 B.C.E., the other an entry of similar length devoted to the first Portuguese purchase of slaves in Africa, followed by a severalparagraph summary of the Atlantic slave trade. Thus Davies not only ignored the decline of slavery but also had nothing to say about slavery in Greece and Rome, or about the European abolition movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries! Even histories with a far narrower scope often do no better. In his revised edition of The Civilization of the Middle Ages, Norman F. Cantor mentioned slavery merely to incorrectly assert the unwillingness of early Christianity to condemn slavery, and to implicate the Church in racist views of blacks.43 As for Joseph Dahmus’s A History of the Middle Ages, the words “slave” and “slavery” do not appear even once.⁴⁴

Worse yet, some historians who have concerned themselves with European slavery deny that it declined at all. Several justify their claim by citing slavery among the Norse and the Russians, failing to admit that these were not really European societies at the times in question, and by treating scattered, very local, instances of slavery—as in Venice—as somehow typical.⁴⁵ Still others reject the decline of slavery by claiming that nothing more took place than a linguistic shift wherein “slave” was replaced by “serf.” That is, rather than disappearing, those once called slaves simply came to be called serfs and existed by the millions throughout the medieval period; thus “transformed but still recognizable, slavery persisted in the West from ancient Rome to the encounter with the Americas.”⁴⁶ Here it is not history but historians who are playing word games. As Marc Bloch noted, the life of medieval serfs “had nothing in common with slavery.”⁴⁷ Serfs were not chattels; they had rights and a substantial degree of discretion. They married whom they wished, and their families were not subject to sale or dispersal. They paid rent and thus controlled their own time and the pace of their work, “which was generally slow and … individualistic.”⁴⁸ If, as in some places, serfs owed their lords a number of days of labor each year, the obligation was limited and more closely resembled “hired” labor than it did slavery. As Bloch put it, “The slave had been an ox in the stable, always under his master’s orders; the … serf was a worker who came on certain days and who left as soon as the job was finished.”⁴⁹ Consequently, although serfs were bound to a lord by extensive obligations, so, too, was their lord bound by obligations to a higher authority, and so on up the line, and all of these were sets of mutual obligations—that was the fundamental nature of feudalism.⁵⁰

While no one would argue that medieval peasants were free in the modern sense, they were not slaves, and that brutal institution had essentially disappeared from Europe. That was not the case in societies to the east or south.

Muslim Slavery

During most of the past century, slavery in Islam received as little attention as that among the Indians of the Northwest Coast. In his Slavery: A World History (1993) Milton Meltzer didn’t even mention Muslim slavery except as part of a brief discussion of current slavery at the very end of the book. It is as if, compared with the Atlantic slave trade, Islamic slavery was too insignificant to matter. In truth, Muslim slave-trading began many centuries before Europeans discovered the New World and carried at least as many Africans into bondage, and probably more, as were shipped across the Atlantic.51 Moreover, long after Western slavetrading had ended, “Arab dhows were [still] furtively moving out of Zanzibar, Mombasa, and other East African ports, following the familiar Indian Ocean routes for the consignment of ‘ebony’ … fated to be sold in the slave marts of Arabia, the Persian Gulf, the Ottoman Empire, and India.”⁵²

Islamic slavery was overwhelmingly of the “consumer” variety. Early experiments with the use of slave labor on plantations resulted in bloody slave rebellions, and the practice was discontinued—large peasant populations in the agricultural areas of Islam also discouraged the reliance on field slaves. There were some elite military units composed entirely of slaves, mainly whites of Christian origins obtained in childhood. But household servants made up the bulk of Islamic slaves, and a substantial number also became concubines. Consequently, “female slaves were in much greater demand than males,”⁵³ and very large numbers of male slaves, adult males as well as boys, had their penis and testicles cut off at the time they were captured or purchased. This resulted in extremely high mortality, but the financial losses entailed were more than offset by the premium price paid for eunuchs. Since all forms of mutilation were prohibited by Islamic law, various “nonbelievers” such as Coptic Christians and Jews were used to perform the actual surgery, but usually under the direct supervision of Islamic slave-traders.⁵⁴

Muslims had no particular preference for black slaves and for centuries maintained huge numbers of white slaves. By far the largest number, probably running to several million, were obtained by the devshirme, a forced tribute imposed on Europeans in the eastern Mediterranean. Every four years Ottoman officials passed through every subordinated Christian district and selected the most suitable children, who were taken away and raised as Muslims, and who served as highly prized slaves. In addition, Muslims rounded up large numbers of slaves in Slavic areas of Europe, as well as Europeans captured in battle or taken by pirates. In 1535 when Charles V of Spain invaded Tunis, he freed about 20,000 Christians held as slaves.55 At the Battle of Lepanto (1571), wherein Christian galleys under the command of Don Juan destroyed a huge Muslim fleet, 15,000 Christian galley slaves were freed, though a far greater number must have drowned.⁵⁶

True Bondage. This picture taken in 1900 of a young Moroccan merchant with his new African slave displays two primary features of Islamic slavery. First, it was mainly “consumption” slavery with a marked preference for attractive female slaves and for castrated males to guard them. Second, slavery did not officially end in Muslim nations until quite recently and still continues “unofficially” in some. © Michael Maslan Historic Photographs/CORBIS.

However, as Islamic forces were pushed out of Europe, Africa became the major source of Islamic slaves. By 1600, it is estimated that more than 7 million Africans had been transported to captivity in Islamic societies.57 During the next two centuries an additional 2 million were taken away.⁵⁸ At the start of the nineteenth century, some nations outlawed the Atlantic slave trade: Denmark in 1803, Great Britain in 1807, the United States in 1808, and Holland in 1818. However, the torrent of slaves into Muslim nations was unabated. The best estimate is that at least 1.2 million were transported between 1800 and 1900.⁵⁹ How many slaves Islamic nations imported during the twentieth century is unknown, but it was certainly not a trivial number—slavery was not legally abolished in Saudi Arabia until 1962, and not until 1981 in Mauritania.

It is important to recognize that these statistics mainly reflect the successful transporting of blacks from the interior of Africa to a destination within an Islamic nation. Hence the actual number of Africans taken into slavery was much larger because many died “during the long forced marches to the coast or on board the crowded” slave ships.⁶⁰ The best estimates are “that 20 to 40 percent of slaves died while being transported to the coast, another 3 to 10 percent died while waiting on the coast, and about 12 to 16 percent of those boarded on ships died during the voyage.”⁶¹ That adds up to losses of from 35 to 66 percent of those initially taken as slaves!

It is often claimed that Muslims gave their slaves much better care and treated them with far greater kindness than did slave-owners in the New World. Ronald Segal would have us believe that “the treatment of slaves in Islam was overall more benign,” and attributes this to the absence of “Western-style capitalism, with its effective subjugation of people to the priority of profit.”⁶² And M. A. Salahi claimed that “slaves in the Muslim state enjoyed all their human rights as fellow human beings to their masters. This was true only in the land of Islam.”63 One basis for this claim is that sometimes slaves, especially eunuchs, achieved positions of considerable power and influence. More fundamental is that a comparison between the typical slave in Islam and in the New World is a misleading comparison between house slaves and field slaves. Even so, it is easy to refute the claim that slaves were better off under Islam. Indeed, it is fully sufficient to note how few people of black ancestry one observes in Islamic nations, compared with the New World. Since approximately the same number of Africans arrived at each destination, if the life of slaves in “the land of Islam” was even comparable to that in the New World, then these nations ought to have very substantial black populations. They do not because slave fertility was extremely low in Islam, not only because of the frequent castration of black males, but because infanticide was routinely practiced on infants having any black ancestry.⁶⁴

The end of Islamic slaving (although it still continues on a minor scale) was the direct result of abolition in the West.⁶⁵ It was primarily the British navy that embargoed the Muslim slave ships, and British and French colonial troops who intercepted countless slave caravans in Africa, freeing the slaves and sometimes executing the slave-traders on the spot. The very recent abolition of slavery in some Islamic nations was undertaken entirely in response to intense Western pressure.

African Slavery

Just as Western historians long ignored Islamic slavery, there “has been a similar tendency to gloss over the widespread practice of slavery and the extensive traffic in slaves that were carried on in Africa itself.”⁶⁶ One reason for this neglect is that to focus attention on slavery other than in the New World is to risk nasty attacks on the premise that this somehow minimizes “white” guilt. But the primary reason is that very little has been written about anything in Africa. Sources are relatively slim, and so are potential book sales. But the fact remains that slavery and slave-trading were well established in Africa long before the arrival of Europeans, and that both the European and Islamic slave-buyers were dependent on black, African suppliers.⁶⁷

The enslavement of black Africans goes back at least to ancient Egypt. Wall paintings in the tombs of pharaohs depict some slaves as black, in very clear contrast with the Egyptians depicted in the same scenes. Nevertheless, it was slave-owning, not slave-trading, that was the most basic aspect of slavery in black Africa: “many if not all precolonial African societies had systems of slavery” involving the systematic and substantial utilization of slave labor.68 Hence the onset of slave sales, whether to Egyptian, Islamic, or, eventually, Christian traders, did not depend on innovation any more than it would require new institutions for a society to begin selling agricultural products or other commodities that had long been produced for domestic consumption. Nor is it the case, despite exhortations by radicals such as Walter Rodney, that slave-trading was forced upon Africans by Europeans.⁶⁹ It long predated all such contacts. Moreover, long after the export market for slaves largely disappeared, and against the efforts of colonial administrations, local slavery continued (and continues) in many parts of Africa. African slavery was an indigenous institution.

New World Slavery

In 1441, a small Portuguese ship carrying twelve black slaves landed in Lisbon. Africans were a novelty, and their arrival was greeted with great interest, but with no disapproval because, although slavery had long since disappeared in most of Europe, it had not done so in some areas along the Mediterranean. Slavery continued in those parts of Spain and Italy under Moorish (Muslim) rule, and it continued in some Christian areas, especially in Spain, where chronic warfare existed between Christians and Muslims. Christians taken in battle with the Moors were enslaved. Christians reciprocated by enslaving Moorish captives. In Italy, too, contact between Christians and Muslims sustained slavery—merchants in Venice actually sold Europeans (mainly Slavs) to the Moors.

The first shipload of black slaves was soon followed by others, and as black slaves began to appear farther north in Europe, a debate erupted as to the morality and legality of slavery. A consensus quickly developed that slavery was both sinful and illegal—Jean Bodin,⁷⁰ that mortal enemy of witches, thundered that slavery was “a thing most pernicious and dangerous,” and that having been cast off, it should not be revived. Bodin’s views were reasserted by Germain Fromageau, professor at the Sorbonne, who noted that “one can neither, in surety of conscience, buy nor sell Negroes, because in such commerce there is injustice.”⁷¹ The principle of “free soil” spread: that slaves who entered a free country were automatically free. That principle was firmly in place in France, Holland, and Belgium by the end of the seventeenth century.⁷² Nearly a century later, in 1761, the Portuguese enacted a similar law, and an English judge applied the principle to Britain in 1772.73 Although exceptions involving a single slave servant or two, especially when accompanying a foreign traveler, were sometimes overlooked, “beyond a scattering of servants in Spain and Portugal, there were very few true slaves left in Western Europe by the end of the sixteenth century.”⁷⁴

African Slave Traders. As shown in this lithograph of a slave caravan crossing the plains of Africa, black Africans were usually taken into captivity by other black Africans. Slave-trading was a lucrative business in Africa for many centuries before there was any contact with Europeans. © Bettmann/CORBIS.

Meanwhile, Columbus had sailed to a New World. Suddenly, Portugal and Spain were involved in extensive efforts to control, exploit, and develop their interests in this enormous new region. Doing so required a labor force. Attempts to exploit the indigenous peoples to work plantations or mines were quite unsuccessful. Not only were Indian captives rebellious and obdurate; communicable diseases that Europeans brought with them—especially measles and smallpox—resulted in massive and deadly epidemics, which rapidly reduced the native American populations. In similar fashion, efforts to use workers imported from Europe failed, especially in the West Indies and Brazil, for lack of immunity to the chronic diseases of the tropics. It wasn’t long before European colonizers recognized that a suitable labor force, having substantial immunity to tropical diseases, could be purchased, cheaply, on the west coast of Africa.75

Europeans seldom participated in slave raids into the African interior. Had that been necessary, it might have greatly minimized the use of black slaves in the new colonies. But the exportation of African slaves had been going on for many centuries, and African dealers were well organized and prepared to offer a seemingly endless supply of prime laborers at a cheap price. To earn huge profits, all the Europeans needed to do was transport them from the coastal African slave centers to the slave markets in the colonies. Usually, the price of slaves in the West Indies was five to six times the going rate in African ports. Between 1638 and 1702, slave prices in West Africa averaged 3.8 British pounds,⁷⁶ and the price paid upon arrival in British colonies averaged 21.3 pounds—these prices fluctuated only very slightly over the period.⁷⁷ Of course, there were many costs to be subtracted, including the not infrequent loss of an entire ship and its cargo, but most slave merchants expected a profit of 200 to 300 percent in a period of three to four months.⁷⁸

Given an almost inexhaustible demand for slaves in the New World, little wonder that slave ships crowded the Atlantic. From the beginning in about 1510, until the very end when Cuba abolished the slave trade in 1868, approximately 10 million African slaves reached the New World slave markets, meaning that at least 15 million (and probably more) began the journey from the African interior. Philip Curtin calculated that of the 10 million who survived the trip, about 400,000 went to British North America, 3.6 million went to Brazil, 1.6 million went to Spanish colonies, and the remaining 3.8 million were imported by the British, French, Dutch, and Danish colonies in the Caribbean.⁷⁹

Death Ship. This famous lithograph shows a typical “packing plan” for maximum utilization of the lower deck of a slave transport. At the time a physician criticized this plan, not merely because it forced slaves to lie in their own waste, but because so many died from the lack of oxygen in the foul air. © Bettmann/CORBIS.

In the New World, slaves overwhelmingly were used as production laborers, mainly on large plantations growing major cash crops, although until 1800 slaves in Spanish areas were mainly used in mining, construction, and general farming. Hence, unlike the Islamic market, in the New World males commanded a far higher price than females, and there was no market for eunuchs. Despite the gender price difference, however, the slave cargoes included substantial numbers of females, and in some colonies slaves were permitted to form “marital” unions, with the result that slave fertility was far higher in parts of the New World than in Islam or the nations of antiquity.

It is difficult to generalize about the conditions imposed on slaves in the New World because there was so much variation across the major slave regions, not only in economics, law, and custom, but also in climate, geography, and endemic diseases. Consequently, I will briefly summarize slavery in the Caribbean, Brazil, and North America.

CARIBBEAN SLAVERY

The territory included in the “Caribbean region” consists of islands such as Cuba, Puerto Rico, Barbados, Martinique, Saint Domingue,80 Bermuda, the Bahamas, and Jamaica, as well as Guyana, Surinam, and Venezuela on the South American coast. These possessions were divided among the Spanish, British, French, Dutch, and Danes. Most were extreme slave societies, in that slaves constituted the overwhelming majority of the populations. Each had a four-tier system of stratification. At the top was the white elite: plantation owners, managers, merchants, bankers, government officials, and military officers. Beneath them were “poor whites” including overseers, slave-drivers, sailors, and soldiers. Next down the status system were freed slaves and free people of mixed race, the “free coloreds” (there were few persons of either kind in the British colonies). Beneath these three rather small tiers lay the huge mass of slaves.

