The problem of slavery in the age of emancipation

Review by Choice Review

Davis (emer., Yale) needed nearly 50 years to complete his monumental The Problem of Slavery trilogy (1966; CH, Apr'75), but it has been worth the wait. This volume is not as comprehensive as the others, focusing mostly on Anglo-American slave societies and abolition movements. It is the most "American" of the three books; attention to significant later emancipations (Cuba, Brazil) is limited. Reading the previous two books is not necessary, but general familiarity with the history of slavery definitely helps. Davis first explores "animalizing" of slaves and its psychological impact. This partly echoes concerns of scholars (e.g., Stanley Elkins, Slavery, 1959) who thought the damage was irredeemable. But Davis crucially connects animalization to resistance against slavery's harsh injustices, reclaiming slaves' humanity. He covers the Haitian Revolution's effects in the US; the colonization movement and its founding of Liberia; and how opposition to removing freedpeople helped define African Americans as Americans entitled to equal rights. Davis highlights the central role of free black abolitionists, and contends that despite its unfinished character--with little compensation or adequate preparation for freedom--emancipation is "probably the greatest landmark of willed moral progress in human history." Summing Up: Highly recommended. Most levels/collections. T. P. Johnson University of Massachusetts, Boston

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by New York Times Review

IN 1862, when Nathaniel Hawthorne headed south from New England to see the Civil War firsthand, he came upon a group of former slaves trudging northward. "They seemed a kind of creature by themselves, not altogether human," he wrote, "but perhaps quite as good, and akin to the fauns and rustic deities of olden times." "Whoever may be benefited by the results of this war," he added, "it will not be the present generation of negroes." Hawthorne's stunning comparison of real men and women to half-human creatures, even if kindly intended, gets to the heart of David Brion Davis's "The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation," the richly textured final volume in his exceptional trilogy about slavery in the Western Hemisphere. "I have long interpreted the problem of slavery," he writes in his introduction, "as centering on the impossibility of converting humans into the totally compliant, submissive, accepting chattel symbolized by Aristotle's ideal of the 'natural slave.'" Less a political historian than a moral philosopher, Davis focuses here on 19th-century trans-Atlantic abolitionism and, in particular, the intellectual and theological origins of the antislavery movement in America. Borrowing from Freud and Descartes, he suggests that slaveholders projected onto their chattels the qualities they repressed in themselves. Particularly in America, the black population represented to white people "the finitude, imperfections, sensuality, self-mockery and depravity of human nature, thereby amplifying the opposite qualities in the white race." As a consequence, an American dream of freedom and opportunity was inseparable from a white illusion of superiority, bolstered by the subjugation and "animalization" of black people. That is, slaves were considered domesticated savages who would, if given the chance, revert to murder and mayhem. To many whites, particularly pro-slavery Southerners, this seemed the lesson of the violent and ultimately successful Haitian Revolution, which represented, as Davis puts it, "the unleashing of pure Id." But the ironies of history are boundless. Although Haiti's slaves did win their freedom, a prolonged civil war damaged the country's economy. Seizing this opportunity, planters elsewhere in the Caribbean and in the American South increased production, which meant they needed to acquire more slaves. In 1803, South Carolina reopened its slave trade, importing 40,000 Africans in the next four years. Yet Great Britain, having lost as many as 50,000 soldiers and seamen in Haiti, responded differently, emancipating 800,000 colonial slaves in 1834 without spilling a drop of blood. After Haiti, many well-meaning American reformers wanted to expunge the black "Id" peacefully by recolonizing free blacks in Africa. While Davis's use of such Freudianism may seem overbearing at times, his analysis of the underpinnings of the American Colonization Society, founded in 1816, is subtle, wide-ranging and consistently judicious. Refusing to dismiss colonization out of hand, he places it within the context of the Exodus narrative of deliverance, which he then persuasively connects to American messianism. He also shows that many supporters of colonization did not consider black people to be inherently inferior. Rather, in the first decades of the 19th century, evangelical reformers argued that slavery and prejudice had so completely dehumanized the African-American that he could never escape what the New England clergyman Leonard Bacon termed "the abyss of his degradation" without being relocated to a less corrupt environment. But, as Davis cogently observes, not only did the pompous style of many colonization speeches reinforce the "self-justificatory power of the myth of America," the rhetoric was "so abstract and