Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823. Cornell Paperbacks. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975.

Title: The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution: 1770-1823

Author: David Brion Davis

Year of Publication: 1999

Thesis:

Essentially argues that the end of slavery was by far a foregone conclusion rooted in the paradoxes of the U.S. Constitution. Even those who abhored slavery, such as Jefferson, considered foremost his "self-preservation," (12). His work was able to use Englightenment ideas to justify freedom based on landholding, and slavery based on the supposed natural inferiority of Africans and African Americans. Economics and these concepts of freedom explain why prejudice against African Americans (especially in Jefferson's proto-scientific racism) and slavery endured for so long, and why ideas couldn't, on their own, force its end. He does credit abolitionists with providing a way to force the issue into the public consciousness.

Time: 1770-1823

Geography:

Organization:

Preface to the New Edition

- Jefferson and cause against King George III

- Jefferson's fear of slave revolts removed from Decl. of Indep.

- Debate over Dunmore (forces Jefferson to try & defend slavery, as manumission becomes an issue of inciting insurrection)

- Believes Jefferson really did condemn slavery (yet pits it against "self-preservation" (12)

- Shift in public opinion over slavery (in previous book) important & foments social movements (13)

Preface

- This follows his intellectual history - w/same title except "in Western Culture"

A Note on Terms

A Calendar of Events Associated with Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Emancipation, 1770-1823

One: What the Abolitionists Were Up Against

- Aristotle - enslaved people as low-level-virtuous, butu they borrow this from connection to/extension of master (39)

- Hegel - the identity of the master is shaped by and dependent upon the enslaved (in their recognition of master's authority) (40)

- Resistance is always present, and therefore makes this theory continue to have to try & adapt (40-41)

- Slavery is "adaptable" shown by slave-produced products as well as its survival after the American Revolution. (83)

- American Rev. does help foment antislavery in the North. (83)

- This chapter really charts a shift of multiple folks who don't like slavery but don't do anything fundamentally to challenge the system to folks who were more amenable to "antislavery ideology" (82)

Two: The Seats of Power, I [BR, FR, North Am]

Three: The Seats of Power, II [BR, FR, North Am]

[4&5: "What effect did the ideals of the Enlightenment and of the evangelical revival have in plantation societies, especially in the American South? How did a social structure dominated by plantation slavery respond to antislav- ery ideals? Conversely, what social groups in England and in the North became involved in organized antislavery activity? What significance can we attach to the Quaker antislavery initiative? The purpose of Chapters four and Five, in short, is to explore some of the social circumstances which either limited or reinforced the effect of antislavery doctrine." (16)]

Four: The Boundaries of Idealism

Five: The Quaker Ethic and the Antislavery International

[6-9: "Chapters Six through Nine form the core of the study and contain its prin- cipal themes. They are concerned, essentially, with the ideological functions and implications of the British and American antislavery movements. Since these functions and implications were very different in the two countries, and since I examine the subject in some detail, I have chosen to treat the countries separately, except for brief and periodic comparisons. The meaning of "ideological functions and implications" should become clearer as I proceed. For the moment it is sufficient to say that in these four chapters I move from the cultural dimension, as analyzed in The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, to points of intersection between ideals and social action." (16)]

Six: The Emancipation of America, I

- Begins with critique of Jordan, whom he believes is too optimistic about how it might have been possible for a the American Revolution to have both emancipated enslaved people but also to have offered them a head start in heading off social Darwinism arguments. However, Davis argues Jordan fails to understand just how intractable the forces governing slavery were. He points to several of these issues - but they boil down to economic dependency on goods produced by enslaved people and the difficulty in mindset that mistrusted centralized power. Even so, Davis argues there was value in the debate that sowed seeds. (256)

Seven: The Emancipation of America, II

Eight: The Preservation of English Liberty, I

[9-10 - human/divine law (17)]

Nine: The Preservation of English Liberty, I

Ten: The Preservation of English Liberty, II

Eleven: The Good Book

Epilogue: Toussant L'Ouverture and the Phenomenology of Mind

Index

Type:

Methods:

Sources:

Historiography:

