16 Quotes by David Brion Davis

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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.