History of abolitionism

[Guest guest]

>Even after reading Merritt's post on the history of slavery today, my

>understanding of the slavery history is that no

>progress was made until the anti-slavery

>campaigners embraced abolition as opposed to

>improved welfare - and that, indeed, slavery

>might have been abolished decades earlier if the

>welfarist camp had not got in the way.

 

 

This is a very bizarre reading of history.

 

The precise mechanisms by which slavery

was finally abolished differed in France,

Britain, and the U.S., and a look at the

differences appears to be in order.

 

France initially abolished slavery in

1794, approximately midway through the 10-year

epoch of the " French Revolution. "

 

The decree that proclaimed abolition was

actually part of a series of decrees meant to

establish universal " liberté, egalité,

fraternité, " and advanced through momentum built

initially from the demands of peasants and the

working class for a fairer share of the proceeds

of commerce. They wanted bread and security

against abuse by the upper classes, essentially

a set of " welfarist " reforms.

 

Overturning the entire French feudal

system was nowhere on the agenda until after

overturning feudalism became the inevitable

result of decapitating a significant proportion

of the ruling monarchs and nobles. Then the

whole nation went through 20 years of frequently

violent instability,

 

Napoleon cancelled the French abolition

of slavery because the language of the decree

also abolished military proscription.

 

France proper never again reinstated

slavery, and had not been a major participant in

the slave trade even before the Revolution, but

slavery was practiced in several French colonies,

notably Haiti.

 

However, an 1804 rebellion led by

ex-slave Toussant L'Overture ended both French

rule and slavery in Haiti, at least officially.

Napoleon was not interested in recapturing the

place because he judged, apparently accurately,

that it was not worth having.

 

Unofficially, slavery continued in Haiti

in several different forms, with black people

owning and controlling other black people, and

reputedly continues to some extent to this day.

 

France re-abolished slavery in 1848,

after several years of growing concern about

Haiti-like abuses developing in other colonies.

 

British and U.S.-style abolitionism never

appears to have been a major force in the French

anti-slavery struggle. Mostly, French

abolitionism advanced with related causes, with

clear " welfarist " origins.

 

British abolitionism arose at the same

time and out of the same activist circles as

other causes originating from the social ferment

resulting from the enclosure of the commons and

the Industrial Revolution. The early British

abolitionists argued against slavery at the same

time that they argued for temperance,

introducing universal public education,

abolishing domestic violence, establishing the

right of the working classes to vote,

establishing the right of women to own property,

and yes, abolishing egregious cruelty to animals.

 

The common element was concern for

improving the lot of the displaced rural people

who formed the first large urban working class,

including improving their morals.

 

In the early phase of the British

anti-slavery movement, the goal was to transform

slavery into an institution parallel to

indentured servitude, the mechanism by which

much British emigration to the U.S. and Australia

was accomplished.

 

Simultaneously, reformers sought

successfully to replace executions for property

offenses with " transport, " or enforced

indentured servitude to the crown. The chief

distinction between slavery and indentured

servitude or transport was that the indentured

servant or transported person could earn his or

her freedom, and indeed was expected to do so.

 

Early British abolitionists envisioned

that slaves could be allowed to earn their

freedom after working for x-number of years to

acquire the alleged benefits and skills of

civilization. This was quite naive on the part

of the abolitionists, who at first largely

failed to appreciate the huge differences between

how African slaves were treated and used, and

the opportunities available to indentured

servants and transported persons.

 

Nonetheless, the rise of British

abolitionism followed the development of a

societal consensus that the condition of

transported persons (especially the Irish) was

the floor for how human beings should be treated,

even if they were convicted criminals, and that

anything worse should be stopped.

 

Britain formally abolished slavery in

1807, but continued to transport rebellious

Irish for another several decades, resisting any

suggestion that transport in itself --

state-directed, but often privatized -- amounted

to a form of slave-trading.

 

The U.S. anti-slavery movement paralleled

the British movement up until the American

Revolution. Slavery was initially permitted in

many of the northern colonies as well as the

South, and indentured servitude was universal.

The initial successes of the U.S. anti-slavery

movement were the passage of " welfarist "

legislation which provided some rights to slaves,

most important among them being the right to buy

their own freedom, like indentured servants.

Then religious groups often chipped in to help

the relatively few slaves in such colonies and

eventual states as Massachusetts, New York, and

Maryland to buy their way out of slavery.

 

New York at last abolished slavery in

1827, and most of Maryland no longer practiced

slavery by 1840, although slavery still existed

there on some rural plantations until 1860.

 

The hardline abolitionist movement arose

for the most part between 1840 and 1850. As late

as 1860, Abraham Lincoln and his closest

political allies still hoped for a brokered end

to slavery that would follow the examples of New

York and Maryland, enabling slaves in the

southern states to be credited for their labor

and become enfranchised in society without the

necessity of fighting a war.

 

The outcome of the " triumph " of

abolitionism was the bloodiest war ever fought on

American soil, followed by more than 100 years

of Ku Klux Klan terrorism and a struggle for

political and economic emancipation by the

descendants of slaves that continues to this day.

Probably the Declaration of Emancipation came

much sooner because of abolitionism than it

otherwise would have, but whether the net

reduction in suffering it achieved was greater

than could have been won without the U.S. Civil

War and aftermath is a debatable proposition.

 

What is clear is that the rise of moral

fervor for abolition was met by equivalent fervor

from the defenders of slavery and

non-slaveholders who were merely terrified by

episodes such as Nat Turner's Rebellion, so that

the issues became polarized beyond the ability of

reasonable people to find solutions that did not

include the deaths of more than 780,000 soldiers

and more than a million people in all.

 

The total U.S. population at the outbreak

of the Civil War was only 31.4 million,

including about four million slaves.

 

As a person who believes in the power of

words to achieve effective, peaceful, and

lasting change, I suspect that if words had been

used with greater wisdom in the abolition

struggle, abolition could have been achieved at

least as soon or sooner, without the

catastrophic bloodshed and divisive aftermath

that still plagues the U.S.

 

In my view, having read much

abolitionist literature, there was entirely too

much emphasis on the righteousness of the cause

and too little practical consideration of how to

go about authentically achieving the greater goal

of extending useable rights to slaves.

 

" Freeing " the slaves so that most could

spend the next century as mostly illiterate

sharecroppers subject to lynch law was more a

feel-good for the victorious than a net gain for

the first couple of generations of " free " black

people, who still did not enjoy educational

opportunities, were mostly unable to use the

hard-won legal right of black men to vote, and

were faced with trying to establish themselves

economically in a region in which everyone had

been impoverished and most of the means of

production and transportation had been reduced to

smouldering ashes.

 

Obviously slavery was an atrocity that

had to end. Equally obviously, there was a

better way -- if the goal had been seen as

achieving equal rights and justice for all,

rather than merely " abolition, " with no thought

of what might come next.

 

 

 

--

Merritt Clifton

Editor, ANIMAL PEOPLE

P.O. Box 960

Clinton, WA 98236

 

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