The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation

Winner of the  National Book Critics Circle Award 2014


With this volume, Davis presents the age of emancipation as a model for reform and as probably the greatest landmark of willed moral progress in human history. Bringing to a close his staggeringly ambitious, prizewinning trilogy on slavery in Western culture Davis offers original and penetrating insights into what slavery and emancipation meant to Americans. He explores how the Haitian Revolution respectively terrified and inspired white and black Americans, hovering over the antislavery debates like a bloodstained ghost. He offers a surprising analysis of the complex and misunderstood significance the project to move freed slaves back to Africa. He vividly portrays the dehumanizing impact of slavery, as well as the generally unrecognized importance of freed slaves to abolition. Most of all, Davis presents the age of emancipation as a model for reform and as probably the greatest landmark of willed moral progress in human history.

David Brion Davis is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University, and founder and Director Emeritus of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. He has written and edited sixteen books, the most recent of which was Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. He is also a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. His books have won the Pulitzer Prize, The Bancroft Prize, and the National Book Awards. In 2014 President Obama awarded Davis with the 2013 National Humanities Medal “for reshaping our understanding of history.” He lives outside New Haven, Connecticut.

Preface
 
Introduction
Discovering Animalization
Some Evidence of Animalization
 
1 Some Meanings of Slavery and Emancipation: Dehumanization, Animalization, and Free Soil
The Meaning of Animalization, Part I
The Meaning of Animalization, Part II
The Search for the Animalized Slave
Domestication and Internalization
 
2 The First emancipations: freedom
and dishonor
Self- Emancipation: Haiti as a Turning Point
Freedmen and Slaves
Freedmen’s Rights
Loss of Mastery
The “Horrors of Haiti”
 
3 Colonizing Blacks, Part I: Migration and Deportation
The Exodus Paradigm
Precedents: Exiles
Precedents: The Displaced
 
4 Colonizing Blacks, Part II: The American Colonization Society and Americo-Liberians
Liberating Liberia
 
5 Colonizing Blacks, Part III: From Martin Delany to Henry Highland Garnet and Marcus Garvey
Nationalism
 
6 Colonizationist Ideology: Leonard Bacon and “Irremediable Degradation”
Bacon’s “Report” of 1823
The Paradox of Sin and “Irremediable Degradation”
Some Black Response
 
7 From Opposing Colonization to Immediate Abolition
Paul Cuffe and Early Proposals for Emigration
James Forten and Black Reactions to the American Colonization Society
The Search for Black Identity and Emigration to Haiti
Russwurm, Cornish, and Walker
Blacks and Garrison
 
8 Free Blacks as the Key to Slave Emancipation
Recognition of the Issue
Abolitionist Addresses to Free African Americans
David Walker and Overcoming Slave Dehumanization
James McCune Smith and Jefferson’s “What further is to be done with these people?”
 
9 Fugitive Slaves, Free Soil, and the Question of Violence
Frederick Douglass as a Fugitive
The Underground Railroad and Runaway Slaves
Harriet Jacobs as a Female Fugitive
Fugitive Slaves and the Law
 
10 The Great Experiment: Jubilee, Responses, and Failure
An Eschatological Event and America’s Barriers
The Enactment of British Emancipation
Some American Responses to British Emancipation
From Joseph John Gurney to the Issue of Failure
 
11 The British Mystique: Black Abolitionists in Britain—the Leader of the Industrial Revolution and Center of “Wage Slavery”
Frederick Douglass Confronts the World
African Americans Embrace the Mother Country
The Problems of Race, Dehumanization, and Wage Slavery
Joseph Sturge, Frederick Douglass, and the Chartists— the Decline and Expansion of Antislavery in the 1850s
 
Epilogue
 
Acknowledgments