Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery

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by David Brion Davis

Harvard University Press

Due/Published August 2003, 128 pages, cloth

ISBN 0674011821

In this perspective on American slavery and starting with a long view across the temporal and spatial boundaries of world slavery, Davis 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.

Contents

Introduction
1. The Origins and Nature of New World Slavery
2. 1819: Signs of a New Era
3. African-American Abolitionism and Southern Fears

Notes
Index