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The Inescapable Problem

David Brion Davis. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. 422 pp. Notes and index. $30.00 (cloth); $16.95 (paper). Slavery posed a problem in the colonization and development of the Atlantic World, a problem that sparked contests over freedom, race, and emancipa- tion stretching from New England to Brazil. This statement, which seems so pedestrian today, was far from established when David Brion Davis embarked upon his field-defining trilogy over fifty years ago. To understand the inspi- ration behind the series that The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation now brings to a close, one must look no further than Kenneth Stampp, whom Davis tells us galvanized him to become a historian of slavery and abolition. Writing against generations of scholars who had depicted slavery as a civiliz- ing and humane institution, Stampp's The Peculiar Institution (1956) revealed the inescapable inhumanity of American slavery. When serendipity brought Stampp to Harvard as a visiting professor just as Davis was finishing up graduate school, the two struck up a close bond. Stampp clearly left an indel- ible imprint on Davis' thinking. Although Davis has provided us with a rich array of analytical insights over the span of ten monographs dedicated to black bondage—including one demonstrating the Atlantic nature of antislavery and another bringing comparative perspective on abolition—the fundamental problem of slavery for Davis has remained remarkably consistent. Put simply, Davis approaches slavery as a "profound moral contradiction" (p. 333) involving "the ultimately impossible attempt to define and treat men as objects." 1 It is this core tension between what slavery intended to do—turn people into things—and what it could never completely achieve, upon which Davis has premised his entire career. This is the problem of slavery. Yet, if human bondage carried within itself a profound problem, how slavery came to be seen as problematic and eventually abolished still required explanation. How could Atlantic slavery have gone from being a ubiquitous and accepted institution to a relic of the unenlightened past, with millions of slaves freed, in a little more than a century? Davis first tackled this question in The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Western Culture (1966). He argued that,