Violent Saviors, page 15
The ACS gave each new emigrant as much as ten acres of land. It took the land back if the emigrants failed to improve it to ACS standards, which was often. The vision of Liberians growing sugarcane, tobacco, and cotton to compete with slave-grown crops in the Americas failed to materialize.13
The mortality on the early voyages would continue to be the biggest problem. From March 1820 to September 1843, there were 4,472 emigrants to Liberia. Of these, 2,198 had died by 1843. Five hundred twenty of the emigrants had left Liberia by that time. Only 1,754 of the emigrants from 1820 to 1843 survived to the end of the period and stayed in Liberia. One modern scholar estimated that Liberia over this period had one of the highest peacetime mortality rates ever recorded from reliable numbers.14
The ACS promised its supporters that a solution to the high mortality in Liberia was just around the corner. In 1834, the ACS claimed that this mortality, which was “the great problem which American philanthropy has been working out for twelve years,” was finally “solved.” The announcement was premature, by a couple of centuries.15
At least the ACS kept reliable numbers, which it reported back home. In 1844, the ACS records on the fate of emigrants were read into the Congressional Record. The numbers to confirm that Liberia was a death trap were available to anyone who wanted to check.
Neither Black people nor slaveholders were as enthusiastic about Liberia as they were supposed to be. The 4,472 Black Americans going to Liberia from 1820 to 1843 was a small number relative to the Black population of 2.9 million in 1838. About half of the settlers were slaves whose owners had freed them on condition of going to Liberia, but it was a tiny number relative to the total slave population. Meanwhile, the flow of free Black people to Liberia amounted to only one hundred a year.16
Most Black American leaders had turned against emigration to Africa after the all-white ACS took over the idea. In 1817, a leader of the free Black community in Philadelphia named James Forten wrote to Paul Cuffe. Of Black Philadelphians, Forten reported to Cuffe, “not one was willing to go to Africa.” Forten chaired an 1817 meeting of Philadelphia Black people, which issued a declaration renouncing colonization. “If the plan of colonizing is intended for our benefit,” the declaration said to colonizers, then you might want to know “that it is not asked for by us.” The ACS “proffers to those who do not ask for them what it calls benefits, but which they consider injuries.”17
Twenty years later in Philadelphia, James Forten’s daughter, Sarah, was still reporting how little enthusiasm Black Americans had for colonization. In a letter to the white abolitionist Angelina Grimké in 1837, Sarah Forten explained how “colonization is, as you well know, the offspring of Prejudice.” Forten told Grimké that she had “never yet met one man or woman of Color who thought better of it than I do.” Colonization just told Black people “this is not your Country,” Forten said.18
Another meeting of free Black people in Richmond in 1817 introduced a rare note of concern about colonization’s effects on Africans in Africa. Black American colonists “would be apt to turn the ignorance of the natives to their own advantage, and do them more harm than good.” And what would the natives think when they learned that the civilized white Americans had deported the Black Americans that were supposed to be civilization’s emissaries? “Tell it not to barbarians, lest they refuse to be civilized.”19
The anti-interventionist John Quincy Adams also disliked the idea of an American colony because it would be… an American colony. In 1819, he worried that the Colonization Society “would smuggle in upon us a system of establishing Colonies beyond [the] sea.” As in his later letter in 1822, he did not go public with his opposition to colonialism. He reported his objections only to himself, in his private diary.20
One of Adam Smith’s classical-economist heirs now entered the debate. Harriet Martineau (1802–1876) gave a favorable reaction at first to colonization. One of history’s first female economists, Martineau in Britain in 1832 had written Illustrations of Political Economy. She displayed a gift for illustrating economics principles with fictional stories. One of her tales in 1832 contrasted slavery with freedom from the slaves’ point of view. Her fictional slave narrator just aspired to “live in the same way that the whites live,” to “trade as we like, and be rich, and even be governors.”21