grandiose that it almost precluded serious discussion of capital investment, technological assistance, labor skills and markets." Without money or training, how were the new colonists to establish a country, much less a prosperous one? What about the commercial networks they would endanger or the native people they would displace? As Davis makes clear, "the glaring defect in the colonizationist ideology was the refusal to recognize the vital contributions that blacks had made and would continue to make to American civilization." Black leaders, understandably resistant to the colonization movement, were crucial to its demise. Except for William Lloyd Garrison's antislavery newspaper, The Liberator, initially financed by the wealthy black Philadelphian James Forten, for almost 10 years most of the white press refused to print the denunciations of colonization issued by black organizations. But the African-American newspaper Freedom's Journal roundly criticized the American Colonization Society as perpetuating rather than eradicating slavery. And in 1829, David Walker's radical "Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World" called on nonwhites to unite, to prove "that we are MEN, and not brutes, as we have been represented, and by millions treated." Smuggled into the South, the "Appeal" caused so much consternation that when Walker died of consumption in 1830, it was widely believed that he had been murdered. Black abolitionists like James Forten, Richard Allen and Samuel Cornish demanded an integrated American society, and by the 1830s the American abolition movement had evolved into an energetic biracial entity. Davis argues that the white abolitionists, however paternalistic, were sincerely inspired by Anglo-American Christianity and by the efforts of religious women. The Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, which first met in New York in 1837, published several significant pamphlets calling for racial and gender equality without any patronizing blather, although by today's standards their emphasis on the "elevation" of the black population might sound sanctimonious and condescending. That's part of Davis's larger argument: Abolitionism was not monolithic in makeup or in motivation. Black emigrationists were not the same as white colonizationists, nor was black nationalism the same as white nationalism. ADDITIONALLY, AS DAVIS demonstrates, every movement contains nuances and paradoxes. When British reformers linked abolition to their crusade against wage slavery, Frederick Douglass replied that unlike exploited workers, chattel slaves did not even have "the privilege of saying 'myself.'" Yet a correlation between these forms of bondage, as Davis points out, helps us to extend "the historically successful moral condemnation of slavery to other forms of coerced labor and exploitation," from Nazi concentration camps to 21st-century sex trafficking. "Moral progress seems to be historical, cultural and institutional," Davis concludes, "not the result of a genetic improvement in human nature." The passage of the Fugitive Slave Law and the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision, as well as the South's increasing belligerence, suggested to many abolitionists that slavery could not be ended without violence. But although the Civil War was truly catastrophic, the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment could not have been predicted at its start - or, for that matter, the subsequent end of slavery in Cuba and Brazil, which resulted partly because of Anglo-American abolition. Moral progress may be historical, cultural and institutional, but it isn't inevitable. All the more reason this superb book should be essential reading for anyone wishing to understand our complex and contradictory past. BRENDA WINEAPPLE'S most recent book is "Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 6, 2014]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* The dehumanizing of enslaved Africans is the problem of slavery on which Davis focuses in the conclusion of his trilogy on slavery in Western culture, analyzing the psychology and immorality of slavery from antiquity to modern times. Davis explores the period from the Haitian Revolution, when enslaved Africans liberated themselves (triumphing over the mighty British and French militaries), to the Thirteenth Amendment and the end of American slavery, if not American racism. Haiti's slave rebellion inspired American freedmen and slaves and horrified whites with the prospect of a population determined to be free and possibly vengeful for their dehumanization. In between, the abolition movements in the U.S. and elsewhere challenged the very concept of slavery in free and democratic societies even as the growth of scientific racism and the colonization movement highlighted the complexity of liberating a people not exactly welcome as free on American shores. Davis, a Pulitzer Prize winner, explores the underappreciated role of former slaves in the push for abolition and the influence of religion in the debate about the morality of enslavement. This is a well-researched and broad historical and global analysis of the complex motives and actions on all fronts, highlighting the transcontinental tension between efforts by white society to dehumanize and the fight by freedmen and slaves for freedom, full humanity, and citizenship.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

