The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation Read Free

segregation, and the persistence of various forms of penal servitude and human trafficking, I conclude by viewing the Thirteenth,Fourteenth, andFifteenth Amendments as the culmination of the Age of Emancipation—the award not only of liberation but of citizenship and the right to vote to the most oppressed class of Americans for well over two hundred years.

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Some Meanings of Slavery and Emancipation:Dehumanization, Animalization, and Free Soil
    God’s first blunder: Man didn’t find the animals amusing,—he dominated them, and didn’t even want to be an “animal.”
    — NIETZSCHE ,
Der Antichrist

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LOSS OF MASTERY
    Of all the freedman groups in the New World, the
gens de couleur
were in the best position to redress their grievances in a revolutionary crisis. No legal restrictions had curbed their acquisition or inheritance of property, and in Saint-Domingue a small minority had prospered at the cultivation ofcoffee,cotton, andindigo, which unlike sugar required relatively little capital investment.Julien Raimond and other colored representatives in France claimed that the freedmen owned more than one-quarter of Saint-Domingue’s slaves and between one-quarter and one-half of the productive land. They outnumbered whites in the South and West provinces and even in the North wereindispensable as the managers of sugar estates. In the militia and especially the rural police they provided the security forces that captured runaway slaves, kept the maroons at bay, and preserved the colony’s peace.
    But from the mid-eighteenth century to the Revolution, white colonists expressed increasing alarm over the growth and power of these “dangerous people.” TheFrenchmulattoes were accused of fraternizing with slaves and sheltering fugitives while also aping the manners and customs of whites, forgetting their dishonorable origins, and aspiring to intermarry with the best white families. As the racist reaction progressed, the
gens de couleur
were prohibited from holding meetings or assemblies, from sitting with whites at meals or in church or the theater, from wearing European dress or playing European games, from taking the title of Monsieur or Madame, from traveling to France without special authorization, and from entering the professions and more prestigious trades. Although many of these laws and customs were not strictly enforced—for example, the colored elite continued to seek education and a less hostile environment in France—no other freedman population had achieved such economic power while being proscribed as a contemptible caste. 43
    At the beginning of the French Revolution, the white West Indian proprietors and investors who lived in France organized an influential lobby, theClub Massiac, to defend West Indian interests. The proprietors hoped to prevent a reckless French Assembly from interfering with colonial affairs. They particularly feared that theConstituent Assembly, intoxicated by theDeclaration of the Rights of Man, would decree equal rights to all colored citizens if the question ever reached the floor. The Club Massiac knew that the
gens de couleur
then living in Paris had formed their own
Société des colons américains
(“American” being reserved to describe colonists of mixed blood, as distinct from “Europeans” and “Africans”), and that Julien Raimond was haunting the corridors of the Assembly as well as the antechambers of the royal ministry. Some of the proprietors and West India merchants thought that direct concessions to the
gens de couleur
would be a way to bypass the Constituent Assembly and to unite property owners of both races against the radical demands of colonial
petits blancs.
But the ensuing discussions between the
gens de couleur
and the Club Massiac came to naught. At best, the absentee proprietors could offer no more than support for future concessions from colonial assemblies.And most proprietors knew that the white colonists, already in rebellion against royal