The Politics of Slavery

Front matter

Laura Brace

EDINBURGH

University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments

Shining a Light on Slavery?

Locke and Hutcheson: Indians, Vagabonds and Drones Empires of Property, Properties of Empire

Chapter 1 SHINING A LIGHT ON SLAVERY?

DEFINING SLAVERY

The problem of defining slavery as an absolute condition or a fixed status has been at the heart of the politics of slavery. Liberals have often striven to draw bright lines between slavery as a wrong or a logical impossibility, and liberal autonomy as a good and a right. For socialists, the concept of slavery is more flexible and the borderlands between slavery, servitude and exploitation are more mobile and contested. The idea of slavery, for them both, carries what Robin Blackburn calls a‘mythic potency’ that takes it beyond the facts and experience of history (Blackburn 1988, 269). This book is about that mythic potency, about the significance of the status of slavery as a lived experience and as an idea and a political concept. Its aim is to explore the injustice of slavery not just as the opposite of self-ownership and liberal autonomy, but also as the opposite of belonging and of free labour. Its particular focus is on chattel slavery, the possibility of defining a human being as an animate piece of property and then making that status hereditable. The chattel slave was unable to make a will, to bring formal criminal charges against others or to appear as a witness in most civil cases. A slave’s evidence was acceptable in court only if it had been extracted by torture. People who had been enslaved could be bought, sold, traded, leased, mortgaged, presented as a gift, pledged for a debt, included in a dowry or seized in a bankruptcy. What does this mean for our political theories that take the autonomous individual as both their starting point and their goal? We have to ask, who are these chattel slaves, and what made them enslavable? What happened to their status as persons and as humans when they were enslaved? What about the people who enslaved them and sought to convince themselves that it was possible (for others) to be both person and property?

Part of the answer to these questions lies in thinking about the definition of slavery, and what might be taken to be its constituent elements. The League of Nations definition began with ‘the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised’ (Ste Croix 1988, 19). As Blackburn points out, this definition does not specify that the owner must exercise’all’the powers of ownership over their slaves, but’some’ of the powers of ownership can be exercised over people such as employees, spouses or children, who are not defined as a slaves. It has to be‘the comprehensive extent of the property rights claimed by the slave owner’ which distinguishes slavery from other forms of ownership and exploitation (Blackburn 1988, 274). Even so, this approach makes clear that slavery has significant continuities with other forms of exploitation and servitude, and we need to pay attention to the power relations, the legal structures and institutions, and the political and historical contexts within which the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised. It also suggests that the idea of ownership, the property aspect of slavery, might not be enough to distinguish slavery from all other forms of dependency and involuntary labour.

Orlando Patterson’s seminal work on slavery, Slavery and Social Death, develops a conception of slavery as a ‘relation of domination’ rather than a category of legal thought (Patterson 1982, 335). His focus on slavery as a relation draws attention to the complexities of dependence, and to the personal and institutional dimensions of slavery as a system of parasitism. Patterson concludes that the slave ‘was natally alienated and condemned as a socially dead person, his existence having no legitimacy whatever’. On this view, the slave becomes the ideal human tool, ‘perfectly flexible, unattached, and deracinated’, existing only through the master. As the slaveholder fed off the slave to gain the satisfactions of power and honour, the slave lost ‘all claim to autonomous power, was degraded and reduced to a state of liminality’ (Patterson 1982, 337). Patterson’s account defines slavery as one of the most extreme forms of the relation of domination, and he draws a clear binary distinction between total power from the viewpoint of the master and total powerlessness from the viewpoint of the slave (Patterson 1982, 1). For Patterson, without the master the slave does not exist as an independent being, and instead becomes a dominated thing, an instrument for the master. Slavery, from this perspective, is not about the legal system or hard labour, but about this process of domination rooted in violence, force and powerlessness. Slavery, for Patterson, can be distinguished from other social relationships by its constituent elements of force, dishonour and permanence: ‘slavery is the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons’ (Patterson 1982, 13).

