In this engaging book, David Brion Davis offers an illuminating
perspective on American slavery. Starting with a long view across
the temporal and spatial boundaries of world slavery, he traces
continuities from the ancient world to the era of exploration, with
its expanding markets and rise in consumption of such products as
sugar, tobacco, spices, and chocolate, to the conditions of the New
World settlement that gave rise to a dependence on the forced labor
of millions of African slaves. With the American Revolution,
slavery crossed another kind of boundary, in a psychological
inversion that placed black slaves outside the dream of liberty and
equality--and turned them into the Great American Problem.
Davis then delves into a single year, 1819, to explain how an
explosive conflict over the expansion and legitimacy of slavery,
together with reinterpretations of the Bible and the Constitution,
pointed toward revolutionary changes in American culture. Finally,
he widens the angle again, in a regional perspective, to discuss
the movement to colonize blacks outside the United States, the
African-American impact on abolitionism, and the South's response
to slave emancipation in the British Caribbean, which led to
attempts to morally vindicate slavery and export it into future
American states. Challenging the boundaries of slavery ultimately
brought on the Civil War and the unexpected, immediate emancipation
of slaves long before it could have been achieved in any other
way.
This imaginative and fascinating book puts slavery into a
brilliant new light and underscores anew the desperate human
tragedy lying at the very heart of the American story.
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