Historian Sean Wilentz has an interesting article in the New York Review of Books on how surprising the abolition of slavery was to most Americans and many Europeans in 1865. Here are a few excerpts rom the article:
Although they diverge sharply, the most common accounts of American slavery have an air of inevitability about them. This is especially true regarding the abolition of slavery in 1865. Whether celebrated as a monument to freedom or diminished as a transition from one form of racial oppression to another, the course of Emancipation can seem almost preordained, the product of essential features of American life. If anything, we wonder why it didn’t happen sooner, and condemn past generations for their hypocrisy, mendacity, and cruelty. Yet few things if any in modern history were more unexpected than the eradication of human bondage in the Atlantic world.
A fixture and force in Western culture, time out of mind, slavery, and more specifically racial slavery, had been essential to the European settlement of the New World ever since the Portuguese pioneered the plantation system with enslaved African labor in the sixteenth century. Apart from sporadic protests, the spread of slavery went virtually unchallenged by European and British settlers let alone their governments; periodic slave revolts and insurrectionary plots did not appreciably slow the rise of the plantation complex that at its height stretched from Brazil to the Caribbean to British North America…
These proslavery Americans and apologists for slavery and their progeny were no less products of the American founding than the early abolitionists inspired by Woolman and Benezet or the conflicted enlightened Virginians like Jefferson. Plantation slavery grew stupendously in the United States after the Revolution, generating a well-organized slave power that long dominated national politics. Slavery’s defeat was not inevitable. Nor, obviously, did white supremacy die with slavery. Over the century and a half since slavery’s abolition, the racist Americanism of Charles Pinckney and Roger Brooke Taney has survived and flourished in new forms, along with dominating social and political structures that uphold it. Far from vanquished, it has morphed and resurged in ways expected and unexpected, from the bloody overthrow of Reconstruction to the menacing rise of Donald J. Trump.
There is another view that challenges the familiar one, hailed by its supporters for forcing an honest reckoning with slavery and its unending consequences. This account asks profound and unsettling questions about the nation’s origins and bids us to regard the experience of the slaves as the true test of America’s professed ideals. Slavery, in this view, wasn’t simply an important part of American society at the founding and after; it defined a nation born in oppression and bad faith. While this view acknowledges the ideals of equality proclaimed by Jefferson and others, it regards them as hollow. Even after slavery ended, the racism that justified slavery persisted, not just as an aspect of American life but at its very core.
If the familiar view courts complacency, this one is vulnerable to an easy cynicism. Once slavery’s enormity is understood, as it should be, not as a temporary flaw but as an essential fact of American history, it can make the birth of the American republic and the subsequent rise of American democracy look as nothing more than the vindication of glittering generalities about freedom and equality founded on the oppression of blacks, enslaved and free, as well as the expropriation and slaughter of Native Americans. It can resemble, ironically, the reactionary proslavery insistence that the egalitarian self-evident truths of the Declaration were self-evident lies. It can leave our understanding of American history susceptible to moralizing distortions that seem compelling simply because they defy reassuring versions of the past.
Some of that cynicism is on display in The New York Times Magazine’s recently launched 1619 Project, enough to give ammunition to hostile critics who would discredit or minimize the entire enterprise of understanding America’s history of slavery and antislavery. The project’s lead essay, for example, by Nikole Hannah-Jones berates our national mythology for “conveniently” omitting “that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” Supposedly, Britain, by 1776, “had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere.” There were, the essay says, “growing calls” in London to abolish the slave trade, which would have “upended the economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South.” Americans, in short, “may never have revolted against Britain” had the founders not believed that independence “was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue.” The American Revolution, in effect, anticipated the slaveholders’ rebellion eighty-odd years later: the American patriots allegedly declared their independence of Britain in 1776 for the same reason that the Southern states seceded in 1860–1861, to guarantee that slavery would endure. American independence, in this view, was a precursor of Southern secession…
Coincidence aside, though, this portion of the 1619 Project is simply untrue. Neither the British government nor the British people were “deeply conflicted” over slavery in 1776. To be sure, controversy did arise in the 1760s and 1770s over the legality of owning slaves on British soil proper, where wealthy merchants and gentlemen held thousands of slaves chiefly as house servants; and in 1772, a small group of abolitionists succeeded in getting Britain declared free soil in the landmark Somerset decision….
