Free to Do What?

The 19th century was the great age of emancipations. The Enlightenment’s hostility to the old intellectual and political verities, followed by the revolutionary export of that hostility by the French Revolution and Napoleon, made emancipation from the weights of control and custom over music, art, and above all, politics the master agenda of the century. “What is the great question of the age?” asked Heinrich Heine in 1826, “It is that of emancipation.” It included the “emancipation of the Irish, Greeks, Frankfort Jews, West Indian Negroes, and other oppressed races.” But it also embraced “the emancipation of the whole world, and especially that of Europe, which has attained its majority and now tears itself loose from the iron leading-strings of a privileged aristocracy.” As the American educator Horace Mann predicted in 1848, The age of “TYRANTS AND SLAVERY is rapidly drawing to a close,” to be followed by “the universal emancipation of man.”

And yet, the century of emancipation closed with the shadow of the following century’s totalitarianisms already falling over it. In so many places, the great experiments in emancipation fell so far short of the promise of the term that it was easy to look for alternatives, not in liberation, but in experiments with power. Russian serfs were delivered from medieval bondage by Tsar Alexander II’s decree of 1861, but the emancipated serfs lost only their constraints without gaining anything beyond that. After Prussia’s catastrophic defeat by Napoleon in 1811, opposition to the civic emancipation of German Jews collapsed and an Act of Emancipation—emanzipierung—naturalized Prussian Jews as citizens. But this was only in time for the dark genius of German Romanticism to begin dreaming the Wagnerian dreams of the Aryan ubermensch that would flower hideously in the Final Solution.

No emancipation, however, cost more or has seemed in the hands of its remembrancers to have delivered less than the American emancipation of its black slaves during the inferno of our Civil War. Alone among the slave societies of the West, the United States could find no path to emancipation except through a war which destroyed six billion dollars of property and ended 600,000 lives, including that of the principal agent of emancipation, Abraham Lincoln. And yet, for it all, the newly freed slaves received only what a sympathetic leader in the crusade against slavery described as “nothing but your freedom.” Land, which was still the best security for economic prosperity, was not re-distributed within the defeated Confederacy; voting rights were conferred through two constitutional amendments, but gradually whittled away by local regulation; and the slaves’ race became a marker for exclusion, prejudice, and violence at the hands of the slaves’ former masters.

The literature for why these emancipations fell so disappointingly short of their intentions is vast, especially concerning the two greatest failed emancipations of the western hemisphere, the British West Indies and the American South. The blame for this failure has been laid variously at the doorstep of capitalism (Eric Williams), racism (Thomas Holt), flawed notions of governmental responsibility (Charles S. Black), and even, as we might wearily expect, at the feet of the victims themselves. But the answer may lie ultimately in simple ignorance, since the single theme running through all four of these new books on the North American and West Indian struggles against slavery is the sheer inability of the assorted emancipators and emancipated of the 19th century to predict the needs and outcomes of a process for which no adequate map existed and for which good intentions proved hopelessly inadequate. The principal flaw may indeed have been the failure to realize that emancipation was a process, and not merely an act.

Seymour Drescher has laid down a lengthy and impressive track of writings on the British abolition of West Indian slavery in 1833. He has long been a skeptic of the thesis first propounded by Eric Williams in Capitalism and Slavery (1944), that the abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean was little more than the abandonment by Britain of the islands whose sugar riches had fueled the Industrial Revolution. Having soaked the West Indies of every farthing, so the argument went, Britain cast aside its islands and liberated its black slaves there as a gesture, not of liberating mercy, but of hand-rinsing of any further responsibility for the fate of the once-prosperous islands.

Drescher is aggressively skeptical of the Williams thesis, and with good reason. The eagerness with which the emerging capitalist societies of Europe and the Americas repudiated slavery yet simultaneously created “free-labor” economies that immiserated their working-classes in conditions often as horrific as those of black slaves has begged for some form of explanation or reconciliation. But Williams’ view of slavery as a capitalist castoff has rarely won a large following, if only because the agents of abolition in Britain and elsewhere seemed to have had no consciousness of abolition as a tool for emancipating capitalism rather than the slaves. David Brion Davis has argued, contra Williams, that abolition grew out of ideological commitments, including the rise of romantic sentimentalism; Thomas Haskell, by contrast, argues that capitalism engendered a new sense of human capacity to organize and direct human affairs, and that new sense of agency gave birth to abolition in the 18th century largely because, for the first time, capitalism had taught people that they actually had the power to do something about it.

