Atlantic Slave Trade: Rationalisations, Justifications, Solutions
When slavery was an issue in the Western world, everybody knew it was wrong. Something that most humans can comprehend is that owning another person is wrong. Yet, there was slavery for several hundred years in the United States, so people who could not or did not want to do something about it, came up with ways to rationalize and justify it. When slavery became illegal in the United States, the bigotry that arose out of slavery was so ingrained that it became vile racism that still survives today. Racism helped to destroy Reconstruction and led to Jim Crow, segregation and voter disenfranchisement. Racism also served to keep African Americans in a place of servitude for nearly another century after the end of Reconstruction. Some spoke out against the racism, such as W.E.B. DuBois. He saw hope for black people in American society, and believed that true equality may be achieved.
Many different ways to justify slavery were presented to those who opposed it. Since, the United States is a religious country, one popular and authoritative rationalization was that God ordained slavery. Those who championed this excuse would use verses from the Christian bible that talked about slaves being faithful to their masters and stories of Noah and his curse on his sons that left the descendants of one of them slaves to the descendants of another. Of course, many parts of the bible can be interpreted to favor whatever cause one wants to promote.
Another argument that was made to rationalize slavery was that slaves were inferior to their masters. This argument said that slaves were not quite fully human, so if they suffer under the oppression of slavery, it is like the oppression that animals feel when humans use them to plow their fields or pull their wagons. Some people who favored this argument thought slaves so inferior they deserved to be slaves. After all, they came from Africa in what Christian Europeans surely thought were heathen societies. Just being around white people, Europeans thought, elevated the slaves’ position. This myth was popular among those who perpetuated the Atlantic slave trade. Similar to the “slaves are inferior” argument is the one that says slavery is good for slaves because it gives them a way to have food, shelter, occupation and Western religion. This argument assumes that slaves were incapable of running their own lives successfully without help from white people. It often took the form of a less than genuine paternalistic interest by the slave owners in their slaves.
More rational, albeit just as misguided, arguments often cited economic reasons for the perpetuation of slavery. A popular economic justification for slavery still made today is that Africans themselves kept slaves and Africans sold the European traders the slaves that the Europeans brought across the Middle Passage to the Americas. For both Africans and Europeans, this is an economic argument. Joseph Inikori says, “African feudalism shared many common features with feudalism in medieval Europe. . . . During the formative period of feudalism in the European Dark Ages slaves were gradually transformed into serf.., while in Africa strong city states and empires destroyed tribal equality and produced a mass of dependent people who were serfs and not slaves” (Inikori 47). Serfs differ from slaves in that they usually sleep in their own home with their family and are not considered the property of the person for whom the work. Serfdom is probably a more correct term for what Europeans labeled the slavery in African communities. “It is hard to find true slaves in the societies affected by the trans-Saharan trade before the coming of the Europeans” (Inikori 60). The argument that says that Africans had slaves so it should have been condoned for Europeans to have them also is one made in the retrospect of many years. Europeans wanted slaves, and Africans went about acquiring slaves for them through wars and captivity of people from other tribes for economic reasons of their own.
Another economic argument said slavery would be too difficult to abolish. This turned out to be true in the case of the United States because it took a civil war with hundreds of thousands of dead Americans to end the practice. An aspect of this argument is that slaves are essential to some industries. For instance, if there had not been slaves to process the cotton from seed to market, it would not have been as lucrative as it turned out to be. Of course, free labor makes any industry more profitable. While it is true that slavery made the economy better for some, it did not make it better for those who did all the work and received none of the rewards. Their enslavement and the society-wide acceptance of slavery only caused heartache, pain and oppression for them.
When economies began to grow and industries such as cotton, sugar cane, rice and indigo became specialized, the need for more crops of these commercial products was more urgent. Just as urgent a need were the laborers who did most of the work to plant, weed, water, harvest and process these crops. The United States banned the slave trade in the early part of the nineteenth century, but not the owning of slaves, and so, the slave population grew through natural and forced reproduction. Not only that, slaves were considered less and less free. A law was even enacted that said if a person did not return a slave to his/her owner, they were a criminal. This transformed slavery to chattel slavery because slave owners then owned their slaves, body and soul.