This has become the key definition of slavery in academic discourse and the subject of intense political debate. It is woven into this book at all sorts of levels, but in particular into the discussion of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, the meanings of slavery in Aristotle and Locke, and the complexities of the relation between slavery, race and agency. As Vincent Brown argues, Patterson’s definition ‘distilled a transhistorical characterization of slavery’, within which slaveholders annihilated people’s social existence by first extracting them from meaningful relations of personal status, belonging and memory, and then ‘incorporating these socially dead persons into the masters’ world’ (V. Brown 2009, 1233). This notion of social death at the core of Patterson’s definition is, as Brown argues, an abstraction that is ‘largely unproblematic as a matter of theory, or even law’ (V. Brown 2009, 1236). It does, however, carry a danger of ‘pathologizing slaves by allowing the condition of social death to stand for the experience of life in slavery’ (V. Brown 2009, 1236). People subjected to social death are almost infinitely vulnerable to the will of others (D. B. Davis 1986, 15), and slaves come to symbolise extreme dependency with no claims or obligations to others.

Patterson’s transhistorical characterisation of slavery is fundamentally about slavery as violence, a primal act of submission that comes out of a state of war, leaving the conqueror with the power of life or death over his vanquished foe. Should he choose to enslave rather than kill his victim, the slave is left living under a permanent death sentence, with his execution suspended but never unthinkable. This state of suspended animation, and the subjection to violence, is the core of Patterson’s understanding of slavery as domination. Slaves lack legitimacy, they are excommunicated persons, because the’slave is always conceived of as someone, or the descendant of someone, who should have died’ (Patterson 1991b, 10). As Alexander Weheliye argues, Patterson’s definition ‘emphasizes mortality at the cost of sociality’ (Weheliye 2014,

38). For many scholars, this conception of social death risks blotting out ‘the lines of flight, freedom dreams, practices of liberation, possibilities of other worlds’ of people coded as property and as totally powerless (Weheliye 2014, 2). James Sweet, for example, draws attention to the slivers and slender threads of belonging, shared language, culture and community that the African slaves used to build families out of nothing and to defy social death (Sweet 2013). The question here is how to respond to these ‘miniscule [sic] movements’ and ‘glimmers of hope’, how to give them substance and weight without denying the annihilation of the people who made and found them (Weheliye 2014, 12). This book aims to explore the relation of the slave to self-possession and to the category of the human through the canonical texts of Aristotle, Locke, Hegel, Kant, Wollstonecraft and Mill, and the slave narratives of Douglass, Prince and Jacobs. This illuminates the indebtedness of the ideas of freedom and the status of personhood to notions of property, possession and exchange, and confirms both freedom and slavery as founding narratives of the liberal subject (Hartman 1997).

Patterson’s focus on social death, violence and dishonour, on the relation of domination between master and slave, means that he characterises slavery as the comprehensive loss of belonging for the slave. It is, for him, all about powerlessness. There is, for Patterson, nothing in the nature of slavery that requires the slave to be a worker, and‘in a great many slaveholding societies masters were not interested in what their slaves produced’ (Patterson 1982, 11). Slaves could be used as workers, and their natal alienation made their exploitation particularly effective, but, for Patterson, ‘this does not in any way mean that slave necessarily implies worker’ (Patterson 1982, 99). This book takes a different approach, arguing that ideas about free and unfree labour as they developed in the abolition debates of the late eighteenth century were crucial in determining the status of personhood and of the liberal subject. In the debates over the immediate or gradual abolition of slavery, the questions of fitness for freedom and dehumanisation take centre stage. In the discussion of how to distinguish between servitude and slavery and whether the few could justifiably be enslaved for the good of the whole, the spaces between personhood, subpersonhood and humanity are opened up and made visible. There are many different ways to guarantee the unfreedom of marginalised and oppressed groups, and we need to pay attention to the connections and continuities between labour, morality and honour in thinking about the processes that transformed humanity into moral beings and left slaves on the outside. In thinking about slavery in social terms, rather than as a property relation, labour turns out to be a key vector in determining who counts as enslavable, worthless or abandoned, who can be subjected to savage, useless tortures, and who can achieve freedom as a unified moral self.

