Quotes from David Brion Davis

We must face the ultimate contradiction that our free and democratic society was made possible by massive slave labor.

tyranny is a central theme of American history, that racial exploitation and racial conflict have been part of the DNA of American culture.

What matters is that Southern slaves, at least on the larger plantations, created their own African American culture, which helped to preserve some of the more crucial areas of life and thought from white control or domination without significantly reducing the productivity and profitability of slave labor. Living within this African American culture, sustained by strong community ties, many slaves were able to maintain a certain sense of apartness, of pride, and of independent identity.

Thus the word "inhuman", in this book's title, refers to the unconscionable and unsuccessful goal of bestializing (in the form of pets as well as beasts of burden) a class of human beings.

It is of inestimable importance that the classical and biblical traditions linked slavery with original sin, punishment <...>, the later abolition of slavery became tied with personal and collective freedom, with the redemption from sin, with the romanticizing of many form of labor, and with the ultimate salvation of humankind.

Several travelers noted that American masters wanted above all to be "popular" with their slaves—a characteristically American need that was probably rare in Brazil or the Caribbean.

black slavery was basic and integral to the entire phenomenon we call "America." This often hidden or disguised truth ultimately involves the profound contradiction of a free society that was made possible by black slave labor.

humans are no less eager than in the past to dominate, degrade, humiliate, and control—often in order to confirm their own sense of pride and superiority. (Adam Smith wrote in 1776 that this was the main motive for slavery.) But

this Revolutionary ideology, epitomized by the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence, showed that the very idea of slavery is a fiction or fraud, since liberty and equality are fundamental rights that no one can legitimately lose.

For Southerners, a white skin was the distinguishing badge of mind and intellect. Black skin was the sign that a given people had been providentially designed to serve as menial laborers, as what Hammond called the "mudsill" class necessary to support every society.

It was the mission of the Confederacy, ordinary whites were told, to carry out God's design for an inferior and dependent race. Slaveholders claimed that owning slaves always entailed a duty and a burden — a duty and burden that defined the moral superiority of the South. And this duty and burden was respected by millions of nonslaveholding whites, who were prepared to defend it with their lives. That, perhaps, was the ultimate meaning of a "slave society.

Much as slavery in the United States was part of a larger Atlantic Slave System, so America's War of Independence was an outgrowth of Europe's Seven Years' War — from 1756 to 1763 — and also a precursor or harbinger of the French and Haitian revolutions and of the subsequent Latin American wars for independence from Spain.

Blue and Gray veterans led the way in focusing public attention on the minute details of each battle, a move that tended to distract attention from larger questions of meaning. Few if any other wars have created among the public such a strange fascination with the concrete details of military tactics and strategy, and thus pride in knowing where and when General Daniel Sickles lost his leg at Gettysburg, but not in knowing when slaves were freed in the District of Columbia.

The subject of British abolitionism has long been controversial, complex, and even baffling. It also raises the issue of moral progress in history - whether groups of reformers and even nations can succeed in eliminating deeply entrenched forms of human oppression, and if so, by what methods, misconceptions, and under what conditions?