Sample Quote

In Frank Tannenbaum's 1947 monograph Slave and Citizen, he argues that the cultures of western slavery depended on the varied colonial belief systems of the nations colonizing the New World, including the British, Spanish, and Portuguese - and later, after the Revolution, the United States. While he elaborates on the "rights" some Latin American colonies and governments granted to enslaved persons, he points overall to the contrast between that culture of limited rights and the culture of the British and the United States. In the slave economies of those latter countries, enslaved persons were at the mercy of legal, religious, and social regimes that entirely denied any African American - including the "liberated Negro" - any form of official recognition (Tannenbaum 97). This meant that all black Americans were considered "as a separate, lesser, being" (Tannenbaum 97). Tannenbaum writes that this "lesser" state of being arose because the Anglo colonists (white British and white Americans) refused to believe the enslaved person was a "free moral agent" (Tannenbaum 97). Since they didn't believe that the Negro had a soul to defend, they didn't think they had to treat her with the respect or dignity of a human being. One who wasn't capable of moral behavior could not expect moral behavior from others.