This book is the capstone of a remarkable scholarly project, the fruit of an equally remarkable career. For half a century, David Brion Davis has led efforts to reshape modern approaches to the history and interpretation of slavery. The work defining his career is his trilogy devoted to “the problem of slavery”; the idea that slavery, the claim that one human being could own another as of right, was a moral problem requiring solution.

Davis's first volume, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966) (PSWC), sought to determine when people began to see slavery as a moral problem. As context for that inquiry, it presented a brilliant, comprehensive account of ideas about slavery from the ancient world to the mid-eighteenth century, spanning more than 2,000 years. Entwined with Davis's story of how people in various cultures and periods justified slavery and accepted it as a fact of life is Davis's tracing of the first stirrings of dissent in the Age of Enlightenment from the prevailing acceptance of slavery as part of the human condition. A central insight of Davis's first volume, which becomes the launching pad for his third, is his declaration, “The laws and customs of every slave society give evidence of the essential contradiction of thinking of a man as a thing.” (PSWC 58). This insight also undergirds the rich, extensive scholarship on the history of the law governing slavery spawned since Davis's first volume.

Davis's second volume, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (1975) (PSAR), explored how those who concluded that slavery was wrong and had to be eliminated tried to find a solution to it; their efforts ranged from the freeing of slaves by slaveowners (manumission) to organized campaigns seeking slavery's abolition. Whereas PSWC was a work of cultural history, Davis declared that PSAR launched an investigation of the “points of intersection between ideals and social action.” (PSAR 16)

At his second volume's close, Davis noted that the dispute between attackers and defenders of slavery focused on a claim of fact: that people of African descent were morally incapable of freedom. That claim and efforts to challenge it form the starting point of The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (PSAE). Davis frames this book as a series of linked investigations. He begins by examining the problem of perceiving enslaved men and women as closer to animals than to human beings (whether invoking race or invoking the effects of slavery on the enslaved). He also recounts efforts by free blacks to refute that characterization and to prove themselves capable and worthy of freedom and equal treatment. He probes the dramatic history of the Haitian Revolution and its contradictory consequences for efforts to abolish slavery. His account juxtaposes the faltering first steps of the Haitian Republic seeming to undermine abolitionists’ and emancipationists’ claims that slaves could live in freedom and succeed, with the ultimate success of Haiti, proving that emancipation and abolition could create a functioning society and polity for the emancipated. And he re-examines the central role of free blacks (whether born free or slaves who escaped) as organizers, polemicists, and leaders of the struggle to abolish slavery and free enslaved people.

Along the way, Davis presents perhaps the most detailed and thoughtful examination we have of the African colonization movement, often stigmatized as a wrong turning in the attempt to abolish slavery. These four chapters are not a digression from Davis's main story; rather, they form an essential part of that story, laying bare assumptions undergirding the colonization movement concerning the enslaved and the enslavers. First, white promoters of colonization assumed that, because enslaved people could not function in a free society, they had to be removed from the scene of their enslavement to their supposed “home,” Africa. Second, those promoters assumed that, because Africa was a place fit only for savagery and savages, it was a fitting home for those who could not live in freedom; they all too readily applied this characterization to enslaved Africans as well as to those living in Africa. Third (an assumption not directly flowing from the alleged inferiority of the enslaved but linked to that assumption), those promoters assumed that former slaves could not live in peace side by side in the same land with former slaveowners; therefore, they rejected the alternative approach—emancipating slaves and allowing them to remain in America as citizens in the same land with their former owners, the immediatist vision of emancipation—as a recipe for a racial civil war.

Davis juxtaposes this sad story of a movement that had an early champion in Thomas Jefferson (and numbered among its American adherents former President James Madison, Chief Justice John Marshall, and Senator Henry Clay) with his account of how free blacks became integral to the rise of an immediatist abolition movement, and how free blacks’ efforts to prove themselves worthy of freedom and capable of assuming its benefits and burdens countered the narrative justifying colonization and the parallel narrative justifying enslavement.

Did the promotion of immediatist emancipation carry with it the risk of violence, as defenders of slavery feared and charged? Davis discusses the effects of efforts to recover fugitive slaves (spurred in 1850 by Congress's enactment of a tough federal fugitive slave law replacing the relatively mild 1793 statute) on the violence spawned by slavery and efforts to enforce it. Although slaveowners and slavery's defenders feared violence by slaves uprising against them, violence broke out as a byproduct of slave catchers seeking to recover runaway slaves and local citizens seeking to impede such recoveries. Violence over slavery convulsed communities from Boston to Kansas, portending the war that ultimately destroyed slavery. In examining that war and the constitutional amendments writing its effects into the Constitution, Davis stresses the contingencies key to ending slavery, rejecting a complacent, triumphalist narrative of slavery's inevitable end.

Davis concedes that this book examines only selected themes of the history of the end of slavery. Therefore, it is not as comprehensive as either of his trilogy's first two volumes. But that difference in scope does not detract from the value of Davis's book. Rather, as the problem of slavery grew as a subject of historical inquiry, it spawned additional books and other studies from Davis's pen. This concluding study is the central vessel of a flotilla of books, monographs, and essays, all generated by Davis's explorations of this last stage of the problem of slavery. He notes the relationship between PSAE and two other books: his 1984 study, Slavery and Human Progress, and his 2006 history, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. Completing the picture of the relationship between the problem of slavery and the achievement of abolition and emancipation are his four collections of essays and lectures: The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style (the Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History) (1970), From Homicide to Slavery: Studies in American Culture (1988), In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery (2001), and Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery (the Nathan I. Huggins Lectures) (2003). The vast subject that Davis defined pushed beyond the boundaries of his projected trilogy to cover the output of a career. The immensity of the topic—its scope, diversity, and historical and moral significance—and the excellence of these books and the trilogy they bolster justify the project's expansion.

David Brion Davis has taught his readers to see how rich, perplexing, and morally challenging the historical study of slavery ought to be. His work and that of the scholars whom he has inspired to take up the subject have transformed the understanding of slavery and the desperate effort of men and women spanning over a century to do away with slavery and to vindicate the humanity of those who were enslaved (efforts that continue today, to combat sex slavery and other forms of covert slavery). Davis rightly speaks of the Age of Emancipation, however historically contingent its achievement was and how perilously close it often came to being derailed or frustrated, “as a model for other reforms and as probably the greatest landmark of willed moral progress in human history” (PSAE xvi).

At the beginning of the story Davis sets out to tell, slavery was a given in human civilization: an institution, a system of labor, a complex of laws governing ownership of a special kind of property, and a way of conceptualizing human relations and a particular subset of humanity as less than human. Slavery still exists today, but it generally now exists cloaked from view, illegitimate, and unable to draw directly on law to protect or enforce it. The shift from slavery as a matter-of-fact part of human life to slavery as a surreptitious practice generally regarded as wrong proves Davis's point, suggesting the enormous impact that the destruction of slavery has had on human history. That shift, and the process by which it occurred, also shows the scope and depth of Davis's investigations of slavery and its end, and the effects that his work has had and continues to have on understanding the past.