FIRST HEAD: AFRICAN ENSLAVEMENT OF AFRICANS

Horowitz's main assertion is that “Black Africans … were responsible for enslaving the ancestors of African-Americans” (Horowitz Reference Horowitz2002, p. 12). He presents three supporting arguments for this thesis. Distilled to their essences, these arguments are: (1) “African slavery”Footnote ³ was a form of involuntary servitude despite claims to the contrary; (2) “African slavery” was at least as bad as “transatlantic slavery” in its scope, motivation, and treatment of slaves; and (3) European colonial powers fought valiantly to abolish “African slavery” while African slave owners fought vigorously to maintain the institution.

As a central argument in his attack against Black reparations, Horowitz elevates African slavery to the level of a “crime against humanity” (Horowitz Reference Horowitz2002, p. 39) that is equal to or more egregious than U.S. slavery. He must therefore prove that Africans were responsible for African slavery within their continent, and that Africans were equally responsible as Westerns for the transatlantic slave trade. The subtext of proving such is that Africans would be rendered as morally bankrupt as Westerners—even more so because they would be found to have had enslaved and sold “their own people.”Footnote ⁴ The political implication of finding Africans equally or more responsible for African slavery would be that living Black Americans would have no ethical justification for singling out the United States to redress their claims. To do so would amount to “reverse racism.” The legal implication of finding Africans equally or more responsible for African slavery would be that the U.S. government would have no legitimate reason to waive its sovereign immunity protection, and thereby expose itself to liability for its part in the slave trade, when African governments of the past committed the “identical” crime against the identical people without making reparations.Footnote ⁵

Horowitz's characterization of African slavery and its demise is, for the most part, factually and conceptually incorrect. This can be proved conclusively through the use of appropriate concepts backed by relevant historical data. First, it is necessary to delimit the spatial boundaries of his comparison of African slavery and U.S. slavery. Since Horowitz wishes to focus on the Black ancestors of living African Americans, this would primarily include persons from the nations today known as Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Chad, Côte d'Ivoire, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, São Tomé and Príncipe, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo—in other words, West Africa.Footnote ⁶ However, Horowitz draws upon examples of slavery that occurred as far away as East Africa (Horowitz Reference Horowitz2002, p. 133). He contrasts these examples with events in the colonial United States.

Second, patterns in human bondage in West Africa prior to substantial European contact should be identified and evaluated. This is a necessary step since Horowitz argues that “African Slavery … pre-existed the Atlantic slave trade by a thousand years” (Horowitz Reference Horowitz2002, p. 48). But note that he is making an assertion about the continent, which includes West Africa but goes far beyond this region. Hence, we are compelled to examine pre-European West “African slavery” and also the existence of slavery throughout the entire landmass to test his assertion. One must therefore go back to 500 AD, nearly one thousand years before Columbus's 1492 landing in the Americas, to prove or disprove Horowitz's spatial and temporal claims.

Sound conceptual tools are necessary before undertaking this journey in comparative history. Most forms of human bondage are identical according to Horowitz, and he heatedly rejects any attempt to establish a hierarchy of wrongdoing.Footnote ⁷ Horowitz accuses reparationists of “argu[ing] incoherently that African slavery was not really slavery; or, if it was slavery, it was not really bad” (Horowitz Reference Horowitz2002, p. 132). (He continues this thesis when he refuses to make sufficient distinctions between so-called “White slavery” and Black slavery in the United States, and between Black slaveholders and White slaveholders in the same country.) But is he correct?

Joseph E. Inikori (Reference Inikori, Okpewho, Davies and Mazrui2001), a scholar who has investigated different forms of human bondage throughout world history, provides important theoretical tools. After analyzing the literature on serfdom and slavery in Europe, Russia, and Africa, Inikori (Reference Inikori, Okpewho, Davies and Mazrui2001) concludes that what is often called slavery in Africa is much more akin to serfdom. He came to this conclusion by first developing a clear, historically informed conceptual distinction between these different types of servitude:

Inikori next mobilizes this clarified notion of slavery in an interregional analysis of African servitude. After surveying several polities existing in West, Central, and East Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he finds that both serfdom and slavery existed in Africa, often simultaneously. However, historical evidence conclusively demonstrates that serfdom was by far the predominant form of servitude in Africa. The reason for this is straightforward:

It is therefore debatable to say that “there were certainly more slaves in Africa in the nineteenth century than there were in the Americas at any time,” as stated by Paul Lovejoy, a scholar Horowitz cites (Paul Lovejoy cited in Inikori Reference Inikori, Okpewho, Davies and Mazrui2001, p. 49).Footnote ⁸ But it is an interesting coincidence that Inikori makes an exception for the East African plantation system because this is exactly a case Horowitz highlights to prove that “African slavery” was “exploitative” (Horowitz Reference Horowitz2002, p. 133). As he will do with U.S. slavery and Black slave ownership, Horowitz chooses an extreme instance to support an exaggerated claim. Therefore, Inikori's finding is not simply a political gloss coincidentally favoring reparationists.Footnote ⁹ Suspicion should fall on Horowitz (Chrisman and Allen, Reference Chrisman and Allen2001).

The question remains whether what has been misidentified as slavery for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has also been misidentified in the thousand-year period before significant European contact with West Africa and the rest of the continent. Therefore, I extend Inikori's analysis to at least the thousand-year period before 1500 AD to further test Horowitz's claims and those of reparationists.Footnote ¹⁰

Covering the four centuries prior to 1500 AD, the twelfth century to the sixteenth century, and examining several African regions, Djibril Tamsir Niane finds that in general the continent's “kings and emperors had ‘human estates,’ that is, lands [were] worked by subjugated communities; but closer examination shows that this was a system of serfdom rather than slavery” (Niane Reference Niane and Niane1984, p. 682; Adamu Reference Adamu and Niane1984, pp. 294–295). Numerically, “Slaves never exceeded peasants as a proportion of the population. Free men worked the soil on their own account, but free men and tributaries both owed service to the ruler or to the local lord” (Niane Reference Niane and Niane1984, p. 683). There were, of course, regional differences, but throughout the sub-Saharan region (and other regions, but to a different degree), serf labor was larger in number, productivity, and economic importance than slave labor.Footnote ¹¹ Inikori's distinction seems to hold somewhat even when extended 3500 years before 500 BC to the era of ancient Egypt, Nubia, sub-Saharan Africa,Footnote ¹² and the East African Coast (Yoyotte Reference Yoyotte and Mokhtar1981, p. 117; Hakem Reference Hakem and Mokhtar1981, pp. 298–325; Sheriff Reference Sheriff and Mokhtar1981, pp. 551–567).

