Webs of Humankind : A World History (9780393417784) by McNeill J. R

Author:McNeill, J. R.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W W Norton College

Abolition within the British Empire inspired abolitionists elsewhere. In the northern United States, abolition gathered momentum in the 1830s, at the same time that slavery was growing entrenched in the cotton South. An antislavery society formed in 1833. Abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison offered moral, religious, and economic arguments in countless lectures, pamphlets, and editorials, drawing freely on the works of British abolitionists. Former slaves such as Frederick Douglass did the same, with the added weight of firsthand knowledge of slavery’s grim realities as he had lived them in Maryland before his escape to freedom in 1838. The 1852 publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s melodramatic novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which sold more copies in the United States than any book other than the Bible, won sympathy for slaves—and support for abolition. The formation of the Republican Party in 1854 was motivated by opposition to the expansion of slavery into the western territories. Abolitionists and slave owners both realized that if freedom was the rule in the new states entering the union, then over time Congress would become more antislavery and abolition would prevail. The new party won the 1860 election, putting Abraham Lincoln in the White House without carrying any southern states. Abolitionism in the United States proved influential enough to threaten restrictions on slavery that seemed, to slaveholders and their supporters, dangerous to the institution and their prosperity.

In the end, it required an all-consuming war between North and South to end slavery in the United States. When 11 southern states seceded in the wake of Lincoln’s election, the president resolved to go to war to keep the union intact. In the Civil War (1861–1865), the North enjoyed a preponderance of resources and military manpower, and after four years of grinding combat, prevailed. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of slaves ran off either to the North or to the Union Army encampments, in effect liberating themselves. Lincoln in 1863 issued the Emancipation Proclamation, a military order that declared slaves in rebel-held territory free. Complete abolition came only with the war’s conclusion and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, both in 1865. Altogether, some 600,000 soldiers died in the Civil War, liberating 4 million people—the single largest slave emancipation in world history.

The end was now near for Atlantic slavery, which remained mainly in some Caribbean sugar islands and Brazil. The success of beet sugar—5 percent of the world’s sugar market in 1840 and 50 percent in 1880—weakened sugarcane planters everywhere by cutting their sales. Dutch Caribbean colonies—Surinam and Curaçao the largest—abolished slavery in 1863. An abolition society formed in 1858 in Puerto Rico, still a Spanish colony. An uprising there in 1868 included abolition among its goals. Shifts in Spanish politics led to the abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico in 1873, freeing 30,000 people over the next three years. Cuba, which had some 370,000 slaves (27 percent of the island’s population), did the same in 1886, ending the long history of slavery in the Spanish Empire.

Brazil was the second-largest slave society in the Americas after the United States.

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