Today, nearly everyone agrees that slavery is immoral and contrary to human rights. This was not generally true in the Atlantic world until the late nineteenth century. First of all, we must distinguish between the opinions of enslaved persons and the opinions of those who remained free. Evidence from both the Africa's and the Americas demonstrates that slaves seldom if ever considered their enslavement to be legitimate and moral. Everywhere slaves sought to increase their autonomy and to be treated with respect and dignity, like free persons. No one wanted to be treated like a slave. In the Americas this is particularly clear, for when slaves did not resist their condition directly and openly (because of repression), they sought autonomy and freedom in less dramatic ways. They told stories that encoded a distinct moral condemnation of slavery. Africans did the same. In Africa, slaves and persons who were at risk of enslavement often talked about slavery as eating, likening the wealth derived by African and European slavers to ill gotten gain. Persons who became rich in the business of enslavement, it was thought, derived their wealth from practising witchcraft. Africans commonly claimed that Europeans transported Africans across the ocean in order to eat them on the other side or to use their blood to paint their ships red. In large areas of West Africa, cowry shells were the forms of money that slaves were bought and sold with. According to widely spread stories in that part of the African continent, the wealthy obtained their cowries by throwing slaves into the water where cowry shells grew on them. Once the shells covered the bodies of the dead, it was said, they were removed and the body discarded. Stories like these suggest that persons enslaved saw their bondage as immoral and illegitimate.

When we talk about slavery and morality, we must distinguish between how free persons and enslaved persons considered slavery. While slaves tended to reject the legitimacy of their bondage, free persons were generally less categorical in their condemnation of servitude. In fact, virtually all societies in the Americas and the Africa's during the period of the slave trade held slaves. This does not mean, however, that free persons considered it legitimate for anyone to be captured as a slave. In the Americas and in Europe, for example, custom and the law prevented whites from being enslaved. In the Africa's, there were usually certain rules that governed who could be captured as a slave and in what circumstances. Of course, these rules were often broken when free persons enslaved others.

Part of the reason slavery came to an end was the mounting sense that enslavement was immoral. But the more likely explanation for the death of slavery was economic.
 

Back to menu