Labour is impossible to disentangle from the ‘volatile rapport between race and the human’ (Weheliye 2014, 8), and the connections between racialisation, labour and slavery are at the core of this book. The grounds for justifying slavery were constantly shifting, and the markers of dispossession, difference and inferiority were not always stable (Turley 2000, 29). Through the antislavery debates of the late eighteenth century, as the defenders of slavery set out their justifications for treating some persons as property by developing doctrines of black inferiority, the fluidity of race as a political concept becomes clear, and we can see how its’meaning is affected by the set of historical, social and political institutions through which race is understood’ (Sheth 2016, 94). As I have argued elsewhere, race formed an integral part of the social, political and ideological relations of power needed to underpin and sustain slavery (Brace 2004). This book explores some of the mechanics of this process by examining the colonists’ positioning of the Native Americans as unable to cross the threshold into a polite and civil world, by looking at how race and slavery were woven together in the late eighteenth century in imperialism, in Kant and Hegel, and in Haiti, and by looking at their continuing complicated entanglements in the prison industrial complex and in discourses of trafficking. As Falguni Sheth argues, racial meanings change over time and across national borders, and the political question always has to be about which identities are visible and which identities matter (Sheth 2016).

One of the key identities that matters in the context of slavery is gendered subjectivity, and the chapters in this book on women’s subjection and on the politics of trafficking explore the connections between unfree labour, empire and gender. The heroic and subordinate character of the slave, particularly the slave performing back-breaking work in the cotton fields, is often figured as a man, and this book explores the masculinity of ideas about violence, resistance and autonomy. It is more difficult to bring the figure of the female slave into narratives of modernity, self-possession and labour, and to consider how the story of transforming humanity into moral beings is gendered as well as racialised. Women’s access to freedom, wages and marriage was formed and given meaning by the culture, politics and history in which it was embedded, and it is important to register how these meanings were different for the white women who endured civil and legal death and engulfment, and the black women who lived and worked within the plantation household as slaves. None of these women fit into the mould of the autonomous, enlightened individual and one of the key themes of this book is the importance of not taking autonomy and personhood for granted and starting our political theories and our understandings of freedom and emancipation from there. The chapters on gender discuss the disavowal of rape and sexual subjection, and the agency and power of women living under conditions of oppressive freedom. The spaces between personhood, subpersonhood and humanity emerge as loopholes of retreat and assertions of the right to locomotion. The differential meanings of slavery for men and for women are made visible by focusing on the ‘collapsed geography’ of the household and the power relations within it (Glymph 2008). Women were not understood to be able to live as independent beings in a free, industrious society. They could not find their way to freedom through the world or through the recognition of others, and instead lived lives in constant contact with each other within the ‘unrestraint of home’ (Mill [1859] 1997, 153). The struggle to find a cogent sense of self was, and is, different, when women are forced to remain within oppressive terms of existence both within the home, and when they find themselves on the move. Their mobility is rendered suspect in ways that are highly gendered, and deeply damaging to their self-possession because they carry risks of vagrancy, poverty and indecency both in the nineteenth and the twenty-first centuries. Migrant women’s relations of power and powerlessness are imagined for them, and they are judged and blamed for their own predicaments. This brings us up against the limits of antislavery discourse, both in the past and in the present.

THE PASTS AND PRESENTS OF ANTISLAVERY DISCOURSE

‘The relation between pasts, presents, and futures’, David Scott (2004, 45) observes, ‘is a relation constituted in narrative.’ In trying to think about the pasts, presents and futures of slavery, this book rejects the idea of a clean break between past and present, old and new, and instead explores what of slavery survives in the institutions of race, gender and nation and some of the ways in which, as Paul Gilroy argues, slaveries provide a firm rebuke to the idea of history as progress (Gilroy 1993). The prevailing discourse of modern slavery tends to take the idea of rupture as its starting point, and it works hard to relegate racial chattel slavery to the past, to seal it off from the present and the future and to re-imagine the slavery of the present as differentin kind. Kevin Bales, the key advocate of this approach, argues that this new form of slavery is a product of the global economy, driven by the pursuit of profit and the vulnerability of the slaves. New slavery is global, temporary and non-racial in the sense that ethnic differences are supposed to be secondary to economic considerations. There is a glut of slaves on the market, and so they are now defined as cheap and disposable rather than as long-term investments. Human beings’, says Bales, ‘have become disposable tools for doing business, the same as a box of ballpoint pens’ (Jensen 2001). This is framed as a distinctively modern problem associated with globalisation. New slavery involves no legal ownership, high profits for the slaveholders, and a surplus of disposable slaves. ‘Old’ slavery is equated with the Southern US and the production of material goods (Quirk 2006). As Stephen Hopgood argues, there is‘underlying Bales’s account, an under-theorised narrative of modernity, where bonded Indian labourers live in the “dark ages”, where Mauritania is“almost medieval”’ (Hopgood 1999) and there is little space for thinking about the more complicated antecedents for brutal exploitation and subordination. The danger, as Orlando Patterson points out, is that the definition of new slavery conflates slavery’with forms of exploitation not considered slavery in most non-western societies or in any historically informed and conceptually rigorous use of the term’ (Patterson 2012).

