This volume concludes David Brion Davis's decades-long investigation of "dehumanization and its implications" in slave societies (304). With several earlier books, Davis considered why slavery persisted for millennia before the abrupt moral shifts that created organized opposition to "inhuman bondage" in the late eighteenth century. Now, with the same wide-ranging erudition and interest in comparative history, Davis turns to the related question of why, once the Age of Emancipation began in the 1780s, it took still another century to abolish New World slavery, and even longer to address fully its implications.
The answer, for Davis, continues to lie in what all three books describe as the "problem of slavery," which he defines as the paradoxical attempt to treat human beings as if they were animals, Aristotle's "natural slaves." Davis sees the ideological effort to "animalize" people as the quintessential feature of slave societies, one that manifested itself---in the case of New World slavery---as racism. While desiring to treat slaves as inhuman, however, white slaveholders always knew they were quite human---human enough to resist their enslavement in ways that domesticated livestock never could.
This ongoing "problem" for slaveholders became particularly acute during the Age of Revolutions because of the Haitian Revolution, which Davis emphasizes here as the crucial inaugurating event of the Age of Emancipation. The success of enslaved revolutionaries in Saint Domingue demonstrated their humanity and capacity for "self-liberation." Yet the Revolution's violence, imagined in grotesque detail by white writers, also reaffirmed, for many contemporaries, that slaves were inhuman, bestial "savages," whether by nature or as a result of their long enslavement.
Haiti thus failed to resolve the "problem of slavery" and in some ways amplified whites' projections of animal characteristics onto enslaved people, a projection that Davis sees as literally pathological. "The new possibility of eradicating slavery ... greatly magnified the importance of race" (7). Fallout from the "horrors of Santo Domingo" hovered over all future discussions of abolition, and also influenced white perceptions of free black communities in the American North, where early emancipations occurred more gradually and peacefully. Growing black urban communities confronted hostile whites whose discriminatory policies kept them mired in poverty. That poverty, together with the troubled early history of independent Haiti, completed a perverse circle in which whites pointed to the degraded status of free blacks as further proof of their animal nature and incapacity for freedom.
Here and elsewhere, Davis reminds readers that early emancipations in the American North and the Caribbean resulted in the "spectacular growth of freedman populations," whose "ongoing status ... had a crucial bearing on debates over the immediate or gradual liberation" of the still-enslaved (61, 193). In the United States, white perceptions about free blacks' degradation explain, for Davis, the widespread appeal of Liberian colonization as a potentially more convincing proof than Haiti of freedpeople's capacities. Davis takes seriously the antislavery convictions of many white colonizationists, describing them as, at the very least, "better prognosticators than the abolitionists" about the "intractability of prejudice and racial conflict" in post-emancipation societies (141).
Racism's intractability also motivated early black colonizationists and Liberian emigrants, according to Davis. Pessimistic about free blacks' prospects in the United States, some African Americans hoped successful black colonies would definitively refute whites' dehumanizing claims. Ultimately, black opposition to removal and support for immediate emancipation spelled the end of colonizationism. But Davis uses its early appeal to some black leaders to focus attention on another of the book's themes: the implications of dehumanization for black people's own self-image---"the need of African Americans to confront and counteract ... white psychological exploitation" (304).
Though careful to distinguish himself from earlier scholars who exaggerated the psychological damage inflicted on slaves, Davis echoes Stanley Elkins and Orlando Patterson in contending that some people of color internalized slavery's attempts to dehumanize. He points to black abolitionists' insistence on a difference between British "wage slavery" and the brutalizing effects of chattel slavery as evidence of how deeply they felt the implications of dehumanization. And he cites writers as various as David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Marcus Garvey, and Barack Obama, to suggest that white pathologies "intent on animalization" (which outlived slavery itself) raised lasting concerns in the minds of many African Americans about their place in white society, even long after emancipation (42).
Indeed, for Davis, Haiti's example was important partly because it encouraged "self-doubting blacks" elsewhere (52). Likewise, when African Americans like Douglass toured the United Kingdom after British West Indian emancipation, they "found new self-esteem and acceptance as full humans" in a society seemingly less burdened by dehumanizing racism (305). The accomplishments of figures like Douglass in turn encouraged American abolitionists and refuted images of free people of color as incapable of uplift. Davis stresses that "free blacks ... provided the key to slave emancipation," not just as founders and sustainers of anti-colonization abolitionism in the United States, but as living rebuttals to the denigration of their humanity by whites (xiv).
Still, across his ouevre, Davis's most lasting emphasis may be on the intractability of human depravity. Despite the efforts of African American abolitionists and their allies, which were significantly aided by British emancipation, only war ended American slavery. Davis remains impressed by the "extraordinary fortuity & contingency" even of this outcome (xvi), and reminds readers throughout of slavery's later, twentieth-century revivals and the continued oppression of African Americans in the United States. The final lesson of the problem of slavery, for Davis, is the "contingency" of moral progress. At no point did emancipation become inevitable, even if it became "foreseeable," and that makes slavery's abolition in the long nineteenth century all the more "astonishing" (336).