Volume 27, Number 11 · June 26, 1980
The Crime of Reform
By David Brion Davis
Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and Its Alternatives in Progressive America
by David J. Rothman
Little, Brown, 464 pp., $17.50
We seldom think of black slavery as a penal institution. Yet throughout history enslavement has been used as a form of punishment while some penal systems have acquired many of the characteristics of chattel slavery. Punishment served as a legal pretext for selling African slaves to European traders—punishment, to be sure, for trumped-up crimes or for being defeated in supposedly 'just' wars. From the fifteenth century onward, European apologists for the slave trade appealed self-righteously to the standards of African justice, arguing that purchasers had no reason to question the local judicial procedures that had condemned certain persons to a lifetime of servitude. Even apart from questions of personal guilt, the dominant tradition of classical and Christian jurisprudence defined slavery as an unfortunate but necessary penalty for original sin. Early abolitionists concentrated their fire on this penal aspect of New World slavery. They questioned the fairness and reliability of African justice, insisted on the innocence of African slaves, and challenged attempts to invoke original sin or the Biblical curse of Canaan as excuses for an arbitrary deprivation of liberty.
Review, 3120 words
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