- American audiences know the history of slavery in the United States from 1619 to the Emancipation Proclamation.

But today's guest reminds us that slavery in the Western Hemisphere predates the British and North American colonies and lasted decades after the end of the American Civil War.

She's Carrie Gibson, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(bright upbeat music) (bright upbeat music continues) Hello, and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from The Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

And my guest this week is Carrie Gibson, an author and historian whose most recent book is "The Great Resistance, the 400 Year Fight to End Slavery in The Americas."

She's joining us today from South Carolina.

Carrie, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thank you for inviting me on.

- I was mentioning to you before we started, this is a towering achievement in terms of the scholarship that went into it.

Do you wanna give us just a quick overview, and then we'll get into it in some depth?

- Yeah, so what I do in this book, what I try to do, is take the reader through the 400 plus year struggle to bring about slave emancipation.

I focus on the actions of enslaved people in this book, that's what I center.

And I take the reader also through a huge geography.

So it's not just the United States I'm looking at and the great resistance, but the entire Americas.

- And tell us why it's important to write that from such a hemispheric perspective, rather than a narrow national perspective.

- So I think when we look at it hemispherically, a different story emerges or maybe a complimentary story.

I think we understand in the United States the path to emancipation and debates around abolition and that sort of thing.

But when you put it in a hemispheric context, you see that it was a much longer battle.

You see how it played out in different countries, in different nations.

It also intersected, for instance, with the creation of new republics in South America.

So, you know, again, the debates and the dynamics within the United States.

Trying to understand where slavery, and then the abolition of slavery, fits into the national story is also something that happened, you know, in our neighbor nations in the Americas.

- Well, and I think that's one of the things that I sort of wanna dwell on a little bit, because you effectively reframe the consideration of slavery from the experience of servitude and the politics of servitude, at least in the American experience, to really this 400 year story of resistance in all of its forms.

What happens when we change that framework for thinking about the experience of servitude in the Americas?

- Well, I mean, the first thing, and probably the most important thing we see is that there was resistance from the beginning.

Like, from the onset of the development of the slave trade.

And initially, that plays out on the west coast of Africa, onboard ships.

And the initial slave trade saw people being taken to Europe, to Portugal and Spain.

And later to the Americas, after Columbus basically.

So what we see when we reframe it is that this struggle was there from the beginning, and that it played out in all kinds of ways.

I think sometimes it's very easy to frame conflict or resistance as something more akin to a war, where there are two sides.

But this plays out in many different ways because there's many fronts, there's many moments of unrest or tension.

I mean, certainly the Haitian Revolution in the middle of it, of this period, is probably one of the most crucial.

And so, by thinking about it in a more hemispheric way, we can see that, you know, it was a much longer battle.

And it was a fascinating one in its own right.

You know, there has been sort of considerable debate in the past about, you know, where do, for instance, slave revolts fit into this story, because many of them did fail?

But if we think about the larger story, we can see that these were important parts, you know?

Important parts in the journey towards ending slavery in the Americas.

- So I think American audiences are familiar with 1619, and the importance of that date in the American context.

So Columbus arrives in the new world in 1492.

How quickly are their slaves?

- Very quickly.

So by the early 1500s, I mean, you know, 1502, 1503, and I write about this in one of the chapters, there's reports from the governor of Hispaniola.

So today's, you know, Dominican Republic and Haiti, but from that island saying, you know, we're having problems because enslaved people are running away and they're making common cause with the Indigenous people on the island.

And so, you get that from very, very early on.

So, you know, the story of the Americas, the arrival of Europeans, European expansion, is very much hand in hand with the, you know, with the arrival of Africans who, you know, who were brought here.

So slavery and colonization, you know, went hand in hand throughout the entire continent.

- Did Native populations find themselves enslaved as well?

- They did, and I'm just gonna speak very generally about it because that's a bit outside of my area.

But the Spanish tried to harness Indigenous labor initially through something called the, (speaks Spanish), which was kind of an agreement with sort of Indigenous leaders for them to give the labor of their people.

And in exchange, they would receive Christianity and protection from their enemies.

