Every writer of history wants to craft a work that sticks to the ribs of the reader, and no meal does that better than one made from sacred cows. That’s what John Samuel Harpham aims to do in The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery. Using an array of texts, ranging from traveler accounts and maps to “compendia of classical wisdom” and philosophy, the author examines ancient and early-modern writing to explain “the surprise expressed by a number of antebellum writers that they would need to defend the practice of slavery at all, since it seemed to them to be an ancient tradition handed down from the remote past.”
For Harpham’s explanation of how England came to view the enslavement of others as both a violation of nature and a legitimate institution, all roads ultimately lead back to Rome, and Roman law in particular. He writes that “in early-modern culture, the reception and development of Roman tradition took multiple forms…[Roman ideas] became the basis for a common consensus about what slavery was and where it came from.” The first portion of The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery effectively explains how the tradition of slavery from Rome, which held that all people were naturally free but could be enslaved “as a result of accident or misfortune,” carried the day in early-modern England over Aristotle’s contention that “some persons were fitted by nature to be ruled as slaves.” Slavery, in this framing, appeared more as a circumstance affecting individuals than the rigid, racial institution it would become in the New World.
The second section of The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery revolves around the English perceptions of Africa and African slavery, showing how “before the English slave trade began in earnest another, more gradual shift” took place, one that, “in a broad sense,” transformed “the English image of Africa.” He offers a “prehistory” of the English slave trade, drawn largely from Richard Hakluyt, a promoter of English exploration and colonization, including in Africa.
Harpham argues that as the English learned more about Africa, they grew more at ease with slavery, though not for the reasons usually assumed. Because they judged African nations to be “civilized,” he writes, “[s]uch a shift could at first seem to have worked against the development of the slave trade … inasmuch as scholars have often maintained that the trade drew upon the impression that Africa was ‘beyond the pale of civilization,’” borrowing a phrase from Winthrop Jordan’s White Over Black, long a touchstone of the field, but one Harpham contends has it backward.
The author argues that the recognition of African “civilization” supplied the foundation for England’s slave trading. As English observers gained knowledge about African practices of government, punishment, war, and commerce, they uncovered “a method to account for the sources of slavery, to explain in detail how free persons were made into slaves.” By the middle of the 17th century, he contends, the English no longer worried over the ethics of buying and selling human beings. That the “sources of African slavery could be traced back into the continent and that these arose from the order and sophistication of African life” offered moral clarity.
In this sense, The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery locates the emergence of a proto–positive good thesis long before Thomas Roderick Dew or John C. Calhoun: slavery was not merely tolerated, but rationalized to foster civilization. Crucially, Harpham insists, this defense preceded the full articulation of a racial logic. English slavery in the Atlantic world began, he argues, less as a direct association between blackness and bondage and more during an “uncertain search after the causes of complexion.” The author devotes much of a chapter to English debates over the origins of African skin color, which laid the initial intellectual foundations of slavery with little reference to race.
Harpham’s thought-provoking rejection of the view that European slavers were motivated solely by racist greed subverts conventional academic and political orthodoxies. Yet, it ultimately raises the question of why this matters in the long run. He insists his study is about ideas, not intellectuals. Yet, ideas only carry weight insofar as they shape human action. Alfred Nobel’s dynamite was designed to split rock, but it soon blew up soldiers whether he liked it or not. So too, whether slavery was justified by Roman law or English accounts of African order mattered little to the captive bound for the Caribbean. It did nothing to lessen the sting of the lash.
Indeed, the epilogue of Harpham’s book recounts how “original” ideas about slavery and the treatment of the enslaved quickly shifted to more familiar ground in the late 17th century. The planter class of the Caribbean charted new validations for the brutal punishments used to control a black population ripe for insurrection, while also craving more bodies from Africa to feed the labor needs of their plantations.
THE GERMAN RESISTANCE TO HITLER
It is here that Harpham’s introduction offers an answer to why ideas matter. Explaining his motivation for writing such a thorough and thought-provoking book, he concedes that early-modern English writers were not yet apologists in the antebellum mold, but that their moral failure was subtler: They adopted what never should have been accepted, treating as legitimate what was manifestly wrong. From this reflection, he draws a warning: “This kind of moral failure might be more common than we would like to imagine. As my research into the intellectual origins of American slavery has neared its end, I have imagined a scholar who is born and raised some four hundred years in the future. I wonder what will appear to this earnest inquirer as the most terrible crimes of the culture in which I lived. … That said, the point of the exercise is to realize that I do not know how the distant future will reflect back upon the present. The subjects of my work do not at all appear inhuman to me. As I would myself be understood, so I have tried to understand them.”
Along with a habit of generalizing what “historians assert,” this is where Harpham reveals his training in political science rather than history. To imagine the future’s judgment upon us is not the work of the historian. History is not prophecy, nor is it a tribunal in which the living condemn the cadavers of the past. It is superficial to treat the past with an endless trial of Pope Formosus. History is the study of change over time, and as The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery shows, the future does not always lead to a more moral or better path. Those who lived in the past cannot be inhuman. They were people — their ideas and their actions show us what humanity is capable of, both for better and for worse. That’s why we study them in the first place, and why books like this are worth reading.
Carl Paulus is a historian from Michigan and author of The Slaveholding Crisis: The Fear of Insurrection and the Coming of the Civil War.
