Now, in his latest formidable synthesis, The Reckoning: From the Second Slavery to Abolition, 1776–1888, Blackburn recounts the long undoing of the “second slavery” in the United States, Cuba, and Brazil. Charting this history from the early 19th century to the American Civil War and the eventual abolition of slavery in Cuba and Brazil in the late 19th century, he examines how the last slave societies in the Americas finally got rid of enslavement through an arduous process that involved grassroots abolitionist activism as well as state intervention and warfare. While historians have given us accounts of the second slavery before, Blackburn is one of the first to provide us with a comprehensive narrative of what one may call the “second abolition.”
The idea of a “second slavery” in the 19th century comes from the work of the late historian Dale Tomich. By the early 19th century, slavery appeared to be mostly on its way out. The British Empire and the United States had both abolished the African slave trade in 1808. Meanwhile, the Northern states of the US and many of the new Latin American republics had passed gradual emancipation laws that freed the children of the enslaved. But slavery nonetheless resurged, both in the United States and outside of it, as Tomich demonstrated in his many books on the second slavery: The rise of slave-grown cotton in the American South, sugar in Cuba, and coffee in Brazil marked a new phase of slave labor in the Western Hemisphere, in which new and expansive plantation economies were tied to the rise of early capitalism and the world market.
To tell his version of this story, Blackburn begins his account of slavery in America, Brazil, and Cuba—“the ABC territories,” as he calls them—with the “first slavery” of the colonial era and the age of republican revolutions in the Americas rather than with the rise of the second slavery of the early 19th century. He discusses the rise and fall of colonial slavery in the ABC territories and the abolition of the African slave trade briefly in three introductory chapters. For Blackburn, the passing away of the first slavery, which was legal throughout the Americas, gave way to an expansive and profitable second slavery in the US South, Brazil, and Cuba. What made the slavery of the 19th century so different from its predecessors was that it “was haunted by its betrayal of the ideals of creole republicanism” that had seen slavery eradicated in much of the Americas. But what emerged, Blackburn notes, was something even more potent: “a turbo-charged and financialized version of servitude.”