Last week, I finished the newest work by David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation, considered the final volume in his trilogy about the history of slavery. While the entire work was interesting, from his discussion about the complicated process of abolishing slavery, to the colonization movement in the United States, and the status of free blacks as a window into how slaves were viewed, his thoughts on the larger question of moral progress and human history in the conclusion were most interesting to me. While it is hard, he writes, to look at the blood-soaked history of the 20th Century and imagine that we are making moral progress, the abolition of chattel slavery in the West stands as a shining example of this very idea, that within roughly two hundred years we ended a practice that had been accepted for thousands of years. The question of race in the United States is, however, another matter entirely. Davis begins with a discussion about the an...
Occasional author. Lover of coffee.