The battle between narrative history and social scientific history, which has broken out again in the pages of the American Historical Review, is a new battle of ancients and moderns. Like many battles of the books, it is deeply foolish and tends to bring the reading of books into disrepute.

It is the old battle of the sciences against art, poetry, and the humanities, refought in history as analysis against narrative, model against story, number against word. The official battle was joined in the seventeenth century. Plato banished poets from the Republic, of course, but his notion that science and poetry are adversaries was not taken up in the ancient world. Plato himself wrote poetic prose, Lucretius a few centuries later presented an atomistic physics in poetry, and down to Galileo and beyond the dialogue served science as much as it served comedy and tragedy.

Historians have often portrayed American Indian populations as relatively homogeneous. Notorious in this regard is the genre of formulaic tribal histories, in which individuals or subgroups are scarcely seen and amorphous tribes merely react to U.S. policy directives and agents’ actions (Clifton 1979; Iverson 1984). When internal differences are noted, they tend to be lumped into dichotomized categories, with little attention given to their composition or to the historical processes from which they arose. Hence the literature is replete with references to traditionalists and progressives, Christians and pagans, and mixed bloods and full bloods, to name only a few. But history does not unfold in fixed oppositional stages, and dichotomizing these terms, even if they were employed by historical participants themselves, reveals little about social processes. They indicate, instead, a recognition that intratribal heterogeneity was increasing, perhaps in patterned ways (Clifton 1989).

After decades of relative residential stability, southern blacks began migrating in striking numbers following the turn of the twentieth century. Reconstruction and Redemption saw a fair amount of short-distance movement as black tenant farmers exchanged one landlord for another in search of favorable financial arrangements. Some blacks moved across state lines, generally toward the Southwest, in pursuit of King Cotton and the livelihood it promised. However, these population movements pale in comparison with the massive migration of southern blacks during the first half of this century.

These papers were among those presented at a conference entitled “The Atlantic Slave Trade: Who Gained and Who Lost?” held under the auspices of the Frederick Douglass Institute of the University of Rochester in October 1988. Social Science History has been publishing some of the papers from this conference, and the full set of papers will be published as a volume by Duke University Press.

The significance of the slave trade and slavery-related commerce—what I will call the slave(ry) trade—in contributing to the development of colonial America and the United States has been a persistent theme in the work of Afro-American scholars. Two scholars in particular should be cited in this regard. W. E. B. DuBois (1896: 27) pointed out that slave labor was not widely utilized because the climate and geography of New England precluded the extensive development of agriculture: “The significance of New England in the African slave-trade does not therefore lie in the fact that she early discountenanced the system of slavery and stopped importation; but rather in the fact that her citizens, being the traders of the New World, early took part in the carrying slave trade and furnished slaves to the other colonies.” DuBois’s account of the role of Massachusetts and of Rhode Island, which later became “the clearing house for the slave trade of other colonies,” was similar to what was popularized as the “triangular trade” thesis.

How might a discussion of the ending of the Atlantic slave trade in relation to the development of European racism illuminate the question of who gained and who lost? The question can be approached at three levels. The first concerns the degree to which the racial attitudes of Europeans were affected by the process of termination. The second would be how the people of Europe and of Afro-America were affected by the termination itself. The third and broadest aspect would be the long-term effects of that complex process. It seems to me that the answers become more speculative as the scope of potential impact broadens, as the discussion moves from a concern with attitudes and ideology to social conditions, as the geographical scope broadens, and as the temporal dimension to be considered expands to encompass the twentieth century. The first level, the relation of the processes of abolition to racism, is the primary focus of this paper; a few brief remarks on the second and third issues are reserved for the conclusion.