It was very complicated.

But, you know, to our modern eyes, it looks like a very bad deal and servitude.

But it wasn't chattel slavery in exactly the same way that we see with what happens, you know, with Africans.

And so, what we find is that in many places, and certainly early on, you know, Indigenous people and captives had reason to join forces against the people trying to, you know, imprison them and to take their labor and take their freedom.

- You mentioned that resistance began immediately.

And the book begins, I thought, breathtakingly with an account of resistance on board a ship at the end of the middle passage.

So maybe for our audience members who maybe might not, maybe they heard that term in grade school, remind us what the middle passage was.

But let's talk a little bit about the kind of resistance and the kind of violence that was seen shipboard on some of those transits.

- Yeah, so the middle passage is, you know, the taking of people in captivity along various points in the west coast of Africa and bringing them to various ports in the Americas.

Not just the United States, but places like Cartagena.

Or there were certain islands, like Curacao, where enslaved people were brought and then re-sent out to other places.

So, you know, it was the slave trade as we understand it.

And the middle passage is, you know, the actual, you know, terrifying sailing of these ships, you know?

The images that people may have seen of diagrams like the Brooks, which was a famous ship diagram where you could see how all the bodies were shoved in there.

That is the middle passage.

And that image was used by abolitionists in the 18th century to bring public awareness to how awful these voyages were.

So you had resistance from, you know, the get go basically.

People jumped overboard sometimes.

You know, suicide was a form of resistance in that context.

You had onboard revolts, where people tried to capture the, you know, the captain and the crew and take over the ship.

And this goes on, again, throughout the whole period.

So you see a number of shipboard revolts, you know, over the course of the slave trade.

- And you cite a number that I found absolutely astonishing.

Something like 36,000 transits, about 3,500, so about 10%, have some sort of act of resistance or rebellion on board.

Do I have that number right?

- Yeah, and that comes from some other scholarship, which I cite in the book.

But yes, that's the current estimate that to my understanding is the most recent, that 10% of ships had some kind of onboard revolt.

And then, of course, there were also shipwrecks.

And in that context, we might not know what happened, if everybody on the ship perished as well.

So that was always a risk at the time.

But, you know, could it be a ship being caught in a storm?

Or, you know, was there a revolt that led to a sinking?

So there are, you know, there are numbers we'll never know.

But certainly, there's an estimate of about 10%.

- So there's so much of this book I found absolutely fascinating and eyeopening and educational.

One of the things that, I don't know if surprised is the right word, but very early on, there are some Catholic missionaries who are upset about slavery.

Not so much about the practice of slavery, but because either the practice of slavery is either driving some souls to Islamic ownership where their souls are lost to Christ.

But other souls are being lost in that shipboard transit and they're being lost to Christ.

It sort of seems like a very... It speaks to the inhumanity with which they viewed Africans.

Is that accurate?

- Well, so I think, again, and I write about this in the early chapters, like understanding the role of Christianity and Islam and the idea of being a nonbeliever, and where that fits into who is enslavable and who is not, is very, very important in the beginnings of all of this.

And so, the idea that Africans were not Christian, you know?

And eventually, obviously parts of Africa become Islamic, but again, you know, a different religion is something that was used to bolster the idea that Africans were enslavable.

But, of course, you know, that's completely ignoring, for instance, the establishment of Ethiopian Christianity, you know, which dates very far back.

And so, there was a willful blindness to this and kind of a willingness to ignore Christianity.

I mean, you have in the kingdom of Congo, which is roughly where today's Angola is, you saw the royal family there convert to Christianity.

And yet people were still, from that region, were still often, you know, captured in various conflicts.

And, you know, there was enslavement and Luanda was a place of disembarkation... Or not disembark, embarkation to the new world.

And so, you know, religion plays an important role in this.

And I think that it's worth mentioning that all the major world religions don't come out of it particularly well.

There are lone voices in the wilderness, certainly various priests who speak out at various points.

But ultimately, you know, as institutions, neither Catholic nor Protestant religions ultimately, you know, managed to make that much of a change.