Slaves in rebel states were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 passed during the Civil War. After the Civil War the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery—except as punishment—in the United States. This left some four million African Americans no longer enslaved, but also without education, shelter, or a livelihood. Not only that, many of them still lived in the South where there were lots of hostile white people who did not want to have an integrated society. The Reconstruction was supposed to help put the rebel state back on the right footing, rebuild the infrastructure of the South, and help the freed slaves gain the rights of citizenship that had been denied them. Teachers from the North came to the South to teach the freed slaves, and the former slaves took advantage of the opportunities given them during the Reconstruction. During this time, African Americans could also vote, run for office, own land, be employed and use the same public accommodations as white people. Unfortunately, this did not last long.
Many of the white people in the South had the racism of slavery so ingrained in them that they could not envision living in a society where white and black were considered equal. Opponents of integration found ways to erode the progress that Reconstruction efforts made. Racists began terrorizing African Americans as the Ku Klux Klan. This sort of terrorism was effective, but the national consciousness changed in the decade during which Reconstruction took place too. Northerners had new causes to fight and lost interest in the South. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. writing in Time magazine says, “The [Reconstruction] era came to an end when the contested presidential election of 1876 was resolved by trading the electoral votes of South Carolina, Louisiana and Florida for the removal of federal troops from the last Southern statehouses” (Gates). Gates also claims that the cost of Reconstruction was too high and Americans no longer wanted to pay for it. Reconstruction gave way to what the white Southerners called “Redemption,” which included voter suppression, Jim Crow segregation, and a new form of enslavement, sharecropping. “In addition to their moves to strip African Americans of their voting rights, ‘Redeemer’ governments across the South slashed government investments in infrastructure and social programs across the board, including those for the region’s first state-funded public-school systems, a product of Reconstruction. In doing so, they re-empowered a private sphere dominated by the white planter class” (Gates). The white planter class were the former slave owners. Laws severely limited the right to vote for black men in the former Confederate states. There was widespread violence against African Americans including lynchings. White supremacy was demonstrated everywhere.
For many years, African Americans were dehumanized in as many ways possible. They did not sit idly by and let it happen to them though. Gates explains that they resisted, which brought about more persecution. White people saw black success as undermining their own. When there were clashes between white and black society, those who came out the worst were African Americans. It was they who had their people murdered without accountability and their towns destroyed by jealous white people who held fast to the racists rationalization for slavery, that black people were inferior to white. This is what prompted some to speak out including W.E.B. DuBois.
DuBois starts his novel, The Souls of Black Folks, describing the way black people felt in American society in the early Twentieth century. He says,
The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. (DuBois 2)
This describes what it is like to be a black person in the United States. If a person is black, then besides seeing him/herself as s/he is, that person must also see him/herself as white society sees them. This is a necessity because black people did not want to be seen as rising above their place in the Jim Crow South.
With this image in place for his readers, DuBois goes on to discuss Reconstruction. He talks extensively about the Freedmen’s Bureau, the organization that was established during Reconstruction to help the freed slaves. DuBois sees the failures of the Freedmen’s Bureau not only because of the strong opposition it faced from southerners, but also from abandonment. He says, “Its successes were the result of hard work, supplemented by the aid of philanthropists and the eager striving of black men. Its failures were the result of bad local agents, the inherent difficulties of the work, and national neglect” (DuBois 16). DuBois also thought that the courts were part of the reason so many people resented Reconstruction. “The most perplexing and least successful part of the Bureau's work lay in the exercise of its judicial functions. . . . The nature of its other activities and the character of its personnel prejudiced the Bureau in favor of the black litigants, and led without doubt to much injustice and annoyance” (DuBois 15). DuBois also recognizes the successes of the Freedmen’s Bureau, namely the schools that were established during Reconstruction, many of them still in operation today.