While some merchants and states engaged in slave trading to amass wealth, and were very adept in doing so, slave trading was never a dominant mode of wealth accumulation nor a means of production for the preponderance of tributary states and kinship societies in Africa prior to European control (Walker Reference Walker1998, pp. 14–17). For African slavery to take on the chattel characteristics it did in the transatlantic trade, it would have required the substantial substitution of serfdom with capitalist relations—entailing, at bare minimum, private-property ownership and its attendant cultural logic of “possessive individualism.”Footnote ¹³ Neither occurred greatly in Africa's pre-European era.Footnote ¹⁴

Economically speaking, after reviewing “the present state of research” (up to 1984) on events and patterns occurring within Africa or involving Africans from the twelfth century to the sixteenth century, Niane concludes that “nowhere did private ownership of property become general; the principle right of ownership belonged to the community,” and although “a certain accumulation of capital began with the merchant class … this did not result in a true bourgeoisie” (Niane Reference Niane and Niane1984, p. 683).Footnote ¹⁵

Traveling further back in time is just as revealing. Abdoulaye Bathily and Claude Meillassoux's appraisal of intra-African trade from the seventh century to the eleventh century describes the nature of African commerce as also overwhelmingly noncapitalist:

Culturally and politically speaking, possessive individualism was nowhere dominant on the continent. Prior to the Europeans, there were three ways an African could be unfortunate enough to become a slave: pawnship, court order, or capture in war. Anthropologist Eric R. Wolf describes each:

This emphasis on lineage connections was not limited to the kin-oriented mode of production,Footnote ¹⁶ but this mode of production was the one most vested in these kinds of connections. Note that while enslavement could occur because of economic motives (such as debt), these motives were not the “profit motive,” a far harder, and some say impossible, imperative to satisfy.Footnote ¹⁷ Moreover, those rendered slaves through these mechanisms were not simultaneously given a subhuman status (unlike U.S. slavery). As Wolf notes:

There are also noteworthy examples of slaves secured for a tributary mode of production by elites, but again this activity was not usually motivated by profit, but rather was a practice designed to concentrate social labor through political might and custom.Footnote ¹⁸ The significance of this clarification is not that “use value”Footnote ¹⁹ slave trading was intrinsically a benign transaction. In almost all instances, a slave was a human being of sorely degraded status.Footnote ²⁰

When the predominant African modes of production began to interface with European and U.S. labor demands, trade between economic systems was initially based primarily on voluntary exchanges that mutually benefited each “world's” merchants.Footnote ²¹ Some African merchants sold slaves for exchange value.Footnote ²² As uncomfortable as this fact may be for some reparationists, it should be acknowledged. Yet this fact should be contextualized and given proper perspective. Were African slave merchants who traded for exchange values the norm in Africa or a lucrative aberration? Was this kind of African slave trader similar to his European counterpart?

Often at the nexus between economic systems, merchants may seem mostly identical in their function. However, as Wolf (Reference Wolf1982) cautions, while some merchants functioned as points of articulation between systems, this does not mean they embodied the predominant economic characteristics of their respective societies. Early modern merchants, for the most part, were only powerful or privileged enough to “skim” a fraction of the surpluses generated by noncapitalist modes of production, and subsequently to commodifyFootnote ²³ these surpluses and to reap profits.Footnote ²⁴ Most could not take this wealth and turn it into capital Footnote ²⁵ ownership of the means of production. Slave labor, the little there was in pre-European Africa, was mostly locked into other modes (Manning Reference Manning, Appiah and Gates1999, p. 1720). Private property on a systemic level was uncommon. Without widespread private property, the “profit for profit's sake” economic logic of capitalism could not take hold or be fully taken advantage of by merchant slavers at this stage. And without this occurring, most of these African merchants could not rightly call themselves true capitalists. Wolf makes an emphatic distinction between mercantile enterprise and capitalist enterprise:

Hence the presence of specialized “interstitial” figures such as slave traders does not indicate that the tributary- and kin-oriented modes of securing and allocating slave laborFootnote ²⁶ in Africa were not still the dominant economic institutions for doing so. For example, the Hausa of Nigeria did “commodify” some of their slaves, but seemingly a larger portion was procured not through purchase or sale but as “tribute from neighboring countries.”Footnote ²⁷ In general, there is little evidence that the minority of slaves, purchased or sold for exchange value within Africa for African usage, were forced to labor in “nontraditional” ways or generally experienced less-than-customary treatment.

Emphasizing modes of production contextualizes commercial acts and also highlights differences between nominally identical economic activities. Slave trading, if not slavery per se, has been a commercial enterprise for millennia within and between societies. However, more specific points should be raised: What was the general nature of this commerce in Africa before European encroachment? What was the commercial nature of the Atlantic slave trade? How did the articulation of Atlantic “commercial” slavery affect African “commercial” slavery?

Only theoretical precision can save reparationists at this point. What they should emphasize, in apparent contradiction to their earlier negative evaluation of all commercial slavery, is that the existence of a market where and when values are traded does not prove that these transactions were predicated on exchange value, per se. They should seek to establish, if correct, that the intra-Africa slave trade was mainly a trade of use values before European control transformed many, though not all, of its slave transactions to ones based on exchange value (Adamu Reference Adamu and Niane1984, p. 156). Only when African “pre-existing institutions were placed in the service of European mercantile expansion” did the African slave trade take on genocidal chattel form (Wolf Reference Wolf1982, p. 208). The domination of the kin- and tribute-oriented African slave trade by the capitalist transatlantic slave trade, a process of economic incorporation Footnote ²⁸ into the Western world economy through military coercionFootnote ²⁹ and exchange-value commerce, would eventually reduce those who were once considered lowly, but wholly human, into chattel. Contra Horowitz, and to the vindication of reparationists, the historical evidence supports the latter's contention that African slavery was far less commercial (capitalist) than the transatlantic slave trade dominated by Europeans and White Americans.