To these complaints Drescher now adds his own suspicions about the Williams thesis. West Indian slavery, Drescher observes, was not, in fact, exhausted as an economic system. If anything, the invention of race-based slavery in Europe’s colonies had enjoyed comparatively “effortless extension” since the opening-up of the American continents to European colonization, and yet had always existed side-by-side with a profound repugnance to the enslavement of European labor. Williams thought of slavery and capitalism as contradictory—hence they could not occupy the same space or time, according to Marx’s notion of struggle. But despite Marx and Williams, Drescher notes that Europeans had a very easy way of combining slavery and capitalism: reserve Europe for free labor and the colonies for slavery.

Drescher drives us back to understanding abolition very much as the abolitionists understood it, as a campaign undertaken in the West Indies, not for the sake of profitability, but for the sake of ideology—to prove, as Adam Smith had insisted, that self-interest naturally makes free labor superior to slave labor. This ran in the face of every statistical evidence that plantation-based slave labor seemed to be ideally suited to certain climates and products, not to mention the less-than-encouraging fate of two early emancipation experiments, Haiti and Sierra Leone. But that, for Drescher, is precisely the clinching proof of the dominance of ideology over economics in emancipation.

West Indian emancipation had four provisos: (a) the end of slavery must be immediate; (b) the transition to full freedom would be gradual, as the majority of freed slaves were to serve out “apprenticeships”; (c) slaveowners would be compensated by an unprecedented Parliamentary appropriation of L20 million; and (d) the compensation would be funded by increased tariffs on colonial sugar. This was intended to promote “an orderly and prosperous transition to freedom.” But the planned orderliness was an illusion, what Drescher calls “a great improvisation.” No one had any real idea how emancipation was likely to play out, and in the event, very little of it did.

The freed slaves deeply resented the imposition of apprenticeship, and by 1837, the campaign to abolish slavery had been converted in Britain into a campaign to abolish the apprenticeships. But far from this representing a victory for free labor, the price of sugar to British consumers soared uncontrollably as sugar production in the islands fell by more than 35 percent. The freed slaves simply showed no inclination to labor for wages, on the free labor model, in the cane fields, preferring instead to eke out subsistence livings on their own plots of land. And instead of free labor proving its superior productivity by encouraging free trade (and the end of tariffs), the removal of tariffs by the free-traders in Parliament very nearly destroyed sugar production in the British islands and made slave-based sugar from Cuba economically enticing. By the 1850s, the other slaveholding societies of the Western hemisphere were gleefully pointing to “the Great Experiment” as a colossal failure.

The end of “the Great Experiment” really came in 1865, with the insurrection of Jamaica’s freedmen at Morant Bay; after that, the West Indian islands were stripped of their provincial legislatures, and Chinese and Indian “coolie” labor was imported to shoulder aside the uncooperative free blacks. For Drescher, the West Indian emancipation was more a “matter of national honour” for the British than cold-headed capitalist calculation, more a victory for free-labor theory than the free laborers it created. “The economics of moral action has continued to haunt the history of abolition to this day,” Drescher soberly concludes. Or rather, the expectation that moral action deserves some form of advantage over, or exemption from, economic realities continues to haunt all manner of Western-style reform movements. The “costs of bringing down slavery were heavy,” Drescher remarks, but the moral absolutists among the abolitionists reasoned that this was a temporary price, and one that morality demanded should be paid. Instead, with a neat irony, their own well-intentioned absolutism “nearly brought down British antislavery.”

But if the campaigns of the moralists embraced delusions, not much more resulted from the involvement of governments in erecting dependable emancipation regimes. Partly because of the overweening confidence Americans (like their British counterparts) placed in the glories of free-labor capitalism, few among even the most progressive abolitionists saw any need to secure anything beyond legal freedom for the slaves. The liberty to labor freely would, over time anyway, level all playing fields, and make for black prosperity as easily as it did white. The occasional voices which were raised in favor of the confiscation of the plantations of rebel masters by the federal government, and turning these lands over to the former slaves who had worked them, came a cropper on free-labor optimism, on the American legal profession’s reverence for the inviolability of property law, and on the constitutional prohibition on attainder-like punishments. As a result, the federal government, which was prepared to lavish blood and treasure to promote emancipation, turned out to be unwilling to spend more than token sums or passing attention to what might happen after the initial emancipation act.

