American Exceptionalism: Land of Liberty, Foundation of Slavery - Part 10

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Part 10 of a Series

“Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed.” 

- Langston Hughes

Today’s post is an exchange with an old friend that got me thinking about both the substance of this series and how to make it more interactive. I have had several personal responses from readers that have challenged me to think more deeply and more clearly, and I’d like to create with this blog a thoughtful conversation as much as a monologue . . . although given the state of social media interactions, perhaps I should be careful what I wish for.

“A point I was going to make the other day if we had more time to talk is that, in my mind, it is a mistake to characterize slavery as a distinctly American social phenomenon. It was for all practical purposes a universal phenomenon: This was driven home to me a couple of years ago when we were in Sicily and toured Syracuse. There, one of the most impactful sites we visited were the massive salt mines within the ancient city walls. Who inhabited the salt mines for hundreds of years? The ancient Greek inhabitants’ slaves from around the Mediterranean world.

“To note this is not to diminish the problematic legacy of slavery in the U.S. in all its current forms, but it argues against any particular blame of our ancestors for its existence on our shores. Similarly, our ancestors don’t deserve particular blame for American women not being allowed to vote until the 20th century. On both scores, we’ve evolved, and the content of that continuing evolution is the stuff of our eligibility to still be considered ‘exceptional.’

“I don’t buy the ‘Land of Liberty, Foundation of Slavery’ juxtaposition because it suggests that the latter is as significant as the substance and spirit of the former. Not close in my mind: It is the former which overcame the latter and which energizes the continuing effort to erase slavery’s legacy.”

I agree that slavery and degradation have been around probably forever, and when you write of Syracuse, I think also of Sparta, whose treatment of its own people, the despised helots, seems cruel even by that city state’s gruesome standards.\

It is also true that North America received a small fraction of the total slave traffic. In the almost 350 years of the transatlantic slave trade, 12.5 million Africans were seized and put on ships. Almost two million died during the brutal “middle passage”. The vast majority of the survivors were shipped to the Caribbean and Brazil, with 5.5 million going to the latter alone; 388,000 were put ashore in North America. Yet on the eve of the Civil War, there were about 4 million slaves in the United States,

Still, I think several things set the United States apart:

  • The creation of a potent theory of racial superiority to justify slavery. Racial prejudice and subjugation are hardly unique to us, but we created a complex legal and philosophical justification for it, one that “Dred Scott v. Sandford” sought to implant in the Constitution.

  • The theory of racial inferiority went beyond justifying the subjugation of people; it defined them as subhuman. Slaves were property.

  • In the years before the Civil War, the argument developed that slavery was not only good for white people, it was also beneficial for the slaves themselves. That argument is still alive, as Ron DeSantis recently demonstrated. (It is also a variant of the “White Man’s burden” European nations used to justify their empires.)

  • What I didn’t learn in high school was the enormous profitability of the slave economy and its role as the foundation of the industrial revolution. “What distinguished the United States from virtually every other cotton-growing area in the world,” writes Sven Beckert in Empire of Cotton, “was the planters' command of nearly unlimited supplies of land, labor and capital, and their unparalleled political power. . . .It was on the back of cotton, and thus on the backs of slaves, that the U.S. economy ascended in the world."

  • Interestingly, Utilitarianism, the dominant and democratizing philosophical school of the mid-19th century, which is often summarized (however inexactly) as  optimizing “the greatest good for the greatest number,” was adopted by apologists for slavery, who pointed to the immense wealth a relatively small number of slaves produced for the rest of the country.

  • Nor did abolition and emancipation end the matter. Jim Crow laws, sharecropping measures, prison work gangs, segregation, intimidation, lynching, and more kept Blacks suppressed.

  • In the end, though, I think that what made American slavery so different from slavery elsewhere is that it refuted the “self-evident” truths that had given birth to the nation.