SECOND HEAD: ISLAMIC ENSLAVEMENT OF BLACK AFRICANS

Horowitz's assertion on this topic—“Arabs were responsible for enslaving the ancestors of African-Americans”—is supported by this argument:

Horowitz is right when he says the enslavement of Black Africans by Arabs is usually unknown or ignored. However, he is wrong on almost every other account.

Horowitz really argues that the Muslim slave trade was larger than the North American slave trade by the order of approximately ten to one, at most (Horowitz Reference Horowitz2002, p. 111). The actual number of slaves transported in this trade is closer to 6 million.Footnote ³⁰ Regardless of the actual number, Horowitz is being conceptually slippery here. Leaving aside his basic error of making Arabs isomorphic with practitioners of Islam, he does not compare equivalent trades. When he argues against Islamic slavery, he includes the entire expanse of that trade (Saharan, Indian Ocean, and Red Sea trade). He then compares this trade in toto to only a portion of the entire transatlantic slave trade to the Americas, that is, the Atlantic slave trade to North America (more specifically, the area that would come to be known in the late eighteenth century as the United States). When compared to the estimated total number of African slaves reaching all American shores, Islamic continental and water trades were far less numerous than the transatlantic slave trade—only half the amount. According to a comprehensive scholarly study of the latter phenomenon, conducted by Harvard University's W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, almost 12 million enslaved Africans were forced onto European ships heading for the Americas, while “many more Africans were captured or purchased in the interior of the continent, [and] … a large number died before reaching the [African] coast” (Behrendt Reference Behrendt, Appiah and Gates1999, p. 1865). This means that at least twice the number of Africans, in about one-third the time span, were enslaved in the North American trade versus the number of Africans enslaved in the Islamic trade.

In addition to the smaller total number enslaved nearly one thousand years before the transatlantic slave trade, it should be pointed out that in Islamic slavery the treatment of captive Black Africans was not as severe generally as their treatment in the Americas. Ronald Segal, a historian who has conducted comparative research on both Islamic and Atlantic slave trades, offers this balanced juxtaposition of slavery in the two different civilizations:

Islamic slavery varied significantly depending upon the circumstances (Hill Reference Hill and Willis1985, pp. 34–36). The Hausa “farm-slavery system” of the Kano Emirate, a polity that predated European control, is a good example of what “typical” Islamic slavery was like (Hill Reference Hill and Willis1985, p. 35). There were similarities between Christian U.S. slavery and Islamic types of slavery. Kano slavery was geared toward household consumption of crops and the generation of surpluses (Hill Reference Hill and Willis1985, p. 36). A slave was “considered chattel because he had a market value, which no one save his owner could realize by selling him” (Hill Reference Hill and Willis1985, p. 37). Moreover, owners owned the offspring of their female slaves (Hill Reference Hill and Willis1985, p. 38). Yet there were many important differences between the two systems. First:

Applying Inikori's conceptual and practical distinction between slaves and serfs means that many so-called slaves under Islam actually functioned more as serfs. Second, while a slave owner had the absolute right to sell any or all of his slaves,

The separation of family members was far more common under U.S. slavery, even based on conservative calculations (Fogel and Engerman, Reference Fogel and Engerman1974, pp. 44–52). Third, slaves under Islamic slavery were allowed to purchase their freedom or could have their freedom purchased for them. However, whereas Kano Emirate slave “masters were obliged to allow their slaves time off in which to accumulate sufficient funds by pursuing some remunerative occupation,” in the United States slave masters provided little to no opportunity for slaves to earn enough money to purchase their freedom (Hill Reference Hill and Willis1985, p. 38). Against the Islamic example stands the practice of charging “self-ransoming” slaves twice their market value for their freedom, whereas self-manumitting slaves in the United States were usually charged their market value (Hill Reference Hill and Willis1985, p. 38). However, U.S. slaveholders often attached pecuniary and humiliating requirements on to-be-freed slaves, while this was not as frequent a practice under Islamic slavery (Berlin Reference Berlin1998). Moreover, “A freed slave was free without qualification” under Islamic slavery since “there was, in fact, no legal status intermediate between slavery and freedom” (Hill Reference Hill and Willis1985, p. 38). This was certainly not the case in U.S. slavery, as I will demonstrate later in my analysis of free Blacks.

Another major difference between the Islamic and transatlantic trades is that the former was overwhelmingly female, whereas the latter was mostly male. African women were used as concubines and domestic servants in Islamic slavery. Turning to another major Islamic slave trade destination, Southwest Asia, Ari Nave concludes:

By stating that Islamic slavery was less severe than U.S. slavery, I do not mean to diminish in any way the crime of sexual exploitation experienced by women or men in the Islamic system(s). But in comparison, this most despicable offense, suffered by slaves in both systems, compounds the larger list of abuses Black slaves faced in the Americas. The secret and public rape of Black women, the more familiar image of Black men noosed, hung, and castrated—there is little proof that these brands of human degradation were practiced as widely under Islamic slave systems as they were under U.S. slavery. Nor is there sufficient evidence that slaves freed under Islamic systems subsequently faced the rampant sexual predations and overall brutality suffered by emancipated North American Blacks.

THIRD HEAD: WHITE ABOLITIONISM OVER BLACK ABOLITIONISM

Horowitz's broadest attack against Black abolitionism begins, strangely, in ancient times:

Horowitz's assertion can be dismantled on the level of historical evidence and on the level of theory. Horowitz's historical knowledge is flawed. Historian Theodore L. Sylvester traces the first signs of abolitionism to two ancient sects of Jews called the Essenes and the Therapeutae (Sylvester Reference Sylvester and Benson2000). These groups lived in first-century Palestine and Egypt, respectively. They were pacifists and abhorred slavery. The Essenes, for example, “actively worked to end slavery by purchasing slaves from their masters and setting them free” (Sylvester Reference Sylvester and Benson2000, p. 33). Second, his minimalization of Spartacus's revolt is not justified. Spartacus did not only free himself and a band of seventy gladiators from their owners when they escaped their slave pens in 73 BC. In addition to freeing themselves, Spartacus's soldiers

The activities of all these groups indicate that efforts against the institution of slavery were under way thousands of years before British or U.S. initiatives began in the late eighteenth century.