That this was not so much a matter of deliberate act as of nearsightedness can be adduced from Freedom’s Promise, Elizabeth Regosin’s tightly constructed little study of the pension records of black slaves in the United States who subsequently volunteered for service in the federal armies in the Civil War, and became entitled to pensions in the postwar years. The Civil War pension system has been studied elsewhere with admirable thoroughness by Stuart McConnell (in Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865-1900) and Theda Skocpol (in Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States), who have portrayed it as the first large-scale federal entitlement program and perhaps even the original model for the “welfare state.” But that entitlement was much more ambiguous when it was applied by the federal government to black veterans and their families.

The service of approximately 180,000 blacks in the Union Army entitled them to congressionally mandated military pensions; but to determine eligibility for these pensions, Congress (first) had to make legal determinations about black citizenship, then (second) try to figure out eligibility regulations for survivor’s benefits in the maze of African-American familial and marital relationships. This maze resembled nothing that the Congressional pension agents had ever seen before, principally because slave marriages had no standing under Southern slave law, and exfoliated in a number of unregulated patterns. The Congressional benefits, dating from the first pension legislation in 1862, had been constructed around notions of family that suited white, middle-class Americans well enough, but which were staggered by the ambiguities of what constituted family or marriage among blacks under slavery.

Indeed, American abolitionists had assumed a little too quickly that slavery was simply a disruption of a “natural” model of family and marriage which required only a little research and some tactful questions to clarify, and to which slaves would revert once they were emancipated. In fact, much of African American family and marriage patterns under slavery were fragmentary but working copies of embedded African models and acquired Anglo-American ones, so that in practice rules for determining the eligibility of survivors all but flew out the window of frustrated pension agents. Emancipation made American slaves free, but it did not lead to any automatic cultural embourgoisement of the freedmen; the Fourteenth Amendment made them citizens, but as Regosin is at pains to illustrate, entering “the world of citizens” was fraught with “complexity and confusion” for the freed slaves.

Least of all the players in emancipation to be prepared for what emancipation entailed were the slaves themselves. Demterius Eudell’s The Political Languages of Emancipation is a teeth-gritted effort to show how language and vocabulary can be controlled and deployed as weapons of their own, either for oppression or liberation. Terms like freedom, virtue, dependence, progress, and autonomy can be double-edged, and in such cases, they can be used by a dominant group as an intellectual weapon to deprive the subordinated group of the language they need for resistance. For instance: Using freedom to speak of the rights of ex-slaveowners to hold former slaves to inequitable labor contracts conferred an “air of legality” that “only served to maintain an imbalance between privileges of the ex-slaves and those of the ex-slaveholders.” On the other hand, though, ex-slaves could re-appropriate this terminology to their own purposes, speaking of freedom as something which “was associated with the protection of rights as well as some kind of landownership.”

This may be only an elegantly postmodern way of saying that the ex-slaves and their onetime masters were both skilled at playing word-games for their own benefit. But that does not diminish Eudell’s sense of resentment at the ways in which seemingly benevolent whites relentlessly created schemes for socializing the freedmen which the freedmen had not asked for. The racism that justified slavery before emancipation justified the domination of the freed slaves after it, even while the white dominators insisted that their language of freedom and independence proved their good will. (This is reminiscent of John McKnight’s complaint in The Careless Society that the rhetoric of “care,” which rationalizes and protects the careers of social service providers, ignores the very simple solutions to their problems proposed over and over again by the recipients of “care.”) The great flaw in both the West Indian and American emancipations was that the language of emancipation was deliberately rigged by the emancipators to produce a very different outcome from that desired by the people being emancipated. “In both postslavery situations,” Eudell concludes, with more than a little disgust on view, “the dominant society found a way to disempower or disenfranchise its respective Black majorities and still continue to see itself as being a nation that embodied free and democratic principles.”

