The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation by David Brion Davis

the first chair in American Civilization at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris for the academic year 1980–81, I was fortunate as the project director in having Loueva F. Pflueger, an administrative assistant in the Yale Department of History, oversee the budget and work with Joan Binder, a full-time associate in research who managed the project in the United States while I was abroad. Ms. Pflueger and Ms. Binder also worked with Dr. Fiona E. Spiers, my full-time, highly experienced researcher in Britain. I could not be moregrateful to Joan Binder and Fiona Spiers for the outstanding work they did in gathering, sorting, and organizing a vast collection of largely primary source materials. While I was in Paris, Ms. Binder also did research on her own from Boston to Washington and supervised the work of quite a few student researchers, including Amy Dru Stanley and Donna Dennis. Dr. Spiers, whom I visited many times from Paris when I did research in Britain, examined primary sources in Dublin, London, Glasgow, Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester, Leeds, Hull, and Durham. When I returned to Yale to teach in the academic year 1981–82, Joan Binder presented me with enormous well-organized files of source material.
    There was increasingly a strong interconnection between this research, my writing, and my teaching. In both lecture courses and high-level new seminars, I distributed hundreds of pages of Xeroxed primary sources—often material that placed slavery within a broad context of antebellum American culture. Above all, I learned a great deal from seminar discussions and student papers, and was very pleased by the way many of my NEH-grant student researchers received personal intellectual benefits by basing some of their own papers on this same research. Unfortunately, given the passage of time I apologize that I cannot begin to thank by name everyone who contributed, including the students whom Joan Binder was able to recruit.
    It is crucial to understand that most of this book was written
after
the publication in 2006 of
Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World.
The path that led to
Inhuman Bondage
was related to my new and long professional relationship, beginning in 1994, with the philanthropists Richard Gilder and Lewis E. Lehrman. My founding of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, and the annual summer courses I taught for New York City high school teachers, sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, helped me create a new lecture course at Yale on the origins and significance of New World slavery. My work at the center, the summer courses, and the new Yale lecture course then led to my book
Inhuman Bondage.
    There is much in the acknowledgments of
Inhuman Bondage,
as in
Slavery and Human Progress,
which also applies to
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation.
Here I will only mention the international libraries listed in
Slavery and Human Progress.
And once again I express my eternal gratitude to Stanley L. Engerman, probably the world’s leading expert on comparative slavery, who carefully read all three of my books in manuscript, including this one, and penned in invaluable corrections and suggestions.
    Turning to the final phase of production of this volume, I am most grateful to Patricia Dallai, executive director of Yale’s Henry Koerner Center for Emeritus Faculty, for helping me receive an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Emeritus Fellowship, which helped pay for indispensable research assistance as I wrote seven new chapters of the book and revised those already completed. I am also very appreciative of the annual research fund of my Sterling Professorship that supplemented the Mellon grant. I am extremely grateful to the librarians at Yale who gave such effective help to my research assistants.
    I briefly benefited from the excellent help of Joseph Yannielli and Christopher Bonner, graduate