DAVIS, David Brion

(b. 16 February 1927 in Denver, Colorado), cultural and intellectual historian best known for his studies of the changing idea of slavery in Western thought and the rise of the international antislavery movement.

The son of Clyde Brion Davis, a novelist and journalist, and Martha Wirt, a writer and painter, Davis graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth College in 1950. He then attended Harvard University, earning a master's degree in history in 1953 and a doctorate in history in 1956. He received additional master's degrees from Oxford University in 1969 and Yale University in 1970. In his distinguished career Davis taught briefly at his alma mater Dartmouth and for longer periods at Cornell and Yale Universities. At Cornell he was Ernest I. White Professor of History between 1963 and 1969. He moved to Yale in 1969, where he was appointed Farnham Professor of History in 1972. In 1978 Davis became the Sterling Professor of History at Yale.

A prolific and accomplished scholar, Davis published his first book, Homicide in American Fiction, 1798–1860: A Study in Social Values, in 1957. This volume emerged from his interest in the effort to abolish capital punishment during the first half of the nineteenth century. As Seymour Drescher, another eminent historian of slavery, argued, Davis logically adjusted his focus to examine the movement to abolish slavery. In 1966 Davis published The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1967, as well as the Anisfield-Wolf Award for "an outstanding work in the field of race relations," and the National Mass Media Brotherhood Award from the National Conference of Christians and Jews, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture garnered almost unalloyed praise. J. H. Plumb, for example, described the book as "one of the most scholarly and penetrating studies of slavery" and congratulated Davis for "his mastery not only of a vast source of material, but also of the highly complex, frequently contradictory factors that influenced opinion on slavery." Moses I. Finley echoed Plumb's assessment, characterizing The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture as an "immensely learned, readable, exiting, [and] disturbing … volume, one of the most important to have been published on the subject of slavery in modern times."

In his monumental study Davis not only sought to detail the religious, philosophical, and literary origins of antislavery thought but also to explain "the profound transformation in moral perception … that led a growing number of Europeans and Americans to see the full horror of a social evil to which mankind had been blind for centuries." Davis maintained that slavery had embodied a contradiction since antiquity. The "true" or "perfect" slave was the extension of the master's will. Yet, as Davis noted following Hegel's analysis, "the more perfect the slave … the more enslaved becomes the master." The identity of a master as master depends upon the slave's conscious recognition and acceptance of him as such. Hence, Davis concluded, in a profound and unsettling way, the master was psychologically dependent on the slave.

These tensions and contradictions in the nature of slavery had persisted for centuries. What historical circumstances had changed, Davis asked, to produce the transformation in moral consciousness that engendered a "widespread conviction that New World slavery symbolized all the forces that threatened the true destiny of man"? In looking beyond moral sentiments themselves for answers, Davis did not wish to diminish or discount the importance of moral outrage, arguing that "the emergence of an international antislavery opinion represented a momentous turning point in the evolution of man's moral perception." It was an evolution that at last required not merely opposition to slavery, but action taken to eradicate it

Researching and writing The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture during the turbulent 1960s, Davis never addressed himself directly to the ongoing civil rights crusade or the deepening racial animosity that was rending American society. But by showing that it had taken centuries to recognize and overcome the injustice of slavery, and that even after its abolition other forms of oppression remained, Davis offered an incisive, if oblique and subtle, commentary on his times. Of course American society remained troubled by the enduring legacy of slavery and the continued presence of racism and discrimination. Along with other historians of slavery, notably Eugene D. Genovese, Davis also affirmed rather more forthrightly that the advocates of justice and equality for blacks during the 1960s had benefited from the many heroic battles against slavery and racism that had taken place in the past.

To demonstrate how the moral aversion to slavery translated into political action against the practice, Davis wrote The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (1975). His thesis was as provocative as it was controversial. Davis argued that, whatever their moral convictions, the political and economic elite of Great Britain had embraced the antislavery cause to deflect attention from the dislocation, misery, and tyranny attendant upon the rise of industrial capitalism. However, although he acknowledged these ulterior motives, Davis did not suggest that they compromised or discredited the indictment of slavery. Davis's objective was not to depreciate the accomplishments of the antislavery vanguard by admitting that their deeds originated in complex, contradictory, and often anguished human circumstances—that is, in history.

In Slavery and Human Progress (1984) Davis explored the connections between the reality of slavery and the idea of progress, revealing that thinkers frequently applied a belief in progress to justify slavery, or at least to challenge the moral and political urgency of antislavery rhetoric. Acclaimed for its astute judgments and encyclopedic range, Slavery and Human Progress was also criticized for being "superficial" and lacking "a straight-forward discussion of the ideas of progress and slavery."

Davis's first marriage, which produced three children, ended in divorce in 1971. That same year he married Toni Hahn, an attorney, and they have two sons. In 2002 Davis was at work on an investigation of The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation, 1815–1890, augmenting an already remarkable body of work. In a career spanning more than forty years, Davis has helped make the study of slavery one of the most intellectually dynamic and theoretically sophisticated areas of historical inquiry.

There is no biography of Davis. Thomas Bender, ed., The Anti-Slavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (1992), provides the best overview of the historical issues and scholarly debates that have engaged Davis throughout most of his career, and also enables readers to assess Davis's contributions to them. Seymour Drescher, "The Antislavery Debate," History and Theory 32 (1993), is also extremely useful.

Mark G. Malvasi