And certainly, with certain Catholic orders and, you know, it's been discovered that they have had investments or owned, you know, enslaved people in the past.

So I'm thinking, I guess in the US, the most well-known case would be the Jesuits at Georgetown.

So, you know, you do have religions also, you know, profiting from this as well.

- Yeah.

So how quickly does slavery wash over the Western hemisphere?

And are there any parts of the continent that are spared from the savages of slavery?

- I would say no, in the sense of thinking about the places now as nations, right?

- Sure.

- But countries like Bolivia did have slavery actually because, you know, enslaved Africans were sent into the mines there.

But, you know, in terms of population, you know, it was a lot smaller than somewhere like Jamaica, which had an, you know, enormous enslaved population.

So, no, I mean, I think I worked out that everywhere had at least some slavery, you know?

Even the Canadians did, you know, sort of in the earlier period.

And even places like Chile or Argentina that we don't necessarily associate with sort of the ideas of slavery that we might have in terms of like big cotton plantations or sugar plantations.

But no, there enslaved people in pretty much every corner.

But it varied, you know, the degree varied by the place.

- And so, in addition to that slavery then, everywhere that there was slavery, there was resistance.

That seems to be one of the critical arguments that you're making in this book.

- Yeah, that's right and, I mean, it plays out in a lot of different ways, right?

So, you know, if you are in an urban setting, the kind of forms of resistance that are open to you might be different to somebody in a more rural setting.

You know, if you are working in a situation where, you know, part of your revolt involves setting sugarcane fields alight, that's one thing.

But, you know, if you are in a mine, that's another thing.

You know, going down into a mine in like, say, Brazil or, you know, Bolivia or somewhere.

So the forms of resistance change.

I mean, you know, broadly speaking, there are kind of armed acts, you know, in various places.

But in terms of the kind of more day-to-day things, that really varies by, you know, what kind of situation people found themselves in.

- Yeah, when you think about the broad sweep of that 400 years, are there particular episodes of resistance that stand out as being especially noteworthy?

- Well, yeah, I mean, definitely the whole 13 years of the Haitian revolution is particularly important.

And so, that takes place between 1791 and the establishment of Haiti in January 1st, 1804.

And the reason that that one is particularly important is because it's successful.

And not only is it successful as a slave revolt in getting rid of slavery, it's also a successful anti-colonial revolt in getting rid of French rule.

So, you know, the story of Haiti is a real one-two punch.

But also, you know, the example that it showed to both enslaved publics and white publics.

So, you know, Haiti becomes this very important symbol after, well, after the kind of the slave revolt starts in 1791 really.

But certainly after the establishment of an independent, you know, state of Haiti, nation of Haiti, it becomes very, very important symbolically.

And then it also becomes important symbolically to white enslaved republics because they are worried about it happening in Jamaica or in Cuba.

And so, you see the specter of Haiti everywhere after this period.

So in the 19th century, there's always a lot of talk of not wanting a place to be the next Haiti.

So, yeah, I think that that's probably the moment or the revolt that is particularly important among the many that took place.

- You know, it's easy sitting in 2026 to look back and just understand the dates that we're talking about.

And say, "Well, was that the beginning of the end?"

But at the time, what was the impression, what was the understanding of the significance of the events in Haiti by the societies that continued to hold slaves even after the Haitian revolution?

- Well, I mean, I think that they found that, you know, incredibly worrying.

Because, you know, the Haitian revolution breaks out in 1791.

So, you know, sort of white publics, European publics have not even really ramped up that much of their talk about ending the slave trade.

So you still have the slave trade at this point which, you know, gradually gets abolished.

But it is a turning point as well because you are starting to see some white abolitionism by this point.

And you're seeing gradual... There, you know, there have been gradual emancipation measures in some places, like in New England.

So, you know, the public, the public is moving, but only a small portion of the public.

And for many places, especially ones with very high densities of enslaved people and very low white populations, you know, this was a warning sign of what was to come.

But, you know, looking at it now, we can see that this is perhaps, you know, arguably a moment where the corner was really turned in the sense of, this cannot continue, you know?

We cannot continue to save people.