Horowitz's conceptual understanding of political movements is generally problematic; its formulation is too narrow. According to him, Black slave revolts were a legitimate form of liberation but ultimately only localized, self-serving efforts. Horowitz does not believe that these events and less dramatic forms of resistance constitute anti-institutional politics. There is no mention in his work of the evolution of a collective antislavery consciousness or of the politics among Blacks independent of, or prior to, White abolitionism.

Robert Chrisman and Ernest Allen, Jr., take Horowitz to task for his omission of Black agency (Chrisman and Allen, Reference Chrisman and Allen2001). Horowitz has responded to this criticism by saying:

More to the point, he argues that all examples Chrisman and Allen give of Black militancy “postdated the creation of the anti-slavery movement by Christians in 1787” (Horowitz Reference Horowitz2002, p. 58n81). The year 1787 is important because it marks the founding of the London Abolition Committee by four White English Quaker merchants, George Harrison, Samuel Hoare, James Phillips, and Joseph Woods.Footnote ³² In short, according to Horowitz, Black revolts and regular resistance do not a “revolution” make. Yet when conceptualized correctly these unpredictable activities are what some social movement theorists would describe as part of a larger “cycle of protest” (Snow and Benford, Reference Snow, Benford, Morris and Mueller1992) against the institution of slavery.

Horowitz understands political movements as efforts involving formal resource mobilization practiced by social movement organizations, to use the parlance of movement theoreticians.Footnote ³³ While these efforts are undoubtedly crucial to most movements, it is incorrect to conflate them with all movement activity as Horowitz does. Doing so prevents Horowitz from accurately interpreting, for example, the attacks and “predations” by Blacks who escaped their personal bondage and formed “bands of runaways sometimes … so emboldened that they sent entire [White] communities into panic” (Franklin and Schweninger, Reference Franklin and Schweninger1999, pp. 86–89). Nor can he explain why slave owners in general feared the instability that rebellious slaves brought to the whole system of slavery through nearly “250 serious revolts (conspiracies and uprisings)” from early colonial times up to the Civil War (Sylvester Reference Sylvester and Benson2000, p. 184).Footnote ³⁴ Slave rebellions did indeed occur in specific places at particular times—in precise “localities.” Perhaps slavers feared no rebellion more than the one at their doorstep. However, as Sylvester notes, the political ramifications of these collective actions were felt

Obviously, Horowitz's implicit “organizational standard” for abolitionism is an inappropriate measure for “informal”Footnote ³⁵ Black abolitionist activities during a time when most Blacks were enslaved or at best “quasi-free” (Berlin Reference Berlin1974). Securing enough freedom and resources to organize and sustain lasting organizations was very difficult during slavery. White violence and other forms of repression hampered Black abolitionist agendas. Black organizations, far more than White organizations, had to perform several social, economic, and political functions for their communities. This meant Black organizations, under racism and heavy demands, required more time to extend themselves markedly in some endeavors. Perforce, many of their antislavery activities came to acquire a more piecemeal appearance, especially in the early days of the colonies. If White abolitionists were able to forge standing organizations before Blacks, then it would be understandable since White abolitionists were not encumbered by as severe restrictions on their personal freedom and political rights as were imposed on Blacks.Footnote ³⁶ To put a fine point on it, it was far easier and less dangerous for a handful of White Quakers in England to take a strong public stand against slavery than two equally religious, abolitionist Black men, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, who did so in the United States. Yet Allen and Jones were still able to found their Free African Society in the same year as the London Abolition Committee! Beginning, most likely, as “the first black benevolent society in the United States … within several years members had turned their attention to antislavery work, including the prevention of kidnapping [free blacks into slavery]” (Wilson Reference Wilson, McKivigan and Harrold1999, p. 111).

Blacks often had to adopt more covert means to undermine the institution of slavery. Some were cultural, as in the case of “slave religion” and its reinterpretation of Christian doctrine as narratives of divine deliverance from and retribution for the temporal horrors of slavery. Slave culture(s) also gave birth to folktales that condoned patience, guile, and even humor as coded counternarratives to the logic of slavery.Footnote ³⁷ Their ubiquity and usage by slaves can be posited, in part, as proof of a widespread counterconsciousness against the slave system which, if not revolutionary, was certainly collective and critical. When they presented their case before colonial authorities, Blacks often had to condemn their enslavement through comparisons that played on the sympathy—and hypocrisy—of the White colonial public's anger toward British tyranny.Footnote ³⁸ For example, in line with this necessarily muted rhetoric, but ignored inexcusably by Horowitz, were “petitions of independence” authored by Blacks during the Revolutionary era, predating the Declaration of Independence by at least three years (Wood Reference Wood, Kelley and Lewis2000, pp. 99–100).

Horowitz's excuse for omitting pre-1787 Black efforts to consistently undermine slavery is unacceptable and galling in light of the vacillations and contradictions displayed by most White abolitionists and American Enlightenment figures. In the first case, history shows that Blacks sought various means to achieve their own freedom once the Revolutionary War began. Five thousand Blacks joined the colonial army, hoping that the ideals of the Revolution would be applied to them if the insurgents won (Littlefield Reference Littlefield, Kelley and Lewis2000, p. 116). Black loyalty to the principle of freedom usually transcended any loyalty to colonial nationalism. Black slaves fled even “kind masters,” such as Thomas Jefferson; they sought not only to escape their particular circumstances but also to rid themselves of the logic and dictates of the “peculiar institution” (Stampp Reference Stampp1956). Since they were not powerful enough to destroy the institution of slavery but could damage its economic base and social stability, many Blacks took flight, with some joining the British army in the wake of Lord Dunmore's 1775 proclamation “offering freedom to slaves … of rebellious [colonial] subjects … able to join and fight” (Littlefield Reference Littlefield, Kelley and Lewis2000, p. 115). Still others fled to “parts unknown,” with “Jefferson estimat[ing] that about 25,000 Virginia slaves left their owners during the war … [even though] many had to endure considerable danger and hardship to do so” (Littlefield Reference Littlefield, Kelley and Lewis2000, p. 117). In other words, attempts to extricate themselves from their particular conditions of enslavement constituted attacks upon the institution itself. Runaway slaves alone cost U.S. slavery a great deal in terms of lost capital, reduced production, and rising “enforcement costs” associated with the greater demand for slave patrols when this kind of “property stole itself” (Hummell Reference Hummell1996).Footnote ³⁹ All these attempts at self-liberation occurred years before Horowitz's start date for White abolitionism.