This magisterial volume concludes (after The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution) Davis's three-volume study of the intellectual, cultural, and moral realities of slavery in the West since classical times. The dean of slavery historians and Yale emeritus professor, Davis has always seen the problem of slavery as a "problem of moral perception" requiring "disciplined moral reflection." Concentrating in this book on Britain and the U.S., he takes readers through the Civil War. His focus here is the central importance of the Haitian Revolution, of free blacks throughout the world, and of failed American efforts to colonize freed people in other lands-subjects too little emphasized in earlier histories. Differentiating himself from most other historians of slavery, Davis stresses the profound complexities of slavery's existence, the unintended consequences of approaches to ending it, and the contingencies that accompanied its end in the U.S. and elsewhere. In stately prose and with unparalleled command of his subject, he offers a profound historical examination of the termination of servitude in the West-a termination that, however, failed to end slavery's accompanying racism, whose consequences remain with us still. While requiring much of readers, this is a book of surpassing importance. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Davis (Sterling Professor of History Emeritus, Yale Univ.) here completes his trilogy begun with The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966) and continued with The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (1975). Intellectual history again marks Davis's focus on the hundred years from the 1780s to the 1880s that saw the outlawing of slavery in the Americas from Canada and New England to Chile and Brazil. Beginning with understandings of what it meant to be human in light of a developing culture of dehumanization, with its principles and practices of treating slaves as though they were domesticated animals, Davis unravels the moral and physical struggle-the debates, the rebellions, the wars-that produced what he considers "probably the greatest landmark of willed moral progress in human history." Free blacks were key in that progress, he argues, as he shows how slavery, because it was never destined to die a natural death, had to be forcibly extinguished by the pressure of a fundamental change in Western moral perception. -VERDICT Another must read from Davis for any generally informed reader interested in the development of the modern Atlantic world or of the Western concept of humanity. Serious students will necessarily pore over this volume for decades to come. [See Prepub Alert, 9/15/13.]-Thomas J. Davis, -Arizona State Univ., Tempe (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A distinguished historian brings his monumental trilogy to a stirring conclusion. Throughout a lifetime of scholarship devoted to the subject, Davis (Emeritus, History/Yale Univ.; Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World, 2006, etc.) has more than established his bona fides as a leading authority on slavery. Here, he considers the decades between the 1780s and the 1880s and the moral achievement of the eradication of human bondage. He eschews a survey in favor of a "highly selective" study of aspects of the Age of Emancipation, particularly as manifest in Britain and the United States. As a predicate, Davis discusses the dehumanizing of slaves (and the scientific racism that perfected this notion), a sordid piece of work that impeded any thought of immediate emancipation, and the Haitian revolution, an example of self-emancipation that horrified whites and was a source of unending pride and hope to abolitionists like Frederick Douglass. The author's treatment of Britain's abolition of the slave trade and its emancipation act and America's grappling with the problem of slavery through the Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil War and the 13th Amendment rests on the impeccable scholarship we've come to expect, but the triumph here is the sympathetic imagination he brings to the topic. For example, his thorough and intriguing discussion of the American Colonization Society and the colonization movement, a phenomenon derided by many modern historians, helps us understand how the notion arose, how it attracted right-thinking individuals from Jefferson to Lincoln, and how it became discredited, in no small part due to the efforts of free blacks. In a memorable passage, Davis places himself in the minds of a free black abolitionist and a white abolitionist in the antebellum North to articulate attitudes and illustrate the tensions, even among allies, in a noble struggle. Deeply researched, ingeniously argued.