You know, it requires such a regime of violence.

It is so incredibly costly in terms of human life, in terms of economic life, in terms of many things.

And so, you know, again, with that distance, I think we can see it now.

At the time, I'm not sure that the sort of free public saw it as the beginning of the end.

But they definitely saw it as something very significant.

- You know, so I can remember even being a student and sort of being fascinated by the disparities and the size of the slave population in Haiti and the free populations in Haiti.

And sort of wondering, well, why didn't that revolution happen sooner?

And I guess I could ask that question about a number of other places, particularly in the Caribbean, where the slave population outnumbered dramatically the population of slave owners.

Why weren't there more successful revolts like that?

- I mean, it definitely wasn't for a lack of trying.

You know, places like Jamaica kind of had a steady stream of events.

And certainly, by the time you get to the eve of Britain ending the practice of slavery, you have a number of very big revolts.

They are suppressed in the end, but they really undermine the kind of legitimacy of the practice by, you know, again, by their enormous human costs.

So I'm thinking of the Sam Sharpe Revolt in Jamaica, which is the end of 1831, '32.

And before that, there was a big revolt in Demerara in 1823.

Demerara is today's Guyana.

And then in 1816, there's a pretty serious revolt in Barbados, which hadn't had one for at least a century.

So with all of those, you know, you can see this kind of buildup.

And no, none of them were successful in themselves.

They were all eventually put down, but at enormous cost.

You know, and increasingly outraging the white publics and saying, you know, we can't continue with slavery.

And so, in that sense, you know, slave revolts are incredibly important because even though, you know, again, that thing of sort of losing the battle, but winning the war eventually.

- Yeah, so, you know, one of the things that I also struggled with as a student, even as a professor teaching this stuff is that, you know, we're talking about an era of great political thought about freedom and personal liberties.

How do we situate the incredible violence and the dehumanization of chattel slavery in the same context of, we're about to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the declaration?

And the idea that all people are born equal and the same and free, how do we reconcile those two different views of humanity in the same timeframe?

- I mean, I think we're still trying to reconcile it.

I mean, this is it, you know?

The republics of the Americas were all born out of a certain level of contradiction and hypocrisy.

Unfortunately, you know, that's kind of where we are.

I mean, you know, exactly, I mean, enlightenment thought about freedom and about, you know, the individual and about rights was all well and good.

But it wasn't extended, you know, to a significant portion of the populations.

And so, trying to reconcile that is the task, I think, in some ways of even of my book, like trying to present that.

Because in the book as well, I talk about earlier ideas of freedom.

You know, you didn't have, sort of chattel slavery dies out in Europe much, much earlier on.

And there's an idea that an Englishman will always be free, or that the heir of France is free.

And then it's like, well, wait a minute, people are supposedly free here, but in your colonies they're not.

And so, again, you have a contradiction like that very early on in colonial expansion.

And this plays out as the United States, but as well as other republics in the new world are trying to work out who these words are for.

You know, who does get to be free?

What is liberty?

And so, yeah, I would argue that that's something I'm still grappling with, you know?

As a historian, as somebody who wants to think deeply about this.

And, you know, arguably to kind of borrow from Orlando Patterson who wrote extensively about this.

You know, we can't even really... I mean, freedom as we understand it was born out of slavery.

So he wrote about this in his seminal work, "Slavery."

And so, you know, that's something worth really, really thinking about.

Like, how we even understand freedom is so deeply linked to the fact of slavery in the Americas that, you know, again, I think we're still trying to work it out.

- You know, in that vein, you know, former American president Barack Obama and others have referred to slavery as America's original sin.

From your history though, I take it's the original sin of the entire hemisphere.

How has that legacy manifested itself across the rest of the Americas, not just here in the United States?

- Yeah, no, it absolutely is kind of one of the original sins of this whole thing.

And, you know, of European expansion and state formation after that.

And the way it's kind of manifested is, certainly one of them, is the persistence of racial categories.

So, you know, there's a lot of debate about sort of race identity, you know, belonging, economic opportunity, things like that.

These play out in very similar ways across Latin America.