FOURTH HEAD: WHITE SLAVERY

Horowitz asserts, “There were white slaves in colonial America” (Horowitz Reference Horowitz2002, p. 12). In raising the question “Are their descendents going to receive payments?” his pretext is explicit (Horowitz Reference Horowitz2002, p. 12). While this may seem to be a question concerned with policy, the underlying purpose for both the assertion and the question is to undermine the moral authority of reparationists if their claims are to apply only to the Black population. By presenting the little-known practice of White slavery as an offense that is equally immoral as, if not numerically equal to, Black slavery, Horowitz hopes to prove not only that “there is no single group responsible for the crime of slavery” but also that no one racial group was its victim (Horowitz Reference Horowitz2002, p. 12). Since Whites are not seeking restitution for this “identical” offense, Blacks should not either. Horowitz scores rhetorically because he has successfully paralleled White slavery with Black slavery in the public's mind. To support reparations for one type of slavery logically presupposes support for the other. Conversely, if one is found to be ridiculous, so is the other, to some extent.

Conceptual clarity and appropriateness will go a long way to refute Horowitz's assertion about the existence of “White slavery.”Footnote ⁴² Is he correct? Were there White slaves in the colonial United States? In the most minuscule way, the answer is yes. According to labor historian Jacqueline Jones, there was only one category of White persons enslaved in the colonial United States: White women who gave birth to babies sired by enslaved Black men (Jones Reference Jones1998, pp. 49, 53). A 1664 Virginia decree was created by colonial officials to punish White women for transgressing racial-sexual boundaries. White men, the vast majority of men fathering mulatto children during slavery, never faced such severe punishment. Yet this statute, lasting seventeen years, was “a development that made colonial officials decidedly uncomfortable,” and was rescinded in 1681 (Jones Reference Jones1998, p. 49).

One cannot help but notice that in the only properly documented case of White slavery in the colonial United States, White enslavement was a horrendous by-product of Black slavery! These women were enslaved for no other reason than ethnocultural racism, not for economic reasons, the main reason Africans and colonial Blacks suffered slavery. Are the ancestors of this tiny, fleeting number of legally enslaved Whites the population Horowitz thinks could lay claim to reparations on the same grounds as Blacks? Perhaps, but he gives no indication of being aware of this minor historical aberration. In fact, he presents no evidence whatsoever in his book in support of his assertion on White slavery. This explosive claim, one sentence in a 147-page polemic dedicated to “the controversy over reparations for slavery,” is pure rhetoric, unsubstantiated by evidence.

But Horowitz probably does not have these unfortunate women (or their unfortunate Black mates and children) in mind when he draws his comparison. Conservative critics of slavery often point to the large number of White indentured servants working in the colonies as proof of the “multiracial” nature of slavery. It is true that most labor in the colonial era was “unfree” and subject to “hard usage.”Footnote ⁴³ But does this mean that Whites of this category were slaves? To answer in the affirmative is to conflate fundamentally divergent modes of racial existence, an error untangled by concepts powered with relevant historical data.

Historian Michael L. Bush provides such concepts in an analysis of “bonded white servitude” in the Americas (Bush Reference Bush2000). He identifies six types of servitude that “unfree” Whites experienced. The best known is indentured servitude. Under this type of bondage, many Europeans who came to the American colonies “before leaving the home country, had signed a legal document specifying the conditions and duration of service. Following their arrival and sale, a note was made to that effect on the back of the indenture” (Bush Reference Bush2000, p. 57).

A second form of bondage was servants by statute. Under this type of bondage Whites “were simply bound by ‘custom of the country’ and the colonial laws appertaining. No legal document was signed” (Bush Reference Bush2000, pp. 57–58). Both forms took root in the seventeenth century. Redemptioning, another form of bondage originating in the eighteenth century, was also an option for Whites. According to Bush:

In the above cases, Whites voluntarily agreed to become servants or to expose themselves to this liability. Bush states there were also three forms of involuntary bondage experienced by some Whites, including those kidnapped from Europe into U.S. servitude, convicts sent to the United States to serve their sentences, and those who broke colonial law by not paying debts or by committing “larceny, arson and forgery and then, if unable to pay the fine, [were] subjected to bonded labour” (Bush Reference Bush2000, p. 58). Both exported and local convicts “were assigned for a given term to whomsoever was prepared to buy them” (Bush Reference Bush2000, p. 58). In both involuntary and voluntary bondage Whites could be sold, would receive no wages for labor, and could not choose their master (Bush Reference Bush2000). Some engaged in fieldwork (Bush Reference Bush2000, p. 61).

There were some commonalities in the legal treatment of White servants and Black slaves (Bush Reference Bush2000, p. 63). However, the overall societal treatment of White servants and Black slaves diverged far more than it dovetailed. Most “unfree” White colonials consented to their own bondage or were convicted of a crime—most often of a capital crime such as rebellion (Bush Reference Bush2000, pp. 66–67). Their bondage was temporary, while Black bondage quickly became lifelong by customFootnote ⁴⁴ and by lawFootnote ⁴⁵ during the middle years of the seventeenth century. White bondspersons could legally own propertyFootnote ⁴⁶ and testify and sue in court, received customary and legal protections against abuse by their masters, and could possess weapons including firearms. Blacks were generally denied these rights and privileges. While they received no wages during their term of bondage, White servants were given several incentives for their continued “good” work (Bush Reference Bush2000, p. 61).Footnote ⁴⁷

Of particular relevance to the reparations debate is the fact that bonded Whites, including indentured servants, were given a “freedom due” at the end of their servitude. This due usually came in the form of a land grant of thirty to fifty acres (Bush Reference Bush2000, p. 64). This due cannot be considered “reparations” for an economic wrong because it was the servant who owed money to the master, not the other way around. Nor can it be considered compensation for the “surplus value” generated above and beyond expenses that the master incurred covering the servant's oceanic voyage or his upkeep while bonded. A servant voluntarily forfeited any right to this future wealth once he signed the contract. The glaring contrast is that while for nearly two centuries White servants were given the material wherewithal to become economically self-sufficient after seven years of voluntary service, Blacks would not even receive forty acres per family for 246 years of coerced labor. Blacks received no “freedom dues” after emancipation, much less true compensation for their unpaid “super-exploited” labor, personal “pain and suffering,” and collective cultural assault.