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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1 Some Meanings of Slavery and Emancipation: Dehumanization, Animalization, and Free Soil God's first blunder: Man ­didn't find the animals ­amusing,--­ he dominated them, and ­didn't even want to be an "animal." --nietzsche, Der Antichrist the meaning of animalization, part i Traveling through the South in 1856, the famous journalist and landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted remarked to a white overseer that it must be disagreeable to punish slaves the way he did. The overseer replied, "Why, sir, I ­wouldn't mind killing a nigger more than I would a dog." Does this mean that blacks who were treated like animals were literally seen as "only animals," or as an entirely different species from humans? The answer is clearly no, except perhaps in some extreme cases and for very brief periods of time--­as for example in the ­post-­emancipation lynching era, when many black men accused of raping white women were hanged or tortured, dismembered, and burned alive, occasionally before immense cheering crowds of Southern white men, women, and children. Degradation and insult are reinforced every day when people call other people curs, pigs, swine, apes, bitches, and sons of bitches, terms which momentarily dehumanize one party while enhancing the ­"non-­animal" superiority of the other. But animalization can cover a spectrum from superficial insult to the justification of slavery and on to lynching and genocide. Thus the use of such animal metaphors as lice, vermin, microbes, and cockroaches, as in the Nazi Holocaust, lowers the process to a different level, justifying the complete extermination of an impure enemy group that supposedly threatens the basic health of society and therefore has no right to exist. I am mainly concerned here with the psychological and linguistic process, as a way of dealing with the question of whether humans who were treated like animals were ever literally seen as "only animals," since a discussion of diverse motives would lead us far astray. The world had never seen such an extreme and systematic engine of dehumanization as the Nazi propaganda machine, epitomized by Joseph Goebbels's assertion in an early speech (March 7, 1942) that "It is a ­life-­or-­death struggle between the Aryan race and the Jewish microbe. No other government and no other regime would have been able to muster the strength to find a general solution to this issue." Nearly a year later, SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler would expand the point in a speech to SS officers: Antisemitism is exactly the same as delousing. Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology. It is a matter of cleanliness. In just the same way, antisemitism, for us, has not been a question of ideology, but a matter of cleanliness, which now will soon have been dealt with. We shall soon be deloused. We have only 20,000 lice left, and then the matter is finished within the whole of Germany. Given the Nazi example, it is worth noting that the antipode of this animalizing can be seen in a universal tendency to project our potentiality for ­self-­transcendence, freedom, and striving for perfection onto images of kings, dictators, demagogues, and cultural heroes of various kinds. This form of idolatry, which ancient Judaism fortunately singled out as the most dangerous sin facing humanity, can also appear in various kinds of narcissism and ­egocentrism, as when an individual imagines that he is godlike and free from all taint of finitude and corruption. There is actually a long history to the links between animalization and genocide or ethnic cleansing, and the formula by no means ended with the Nazis. In 1994, when the Hutu slaughtered some 800,000 Tutsi neighbors in Rwanda, the victims were repeatedly likened to inyenizi, or cockroaches. But were Jews and Tutsis truly seen as nonhumans, as the actual equivalent of microbes, lice, or cockroaches? Given the appalling realities of mass murder, we are intuitively inclined to think yes. Why else would Himmler try to persuade SS officers that their actions would be exactly the same as delousing? Fortunately, philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has insightfully clarified this issue as his discussion of ethics moves from social hierarchy to insiders/outsiders and on to genocidal massacres. In accounting for genocide, "the familiar answer" presumes that members of some outgroup are not considered "human at all." Yet that ­"­doesn't explain the immense cruelty--­the abominable cruelty," which is not evident even in the extermination of pests. As Appiah then reasons: The persecutors may liken the objects of their enmity to cockroaches or germs, but they acknowledge their victim's humanity in the very act of humiliating, stigmatizing, reviling, and torturing them. Such treatment--­and the voluble justifications the persecutors invariably offer for such treatment--­is reserved for creatures we recognize to have intentions and desires and projects. Appiah adds in an endnote that the victimizers always "tell you why their victims--­Jews or Aztecs or Tutsi--­deserve ­what's being done to them." That was emphatically true of the Nazis, who pictured the Jews not only as an active global threat to civilization throughout history, but in World War II as the hidden conspiratorial force behind both their Soviet and Western enemies. Clearly this retention of a human element fails to make animalization more humane. Quite the contrary. At this point it should be clear that "dehumanization" means the eradication not of human identity but of those elements of humanity that evoke respect and empathy and convey a sense of dignity. Dehumanization means the debasement of a human, often the reduction to the status of an "animalized human," a person who