The problem with Eudell’s attack on emancipation language is his inability to specify what the legitimate alternative meanings of freedom, virtue, dependence, progress, and autonomy ought to look like, or why the instability he detects in the post-emancipation use of these terms gains any more heft simply by being used in ways he applauds. If words have no hermeneutic save suspicion, then the determining issue is power—something Eudell, I suspect, would not disagree with, but which legitimizes the usage of Nathan Bedford Forrest fully as much as Frederick Douglass.

It is not in the external use of words, but in the internal sentiments of the heart, that John Stauffer hopes to find what could have been the real locus of hope for emancipation. The Black Hearts of Men is not about original sin, as some of us might at first glance think. Rather, it is about the conscious struggle of two white men—the abolitionists John Brown and Gerrit Smith—and their two black allies, James McCune Smith and Frederick Douglass, to so nurture a sympathy with the mind and plight of African-Americans before the Civil War that they could be said to have set aside the trammels of “whiteness” and become black at heart.

Stauffer’s book is easily the best read of this quartet, both because he is dealing in the living mud of biography, and because he has entered so thoroughly himself into the quest of Brown and Smith. In the intertwined lives of these men, Stauffer considers how all four struggled to find a common “blackness” in terms of self-presentation (which leads him into an intriguing study of photographs of the four), their Romantic idealization of Nature, their passion for independence and autonomy, their shared contempt for weak-kneed concessions to colonization by both blacks and whites, and their empathy for other reform movements.

The soft glow Stauffer paints behind these images seems too good to last—and indeed it was, as Stauffer himself acknowledges in the final chapter. John Brown goes off to a revolutionary self-crucifixion at Harper’s Ferry in October of 1859; Gerrit Smith is driven into an asylum by the anxiety that he will be arrested for complicity with Brown and is never the same man again; Frederick Douglass flees to England after refusing to join Brown’s hapless little army, something for which Douglass never quite forgave himself; and McCune Smith dies of heart failure in 1865, vainly trying to nudge Gerrit Smith back to the forefront of abolition. Perhaps the project for exchanging whiteness for blackness was doomed from the start, Stauffer conjectures: “The dissolution of these men’s alliance points to the power of the surrounding white culture and its racist solution to America’s great paradox.” For a little while, empathy and religion had helped these four “to burst free from white society.” But they had only assaulted their jailer, and at the end of the day remained firmly in jail, finding “refuge in the traditional racist answers to the American dilemma.” This is not a hopeful note on which to dangle the memory of emancipation, although the disappointment is softened in Stauffer’s case (as it is not in Eudell’s) by an almost pacifistic resignation.

In all four of these considerations of the shortcomings of emancipation, there is a common difficulty in appreciating the impossibility the actors had in understanding the consequences, or even the nature, of emancipation. Looked at from their end of the telescope, with the ground ahead all unsure and beclouded, the accomplishments of the emancipators are considerable, and especially in the United States—where, in contrast to post-emancipation societies, freed slaves (through the mechanism of the post Civil War amendments) automatically had both citizenship and the franchise conferred upon them.

And though unreconstructed Southern white governments struggled to eliminate those rights, they found it impossible to revoke the first (although they tried, and kept trying until the 1920s) and were never entirely successful in diminishing the second. Nor, despite the most vicious efforts of Jim Crow, were white racial supremacists successful in preventing the rise of an independent black middle class between 1920 and 1960, a middle class which then turned and used its economic and political weight to wedge open the door to equality for all African-Americans. (None of the black leadership of the NAACP, the SCLC, CORE, or even SNCC in the 1950s and 1960s were sharecroppers—they were the offspring of conventionally solid black professional families.)

In a remote way, the optimism of the free-labor ideologists turned out not to be mistaken about the possibilities of emancipation—but they were hugely wrong about the time they would require, the intensity of the struggle for full equality, and the persistence of racism as a hurdle. Perhaps, in the long view, the language of emancipation, like King’s “moral arc of the universe,” really did tend toward justice. Perhaps, in the long view, government and the black family in America were not nearly so clumsy in their first encounter as in their later ones. Perhaps, in the long view, there is a heart beyond simple blackness and whiteness to which humankind can aspire. Perhaps, in the long run, there is more to celebrate about emancipation than we think.

Allen C. Guelzo is the author of the prizewinning biography, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Eerdmans), and James Madison Fellow at Princeton University.