Dan Snow's History Hit - The Long Death of Slavery

Episode Date: July 28, 2022

We celebrate abolition - in Haiti after the revolution, in the British Empire in 1833, and in the United States during the Civil War. Yet, over the approximately 100 years in which there were various moments of emancipation, these processes often provided failed pathways to justice for people who had been enslaved.Kris Manjapra is a professor, author and historian. Kris joins Dan on the podcast to unearth disturbing truths about the Age of Emancipations, 1780-1880. They discuss examples of emancipations across the Americas, Europe and Africa where Black people were dispossessed by the very moves that were meant to free them.Produced by Hannah WardMixed and Mastered by Dougal PatmoreIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hey everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I'm talking to Professor Chris Manjapra. We are talking about emancipation. We are talking about the act of being freed from a state of enslavement. In the Atlantic world in particular, we're talking Britain and its empire. We're talking the US of A, we're talking a little bit about Africa. The destruction of the slave trade and the ending of the institution of slavery itself. We're going to rattle through 250 years of history, folks, so buckle up. It is extraordinary. And at the end of it, Chris reminds us all that emancipation is the act of freeing a fellow human being. But doing reparations, the atonement for that slavery, directing money and resources towards the descendants of formerly

enslaved people, that argument that is going on, that policy debate which is happening now, is dependent on us understanding this history. It was great to have Chris on the podcast. Here is Chris Manjapra. Chris, thank you so much for coming on the pod. It's great to be here. I'm so happy to have this chance to talk with you, Dan. Here's a big question. What do we mean when we talk about emancipation? Yeah, great question. So emancipation is the process of freeing enslaved people from slavery at a basic level. Interestingly, the term itself comes from the Latin word,

which means to let free from the hand. And this was used in the ancient times. What's interesting about this, though, is who was letting the enslaved free from their hand, right? It was obviously the slave owners. becomes both a little more complicated and also interesting, because we realize that emancipations took place on the terms of the slave owners, not on the terms of the enslaved, because it was the letting free of the enslaved from the hands of those who owned them. That's the way the whole process was framed. What I like about your work is you kind of chart, there are various emancipatory moments, aren't there, in the Atlantic world, I guess we could say,

emancipatory moments, aren't there, in the Atlantic world, I guess we could say, from the late 18th century onwards. But let's talk a little bit, let's talk about the US, the American colonies under British rule, pre-independence. Give me a sense of the scale of slavery and its importance in that colonial economy. Yeah, absolutely. So by the time that we come to the end of the 18th century, slavery, especially spreading across the U.S. South, is one of the largest sources of wealth for the emerging U.S. nation. And amongst these people, mostly located in the South, we have, of course, slavery as the institution, the way that the sugar and the cotton, mostly the cotton in the U.S. context is being produced. There's a smaller group of enslaved people, we're talking here tens of thousands, who are located in the U.S. north. And it is those communities that would see the first emancipations, in fact, the first emancipations of the modern world taking place beginning in the city of Philadelphia,

for example, in 1780. And then we see this process, the gradual emancipation spreading to New York and Connecticut, Rhode Island, over the coming decades. Are those kind of economic? Are they based on ideas? Is it something legal changing? What's going on? Why does that start? Yeah, great question. Definitely a complicated question to answer, because ideas are definitely part of the story. Abolitionist ideas, anti-slavery ideas are part of the story. Philadelphia is the heart of the Quakers in the United States, a dissenting religious group that migrated over in the 1600s from Britain. And Quakers had from the 1600s onwards,

a very strong anti-slavery ideology or imagination as part of their faith. So Quaker Philadelphia is where we see this first emancipation taking place. But the deeper source, I think, of emancipations probably has to do with a famous argument made by Eric Williams back in the 1940s. He wrote a book called Capitalism and Slavery, and he looked to the economy as the key to explain why emancipations were beginning around this time. And fundamentally what we're seeing, you know, there's been a lot of argument about the quote unquote Williams thesis, but there's something about it that holds, which is that around this time, we have the Industrial Revolution taking place. We have the rise of free markets, the rise of free trader ideology. Here we come again with new ideas that are emerging. We have the end of an old world, the beginning of a new, the beginning of republicanism. Slavery was increasingly part of

an old world economy, and people were moving to a new world economy. And so there's this deeper kind of economic logic to why slavery was ending, especially in the sites where republicanism was its strongest, therefore in the US North at this time. And we then get the American Revolution. The American Revolution, which was like the one of the greatest emancipatory moments at that point in the history of North America, because of all the formerly enslaved people that were able to fight for the British during that war. So it's quite a difficult idea, I guess, for many. Talk to me about that moment. Yeah, fascinating. So in some ways, you know, the very first emancipations were what we might call war emancipations.

