Racism - A Short History - George M Fredrickson.pdf - WNLibrary

the northern states of the new United States of America
gradually abolished slavery. A combination of the economic
interests involved in the emergence of cotton as a major
export crop and the racial anxieties of whites in areas of
heavy black concentration prevented the South from following
suit and set the stage for the great American sectional
conflict of the mid–nineteenth century. The separation
of church and state decreed in the United States
Constitution, and eventually in those of all the states,
meant that the few Jews residing in the early American republic
would suffer less than their coreligionists in the
mother country and other European nations from the persistence
of legal and political disabilities.
The French Revolution seemed at first to go even further
than the American in extending democratic rights to
previously oppressed racial and ethnic groups. In the early
1790s, slavery was abolished throughout the French colonies.
The resistance of planters in Saint Domingue to the
decrees of the French National Assembly provoked the
slave revolution that gave birth to the world’s first independent
black republic. At the same time, the Jews of France
were emancipated from special taxes, restrictions on movement,
and political and social segregation, and they were
made citizens of the republic. But Napoleon’s rise to power
and his subsequent creation of an empire saw the reestablishment
of slavery in the remaining French colonies and
the passage of new laws discriminating against Jews. Great
Britain, which did not have a democratic revolution but did
have a potent humanitarian movement, moved decisively
against the slave trade in 1807 and became the first European
nation to abolish slavery on a permanent basis in 1833.
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