New Republic

It was a contingency that, by Davis’s reckoning, marked “the final stage of the Age of Emancipation,” and served as a reminder of alternative possibilities for the United States and the Atlantic world. New World slavery, Davis argues, was neither retrograde nor economically backward, nor was it headed for some type of “natural extinction”: it was profitable, productive, and expanding in Cuba and Brazil as well as the United States. Had the Civil War turned out differently, the Confederacy might have succeeded in establishing “at least a minor slaveholding empire” and slavery would surely have survived for decades to come. Instead, the Civil War–era emancipations liberated the largest number of slaves in the Americas, had a “profound influence” on freeing slaves elsewhere in the hemisphere, and left a powerful political legacy for radical reformers of all stripes and the ongoing fight against slavery in various parts of the world in the twentieth century. American emancipation and especially the Reconstruction Amendments ending slavery and establishing a national citizenship, Davis insists, “represent the climax and turning point of the Age of Emancipation,” an era that witnessed “probably the greatest landmark of willed moral progress in human history.”