Institutions and the Law of Slavery: The Dynamics of Unopposed Capitalism

Abstract

IT WAS inherent in the state of sensibility which Western civilization had attained by the nineteenth century, that slavery, perforce involving the most basic values of humanity, should at that time become morally absorbing to both Europeans and Americans. Englishmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards, and Portuguese each responded to the oppressive subject at various levels of intensity in thought and action; out of their complex experience each could focus upon slavery a variety of resources, that they might judge its evils, mitigate its abuses, and finally abolish it altogether.' There is a certain sense in which the same might be said of the Americans. Yet the simple and harsh moral purity of our own antislavery movement, from the 1830's on, gave it a quality which set it apart from the others. Every phase of that movement-the theory of society which was its backdrop, the intellectual expressions upon which it drew, the slogans which it sent to the marketplace, the schemes for practical action which it evolved-all combined to produce in our abolitionists that peculiar quality of abstraction which was, and has remained, uniquely American. For them, the question was all moral; it must be contemplated in terms untouched by expediency, untarnished by society's organic compromises, uncorrupted even by society