Cynicism about the Revolution gives way to cynicism about the Civil War and, in particular, about Abraham Lincoln—rendered as a white supremacist who, whatever his qualms about human bondage, supposedly had no interest in ending slavery, but only in preserving the Union. One is left to wonder how Lincoln’s first Inaugural Address, delivered weeks before the fighting began, affirmed to one admittedly unfriendly Northern editor “that anti-slavery is the corpus, the strength, the visible life of the party which has now assumed the reins of government.” One is bidden to forget that the war was a Southern counterrevolution against the victorious Republicans’ explicit intention to place slavery, in Lincoln’s words, “in the course of ultimate extinction”—and much else that Lincoln said against slavery—a counterrevolution that Lincoln was determined to crush. It took a year and a half—just a year and a half—before the Emancipation Proclamation officially turned the struggle against secession into a struggle for liberation under force of arms, fought in part by African-American Union troops who included more than one hundred thousand former slaves. That, too, was part of the Emancipation Proclamation. From the very start, however, the war for the Union was inherently antislavery…
What 1619 has become to the history of American slavery, 1688 is to the history of American antislavery, the year that four German speaking Quakers in the settlement of Germantown, Pennsylvania, raised what is generally regarded as the first written public protest against African-American slavery in the British colonies. Denouncing slavery as a violation of the Golden Rule, they initially directed their petition to the local Quaker monthly meeting, but it had no effect and was forgotten until its accidental rediscovery in 1844.
Antislavery sentiment persisted in Pennsylvania, as part of what became a dissenting tradition inside the Society of Friends aimed by a minority of pious Quakers against the more extravagant slaveholding and slave-trading majority. Finally, in the 1750s, a full-scale reformation of American Quakerism produced a revulsion against what was still very much a fundamental institution in the Quakers’ world, but the reformation did not expand much beyond the Friends. As late as 1763, only a small minority of British or European colonists anywhere in North America thought involvement in slaveholding or the slave trade, direct or indirect, deserved the slightest ethical questioning.
Yet the moral revolution of the 1740s and 1750s, advanced on these shores by prophets like John Woolman, exploded after the French and Indian War, the American front of the European Seven Years’ War, amid the rising colonial revolt against imperial rule. Couching political complaints not as assertions of customary English rights and liberties but as tests of universal principles and natural rights rapidly dishonored holding Africans and their children in permanent slavery…
The upsurge achieved some rapid results. In 1777, fractious Vermonters adopted the first written constitution in history to outlaw adult slavery. That same year, when drafting a new state constitution, the New York State legislature stopped short of approving emancipation but endorsed the principle that their state should be free soil and exhorted future legislatures to take the most effective and prudent steps toward “abolishing domestic slavery.” Three years later, the Pennsylvania assembly approved the first legislatively enacted emancipation law in modern history; four years after that, Rhode Island and Connecticut passed similar measures. Petitions and freedom suits initiated by slaves and pressed by antislavery legislators and lawyers undermined slavery’s legitimacy in Massachusetts, leading to the landmark rulings in cases involving the slaves Quock Walker and Mum Bett, which in 1783 outlawed slavery under the terms of the commonwealth’s constitution of 1780…
That history was not harmless. It was not peripheral. Nothing about it was inevitable. It began with perhaps the greatest unforeseen transformation in modern history, the rise of antislavery ideas and arguments. Americans, earlier than anywhere else, turned that transformation into the politics that would seek to bring slavery to its “ultimate extinction.” In reaction, Americans also produced the mightiest proslavery resistance to those politics the world had ever seen and, through the Confederacy, came perilously close to establishing an American empire of slavery, if not for what Lincoln called the “terrible war” that rendered a “result” which was “fundamental and astounding.” Cynicism about this history defeats understanding as surely as complacency does. We are left to contemplate…the terror and the triumph of the relentless unforeseen.
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