The Great Contradiction

Part I

Overviews

F

Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up (1945)

To despise slaves as Negroes was redundant, but when Negroes were no longer slaves they became despicable as Negroes. The spate of manumissions after the Revolution tended to heighten the white man’s distaste for Negroes as such. Certainly no one wanted them around.

—winthrop d. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1968)

Chapter 1

An American Dilemma

Why increase the sons of Africa, by planting them in America, where we have so fair an opportunity, by excluding all blacks and tawneys, of increasing the lovely white and red? But perhaps I am partial to the complexion of my Country, for such kind of partiality is natural to Mankind.

—Benjamin Franklin, Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind (1751)

If historians were asked to identify the greatest human tragedies of all time, the Holocaust would probably top the list, for reasons both powerful and plausible. In a short period of time, between six and seven million Jews were exterminated in Central and Eastern Europe. Unlike the higher mortality rates caused by plagues and pandemics, the Holocaust was a man-made event, a systematic program of unspeakable brutality conducted by otherwise civilized human beings.

A century before the Holocaust happened, the future prime minister of Great Britain Henry Palmerston provided his own answer to the same question: “If all the crimes which the human race has committed from the creation down to the present day were added together in one vast aggregate . . . ,” he observed in 1844, “they would scarcely equal . . . the amount of guilt which has been incurred by mankind in connection with this diabolical slave trade.”

Palmerston was describing the Atlantic Slave Trade, also a systematic program of unspeakable brutality conducted by otherwise civilized human beings. But it was a much-longer-term tragedy, lasting for four centuries—roughly speaking, from 1460 to 1860. And it was, if you will, a sin committed by multiple nations, including Portugal, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and the United States. And for that very reason, it enjoyed long-standing and broad-gauged acceptance; nothing akin to the Nuremburg Trials occurred to judge and condemn the prominent slave traders. Great Britain did its penance by becoming the most ardent enforcer of laws against the slave trade on the high seas during the middle decades of the nineteenth century.

Almost four centuries earlier, Portugal had laid the foundation for the Atlantic Slave Trade, primarily because the superior design of Portuguese ships permitted captains to sail against the wind and down the western coast of Africa. Europe was “discovering” Africa at the same time it was “discovering” the Americas. Initially, the dominant presumption was that enslaved Native Americans would become a labor force for European nations. Instead, enslaved Africans became the labor force for European colonies in the Americas.

Portugal established the framework: coastal harbors from Senegal to Angola; inland routes, usually along rivers, reaching five hundred miles into the African interior; contracts with African tribal chiefs, who provided the human captives for a price that, on average, was less than half the price the enslaved Africans would fetch in Brazil. Everyone prospered: the Lisbon investors; the Portuguese government, which took a percentage of the profits; the merchant class; the African chiefs. The only losers were the enslaved Africans. Several papal bulls offered assurance that the suffering that Africans endured as slaves was more than justified by the eternal life in heaven they would enjoy as converts to Christianity.

Over time, first the Spanish, then the French, then the British stepped into the African marketplace that the Portuguese had created. Although the word “capitalism” had not yet entered the lexicon, the Atlantic Slave Trade flourished for one elemental reason: it was the most lucrative investment available for Europe’s merchants, bankers, and landed aristocracy. And until late in the game—the middle years of the eighteenth century—one would be hard-pressed to hear any criticism of such a flourishing enterprise. Moral blindness made eminent economic sense.

If demography is destiny, the Atlantic Slave Trade transformed the destiny of the entire Western Hemisphere. Between 1500 and 1800, five times as many Africans as Europeans were carried to the New World. Thanks largely to the recent work of British historians, who have created a digital database that provides the most accurate account ever assembled of the African diaspora, we now know much more precisely the scale and size of the Atlantic Slave Trade and where the enslaved Africans ended up.