Winthrop Jordan

Keywords:

Ideology - "an integrated system of beliefs, assumptions, and values, not necessairly true or false, which reflects the needs and interests fo a group or class at a particular time in history." (17)

Interest - "anything that benefits or is thought to benefit a specific collective identity." (17)

Abolitionist - Militant/immediate reformers (21)

Antislavery - nonspecific/gradual (21)

Themes:

- American Colonization Society debates

- Paradox of slavery - treating people as property, "animalizing" them, but also recognizing they resisted

- The intractability of racial prejudice

- Internalization of "anti-Blackness"

- Emancipation never a given (requires both war and abolitionist efforts and still returns in many attempts)

- Rationalization of slavery by thinkers all the way back to Plato; 

- Gradual Emancipation

- Enlightenment/natural rights/slavery can co-exist as long as Black people are considered innately incapable of self-rule. Or, for example, if slavery had rendered them such, the idea still worked in favor of oppression.

Critiques:

Questions:

Curious what the underpinnings behind undoing the order to grant formerly enslaved people land. Did it have to do with principles Jefferson, et. al. had set forth about African Americans' ability to reason?

Quotes:

"Indeed, I would argue that there was a kind of uncon- scious collaboration even between abolitionists and their opponents in defining race as the ultimate "reality." If my suspicions are valid, then a preoccupation 

with racial conflict, as the ultimate reality, may only help to obscure more fundamental issues of ideology and power." (17)

"If Plato and Aristotle provided an ideology for masters, the Cynics, Sophists, and Stoics provided an ideology for slaves. Externally, the servant might be the instrument of his master's will, but internally, in his own self-consciousness, he remained a free soul. And he could affirm the truth of this subjective reality by denying the importance of the world of flesh and human convention. Physical constraint could never bar a man from true virtue. Hence the master, imagining him- self to be free and omnipotent, might well be the true slave—at least in the eyes of the slave." (42)

"The Revolution could not have opened avenues toward general emancipation unless the slaves themselves had become involved as a significant military force. Historians have too often underestimated the economic strength of slavery during the Revolutionary period, exaggerated the force of antislavery senti- ment in the Upper South, and minimized the obstacles that aboli- tionists faced even in the northern states. The American colonists were fighting, after all, for self-determination. And it is now clear that slavery was of central importance to both the southern and national economies, and thus to the viability of the "American system." (256)

"A free society, in other words, was by no means incompatible with dependent classes of workers. Its central prerequisite was a large class of freeholders, unencumbered by feudal, military, or political obligations. Liberty required independence, and independence required freehold property." (259)

"Clearly there was nothing novel about the freedom and independence of some men depending on the coerced labor of others. What distinguished American colonists was their magnificent effrontery. They rejoiced to find their ideals of freedom and equality reflected in the actual social order, but resolutely denied that the social order rested on a "mudsill" of slavery, as Southerners would later acknowledge. Yet like their English contemporaries, the American colonists equated social responsibility with independence, and independence with land ownership." (261)"

Notes:

Curtin, Philip D. The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Title:

The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History

Author:

Philip D. Curtin

Year of Publication:

1990

Thesis:

Plantation complex drives the slave trade, preindustrial global population movements, exchange of goods (ergo, it affects areas that don't have plantations). This synthetic collection of essays/lectures displaces the U.S. South and focus on plantation development beginning from from medieval times in the Mediterranean (1123) and ending in the 19th century with democracies and revolutions and shifts to other forms of labor. Focuses on sugar production, and therefore is centered in West Africa, Caribbean, and Brazil.

Time:

15-19th centuries

Geography:

British, French, Portuguese Atlantic / Africa / Caribbean / Brazil

Organization:

Preface

Preface to the first edition

1. The Mediterranean origins

Sugar planting

Cyprus

The Mediterranean slave trade

The mature plantation complex

Forms of cultural encounter

2. Sugar planting from Cyprus to the Atlantic Islands

The Atlantic Islands

Colonial institutions: The Canaries

The westward migration

To the Americas

Why migration?