The basis for the extreme imbalance between slaves and free residents in the Caribbean was that, with exceptions to be noted, these were purely plantation economies, specializing in labor-intensive cash crops: primarily sugar, but with some plantations devoted to rice, indigo, cacao, coffee, cotton, and tobacco. The primacy of sugar had many serious consequences.⁸¹ First of all, it generated very large plantations, as is reflected in the fact that most Caribbean slave-owners had more than 150 slaves (in contrast with North America, where more than 90 percent of slave-owners had fewer than 50). Second, it lent itself to the use of labor gangs of 10 to 20 slaves, each controlled by a driver who was ready to whip laggards. Third, partly because of the intensity of gang labor, and partly because of the environmental conditions suitable for sugarcane (low, swampy areas), mortality was extraordinarily high—in Jamaica the death rate on sugar plantations was 50 percent higher than on coffee plantations.⁸² Fourth, a constant and substantial flow of new slaves was necessary since, in addition to high mortality, fertility was well below normal.

Beyond these general conditions, there were very substantial differences in the treatment of slaves in the Caribbean, depending on the nationality of the rulers.

In the French colonies the condition of slaves was carefully specified in the Code Noir (Black Code) formulated by Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683), Louis XIV’s minister of finance. In drawing up the code, finally promulgated in 1685, Colbert was assisted and greatly influenced by leading French Churchmen. Too many historians have noted only Article 3, which prohibited “any public exercise of a religion other than” Roman Catholicism, using it as an opportunity to rail against Catholic “intolerance.” Not one of them mentioned that public worship by Roman Catholics was prohibited in British colonies (other than Maryland) at this same time. More important, however, is that these historians ignored the many articles of the code that expanded on the premise that a slave is “a being of God.” It was in this spirit that the code required owners to baptize their slaves, provide them with religious instruction, and allow them the sacrament of holy matrimony, which, in turn, became the basis for prohibiting the selling of family members separately. Slaves were also exempted from work on Sundays and holy days (from midnight to midnight), with masters being subject to fines or even to the confiscation of their slaves for violating this provision. Other articles specified minimum amounts of food and clothing that masters must provide, and ordered that the disabled and elderly must be properly cared for, including their hospitalization.

It is surely no surprise that Article 12 prohibited slaves from carrying guns or clubs, or that Article 13 outlawed “slaves belonging to different masters to gather in a crowd.” Article 38, which forbade masters to torture their slaves, allowed that they might be whipped. As will be seen, these articles were seized upon by some historians who misrepresented them as the entire Code Noir, in an effort to claim that it was devoted solely to “the protection of whites.” Peter Gay wrote that the Code was “extraordinarily severe—toward the slave, of course.”83 For this fraud to be perpetrated, it is necessary that there be no mention, not only of the many other articles already noted, but of Article 39, which ordered officers of justice “to proceed criminally against the masters and overseers who will have killed their slaves or mutilated them.”

It is fashionable to dismiss the Code Noir on grounds that often it wasn’t fully observed or enforced—David Brion Davis complained that “there is apparently no record of a French master being executed for killing a slave.”⁸⁴ It strikes me as significant that Davis failed to convey the entire sentence he cited as his source, which reads, “Masters maltreating or killing slaves were liable to prosecution, and there are records of cases having been brought against them, although no master appears to have suffered the death penalty for killing a slave.”⁸⁵ That puts the issue of enforcement in a rather different light, does it not? Undoubtedly the Code Noir was often violated. And undoubtedly masters enjoyed many advantages when the code was interpreted vis-à-vis their actions. But it is equally obvious that legal codes do set standards, and an action is far less likely to occur when explicitly prohibited by law than when left entirely as a matter of choice—there is, after all, a chance of being prosecuted, as some French slave-owners discovered. Granted that the observance of the Code Noir varied from one colony to another, and from time to time, but that it did generally mitigate the situation of slaves in most French colonies will be clear in several subsequent discussions.

Surprisingly perhaps, the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean did not become true slave societies or develop an extensive system of plantation agriculture until the nineteenth century; as a result, prior to that time there were relatively fewer slaves in Spanish America. The shift to plantations began in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). Assessing the weakness of their Caribbean colonies, the Spanish court decided to “emulate other European nations’ success with slave plantation development in the Caribbean.”86 So the Spanish formed large coffee and sugar plantations in Cuba, Santo Domingo, and Puerto Rico. These plantations required an immense expansion of slavery; nearly a million slaves were imported from Africa during the first half of the nineteenth century, after which the Atlantic slave trade was fully suppressed by international treaties and by the British navy (although slaves continued to be smuggled into Cuba until 1867).

As in French colonies, the Spanish treatment of slaves was greatly influenced by Catholic concerns, but with the effect of far greater leniency. Indeed, toward the end of the eighteenth century, Spain adopted the Código Negro Español (Spanish Black Code), based on a thirteenth-century Castilian code formulated to set standards for the treatment of enslaved Moorish prisoners of war. The Código not only included most of the provisions of the French Code Noir; it was far more liberal in that it guaranteed slaves the right to own property and to purchase their freedom. Specifically, slaves were enabled to petition the courts “to have themselves appraised and to purchase themselves from even unwilling masters or mistresses at their judicially appraised market value.”⁸⁷ This was greatly facilitated by terms of the code that gave slaves the right to work for themselves on their days off, including the eighty-seven⁸⁸ days a year they were at liberty because of not having to work for their owners on Sundays and holy days. In rural areas, slaves were typically permitted to sell the produce raised in their own gardens and keep the proceeds.⁸⁹ In contrast, in its original version the Code Noir placed serious impediments on manumission, even requiring owners to obtain permission from the government—although “a customary right of self-purchase [soon] began to gain recognition in the French [colonies],”90 and this eventually led to modification of the code.⁹¹

Many skeptics have spurned the rights given by the Código as merely “symbolic.” But how then to account for the fact that in 1817 there were 114,058 free blacks in Cuba alone, many times more than in all of the British West Indies?⁹² Or that Spanish slaves married (in church) at almost the same rate as whites? As for enforcement of the Código, just as the Church had played the major role in its formulation, bishops held frequent synods to “deal with local conditions,” during which they “always legislated in favor of the fullest freedom and rights [for slaves] that were permissible” under the Código. Meanwhile, “the lower clergy, especially at the parish level, effectively carried this law into practice.”⁹³ They did this, not only by maintaining close contacts with their black parishioners, but by imposing religious definitions on many aspects of the master-slave relationship. Not only were newborn slaves baptized in formal church services that emphasized their “humanity”; church weddings were held for slave couples, and even manumission was made into a religious ceremony held in church.⁹⁴

In contrast, the British did not baptize slaves or seek their conversion to Christianity—indeed, several colonial assemblies imposed heavy fines on Quakers for doing so.⁹⁵ Moreover, the British had no tradition of slave codes to restrain master-slave relations. In his brutal attack on all non-Marxist historians of slavery, Marvin Harris found it “quite obscure” why this “legal lacuna” could matter “for the course run by slavery.”⁹⁶ The answer should have been obvious even to so polemical a Marxist. No slave code existed, and Parliament declined to formulate one; thus it was left to the British colonies to enact their own. Since the colonies were fully under the control of a slave-owning “ruling class” (the Church of England did not even pretend to be concerned), the laws enacted were a planter’s dream and a slave’s nightmare.

In 1661 the plantation owners of Barbados adopted an “Act for the Better Ordering of Slaves.” It was soon copied in other British colonies—in Jamaica in 1664, South Carolina in 1696, and Antigua in 1702⁹⁷—and those few historians who mention it sometimes use the designation Code of Barbados or Act of Barbados. Whatever its title, this code was at least as brutal as any formulated by the Romans.⁹⁸ It characterized black slaves as “heathenish, brutish, and an uncertaine, dangerous kinde of people.”99 Masters had the right to “apply unlimited force to compel labor,” without penalty, even if this resulted in maiming or death.¹⁰⁰ Thus while the code imposed a fine for “wantonly” killing a slave, this did not apply when slaves were punished for “cause,” no matter how insignificant their offense. Consistent with the principle that slaves were private property, the fine was substantially larger if someone wantonly killed someone else’s slave.¹⁰¹ Slaves were specifically denied jury trials: “[B]eing Brutish Slaves, [they] deserve not, from the Baseness of their condition, to be tried by … twelve men.”¹⁰² However, in the instance of “any offense worthy of Death” the master ought to “bring the culprit before a justice of the peace and two neighbors for formal sentencing.”¹⁰³ The code also specified that overseers must keep slaves under very close surveillance, including searching their cabins at least twice a month for stolen goods and contraband such as clubs. Slaves were not allowed to marry, and masters were prohibited from setting a slave free, except by a special act of the legislature. This legal restriction on manumission was soon replaced with a tax so heavy as to virtually prohibit it. In the Northern Leeward Islands an owner was required to pay five hundred pounds to the public treasury to free a slave, which was many times a slave’s purchase price.¹⁰⁴ A similar tax was imposed on manumission by the legislators on St. Christopher in 1802, with the declared intent of preventing increases in the number of “free Negros,” whom they regarded as a “great inconvenience.”¹⁰⁵ The planters on Barbados were so concerned to minimize the number of free blacks that they placed an even heavier tax on the freeing of a female slave.

When the code was enacted, the governor of Barbados feared that it might “shock” officials back in England when he sent the document home for review by the government. To his surprise it was quickly approved by the Lords of Trade, who noted that black slaves are “a brutish sort of people and [properly] reckoned as goods and chattels.”¹⁰⁶

Keep in mind that the Code of Barbados was adopted in part to moderate treatment of slaves in the British colonies! And much moderation was needed. For example, a report from the colony of Nevis in 1675 referred to “severall evill minded persons” who had killed “many” black slaves “frivolously.” On Montserrat during the 1690s, a runaway slave was drawn and quartered and “his quarters put up in Publicque places as usual.”¹⁰⁷ A visitor to Jamaica during the late 1680s cataloged a whole series of extreme punishments including impaling slaves on stakes up their anus and then slowly burning them alive.¹⁰⁸ In practice, British slave masters were usually rather less brutal than the law allowed, but still most of them treated their slaves far more harshly than was the norm in Catholic colonies.

Thus contrary to all the usual allegations made about “cruel” Spaniards, it was Spain that sustained the most humane slave laws, followed by the French, with the British guilty of enacting by far the most brutal practices into law. As for slave laws not mattering, variations in the severity of legal codes are matched by variations in mortality: slaves had substantially higher death rates in the English colonies than in the Spanish colonies, with the French colonies falling in between the two.109

From early times, observers of New World slavery agreed that the Spanish and Portuguese were “undoubtedly the best masters of slaves,” as Wadström put it in 1794, and that the English were the worst.¹¹⁰ Sir Harry Johnston noted that the Portuguese and Brazilians “rival the Spanish for first place in the list of humane slave-holding nations … Slavery under the flag … of Spain was not a condition without hope, a life in hell, as it was for the most part in the British West Indies.”¹¹¹ And, of course, Frank Tannenbaum, who is often credited¹¹² with initiating comparative studies of New World slavery, developed this view in systematic detail in Slave and Citizen.¹¹³ This classic study, first published in 1946, was long regarded as the definitive demonstration of the marked contrasts between Spanish and British slavery, “not merely in their effect upon the slave, but even more significantly upon the place and moral status of the freed men.”¹¹⁴ Subsequently, Tannenbaum’s judgment was ratified by Stanley M. Elkins, who wrote that in Catholic colonies “the very tension and balance among three kinds of organizational concerns—church, crown, and plantation agriculture—prevented slavery from being carried by the planting class to its ultimate logic.”¹¹⁵ Many other distinguished scholars have expressed similar views.¹¹⁶

Of course, revisionists were soon hard at work to show that slaves were certainly no better off under the Spanish or in Brazil, and perhaps they were even worse off. No revisionist was louder than Marvin Harris,¹¹⁷ or more given to “savage polemical excursions.”¹¹⁸ Harris condemned all notions that aspects of “culture” such as laws or ideals can affect anything, demanding that all historical analysis must be entirely “materialist.” He believed it follows that since only class and modes of production can make any difference, the French and the Spanish slaves must have suffered as greatly as did those owned by the English. Although expressing themselves with much less venom, since the late 1950s Brazilian Marxist historians have also attacked claims that slaves were better off under the Portuguese and the Spanish, which is a complete reversal of the views of earlier Brazilian historians.119

The case against the moderating effects of legal and religious culture gained considerable respectability when it was endorsed by David Brion Davis in his Pulitzer Prize–winning The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966). Davis condemned as “idealized models” all claims that conditions of servitude were milder in Catholic areas, equating such claims with those made by “Southern apologists” for slavery. He argued instead that “Negro bondage was a single phenomenon, or Gestalt, whose variations were less significant than underlying patterns of unity.”¹²⁰ This pronouncement was followed by pages of examples showing “good” masters in what were alleged to have been “bad” places, and vice versa, and by claims that more humane slave laws were of no consequence owing to dishonest magistrates and sadistic, greedy masters. Finally, Davis concluded that for “lack of detailed statistical information,” and because the subject is “too complex,” it is impossible “to assume that the treatment of slaves was substantially better in Latin America than in the British colonies, taken as a whole.”¹²¹

Nowhere else did Davis express much interest in statistics, and for him to deny the existence of cultural effects was entirely out of keeping with his whole approach—the remainder of his book is a very traditional history of ideas. Indeed, Moses Finley correctly complained that Davis often erred because he was too much the historian of ideas, too little interested in actions and events, and too given to “remaining in the realm of abstractions.”¹²² I am inclined to attribute Davis’s uncharacteristic venture out of the realm of ideas to what has come to be called “political correctness.” In the highly charged and polemical context of the 1960s, Davis seems to have been very concerned to avoid the accusations of being “soft” on slavery that were so often heaped upon those who suggested that some slave systems had been less brutal than others—as Fogel and Engerman¹²³ were soon to discover. The safe position was to assert that slavery was equally inhumane in all of its manifestations. Davis was certainly not alone in opting for safety; it was very typical of the era—as Finley recounted so eloquently.¹²⁴

Another example of this tactic can be found in the distinguished study of the British colonies by Richard S. Dunn, wherein he denied that “Protestant English slavery was more vicious and traumatic than Catholic Spanish and Portuguese slavery.” He justified this claim by making an obviously specious comparison, not to the British Caribbean, but to the relatively milder treatment of slaves by the “Protestant English tobacco planters of Virginia or the Protestant English rice planters of Carolina.”125 For many scholars, of course, these are the only comparisons of interest, since nothing is more central to their concerns than slavery in the American South. Even so, when proper comparisons are made among slaves engaged in the same kind of labor (such as growing and processing sugar), in the same physical environments, and where slave-owners (unlike those in the American South) were free from abolitionist pressures, slaves owned by the “Protestant English” were worse off by far.

I have devoted so much attention to this matter only because, as everyone agrees, religion played a far more prominent role in the circumstances of slaves in the Catholic colonies than where Protestants prevailed. To embrace the claim that these religious differences, and the legal differences they inspired, were irrelevant to what actually went on is not only to reject the thesis of this chapter but to ignore common sense.

The Dutch played a leading role, second only to the British, in the Atlantic slave trade.¹²⁶ However, Dutch planters failed repeatedly in their efforts to run slave plantations. They acquired Surinam from the British in a trade for New Amsterdam, soon renamed New York. But through a series of misjudgments, and hobbled by a high and constant rate of escape by slaves who fled to “maroon” strongholds in the jungle, the Dutch planters never produced a positive balance of trade and experienced frequent bankruptcies. Observers at the time ranked the Dutch with the British as the “worst” slave masters.¹²⁷ Of course, the Dutch were also Protestants and like the British allowed the planters to devise their own slave code.