To Martineau, colonization was a way for American Black people to start from scratch under free institutions. Liberia offered American ex-slaves “a better place” with American institutions. She saw it as offering both collective and individual agency to Black people. In Liberia, Martineau explained, American Black people “will make their own laws,” and “guard their own rights.” According to the precepts of classical economics, such ideal laws would make it possible for American ex-slaves to “labor, and prosper and be happy. They will become farmers, planters, merchants, or tradespeople.” Progress will ensue. Liberals would often be tempted by some deus ex machina for instant liberty and free markets.22
But Martineau by 1838 had turned against colonization. On another trip to the South, she said she had learned of most slaves’ “horror of going to Liberia,” which “appears to me decisive as to the unnaturalness of the scheme.” Like a good classical economist, Martineau judged schemes for progress by the choices of the intended beneficiaries.23
For their part, many free Black people noted the parallel between Black removal and Indian removal. A meeting in New York in 1831 noted that whites had also promised that Indians’ removal would be with Indians’ consent. With that promise not kept, this assembly of Black New York asked, “Can they blame us if we attach the same credit to the declaration that they mean to colonize us only with our consent?”24
In December 1844, the annexation of Texas set off a new crisis over slavery. Northerners objected to Texas as a slave state. They feared the annexation of the formerly Mexican territory would provoke war with Mexico. Such a war would likely lead to the US conquering yet more territory that could become yet more slave states. The war with Mexico did indeed break out in May 1846 and did lead to the US annexation of Mexican territory from New Mexico to California.25
Many Southern leaders feared the reverse outcome—that a slew of free states would emerge out of the Louisiana and Mexican territories. Panicked by the growing abolitionist movement in the North, Southerners worried about how the dominant free states would impose abolition on them. To counter the abolitionist narrative of slave owners as selfish oppressors, the South needed its own positive ideology about slavery. Most Southern leaders now rejected colonization, because it highlighted the possibility of emancipation. At this point, many Southerners fell back on the first position in the debate on Black progress—slavery itself was the best option for Black people.
The South Carolina slaveholder James Henry Hammond (1807–1864) became one of the loudest advocates of benevolent slavery, resuscitating the British proslavery arguments that Adam Smith had confronted in the late eighteenth century. Hammond was governor of South Carolina from 1842 to 1844 and a senator from 1857 to 1860.
On January 28, 1845, Hammond addressed a letter to the British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson. The one-time protagonist in the campaign to abolish the slave trade in Britain in 1807 was still fighting slavery. Now the aged Clarkson had taken the abolition debate into the next generation and across the Atlantic in 1844 with a letter appealing to American Northerners to recognize the evils of slavery.26
Hammond responded furiously to Clarkson, updating previous claims from Clarkson’s generation about the benevolence of slavery. Slavers who shipped Africans to be slaves in the South enabled them to move “from barbarism to civilization,” Hammond insisted.
Moreover, Southern slaves consumed more than free British laborers, claimed Hammond. The latter were in “frightful destitution.” Quoting official British sources, Hammond noted some British workers lived in horrific conditions, in cellars, in tents, or in the open air; some lived as many as ten to a cottage in dire hunger. In contrast, Hammond claimed, “never did a slave starve in America.” Slave owners had strong incentives to take care of their slaves. The half-hearted British relief system had weak incentives to take care of British paupers. The British poor did not get “the slightest comfort” from their freedom. The British had no solution to end white poverty in Britain, Hammond gleefully taunted Clarkson, while the slave owners had one to prevent Black poverty in America.
