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By Root 1701 0

in the New World. The 1790s witnessed the slave revolution on the rich French sugar island of Saint-Domingue, which destroyed slavery and established the nation of Haiti. Wars for independence in Spanish Latin America soon followed, producing new nations that embarked on the process of emancipation. In 1833, Parliament outlawed slavery throughout the British Empire. Although it persisted in Brazil, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, by the mid-nineteenth century slavery had become the South’s “peculiar institution”—that is, the institution that set the region apart from the rest of the nation and, increasingly, the rest of the world.

With a few exceptions, the end of slavery came through gradual emancipation accompanied by some kind of recognition of the owners’ legal right to property in slaves. In the United States, court decisions in Massachusetts and New Hampshire in the 1780s declared slavery incompatible with new state constitutions that affirmed mankind’s natural right to liberty. But the abolition laws of the other northern states freed no living slave. Rather, slave children born after a specified date would work for the mother’s owner as indentured servants until well into adulthood (age twenty-eight, for example, in Pennsylvania, far longer than what was customary for white indentured servants), and only then would become free. Most Latin American nations also allowed slaveholders to retain ownership of existing slaves, as well as the labor of their children for a number of years. These laws, in effect, required slaves to compensate their owners for their freedom by years of unpaid labor. As one official wrote, they “respected the past and corrected only the future.”

In some cases, owners received direct cash payments as well. In the British Empire, Parliament in 1833 mandated almost immediate emancipation, with a seven-year transitional period of “apprenticeship” that produced so much conflict between former masters and former slaves that complete freedom was decreed in 1838. The law appropriated twenty million pounds to compensate the owners. Even Haiti, where slavery died amid a violent revolution, agreed in 1824 to pay a large indemnity to former slaveowners in exchange for French recognition of its independence, a financial burden the new nation could ill afford. No one proposed to compensate slaves for their years of unrequited toil. The experience of emancipation in the North and other parts of the hemisphere strongly affected subsequent debates over slavery and influenced Lincoln’s own ideas about how to abolish the institution. Even after issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, he reiterated that he would be glad to see the southern states return to the Union and enact “the most approved plans of gradual emancipation.”31

The end of slavery in the North did not imply political or social equality for blacks. Race, long one of many forms of legal and social inequality among colonial Americans, now emerged as a justification for the existence of slavery in a land of liberty. How else could the condition of blacks be explained other than by innate inferiority? Northern blacks who became free endured severe discrimination. At first, the northern states allowed black men to vote if they could meet existing property qualifications. But beginning with Ohio in 1803, every state that entered the Union, with the single exception of Maine in 1821, restricted the suffrage to whites. Between 1818 and 1837, moreover, Connecticut, New York, and Pennsylvania limited black voting rights or eliminated them altogether. With the federal government under the control of southerners (of the sixteen presidential elections between 1788 and 1848, all but four placed a slaveholder in the White House), free blacks were denied basic rights. The Naturalization Act of 1790 barred black immigrants from ever becoming citizens; the Militia Act of 1792, which established ground rules for a central responsibility of citizenship, limited service to whites. In 1853, Frederick Douglass, who had escaped from slavery as a young man and gone on to become