As for the Danes, only on St. Croix did they manage to establish largescale sugar plantations by 1750, but by then the end of slave-trading was in sight—Denmark abolished slave-trading in 1803.¹²⁸

BRAZIL

The Portuguese colony of Brazil was the largest and longest-lived slave society in the New World.¹²⁹ Initially, the slaves were native Indians. However, Indian slaves could be captured only by expensive and risky expeditions into the wilderness; the captives were very difficult to control (and often escaped back into the jungle) and suffered very high mortality rates from European diseases. Moreover, Jesuit and Dominican missionaries hotly and effectively opposed the enslavement of Indians, citing papal bulls on the matter (of this, more later). So in 1570 the Portuguese Crown prohibited the enslavement of Indians unless they were captured in a “just war.” The Roman Catholic Church was quick to note that attacks on Indians were not just wars. In addition, the Church condemned enslavement of Indians “whether by just or unjust war,” as Pope Gregory XIV (1590 to 1591) put it in his bull Cum sicuti of 1591.130 All of these factors caused the Portuguese to turn to Africa for slave laborers, with the added inducement that the African coast is far closer to the coast of Brazil than to any other point in the Western Hemisphere.

From the middle of the sixteenth century until the abolition of slavery in 1888, the Brazilians imported at least 3.6 million slaves from Africa.¹³¹ In addition to very high mortality, very low fertility necessitated this massive importation. Low fertility was the result of a number of factors, including the importation of far more males than females (about 3.2 to 1), brutal living conditions, the harsh climate, and extremely high infant mortality.¹³² An unanticipated result of the continuing influx of new slaves from Africa was to reinforce the survival of African culture, which, in turn, shaped “Brazilian culture in general, as is evident in its cuisine, language, music, religion, and many other aspects of life.”¹³³

Slavery took many curious twists in Brazil. While large numbers of slaves toiled in work gangs on the plantations, many others lived in Brazil’s rapidly growing cities—in 1849 Rio de Janeiro had a population of about 200,000, nearly half of whom were slaves, and many others were ex-slaves. But it was often hard to tell the two groups apart—not because ex-slaves lacked freedom, but because many slaves were so unsupervised as to be able to hire themselves out for wages, which was the common source of sums needed to purchase their freedom.¹³⁴ Urban slaves also formed their own religious confraternities and took a very visible and active part in public festivities such as Carnival.¹³⁵ Unlike the Caribbean colonies, where most slaves were acquired from new overseas shipments, in Brazil there was a very substantial amount of internal slave-trading, and the center of the slave population shifted over time, moving from sugar plantations in northeastern Brazil to coffee-growing areas in the south-central region.¹³⁶

Modern writers are puzzled by laws governing slavery in Brazil, which is hardly surprising since it appears that the Brazilians were quite confused as well. What can be distilled from various bits and pieces of legislation and court decisions are practices apparently influenced by Roman law and the Código Negro Español, but often without any specific mention in statutes. For example, the Catholic Church recognized slave marriages as valid, and this was “tacitly accepted in Brazil” but was not recognized “in the civil law.” However, the law did acknowledge that an “owner could not sell or alienate a slave in such as way that he or she could not continue the matrimonial life.”137 In general, slaves were permitted to keep a portion of any outside income they gained, and it was common for slaves to buy their freedom, but there were no legal guarantees, and there were no legal formalities involved in manumission. The law did authorize a slave to request to be sold if a master was vicious, yet mutilation, branding, and severe beatings were within the law. Perhaps this legal muddle is partly responsible for the fact that some masters may have felt free to do as they wished—it is claimed that some socially prominent Brazilian planters may have maintained torture chambers on their estates.¹³⁸ In any event, there has been a considerable dispute as to whether, compared with other colonies, slaves were treated better or worse in Brazil.¹³⁹ As already mentioned vis-à-vis the Spanish colonies, the conclusions drawn depend upon which comparisons one makes. Slaves in Brazil were probably treated considerably better than in the British Caribbean colonies, and they probably fared worse than slaves in the Spanish colonies, and possibly no better than slaves in North America.

NORTH AMERICA

Remarkably few slaves were brought to North America, given the extent of the Southern plantation system at its height and the millions of Americans of African descent. The first black slaves arrived in North America in 1626 when the Dutch landed a small shipment on Manhattan Island. From then until 1808, when it became illegal to import slaves, a total of about 400,000 slaves entered the country. In contrast, an estimated 340,000 slaves were imported by English planters in Barbados, a tiny island having an area of only 166 square miles, or barely a fourth the size of the median American county. Barbados could absorb such a huge number of slaves only because its appalling slave mortality rate was approximately equal to the rate of imports.¹⁴⁰ As another comparison, between 1600 and 1808 an estimated 750,000 slaves were imported by the English colony of Jamaica–at the end of which time there were fewer than half that many persons of African origins or descent alive in the colony.¹⁴¹

Thus the most striking feature of slavery in the United States was the rapid, natural population growth. The U.S. Census of 1790, taken before the slave ships stopped debarking, counted 694,224 slaves in America, far more than the total number that were eventually imported. Seventy years later, the Census of 1860 counted 3,950,546 slaves, equally divided between males and females, as well as 482,122 free blacks, for a total eleven times greater than the number brought over from Africa. This is in dramatic contrast with the demography of slavery elsewhere. Unfortunately, it has also often been a very controversial feature of American slavery, because it has been interpreted to mean that the fundamental conditions of slave life in the American South were significantly more favorable than those in other times and places. As noted, some claim that it is immoral and implicitly racist to suggest that there can be degrees in the treatment of slaves, since slavery is an absolute evil. But any serious comparative history must confront demographic variations as dramatic as these. American slave-owners probably punished their slaves more severely than did the Spanish or the French, but the health of slaves in the American South benefited greatly from a far more moderate climate and the relative absence of the tropical diseases that beset the Caribbean. Moreover, a whole series of careful and well-documented studies reveal that American slave-owners regarded their slaves as very valuable assets and fed, sheltered, dressed, and worked them accordingly—slave diets in the United States were probably superior to those of the average peasant in most European nations at the time.142 One need not make any apologies for Southern slave masters to admit that by selfishly pursuing their economic interests, they benefited their chattels.

A major factor in the fundamental shape of American slavery is that it was not based on sugar plantations.¹⁴³ In the first part of the eighteenth century, the majority of American slaves were involved in general farming, crafts, and domestic services, while tobacco plantations engaged about a third, and the rest of the plantation slaves grew rice and indigo. Cotton plantations did not become of major importance until about 1800 with the introduction of the cotton gin. Sugar plantations never employed more than 5 percent of American slaves, and that mainly late, and in Louisiana. In comparison with sugar, other crops were not nearly so labor-intensive. Consequently, the demand for slaves was not rapacious; as a result of this, combined with the rapid natural increase of the American slave population, imports were minimized.

Together, these factors had many very significant consequences. First, early on American slaves were overwhelmingly native born: by the 1740s more than half of American slaves were native born; by 1780 about 80 percent of slaves were born here, and many had been here for many generations. In contrast, as late as 1800 about a quarter of the slaves in Jamaica had arrived from Africa during the previous ten years! Second, nearly all American slaves served on small units. The median tobacco plantation had fewer than twenty slaves, and even the larger cotton plantations were small by Caribbean and Brazilian standards, the median spread having only thirty-five slaves. Third, rather than being isolated in large work gangs, American slaves usually had close, constant contact with whites. This was further sustained by the fact that while slaves made up the vast majority of the population of the Caribbean slave societies, even in the Deep South they remained a minority. Fourth, this high level of contact with whites over such an extended period resulted in American slaves’ becoming far more fully assimilated into “European” culture—hence the present efforts to recover an African heritage, something that has not occurred in the Caribbean or Latin America.

Many readers will be surprised that the first black slaves brought to America came to New Amsterdam on Dutch ships, and that slavery was not initially restricted to the South. As shown in Table 4.1, in 1790 there were slaves in every state except Massachusetts and Maine, where, owing to their Puritan heritage, slavery was already illegal. While the slave population was concentrated in Southern states, there were significant numbers in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. Most of the slaves in these Northern states were “consumption slaves,” used as personal servants.

The American slave plantations began as part of the British colonial system and were influenced by the Code of Barbados rather than by the Code Noir or the Código Negro Español. However, unlike the British planters in the Caribbean, the Southern planters soon adopted many “reforms” in an effort to forestall the mounting pressure from Northern abolitionists, especially following independence. Thus, for example, Southern courts and legislatures did enact laws against killing slaves. In 1791, North Carolina defined killing a slave as “murder” and subject to pertinent statutes against that crime; in 1816 Georgia held that killing or maiming a slave was the full equivalent of killing or maiming a white person.¹⁴⁴

In general, however, most Southern courts defined slaves as “real estate,” and a few treated them simply as “personal property.”¹⁴⁵ This meant that slaves could be inherited, traded, or sold at will, without regard for such concerns as not separating married couples or parents from children. However, increasingly, Southern courts held that slaves “were property with souls,” and evolved principles concerning the “reciprocal duties of slaves and masters and enforced them at law.” Hence masters “were obligated to feed, clothe, and provide medical care for slaves, and in many slave jurisdictions they had to provide counsel for slaves on trial for crimes.”¹⁴⁶ In a few Southern cities slaves were allowed to hire themselves out (paying a fee to their masters), and sometimes they pursued highly skilled trades. But the courts always upheld the primacy of property rights vis-à-vis slaves.

TABLE 4.1
Slavery in America, 1790

	Number of Slaves	Percent of Population
1. Virginia	292,627	39.1
2. South Carolina	107,094	43.0
3. Maryland	103,036	32.2
4. North Carolina	100,783	25.6
5. Georgia	29,264	35.5
6. New York	21,193	6.3
7. Kentuckya	12,430	16.8
8. New Jersey	11,423	6.2
9. Delaware	8,887	15.1
10. Pennsylvania	3,707	0.9
11. Connecticut	2,648	1.2
12. New Hampshire	157	0.1
13. Vermont	17	0.0
14. Maine	0	0.0
15. Massachusetts	0	0.0
Total	694,224b	17.7

Source: U.S. Census, 1790.

a Still a territory, admitted to statehood in 1792.

b Total includes 958 slaves in territories and the newly founded District of Columbia.

Moreover, Southerners were as apt as were whites in the British Caribbean to regard “free blacks” as undesirable. Thus the U.S. Census of 1860 reported that in 1849, of more than 3.2 million slaves, only 1,467 had been set free during the year, and of the more than 3.9 million slaves in the nation in 1859, 3,018 were set free that year. Indeed, statistics on free blacks present an opportunity for a “natural experiment” to assess whether and to what extent the Code Noir and the Código Negro Español made a difference in the lives of slaves. This involves comparing “Catholic” Louisiana with the rest of the “Protestant” South.

Louisiana came under the Code Noir in 1724 as the French consolidated their administration. When control of Louisiana shifted to Spain in 1769, the circumstances of slaves were greatly improved owing to the liberal provisions of the Código Negro Español concerning the right of slaves to own property and to purchase their freedom. France regained Louisiana in 1802 and sold it to the United States the next year, but by then Catholic norms concerning slavery and the treatment of free blacks were deeply rooted. This is evident in the fact that the U.S. Census of 1830 found that a far higher percentage of the blacks in Louisiana were free (13.2 percent) than in any other slave state. The contrast is especially sharp in comparison to neighboring states having similar plantation economies: Alabama (1.3 percent), Mississippi (0.8 percent), and Georgia (1.1 percent).

However, the contrast between New Orleans and other major cities of the South is even more revealing, as shown in Table 4.2.¹⁴⁷ In New Orleans, more than four of ten black residents were free! Even in Richmond and Norfolk, blacks were far less likely to be free, and these cities are not located in the Deep South. In the Carolina cities the odds of a black’s being free varied from 1:10 to 1:20. Elsewhere, very few blacks had gained their freedom. Can such immense differences stem from anything other than the effects of Catholic codes and attitudes toward slavery? Rather than shedding crocodile tears over the lack of “detailed statistical information” to reveal whether Catholic slave codes made a difference, David Brion Davis might better have done the simple calculations shown in Table 4.2—the data have been available for about 170 years.

In keeping with their far greater prevalence, free blacks (as well as slaves) played remarkably prominent roles in the cultural and economic life of New Orleans, and race was often far from decisive in social activities.¹⁴⁸ Indeed, as revealed in nineteenth-century U.S. Census enumerations, although there were black slave-owners in some other parts of the South, they were far more common in New Orleans, and only in Louisiana were there large, black-owned plantations having many slaves.¹⁴⁹ In contrast, elsewhere in America—even in the nonslave states—free blacks were denied many legal rights, including even the right to testify in court.

TABLE 4.2
Free Blacks in Southern Cities, 1830

	Percent of Blacks Who Were Free	Black Population
New Orleans, Louisiana	41.7	28,545
Richmond, Virginia	21.1	11,385
Norfolk, Virginia	16.5	11,492
Raleigh, North Carolina	9.3	8,942
Charleston, South Carolina	6.4	56,116
Columbia, South Carolina	5.2	9,534
Savannah, Georgia	4.3	9,901
Augusta, Georgia	3.6	6,481
Nashville, Tennessee	3.9	12,133
Memphis, Tennessee	2.9	2,111
Montgomery, Alabama	1.0	6,515
Selma, Alabama	0.9	7,723
Natchez, Mississippi	1.2	11,077
Vicksburg, Mississippi	0.5	4,505

Source: U.S. Census, 1830.

Note: Atlanta did not exist at this time.

This completes what I intended only as a “brief survey” of slavery, meant to provide nothing more than an adequate basis for analyzing the role played by religion in ending this sad history.

GODS AND MORALITY

It has been an axiom among social scientists that religion functions to sustain the moral order. But it’s not true, or at least not true in many cases, for only some kinds of religions have moral implications. This is not to say that there are societies without moral codes, but that in many, morality has no religious basis and lacks sacred authority. I will pursue this issue at length in the postscript. Here a very brief summary will suffice.

Whether religions generate moral culture depends greatly upon their image of God. Not only are divine essences unable to issue commandments; they cannot sustain any concept of “sin.” The Tao does not advise humans to love one another, nor does the “First Cause” tell us not to covet another’s spouse. Paul Tillich’s “ground of our being” is not a being and consequently is incapable of having, let alone expressing, moral concerns.150 Only Gods—conscious supernatural beings—can desire our moral conformity. Even that is not sufficient. Gods can lend sanctions to the moral order only if they are responsive and dependable—if they are concerned about, informed about, and active on behalf of humans. Moreover, to promote virtue among humans, Gods must themselves be virtuous—they must favor good over evil. Finally, Gods will be more effective in sustaining moral precepts, the greater their scope—that is, the greater the diversity of their powers and the range and duration of their influence.

Besides lacking scope, the many Gods of polytheistic systems are often not conceived of as responsive and dependable, or as necessarily favoring good over evil. Among the Indians of the Northwest Coast, the Gods (such as they were) did not concern themselves with morality, and magic dominated ritual life.¹⁵¹ Aside from those involved in ascetic sects, most Greeks and Romans believed that their Gods could hear their pleas, but that they mostly didn’t listen and didn’t care. Aristotle taught that the Gods were incapable of real concern for humans—lust, jealousy, and anger, yes, but never affection. Such Gods may require propitiation, and it may sometimes be possible to bargain with them for favors. But they are not to be counted on, and it is quite uncertain that it is even wise to attract their attention. Indeed, the Gods of Greece and Rome (and of polytheisms in general) sometimes kept their word, and sometimes they provided humans with very valuable rewards. But they often lied and did humans great harm for very petty reasons. As William Foxwell Albright put it, “the Olympian deities of Greece [were] charming poetic figures [but] unedifying examples.”152 It may have been worthwhile to periodically offer such Gods a sacrificial animal or two (especially since the donors feasted on the offering after the ceremony), but they were not worth more. Consequently, they could not ask more.

