Name: _______________
APUSH
Date: _______
UNIT 1
Where Historians Disagree
(See related pages)
Society and Culture in Provincial America
Where Historians Disagree - The Origins of Slavery
The debate among historians over how and why white Americans created a system of slave labor in the
seventeenth century--and how and why they determined that African Americans and no others should populate that
system--has been an unusually lively one. At its center is a debate over whether slavery was a result of white racism, or
whether racism was a result of slavery.
In 1950, Oscar and Mary Handlin published an influential article comparing slavery to other systems of
"unfreedom" in the colonies. What separated slavery from other conditions of servitude, they argued, was that it was
restricted to people of African descent, that it was permanent, and that it passed from one generation to the next. The
unique characteristics of slavery, the Handlins argued, were part of an effort by colonial legislatures to increase the
available labor force. White laborers needed an incentive to come to America; black laborers, forcibly imported from
Africa, did not. The distinction between the conditions of white workers and the conditions of black workers was,
therefore, based on legal and economic motives, not on racism.
Winthrop Jordan was one of a number of historians who later challenged the Handlins' thesis and agued that
white racism, more than economic interests, produced African slavery. In White Over Black (1968) and other works,
Jordan argued that Europeans had long viewed people of color as inferior beings. Those attitudes migrated with white
Europeans to the New World, and white racism shaped the treatment of Africans in America from the beginning. Even
without the economic incentives the Handlins described, in other words, whites would have been likely to oppress blacks
in the New World.
Peter Wood's Black Majority (1974), a study of seventeenth-century South Carolina, was one of a number of works that
moved the debate back toward social and economic conditions. Wood demonstrated that blacks and whites often worked
together on relatively equal terms in the early years of settlement. But as rice cultivation expanded, it became more
difficult to find white laborers willing to do the arduous work. The increase in the forcible importation of African slaves
was a response to this growing demand for labor. It was also a response to fears among whites that without slavery it
would be difficult to control a labor force brought to America against its will. Edmund Morgan's American Slavery,
American Freedom (1975) argued similarly that the southern labor system was at first relatively flexible and later grew
more rigid. In colonial Virginia, he claimed, white settlers did not at first intend to create a system of permanent bondage.
But as the tobacco economy grew and created a high demand for cheap labor, white landowners began to feel uneasy
about their dependence on a large group of dependent white workers. Such workers were difficult to recruit and control.
Slavery, therefore, was less a result of racism than of the desire for whites to find a reliable and stable labor force.
Robin Blackburn's The Making of New World Slavery (1966) argues particularly strenuously that, while race was
a factor in making the enslavement of Africans easier for whites to justify to themselves, the real reasons for the
emergence of slavery were hardheaded economic decisions by ambitious entrepreneurs who realized very early that a
slave-labor system in the labor-intensive agricultural world of the American South and the Caribbean was more profitable
than a free-labor system. Slavery served the interests of a powerful combination of groups: planters, merchants,
industrialists, and consumers. The most important reason for the creation and continuation of the system, therefore, was
not racism, but the pursuit of profit. Slavery was not, Blackburn concludes, an antiquated remnant of an older world. It
was a recognizably modern labor system that served the needs of an emerging market economy.
Click the links that will bring you a variety of documents on the slavery issue. Read through the documents sets
(highlight/annotate) and answer the questions that follow each set.
Document Set A:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/tguide/tgsocw.html - Eric Foner, Slavery and the Origins of the Civil
War
http://cghs.dade.k12.fl.us/slavery/interpretations_of_slavery_in_U.S/phillips_stampp.htm Interpretations of Slavery: Phillips & Stampp
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/con_slavery.cfm - What are the Origins of American
Slavery?
1) After reading the historiographic essays on slavery's origins, do you
believe slavery was more a cause or a result of white racism? Reference
historians' arguments to support your thesis. What other central
questions have historians grappled with in this literature?
Document Set B:
http://uncpress.unc.edu/chapters/morgan_slave.html - Philip Morgan's Slave Counterpoint, Chapter 1
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/BERMAN.html - Ira Berlin's Many Thousands Gone, Summary
and Praise
2) Two of the more important books on the origins of slavery to emerge in
recent times are Philip Morgan's Slave Counterpoint and Ira Berlin's Many
Thousands Gone. Using the excerpts and reviews above, summarize
briefly their respective arguments and how they fit in the wider debate
over the historiography of slavery.
Document Set C:
http://edweb.tusd.k12.az.us/uhs/APUSH/1st%20Sem/Articles%20Semester%201/Artiles%20Semeste
r%201/Freehling.htm - "Founding Fathers and Slavery," William Freehling
http://edweb.tusd.k12.az.us/uhs/APUSH/1st%20Sem/Articles%20Semester%201/Artiles%20Semeste
r%201/Robinson.htm - "Slavery and the Constitutional Revolution," Daniel Robinson
3) In his landmark American Slavery, American Freedom, Edmund
Morgan aims to ascertain "to explain how a people could have
developed the dedication to human liberty and dignity exhibited by
the leaders of the American Revolution and at the same time have
developed and maintained a system of labor that denied human
liberty and dignity every hour of the day." What do you make of this
contradiction? Is it a coincidence that a revolution based on liberty
arose in a land grounded in slavery, or something more? Evaluate
Morgan's claim using the essays by Freehling and Robinson. Support
your thesis using material and arguments from the websites above.