The Transformation of the World (182 page)

The End of Slavery in the United States

Things ran a very different course in the United States.
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Nowhere were the foundations of slaveholder society more stable than in the Southern states, whose very population, despite the lack of new imports from Africa, continued to grow by leaps and bounds. On the eve of the Civil War, four million slaves were living in the United States; twenty years earlier, in 1840, there had been no more than 2.5 million.
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These people lived in the same society with whites, whereas the British and Continental abolitionists who took up the cause of slaves in their own country or across the ocean rarely had any actual contact with Africans. The abolitionist movement campaigned in the slave-free North but had no chance of catching on in the South. What developed in the South in the years before the Civil War was increasingly a laager mentality that brooked no opposition to the system. Even the nonslaveholding majority of whites identified as voters with a propagandistic image of the South and helped to sustain social relations from which they did not themselves profit directly; after all, the life of a big plantation owner often corresponded to their vision of an ideal existence. Northern abolitionists—who launched a militant crusade, with strong female and Afro-American involvement, only in the 1830s—succeeded in mobilizing a smaller base than British opponents of slavery had had at various peaks before 1833. They also fought in a more difficult situation, since the North and South of the United States had much closer ties with each other than Britain had with its distant sugar colonies. Besides, racism was much more pervasive in Northern society than in early-nineteenth-century Britain and reflected the influence of the North's own past history of slavery.

Confronted with an elaborate apologia for slavery, North American abolitionists drew upon more radical religious sources than their British counterparts, and appeared more fanatical within the ideological spectrum of the United States. Many believed, with an almost obsessional conviction, that the practice of slavery, or indeed its craven tolerance, was a sin worthy of punishment. Since their primary aim was often more to eradicate the evil of slavery than to integrate blacks into American society, proposals to solve the problem by repatriating emancipated slaves to Africa found approval well beyond the limited abolitionist circles; it was quite possible for criticism of slavery to go hand in hand with rejection of a dark-skinned presence in America.
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However, radicals grouped around the publicist William Lloyd Garrison would have nothing to do with such plans.
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In the North too, abolitionists encountered stronger resistance than ever existed in Britain; it might involve physical attacks on their persons and stocks of literature, but also a conspiracy of silence. After the Missouri crisis of 1819 to 1821 there was a secret agreement among leading political forces to make slavery a taboo subject, and between 1836 and 1844 an actual “gag rule” prohibited any treatment of the subject in Congress. For a long time, then, the United States lacked the political will that in
Britain associated the slave question with changes in voting law and resulted in the great reform package of 1832–33.

The struggle of white and black abolitionists would not by itself have brought about the Civil War, and without the Civil War the “peculiar institution” would probably have held on a while longer. The North did not wage war
directly
to end slavery. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863—the most important turning point in nineteenth-century African American history—also had the pragmatic intent of mobilizing black resistance for the Northern military effort. Lincoln himself had not originally been an abolitionist, believing that blacks would not be able to live with equal rights in a majority white society, but he publicly changed his position in the mid-fifties. On the other hand, he had long held the conviction that everyone should harvest the fruits of their labor and be free to develop as individuals. When he became president, Lincoln first acted cautiously with regard to the goal of full emancipation, but he then took the leap with characteristic determination.
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Thus, although abolition in the United States came as a by-product of war rather than as the culmination of public campaigns or a steadily growing openness among top political leaders toward decisive reforms, the problem of slavery was at the origin of the Civil War. It was the main reason why the weak institutions of central government—presidency, Congress, Supreme Court—could no longer hold in check the centrifugal tendencies asserting themselves in the regions. The pros and cons of extending slavery into the new territories in the West was the fulcrum of US domestic politics between 1820 and 1860. The revolutionary process in the Americas—which included the revolution in Haiti, the decree of 1794 (later repealed in 1802) abolishing slavery in all French colonies, and the British Slave Trade Act of 1807—had weakened the foundations of slavery, while at almost the same time the Deep South of the United States became the new center of gravity of the plantation economy.

Notwithstanding the principle of the indissolubility of the Federal Constitution, this might well have led to the coexistence of two differently constituted sovereign countries on the territory of the (former) United States, if slaveowning Southerners had not exercised a dominant influence in national politics all the way from George Washington to the election of Abraham Lincoln. The laager mentality of the antebellum South therefore went together with attempts to force the North to abandon its own moral principles. In 1850 Congress passed a Fugitive Slave Law permitting the federal authorities to pursue runaway slaves into free states and to return them by force to their owners in the South. There were several other provocations of a similar kind, which made it clear that the normative unity of the country—an emotive myth cultivated since the earliest days—was breaking down. The mounting tensions finally resulted in the outbreak of the Civil War, each side declaring itself blameless.

Both made a strong pitch to the outside world: Britain, despite many conflicts, remained the chief political and cultural reference for the industrializing
North, while the Southern elites had greater affinities with slave owners in Brazil and Cuba. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation also had an impact overseas, by aligning British public opinion more clearly with the North. Lord Palmerston's government, partly under pressure from Napoleon III, had previously been toying with the idea of intervening in the Civil War, but the proclamation rekindled the moral energies of the abolitionist movement thirty years on and led to mass demonstrations that prevented Whitehall from siding with the Confederacy.
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Brazil, Compared with the United States

In Haiti and the United States, the ending of slavery was attended with violence on a large scale. The process was more peaceful in other Caribbean colonies and the new republics of Hispanic America (where abolition laws were mostly enacted in the 1850s), as was the emancipation of the serfs in the Tsarist Empire in 1861. Cuba and Brazil, too, saw relatively low levels of violence. It is still debated among historians whether slavery was less brutal for those concerned in Latin America than in the Caribbean and the United States. The fact that toward the end of the system, the mortality rate of slaves in Brazil was distinctly higher than in the Southern US states would seem to suggest the opposite.