In contrast, the immense Gods of the monotheisms ask much more and get it. In return for the otherworldly rewards they promise, and to enable humans to avoid the terrible punishments they threaten, these Gods uniformly impose sets of demands. And all of these sets include extensive codes of human conduct, not only toward the sacred, but toward one another. Underlying and reinforcing these moral codes is the concept of sin—wrongful thoughts and actions that will bring divine retribution. Some sins will be spelled out in revelations; others will be the products of theology, of study as to the implications of revelations.

Identifying new sins has been a central focus of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic theologians. For example, nowhere in the Bible is suicide prohibited. It was Saint Augustine who deduced that it is a sin to take one’s own life.¹⁵³ Turning to the issue at hand, I propose to show that prior to the rise of monotheism, religions were poorly equipped to impose extensive moral codes, including moral prohibitions of slavery. Nor could philosophers fill the moral gap. Then, I will trace how it was that two early Jewish sects and then medieval Christianity deduced that slavery was a sin—a conclusion subsequently ratified by many popes, then by the Quakers, followed by many other Protestant groups. I complete the section by explaining why Islamic theologians failed to conclude that slavery was sinful.

Polytheism and Slavery

When religions do not underwrite the moral order, social criticism is a secular enterprise left to philosophers, artists, and other intellectuals. Having no concept of sin to put teeth in their judgments and no revelations from which to begin, ancient philosophers were, for the most part, proponents of the status quo. There is no record that any philosopher in Sumer, Babylon, or Assyria ever protested against slavery, “nor is there any expression of the mildest sympathy for the victims of this system. Slavery was simply taken for granted.”¹⁵⁴ Indeed, the Code of Hammurabi (ca. 1750 B.C.E.) prescribed death for anyone who helped a slave to escape.

Egyptian Slaves. This carving in the base of a colossal statue of Pharaoh Rameses II shows a group of slaves roped together by the neck. The statue stands at the entrance to the Great Temple at Abu Simbel, built more than three thousand years ago. The many Gods of Egypt were not thought to concern themselves with how humans treated one another. © Bettmann/CORBIS.

Nor did the famous Greek philosophers condemn slavery. Plato did oppose enslavement of his fellow “Hellenes” (Greeks) but assigned “barbarian” (foreign) slaves a vital role in his ideal Republic—they would perform all of the productive labor.155 In fact, the rules Plato laid out concerning the proper treatment of slaves were unusually brutal—“No American slave code was so severe.”¹⁵⁶ Moreover, Plato did not believe that becoming a slave was simply a matter of bad luck; rather, in his view, nature creates a “slavish people” lacking the mental capacity for virtue or culture, and fit only to serve. Because slaves have no souls, they have no “human rights,” and masters can treat them as they will. Of course, if someone kills a slave belonging to someone else, the owner must be recompensed at twice the dead slave’s market value—a principle that reappeared in the Code of Barbados.¹⁵⁷ While Plato suggested that slaves should be sternly disciplined, he believed that, to prevent needless unrest, they generally should not be subject to excessive cruelty.¹⁵⁸ As enumerated in his will, Plato’s estate included five slaves.

As for Aristotle, he rejected the position advanced by the Sophists that all authority rests on force and therefore is self-justifying, because he sought to condemn political tyranny. But then, how to justify slavery? Here, Aristotle anticipated the Humanists by arguing that without slaves to do the labor, enlightened men would lack the time and energy to pursue virtue and wisdom. He additionally justified slavery by drawing upon Plato’s biological claims—slavery is justified because slaves are more akin to dumb brutes than to free men.159 Left on their own, slaves would be ruled solely by their appetites, causing endless civic harm. The basis for slavery, he wrote, is innate: “From the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.”¹⁶⁰ Upon his death, Aristotle’s personal property included fourteen slaves.

There were some contrary voices among Athenians. The playwright Euripides (480–406 B.C.E.) argued that some slaves were more virtuous and intelligent than their masters, thus rejecting the claim that hereditary slavery is in accord with nature. But he also accepted that “there existed some whose nature was fit for slavery.”¹⁶¹ The poet Philemon (361–262 B.C.E.) wrote that slave and master are made of the same flesh, and that it is not nature but fate that enslaves the body. And the fourth-century Sophist philosopher Alcidamas taught that “God created us all free; nature makes no slaves.”¹⁶² But what God? Sophists could not invoke One True God. Invoking a lesser God made no one tremble.

Monotheism and Slavery

During the twentieth century, most scholars who mentioned the topic took special satisfaction from noting that Judaism, Roman Catholicism, and Islam embraced slavery.¹⁶³ Forget for the moment that the medieval Catholic Church did condemn slavery; it is no surprise that theologians suffer from the “blindness” of their times and places. As discussed in Chapter 2, many Christian theologians, including Saint Augustine and John Calvin, have taught that cultural limitations have often made it impossible for people in an earlier time to fully understand a revelation when it was granted them. What is remarkable is that theologians can ever rise above these limits. And that is the tale I now tell.

JUDAISM: ESSENES AND THERAPEUTAE

Moses did not come down from the mountain with a commandment forbidding slavery. But, according to the Torah, God did reveal to him a very elaborate moral code vis-à-vis slavery—one that made Jewish slavery far more humane than that of other societies in classical times.

Although Jews were prohibited from enslaving other Jews, and their slaves therefore came from among the “heathen,” there were still severe limits on their treatment. Death was decreed for any Jewish master who killed a slave. The Torah also admonished that freedom was to be awarded any slave as compensation for suffering acts of violence: “And if a man smite the eye of his servant, or the eye of his maid, that it perish; he shall go free for his eye’s sake. And if he smite out his manservant’s tooth, or his maidservant’s tooth; he shall let him go free for his tooth’s sake” (Exod. 21:26–27). Hebrew law held that children of slaves must not be parted from their parents, nor a wife from her husband. Moreover, in Deut. 23:15–16 Jews were admonished not to return escaped slaves: “Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee: he shall dwell with thee, even among you … thou shalt not oppress him.” Indeed, the Talmud advises that the slave be treated as one of the family, allowed to rest on the Sabbath and treated equally: “Do not drink old wine while you give him new wine. Do not sleep on cushions while you let him lie on straw.”164

Eventually some Jews rejected slavery entirely. Thus the Essenes, the ascetic sect described in Chapter 1, were said to have outlawed slavery.¹⁶⁵ As Philo of Alexandria (ca. 20 B.C.E.–50) reported, the Essenes “condemn [slave] masters, not only as unjust, inasmuch as they corrupt the very principle of equality, but likewise as impious, because they destroy the ordinances of nature, which generated them all equally.”¹⁶⁶ In similar fashion, the Therapeutae (“healers”), another Jewish sect believed to have lived near Alexandria, also rejected slavery. Philo wrote, “And they do not use the ministrations of slaves, looking upon the possession of … slaves to be a thing absolutely and wholly contrary to nature, for nature has created all men free.”¹⁶⁷

Philo does not explain the theology by which either of these groups condemned slavery. Since the Torah clearly accepts slavery, how did they reject it while claiming to be strict observers of the Law? I think the answer is twofold. First, they may not have defined slavery as sinful per se but concluded that true asceticism required many sacrifices including their forgoing being served by others. That is, they rejected slavery as sinful for them, rejecting it on the same grounds that they rejected other luxuries and creature comforts. Second, they assumed that as long as they fully observed the Law, they were entirely free to impose even stricter standards. For example, they met kosher precepts by refusing to eat pork and exceeded them by eating no meat of any kind. Similarly, they not only observed the Law concerning humane treatment of slaves; they surpassed it by not reducing anyone to the condition of slavery.

Since the Essenes and the Therapeutae were cloistered groups, regarded as precursors of Christian monastics, it is not certain that they had any expectation that their standards ought to be adopted generally. Consequently, their rejection of slavery may have had no moral significance outside their communities. Whatever the case, so far as I can determine, the Essenes and Therapeutae were the first “societies” (albeit small ones) to prohibit slavery. That the Jews were also among the very first to believe that God took minute interest in the moral behavior of humans is not coincidental.

SAINTS AND POPES

Even some Catholic writers parrot the claim that it was not until 1890 that the Roman Catholic Church repudiated slavery,168 and a British priest has charged that this did not occur until 1965.¹⁶⁹ Nonsense! As early as the seventh century, Saint Bathilde (wife of King Clovis II) became famous for her campaign to stop slave-trading and free all slaves; in 851 Saint Anskar began his efforts to halt the Viking slave trade. That the Church willingly baptized slaves was claimed as proof that they had souls, and soon both kings and bishops—including William the Conqueror (1027–1087) and Saints Wulfstan (1009–1095) and Anselm (1033–1109)—forbade the enslavement of Christians.¹⁷⁰ Since, except for small settlements of Jews, and the Vikings in the north, everyone was at least nominally a Christian, that effectively abolished slavery in medieval Europe, except at the southern and eastern interfaces with Islam where both sides enslaved one another’s prisoners. But even this was sometimes condemned: in the tenth century, bishops in Venice did public penance for past involvement in the Moorish slave trade and sought to prevent all Venetians from involvement in slavery. Then, in the thirteenth century, Saint Thomas Aquinas deduced that slavery was a sin, and a series of popes upheld his position, beginning in 1435 and culminating in three major pronouncements against slavery by Pope Paul III in 1537.¹⁷¹

It is significant that in Aquinas’s day, slavery was a thing of the past or of distant lands. Consequently, he gave very little attention to the subject per se, paying more attention to serfdom, which he held to be repugnant. However, in his overall analysis of morality in human relationships, Aquinas placed slavery in opposition to natural law, deducing that all “rational creatures” are entitled to justice. Hence he found no natural basis for the enslavement of one person rather than another, “thus removing any possible justification for slavery based on race or religion.”172 Right reason, not coercion, is the moral basis of authority, for “one man is not by nature ordained to another as an end.”¹⁷³ Here Aquinas distinguished two forms of “subjection” or authority, just and unjust. The former exists when leaders work for the advantage and benefit of their subjects. The unjust form of subjection “is that of slavery, in which the ruler manages the subject for his own [the ruler’s] advantage.”¹⁷⁴ Based on the immense authority vested in Aquinas by the Church, the official view came to be that slavery is sinful.

It is true that some popes did not observe the moral obligation to oppose slavery—indeed, in 1488 Pope Innocent VIII accepted a gift of a hundred Moorish slaves from King Ferdinand of Aragon, giving some of them to his favorite cardinals. Of course, Innocent was anything but that when it came to a whole list of immoral actions, as noted in Chapter 1. However, laxity must not be confused with doctrine. Thus while Innocent fathered many children, he did not retract the official doctrine that the clergy should be celibate. In similar fashion, his acceptance of a gift of slaves should not be confused with official Church teachings. These were enunciated often and explicitly as they became pertinent.

During the 1430s, the Spanish colonized the Canary Islands and began to enslave the native population. This was not serfdom but true slavery of the sort that Christians and Moors had long practiced upon one another’s captives in Spain. When word of these actions reached Pope Eugene IV (1431 to 1447), he issued a bull, Sicut dudum. The pope did not mince words. Under threat of excommunication he gave everyone involved fifteen days from receipt of his bull “to restore to their earlier liberty all and each person of either sex who were once residents of said Canary Islands … These people are to be totally and perpetually free and are to be let go without the exaction or reception of any money.”¹⁷⁵ Pope Pius II (1458 to 1464) and Pope Sixtus IV (1471 to 1484) followed with additional bulls condemning enslavement of the Canary Islanders, which, obviously, had continued. What this episode displays is the weakness of papal authority at this time, not the indifference of the Church to the sin of slavery.

With the successful Spanish and Portuguese invasions of the New World, enslavement of the native peoples and the importation of Africans ensued, and some slavers offered the rationale that this was not in violation of Christian morality, as these were not “rational creatures” entitled to liberty but were a species of animals and therefore legitimately subject to human exploitation. This theological subterfuge by slave-traders was artfully used by Norman F. Cantor to indict Catholicism: “The church accepted slavery … in sixteenth-century Spain, Christians were still arguing over whether black slaves had souls or were animal creations of the Lord.”176 Cantor gave no hint that Rome repeatedly denounced New World slavery as grounds for excommunication.

But that is precisely what Pope Paul III (1534 to 1549) had to say about the matter. Although a member of a Roman ecclesiastical family, and something of a libertine in his early years (he was made a cardinal at twenty-five but did not accept ordination until he was fifty), Paul turned out to be a very effective and pious pope who fully recognized the moral significance of Protestantism and initiated the Counter-Reformation. His magnificent bull against New World slavery (as well as similar bulls by other popes) was somehow “lost”¹⁷⁷ from the historical record until very recently.¹⁷⁸ I believe this was due to the extreme Protestant biases of historians, who may also have been scornful of the pope’s predicating his attack on the assumption that Satan was the cause of slavery:

[Satan,] the enemy of the human race, who always opposes all good men so that the race may perish, has thought up a way, unheard of before now, by which he might impede the saving word of God from being preached to the nations. He has stirred up some of his allies who, desiring to satisfy their own avarice, are presuming to assert far and wide that the Indians of the West and the South who have come to our notice in these times be reduced to our service like brute animals, under the pretext that they are lacking in the Catholic faith. And they reduce them to slavery, treating them with afflictions they would scarcely use with brute animals.

Therefore, We … noting that the Indians themselves indeed are true men … by our Apostolic Authority decree and declare by these present letters that the same Indians and all other peoples—even though they are outside the faith—… should not be deprived of their liberty or their other possessions … and are not to be reduced to slavery, and that whatever happens to the contrary is to be considered null and void. (My italics)¹⁷⁹

In a second bull on slavery, Paul imposed the penalty of excommunication on anyone, regardless of their “dignity, state, condition, or grade … who in any way may presume to reduce said Indians to slavery or despoil them of their goods.”180

But nothing happened. Soon, in addition to the brutal exploitation of the Indians, Spanish and Portuguese slave ships began to sail between Africa and the New World. And just as overseas Catholic missionaries had aroused Rome to condemn the enslavement of Indians, similar appeals were filed concerning imported black slaves. On April 22, 1639, Pope Urban VIII (1623 to 1644), at the request of the Jesuits of Paraguay, issued a bull Commissum nobis reaffirming the ruling by “our predecessor Paul III” that those who reduced others to slavery were subject to excommunication.¹⁸¹ Eventually, the Congregation of the Holy Office (the Roman Inquisition) even took up the matter. On March 20, 1686, it ruled in the form of questions and answers:

It is asked:

Whether it is permitted to capture by force and deceit Blacks and other natives who have harmed no one?

Answer: no.

Whether it is permitted to buy, sell or make contracts in their respect Blacks or other natives who have harmed no one and been made captives by force of deceit?

Answer: no.

Whether the possessors of Blacks and other natives who have harmed no one and been captured by force or deceit, are not held to set them free?

Answer: yes.

Whether the captors, buyers and possessors of Blacks and other natives who have harmed no one and who have been captured by force or deceit are not held to make compensation to them?

Answer: yes.¹⁸²

Nothing ambiguous here. The problem wasn’t that the Church failed to condemn slavery; it was that few heard and most of them did not listen. In this era, popes had little or no influence over the Spanish and the Portuguese since at that time the Spanish ruled most of Italy (see Chapter 1); in 1527, under the leadership of Charles V, they had even sacked Rome. If the pope had little influence in Spain or Portugal, he had next to none in their New World colonies, except indirectly through the work of the religious orders. In fact, it was illegal even to publish papal decrees “in the Spanish colonial possessions without royal consent,” and the king also appointed all of the bishops.¹⁸³ Nevertheless, Urban VIII’s bull was read in public by the Jesuits in Rio de Janeiro, with the result that rioters attacked the local Jesuit college and injured a number of priests. In Santos a mob trampled the Jesuit vicar-general when he tried to publish the bull, and the Jesuits were expelled from Sa˜o Paulo when word spread of their involvement in obtaining the bull.184 Even so, knowledge of the antislavery bulls and the later ruling of the Inquisition against slavery was generally limited to the clergy, especially the religious orders, and thereby had limited public impact.

Pope Paul III. Although he was celebrated in life for leading the Counter-Reformation, his portrait painted by Titian, it has been nearly forgotten that this son of a wealthy Roman family condemned slavery on pain of excommunication.
© Archivo Iconografico, S.A./CORBIS.

Of course, the Spanish and the Portuguese were not the only slavers in the New World. And even had they been published far and wide, papal bulls had no moral force among the British and the Dutch. Thus it must be noted that the introduction of slavery into the New World did not prompt any leading Dutch or English Protestants to denounce it.

However, even though the papal bulls against slavery were hushed up in the New World, the antislavery views of the Church did have a significantly moderating effect in the Catholic Americas by means of the Code Noir and Código Negro Español. In both cases, the Church took the lead in their formulation and enforcement, thereby demonstrating its fundamental opposition to slavery by trying to ensure “the rights of the slave and his material welfare,” and by imposing “obligations on the slave owners, limiting their control over the slave.”185 As Eugene Genovese put it: “Catholicism made a profound difference in the lives of the slaves. [It] imparted to Brazilian and Spanish American slave societies an ethos … of genuine spiritual power.”¹⁸⁶

The prevalence of antireligious, and especially anti-Catholic, bias in histories of slavery is well exemplified by the “discussion” of the Code Noir in the Columbia Encyclopedia (1975) entry for Louisiana: “[T]he Code Noir, adopted in 1724, provided for the rigid control of their [slaves’] lives and the protection of whites. Additional provisions established Catholicism as the official religion.” And that’s it! Not the slightest acknowledgment of the many articles designed to protect slaves. Granted, it was not an emancipation proclamation, but neither was it the Code of Barbados.

As an additional instance of the antireligious bias among contemporary historians, consider that in his discussion of the Code Noir, Robin Blackburn wrote of the “pretended official policy of encouragement of slave marriages in the French colonies,” only to end his sentence with the remarkable admission that it had “limited but not negligible results.”¹⁸⁷ He then cited a document from Martinique reporting that half of the slaves of marriageable age were married. Since, given the gender distribution of the slave population, this would have equaled marriage rates in France at that time, it would seem that it was sufficient that support for marriage be “pretended.”

Equally remarkable is the fact that so many distinguished historians of slavery barely mentioned the Code Noir and ignored the Código Negro Español so completely that it does not even appear in the indexes of their well-known works.188 But if many historians have paid little or no attention to these Church-inspired codes, virtually no one has even mentioned the Code of Barbados (under any name), except for the few historians specializing in slavery laws,¹⁸⁹ and several who wrote specifically about the history of slavery in Barbados,¹⁹⁰ although the code was observed in the entire British West Indies. I suggest that the Code of Barbados would have received considerable attention had it been produced by Catholics rather than by Protestants.

But perhaps the most revealing omission from all discussions of New World slavery, and especially of the enslavement and mistreatment of indigenous populations, concerns the Jesuit Republic of Paraguay.¹⁹¹ For more than 150 years (1609–1768), the Jesuits administered an area more than twice the size of France, located south of Brazil and west of the territory ceded to Portugal by the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494). Here, a tiny group of Spanish Jesuits (probably never numbering more than two hundred) founded, protected, educated, and advised a remarkable civilization encompassing at least thirty “Reductions,”¹⁹² or communities, of Guaraní Indians. Not only did arts and industry flourish in the Jesuit republic (cities with paved streets and impressive buildings, symphony orchestras, printing), but a valid attempt was made at representative government. Their purpose in founding the republic, as explained by the Jesuit superior Antonio Ruiz de Montoya in 1609, was to Christianize and “civilize” the Indians so that they could be free subjects of the Crown, equal to the Spaniards, and thus to “bring about peace between the Spaniards and the Indians, a task so difficult that, since the discovery of the West Indies more than a hundred years ago, it still has not been possible.”¹⁹³

The republic flourished, but rather than becoming the basis for equality and peace, its existence offended many colonial officials and planters, and provided a tempting plum for expropriation. Nevertheless, the Jesuits managed to forestall and outmaneuver these opposed interests for several generations. But then things began to go sour. The first step in the downfall of the republic came in 1750 when the Portuguese and Spanish signed a new treaty, redividing South America along natural boundaries. As a result, seven of the Reductions fell within Portuguese jurisdiction. Ordered to turn these settlements over to civil authorities, the Jesuits resisted and appealed to the Portuguese and Spanish Crowns to have the Reductions spared. But their opponents were too strong and too unscrupulous, planting rumors and false evidence of Jesuit conspiracies against both Crowns. So in 1754 the Spanish sent troops against the seven Reductions from the west, while the Portuguese advanced from the east. Both forces of European troops were defeated by the Indians, who were quite well trained in military tactics and had muskets and cannons. Although the Jesuits had not participated in the battles, they were blamed as traitors and in response were expelled from Portugal and all Portuguese territories in 1758. Soon additional plots against the Jesuits succeeded in Spain as all members of the order were arrested early in 1767 and deported to the Papal States. In July, colonial authorities were ready to move against the Jesuits in Latin America, and the roundup began in Buenos Aires and Córdoba. But it wasn’t until the next year that Spanish troops moved against the final twenty-three Reductions and seized the remaining Jesuits, whereupon even very sick and elderly fathers were tied to mules and transported over mountains in bad weather, many to their deaths. Thus were the Jesuits expelled from the Western Hemisphere. Soon their republic lay in ruins—defeated and looted by civil authorities. Disheartened by their mistreatment and the loss of the Black Robed Fathers, the surviving Guaraní drifted away, many into the cities.

Of course, among the few historians to deal with the Jesuit republic are some who harp against colonialism and Catholicism, condemn the “fanatical” Jesuits for imposing religion and civilization on the “gentle” Indians, and denounce Jesuit efforts to sustain a republic as cruel paternalism and “ruthless exploitation.”194 But even if one were to accept the most extreme version of these claims, one is still faced with sincere and effective efforts by the Jesuits to protect the Indians against the planters and colonial authorities who wished to reduce them to servitude or to eradicate them entirely. To have constructed an advanced Indian civilization in this historical context was quite an extraordinary feat. Moreover, the antagonistic historians at least tell about this significant historical event, while most other historians have simply ignored it. I was able to find only two books on the subject in English written during the past thirty years, one of them translated from Portuguese and both now out of print.¹⁹⁵ So far as I could discover, the only acknowledgment of the subject in the Encyclopaedia Britannica was this single sentence under “Paraguay, History of”: “During most of the colonial era, Paraguay was known chiefly for the huge Jesuit mission group of 30 reducciones.” We are not even told what “reducciones” are. As for the major works on New World slavery, all of which have bitter (and often anti-Catholic) things to say about the enslavement and abuse of Indians in Latin America: complete silence.

In contrast, considerable attention has been paid by historians to the fact that not all of the Catholic clergy, including not all Jesuits, accepted the claim that slavery was sinful. Indeed, sometimes in the midst of slave societies, clergy themselves kept slaves—during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Jesuits in Maryland were slave-owners.196 Other clergy were very confused about the issue. For example, the Dominican Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474–1566) waged a bitter and quite successful campaign against enslaving Indians, during which he proposed that slaves be brought from Africa instead. Later he came to deeply regret this proposal and expressed doubt as to whether God would pardon him for this terrible sin.¹⁹⁷

It must also be acknowledged that the Church did not, usually, confront governments head-on over the issue and attempt to force an end to slavery. Granted that popes had threatened excommunication, but in practice the Church settled for attempting to ameliorate the conditions of slaves as much as possible. Thus the Church was unrelenting in its assertion that slavery was only a condition of service, and that those enslaved remained fully human and retained their full equality in the eyes of God. As the prominent Italian Cardinal Hyacinthe Gerdil (1718–1802) put it: “Slavery is not to be understood as conferring on one man the same power over another that men have over cattle … For slavery does not abolish the natural equality of men … [and is] subject to the condition that the master shall take due care of his slave and treat him humanely.”¹⁹⁸ As already mentioned, it was in this spirit that the first article of the Código Negro Español required all masters to have their slaves baptized and specified serious penalties for masters who did not allow their slaves to attend mass or celebrate feast days. In contrast, the Church of England usually did not recognize slaves “as baptisable human beings.”¹⁹⁹ Both views had a profound effect, not only on those in slavery, but on attitudes toward manumission and especially toward ex-slaves.

What is clear is that the common assertion that the Catholic Church generally favored slavery is not true. Indeed, as will be seen, when American Quakers initiated the abolition movement, they found kindred souls not only among other Protestants but among Roman Catholics too.

THE ISLAMIC EXCEPTION

If monotheism has the potential to give rise to antislavery doctrines, why did Islam not turn against slavery too? Indeed, why does slavery persist in some Islamic areas, while having only recently been discontinued in other Muslim nations in response to intense pressure from the West?

To answer this question, we must recognize that theologians work within definite intellectual limits—not just any conclusion is possible given particular cultural materials. For example, it would be quite impossible for Jewish, Christian, or Islamic theologians to deduce that God takes no interest in human sexual behavior. The revealed texts simply will not permit such a conclusion. Nor could Christian theologians deduce that Jesus favored polygamy, at least not without an additional revelation. The fundamental problem facing Muslim theologians vis-à-vis the morality of slavery is that Muhammad bought, sold, captured, and owned slaves.200

Like Moses, the Prophet did advise that slaves be treated well: “[F]eed them what you eat yourself and clothe them with what you wear … They are God’s people like unto you and be kind unto them.”²⁰¹ Muhammad also freed several of his slaves, adopted one as his son, and married another. In addition, the Qur’ān teaches that it is wrong to “compel your slave girls to prostitution” (24.33), and that one can gain forgiveness for killing a fellow believer by freeing a slave (4.92). As with the Jewish rules about slavery, Muhammad’s admonition and example probably often mitigated the conditions of slaves in Islam as contrasted with Greece and Rome. But the fundamental morality of the institution of slavery was not in doubt. While Christian theologians were able to work their way around the biblical acceptance of slavery, they probably could not have done so had Jesus kept slaves.²⁰² That Muhammad had owned slaves presented Muslim theologians with a fact that no intellectual maneuvering could overcome, even had they desired to do so.

EXPLAINING ABOLITION MOVEMENTS

When slaves began to reappear in Europe in the fifteenth century, their presence aroused what can only be called nascent abolition movements. In 1444, when a boatload of African slaves was put on sale in Lagos, Portugal, the crowd became so upset by the sight of families being separated and sold that they stopped the proceedings.203 When a Dutch slavetrader brought a cargo to the Netherlands in 1596, the local council, prompted by enraged citizens, pronounced all of the slaves to be free—after that, Dutch slavers kept their activities abroad.²⁰⁴ The sight of slaves on the streets of Paris aroused public disturbances.²⁰⁵ Upon seeing the slave market in Jamaica early in the eighteenth century, an English admiral wrote an angry and disgusted letter about buyers picking over human beings “as if they had been so many horses.”²⁰⁶

What these reactions suggest is that direct contact with slavery proved intolerable for many Christians not personally involved in exploiting slaves. Indeed, the fundamental thesis of the remainder of this chapter is this: Organized opposition to slavery arose only when and where (1) the appropriate moral predisposition was (2) stimulated by the salience of the phenomenon and (3) was not counteracted by perceived self-interest. The first element explains why indigenous abolition movements have yet to appear in non-Christian nations. The second accounts for the fact that abolition movements were limited to places where people felt some direct responsibility for the existence of slavery, as in the United States, Latin America, and those European nations directly involved in colonial slavery. The third element explains why abolition movements did not prosper in the American South or in European colonies.

To fully explore this thesis, I will trace the rise of the abolition movement in the United States. Then, I trace its career in Great Britain and in France. Finally, I explore abolition in Spain and Latin America.

America

On June 19, 1700, Samuel Sewall (1652–1730), published The Selling of Joseph, the first abolitionist tract written in America. Sewall was an extremely prominent Bostonian—a devout Puritan, a graduate of Harvard, a successful merchant, and a well-known judge who had served on the court during the Salem witchcraft trials, something for which he later offered his public repentance. Despite his social stature, Sewall’s attack on slavery “was simply ignored by his contemporaries.”²⁰⁷

This example demonstrates a fundamental sociological principle: publications don’t launch social movements; people do. They do so by bringing their friends, relatives, neighbors, and associates together and motivating them to act in coordinated ways—to become an organization. This is most easily accomplished when one begins with a group that is already organized.

Consequently, the American abolition movement began not in Boston but fifty-four years later at the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Quakers, prompted by another abolitionist tract. This one was by John Woolman (1720–1772), a very pious young man whose moral concerns about slavery surfaced when he was asked by his employer to draw up a bill of sale for a female slave. He did so but experienced unrelieved guilt as a result. Woolman’s concerns about slavery grew critical when, while traveling through Virginia, he observed the misery of slaves. Upon his return, he wrote his first tract against the “sin of slavery.” However, rather than merely reflecting the opinion of its author, Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes was officially approved by the Meeting’s Overseers of the Press and circulated to everyone in attendance. Woolman’s pamphlet208 was a model of gentle Quaker persuasion. He began by quoting Matt. 25:40: “For as much as ye did it to the least of my brethren, ye did it unto me,” with the direct implication that to enslave a “Negro” was to enslave Christ. Although clearly aimed at slaveholding Quakers, it did not single them out but reminded all Quakers that “Negroes are our fellow creatures, and their present condition amongst us requires our serious consideration,” and that Friends are committed to justice, love, and the betterment of all humankind, not to self-interest. In his final paragraph he expressed his belief that while God has so far not intervened, he sees that “[Negroes] are trodden down and despised, yet he remembers them: he seeth their affliction,” and soon God is apt to “humble the most haughty people” who prefer “gain … to equity.” Subsequently, Woolman devoted his life to spreading the message of abolition, which he based exclusively on religious objections.

It is significant that Woolman had actually written his tract in 1746 but knew better than to bring it forward then because the Overseers of the Press included a majority of slave-owners. By 1754, membership had changed such that only a third of the Overseers were slaveholders. Moreover, the proportion of slave-owners among those sent as representatives to the Yearly Meeting had recently dropped from more than half to only 10 percent.²⁰⁹ Hence Woolman’s message did not confront invincible selfinterest but gained considerable acceptance, and by the next year the Meeting agreed to publish a tract of its own, constituting a far more direct attack on slavery: An Epistle of Caution and Advice, Concerning the Buying and Keeping of Slaves.

Written by a committee, this statement began by asking whether it was consistent with the Golden Rule to deprive “our fellow creatures of that valuable blessing liberty,” or to “grow rich by their bondage.” It further proclaimed, “To live in ease and plenty by the toil of those whom violence and cruelty have put in our power, is neither consistent with Christianity nor common justice, and we have good reason to believe draws down the displeasure of Heaven … How can we be said to love our brethren and … for selfish ends keep them in bondage?”

Then, having pursued some similar lines of concern, the committee got to the clincher: “Finally, brethren, we entreat you in … Gospel love, seriously to weigh the cause of detaining them in bondage. If it be for your own private gain, or any motive other than their good, it is much to be feared that the love of God, and the influence of the Holy Spirit is not the prevailing principle in you.”210

In addition to circulating this tract, the Yearly Meeting also appointed a correspondence committee to inquire of local Meetings whether their members were “clear of importing and buying Negroes”; efforts were to be directed toward convincing those guilty of such actions that they were in the wrong. In response, several local Meetings began to disown such offenders. Next, in 1758 the Yearly Meeting appointed a five-man committee “to visit and treat with all such Friends who have any Slaves” and to report back on their progress. Finally, in the early 1770s, Quaker Yearly Meetings in New England, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania prohibited members from owning slaves, under penalty of exclusion. Thus was launched the American abolition movement.²¹¹

David Brion Davis was correct to note that a number of non-Quaker voices were also being raised against slavery at this same time, both in America and abroad.²¹² But, as Davis recognized, “voices” are not movements. The Quakers were not just a bunch of like-minded people who read and agreed with antislavery tracts. Their approach to abolition was potent because from the start they committed their well-organized and influential religious body to the cause. Their initial aim was to purge themselves of slave-ownership, and in this they were mainly successful. While some Quaker slave-owners abandoned their church rather than comply, most went along, including owners of some extremely large plantations.²¹³ But just as the Friends hoped eventually to achieve the salvation of all humankind, so, too, did they aim to end slavery everywhere. They came much closer to doing the latter than most sophisticated persons would have anticipated at the time (or than many modern sophisticates are inclined to admit).

One reason for their success was that, despite having begun as a despised sect (between 1659 and 1661 four Quakers who had previously been whipped and driven out of Massachusetts for “heresy” were hanged for having returned), American Quakers had achieved great economic and political power. Many of the wealthiest people of the time were Quakers, some of whom, such as John Pemberton, purchased the freedom of many slaves. Remember, too, that Philadelphia was the largest city in the American colonies and served as the nation’s capital until Washington, D.C., was built. Also indicative of Quaker influence: in 1787 the Quakerinspired Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery was headed by Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush, two of the most respected and influential living Americans. What such people said, mattered. Moreover, the Quakers posed a moral challenge to other Christian organizations. The Puritans could easily ignore Samuel Sewall, but could they let the Quakers monopolize the moral high ground? Surely not, said the Puritan majority in the Massachusetts legislature in 1771 as they outlawed the importation of slaves.

Not to be outdone, many Christian groups and luminaries took up the cause of abolition, and soon abolitionist societies sprang up that were not associated with a specific denomination. But, through it all, the movement (as distinct from those it made sympathetic to the cause) was staffed by devout Christian activists, the majority of them clergy.214 Indeed, the most prominent clergy of the nineteenth century took leading roles in the abolition movement, including the liberal Congregationalist Lyman Beecher (1775–1863), whose daughter wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin; the most potent evangelist of the era, Charles Grandison Finney (1792–1885), who turned Oberlin College into a key station along the “underground railroad” conveying runaway slaves to Canada; and even John Humphrey Noyes (1811–1886), the most prominent “Perfectionist” of them all and founder of the “notorious” Oneida communal group.

In 1833 leading abolitionists formed the American Anti-Slavery Society.²¹⁵ Led by the fiery agitator and editor of The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879), the group adopted and published a ringing Declaration of Sentiments, filled with religious justifications. Noting that to hold a human being “in involuntary bondage” is, “according to Scripture” stealing, the document proclaimed it a certainty that “the slaves ought instantly to be set free, and brought under the protection of law.” Furthermore, all current laws “admitting the right of slavery, are therefore, before God, utterly null and void … an audacious usurpation of Divine prerogative” and “a presumptuous transgression of all the holy commandments.” Nevertheless, the group accepted “the sovereignty of each State” and conceded “that Congress … has no right to interfere with any slave States.” But the declaration maintained that Congress had both the right and the obligation to end slave-trading between states, and to outlaw slavery in all territories. In conclusion, they placed their faith “in the overruling justice of God”: “we plant ourselves upon the Declaration of our Independence and the truths of Divine Revelation, as upon the Everlasting Rock.”216

The American Anti-Slavery Society grew rapidly. Within two years there were 400 local chapters, and by 1838 there were more than 1,000. Although Garrison himself often found it difficult to get along with clergy,²¹⁷ they formed the vital spine of his organization. The society spread and grew through the efforts of traveling agents appointed to supervise specific territories, aided by local agents established in major population centers. John A. Auping collected data on all 155 traveling agents and all 149 local agents who served the American Anti-Slavery Society during the period of its great expansion, 1834 through 1840. Eighty-one of the traveling agents, or 52 percent, were ordained ministers. And of the local agents, 111, or 75 percent, were clergy.²¹⁸

Moreover, as abolition sentiments spread, it was primarily the churches (often local congregations), not secular clubs and organizations, that issued formal statements on behalf of ending slavery.²¹⁹ The outspoken abolitionism expressed by Northern congregations and denominational gatherings caused major schisms within leading Protestant denominations, eventuating in their separation into independent Northern and Southern organizations; this was the origin of the Southern Baptists, the Southern Methodists, and the Southern Presbyterians. The Congregationalists didn’t split because they had no churches south of Connecticut.

The American Roman Catholic Church faced no serious internal conflict over slavery because it had few Southern parishes, and, at least by the start of the nineteenth century, the clergy followed the pope in opposing slavery. At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Pope Pius VII (1800 to 1823) demanded the suppression of the slave trade. Then, in 1839, Pope Gregory XVI (1831 to 1846) sent an Apostolic Letter to the Provincial Council of American Bishops in which he condemned slavery. It began with a fine example of theological “deduction.” In his opening paragraph the pope admitted that the Apostles counseled slaves to obey their masters, but went on to note (as Woolman had also done) that just as Christ declared that whatever was done to the least of all humans, it was done to Him, “it naturally follows” that Christians should treat slaves as their brothers. He then pointed out that “In the process of time, the fog of pagan superstition being more completely dissipated and the manners of barbarous people having been softened, thanks to Faith operating by Charity … there are no more slaves in the greater number of Christian nations.” Unfortunately, there were “among the Faithful” men who were “shamefully blinded by their desire for sordid gain,” and who went to distant countries and there “did not hesitate to reduce to slavery Indians, Negroes and other wretched people.” Then, “desiring to remove such a shame from all Christian nations” and “walking in the footsteps of Our Predecessors,” the pope demanded an end to slavery.220

Subsequently, the American secretary of state, John Forsyth, campaigning in the South during 1840 for the renomination of President Martin Van Buren, identified the pope as an abolitionist to enlist anti-Catholic sentiments. To this, Bishop John England of Charleston, South Carolina, responded that although the Church regarded slavery as sinful, it intended to leave legal issues concerning the matter to the legislative bodies of government. England had reason to be somewhat circumspect, since in 1836 mob violence had forced him to close the school for free blacks he had opened in his diocese the year before.²²¹ But the bishop’s statement failed to defuse the rapidly rising anti-Catholicism—rioting Protestants in Philadelphia during the summer of 1844 burned down the two largest Catholic churches in the city. Indeed, the Catholic Church was so associated with abolition in the eyes of the pro-slavery forces that Charles Finney, the famous evangelist and an early president of Oberlin College, recalled that the school had been boycotted on grounds that its racial views were even “worse than those of Roman Catholicism.”²²² Be that as it may, as demonstrated by John Hammond’s splendid analysis, Finney’s revivals had a profound effect on generating membership in the various antislavery societies, as well as support for the Liberty Party in 1844 and the Free Soil Party in 1848.²²³

The larger point is that the abolitionists, whether popes or evangelists, spoke almost exclusively in the language of Christian faith. And although many Southern clergy proposed theological defenses of slavery, pro-slavery rhetoric was overwhelmingly secular—references were made to “liberty” and “states’ rights,” not to “sin” or “salvation.” This was conclusively demonstrated by Auping, who performed a content analysis of writings by randomly selected samples of prominent abolitionists and defenders of slavery. The abolitionists were many times more likely to invoke God, and the difference persisted even when only clergy were compared.224 This is hardly surprising, since even the most extreme Marxist historians agree that the abolition movement was initiated and sustained by religious people. Of course, as will be seen, these Marxists also claim that when religious people condemned slavery on religious grounds, they were insincere or victims of false consciousness.

But there is another and far more persuasive tack taken to minimize the importance of religion in abolishing slavery. It is argued that many sincere Christians were quite able to square slavery with theology—as Francis Asbury, first Methodist bishop of the United States, put it in 1798, “Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians … in the highest flights of rapturous piety, still maintain and defend [slavery].”²²⁵ This being the case, the argument goes, it must have been not religion per se but something else that prompted some Christians to conclude that it was a sin to hold humans in bondage. But, as Asbury was fully aware, that conclusion misses the point. The case against slavery is theological, not revelational. Had Moses been given a commandment against slavery, then only heretical Jews and Christians could have owned slaves. Or had Jesus proclaimed that no slave master shall enter heaven, there would have been no ambiguity as to what Christians must do. But theology is based on human interpretations, and therefore sincere and brilliant seekers may reach opposite conclusions. Asbury did not propose that those who accepted slavery were ignorant of revelations, but that they had drawn incorrect theological conclusions, that they had neither “a sufficient sense of religion nor of liberty.”

Abolition was not inherent in Christian scripture; it was only a possible conclusion and one unlikely to be reached except under favorable circumstances. Put another way, I do not propose that monotheism or even Christian culture was a sufficient basis for deeming slavery to be a sin. Instead, I propose that it was a necessary basis, in that only those religious thinkers working within the Christian tradition were able to reach antislavery conclusions (with the exceptions of the two Jewish sects). But just as I noted that belief in a rational, creator God was a necessary but not sufficient cause for the rise of science (that substantial technological and intellectual progress was needed too), here the moral potential for an antislavery conclusion lay within Christian thought, but to bring it to fruition probably required exposure to and perhaps experience with correlative concepts such as freedom and the dignity of the individual—with the general moral and political trends of Western civilization. Indeed, as noted, European Christians had the unique opportunity to live in a “world” without slaves, giving them a vantage point from which to view slavery, free of preconceptions as to its normality.

Keep in mind, too, that I do not suggest that the abolition movement eventually enrolled so many Americans that Lincoln was elected president. Relatively few Americans actually joined any abolition organization, and many factors influenced the rise of the Republican Party and Lincoln’s nomination and election in 1860. However, contrary to the revisionist views of such Progressive historical stalwarts as Charles Beard, the Civil War was primarily about slavery, not about the economic interests of the industrial North versus those of the agricultural South. It reveals much about the Progressive historians that none of his peers thought it strange that, as he disdained the religious motives of the abolitionists, Beard blamed religious influences for sustaining Southern pro-slavery opinions.226 But at least Beard did not deny that emancipation would have been worth fighting for, as did several other distinguished historians of the time, including Avery O. Craven, who blamed the Civil War on reckless moral agitators on both sides, concluding that the war was a needless blunder and slavery not worth fighting over.²²⁷

Even so, Craven was correct in seeing that the Civil War was not primarily about factory systems versus plantation systems, but about moral visions. Few “Yankee” soldiers had any connection with industry, and most “Rebels” owned no slaves. Blue or Gray, idealism was rampant! And it was for causing this moral confrontation that the abolitionists deserve full credit. Their decades of exhortation, from the pulpit and the public podium, prompted Union regiments to march away singing, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord …”

The achievement of emancipation in America is a long and complex story, involving intense political crises and compromises and eventually a very bloody war, in which one Union soldier died for every ten slaves who were set free. I have not presumed even to summarize these events in such a short study, being concerned only to provide an adequate account of aspects pertinent to my thesis. To sum up: organized opposition to slavery arose (1) as a matter of conscience among Quakers having (2) personal contact with slavery, but (3) who were not slaveholders, although their moral suasion did cause some Quakers to give up their slaves. Raised to the more general level, (1) abolitionism spread through the Christian churches in the North, sustained by moral indignation, (2) inflamed not only by the existence of slavery in the nearby South but by the testimony of ex-slaves and the predations of agents who captured and, often, kidnapped runaway slaves all across the North. Finally, (3) very few people in the North profited directly from slaves. Thus the abolitionists were well situated to confront slavery from a close, but external vantage point. As will be seen, all major abolition movements in Europe and in Latin America enjoyed such a vantage point.

In contrast, although the vast majority of Southerners were active Christians and did not own slaves, most of them regarded slavery as a matter of self-interest, as being basic to the Southern economy and culture, and it was this that stimulated the rise of an intense countermorality in which religion also played the sustaining role.228 In that fervent spirit they rode off eagerly to defend “Dixie” and the Southern Way of Life.

Finally, the abolitionists knew that theirs was a religious movement, and so did several generations of historians.²²⁹ But during the latter half of the twentieth century, many historians decided they knew better. I leave the Marxist revisionism for later consideration. But it seems appropriate here to clarify misconceptions perpetrated by historians whose failure to see things as they were lay mainly in their antagonism toward religion in general, and the Roman Catholic Church in particular. Once again David Brion Davis can serve as the edifying example.

Davis posed the critical issue concerning the role of religion in abolitionism in two sentences: “For some two thousand years men thought of sin as a kind of slavery. One day they would come to think of slavery as sin.”²³⁰ But he made no effort to say why this switch took place. Having devoted many pages to demonstrating that those who led the way to abolition overwhelmingly were devout Christians, all of whom said, in one fashion or another, that they were doing it for God, Davis chose not to believe them. In my judgment, Davis reached this conclusion because he failed to grasp the problematic character of theology, and because he denied or overlooked the actual history of Christian responses to slavery. Thus Davis asserted that Christian theologians, and especially the Catholic Church, could not “question the ethical basis of slavery … [because] that would be to question fundamental conceptions of God’s purpose and man’s history and destiny. If slavery were an evil and performed no divinely appointed function, then why had God authorized it in Scripture and permitted it to exist in nearly every nation?”²³¹

Liberation. A Yankee soldier cuts the “hobble” chain from this woman who has escaped from slavery, her infant in her arms. Before the Civil War was over, one Union soldier died for every ten slaves set free. © Bettmann/CORBIS.

This argument is plausible only if one fails to see that it must have been possible for Christians to question the ethical basis of slavery because so many of them did so. As is often the case with academic intellectuals, Davis failed to grasp how creative and subtle theologians can be at finding grounds to justify a desired conclusion—recall the logical elegance of Pope Gregory XVI’s Apostolic Letter. Worse yet, because Davis had imputed a monolithic social and moral character to Christianity, whenever he encountered indifference or pro-slavery sentiments on the part of anyone connected to the churches, all stood indicted. Moreover, whenever religious leaders recognized the limits of their power and influence and settled for attempting to humanize the conditions of slavery, Davis disdained their efforts as complicity. By this logic, Christianity could not be given credit for providing the essential moral basis for opposition to slavery unless a huge Ecumenical Conference had been held at which slavery was denounced as a sin by a unanimous vote, accompanied by ordeals of penance for its having been condoned in times past. That not having taken place, Davis was unable to grasp that the conviction that slavery was a sin originated among some Christians, because they were Christians. It did not trouble them that some other Christians might disagree. Just as none of the thousands of Christian sects and factions that arose through the centuries suffered from doubt because others disagreed with them, so, too, the Christian abolitionists. And, in this case, virtue prevailed.

Great Britain

It was from their American cousins that British Quakers gained enthusiasm for abolition, and they, too, provided the initial religious backbone of the antislavery movement. However, these British forces achieved their goal far sooner than did abolition forces in America. There were two main reasons. First, because nearly all of the British slave-owners lived in distant colonies, their political influence was limited. Second, the British government was far more centralized and far less representative than government in America. Thus party elites could enact laws with considerable impunity in comparison with the United States, where many actions required local, not national, legislation, and where even Congress was an unruly body, often unable to reach any consensus. These are the themes I now pursue.232

In 1783, at the request of the Quakers of Philadelphia, the London Meeting for Sufferings was established by British Quakers. Thus, as in America, the Quakers provided a solid organizational basis for British opposition to slavery: volunteers, meeting places, and money. These efforts were greatly amplified in 1787 with the formation of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, in which other Protestant nonconformists joined with the Quakers. The aged John Wesley (1703–1791), founder of Methodism, undertook a preaching campaign against slavery, echoing many of the ideas he had so forcefully expressed in his 1774 abolitionist tract, Thoughts on Slavery.²³³ Wesley’s actions added the substantial resources of his Methodist chapels to the rapidly growing religious coalition for abolition. It was also at this time that the British abolition movement gained its two most important recruits.

William Wilberforce (1759–1833) was the father of Bishop Samuel Wilberforce (Chapter 2) and a member of Parliament from Yorkshire. He belonged to a very strict and influential evangelical group within the Church of England known as the Clapham Sect. Probably the only reason these evangelicals did not leave the Church of England was that at this time only members of that denomination had full civil rights, including the exclusive right to serve in the House of Commons. Upon embracing the abolitionists, Wilberforce assumed responsibility for guiding antislavery efforts in the House of Commons, where he enjoyed a close relationship with Prime Minister William Pitt.

Thomas Clarkson (1760–1846) attended Cambridge, where he prepared to enter the clergy. Having been ordained a deacon, he competed for an essay prize on the subject “Is it right to make slaves of others against their will?” Grappling with this question led Clarkson to discard “his considerable prospects of ecclesiastical preferment” within the Church of England, to devote his life entirely to the cause of abolition.234 In his own words, there “never was any cause … so great and important … never was there one in which the duty of Christian charity could be so extensively exercised; never one, more worthy of the devotion of a whole life towards it.”²³⁵ Clarkson soon assumed responsibility for mobilizing public opinion. To this end he built a network of local organizations and activists on the preexisting framework of Quaker congregations, traveling an estimated thirty-three thousand miles on horseback, crisscrossing England again and again between 1787 and 1792. The most visible fruit of all this effort was a petition campaign, calling on Parliament to end the slave trade. During 1786–1787 Clarkson’s efforts produced petitions signed by at least sixty thousand English men²³⁶—eleven thousand from Manchester alone (where about two-thirds of the adult males signed).

These petitions gave Wilberforce powerful ammunition to use in Parliament, and during 1792 it looked as if legislation prohibiting the slave trade would pass the Commons. However, the outbreak of the French Revolution and of war with France thwarted the abolition efforts. In fact, at the height of British outrage over the brutal excesses taking place in France, Wilberforce was briefly accused of radical sympathies. With the defeat of Napoleon’s fleet at Trafalgar in 1805, the British seized the French colonies in the Caribbean. At this point a renewed campaign for abolition arose but was unable to gain sufficient votes in Commons to pass a bill abolishing slavery. At this juncture Wilberforce changed tactics and convinced Pitt to impose a ban on the slave trade in the French colonies by administrative decree under his powers to regulate trade in captured territories. Pitt died five months later. When a new government was formed, with Lord Grenville as prime minister and Charles Fox as leader of the House of Commons, it was discovered that a majority in the cabinet favored abolition. So in 1807 a bill abolishing the slave trade throughout the British colonies was approved by overwhelming majorities in both the House of Lords and the House of Commons. Not content with being out of the slave trade themselves, the British used diplomacy and even bribery to cause other nations to sign treaties prohibiting the transportation of slaves from Africa to the New World. More than that, the British formed and financed a special naval squadron to patrol the African coast and enforce these treaties. During the next fifty years, the British navy seized nearly sixteen hundred slave ships, many of them with cargoes of slaves, but even those without slaves on board were taken if they were equipped to transport slaves. Altogether, the British liberated more than 150,000 slaves from ships at sea.237

However, ending the slave trade did not abolish slavery in the British colonies; it merely prevented more slaves from being brought in. Hence a new British society was formed to pursue complete abolition: The Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British Dominions. Once again Clarkson toured the country renewing and energizing local organizations. A new petition campaign was organized; as political developments came to a head in 1833, the abolitionists produced more than 1.5 million signers, about half of the adult male population of England.²³⁸ These efforts were augmented by the work of Methodist and Baptist missionaries among the slaves in the West Indies—the Church of England still held back. Public opinion in Britain continued to be stirred by reports from the missionaries that “described the threats and harassments they suffered at the hands of planters and lent authenticity to the growing view, not only among Methodists but throughout the evangelical churches that West Indian planters were a corrupt class.”²³⁹

In response, the planters in the colonies warned that emancipation would cost investors in Britain catastrophic losses, and pointed out that everyone in Britain would pay because the price of sugar would rise greatly if it had to be produced by free labor. These appeals carried weight in the House of Lords—in those days the Lords were not a figurehead, and their agreement was needed for all legislation. To gain this agreement, abolitionists in the House of Commons accepted provisions in the Emancipation Act to compensate the planters by an enormous sum—equal to half of the British annual budget. The act thus passed in 1833, a month after the death of William Wilberforce, providing that on August 1, 1834, slavery would cease in all British colonies. The direct cost to individual British citizens was substantial, both in terms of taxes to buy off the planters (and continuing support of naval operations against slave ships) and in a higher cost of living—the price of sugar did rise sharply, as had been predicted. Indeed, the costs of emancipation were so high that Seymour Drescher characterized the British abolition of slavery as voluntary “econocide.”240

From the beginning to the end, Quakers had played a pivotal role in British abolition organizations, and nearly all of the other leading abolitionists were devout members of nonconformist religious groups—especially the Methodists and Baptists. Nevertheless, revisionist historians have attempted to dismiss religious influences. Their most frequently used argument is that while religious people may have begun the British abolition movement, it succeeded only because it caught on in purely secular quarters, as evidenced by the huge success of the petition campaign. Particular emphasis is given to the overwhelming response of men in Manchester in signing petitions. Manchester was a leading industrial city, and it has been proposed that its workers were somehow “the least parochial in Great Britian,” committed to market principles and free trade. Thus it was “Manchester rather than the Quaker religious network [that] pushed Britain across the psychological threshold into the abolitionist era.”²⁴¹

There are many flaws in this interpretation. First of all, nothing in its industrial, economic, or cultural makeup distinguished Manchester from several other English cities, aside from its response to the abolition petition. Claims to the contrary are invariably vague and offered without evidence. Second, it presumes that workingmen in Manchester were not influenced by religious motives, as though only clergy and full-time religious activists could be so motivated. But there is no reason to suppose that most people in Manchester so compartmentalized their faith that it had no influence on their “political” judgments. Besides, the petition campaign was presented primarily not as a political matter but as a moral obligation. In addition, it strikes me that the one very significant way that Manchester was different was that in 1787, just before the immense local response to the antislavery petitions, John Wesley, the most effective evangelist of the day, preached a revival against slavery in Manchester, and the local Methodists, breaking with the denominational policy of not participating in politics, joined in circulating the petition.²⁴² It would have been astonishing if these developments had not galvanized local support!

Third, to minimize the importance of those who popularized antislavery attitudes and who circulated the abolitionist petitions, and to credit instead the signers as the true basis of British abolitionism, is to transpose cause and effect. Granted that neither the Quakers nor their nonconformist allies could have achieved the Emancipation Act had they failed to arouse public opinion. But without their organized and effective efforts to shape and arouse public opposition to slavery, nothing would have happened. Finally, claims that abolition was a secular achievement have created a silly and unnecessary “mystery,” as is illustrated by Howard Temperley’s reflections on the motivations of British abolitionists:

The British anti-slavery movement has continued to intrigue historians, not the least because of the apparent lack of self-interest on the part of its principal supporters. This is so contrary to conventional views of political behavior that it has given rise to scholarly controversy. Yet in spite of the exercise of much ingenuity, no one has succeeded in showing that those who campaigned for the end of the slave trade and then for the freeing of the slaves stood to gain personally in any tangible way, or that these measures were other than economically costly to the country. In due course Britain’s anti-slavery achievements came to be viewed with pride as expressing the nation’s commitment to humane and liberal principles.243

Temperley’s paragraph recapitulates “respectable,” recent historiography. After considerable dithering and many flirtations with unfounded Marxist notions that emancipation was indeed an act of economic selfinterest, historians have been driven to accept the idea that an immense quotient of idealism was involved. They have come to terms with this conclusion by asserting that these were “liberal principles,” thereby averting a return to the “incorrect” belief that the idealism was of religious character. But this requires that we ignore the unanimous testimony of the people who actually accomplished the deed! Those who brought about abolition in Britain quoted not “liberal principles” but the Bible. They talked about sin and about God’s saving grace.

France

At first glance it might appear that the abolition movement in France really was based on “liberal principles.” However, once allowances are made for the fact that the French abolitionists never appealed for mass support, it was as much of a result of religious concerns as were the American and British movements. Indeed, the three movements were directly connected.²⁴⁴

In 1793 Commissioner Léger Félicité Sonthonax of Saint Domingue, an appointee of the revolutionary government of France, declared the abolition of slavery in that colony. He did this in response to the successful slave rebellion that had raged since 1791, and the threats of invasion by the British and the Spanish. His hope was that emancipation would enable him to enlist the support of both ex-slaves and the rebels to help defend the colony. When word of this action reached France, the Jacobin-controlled National Convention not only supported it but abolished slavery in all French colonies. In taking this action members of the convention condemned slavery as a relic of the monarchy and inconsistent with their revolutionary values. That they did not act until four years after the Revolution had occurred, and only when informed of the need for slave allies to defend the colonies, suggests that radical idealism alone might not have sufficed. In any event, in 1802 Napoleon reinstituted slavery in the French colonies. As noted, when the British subsequently took the French colonies in the Caribbean, Pitt prohibited them from importing slaves. However, after the final defeat of Napolean, the Caribbean colonies were returned to France, and the importation of slaves resumed. During the next fifteen years approximately 125,000 new slaves arrived in the French Caribbean.245 It was not until February 22, 1831, that the French passed an effective law against the slave trade; the abolition of slavery did not occur until 1848.

With British help, an abolition society, the Société des Amis des Noirs (the Society of Friends of Blacks), was founded in France in 1788, just prior to the Revolution. Thomas Clarkson spent considerable time in France helping to form the group, and much of its literature consisted of British pamphlets translated into French. These were appropriate since the French abolitionists also stressed that slavery was wrong on religious grounds. Although the Amis des Noirs never had more than 150 members, many of them were famous, including the philosopher Antoine de Condorcet and the French hero of the American Revolution, the marquis de Lafayette. Unfortunately, as the French Revolution turned on itself, the Amis des Noirs were identified with the Girondist faction and were condemned to death by Robespierre in the spring of 1793—the leaders went to the guillotine, Condorcet committed suicide in prison, and Lafayette fled to Austria. A few survivors resumed meeting later in the decade but were “finally suppressed in 1799 when Napoleon came to power … It would be two decades before a society devoted to ending the slave trade and slavery in the French colonies would emerge once again within France.”²⁴⁶

In 1821 the Société de la Morale Chrétienne (the Society of Christian Morals) was founded. As was evident in its name, the agenda of this group was inspired by religious concerns, and these included abolition of the slave trade. Like the Amis des Noirs, this was a very small group (at its peak it had 338 members), but they composed an even more illustrious elite, including the soon-to-be king, Louis Philippe. They, too, circulated a petition and in 1825 presented it to the government; the petition’s 130 signatures were all from people said to be “foremost citizens.”247 In any event, slave-trading was outlawed in 1831, close on the heels of the July Monarchy that brought Louis Philippe to the throne.

The French were soon cooperating fully with the British to capture slave ships sailing from Africa. But, of course, that left slavery intact in the French Caribbean. So in August 1834 French abolitionists formed another group, the Société Française pour l’Abolition de l’Esclavage (French Society for the Abolition of Slavery). It, too, was very small, probably never exceeding 92 members.²⁴⁸ But it also was a very elite group, made up of leading notables and nobility, and “would operate largely as an appendage to the Chamber of Deputies.”²⁴⁹ Even so, the group had a higher percentage of Protestants than the national average, and nonconformist British abolitionists exerted a considerable influence on the group, despite the fact that the vast majority of members were active Catholics. In addition, more than half of the members were of noble birth, and many of them were well placed in the government. Among them was the distinguished Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), recently back from his tour of America. In 1839, on behalf of the Société, Tocqueville submitted an emancipation proposal to the French Chamber of Deputies. It was modeled on the British Emancipation Act and would have provided compensation of 150 million francs to French slave-owners. But the proposal was tabled, and subsequently so were many others of a similar kind.

During the 1840s, with financial support from British abolitionists, the Société began to expand its scope.²⁵⁰ In 1844 they submitted a new antislavery petition to the government including about 7,000 signatures from Parisians. In response, King Louis Philippe freed all slaves belonging to the Crown. At this point the Catholic Church entered the campaign, calling for immediate emancipation of all French slaves and circulating a new petition. Many of the 11,000 citizens who signed were Catholic priests. Backed by the archbishop of Paris, the Catholic newspaper L’Univers joined the battle against slavery, and in 1848 these efforts succeeded when the July Monarchy was replaced by a provisional government prior to the formation of the Second Republic. The emancipation decree passed by the provisional regime freed all slaves within two months of its proclamation and compensated slave-owners at a rate of half the value of each slave, at a cost of 6 million francs in cash and 120 million in 5 percent bonds. Thus, as in Britain, emancipation came at a very substantial cost to all taxpayers.

It has often been remarked that the organized abolition movements in France were tiny and elitist. But in this era France was not a democracy: appeals to popular support not only lacked relevance; they could have severely damaged the cause. From Napoleon on, French governments sought to minimize mobilization of the public, believing, probably correctly, that this was but an invitation to disorder and revolution. Hence mass abolition appeals would have been repressed; success required convincing the French political elite to act. It would be quite wrong to interpret this as evidence that ideals and religious convictions were irrelevant or, at most, window dressing. Why did the French elite take this action? It could not have been self-interest, since, as with the British, emancipation of slaves in the French colonies was achieved at a considerable cost that fell most heavily on those who brought it about. Nothing so clearly demonstrates that ideals matter than such an example of idealism in action.

It should also be noted that there is a religious “trail” linking the American, British, and French abolition movements: American Quakers initiated abolitionism among their coreligionists in Britain, whereupon John Wesley’s commitment of his British Methodists to abolition influenced American Methodists. Then, it was devout British abolitionists who initiated and partly funded the French abolition movement.

Spain and Latin America

By the time the Sociedad Abolicionista Española (Spanish Abolition Society) was organized in 1865, it was very late in the day. Slaves had been free in the British colonies for more than thirty years, in the French colonies for nearly twenty, and in the Dutch colonies for two; on April 9 of that year, Lee had surrendered to Grant, and all American slaves became free. Only Spanish colonial slavery remained, along with slavery in Brazil, which had by then thrown off Portuguese rule.

Those seeking a secular abolition movement can point to Spain, where religion served as little more than an implicit moral basis and to provide a vocabulary of obligation. Historians of Spanish abolitionism quite properly stress the role of emerging liberal and radical political movements in Spain as well as in the colonies.251 But these historians fail to give adequate regard to Spain’s glaring economic and military weaknesses. It seems very significant that it was antislavery activities in Puerto Rico that prompted the formation of an abolition society in Spain, and that the basis for Puerto Rican abolitionism was mainly its recent economic decline and anxieties about American expansionism. Local interests proposed that “an immediate transition to free labor would benefit the island’s” depressed economy.252 Although this proposal was based on faulty economic reasoning (which the slave-owners spotted at once), it had the effect of linking moral virtue to apparent self-interest. Indeed, visions of a renewed and powerful Spain were an explicit part of Spanish abolitionism, with its dual emphasis on the benefits of free labor and free trade.

Keep in mind that Spanish abolitionists played no role in the emancipation of slaves in most parts of Latin America, because Spain had long since lost its sovereignty over the continent to national liberation movements. Three factors linked most of these liberation movements to emancipation. First of all, aside from Brazil and several continental colonies along the Caribbean, Latin America did not have plantation economies, and slavery was always on a small scale—involved as much in consumption as in production. Second, nearly all who owned slaves opposed the liberation movements. Third, by proclaiming emancipation, liberation movements were able to enlist slaves in their cause—albeit the revolutionary leaders were probably entirely sincere in their opposition to slavery. As Latin American nations gained their independence, they opted for emancipation: Argentina in 1813, Columbia in 1814, Chile in 1823, Central America in 1824, Mexico in 1829, Bolivia in 1831, Ecuador in 1851, and Peru and Venezuela in 1854. Thus when it finally came, Spanish abolition activity was of very reduced scope, applying only to Spain’s few remaining colonies, primarily Cuba and Puerto Rico.

The story of how the Spanish government emancipated the slaves in Puerto Rico (1873) and in Cuba (1886) is a complex tale of political turmoil and cycles of liberalization and repression. Through it all, of course, Spain was intensely aware, not only of its status as a slave-owning pariah in the eyes of other European nations, but of its economic and military weaknesses. In fact, a decade after the Spanish Cortes abolished slavery in Cuba, the United States seized all of Spain’s Caribbean colonies as well as the Philippines.

Brazil became an independent nation in 1822, when Pedro I (son of King John VI of Portugal) proclaimed himself emperor. As a result, not only were the planters of Brazil the dominant economic and political influence; they could not be overruled by a European regime. Consequently, emancipation came very slowly. When it finally did so in 1888, three factors were involved.253

The first factor in ending Brazilian slavery was intense foreign pressure: “Brazilians [were] humiliated by condescending references to their country as the last Christian nation that tolerated slavery, on a level with ‘backward’ African and Asiatic slaveholding societies.”²⁵⁴ Indeed, it was only in response to British pressures that Brazil agreed to end its involvement in the Atlantic slave trade in 1831. And it was British patrols that eventually halted the illegal importation of slaves by Brazilians by 1853. The fall of the American Southern Confederacy came as a terrific political blow, depriving Brazil of a major ally—had the South won the Civil War, Brazil and the Spanish Caribbean colonies might have joined the Confederacy.²⁵⁵

The second factor was an increasingly militant abolition movement, fueled by young men educated abroad and by the very large and rapidly growing number of free blacks, the result of very liberal manumission terms (patterned on the Código Negro Español). As early as 1817, about 25 percent of the 2.3 million Brazilians of African descent were free. When emancipation came in 1888, slaves made up only about 5 percent of the total Brazilian labor force.²⁵⁶

The third factor was rapid economic development and population growth, which shifted political power away from the planters. Between 1840 and 1890, Brazil’s population increased from 4 million to 14 million, a substantial part of the growth being immigrants from Europe.²⁵⁷ Although cities absorbed much of this growth, immigration also provided a supply of agricultural labor that helped to convert some northern planters to abolitionism.²⁵⁸ Meanwhile, the sugar and cotton plantations in the northern states fell upon economic hard times, and the active slavery zone shifted to the southern states where coffee was the primary crop—large numbers of slaves were relocated from north to south. Urbanization, industrialization, and a depressed sugar market eroded the political influence of the planters. In the end, the cities and the areas lacking significant dependence on plantations imposed emancipation on the slave-dependent south. Indicative of the reduced influence of the planters, they received no compensation when they were forced to give up their slaves.

Thus was slavery ended in Christendom. It was stopped by moral campaigns stimulated by the salience of the phenomenon—the sense of direct responsibility for its continuation. Of course, most humans not being unreserved moralists, the abolition movements succeeded where moral concerns were not complicated by perceptions of a substantial self-interest in slavery, although in America, Britain, and France people were willing to make considerable personal sacrifices on behalf of freeing the slaves. Nevertheless, in every case, a powerful nonslave area imposed abolition on a weaker slave-owning region. That is, the American abolitionists mobilized the North to free the slaves of the South; abolitionists in slave-free Britain convinced the government to outlaw slavery in its far-flung colonies; it was in metropolitan France that the fate of slavery in the French West Indies was decided; it was in Madrid, not in Havana or San Juan, that emancipation of Spain’s Caribbean slaves was accomplished; and it was in Rio that Brazilian slaves were emancipated. In contrast, abolition movements made little or no headway in the southern regions of the United States and Brazil or in Europe’s plantation colonies.

THE “ENLIGHTENMENT” AND SLAVERY

It would please many contemporary scholars if the moral arguments for abolition had been a product of the “Enlightenment.” Indeed, Peter Gay went so far as to claim that to have been the case, albeit he chided the philosophes for having been a bit too vague on the subject.259 But even Gay’s careful selectivity cannot hide the fact that a virtual Who’s Who of “Enlightenment” figures fully accepted slavery. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and John Locke (1632–1704) “openly sanctioned human bondage”²⁶⁰—Locke invested in the Atlantic slave trade.²⁶¹ Voltaire (1694–1778) wrote a nasty comment concerning Christians profiting from slavery, but he supported the slave trade and believed in the inferiority of Africans.²⁶² Baron Montesquieu (1689–1755) took pains to dismiss religious reasons in favor of slavery, only to pronounce it as justified by natural law. Comte de Mirabeau (1748–1791) accepted slavery, and so did Edmund Burke (1729–1797), who dismissed abolitionists as religious fanatics and explained that “the cause of humanity would be far more benefited by the continuance of the [slave] trade and servitude … than by the total destruction of both or either.”²⁶³ David Hume (1711–1776) did not favor abolition, although his neighbor and close friend Adam Smith (1723–1790) was a vehement opponent of slavery on both moral and economic grounds, as will be seen. Indeed, some others associated with the “Enlightenment” also supported abolition, including Denis Diderot (1713–1784), Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727–1781), Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), and, of course, Condorcet (1749–1794). But most accepted slavery as a normal part of the human situation.264 It was not philosophers or secular intellectuals who assembled the moral indictment of slavery, but the very people they held in such contempt: men and women having intense Christian faith, who opposed slavery because it was a sin. Thus, as mentioned in Chapter 2, it was the natural theologian William Paley, not his atheist opponent David Hume, who condemned slavery as an “odious institution” and did so on the basis of Christian “light and influence.”²⁶⁵

Not only did the intellectuals of the “Enlightenment” fall far short of matching the extent and passion of abolitionist commitment spreading through religious circles at the same time; even had they been unanimously in favor of emancipation, their public support would have counted for far less than that of the Christian abolitionists. The reason is simple: in the course of human events, “voices” count for far less than organizations. The Quakers were few in number,²⁶⁶ but they were not “voices”; they were congregations. They didn’t merely express their views; they acted. Their undertakings were well funded, coordinated, well led, and designed to influence public opinion. Churches are always unusually effective in shaping public policy because they do not need to assemble organizations to pursue their aims; they are organizations-in-being. Indeed, abolition was only the most celebrated of many similar and effective religious campaigns—churches played a leading role in the women’s suffrage movement and were the essential component of the civil rights movement in the American South.²⁶⁷

THE MARXIST COUNTEREXPLANATION

Unbeknownst to most Marxist historians, their revisionist explanation of why the slaves “really” were freed is based on the work of the economist they most despise: Adam Smith. But Smith was wrong about the economics of slavery, and, consequently, so were (are) the Marxists.

Smith claimed that slavery is an inefficient mode of production in that slave labor costs more than the labor of free, hired individuals. Slaves have no profit motive but work only to the extent needed to avoid punishment—hence as slowly and carelessly as possible. But free workers can be rewarded in proportion to their production and will therefore exert themselves, mentally and physically. “It appears, accordingly, from the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, that the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves.”268 Hence the wise planter would much prefer a system such as sharecropping to slavery.

As Smith’s reputation grew, the conviction spread among intellectuals that slavery was contrary to good business practices—that slave plantations were far less profitable than they would be if they employed free laborers. This soon became the prevailing view among opponents of slavery. So much so that William Lloyd Garrison condemned what he deemed corrupt proposals that the American abolitionists shift the basis of their attack from “Christian duty” to issues of “the pocketbook.”²⁶⁹ On the eve of the Civil War, Hinton Rowan Helper argued that slavery was retarding Southern economic growth,²⁷⁰ and Frederick Law Olmsted proclaimed Southern slave plantations to be an unprofitable investment.²⁷¹ Subsequent to the war this became the accepted academic wisdom on the matter—by the start of the twentieth century every “informed” person knew that Southern slavery had been on its last legs by the time the South seceded, and that had the planters been sober businessmen, not playboys, they would have abandoned slavery long before any war was necessary.

As Marxists took up the matter, these ideas escalated into the claim that it was not moral objections but capitalism that killed slavery! Not that capitalism led to sympathy for those held in bondage, of course. As Howard Temperley put it, “how could a philosophy which extolled the pursuit of individual self-interest have contributed, in the absence of any expectation of economic gain, to the achievement of so praiseworthy an object as the abolition of slavery?”²⁷² Or, in the words of David Brion Davis, the “paramount question” is this: how “did a seemingly liberal movement emerge and continue to win support from major government leaders in the period from 1790 to 1832, a period characterized both by political reaction and industrial revolution?”²⁷³ The Marxist answer is that abolition was accomplished to replace the unprofitable, outmoded, precapitalist economic institution of slavery: the “real” aim of the abolitionists was to remove an impediment to the further development of capitalism.

The most forceful and original proponent of this view was Eric Williams, an economic historian who served as prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago from 1961 through 1981. He argued that the British attacked slavery in the West Indies because it was “so unprofitable that for this reason alone its destruction was inevitable.”²⁷⁴ Spelled out more fully, Williams’s argument was that the primary aim of emerging capitalism was to lower the cost of labor: being fully aware of Adam Smith’s claim that slave labor was more expensive than hired labor, the British capitalists therefore backed abolition. Williams recognized that if he left it at that, his claim was obviously falsified by the fact that slavery in the West Indies was by no means ended by island capitalists seeking to increase their profits. To get around this snag, Williams dismissed the planters as “blind to all considerations and consequences except the maintenance of their diseased system.”275 But how could reduced labor costs in the West Indies benefit capitalists in Britain? By greatly lowering the cost of sugar: as this reduced the cost of living in Britain, employers would be able to reduce the wages of workers. As for religious motivations, Williams dismissed them as obviously insincere because, had they been authentic, the abolitionists would also have campaigned against colonialism and against the capitalist exploitation of free labor. From Williams’s perspective, any true opponent of slavery would have fought against “wage slavery.”

The economic aspects of Williams’s thesis have long since been overwhelmed by the facts. First, it is well established that the planters were not foolish playboys or blind to economic realities; rather, slavery was very profitable, and for large-scale, labor-intensive forms of agriculture, slaves were far more productive than hired workers.²⁷⁶ Second, as already noted and as fully anticipated by those who passed Britain’s Emancipation Act, the economic costs of abolition were immense, and the domestic price of sugar rose sharply. Nevertheless, Williams’s insistence that the abolitionists must have been insincere, self-interested capitalists lingers on. Here, too, David Brion Davis provides the most influential example, albeit his is a somewhat “soft” Marxism.

Davis began by identifying the English Quakers as the “very embodiment of the capitalist mentality … in the vanguard of the industrial revolution.”²⁷⁷ As an “entrepreneurial class” their most urgent concern was with “an unruly labor force” and the need for “labor discipline.” In effect, abolitionism was the method adopted by Quakers to accomplish that goal:

To moralists and reformers of other faiths, the Quakers demonstrated that testimony against slavery could be a social correlative of inner purity which seemed to pose no threat to the social order—at least to that capitalist order in which the Quakers had won so enviable a ‘stake’ … [Quaker] antislavery was a highly selective response to labor exploitation. It provided an outlet for demonstrating Christian concern for human suffering and injustice, and yet thereby gave a certain moral insulation to economic activities less visibly dependent on human suffering and injustice.²⁷⁸

London Quakers. A Quaker woman speaks from the balcony to the Friends gathered for their Sabbath Meeting late in the eighteenth century. Despite their commitment to being “plain” people, the wealth of the community is obvious in the way everyone is dressed. In addition to their wealth and influence, the Quakers were a potent force for abolition because they were well organized and deeply committed. © Gianni Dagli Orti/CORBIS.

Thus “the abolitionist movement helped to clear an ideological path for British industrialists.”279

Nevertheless, Davis was unwilling to accuse the Quakers of real “insincerity or deliberate deception.” Rather, to get around the fact that the Quakers and other Christian abolitionists met all reasonable tests of their sincerity, he claimed that their economic motivation, although real, was unconscious. Although the Quakers were oblivious to their true, self-interested motive, sophisticated modern observers can penetrate the “conscious intention” of the abolitionists to see that underneath they truly “reflected the needs and values of the emerging capitalist order.”²⁸⁰

Here Davis employed the most celebrated dud in the Marxist arsenal: the principle of “false consciousness.” Whenever people do not respond to their “economic interests” in accordance with Marxist predictions, this is to be explained as an error or mispercepetion on their part. Thus although the Quakers should have known they opposed slavery because they favored the expansion of capitalism, they seem not to have grasped this point, perhaps because they spent too much time in church telling one another religious “fairy tales.” As a further explication of this Marxist principle it is appropriate to quote John Ashworth, since he wrote these lines precisely in support of Davis and to elude the plain evidence that the abolitionists were sincere in their idealism. Ashworth defined false consciousness as “the notion that the awareness of historical actors is incomplete, with the result that they misperceive the world around them.” This is not merely a matter of self-deception, for it is “society rather than the individual [that] generates false consciousness.” He then quoted the assertion of a “Marxist theorist”: “[I]t is not the subject that deceives himself, but reality which deceives him.” To illustrate this point, Ashworth noted:

When Marie Antoinette told the peasants of Paris (never mind that the story is probably apocryphal) to eat cake when there was no bread, she was not deceiving herself in thinking they could afford it. Rather the nature of her involvement in society obscured from her the realization that peasants could not in fact afford to eat cake.281

Of course, as Ashworth admits, she never said it, and it seems quite inconceivable that she, or anyone else of ordinary intelligence, didn’t know that peasants were poor. How appropriate that Ashworth chose to illustrate false consciousness with a false example.

Do people misperceive their situations? Certainly. Do they sometimes have mixed motives? Of course. Do they sometimes unintentionally help those whom they oppose? Undoubtedly. But to admit such human failings falls far short of claiming that reality is whatever Marxist theory leads one to believe—that is pure solipsism. All that I am willing to concede to Marxists on this point is that the principle of false consciousness is a fine example thereof, but I am unable to find another. Instead, I fully agree with Thomas Haskell: “To say that a person is moved by class interest is to say that he intends to further the interests of his class, or it is to say nothing at all.”²⁸²

CONCLUSION

Slavery did not die of its own inefficiency, and emancipation was not a capitalist ploy. As Robert William Fogel put it so well, the death of slavery was “a political execution of an immoral system at its peak of economic success, incited by [people] ablaze with moral fervor.”283 Precisely! Moral fervor is the fundamental topic of this entire book: the potent capacity of monotheism, and especially Christianity, to activate extraordinary episodes of faith that have shaped Western civilization.

Futile Sacrifice. Many modern social scientists would argue that this Egyptian priest wasn’t really concerned about pleasing the Great God Re. They would propose that the real point of this and similar ceremonies is to build group solidarity, and that despite the sacrifices being offered to the large statue of the God, his “presence” is incidental. I am confident that this priest would find such claims incomprehensible. © Bettmann/CORBIS.