American Slavery

However large the role of economic considerations in the origins and spread of American slavery, once established, the slave system of production had powerful ramifications in other spheres. As it evolved, slavery became the principal factor controlling relations between whites and blacks in the United States, with consequences that still shape the course of American life. Moreover, the struggle over American slavery affected all aspects of politics, not only in America but around the world, producing slogans, ideologies, policies, and alignments that are still active and that deeply influence the politics of our own age. Political forces, not economic ones, were the overriding factors in the destruction of slavery. If the foes of slavery had waited for economic forces to do their work for them, America might still be a slave society, and democracy, as we know it, might have been a subject only for history books.

The point is not merely that the economic, cultural, ideological, and political aspects of American slavery have to be viewed in an integrated way. It is that the various trains of slavery research are converging and that a new synthesis on the nature of the slave system and the struggle to end it is beginning to emerge. This emerging synthesis is the cumulative result of an avalanche of new evidence and of penetrating insights by numerous scholars. Although the research process has been halting, uneven, be grudging, often tenuous, sometimes breaking down altogether, the direction of movement has not reversed itself, and the momentum, if anything, appears to be increasing.

To those who classify American slavery with cotton and tobacco trade, the petite size of the U.S. share in the slave trade may seem unexpected. The temporal pattern of slave imports, however, clearly reveals that the course of the Atlantic slave trade cannot be explained by the demand for these crops. Over 75 percent of all slaves were imported between 1451 and 1810. This fact clearly rules out cotton as a dominant factor in the traffic since the production of cotton was still in its infancy in 1810. There was also an enormous increase in the extent of the Atlantic slave trade during the eighteenth century. This fact rules out the possibility of a major role for tobacco: During the eighteenth century, tobacco imports into Europe increased at an average annual rate of about 350 tons per annum. Since an average slave hand could produce about a ton of tobacco yearly, the total increase in the tobacco trade over the century required an increase of about 70,000 hands, a minuscule fraction of the 5.7 million slaves imported during the same period.

The new knowledge about the nature of the American slavery system and the struggle to destroy it has revealed agonizing dilemmas and paradoxes that did not arise in the historical glosses that most of us learned in school. The heroes of the antislavery struggle are generally still heroes, but they are somehow less perfect than one would like heroes to be. The alternative to American slavery generally embraced by the abolitionists, while morally better than slavery, is to the modern mind still brutal and exploitative. That the abolition of American slavery often led to extended periods of economic decline is an unsettling discovery to scholars living in an age when technological advance and rising incomes have been viewed by so many as moral imperatives, and even more widely viewed as political imperatives.

Some scholars found the cliometric analysis of the economics of American slavery morally offensive. Yet far from distracting attention from the immorality of American slavery the cliometric debate had underscored it, although sometimes indirectly. By itself the size of the profit reaped by masters was irrelevant to the moral indictment of American slavery. Whether the profit was large or small, it was extracted by cruel exploitation.

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