Strong forces supported slavery both in politically independent Brazil and in the Spanish colony of Cuba—otherwise it would not have lasted until 1886 and 1888, respectively. In Brazil, slave owners still defended their property with gun in hand at the beginning of the 1880s; slave resistance, overt or covert, never slackened, but the repression was strong enough to head off major revolts. In Cuba, which was still receiving shipments of slaves in the mid-sixties, the question of emancipation became caught up in the wider program of the independence war of 1868 to 1878. The war ended in failure, but both Creole rebels and Spanish rulers courted slaves to fight on their side and offered them the prospect of freedom.
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In contrast to Cuba and elsewhere in Hispanic America, Brazil had a slave system that was one of the two largest in the Western world (together with the Southern US states). Its abolition did not come suddenly, as in the United States, but through a long decline in significance involving numerous acts of manumission and culminating in the “Golden Law” of 1888, the last spectacular official action of the monarchy under the princess regent, Isabel. In 1831, under British pressure, new legislation had promised freedom to all human beings recently imported as slaves, but smugglers went unpunished and largely circumvented its provisions; in the forties there was even a rise in the import trade. More effective measures were introduced in 1850, partly out of fear that slave ships would bring cholera with them. The price of slaves then increased, while the numbers set free declined.

Manumission had always been much simpler in Brazil than in the United States, and the chances of gaining freedom therefore higher. So long as the slave trade and smuggling ensured fresh supplies from Africa, it made economic sense
for Brazilian slave owners to allow the freeing of slaves and to use the proceeds of their sale to fill the resulting gaps. In the United States this was no longer an option after 1808, because of the ending of imports and the sharp rise in slave prices—and the same now happened in Brazil. Around the middle of the century, albeit with wide regional variations, slavery began to lose its importance for the Brazilian economy, first in the cities, then on the sugar plantations (increasingly equipped with modern steam mills and run by British investors using free labor), and finally in the coffee-producing areas. Unlike in the Southern United States, slavery was no longer an economically vigorous institution at the time when it was abolished. It had been hanging on mainly in less productive, technologically backward sectors and in regions with poor transportation links.

The relatively peaceful road to abolition in Brazil may be attributed to three factors. First, the main economic center of gravity shifted from the sugarproducing Northeast to the expanding coffee zones in the South, where immigrants from southern Europe played a growing role. Slavery held its ground there, amid an insatiable labor market, but the advantages of free immigrant labor were ever more apparent to entrepreneurs. Second, Brazil was the only part of the Americas south of California where abolitionism (from the 1860s on) spread beyond circles of intellectuals, liberal politicians, and capitalist employers to gain a mass following among the urban middle classes and free workers (immigrants as well as locally born men and women). Third, despite the formation of centers of gravity, the slave population was distributed across the regions of Brazil. The slave question was therefore not a source of polarization between free and unfree zones, as it had been in the US drift toward secession and civil war.
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To a greater extent than in the Caribbean and the Southern United States, slavery ceased to be a suitable form of labor in its final decades. Nevertheless, it did not simply evaporate. In a constitutional monarchy, its abolition without compensation (as in the United States, though not in the British Caribbean) became the object of political power struggles, in which the victors were those who saw a slave-free republic as the prerequisite for a modern nation-state, especially one oriented to the Anglo-Saxon countries.
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In the end, the decision was made under the impact of a kind of mass strike, as slaves deserted the plantations by the thousands.

The long history of the rise and fall of slavery and the “second serfdom” in the civilization of “the West” therefore came to a final conclusion in the 1880s. Later it would be Eurasia, but not the Western hemisphere, that witnessed the camps and exterminatory worlds of the National Socialists and Soviet or Chinese Communists (Hitler's armaments minister, Albert Speer, spoke after 1945 of an SS “slave state”)—a phenomenon ultimately worse than classical African slavery, as it rested not upon
trade
in human beings but upon a system in which labor was more a by-product of organized repression than a reason for its exercise.
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In the liberal-capitalist West itself, however, not even extreme reactionaries or antihumanists thought of making slavery once more a “normal” social institution.

Emancipation in the Muslim world?

Developments were different in the Muslim world. Slavery, traditionally approved of, underwent a decline in the eighteenth century. In the middle third of the nineteenth, however, rising demand for exports led again in many places to a sharp upward trend in the employment of slaves, typically in small-scale production rather than on large plantations. In the Egyptian cotton boom of the 1860s and 1870s, resulting from the interruption of American supplies to European factories during the Civil War, even ordinary farmers reached the point of employing black African slaves. At the same time, the state's need for forced labor and slave troops kept growing, while servile concubines from the Black Sea area became a status symbol among wide circles in Egypt. Slaves were also a common sight in the homes and fields of Anatolia, Iraq, and Muslim parts of India.

Production slavery probably declined in the Islamic countries from the 1880s on.
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But the views of intellectual opinion leaders, especially of clerics schooled in law, and the value system of society as a whole did not display the same decisive turn against slavery that had taken place in the West. Proposals for its sudden abolition almost never became politically influential. One early exception, though, was Ahmad al-Husain, the bey of Tunis, who in 1846 (two years before France) became the first ruler in Muslim history to lay the basis for the end of slavery, combining personal convictions with an attempt to gain British respect and to deny France any pretext to intervene from across the border in Algeria. On a visit to France in late 1846, he enjoyed being feted by French liberals as a civilized champion of liberty.
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