3. Africa and the slave trade

African isolation

Political forms south of the Sahara

The trans-Sahara trade

Disease and isolation

African, Muslim, and European slavery

The beginning of the Atlantic trade

4. Capitalism, feudalism, and sugar planting in Brazil

Feudalism and capitalism

Intentions and experiments in Brazil

The sugar industry

Feudalism from below

Local government

5. Bureaucrats and free lances in Spanish America

Frontiers: freedom and anarchy versus despotism and slavery

The crown and the bureaucracy

Intentions and achievements in the American world

The West Indies

Mexico

Encomienda

The return of the bureaucrats

Seventeenth-century transition

6. The sugar revolution and the settlement of the Caribbean

Caribbean geography

European settlement

The economics of sugar and disease

The sugar revolution

7. Anarchy and imperial control

"No peace beyond the lines"

Buccaneers and transfrontiersmen

8. Slave soceities on the periphery

Differential population growth

Placer gold

Bandeirantes

Slave revolts and maroon settlements

The settlement colonies

Apogee and revolution

9. The slave trade and the West African economy in the eighteenth century

Prices

The economics of supply

Political enslavement

Rising demand -- rising exports

Assessing the damage

10. Atlantic commerce in the eighteenth century

Bureaucrats and private traders

Commodities in the African trade

The conduct of the African trade

Merchants and planters

Caribbean trade

11. The Democratic Revolution in the Atlantic basin

The Democratic Revolution

Industrialism, capitalism, and imperialism

Background: economic, social, and political

The Englightenment

Realignments in the colonial world

Democratic revolutions and the plantations complex

Counterrevolution in Spanish America

12. Revolution in the French Antilles

Geography of the French Antilles

Social structure and social tensions

The revolution on Saint Domingue

Other islands, other combinations

Aftermath

Reajustments in the nineteenth century

The end of the slave trade

New migrations: new wine in old bottles

The end of slavery in the French and British Caribbean

New plantations: old wine in new bottles

African adjustments

The politics and economics of legitimate trade

14. Teh end fo slavery in the Americas

Brazil: sugar and coffee

Brazil: differential regional growth

Sugar in cuba

Emancipation in cuba

Retrospect

Appendix

Index

Type:

Methods:

chronological

Sources:

Historiography:

Keywords:

Themes:

Critiques:

Questions:

Quotes:

Notes:

Curtin, Philip D. The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969.

Title: The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census

Author: Philip D. Curtin

Year of Publication: 1969

Thesis:

Surveys literature on the fundamental questions of who, how many, etc. in the Atlantic Slave Trade, revising down previous estimates to around ten million from fifteen or twenty. Also desribes his estimates as exactly that: estimates.

Time: 15th-17th centuries

Geography: Atlantic Slave Trade

Organization:

List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Preface
- Argues that historians have treated the development of the Americas in an ethnocentric way.

1. The Slave Trade and the Numbers Game: A Review of the Literature
2. Distribution in Space: The Hispanic Trade
3. Distribution in Space: The Colonies of the North Europeans
4. Distribution through Time: The Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries
5. The English Slave Trade of the Eighteenth Century
6. The French Slave Trade of the Eighteenth Century
7. Main Currents of the Eighteenth Century Slave Trade
8. The Slave Trade of the Nineteenth Century
9. Major Trends
10. A Postscript on Mortality
Appendix: Koele's Linguistic Inventory
Bibliography
Index
Type: Social

Methods: Anticipates Ira Berlin’s “Time and Space” article (1980) by a decade in organizing his study by space and time.

Sources: Secondary research supplemented by primary data on exports of enslaved people.

Historiography:

I can see a connection between Curtin's work and David Eltis', et. al.'s development of the Slave Trade Database. However, I see now it is necessary to look much deeper and wider into its roots.

Keywords:
Themes:
Critiques:
Questions:
Quotes:

"Its central aim is to bring to- gether bits and pieces of incommensurate information already published, and to do this for only one aspect of the trade-the measurable number of people brought across the Atlantic. How many? When? From what parts of Africa? To what destinations in the New World?" (xvi)

Notes:

This is the first book in which I discovered that most traffic in enslaved people went to Brazil. I'm realizing that information was well known way before Curtin came along, but somehow it was left out of my own education.