As further evidence, Hammond cited the British Caribbean colonies after the abolition of slavery there in 1833. The economy of the West Indies had collapsed after abolition, and the ex-slaves had miserable incomes, he said. He would never have been so inhumane to his own slaves.27
Hammond had self-interest at stake, but some non-slaveholders also argued for the idea of benevolent slavery. Across the Atlantic, the British historian and literary celebrity Thomas Carlyle also looked back to the emancipation of slaves in the British Empire in a series of articles between 1843 and 1850. It distressed him that West Indian Black people after emancipation “refuse to work” on the sugar plantations as before. The sugar economy had declined, and the ex-slaves had fallen into “the abysses of open Beggary.” As always, the evidence for benevolent slavery for Black people was their material poverty without slavery. Now he addressed them on their attempt to be free: “You, for your part, have tried it, and failed.”28
Like Jefferson earlier, the key question for Carlyle to ask the slaves after emancipation was “What to do with you?” Emancipation was fatefully not a good idea unless the emancipators also had a good plan for the ex-slaves.29
Carlyle imagined the slaves answering him: “If thou art in very deed my Wiser, may a beneficent instinct lead and impel thee to ‘conquer’ me, to command me!” Carlyle was clear about the link between paternalism and compulsion: “If thou do know better than I what is good and right,” then thou should “force me to do it.”30
I may even have to kill you in order to save you, Carlyle said. If you resist, “I will flog you; if still in vain, I will at last shoot you,—and make God’s Earth… free of you.” Carlyle’s apocalyptic answer to the poverty of ex-slaves in the Caribbean was to either kill them or return them to slavery.31
Now a second heir to Adam Smith entered the slavery debate on the same side as Harriet Martineau. The great classical economist John Stuart Mill answered Carlyle in 1850. Mill throughout his long career was one of history’s greatest liberal proponents (although sadly not always a consistent one) of “the rights of others,” to use his words.
Mill denounced Carlyle’s theory of innate differences between white and Black people. Mill was one of the foremost critics of the nineteenth-century rise of scientific racism. He referred to all such theories of non-white racial inferiority as “vulgar.” It was so unscientific to just attribute “the diversities of conduct and character to inherent natural differences.”
The reasoning was vulgar because it was circular reasoning. The slaves were poor because they were allegedly inferior. Carlyle said he knew they were inferior because they were poor.
Mill instead said that poor incentives for the slaves explained their reluctance to work hard and to invest in the future: “What race would not be indolent and insouciant when things are so arranged, that they derive no advantage from forethought or exertion?” Mill rejected Carlyle’s justification of slavery as fit for slaves permanently unfit to choose for themselves.32
Some thought the debate between innate inferiority and incentives was an empirical debate about the cause of Black poverty. However, Mill insisted also on the slaves’ demand for agency: Nobody should take away someone else’s agency based on the supposed material benefits of doing so. Mill actually used the word agency elsewhere in his political writings. In 1861, he discussed how much rulers varied in “free agency of their subjects, or the supersession of it by managing their business for them.”33
Like Smith, Mill compared slave owners coercing Black people with husbands coercing wives. For both Black people and women, Mill celebrated “freedom of individual choice,” against the “general presumption, that certain persons are not fit” to choose for themselves. He scorned the self-interest of slave owners and husbands who claimed a right based on their alleged superiority to dominate their slaves and wives.34
Mill’s wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, influenced these passages. She had written an earlier and briefer article with much the same arguments. She had also compared slavery and oppression of women. She ridiculed those who claimed that women were fine with their husbands’ right to coerce them. The men did not appear to consult any actual wives on the matter. Therefore, Mrs. Mill asked, how did they “know that women do not desire equality and freedom?”35
Mill gave credit to his wife for much of his writings. What I owe to her, Mill said, is “almost infinite.” Most of his readers then and now did not believe him on Harriet Taylor’s contribution to his work and gave Mrs. Mill little recognition, continuing the phenomenon of wives of economists (like Condorcet’s wife, Sophie de Grouchy) getting a little bit of a voice but getting too little credit for it. It would happen again.36
Mill’s critique of benevolent slavery was both a demand for agency and a moral critique. Like Smith, Mill believed economists could not talk about whether economic outcomes were desirable without a theory of justice. Material improvement was not enough to judge an outcome as satisfactory; the outcome also had to be just. His definition of justice was “the recognition and observance of the rights of other people.”37
Another theme of Smith and Kant that Mill picked up was the demand for dignity, which he linked to the demand for agency. Mill thought dignity was the best word to describe “the love of liberty and personal independence.” This “sense of dignity” was something that “all human beings possess in one form or other.” There was some variation across individuals, only imperfectly correlated with education or income. Dignity was essential to happiness. No material reward associated with the elimination of dignity was adequate compensation for such a loss. “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied,” Mill asserted. Elsewhere, Mill described economics as “absurd” if it assumed that individuals were motivated only by material incentives.38
For Mill, dignity was connected to the individual’s right to be free from coercion by society or government. He proclaimed that “there is a circle around every individual being, which no government, be it that of one, of a few, or of the many, ought to be permitted to overstep.” The people who believed in this space for individuals included anyone “who professes the smallest regard to human freedom or dignity.”39
These passages on dignity versus coercion did not refer to slavery, but they help us understand why Mill in 1850 was not going to argue with Carlyle about whether the slaves were materially better off than British workers or Caribbean ex-slaves. Mill said, “It is not the facts of the question, so much as the moralities of it, that I care to dispute with your contributor.” All that mattered was that slaves had not chosen slavery.
Carlyle understood well this opposition to slavery from classical economists, especially the opposition of Mill. He mocked Mill’s “Voluntary Principle.” He thought it ridiculous that British Empire officials should leave the fate of West Indian plantations to ex-slaves and sugar consumers making their own decisions on “supply and demand.”40
Could economists really believe only in just “letting men alone”? Carlyle wondered whether Mill thought “all the Horses also are to be emancipated, and brought to the supply-and-demand principle?”41
Carlyle’s comparison of ex-slaves to horses shows how much what Mill called his “vulgar” belief in the innate inferiority of the ex-slaves motivated his views on coercion. Deploying another livestock metaphor later in an 1859 letter to his brother, Carlyle rejected Mill’s view that it was “a sin to control, or coerce into better methods, human swine in any way.”42
Carlyle applied the Development Right of Conquest to both the land and the slaves. Before colonization, the Caribbean islands had been nothing but “mere jungle, savagery, poison reptiles and swamp malaria.” Our Maker had decided to give “proprietorship” to whoever could get from the islands the “noble produce they were created fit for yielding.” Heaven appointed this most efficient producer as “Vicegerent of the Maker.” This vicegerent turned out to be “the white European” who got the lands and forced the slaves to produce sugar. Now the ex-slaves revealed again their innate inferiority as “indolent, two-legged cattle.” They refused to work for God’s sugar mission and chose to produce pumpkins for their own subsistence. The “Eternal Powers” therefore decided that “no black man, who will not work” had “the smallest right” to any of his own land or his own subsistence crops.
Carlyle knew about the tradition of skeptical liberalism that had produced Mill—he saw him as a “sad product of a skeptical eighteenth century.” Carlyle coined the phrase “Dismal Science” for Mill’s incomprehensibly passive economics of “letting men alone.”43
Carlyle was clear on his crucial difference with Mill, that Mill’s Dismal Science declared that “negro and white” were “on a footing of perfect equality, and subject to no law but that of supply and demand.” Carlyle thought this to be “clearly no solution” for Caribbean prosperity.44
Carlyle’s low view of classical economists also applied to Harriet Martineau, with an added dose of condescension. In later reminiscences, Carlyle said that “her talent” suited her to be “a quite shining Matron of some big Female Establishment, mistress of some immense Dress-Shop.” But Martineau’s talent “was totally inadequate to grapple with deep spiritual and social questions.” He dismissed her views on slavery as “N—— fanaticisms.”45
“Dismal Science” was to be a lasting slur on economics, although later users of the phrase seldom realized that it had originated from a proslavery polemic. Today people usually identify promarket arguments with the right, and criticism of markets with the left. In 1850, it was the promarket left against the anti-market right.46