By the way, long before we come to the 1770s moment, you know, the American Revolution beginning 1775, we have something called the manumissions that take place. So slave owners could individually free enslaved people, if they willed, as part of slave codes going back for hundreds of years. Emancipation in specific is when enslaved people start to be freed en masse as a group, generally by the state. And the first time that this begins to happen is in the context of the war, you know, the Revolutionary War, 7 to 1075 to 1783, in which we have on the British side, the British offering large numbers of enslaved people on the fringes of the 13 colonies, meaning more in the south in areas like Virginia and the Carolinas. They're offering them the opportunity for freedom in exchange for their loyalty in fighting against the American rebels at that time.

And so this is an opportunity that many Black people in places like Virginia and Carolina take up, and they win their freedom. And large numbers of them are then transported to Nova Scotia by, you know, the 1780s and then into the 1790s. And then there's a very interesting history of what then happens. Many of them end up in Sierra Leone. We can also note, though, that this mode of war emancipation sets a template because during the War of 1812, it happens again. In other words, emancipation being offered as a kind of benefit or as a kind of carrot to gain troops, especially black troops, in the context of these wars, specifically between America and the United Kingdom. And if you were able to get yourself to British lines, as it were,

to British hell, would you become free by a simple mechanism? Or is it only if you then would sign up to fight? There were terms. There were terms for the freedom, and you would be free if you signed up to fight. And furthermore, what the content of the freedom, in fact, involved remained unknown, right? And to me, this is the crux of what I call the failure of emancipation. Freeing the enslaved is certainly a process of ending a past institution, the institution of slavery in which that enslaved person lived. But where emancipations almost to the emancipation then failed was in thinking through what then would be the condition of that enslaved person, that formerly enslaved person afterwards. And so just beginning with that concrete case, what happens with these war-emancipated enslaved people, the majority of them, approximately

6,000 to 7,000, are relocated to Nova Scotia, but they are then consigned to basically a condition of abandonment, right? There are no opportunities for them there. They are confronting the a condition of abandonment, right? There are no opportunities for them there. They are confronting the Nova Scotian settlers who are quite confrontational and don't necessarily want these new black settlers to be moving in. There are no state services. There is no fundamentally, there is no compensation, no capital investment, if we might say using that language today, to help the enslaved to form a new life. And that kind of process of being emancipated into abandonment is what we see replicating over and over again in this long history of emancipations, which begin around this time, the 1780s, but then continue for

a whole century and more, really, culminating, you know, in the 1880s, Brazil, but then continue for a whole century and more really, culminating in the 1880s, Brazil, but then emancipations continue into, in fact, the 20th century in parts of Africa. There were no 40 acres and a mule, buddy, for people, right? Well, it's interesting because by the time that we get to what happens in the US South after 1865, people are looking at history. They had their historical imagination too.

They knew the history that was coming before. And so we have people like Sherman, General Sherman, and folks who were consulting with him, including the black communities who he was consulting with, who were saying, let's actually have land. And there was a process that lasted for a number of months of redistributing land to enslaved people before, of course, it was shut down by the president, by President Johnson at that time. If you listen to Dan Snow's history, we're talking about emancipation. More coming up. Move over Rome, move over Greece. This month on The Ancients, we're heading to the Americas, This month on the Ancients, we're heading to the Americas. North, Meso and South.

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And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. Before we come to the US, or later history, talk about Haiti, because this emancipation process in Haiti is so interesting. Obviously, we haven't got time to go into the whole revolution here, but the bit that you taught me, it was way later, like a generation later in the 1820s, like Haiti had to try and buy its way back into the global marketplace and of freeing the slave from the hands of the slave owner on the terms of the enslaver.