Between 1550 and 1860, European vessels embarked with 12.5 million African captives and landed 10.7 million in the New World. During the notorious Middle Passage, 1.8 million enslaved Africans died from some combination of disease, malnutrition, mistreatment, and suicide. Of the 10.7 million survivors, 4.8 million went to South America, 4.7 million went to the Caribbean, 800,000 went to Central America, and 400,000 went to North America. (An additional 60,000 entered North America indirectly from the British West Indies.) In effect, only a small percentage of the enslaved Africans, about 4 percent, were deposited in the future United States.

As a result, the Southern Hemisphere was destined to become a multiracial society including a population with African origins. The Northern Hemisphere was destined to become a predominantly white society with a substantial African minority. The term “African” is somewhat misleading, since the enslaved black population identified as Ashanti, Ebo, Igbo, Congolese, or other tribal affiliations, each with its own language, religion, and customs. In his monumental African Founders, David Hackett Fischer has documented in considerable detail the ways in which the different tribal origins of the enslaved population generated regional differences in the shape slavery assumed within the future United States.

For obvious reasons, the vast majority of enslaved Africans were imported into the British colonies of North America only after Great Britain assumed domination of the Atlantic Slave Trade in the late seventeenth century. On the eve of the American Revolution, there were five hundred thousand slaves of African origin in the mainland British colonies—20 percent of the total population. Though the slave trade was still booming, a majority of the enslaved population were second- or third-generation residents, for whom Africa was a distant memory and English the dominant language. They had become African Americans, a term that entered the lexicon in 1782. For that reason, when the plan to reverse the diaspora and resettle the emancipated slaves in Africa became a condition for emancipation, very few of the African Americans were willing to go voluntarily.

The accompanying map describes the distribution of African Americans in the American colonies on the eve of independence. Approximately 10 percent of the black population lived in New England or the Middle Colonies, where most but not all were enslaved. The remaining 90 percent lived south of the Chesapeake, from Maryland to Georgia. Virginia was the largest colony with the highest number of enslaved African Americans, constituting 40 percent of the population. The number in South Carolina was smaller, though enslaved Blacks constituted 60 percent of the population. In Tidewater Virginia and coastal South Carolina, Blacks outnumbered Whites by a ratio of four to one, in some counties eight to one.

No map can capture the evolving demographic trend upward for the enslaved population. Apart from growth generated by the slave trade, the African American population had become self-sustaining. Even if the Atlantic Slave Trade had somehow ended in 1776, the size of the black population would have continued to increase at roughly the same rate as the white population, which was on the verge of doubling every two to three decades. In effect, a permanent racial minority was built into the British colonies of North America even before they declared independence.

The statistical evidence generated by British historians of the Atlantic Slave Trade is certainly good to have, and the pioneering work of David Hackett Fischer on the diverse demographic origins of the enslaved Africans is a major contribution. But the most significant fact about the Atlantic Slave Trade defied statistical or demographic evidence.

We might call it the Great Silence. For more than four centuries, the most important voices of Western civilization remained mute as a highly organized program of unspeakable barbarity with genocidal implications flourished throughout Europe. Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Aquinas, Erasmus, Locke, and all the Catholic popes regarded slavery and the slave trade as acceptable features of European society. Western civilization lacked a conscience.

Then, all of a sudden, in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, a chorus of voices condemning both the slave trade and slavery itself ended the Great Silence. In Europe the voices came from so-called philosophes in France, England, and Scotland, a movement led by intellectual elites, eventually called the Enlightenment, that demonized slavery as a vestige of the Dark Ages, when human reason was trapped in a cave of ignorance. Although the voices of Diderot, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, and David Hume were destined to play a significant role in the British colonies of North America during the American Revolution, prior to the war for independence the strongest voices opposing slavery and the slave trade came from religious leaders, chiefly Quakers and ministers of the “New Light” persuasion.

For the secular philosophes, slavery was a medieval anachronism. For religious advocates of the “Inner Light” or “New Light,” slavery was a sin. Human equality was rooted in the recognition that, as Jonathan Edwards put it, we are all “sinners in the hands of an angry God.”