exemplifies the ­so-­called animal traits and who lacks the moral and rational capacities that humans esteem. As Appiah implies, this extreme dehumanization deprives the victims even of the kind of sympathy and connectedness often given to Alzheimer patients or those in a coma. I would only add that since the victims of this process are perceived as "animalized humans," this double consciousness would probably involve a contradictory shifting back and forth in the recognition of humanity. When Henry Smith, an African American accused of rape, was tortured and killed in 1893 before a Texas mob of some ten thousand whites, many in the crowd no doubt saw him momentarily as "nothing but an animal" as they watched hot irons being pressed on his bare feet and tongue and then into his eyes, and heard him emit "a cry that echoed over the prairie like the wail of a wild animal." Conversely, we have reports of German soldiers who momentarily recognized the true humanity of individual Jews as they were herded ­toward the gas chambers. In any event, the creation of "animalized humans" can produce a mental state in the victimizers and spectators that disconnects the neural sources of human identification, empathy, and compassion, the very basis for the Golden Rule and all human ethics. In extreme cases, this means the ability to engage in torture or extermination without a qualm. But the focus on extreme cases can obscure the fact, emphasized by David Livingstone Smith, that "we are all potential dehumanizers, just as we are potential objects of dehumanization." No doubt many situations arise, especially in war, where people kill or inflict pain without misgivings and without any explicit animalization. But the victims must still be dehumanized in similar ways. And animalization, which also appears in such group differentiations as class, caste, and ethnicity, as well as race, clearly makes the process easier for large collective groups. One explanation, as already suggested, involves the projection on victims or on groups such as slaves of an exaggerated version of the ­so-­called animal traits that all humans share and often fear and repress. This psychological process deprives the dehumanized of those redeeming rational and spiritual qualities that give humans a sense of pride, of dignity, of being made in the image of God. At the same time, the projection enables the victimizers to become almost psychological parasites, whose ­self-­image is immeasurably enhanced by the dramatic contrast with the degraded and dehumanized "Other." But why have we humans been so concerned with our "animality," and what is the ultimate source of this desire to animalize other humans--­apart from the quite diverse motives of slaveholders, white supremacists, and Nazis? Here I would turn to Reinhold Niebuhr's view of the core of human "distinctiveness," as opposed to other animals, in the fear, ­self-­doubt, anxiety, and even pride and confidence generated by the dilemma of finitude and freedom. The dilemma that prompts us to ask, "Who am I?" "Why am I here?" "What is it all about?" As Niebuhr remarks, while surveying the ways we distinguish the self from the totality of the world, "The vantage point from which man judges his insignificance is a rather significant vantage point." If one samples some typical quotations on the human condition, we see a single answer in the tension between our sense of our existential animal finitude (evoked by our discovery in childhood that we are certain to die) and our capacity for ­self-­reflection, for making ourselves our own object. Countless poets and philosophers have agreed with Charles Caleb Colton (1780-1830): "Man is an embodied paradox, a bundle of contradictions." As expressed by the great French Renaissance essayist Montaigne, "Man sees himself lodged here in the mud and filth of the world, nailed and fastened to the most lifeless and stagnant part of the universe, in the lowest story of the house, at the furthest distance from the vault of Heaven, with the vilest animals; and yet, in his imagination, he places himself above the circle of the moon, and brings Heaven under his feet." Or according to Edward Tyson, a founder of comparative anatomy whose dissection of a chimpanzee in 1698 led him to the view that "Man is part a Brute, part an Angel; and is that Link in the Creation, that joyns them both together." Or Edward Young, an ­eighteenth-­century religious poet much favored by the later British abolitionists: "Helpless Immortal! Insect infinite! / A worm! a God! I tremble at myself, / And in myself am lost! At home a stranger." And Lord Byron, first in Sardanapalus: "I am the very slave of circumstance/ And impulse--­borne away with every breath! / Misplaced upon the ­throne--­misplaced in life. / I know not what I could have been, / but feel I am not what I should ­be--­let it end." But then, in Byron's Sonnet to Chillon: "Eternal spirit of the chainless mind! / Brightest in dungeons, Liberty! thou art, / For there thy habitation is the heart, / The heart which love of thee alone can bind." When I think of myself wholly in terms of my eating, sleeping, urinating, defecating, cutting toenails (claws), scratching an itch, aging and dying, there can be no question that I am a finite mammal. This exercise, which runs against the grain of a lifetime of "civilizing" and ­self-­idealizing, requires some concentrated effort. But as we define ourselves as rational animals, Homo sapiens, we continue to marvel over our amazing capacity for ­self-­reflection and rational analysis--­for viewing ourselves from a vantage point outside the self, for analyzing our own introspection, and for imagining what it would be like to be someone else, including their own imaginings, even a slave or animal. The 100 billion neurons in our brains enable us even to study and understand their own actions. Much human behavior is ­driven not by simple desires for food, money, sex, and security, but by our need to respond to this paradoxical nature. According to Niebuhr's classic analysis, the anxiety generated by this paradoxical condition can lead to a denial of our capacity for rationality and ­self-­transcendence, in the sin of sensuality; or, far worse, to a denial of our animality itself, the sin of pride. Animalizing other people is clearly an expression of the sin of pride and was long encouraged, as we will see, by the constant ubiquity and interaction with domesticated animals, as well as by the sharp conceptual division between humans and animals imposed by Western culture. The psychological mechanism of animalization has been so deeply implanted in white culture, with respect to African Americans, that most white Americans have been unaware of their usually unconscious complicity as well as the significant benefits they have reaped from their "transcendent whiteness." Especially during the period of racial slavery, the process of animalizing blacks enhanced the whites' sense of being a rational, ­self-­disciplined, and ambitious people, closely attuned to their ­long-­term best interests. Racism became the systematic way of institutionalizing and justifying the individual white's projection of an "animal Id" upon blacks. It took the form of an intellectual theory or ideology, cloaked in science, as well as actions and behavior legitimated by laws, customs, and social structure. As I wrote in a review of Winthrop D. Jordan's landmark book White Over Black, "The ­counter-­image of the Negro became the living embodiment of what transplanted Europeans must never allow themselves to become." This parasitic relationship gave special force to the whites' sense of historical mission, the "American Dream" of overcoming the limits and boundaries of past history. But as I briefly explore later, a long succession of African American writers, beginning in the eighteenth century and including even Barack Obama, have conveyed the ­deeply felt effects of this process on individual and collective black ­self-­esteem. Yet the animalization of black slaves obviously differed markedly from that of groups in danger of genocide. For one thing, slaves were valuable as chattel property and as investments, and in ­nineteenth-­ century America their value soared as they became increasingly important to the economy. Far from being in danger of extermination, the lives of slaves were at least legally protected by state laws and interpretations of common law that ruled that the murder of a slave was a crime punishable by death. But if state laws and courts repeatedly recognized the humanity of slaves, Thomas Jefferson was far from being alone in fearing an eventual war between the races, a war that many whites predicted would end in the extermination of all "Negroes." And the related subject of black colonization, which had immense theoretical support among the American antebellum white population, promised an eventual removal of the black population by "peaceful means"--­an option that even Hermann Göring and some other Nazi leaders favored for the Jews before World War II and "the final solution." Finally, as we have seen, the populist lynching of blacks began to reach epic levels in the 1880s and '90s. The widespread acceptance of scientific racism, a central prop for Jim Crow segregation and white supremacy, reinforced the traditional fear of sexual contamination, through rape or intermarriage--­the invasion of the black Id, a reprisal of all the animalistic traits that had been projected on blacks to achieve white purity. In 1897, Rebecca Latimer Felton, a prominent Georgia feminist, journalist, and eventually the first woman to become a U.S. senator, aroused national attention with a near hysterical speech on the peril of black rapists: "[I]f it takes lynching to protect woman's dearest possession from drunken, ravening human beasts," she cried, "then I say lynch a thousand [blacks] a week if it becomes necessary." Later, emphasizing the "moral retrogression" of blacks since the days of slavery, Felton accused the "promoters of Negro equality" of preparing the way for an imminent "revolutionary uprising" that "will either exterminate the blacks or force the white citizens to leave the country." Fortunately, such extremists never came close to shaping federal policies, but it is significant that at the turn of the twentieth century the Chief Statistician of the U.S. Census, Professor Walter Francis Willcox, and other prominent statisticians, happily predicted the gradual extinction of the Negro race. Excerpted from The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation by David Brion Davis All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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