The United States went through a devastating civil war to end slavery—the deadliest war in American history. Have you ever thought about how the British ended slavery in their Caribbean possessions such as Barbados and Jamaica?
The answer is, in a word, “peacefully.” It happened fifteen years before our 1863 Emancipation Proclamation and 17 years before the end of our Civil War.
I don’t mean to gloss over the turmoil—there were major slave revolts in British territories before the Emancipation Act was adopted in 1833, and full emancipation did not arrive until 1838. From 1787, when the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was created (mostly by Quakers), protests against the slave trade in Britain were fierce, long-lasting, and initially futile.
Recent “woke” campaigns have raised a legitimate question: How could the founders of our country espouse the ideals of freedom, especially in the Declaration of Independence, and still support slavery?
A related question (not so often asked by critical theorists) is: How did the country ultimately conduct a deadly war (with 600,000 combatants killed) to end slavery?
The argument reflected in these essays is that ideological, emotional, and political support for slavery changed over time. Southern founders such as Washington and Jefferson believed that slavery was a “necessary evil,” but a temporary one. Beginning around 1830 (after most if not all the founders were dead) Southern elites argued instead that slavery was a “positive good.” The development of what Grynaviski and Munger call institutional racism was a “conscious project of ideological reconstruction.”[2]
Frederick Douglass, the nineteenth-century orator, abolitionist, and escaped slave, is a hero of our country. Many biographies of him have been written, one of them a Pulitzer Prize winner; at least six books deal with his relationship with Abraham Lincoln; and a book has even been devoted to one famed speech of 1852, “What, to the Slave, Is the Fourth of July?”
Douglass is not famous only for his eloquence, but also because of his long years of political activity in which his unfailing message was that the United States could and should carry out the promises of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. That message did not end when the Civil War ended.
But for a long time Douglass and his message were eclipsed by history. The purpose of this post is, in addition to honoring Douglass on the Fourth of July, to explain why Douglass’s fame faded for more than half a century. At the same time, I recommend two books that will clarify this further. One is a short biography by Timothy Sandefur; the other is David Blight’s massive Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory.[1] Continue reading ““What, to the Slave, Is the Fourth of July?””
Studying U. S. agricultural history, as I have been doing, sheds new light on historical issues that once seemed solved. Thus my question: Could the deterioration of Southern soil have been a cause of the Civil War?
We know that the Civil War was not fought over freeing slaves but over whether slavery would expand as the nation moved westward. [1] It is less well-known that the South experienced widespread deterioration of its land during the half-century before the Civil War. Much of the South was planted in large monocultures, first tobacco and then cotton. Growing cotton and tobacco year after year takes the nutrients out of the soil.
These days, many people are claiming that the United States is composed of two groups, oppressors and victims.
We see this in university “whiteness studies,” which treat white people as inevitable oppressors and black people as inevitable victims. We see it in the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which claims that the true founding of the United States was not 1776 but 1619, when the first African slaves (or possibly indentured servants) arrived at Jamestown, Virginia. Much of “cancel culture” is based on the ideas that white people are guilty for the sins of their ancestors and people of color remain victimized today.
Yet academic historians, by and large, do not look at race this way. And I am not talking just about conservative historians. I mean historians of all perspectives, including historians on the Left.
