Slavery and Evil
The ringing phrases of the Declaration of Independence would not be explicitly applied to women until 1848. Their relevance to slavery, however, was immediately apparent. Indeed, the original Declaration, authored by Thomas Jefferson, contained a distinctly anti-slavery sentence that was removed by Congress in 1776 to placate Southerners.31 Patrick Henry, of ‘‘Give me liberty or give me death!’’ fame explained that while slavery was lamentable, its conveniences were great.32 Observers in London made much of the contradiction.
‘‘How is it,” asked a sarcastic Samuel Johnson, ‘‘that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”33Political and economic expedience alone could not explain why the century of Enlightenment cast such a dark shadow on non-Europeans who lacked the power to defend themselves. An ideological rationale was required. The Church largely absolved Christians of responsibility for infidels. English political theorists relied more openly on the logic of national self-interest. Hobbes explained slavery as a result of war, and John Locke, who drafted a constitution for the Carolinas, described it as a state of war indefinitely continued. Likewise, Native Americans were described not as potential citizens, but as members of a foreign nation.
Neither social affections nor moral principles applied beyond the larger family of nations that conceived themselves as the civilized above the savage. The Bible described all humans as brothers and sisters descended from Eve and Adam. On the other hand, it named Cain and Abel as original sons, but no daughters, leaving the origins of the lineage unclear. Had there been, perhaps another race left out of the official story? Non-Europeans might have descended from the villainous Cain or Ham, inheriting some collective guilt. Among those who looked beyond the Bible, the notion that men were shaped by climate (as articulated, for instance, by Montesquieu) began to lose its force, replaced by notions of innate difference.
Voltaire, for instance, believed that Negroes and Indians represented races separate from the white man.34 The voice of the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume, assumed Negroes were naturally inferior.Racial difference was constructed in highly gendered terms. Negroes could be distinguished by their highly sexualized qualities. Their sexual organs, male and female, were described as larger and more exaggerated. The wanton lust of both Negro and Native American women was especially indicative. Their lack of shame brought their lineage into question, but it was also remarked that they experienced little pain in childbirth, unlike the true daughters of Eve who had been sentenced to such pain by God himself.35 Negro women were often depicted with long breasts that could be flipped over to nurse a child upon their back. West Indian slave-holders, defensive about the low rate of natural increase of their human capital, explained that it was simply the result of polygamy and promiscuity, rather than maltreatment.36
Even abolitionists deplored the innate inferiority of the Negro, explaining why liberation would prove stressful to them, probably requiring deportation. Thomas Jefferson registered his disapproval of slavery in politically cautious ways even as he prospered from it.37 In his view, Negroes lacked the ability to benefit from their exposure to Western civilization: ‘‘Nature has been less bountiful to them in the endowments of the head.”38 The best he could say of them was that they had fared better in the endowments of the heart. In this respect, descriptions of Negroes resembled descriptions of women. The Negro that Jefferson knew best was his slave Sally Hemings (his widowed wife's half-sister), who bore him at least one child. His paternity was dismissed as slanderous rumor until recently substantiated (if not completely proved) by the DNA testing of Sally's descendants. 39
While theories of misplaced sexuality helped justify slavery, they also excited opposition to it.
Abolitionists made much of the vulnerability of slave women, and the temptations it posed to even the most virtuous men. Few themes aroused more passionate condemnation than the lack of respect for marital ties and the separation of children from their parents. Such condemnations reached a crescendo when abolitionist Theodore Weld claimed that the high rate of slave population growth was attributable to raising children explicitly for sale.40 When the British campaign to outlaw the slave trade won support from Parliament—and the Royal Navy—in 1808, the older, more established areas of the Southern U.S. began exporting slaves to the frontier areas. Lighter-skinned mulattoes generally yielded a higher price than their darker kin. In principle a man could buy a young female slave entirely for the purpose of profiting from the offspring he could sire upon her.Opposition to slavery found especially fertile ground in parts of the country that enjoyed few economic benefits from it. In New England, New York, and Pennsylvania slavery was often described as the concatenation of both greed and lust. Denounced by most millenarian, perfectionist, and evangelical groups, its morality was most effectively challenged by the patient and persistent Quakers. Yet those who merely sought to establish their own virtues in opposition to it also favored the characterization of slavery as epitome of evil. An emerging class of industrial investors defended conditions in their factories by insisting that their employees were, after all, better off than slaves.41