This book seeks to challenge the old/new split at the heart of the definition of modern slavery, and in particular the narratives of modernity and race that lend it much of its power. What happens if instead of relegating racial chattel slavery to the past we think instead about the afterlives and legacies of’old’ slavery that continue to haunt and inform the present? Such a focus brings us to a very different set of political concerns, and to a very different vision of the past and of human agency, culture and endeavour within which people bear very little resemblance to ballpoint pens. This book asks what happens when we make slavery the hub of our analysis of political thought and our narratives of modernity rather than treating it as an unfortunate and embarrassing lapse from which we should turn away. The shift in perspective changes what the project of political theory is saying about key concepts such as freedom, democracy, equality and citizenship by revealing the domination and violence that are‘un-seeable in prevailing theoretical frames’ (Balfour 2016, 83-4). It also allows us to explore slavery as an idea and a political concept as well as an institution and a practice, and to understand its complex and contested relationship to social, economic and political relations, and to history. Slavery emerges as an integral part of colonialism, sovereignty and political thought and central to the meanings of class, gender and race. It remains part of the answer to the questions about which identities are visible, whose identity matters and who counts as human and as a person, as a subject and a citizen. Bringing slavery into history, into political thought and into the present troubles the narratives of progress and reminds us that change is not the same as emancipation, leaving us able to ask which problems and whose concerns are supposed to have been left to rest in the past (Balfour 2016, 81) and what is at stake in presumptions of political innocence and in claims to newness.

The discourse of the newness of new slavery is part of a story within which ‘the absence of slavery comes to be viewed as natural or normal, rather than remarkable’ (Quirk 2006, 585). Freedom appears as the innate human condition, an implicit longing within each individual and the inevitable outcome of liberal politics. This narrative makes it easy to lose sight of the distinction between freedom and unfreedom as an ongoing social struggle, within which ‘free status may be nothing more than a trench’, and the success of some in reaching this refuge ‘may merely reinforce the boundary between them and those who remain in the line of fire’ (Binder 1995, 2022-3). As Guyora Binder points out, no slave-holding class ever lost out in the process of disenslavement or manumission. The freeing of some individuals perpetuates the slavery of others, and’[e]ven sincerely motivated moral crusades to suppress slavery carry risks to freedom’ (Binder 1995, 2075). This book is concerned with these risks to freedom which continue to trouble modern abolitionism, and with the impossibility of reclaiming an innocent modernity that can disentangle freedom from slavery.

For some, the brutal dislocation of slavery means that it cannot be given a history, instead the erasure of collective memory and the transgenerational haunting creates a ‘nonhistory’, a problem-space within which the past has not yet emerged as history. Writing about Haiti, Carole Sweeney argues that slavery rests on a core of unrepresentability, a central absence, within which traces of violence, rupture and dislocation are “producing a present that is played out as repetition and recurrence, endlessly circling around a central lacuna of loss and dispossession’ (Sweeney 2007, 54). As a result, many engagements with the pasts of slavery are about haunting stories, tales and memories ‘that struggle to find a narrative’ or a chronology (Sweeney 2007, 56). At the same time, recent economic history has begun to adopt a broader conception of the slave-economy, opening up the possibility of new narratives that can bring the slave trade and slavery in the New World ‘properly back into British and European history’ (C. Hall 2014, 25) in ways that problematise whiteness as an identity that carried privilege and power. The delineation of black men and women as property had, Hall argues, as‘its counterpoint the naming of whiteness as a different kind of property — the property of freedom — access to public and private privileges, the possibility of controlling critical aspects of one’s own life rather than being the object of others’ domination’ (C. Hall 2014, 28). In bringing together the histories of both enslavers and enslaved, we can begin to unpick some of the ways in which the history of slavery has been assigned to black people as a kind of special property (Gilroy 1993). This is coupled with a set of parallel assumptions about political subjectivity that ‘substitute an integrative ideal of whiteness for more transformative conceptions of freedom’ (Balfour 2016, 81). Thinking through slavery and freedom together in the history of political thought and in narratives of modernity forces us to reconsider whose property the history of slavery is, and how it might be possible to forge more transformative conceptions of freedom. As Jared Sexton argues, following Grandin, the modern world owes its existence to slavery, and that is an ‘impossible debt’ (Sexton 2014, 11). The impossibility of that debt means that we find ourselves in the problem-space identified by Saidiya Hartman, between the no longer and the not yet. This book is an attempt to explore some of this space between old and new slaveries by thinking about the pasts, presents and futures of slavery as they are constituted in the ideas of Aristotle, Locke, Kant, Hegel, Wollstonecraft and Mill, asking how the past, present and future might emerge as history in political thought.