In 1995, Philip Curtin published a piece entitled "Ghettoizin African History" that provoked quite an uproar. His first sentence began, "I am troubled by increasing evidence of the use of racial criteria in filling faculty posts in the field of African history." He goes on for several pages, and to explore all the problems with it would take quite some time. Plus, his article is reprinted under a bulletin and subsequent arguments by the Association of Concerned African Scholars against it. Curtin essentially rails against creating equitable opportunities (Affirmative Action) and intimates a conspiracy to box qualified white candidates out of the quickly "ghettoizing" field of African history. The energy devoted to dealing with Curtin is admirable and maddening. He met several opportunities to recognize his error, even to acknowledge the fact that his comments were harmful, with continued obstinance.  32-130-1EE9-84-ACAS Bulletin Winter 96 opt.pdf

Chang, David A. The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832-1929. The Color of the Land. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.

Submitted for coursework, June, 2019. Lightly redacted.

David Chang argues that we should consider land itself as key in determining the ways both the U.S. and the Creek Nation “have defined their races, nations, and classes” focusing on the allotment process as a key way in which change was negotiated (6). He complements an array of typical government documents and treaties with oral histories to prove his thesis, which is largely successful. The book is divided into three parts, with pre-and post-allotment periods sandwiching a long chapter on how Creeks and non-Creek Blacks dealt with how to best negotiate allotment. As “freedmen” came to signify a one-drop rule and the possibility of accepting only “full-blooded” Creeks into the nation, Blacks had to decide whether allotment would provide economic security or whether they would support an anti-allotment policy. As allotment policy was designed somewhat transparently as a policy of racial division and usurpation, these divisions became paramount. While the Dawes Act of 1887 brought allotment into political discourse, the Curtis Act of 1898 threatened to amend the 1887 Act, forcing the Creek nation to negotiate as best terms they could, which meant problems for African-descended Creeks. These acts were predicated on liberal concepts of freedom and equality, using the excuse of breaking up large Creek landholders. Chapter five develops some of the interesting arguments that ensued, with some Creeks exploiting the language of racial inferiority to describe themselves (and often Black Creeks) as biologically backward, the idea being to establish property protections to buffer them from the exploitation of predatory land speculators. On the other hand, whites tended to argue for Creeks to have full autonomy over their allotments. The compromise allowed for Creeks to have a portion of their land set aside as “homestead” and the other as “surplus). Yet, the racialized way restrictions were put into place handicapped Black Creeks as protections for “full-blood” Creeks were much more robust. These restrictions led to tenancy, not ownership by whites, which encouraged whites to look for ways to adjust policy in favor of removing lands; taxes were one way to do this, where smaller landowners unable to pay their debts quickly succumbed to debt. Regardless, Chang argues that “the way [Creeks] chose allotments and the ways they used them demonstrate that Creeks were determined to try and use the new land system to sustain kinship and community ties rather than to embrace the economic individualism that allotment was meant to accomplish” (144).

One of the remarkable qualities about Chang’s writing is his willingness to define terms succinctly and informatively. His erudite and readable analysis offers a critical look at how race, land, nation, and politics intersect in one of the areas where heterogenous groups formed and capitalist exploitation abounded.

Breen, T.H., and Stephen Innes. Myne Owne Ground: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640-1676. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Title:

"Myne Owne Ground": Race and Freedom on Virginia's Eastern Shore, 1640-1676

Author:

T.H. Breen and Stephen Innes

Year of Publication:

1980

Thesis:

Using a Foucauldian lens, the authors seek to identify ways in which Black people were able to free themselves through manumission or purchase and acquire land, which was considered the measure of citizenship. This story is one of contingency, one that ended in the exclusion of Black people with citizenship rights within the span of a few decades.

Time:

1640-1676

Geography:

Northhampton, VA

Organization:

Type:

Methods:

Sources:

Historiography:

Keywords:

Themes:

Critiques:

The authors use Anthony Johnson as an example of success, but doesn't take his story to the end, where the court cases establish his children have no right to retain his property.

Quotes: