The abolition of slavery - TLS Highlights - Times Online

The abolition of slavery - TLS Highlights - Times Online: "Within fifty years of Columbus’s arrival in the New World, the native population of Hispaniola had fallen from around 500,000 to less than 500. Elsewhere, the collapse was scarcely less dramatic. In Mexico and Peru, it was hastened by the brutal regimens imposed by the conquistadores. Yet, as far away as the Great Plains of North America, people were sickening and dying. Had the Spanish and Portuguese embarked on a policy of deliberate genocide they could not have wreaked a fraction of the havoc caused by the pathogens they had introduced. Unable to comprehend what was happening, they stood amazed as the thriving communities they had conquered evaporated before their very eyes. Within a century of the Europeans’ arrival, roughly 90 per cent of the population of the Americas perished.


What would have happened to Native Americans had they proven less susceptible to Old World disease may be inferred from the fate of the 12.5 million Africans imported to take their place. Africa had been a source of slave labour since ancient times. Over the centuries it is likely that as many slaves had been marched northward across the Sahara as would be shipped westward across the Atlantic. Some were employed as household servants, others as eunuchs and concubines. Many, however, laboured on the sugar plantations that, from the time of the Crusades onward, advanced steadily westward from Palestine to Cyprus, Majorca, the Iberian Peninsula and thence out into the Atlantic. Well before Columbus’s first American voyage, Madeira had become a wealthy sugar colony employing largely African slave labour."...

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H. Lecky describes England’s crusade against slavery as “among the three or four perfectly virtuous acts recorded in the history of nations”. Great powers do not as a rule behave selflessly. Not surprisingly, Lecky’s comment has generally been regarded with scepticism. Now, knowing vastly more than he did about slavery and its abolition, Davis believes Lecky was basically right. Although the American abolition movement came later and assumed a somewhat different character, the same might equally well be said of it. Slaves had never liked being slaves, but the rise of a climate of opinion that objected to slavery on moral grounds was something new. There had been nothing like it in ancient or medieval times or in any other society of which we have record. The upsurge of popular support for abolition both in Britain and the northern USA was unprecedented. Perhaps, David Brion Davis hypothesizes, moral progress is possible.

Whatever lay behind it, the cost of doing away with what up to then had been a resilient, flexible and expanding institution proved formidable. “I thank God”, declared Wilberforce on his deathbed, “that I should have lived to witness a day in which England is willing to give twenty millions sterling for the Abolition of slavery.” In terms of loss of trade, the cost was much greater. The United States, confronted by a far larger problem and lacking a central government capable of solving it peacefully, barely survived the ordeal.