Abraham Lincoln famously remarked, "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master."
In the many years since, something of the Emancipator's moral point has been lost, along with the memory of what benefiting from slavery entailed. No one who reads Marcus Rediker's searingly brilliant "The Slave Ship: A Human History" can have the slightest doubt concerning the real point of Lincoln's aphorism.
Rediker is a distinguished maritime historian whose previous books have used long-neglected primary sources to shed important new light on life around the 18th century Atlantic. In this book, he uses a similar technique to recover in horrific detail an economic system that brought more immigrants to the New World than any other in that era. It's a beautifully timed book, since last year marked the bicentennial of England's abolition of the slave trade and this year marks ours.
Rediker's book makes it possible for us to understand in an entirely fresh and disturbing way precisely what those anniversaries signify.
Part of the book's power comes from the author's mastery of sources and part from his sophisticated appreciation of the way technology, economics and avarice conjoined in moral infamy. As early as 1740, the British merchant Malachy Postlethwayt, arguing for parliamentary subsidies for slave trade as essential to English prosperity, described the trade's "triangular nature." British ships carried manufactured goods to West Africa, where they were exchanged with local rulers for slaves. Hundreds of these slaves were packed into the ships and carried to the West Indies -- the so-called "middle passage" -- where they were sold and the proceeds used to buy sugar and rum, which the ships then transported back to England.
Rediker uses his experience as a maritime historian and his mastery of the contemporary documents to re-create all three legs of the triangle, often in the very words of the participants -- captains, seamen and slaves. It is a stunningly immediate, brutal portrait and enlightening in unexpected ways. Torture and sexual abuse weren't simply commonplace but institutionalized. Rebellion was more frequent than conventional opinion allows and the lives of ordinary seamen much harder. Often, they were cheated of their wages by avaricious captains and abandoned after the middle passage, since fewer were needed to bring the ships home.
Rediker devotes a bracingly unsentimental chapter to John Newton, the slaver-turned-Christian-turned-abolitionist, who wrote that famous hymn of the justified sinner, "Amazing Grace." He draws on Newton's extensive public and private writings, never with more effect than in the chapter devoted to the slave ships' maritime masters and titled "The Captain's Own Hell." As the author points out, when Newton wrote to and for others concerning the outrages he had "witnessed," he often was describing acts in which he had taken part, including executions by dismemberment and the application of thumb screws to rebellious children.
As Rediker notes: "Newton developed a theory about why violence, cruelty and terror were intrinsic to the slave trade. . . . He wrote, 'A savageness of spirit, not easily conceived, infuses itself . . . into those who exercise power on board an African slave-ship, from the captain downwards. It is the spirit of the trade, which, like a pestilential air, is so generally infectious that but few escape it.' Violence and suffering were so pervasive on the slave that the 'work' itself -- meaning the discipline and control of the human 'cargo' -- tended directly to 'efface moral sense, to rob the heart of every gentle and humane disposition and to harden it, like steel against all impressions of sensibility.' "
Rediker is one of the most interesting of the American historians who acknowledge their participation in the 1960s New Left as fundamental to their intellectual formation. In part, one suspects, that was because he found in the movement insight that described his personal experiences as the son of working-class Kentucky parents and as a one-time factory worker himself. It's a background that predisposed him to the so-called "people's history movement" that sought to retell the Western story -- and good history always is a story -- through the lives of ordinary people, from the bottom up, as it were. In the hands of skilled practitioners -- whose methodology was informed by the French Annales School's rigorous attention to overlooked documents -- it produces history of great power. It is a view of the past that seeks to recover not just facts, but the conscience that renders them sensible. Rediker is one of those skilled historians.