MODERN SLAVERY: KNOWING AND NOT-KNOWING

In 2000, Kevin Bales, founder of Free the Slaves, published and proceeded to publicise an estimate of 27 million slaves in the contemporary world (May 2013). In 2013, the Walk Free Foundation launched a report titled The Global Slavery Index, which enlarged this estimate to 29.8 million people, and their 2014 report puts the number at 35.8 million men, women and children. These numbers are largely arrived at by totting up estimates of people thought to fall into a series of other categories, such as bonded labour, forced labour, worst forms of child labour, early and forced marriage, and trafficking. These numbers are important for understanding the relationship between old and new slavery because they allow the new abolitionists to claim that there are more slaves in the world today than were shipped across the Atlantic as part of New World slavery. In terms of sheer, quantifiable, human suffering, ‘the quantum of misery’, they argue that new slavery wins out over old slavery. The rhetoric is all about how pervasive slavery is in its new globalised guise; it is an evil that is happening all around the world. As Theresa May put it in article for the Telegraph in 2013, it is ‘hidden in plain sight. It is walking our streets, supplying shops and supermarkets, working in fields, factories or nail bars, trapped in brothels or cowering behind the curtains in an ordinary street’ (May 2013). The key question, as Joel Quirk points out, has ‘gradually become which practices and institutions are sufficiently similar to legal slavery that they deserve to be legitimately classified as such’ (Quirk, 2006, 566).

The UN Working Group on Slavery endorses this “open-ended approach’, deeming the forced exploitation of labour, serious hardship and serious deprivations of liberty to be legitimately classified as slavery. All of these categories taken as proxies for slavery present their own problems of definition, and none of them straightforwardly constitutes what people like Bales define as modern slavery. Instead, the focus is on the idea of a threshold, looking for practices that are as Quirk puts it ‘sufficiently horrendous and/or analogous’ to be classified as slavery (Quirk 2006, 578). The problem of the parameters of the concept remains, and that ‘threshold’ is constantly being renegotiated. Many of these are overlapping categories, and there is no coherent rationale that links these disparate practices together (Quirk 2006, 567). We can, as Quirk points out,’quickly end up with a multifaceted continuum, where concepts such as trafficking, slavery, and servitude can be invoked interchangeably to highlight acute forms of suffering and exploitation’ (Quirk 2006, 577). The new slavery discourse is caught up in what Quirk has termed ‘classificatory conundrums’ about where to draw the line between a slave and a non-slave, and about how to distinguish between literal and rhetorical claims of slavery (Quirk 2006, 598). How should we understand the entanglements between the literal and the rhetorical in the writings of Aristotle, Locke and Hegel on the subject of slavery and enslavability? What did they know about acute forms of suffering and exploitation, and how did that knowledge affect what they understood freedom to mean and their constructions of subjectivity?

This question of knowing and not-knowing structures our understanding of slavery both in the past and in the present, and calls on us to consider the place of wilful or motivated ignorance in relation to what we choose to remember about slavery and its place in our histories of freedom, enlightenment and empire and what we choose to label and fight against as instances of modern slavery. This is connected to what Charles Mills has called ‘white ignorance’, which can take the form of individuals blocking certain truths or of the social suppression of pertinent knowledge, and is connected to’mainstream theorizing in political science that frames American sexism and racism as“anomalies”’, the exception rather than the norm (Mills 2007, 17). As Mills argues in his discussion of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, this is about the refusal of white people to see the black experience, their’systematic misperception’ that means that they see, in the words of Ellison’s protagonist, ‘only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination’, which captures very neatly a whole set of criticisms of modern slavery discourse (Mills 2007, 18).

