The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution

The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution is the central panel of David Brion Davis's great trilogy on slavery in Western thought, and it takes up the era's sharpest contradiction: an age that proclaimed the rights of man while expanding human bondage. Covering 1770 to 1823, from the eve of the American Revolution to the crisis of the Missouri Compromise, Davis follows the argument over slavery wherever it ran, through the American founders' compromises, the British abolition campaign of Wilberforce and Clarkson, the French Revolution's collision with its own colonies, the revolution in Haiti that made emancipation a fact before it was a doctrine, and the courts, parliaments, and pulpits where antislavery first became a political force. Davis's method is the history of ideas practiced with unusual honesty about power. His most influential argument concerns why antislavery triumphed when it did: the new industrial order, he suggests, could attack chattel slavery while leaving wage labor's own coercions sanctified, so that abolitionism was at once genuinely moral and genuinely useful to the class that adopted it. The reading is subtle, meticulously fair to the reformers' sincerity, and it set the terms of a scholarly debate that has run ever since. The book won the 1976 National Book Award in History and Biography and the Bancroft Prize, joining the Pulitzer that the trilogy's first volume had won a decade earlier. Davis taught at Yale, founded its center for the study of slavery and abolition, and did more than any other scholar of his generation to put slavery at the center of American and Atlantic history.