FIFTH HEAD: NON-SLAVE-OWNING WHITES

This brings us to the related question of whether non-slave-owning Whites benefited from Black slavery. This is a major sticking point for Horowitz, for he argues that since only 20% of southern Whites owned slaves (Horowitz Reference Horowitz2002, p. 12), descendents of those who did not—most of the White United States—are in no way obligated to pay.

The major reparationist organizations in existence today do not direct their claims against the descendents of White slave owners or Whites in general. These reparationists usually hold the U.S. governmentFootnote ⁴⁸ and certain private corporations accountable (Robinson and TransAfrica Forum, Reference Robinson, Martin and Yaquinto2007; N'COBRA 2002). However, it should be made clear that this decision is strategic and visionary; its goal is to obtain compensation for Blacks in a way that balances this primary concern with an equally genuine concern: to improve race relations in the country (Robinson and TransAfrica Forum, Reference Robinson, Martin and Yaquinto2007). It is therefore best for the United States that reparationists do not seek to recover damages from individual members of the dominant racial group.

Yet one should not infer from this decision that a valid case against non-slave-owning Whites could not be made. Several scholars have provided ample historical evidence of the racial benefits of slavery (and segregation) to working-class Whites.Footnote ⁴⁹ These benefits were economic, cultural, and political. Surprisingly, even bonded servants benefited, as Bush reveals:

Even in the fieldwork they did share, further racial distinctions evolved. Labor tasks were bifurcated whenever practical. For example:

The evolution of White prerogatives to secure better jobs, rights, and customary privileges of the society did not stop where the fields ended. Distinctions in this area and other areas of work became more apparent by the late eighteenth century (Jones Reference Jones1998).Footnote ⁵⁰ The most difficult or unpleasant tasks were reserved for Blacks.

Non-slaveholding Whites reaped benefits from Black enslavement in other ways. Economically, Whites, including White women, were generally given preference for better jobs or in getting hired for any job over Blacks. White women, and White men to a greater degree, were able to take this “extra racial income” home to benefit not only themselves but also their entire families.Footnote ⁵¹ Economic advantages in terms of income and assets (recall the fifty-acre freedom dues many White ex-servants received) often translated into the possibility of purchasing slaves to augment other wealth holdings. Indeed, 135 years earlier, Virginia instituted a blatant policy of wealth transference from slaves to poor Whites.Footnote ⁵² Approximately seventy years later, the same colony enticed soldiers to fight the war for U.S. Independence with the promise of receiving a “prime” slave and 300 acres of land per soldier (Takaki Reference Takaki1993, p. 68). It is likely to assume it was the superior class advantages White non–slave owners enjoyed that explain why by 1860 88% of all persons owning slaves in the United States were small-property owners (Rubio Reference Rubio2001, p. 20). The important point is that many “non-slave owners wanted to become slave owners—and supported that mentality throughout the early nation's culture” (Jones Reference Jones1998, p. 205).

Many poor Whites further benefited psychologically from the economic opportunities and cultural conventions that permitted even the most bedraggled, bonded “buckra” to think he was better than the “niggra” next to him in the field. Both knew the White would eventually be freed, own the sweat of his labor, and likely end up tilling his own field. All this was not for the Black slave. Knowledge of this upward class trajectory for Whites could not help but to add to the slave's misery while making the servant's load lighter. As Jones (Reference Jones1998) pointed out, the social meaning of labor, a changing phenomenon shaped by several societal forces, is not the product of individual imagination. Unlike that of a White servant, the Black slave's dreams of freedom and farmland could only turn him every which way but loose.Footnote ⁵³

Sociocultural privileges were also accorded to non-slave-owning Whites. A prime example of this is how nonpropertied Whites were given leave to lord over slaves they did not own, as well as reign over free Blacks. In the wake of Bacon's Rebellion in 1676—a failed revolt of Black slaves and White indentured servants who had been denied freedom dues—colonial powers punished Whites and Blacks but Blacks worse (Takaki Reference Takaki1993, p. 67). Slaveless Whites were given the right to whip any Black resisting the will of any “Christian” (Takaki Reference Takaki1993, p. 67). Mandatory deference to Whites from slaves and free Blacks predates the rebellion and would continue for centuries, even after emancipation.

Politically, the United States witnessed the further consolidation of White advantage for non-slaveholding, nonpropertied Whites in the early nineteenth century. The presidency of Andrew Jackson, from 1829 to 1837, politically benefited non-slave-owning working-class Whites at the expense of Blacks. Jacksonian “democracy” expanded the right to vote to include nonpropertied White men, while Blacks were disenfranchised all over the South and North, regardless of their possession of property (Rubio Reference Rubio2001, pp. 21–26).

Black reparationists are making a claim for compensation based on the social fact that Black slavery was a massive, long-lasting, multi-institutional, brutal, exploitative, racially specific set of practices and ideologies whose economic and cultural legacy adversely impacts Black progress today. White slavery was short-lived, minuscule, and not racially motivated. There is no way White slavery was substantial enough to impede the progress of the White people, either in the colonial era or up to the present day. White slavery did not exploit enough individual Whites to economically debilitate their overall population. White slavery did not lead to the establishment of a large White underclass during its seventeen years of “practice,” nor did it contribute to White poverty centuries later.

On the other hand, there is overwhelming evidence of how Whites benefited from the enslavement of Blacks even when they did not directly own slaves. The racial strictures of slavery augmented the economic, cultural, political, and psychological standing of most Whites to some degree, usually to a great degree.

SIXTH HEAD: FREE BLACKS

Horowitz asserts, “During the slavery era, many blacks were free men … yet the reparations claimants make no attempt to take this fact into account” (Horowitz Reference Horowitz2002, p. 13). In another section, he propounds:

Horowitz makes it seem that during slavery free Blacks had nearly equal rights, treatment, and social standing as Whites. As “proof,” he points to the ownership of slaves by some free Blacks, an association thoroughly dismantled and debunked in the seventh section of this essay.