The discourse of new slavery is all about uncovering, acknowledging and confronting the ‘scourge’ of modern slavery. This is presented as difficult to do because it is taken to be self-evident that, as Theresa May put it, it is‘scarcely credible that slavery can exist in our modern age’ (May 2013). It is something that we are supposed to assume has been consigned to history books, belonging in a different century. Written into the new slavery rhetoric is the idea that slavery belongs to a benighted past. This is linked to a trope within new slavery rhetoric that assumes that’we’ know about slavery in the past, but not about the hidden evil in our nail bars. This is a concept of slavery that relies on a particular interpretation of the world and is oriented towards a certain understanding, and which plays on the idea of not-knowing, on the supposed ignorance of its audience and their inability to see and bear witness. In her TED talk, Lisa Kristine says, ‘I felt so horrible and ashamed at my lack of knowledge. It burned a hole in my stomach’ (Kristine 2012). To fill this hole, she describes her journey into modern day slavery, which is‘all around us, but we just don’t see it’. For both May and Kristine, as self-styled new abolitionists, what they need to do is‘shine a light on slavery’ (Kristine 2012). Theresa May introduced her Modern Slavery Bill by quoting from William Wilberforce: ’[Y]ou may choose to look the other way but you can never again say that you did not know’ (May 2013). What they see when they look around, when they shine their lights, are their own myths, themselves and figments of their imagination. The concept of new Slavery is driving their perception of other people’s exploitation and oppression and giving the abolitionists a conceptual apparatus that allows them to engage in the ‘deliberate forgetting’ of ‘old’ slavery while accusing others of, and retrospectively blaming themselves for, failing to see what is all around them. In drawing on Wilberforce and the history of abolitionism in this way, May was calling on ‘feelgood history for whites’ (Mills 2007, 30) at the same time as inviting them to feel bad and ashamed of their’ignorance’.

This version of not-seeing is linked to presumptions of political innocence which are central to the new antislavery discourse, as they were to the original abolitionism of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Abhorrence of slavery and an inherent love of liberty are constructed as defining characteristics of what it means to be British (in particular), and it is this that renders the idea of slaves on ‘our’ soil’scarcely credible’ (May 2013). In this, the new abolitionists are drawing on a much older story of Enlightenment and abolition which is also about nation, and about gender. For Benezet and Sharp in the eighteenth century, slavery was tainting the ideals and corrupting the character of the nation. As

Srividhya Swaminathan argues, the debates over the slave trade were central in helping to define the national character, setting Britons apart from other Europeans and creating a place for British colonial identity (Swaminathan 2009, 13). The debates created what Swaminathan calls a common morality, a national code of conduct that was applicable both at home and abroad. It is this delineation that a Conservative Home Secretary could still draw upon in the twenty-first century, a shared perception of cultural identity, the idea that the air in England is too pure for slaves, and of the superiority of English liberty and citizenship, a constellation of humanity, nationality and spirituality, with the value of liberty vaunted as its foremost characteristic.’Let us’, said Elizabeth Coltman in 1824, referring to the British, and to British women in particular, ‘whose moral perceptions are unblended by interest or prejudice — whose charity is unwarped by partiality and hypocrisy’ be the first to liberate our own slaves (Coltman 1824, 19). The Europe of the abolitionists in the eighteenth century and the’West’ of the abolitionists today, is a place of generosity and bravery, remarkable for its humanity and justice. New abolitionism feeds into what Anita Rupprecht has called‘a long dominant discourse of humanitarian triumph’ (Rupprecht 2008, 266). While ‘slaves’ in India are understood by Bales to be ‘trapped by tradition’, in modern liberal democracies the chain of history has been broken by the legal abolition of slave trading and slavery in the nineteenth century. In this account, Europe entered history, and became the centre of the world, in the moment that it abolished slavery and moved out of the dark ages and into Enlightenment.