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Slave and Citizen: The Classic Comparative Study of Race Relations in the Americas

by Frank Tannenbaum

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1101246,002 (3.86)1
Originally published in 1947, Slave and Citizen is a classic in the field of comparative slave history and race relations.
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Since non-fiction isn’t something I read often, I needed to think about my approach when reviewing it. I’ve decided I should be asking myself two questions: Did I learn something, and did I understand what I was learning/reading (how accessible was the content, basically)?

In the case of Slave and Citizen, the answer to both questions was yes. The writing was a number-heavy at times, but I think it’s incredibly important to see then numbers when looking at the history of slavery. For example, the number of slaves taken who died in transport (either on land to the ships or on the ships themselves) compared to how many survived to actually become slaves.

I feel like I learned a lot more about the beginning of slave trade, as well as how slaves were treated in the US, versus South America where there were many routes to freedom and where freed slaves were overall seen as citizens afterwards. This is great jumping-off point for anyone looking to educate themselves on how this country was built on systemic racism and at only 130 pages or so, easily worth your time. ( )
  MillieHennessy | Jul 1, 2020 |
Slave and Citizen is a groundbreaking work of comparative history, contrasting the slave cultures of Ibero-America and Anglo-America. Frank Tannenbaum’s thesis begins with the assertion that the Catholic cultures of Spain and Portugal had long known slavery in both a moral and legal sense and had long acknowledged that the slave was a Christian brother, a human being with natural rights; there was no such ancient familiarity with slavery or tradition of catholic brotherhood in the Britain or the United States, thus the slave was marked as a racial inferior, a sub-human unworthy of natural rights. This, Tannenbaum claimed, explains the divergent nature of the two systems of slavery and even the differing ways the two cultures absorbed their black citizens after emancipation. Tannenbaum’s work makes some interesting claims that have rightly sparked debate, but his work suffers from some flaws in evidence, methodology, and logic, making Slave and Citizen not a holy book of truth but a historiographical springboard for further research into the nature of African slavery.

Slave and Citizen was first published in 1946, before vast amounts of primary archival sources on slavery were utilized in the study of slavery and well-before this data could be satisfactorily analyzed by cliometricians like Robert William Fogel and Stanley Engerman in their ground-breaking1974 work Time on the Cross. Franklin W. Knight makes this clear in his introduction. Tannenbaum instead utilized anecdotal primary accounts of travelers and observers, the scholarly work of previous historians, and published compendiums of legal cases and laws. Through a brilliant synthesis of these materials, stretching from the days of Justinian to the 1940s, Tannenbaum makes his case that the fundamental differences between Ibero-American and Anglo-American views on the moral and legal status of the slave determined slavery’s type, severity, and course in their respective spheres, an influence even felt after emancipation.

Tannenbaum held that Spain and Portugal had a long legal tradition dating from the days of the Roman Empire, reinforced by the Roman Catholic Church and its theology, that slavery was not a natural condition of man. A slave was not any less a man than his master, in true Aristotelian logic he was a slave only by the accident of his being a slave. Thus in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires around the globe, the slave was worthy of participation not only in the superficial trappings of Christianity, but was a full member of the Catholic community. He could take the sacraments, his children could be baptized (often with their masters standing in as godparents), and their marriages were solemnized by the Church and recognized under the law. In contrast, the British, and later the Americans, had no such traditions. Slavery was so foreign to the British that the first Africans transported to the New World were classed as indentured servants, though Tannenbaum noted they were not truly so. Enslaved Africans were soon legally treated as chattel, classified with livestock and movable property. Slaves in the English-speaking world were not moral beings. They could not be full members of any Christian church though some might be nominally Christian, they were not Christians in the eyes of the law or the free white public. Their marriages were neither solemnized nor recognized. Slaves in Latin America, Tannenbaum contends, were treated as men—in Anglo-America they were mere property.

No more was this apparent, Tannenbaum argued, than in the differing attitudes towards manumission in the Ibero-American and Anglo-American spheres. Manumission, in fact, is a central theme of the book: “The frequency and ease of manumission more than any other factor, influence the character and ultimate outcome of the two slave systems in this hemisphere” (p. 69). Tannenbaum claimed that cultures of Latin America were “biased in favor of freedom” (p. 53). In a stunning blitz of examples from the literature, Tannenbaum noted the many instances of manumission in the Spanish and Portuguese Americas, especially in Brazil. Masters freed their slaves on special occasions like baptisms and marriages by their masters. Slaves could easily purchase their own freedom. The laws in the Catholic nations were skewed towards the rights of the slave. Conversely, in the Anglo world, manumission was hard to attain. Strictures were placed on the few masters who wished to grant their slaves freedom. It was even harder for the slave to purchase his own freedom. The slaves too, in Latin America, had more access to civil life after manumission—often became respected members of society. Freed slaves in the Anglo world, however, were not treated as members of the civil polity. They had no legal rights as in the Latin empires.

Tannenbaum’s sources and analyses are not without their problems, however. His sources for Latin America seem biased towards the large urban areas of Brazil, especially Rio de Janeiro. Urban slavery in both the English and Iberian worlds was often vastly different than their rural counterparts, even more “liberal” and “lenient” (to abuse those words). His reliance on the reports of travelers presents problems as well. “Others” from outside the Spanish and Portuguese realms, often British, were wont to see the things that made those societies vastly different than their own and stress these differences in their writings, rather than focus on the similarities between the systems. Slave and Citizen also treats laws and slave codes in both the English-speaking world and Ibero-speaking world as if they were followed assiduously and whole-heartedly by slave owners. True, the law and customs mandated that blacks in Brazil be treated as Christian equals, but were they? True, the laws and customs forbade blacks in the United States be taught to read, but many were. Tannenbaum notes the relative freedom of slaves in Brazil to hire themselves out, make their own money, and work their own plots, contrasting this with laws in the southern United States that prohibited these actions. Yet American slaves routinely earned extra money for themselves. Tannenbaum also places too much uncritical emphasis on the ease in which masters broke up slave families, tracing this to the lack of religious or political sanction given to slave marriages, yet research has shown that many planters encouraged slaves to marry and even, in many instances, protected the sanctity of slave families. Slave-owners in the English-speaking world knew that happier workers were better workers.

Tannenbaum’s synthesis of materials was a welcome addition to the slave literature of the time, comparing Anglo slavery to the Iberian form—perhaps breaking American slavery scholars from their parochial study of the Peculiar Institution in the slaveholding United States. It suffers, however, from using sources that may be irrevocably biased. The conclusions, too, are perhaps too rosy for some to swallow. Tannenbaum’s apparent rush to whitewash the leyenda negra from the annals of Spanish and Portuguese history by claiming their form of slavery was, in some fashion, “better” or “easier.” Far more slaves where shipped to Latin America than Anglo America, something Tannenbaum attributed to the ease in which slaves were manumitted in Latin America, as new slaves replaced those who gained their freedom. The morality of this is left unquestioned. Would slave owners in Latin America who knew their charges were soon to be freed try to “get their money’s worth” by working them nearly to death? How does this compare to the apparent “ease” of working life in the U.S. South as portrayed by Fogel and Engerman, where slave owners were apparently wary of working their investment to death? Still, Slave and Citizen helped bring these questions to the attention of the scholarly community. ( )
  tuckerresearch | Jan 25, 2008 |
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