A few sharp blows destroy this particular hydra head. Theodore L. Sylvester (Reference Sylvester and Benson2000) provides some weapons. Life in the main was deplorable for free Blacks. Reminiscent of Ronald Takaki's point above—that since 1676 (at least) Whites were free to physically punish any Blacks who they felt were “belligerent”—Sylvester states, “If found guilty of certain crimes, free blacks were subject to public whippings and the possibility of enslavement, fates that no whites were forced to endure” (Sylvester Reference Sylvester and Benson2000, p. 157). In the matter of political rights, he adds, “In the North, only five states, four of them in New England, permitted free blacks to vote. Free blacks could not vote anywhere in the South” (Sylvester Reference Sylvester and Benson2000, p. 157). Some free Blacks were forced to leave the states where they were emancipated, as was the case in Virginia.Footnote ⁵⁴ Most were not free to travel wherever they wished, even in the North (Sylvester Reference Sylvester and Benson2000, p. 160). “By 1835, most free blacks in the South had lost the right of free assembly,” writes Sylvester (Reference Sylvester and Benson2000, p. 160). Economically, they were legally and violently relegated to the worst jobs, pushed out of skilled trades by White workers, and barred from labor unions. Consequently, free Blacks often suffered poverty so severe that a tiny minority even chose to re-enslave themselves in order to acquire the basic prerequisites of life. More generally, free Blacks were re-enslaved by kidnappers preying mainly on those living in Delaware, Maryland, and Pennsylvania—states close to the Mason-Dixon line and possessing “a greater free black population than the rest of the country combined from 1790 to 1860” (C. Wilson Reference Wilson1994, pp. 10–11).

Horowitz's rhetorical differentiation of antebellum free Blacks from enslaved Blacks is more a conceptual feat than an actual fact. One must ask, how free could any Black person have truly been when the majority of their friends, family, and race were enslaved in the United States before 1865?Footnote ⁵⁵ Slaveholders knew that social bonds between differently positioned Blacks did not end at the outer edge of their plantations, and they used these connections to their advantage whenever they could (Berlin Reference Berlin1998, p. 233). The connection between free Blacks and those still enslaved was not incidental; it was sociological, economic, political, personal, and ethical, as historian James Oliver Horton elaborates in Free People of Color: Inside the African American Community (Reference Horton1993). Horowitz ignores these dimensions, preferring to focus his attention on the fractional number of free Blacks who were slaveholders,Footnote ⁵⁶ as if this minute statistic was a fair indication of relationships between free Blacks and enslaved Blacks in general. Under these adverse circumstances, free Blacks were not truly free but rather were what historian Ira Berlin more aptly described as “slaves without masters” (Berlin Reference Berlin1974).

Besides having grounds for compensation for racial discrimination and racial terrorism, descendents of antebellum free Blacks could also demand compensation for the loss of income they incurred every time they purchased the freedom of enslaved Blacks for familial or humanitarian reasons. These expenditures were substantial and further depleted resource-bare free communities of savings and wealth.Footnote ⁵⁷ Moreover, any Black slave who had to purchase his or her own freedom could also be eligible for compensation.Footnote ⁵⁸

SEVENTH HEAD: BLACK SLAVE OWNERS

Horowitz makes two surprising points on Black slave ownership in the United States: (1) that Black slave owners existed at all, a fact known by few; and (2) that “there were 3,000 black slaveowners in the antebellum United States” (Horowitz Reference Horowitz2002, p. 12). Horowitz accuses reparationists of “reverse racism” because they “make no attempt to take this fact into account” when making their claims against Whites (Horowitz Reference Horowitz2002, p. 13). His reason for raising these points about Black slave ownership is explicit and subtextual. His explicit reason is one of policy: “Are reparations to be paid by their descendants too?” (Horowitz Reference Horowitz2002, p. 12). Yet it is the subtext of his argument which is most damaging. The subtext of the argument is that if Blacks had been given equal opportunity to enslave, they would have done so and would have treated slaves as deplorably as Whites. Driven by avarice equal to Whites, Blacks in similar circumstances would have enslaved their own people (as they allegedly did in Africa, according to Horowitz) and treated Black slaves as poorly as White masters did. The philosophical implication of this subtext is that the pernicious parts of human nature are indeed cross-cultural, and in the context of Black enslavement, generic “greed” and “power lust” were more slavery's root causes than was the deplorable combination of Eurocentric racism and a system of capitalist production.Footnote ⁵⁹

Horowitz ignores the basic fact that neither Whites nor Blacks could have carried out widespread enslavement unless a slave system existed. The slave system in the United States was an interlocking and evolving set of economic, cultural, political, and legal initiatives that set the general societal conditions permitting and supporting the involuntary possession of one human being by another. Establishing a slave system in the United States meant that the ownership of slaves was no longer left entirely up to personal feelings, codes of ethics,Footnote ⁶⁰ or class position, but more fundamentally, the very possibility of owning others and their then offspring in perpetuity was then legitimated, facilitated, and indeed coerced by societal institutions. In other words, Black slavery in the United States had become a fully crystallized social fact by at least the mid-1660s, not merely a result of individual lapses before the “seven deadly sins” (Handlin Reference Handlin1957, pp. 3–22; Jordan Reference Jordan, Weinstein and Gatell1968, pp. 13–24).Footnote ⁶¹

U.S. slavery, best understood as a social fact, is therefore analyzed most appropriately with sociological, economic, anthropological, political, and/or historical concepts and methods, not with psychological profiles or “character studies” in morality. In order to produce a sound social scientific study of slavery and its insignificance to the socioeconomic situation of twenty-first-century Blacks, Horowitz would have had to follow the basic methodological directives of one of sociology's founding fathers, Émile Durkheim, at the very least. Doing so would have helped Horowitz avoid reducing society-level matters to instinctual or learned behavior, and instead would have led him to examine the “energies capable of producing [slavery]” (Durkheim Reference Durkheim, Solovay, Mueller and Catlin1938, p. 144), that is, the social facts surrounding slavery.Footnote ⁶²

Following this Durkheimian approach, the basic question relevant for this section becomes how it was that Black slave ownership in the thousands was even possible during a time of widespread Black enslavement and anti-Black racism. Obviously, the institution of U.S. racial slavery existed as an overarching social fact that in one of its many paradoxes facilitated the existence of another much smaller, but apparently complementary, social fact: Black slave ownership.

