David Brion Davis, America’s great historian of the ideologies that supported slavery and those who intervened to dismantle the institution, died in 2019, the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first African slaves in Virginia. John Samuel Harpham has embarked on a project to revisit this story for a new generation in the first of three planned volumes to parallel Davis’s triptych of studies that began with his Pulitzer Prize-winning work, The Problem of Slavery in western Culture (1966).
The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery is a significant achievement in setting out the changing context in which English authorities somehow accommodated their own sense of being a free people, disparaging of Spanish atrocities in the New World, including practices of slavery, to their own growing involvement in the trade. This was a long process, from early English slave raids on the Gold Coast in the 16th century, where the market was in Spanish and Portuguese territories (prior to the establishment of English colonies in America), to the emergence of 17th-century English possessions in the Caribbean, where sugar took off and required an immense labour supply.
Harpham tackles the difficult task of explaining the legal and philosophical assumptions behind this practice. Roman law played a huge role, deeming freedom to be a natural condition and slavery an acquired state befalling those, above all, who had been taken captive in African wars and could either suffer death or be sold into perpetual slavery. Not much attention was given to the justice of the wars in question, which made losing combatants liable to such a fate.
Along the way, Harpham provides compelling evidence to suggest that African societies were not disparaged as savage but largely fell within an intelligible order. Only much later did it occur to English writers to revive the Aristotelian idea of the “natural slave” to defend the institution. He also interrogates how “blackness” was understood and finds that colour difference was seen as a divine secret, and not the basis of racial theorising, which developed later.
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The arc of the story needs a continuation. And so, one must say, does America. Amid the din of dispute that marks the country’s culture wars, it’s easy to miss how much of the campaign is directed against discussion of racism and the legacy of slavery. Harpham deserves a wide readership, at home and abroad.
- Daniel Carey is professor of English at the University of Galway