And, again, I'm speaking, you know, very broadly.

There's a lot of colorism, there's still a lot of racism.

You know, for instance, looking at a country like Brazil, which also had, you know, a very long history and a very large enslaved population.

It has, you know, some of the poorest people are Afro Brazilians, you know, at the bottom of sort of social economic indicators.

So, you know, the problems that perhaps people in the United States think are unique to United States are actually shared by a lot of its neighbors.

And that's another reason I really wanted to write this book is to remind readers that, you know, the United States is not alone in its history.

This is a shared history.

And we need to think about, you know, again, the kind of modern ramifications, you know, in a more sort of hemispheric way.

- And one of the things though that is different about the American experience is that we had to fight a Civil War.

- Yeah.

- To end slavery in this country.

- That's true.

- How did slavery end in most of the rest of the hemisphere?

- I mean, it's a gradual process everywhere.

And I wanna make that quite clear.

You know, the only place that it's very unequivocal in the end is Haiti.

But everywhere else wants to have sort of gradual measures.

The concern at the forefront is, you know, how are people going to be compensated for this?

Like, that's certainly the case with Britain, who ends up spending about 20 million Pounds at the time to compensate enslavers and plantation owners in 1833.

But yes, the United States fights a war over it.

Other imperial systems play out very differently.

So the British eventually pass it through, after the series of slave revolts, pass legislation in 1833.

They try to implement an apprenticeship system also to, again, just eke out just a bit more labor from people.

And that turned out to be very unpopular.

And people who know they are now free, you know, protest against this and they end up kind of stopping it a bit earlier than planned.

And so, full emancipation comes in at 1838.

Brazil is a very, you know, long struggle as well.

And it comes last in this story, in 1888.

And it's a series of, you know, it takes a lot of, I guess, what I'm trying to say is, there's a lot of politics involved in the late 19th century there.

So it comes out of, you know, a political process.

And, again, there's a number of gradual reforms.

You get a lot of this throughout most of Latin America, where they're often known as free womb laws.

So an enslaved woman who has a child is still enslaved, but the child is freed after a set number of years, 18 or 21 or 25.

And this is very common.

So you have Haiti, you have Britain.

I should mention France, France is very important because France and slavery across its empire ends in 1794 in response to what happens in the first phase of the Haitian Revolution.

And then Napoleon brings it back in 1802.

So I just want to also point this out because it just shows how fragile these ideas about freedom are.

So it's not, you know, just because slavery ended once, didn't mean it couldn't be brought back.

And so, the French bring it back and it's in the rest of their colonies.

So, Martinique, Guadalupe, French Guyana until 1848.

So you have a second phase of French enslavement.

And the Danes in 1848 also end slavery.

And then in Saint Croix.

And so, the Danish had colonies in the Caribbean, which are today the US Virgin Islands.

And on those islands, people knew that this change was coming.

And they basically got the governor to give them their freedom before the actual kind of letter arrived.

So people knew, you know, this change was in the air.

They were claiming their freedom, certainly by the 1840s.

And so, that's how, you know, it plays out with the Danish islands.

And then obviously you have the US Civil War.

And then you have the rest of Spain's colonies, which are Puerto Rico and Cuba.

And that, again, it's a long process and it phases out over the 1870s and 80s.

Although Cuba also has a war that intersects with questions about emancipation.

And it has a 10 years war between 1868 and '78.

And in that, part of that became a struggle over the question of the persistence of slavery.

Although in the end, just to keep it short, Cuba doesn't end up fully abolishing slavery till 1886, and then you have Brazil.

So this is a very long struggle.

The United States is just kind of towards the latter bit in this much longer arc of abolition and emancipation.

- Carrie Gibson, this is a remarkable body of research.

The book is "The Great Resistance."

Thank you for spending some time with us about it this week.

But that is all the time we have.

If you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit salve.edu/pellcenter, where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

And I wanna thank you for spending some time with us too.

I'm Jim Ludes, asking you to join me again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

(pleasant bright music) (pleasant bright music continues) (pleasant bright music continues) (upbeat bright music)