Adam Rothman’s Visit to the Moral Innovation Seminar

By: Terry Pinkard

September 4, 2014

Adam Rothman, Professor of History at Georgetown and one of the leading historians of American slavery, presented to the seminar. The readings for his session were a couple of classic articles by Thomas Haskell criticizing David Brion Davis’s series of acclaimed histories on the development of the system of American slavery. Haskell argued that Davis, widely acknowledged as a path-breaking historian of American slavery, had failed to explain why abolitionism, which arose rather suddenly in the eighteenth century, did in fact arise. Haskell said that Davis was led to claim that many of the founding figures of the revolution in the United States were laboring under self-deception about their own commitments to freedom and equality. That could not explain why, after about 3,000 years of acceptance of the institution of slavery in the West, there was suddenly a movement that claimed that the institution itself was intolerable and campaigned not for its reform but for its abolition.

There was a brief conversation in the seminar about some of the history of abolitionism. In 1772, the case of Somerset v Steward led the judge, Lord Mansfield, to declare that chattel slavery was illegal in England, having never been part of the common law nor enacted by statute. Although many abolitionists were devout Christians and explained their opposition in terms of their Christianity, people like Karl Marx were to claim that this was a sham. What was really at work were class interests, and since the leaders of the capitalist class had an economic interest in promoting free labor, the abolitionist movement was not about promoting Christian freedom but rather capitalist freedom. Haskell in effect claimed that Davis’ position was the culmination of Marx’s since it attributed self-deception based on class interest to the slave-owning ruling class. 

On the other hand, Haskell argued that “class interest” could not explain the origins of abolitionism and in particular why it became effective. To that end, Haskell, himself also a historian, brought to bear some sophisticated philosophical conceptions of causation to show that it was in fact the moral effects of “market relations” that gave people new tools and a new imagination to respond to what was the obvious suffering on the part of slaves. Roughly, Haskell’s idea was that whatever the two changing moral outlook of the West had been, it had always been taken for granted that some form of coerced labor (chattel slavery, serfdom, etc.) had thought to be necessary to make the economy work, but the rise of new and large markets showed people that not only could a complicated economy work with free and not coerced labor, it also gave them the intellectual tools they needed to stage an abolitionist movement. 

In the discussion, alternatives were raised. It was suggested that Tocqueville’s view that certain kinds of agricultural production work better with hierarchical stratified societies than others, and the kind of large, cereal producing agriculture of the United States did not fit well into an aristocratic, hierarchical system. In such hierarchical systems, those at the top simply can’t “see” the suffering imposed on others. In the new, more egalitarian market systems, one comes, as Adam Smith argued, to think from the other’s point of view. 

Rothman pointed out that the slave trade fit very comfortably into the emerging market organization of the world, and European slave traders had cordial and very egalitarian relations with their African suppliers, both of them seemingly blind to the suffering of the goods (human slaves) they were trading. It was also brought up for discussion that one of the best ways of changing things is changing the way people think (a contra-Marx suggestion). There was also the idea that was raised early in the eighteenth century that it was wrong to enslave a Christian but not a non-Christian, and that in turn provoked a public debate in the eighteenth century about whether slaves should be converted to Christianity. It was also suggested that perhaps the object of explanation being discussed—“What explains the rise of abolitionism?”—was too narrow. We needed to ask a different question: Why did abolitionism arise but not a more general distaste for the oppressive treatment of black people? Why was the abolition of slavery not connected more closely with the call for equal political rights?

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