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

students at Yale. My immense thanks to Philipp Peter Ziesche, who as a graduate student had been a major contributor to my work on
Inhuman Bondage,
and for this volume continued to play a leading role tracking down materials and offering his own insights. Even after receiving a Ph.D., publishing his own book, and working full-time as a top editor of the Benjamin Franklin Papers project, he helped me update the older chapter on the Haitian Revolution. Immense thanks also go to Christopher Allison, now a doctoral student at Harvard, who for years not only found crucial sources for this project at every step of the way but had such an imaginative grasp of the material that he was able to help me plan and envision the arguments of many of the chapters.
    I am immensely grateful to the following historians for reading and commenting on parts of this book: Harold Brackman, Peter Hinks, David P. Geggus, David Blight, Michael G. Kammen, Seymour Drescher, Malick Ghachem, and Matt Spooner. As so often in the past, I am especially indebted to John Stauffer, Steven Mintz, Sean Wilentz, and William Casey King, former students and now distinguished historians and friends who provided essential comments and corrections on all or parts of the book.
    Since my work on this book began so long ago, I fear I have inevitably omitted the names of some of the people who gave me important help, an error for which I deeply apologize. It is also crucial to exempt everyone named from any blame for any errors, misconceptions, and omissions—shortcomings for which I take full responsibility.
    Finally, let me emphasize my indebtedness to my literary agent, Wendy Strothman, who in 2007 arranged a publishing agreement with Alfred A. Knopf and who continued to advise and assist me. My thanks to my superb editor at Knopf, Andrew Miller, who improved my prose, who continued to give me encouragement, and who in countless ways facilitated the publicationof this book. Thanks also to his able assistant, Mark Chiusano, who helped with countless details.
    Since the completion of this trilogy, at age eighty-six, in many ways marks the fulfillment of a career, it is appropriate to emphasize the
central
parts of a life that balance and compensate for a career. I am immensely grateful to such close personal friends as Howard and Sylvia Garland, Mal and Jane Rudner, and Sam and Judy Sprotzer because they enhance and deepen my life. When they express real interest in how my book is coming along, it is because we are deeply interested in one another’s lives, not because they are historians.
    I have dedicated this book to my sons Adam and Noah and their wonderful families because they and their future lives are far more important to me than any books I write. When I read to little Jonah or Tola, or hold baby Elena in my arms, I am forming a connection with a beloved family that will hopefully last long after my death. My profound love and interest in the lives of Adam and Noah and their families, and their love for me, forms part of a center that has given enormous meaning to my life.
    Throughout the past forty-four years my wonderful and beloved wife, Toni Hahn Davis, has helped create that balancing center, and I am above all indebted to her. She has not only read and improved much of my work, supported my efforts as a teacher and writer, but has really made possible my continuing career as a historian. Above all else, she has enriched my life in infinite ways.

Notes
INTRODUCTION
    1. Laurent Dubois,
Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Dubois,
Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006); Madison Smartt Bell,
Toussaint Louverture: A Biography
(New York: Pantheon, 2007); Julius S. Scott, “The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution” (Ph.D.