The Anglo-Saxon’s Great Failure
Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas.
by Frank Tannenbaum.
New York, Knopf, 1947. 128 pp. $2.00.

To most of us, the colonizers of the American continents are the Spanish, Dutch, French, and English. We generally overlook the Negroes, who were among the first settlers—forced, it is true—to come to these shores. So numerous were they, in fact, that we find Alexander von Humboldt, at the beginning of the 19th century, writing of a possible colored empire in the Caribbean. American civilization, both Anglo-Saxon and Latin, has been influenced in important respects by the presence of the Negro.

The social systems that grew up in areas containing large numbers of Negroes showed important basic differences as between the Spanish and Portuguese areas and the British and American. Contrary to what we might expect—believing as we do that Britain was the fount of all liberty and that the Spanish colonial regime was as diabolical in its treatment of subject races as Las Casas depicted it to be—the Latin American system was the more flexible. Professor Tannenbaum devotes a large part of his essay to a discussion of the reasons for this apparent contradiction. It is a task for which he is peculiarly well suited, for he is one of those historians, unfortunately rare, who can see a cultural pattern and the interactions of its various elements as a whole. (This quality can be seen also in Professor Tannenbaum’s earlier books, Mexican Agrarian Revolution and Peace by Revolution, as well as in his criminological and other sociological studies.)

When the New World was discovered, slavery had long been an accepted institution in the Iberian Peninsula—both white and Negro slaves being known. The ancient Roman slave code, which considered slavery an accident having no effect on the moral status of the individual, was adapted to the Iberian and, later, to the Latin-American scene. This code guaranteed the slave certain rights as a person which could be defended in the courts of law. Manumission, under this system, was relatively easy, being granted for certain services or upon payment of a set price. And the freedmen were easily assimilated into the community, since their former status carried with it no stigma of inferiority; many rose to high office in in the state, army, or church. The Catholic Church, with its insistence upon baptism and the sanctity of the family, and its advocacy of manumission, helped increase the fluidity of the social system.

In the English-speaking countries, on the other hand, Dr. Tannenbaum points out, development was along the lines of a rigidly stratified society, in which manumission was discouraged by law, and miscegenation, though practiced, was frowned upon. The English common law, recognizing only freemen and chattels, destroyed the moral status of the slave: he was, in effect, under his master’s absolute control like any other piece of property. The Protestant churches showed themselves more or less indifferent to the spiritual life of the slaves, and did not emphasize the brotherhood of man, as did the Catholics to the south; thus, they did nothing to counteract the theory that the slave was an inferior being or to lighten his burden in any way.

Under such conditions, freedom could come only as a result of revolution. Slavery, in these areas, was a racial matter; the Negro, with whom it was identified, a physically and morally inferior being. As a result, assimilation has been a slow, painful process.

However, in spite of all seemingly absolute systems of values and prejudices, “physical proximity, slow cultural intertwining, the growth of a middle group that stands in experience and equipment between the lower and upper class, and the slow process of moral identification” will eventually break down the walls. All obstacles notwithstanding, Professor Tannenbaum feels, society is essentially dynamic, But this little volume has a pertinence beyond this discussion of the relative fluidity of two forms of society. Its greatest value lies in a question it raises only implicitly: the importance of the moral value of man. It is upon a belief in this value that Western civilization, as we know it, is based, and it is upon the continuation of this belief that the survival of Western culture depends. In a world in which racial theories still flourish, we would do well to ponder this question. It has the deepest meaning for us, not only domestically, but for the kind of world role that America is to play.

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