That leads to DuBois discussing Booker T. Washington, a black educator and voice of African Americans for years before DuBois came onto the national scene. In 1904, Washington was involved in starting a magazine for African Americans called The Voice of the Negro. According to Louis R. Harlan of the Journal of Southern History explains that the first issue featured Washington and his close followers, who Harlan calls “Bookerites.” One of the editorials, while it was unsigned, is thought to have been written by John Wesley Edward Bowen, a Bookerite, who said, "It is our purpose to steer clear of the prophets, seers and visionaries who dream dreams and prophesy out of their lurid imaginations or unreasoning hopes” (Harlan 47). Instead, the unsigned editorial promised, the magazine would be “a broad, sensible, practical magazine for all the people" (Harlan 47). This does not sound terrible, but it is a concession and DuBois believed that Washington led African Americans down the wrong path by encouraging them to concede to white society’s wishes that they do not vote and focus on making money.
DuBois thought this sounded too much like white man capitalism. He said, “Mr. Washington represents in Negro thought the old attitude of adjustment and submission. . . .This is an age of unusual economic development, and Mr. Washington's programme naturally takes an economic cast, becoming a gospel of Work and Money to such an extent as apparently almost completely to overshadow the higher aims of life” (DuBois 22). DuBois encouraged African Americans to seek higher education while Washington thought it best if they learned a trade that could support them, and wait for social progress to find them rather than seek it. DuBois wanted social equality and he did not think African Americans should have to wait any longer for it. He saw the right to vote, social equality and education of whatever type a person wanted as the keys to African Americans becoming fully recognized citizens of the United States.
DuBois goes on to talk about capitalism being bad for African Americans because they are not included in the wealth accrual. In Chapter VII, he cites Dougherty County, Georgia where cotton was still the main money earning crop, but white people were the only ones profiting from it. Black people were doing all the work and stuck in the tenant farming system that oppressed them nearly as much as slavery did. DuBois also talks about the churches in Dougherty County, and points out the importance of religion in the lives of black people. To end The Souls of Black Folks, DuBois cites slave spirituals that brought slaves hope, and help, and that still bring comfort and solace to those who are oppressed.
Slavery was a product of greed, capitalism and racism. When those who thought the institution abhorrent were victorious in the Civil War, the unfair treatment of African Americans should have ended. Reconstruction was established to bring that about, but greed capitalism and racism are strong forces because they still survive today in a nearly identical fashion. Reconstruction failed for several reasons as DuBois points out, but that did not mean that the United States had to fail. Americans could have fought to combat racism, but so many were just complacent, satisfied to wait for a better day when Americans would become less hateful and more moral, but that day still has not come. DuBois wanted that day when he was alive. Martin Luther King wanted that day too. The conditions that created slavery have never been reconciled and people still try to justify it, try to justify the inequities that still remain. DuBois was right: African Americans should be able to do everything that European Americans can do without fear, and without having to patiently wait for a day in the future when Americans will all be equal.
Works Cited
DuBois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folks. Chicago: A.C. McClurg and Co./ Project Gutenberg, 1903. E-Book. 4 October 2019. https://www.gutenberg.org/file....
Gates, Henry Louis. "How Reconstruction Still Shapes American Racism." Time 2 April 2019. Web. 4 October 2019. https://time.com/5562869/recon....
Harlan, Louis R. "Booker T. Washington and the Voice of the Negro, 1904-1907." Journal of Southern History 45.1 (1979): 45-62. JSTOR. 4 October 2019. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2....
Inikori, Joseph E. "Slavery in Africa and the Transatlantic Slave Trade." Harris, Joseph E., et al. The African Diaspora. Ed. Alusine Jalloh and Stephen E. Maizlish. College Station: Texas A&M UP, 1996. 39-72. Print. 4 October 2019.
