An argument about Slave and Citizen

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TITLE: The Irony of the Moral Personality of the Enslaved

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). In many moments throughout his text, Tannenbaum argues that the main difference between the Anglo and Latin slave systems was the belief in a "moral personality" of the enslaved. In this essay, I will argue that his focus on the "moral personality" of the enslaved poses a problem in his argument. On the one hand, he repeatedly claims that Anglo-Americans denied African-American this moral personality, while the Latin slave systems granted her it. On the other hand, both the Anglo and Latin slave economies relied on the horrific middle-passage to transport the enslaved from African to the Americas. I will argue that the Latin American reliance on this cruelty, which Tannenbaum elaborates on in the first third of the text, contradicts his claim that the Latin system was less violent. In fact, it relied on extreme forms of violence even if the Latin American culture of enslavement could have been considered less violent for those that survived. In my essay, I will support this point by investigating Tannenbaum's summary of the middle passage, his discussion of "moral personality," and his emphasis on sexual relationships in New World slave economies.