Many historians have concluded that one reason for the increasingly negative view of the Negro through the later eighteenth century was the need to salve the consciences of those who trafficked in and exploited enslaved men and women. As Grégoire put it, bleakly but bluntly, “People have slandered Negroes, first in order to get the right to enslave them, and then to justify themselves for having enslaved them. . . .”14 Many in Europe needed, in short, to believe that the subjugation of black people was justified by their natural inferiority.