That is the key to how emancipations worked. They were done in the interest of the enslavers. interest of the enslavers. This case in Haiti shows this very logic of emancipation, but kind of blown up at a national and international level. Like you just mentioned, you know, we have the Haitian Revolution, which takes place in the 1790s through to all the way up to 1805, 1806. In that context, the Haitian people, in fact, are not emancipated. They simply declare their freedom. We might say they stole their freedom from the French very, very heroically. The French state then spent the coming two decades asserting their power over the Haitian people, asserting their right over the Haitian people to have what the French would have considered, did consider to be a just emancipation process. And for them, a just emancipation, a proper emancipation process

required that the Haitian people had to pay a compensation, a reparations to the French state for the loss that was represented by their revolutionary action of transforming Saint-Domingue into Haiti. And so concretely, what we have is that the French state in about 1825 demands this reparations payment, what was called the indemnity from Haiti. And Haiti ends up having to pay the indemnity over the coming decades, but even more than that, all the way up to 1947 because they had to take out loans in order to do so. So we have a state paying another state reparations. In today's understanding, we would see this as reparations being paid the wrong way,

from the enslaved to the enslavers. And in fact, that happens to be the way that the reparations for slavery have always been paid. When there have been compensations, they've always gone in that direction from the enslaved to the enslavers. Right. So we should talk about the classic in Britain, which is the Brits like to celebrate 1807 when the British Empire abolished the slave trade. But you are still allowed to own enslaved human beings much later for a generation or two. And then tell me about the big government bailout. It's unbelievable. Yes, right. Yeah, it was about three years ago now that I chanced across a reference online. It was in a treasury document that not only mentioned the fact that we had this huge cash payment that was offered to the slave owners of the British Empire,

a total of about 44,000 slave owners distributed between Britain and the plantation colonies received cash payouts that we knew. And we knew also the amount that that totaled at the time, 20 million pounds. million pounds. If you go by the proportion of GNP that it was represented in the day, it would be about 200 or 250 billion pounds today. So a huge amount. But what this document showed that I chanced upon was that, in fact, it took the British state 180 years to pay off that loan. The British state took out a loan in order to have the funds to pay the 44,000 accounts at the time of emancipation. And because that amount was so large, it took 180 years of basically the British taxpayers footing the bill for that. And that debt legacy only ended in 2015. And so, you know, that's the story of the British slave owner compensation. It was

the largest slave owner compensation made ever in the world. But you might say even more significantly, it set a standard after the British made their compensation in this mode. We call it the compensated emancipation scheme. We have the French Empire doing the same, the Dutch, the Danish, the Swedish. This becomes the standard for how to emancipate enslaved people and compensate slave owners during this period from the 1830s through to the 1860s. The new model would be set during the American Civil War beginning in 1861. Well, let's touch on the American Civil War at the end. People will know, of course, about the Emancipation Proclamation by President Lincoln. Again, this is a far more complicated story, isn't it? Talk me through this great wave of emancipations were part of each other's history. So, so far we've started kind of in the 1780s, now we're into the 1860s. As these different emancipatory moments were cresting, they set new precedents and those precedents were then studied and often implemented or modified

by state officials, policymakers later on. So, in this case, we know that President Lincoln, who led the North and eventually as the Civil War increasingly became a war over slavery, who continued to insist over time from 1861 to 1865, we see his policies and his stances changing, to insist that this war would be a war to free the enslaved people. But what's interesting is when we look back at his earlier career, he was fascinated by the British compensated emancipations. He studied them very carefully. He, in fact, was a proponent of compensated emancipation, and he enacted compensated emancipation as a test case in Washington, D.C. in 1862. And he wanted to do it elsewhere, but there wasn't enough political will to do that

at the time. By the time that the war continues, it's clear that a compensated emancipation, the goal of which, by the way, is to keep everyone happy, you know, to keep the different kinds of political elites, to give everybody a little bit of the pie. It was clear that the war was not going to allow that, that there would be a pitched battle over slavery, that the South wanted a slavery empire. And in that context, there was a quick move from the policy of a compensated emancipation to that of a total emancipation, which then is what was enacted beginning in 1865. But here there is a complication, which is that from the very beginnings of this new form of American revolutionary emancipation, you could say that the poison was in the remedy here too.