The most prominent revivalist preacher, George Whitefield, described white racism as a massive delusion. “Do you think you are any better by Nature than the poor Negroes? No, in no wise. Blacks are just as much, and no more, conceived and born in sin, as White Men are. Both, if born and bred up here, I am persuaded, are naturally capable of the same improvement.” The leading Quaker orator, John Woolman, expanded on the same egalitarian message: “Placing on Men the Title, SLAVE, dressing them in filthy Garments, making them perform manual labour, in which they are often dirty, tends gradually to fix a Notion in the Mind that they are a Sort of People below us in Nature. This deprives the Mind as prevailing cold congeals Water.”

While the revivalist movement generated a potent emotional message among its followers—endorsing slavery or the slave trade was effectively purchasing a one-way ticket to hell—the Quakers created the framework for the first antislavery movement in the British colonies and, in fact, in the world. John Woolman led the way as an orator, but Anthony Benezet outdid him as a writer; his pamphlets most fully exposed the horrors of the Atlantic Slave Trade, so long suppressed, ignored, or erased from memory.

For example, Benezet described the screams as African families were split apart at slave auctions; the nonchalant way in which unhealthy slaves had their throats slit and were thrown to the sharks during the Middle Passage; the brutal execution of recalcitrant slaves in Jamaica, who had their legs and arms cut off before being burned alive. More than any other American writer, Benezet ended the Great Silence for an American audience. Over a decade before the onset of hostilities with Great Britain, Quaker meetings had initiated the practice of expelling all members who insisted on owning slaves or making a profit in the slave trade.

On the eve of the American Revolution, then, half a million African Americans, many in place for several generations, were permanently embedded in the North American population. The slave trade was flourishing, with record numbers of British slave traders docking along the southern coast. Charleston had become the emerging epicenter for imports; and the blooming rice and indigo economy in the South Carolina lowlands had become the chief market for slave labor. (Between 1760 and 1770, over fifty thousand Africans were landed in Charleston.) The following advertisement appeared in the Charleston newspaper on July 19, 1760: “To be sold, very cheap, on Tuesday at Strawberry Ferry, a choice cargo of about Two Hundred very healthy Negroes, of the same Country as are actually brought from the River Gambia.” Instead of declining, the Atlantic Slave Trade to the future United States was growing exponentially.

Meanwhile, although no such thing as a plan for emancipation was under consideration in any of the colonial legislatures, a robust antislavery movement was occurring “out of doors” at crowded religious revivals, in evangelical churches (chiefly of the Baptist and Methodist persuasion), and in Quaker meetings. The strength of this abolitionist movement, the first of its kind in world history, was its resolutely moral focus. The Great Silence was over. It was no longer possible to debate the slavery question with blissfull indifference to the moral issues at stake. Looking ahead, a half-century later, William Lloyd Garrison would make the same nonnegotiable moral message the foundation of the second-wave abolitionist movement.

In the crucible of the moment, however, once the American Revolution put slavery on the political agenda, first-wave abolitionists had little to offer other than their moral certainty that slavery was a sin. For the underlying question became not whether slavery should be ended but how to do so without creating a biracial society.

There was a decidedly demographic dimension to that question, with a uniquely American question mark. For, once emancipation became a visible and viable prospect, American slaveowners were forced to face a racial reality that their counterparts in London, Paris, Madrid, and Lisbon could ignore. Namely, what would happen to the freed slaves? The enslaved population of all the European powers was located an ocean away in the Caribbean and Latin America. Not so the slaves in the former British colonies of North America, most of whom were long-standing residents on American soil. Quite quickly, the debate over slavery became an argument about the viability of a biracial society, an arrangement that enjoyed the support of only a tiny fraction of the white citizenry, and that no other nation in the world had ever embraced, much less achieved.

In his Notes of a Native Son (1955), James Baldwin provided the most succinct assessment of the unique challenge that demography had forced upon American society. “The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening the concept to include black men.” The term “American exceptionalism” usually refers to some quasi-divine status of superiority enjoyed by the United States. More realistically, it accurately described the uniquely American challenge of coming into existence as a white-dominated biracial society that was rhetorically committed to human equality. This was the American dilemma long before Gunner Myrdal gave it a name. And, to a surprising extent, it still is.