Inhuman Bondage Quotes

“We must face the ultimate contradiction that our free and democratic society was made possible by massive slave labor.”
― David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World

“<...> tyranny is a central theme of American history, that racial exploitation and racial conflict have been part of the DNA of American culture.”
― David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World

“Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, who had spent much of his youth in Europe, expressed surprise and shock when John C. Calhoun, a fellow cabinet member, confided to Adams that one of the major benefits of racial slavery was its effect on lower-class whites, who could now take pride in their skin color and feel equal to the wealthiest and most powerful whites. Thus slavery, in Calhoun’s eyes, defused class conflict. Precisely because slavery was the most extreme instance of inequality, it helped to make other relationships seem relatively equal.”
― David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World

“humans are no less eager than in the past to dominate, degrade, humiliate, and control—often in order to confirm their own sense of pride and superiority. (Adam Smith wrote in 1776 that this was the main motive for slavery.) But”
― David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World

“Several travelers noted that American masters wanted above all to be “popular” with their slaves—a characteristically American need that was probably rare in Brazil or the Caribbean.”
― David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World

“Although the Civil War was an apocalyptic success in the sense that it brought an end to nearly a century of struggle and broken hopes regarding the ultimate extinction of African American slavery, it also combined new freedoms, as in other major revolutions, with shock, breakdown, trauma, and tragedy. Neither desired nor accurately anticipated by leaders in the North and South, the war dramatized the failure of the whole American system of political negotiation and compromise that had never weakened the institution of slavery but had supported democratic government for whites for over eighty years. <...> Moreover, the long-term outcome of this revolutionary decision would be determined within a context of sectional hate and bitterness, political revenge, and competing presssures for reconciliation, reunion, and forgiveness.”
― David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World

“Sad to say, in a present-day world that seems to be governed by clashing self--interests and material forces, where we have learned that idealistic rhetoric usually cloaks nationalistic purposes or even far more diabolical schemes, it has become increasingly difficult to explain collective actions that profess to be driven by virtuous ideals or a desire to make the world a better place. During the past century, various national leaders have ordered the slaughter of tens of millions of people as the supposedly necessary means to perfect the world. Today we are far more cynical, I fear, than the generations at the beginning of the past genocidal century, before the First World War and the Russian Revolution.”
― David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World

“A final word should be said concerning the status of free blacks. Before the American Revolution this status had been ambiguous, and the number of free blacks was insignificant. <...> A rash of new laws, similar to the later Black Codes of Reconstruction, reduced free blacks almost to the status of slaves without masters. The new laws regulated their freedom of movement, forbade them to associate with slaves, subjected them to surveillance and discipline by whites, denied them the legal right to testify in court against whites, required them to work at approved jobs, and threatened them with penal labor if not actual reenslavement.”
― David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World

“What matters is that Southern slaves, at least on the larger plantations, created their own African American culture, which helped to preserve some of the more crucial areas of life and thought from white control or domination without significantly reducing the productivity and profitability of slave labor. Living within this African American culture, sustained by strong community ties, many slaves were able to maintain a certain sense of apartness, of pride, and of independent identity.”
― David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World

“What matters is that Southern slaves, at least on the larger plantations, created their own African
American culture, which helped to preserve some of the more crucial areas of life and thought from white control or domination without significantly
reducing the productivity and profitability of slave labor. Living within this African American culture, sustained by strong community ties, many slaves were able to maintain a certain sense of apartness, of pride, and of independent identity.”
― David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World

“It was the mission of the Confederacy, ordinary whites were told, to carry out God’s design for an inferior and dependent race. Slaveholders claimed that owning slaves always entailed a duty and a burden — a duty and burden that defined the moral superiority of the South. And this duty and burden was respected by millions of nonslaveholding whites, who were prepared to defend it with their lives. That, perhaps, was the ultimate meaning of a “slave society.”
― David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World

“For Southerners, a white skin was the distinguishing badge of mind and intellect. Black skin was the sign that a given people had been providentially designed to serve as menial laborers, as what Hammond called the “mudsill” class necessary to support every society.”
― David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World

“Some Southerners effectively applied slave labor to the cultivation of corn, grain, and hemp (for making rope and twine), to mining and lumbering, to building canals and railroads, and even to the manufacture of textiles, iron, and other industrial products. Nevertheless, no other American region contained so many white farmers who merely subsisted on their own produce. The “typical” white Southerner was not a slaveholding planter but a small farmer who tried, often without success, to achieve both relative self-sufficiency and a steady income from marketable cash crops.”
― David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World

“<...> slaves became the major form of Southern wealth (aside from land), and slaveholding became the means to prosperity. <...> The later impoverishment of the South nourished the myth that the slave economy had always been historically “backward,” stagnating, and unproductive. We now know that investment in slaves brought a considerable profit and that the Southern economy grew rapidly throughout the pre–Civil War decades. It is true, however, that the system depended largely on the international demand for cotton as the world entered the age of industrialization, led by the British textile industry. There was an increasing demand for clothing that was cheaper than linen and not as hot and heavy as wool.”
― David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World

“<...> this Revolutionary ideology, epitomized by the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence, showed that the very idea of slavery is a fiction or fraud, since liberty and equality are fundamental rights that no one can legitimately lose.”
― David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World

“<...> many national leaders including Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, John Adams, John Jay, Gouverneur Morris, and Rufus King saw American slavery as an immense problem, a curse, a blight, or a national disease. If the degree of their revulsion varied, they agreed that the nation would be much safer, purer, happier, and better off without the racial slavery that they had inherited from previous generations and, some of them would emphasize, from England. Most of them also believed that America would be an infinitely better and less complicated place without the African American population, which most white leaders associated with all the defects, mistakes, sins, shortcomings, and animality of an otherwise almost perfect nation.”
― David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World

“Much as slavery in the United States was part of a larger Atlantic Slave System, so America’s War of Independence was an outgrowth of Europe’s Seven Years’ War — from 1756 to 1763 — and also a precursor or harbinger of the French and Haitian revolutions and of the subsequent Latin American wars for independence from Spain.”
― David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World

“<...> black slavery was basic and integral to the entire phenomenon we call “America.” This often hidden or disguised truth ultimately involves the profound contradiction of a free society that was made possible by black slave labor.”
― David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World

“It is of inestimable importance that the classical and biblical traditions linked slavery with original sin, punishment <...>, the later abolition of slavery became tied with personal and collective freedom, with the redemption from sin, with the romanticizing of many form of labor, and with the ultimate salvation of humankind.”
― David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World

“Despite widespread attemps to equate human captives with domestic animals and even to market them and price them the same way <...> slaves were fortunately never held long enough in a distinctive group to undergo genetic neoteny <...>. Yet a kind of neoteny was clearly the goal of many slaveholders, even if they lacked a scientific understanding of how domestication changed the nature and behavior of animals. Aristotle's ideal of the "natural slave" was very close to what a human being would be like if subjected to a genetic change similar to that of domesticated plants and animals.”
― David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World

“Thus the word "inhuman", in this book's title, refers to the unconscionable and unsuccessful goal of bestializing (in the form of pets as well as beasts of burden) a class of human beings.”
― David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World

“Blue and Gray veterans led the way in focusing public attention on the minute details of each battle, a move that tended to distract attention from larger questions of meaning. Few if any other wars have created among the public such a strange fascination with the concrete details of military tactics and strategy, and thus pride in knowing where and when General Daniel Sickles lost his leg at Gettysburg, but not in knowing when slaves were freed in the District of Columbia.”
― David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World