The remedies were the Reconstruction Acts. You know, we have the 13th Amendment, the 14th, the 15th Amendment. These were all being passed. When we read those amendments, we see that at a legal and policy level, yes, enslaved people were being given freedom, were being even black men, for example, were being enfranchised. But at the same time, often in the second articles of the same amendments, there was some constraint on the quality or the level of freedom that the ex-enslaved people would have. They were simultaneously being included, but also subordinated within the very texts of these reconstructions. And that, at a policy level, served the interests of the plantation elites. So many of us have watched The 13th, a wonderful

documentary about the origin of the prison industrial complex. And we could argue, I do argue, that the origins in some ways of Jim Crow segregation policies of American anti-blackness are actually rooted in these reconstruction acts because they, like the previous emancipations before them, could not bring themselves to fully, number one, incorporate and enfranchise Black people. That did not happen. And number two, to actually engage the formerly enslaved in conversation around what proper reparations should look like. So kind of one big takeaway for me is,

if we want to redress a historical problem, we have to engage the groups who have been most harmed by the problem. They have to be at the table to talk about what solutions can look like. And therein, I think we see where probably one of the great failings of emancipations had been historically in the 19th century, that the ex-enslaved were excluded from those conversations. They were not included. And so the emancipations that were enacted were not done with their imagination at work. And the freedom that was granted, therefore, looked very different and was quite constrained.

They weren't just not included. They were ghettoized, sidelined, geographically isolated, denied access to services. That all works. Turns out it wasn't a great idea. So when you talk about compensated emancipation, I keep thinking, right, compensation, of course, to the people who were grotesquely enslaved. Oh, no, no, of course, we're talking about compensation to the people who

owned human beings, of course. So let's move from compensation to reparation. Let's finish the conversation there. This is history. The stories you're telling matter, not just for those of us with a fascination for the past, but for everybody who is interested in where we're going. How important do you think conversations around reparation are now? I think that's probably the reason why I felt so urgently the need to write this book, because Hilary Beckles, one of the great reparation leaders of the Caribbean, likes to say, and I believe his view, that the 21st century is the century for the reparations for slavery. This is the moment. This is the time. And we see reparations at the headlines of national discussions, not just in the United Kingdom, but also in the United States and in the Caribbean. And I think we're going to see that continuing.

But when we hear this term reparations, I think it's actually very helpful for us to also hear in the background the word emancipations, failed emancipations, to put the contemporary discussions around reparations within that historical context, within that historical context, that what reparations are fundamentally about today is addressing unfinished business from the time that slavery's ended in the past. That unfinished business, those unfinished ends, they still haunt us today. Now, to talk about this in a more concrete manner, I think it's actually really impressive, inspiring, I think is the better word, to recognize that the reparations movements that are living today actually draw on a very, very, very long legacy. And that legacy goes back, you know, at least 250 years, because in the aftermath of every single failed emancipation

of the past, there has been a reparations movement generally led by the Black community. And what have these reparations movements wanted? Well, you know, if we look at them comparatively across time, there kind of is a set of common demands, proper access to education, access to land, access to the ability to grow and accumulate generational wealth for the community, security for the community, access to the vote and to equitable political representation. These are the core demands that inspired reparations in the past and that continue to inspire reparations today. And what's interesting to me is in that list that I just gave, I didn't mention cash compensation. Certainly, cash compensation is an essential part of the mix. It's an element of what reparations means.

But this long history of reparations that we have and that we're drawing on, it's actually more like a set of requests, a set of demands that we need to attend to in order to address this long history of inequity and of the ongoing legacies of slavery. And fundamentally, those demands have to do with creating the opportunity for the Black community to build community wealth. And the Black community has across the United Kingdom, the United States, the Caribbean, and also we could talk about Africa and the effect of colonialism and emancipations across Africa. Black communities across the Atlantic have not been in a position to build community wealth because the history of slavery was not properly ended. And that's what reparations are here to address today, I think, in a very urgent way.

Chris, thank you very much. But what's the last name of the book again? It's called The Black Ghost of Empire. Thank you very much indeed. Absolutely. It's great to be here, Dan. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all work out.