But beyond this proper recontextualization, Horowitz would still need to communicate to readers the relative scale and significance of Black slave ownership as a social fact before making more general claims and inferences about its practice. To employ a social fact as part of a sociological explanation without clearly establishing whether the fact either occurs frequently enough to constitute reasonable proof of a societal pattern, or, if not frequently enough, whether it is so crucial to the operation of a societal institution (in this case, slavery) as to determine its function Footnote ⁶³ is an unforgivable lapse in research methodology that makes accurate findings and contingent political decisions regarding reparations more difficult to achieve.

A proper sociological-historical investigation of social facts can be pursued correctly through quantitative analysis, to name only one approach.Footnote ⁶⁴ It is for this reason that Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua's critique of Horowitz's assertion about Black slave owners is as methodologically correct as it is empirically correct. Using statistics, Cha-Jua first appears to strengthen Horowitz's case. He reveals that “the 1830 census lists 3,777 Black slave owners, not 3,000 as Horowitz carelessly states” (Cha-Jua Reference Cha-Jua2001). But this underestimation of 21%, so favorable to Horowitz's argument if this difference had been included, would not help his case fundamentally, as Cha-Jua reveals:

Yet is it fair to ask whether one can rightly infer from quantitative data the qualitative character of sociological relations between groups?Footnote ⁶⁵ Horowitz chooses to deduce the social characteristics of Black slave ownership using statistical data and only one concrete case study (Koger Reference Koger1985). Doing so is methodologically unsound, as Cha-Jua criticizes.Footnote ⁶⁶

Horowitz interprets statistics on Black slave ownership as indicators of slaveholding for commercial purposes by Blacks. He strongly contests the claim made by two of his critics, Robert Chrisman and Ernest Allen, Jr., that Black slave ownership was humanitarian and based on the purchases of family and friends (Chrisman and Allen, Reference Chrisman and Allen2001). He grounds his position in a statement by slavery historian Larry Koger:

A critique of Horowitz's methods and levels of social analysis should not be limited to a war of numbers.Footnote ⁶⁷ Social facts, as the work of founding sociologist Max Weber exemplifies, cannot be fully understood without paying attention to patterns of social action, which groups manifest when forming and engaging institutional formations.Footnote ⁶⁸ The scientific study of society, the standards of which Horowitz wishes to apply to the public debate over reparations, not only engenders a search for “diachronic” (historical) and “synchronic” (contemporary) social facts but is also inseparably an interpretive enterprise. It is this attention to the interpretation of social facts that must be applied here to Horowitz's generalizations.

Koger's findings are correct and generally supported, though one should question his logic for deciding “mulatto masters” were unrelated to Black slaves. A better way to comprehend this socioanthropological phenomenon is found in the works of historian Loren Schweninger, who combines class, ancestry, social milieu, and regional factors to explain the split between mulatto slave owners, Black slaves, and, for that matter, Blacks in general (Schweninger Reference Schweninger1990a, Reference Schweninger1990b).Footnote ⁶⁹

Yet the real issue here is not whether Black ownership of slaves in South Carolina occurred, but rather that Horowitz extrapolates this pattern of unbenign slave ownership by Blacks as the general characteristic of this phenomenon throughout the rest of the South and the United States overall. Horowitz's claim is grounded in the peculiar case of South Carolina, which had an unusually high percentage of commercial Black owners of slaves. Koger even admits that South Carolina “may not have been the typical Southern state where free Blacks owned slaves” (Koger Reference Koger1985, p. 2).

Why then does Horowitz choose an obviously exceptional circumstance of unbenign slave ownership among Blacks to back his claim? By using Koger as his only illustrative source to make his point about the existence of Black slave owners and their alleged exploitation of slaves, Horowitz violates a central tenet of social scientific investigation: establishing the degree to which a finding can be said to be representative of a general pattern.Footnote ⁷⁰ By explicitly presenting the South Carolina case as indicative of a general pattern, he has misled his readership. Without taking the time to prove his point “scientifically” (let us say, “statistically”) or beyond a reasonable common sense doubt, Horowitz's ideal type here (and in the several “hydra head” comparisons he makes) remains a stereotype.

A proper survey of Black slaveholding in the United States, about which there is no lack of scholarship, serves as a corrective. Horowitz's subtext of Black slave ownership for profit was not true for Louisiana, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, or New York (Sterkx Reference Sterkx1972, pp. 236–237; Franklin Reference Franklin1969, pp. 159–161; Bogger Reference Bogger1997, p. 33; Berlin Reference Berlin1998, p. 323; Phillips Reference Phillips1997, p. 95; S. Wilson Reference Wilson1994, p. 75). His claim does not even hold true for the South in general (Berlin Reference Berlin1974, p. 273). Moreover, Black slave ownership, which in reality was rare for ethical and financial reasons, was possible only because a racist slave system already existed, a system designed primarily by Whites for the benefit of Whites. Since the overwhelming number of those who enslaved Blacks were White and did so for commercial reasons, while most Blacks who enslaved Blacks did so to get them away from worse situations, it is inaccurate and misleading to present Black ownership of slaves as anything but humanitarian in the main.Footnote ⁷¹ Overall, Horowitz selected a nonrepresentative case to make a general point, a point designed to undermine the moral power of the reparations claim. Here reactionary rhetoric outraced reality.

Returning to the question of whether to provide reparations for Black slave owners, historical research would support such a claim. However, descendants of Black slave owners have not to this date pursued redress individually or in a class action suit. Like most reparationists, most descendants of Black slave owners seeking redress would probably desire rehabilitative reparations for the entire Black community (Robinson and TransAfrica Forum, Reference Robinson, Martin and Yaquinto2007; N'COBRA 2002).Footnote ⁷² Thus, to answer Horowitz's query, the living descendants of Black slave owners are not direct “plaintiffs,” nor would they be direct beneficiaries of reparations—although they would have good cause to make such a claim.