At the foundation of the Atlantic world lay an idol simple and monstrous: the human being as property. The plantation economy of the New World turned the living person into a thing, into a line in an inventory of goods alongside cattle and household utensils. Race served as the justification — if the African is declared inferior, then to own him is lawful, to inherit his children natural, and his labor belongs to the master for life. Whole systems of law, of theology, and of everyday morality were rebuilt so that this would not offend the eye. The idol demanded not only chains, but the untroubled conscience of the slaveholder.
The reckoning for this idol stretched across centuries and cost torrents of blood. Britain abolished slavery in its possessions by the act of 1833, freeing more than 800,000 people in the Caribbean and South Africa — but paying compensation not to the slaves but to the slaveholders, for their "lost property." In the United States the price proved even more terrible: the question of slavery split the nation and spilled over into the Civil War of 1861–1865, which took hundreds of thousands of lives. The idol did not let go without a ransom paid in blood.
Yet even formal abolition did not at once bring freedom. The captivity of slavery gave way to the captivity of segregation. In the United States the Jim Crow laws built a system of racial separation — the freed received a formal liberty but not equality: they were deprived of the vote, of education, of dignity, and driven into a new, legalized bondage. The shackles were struck from their hands, but not from society; the idol of property in human beings simply changed costume — became the idol of racial purity — and lived on.
And still the turning point was genuine. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, and the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in December 1865, outlawed slavery throughout the country. Behind this stood a mighty engine — Christian abolitionism: the conviction that before God there is neither slave nor free, that each person carries within an inalienable dignity. The return came to pass — but it remained unfinished. It is precisely this incompleteness, this memory of an unkept promise of equality, that would give birth in the twentieth century to the civil rights movement: a resurrection that had to be completed a full century later.