HIt is surely certain – as certain as one can be about any historical events – that the fall of New World slavery could not have occurred if there had been no abolitionist movements. We...

mudsill” class necessary to support every society.

We must face the ultimate contradiction that our free and democratic society was made possible by massive slave labor.

Despite widespread attemps to equate human captives with domestic animals and even to market them and price them the same way slaves were fortunately never held long enough in a distinctive group to undergo genetic...

slave society.

What matters is that Southern slaves, at least on the larger plantations, created their own AfricanAmerican culture, which helped to preserve some of the more crucial areas of life and thought from white control or...

It is of inestimable importance that the classical and biblical traditions linked slavery with original sin, punishment , the later abolition of slavery became tied with personal and collective freedom, with the redemption from sin,...

A final word should be said concerning the status of free blacks. Before the American Revolution this status had been ambiguous, and the number of free blacks was insignificant. A rash of new laws, similar...

America.” This often hidden or disguised truth ultimately involves the profound contradiction of a free society that was made possible by black slave labor.

tyranny is a central theme of American history, that racial exploitation and racial conflict have been part of the DNA of American culture.

Much as slavery in the United States was part of a larger Atlantic Slave System, so America’s War of Independence was an outgrowth of Europe’s Seven Years’ War — from 1756 to 1763 — and...

The subject of British abolitionism has long been controversial, complex, and even baffling. It also raises the issue of moral progress in history – whether groups of reformers and even nations can succeed in eliminating...

many national leaders including Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, John Adams, John Jay, Gouverneur Morris, and Rufus King saw American slavery as an immense problem, a curse, a blight, or a national disease. If the...

Sad to say, in a present-day world that seems to be governed by clashing self–interests and material forces, where we have learned that idealistic rhetoric usually cloaks nationalistic purposes or even far more diabolical schemes,...

this Revolutionary ideology, epitomized by the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence, showed that the very idea of slavery is a fiction or fraud, since liberty and equality are fundamental rights that no one...

Although the Civil War was an apocalyptic success in the sense that it brought an end to nearly a century of struggle and broken hopes regarding the ultimate extinction of African American slavery, it also...

Thus the word “inhuman”, in this book’s title, refers to the unconscionable and unsuccessful goal of bestializing (in the form of pets as well as beasts of burden) a class of human beings.

backward,” stagnating, and unproductive. We now know that investment in slaves brought a considerable profit and that the Southern economy grew rapidly throughout the pre–Civil War decades. It is true, however, that the system depended...

typical” white Southerner was not a slaveholding planter but a small farmer who tried, often without success, to achieve both relative self-sufficiency and a steady income from marketable cash crops.