The New York Review of Books - USA (2022-04-07)

April 7, 2022 53

the figure is in the hundreds. In the vil-

lage of Novokaterinivka, where part of

the convoy met its end, I saw something

that will be seared into my memory for-

ever: a dead Ukrainian solider who had

been blasted out of his armored vehi-

cle was hanging over the electric lines

above the road.

A couple of days later the Ukraini-

ans, in full retreat, were forced to sign

a deal known as Minsk II, which could

have led to a peace settlement, but on

Putin’s terms. Russia never abided by

the deal, and the Ukrainians resisted it,

because although it would have brought

the breakaway regions in the Donbas

back under nominal Ukrainian rule, in

fact they wou ld have been control led by

Moscow. This in turn would have given

the Kremlin an indirect means of con-

trolling Ukraine’s government and, in

particular, of vetoing any of its moves

toward joining NATO and integrating

its economy with that of the EU. One

of the reasons Putin has gone to war

now is because Minsk II failed.

The ghost of Ilovaisk haunts Ukraine.

In the last few days I have seen many

videos on social media of columns of

destroyed Russian armor, and every

one of them resembles what I saw of the

Ilovaisk convoy. It makes me think that

Ukraine is wreaking a bloody revenge.

Konstantin said that the Russian

soldiers he had seen in Irpin were

young conscripts from the town of Uly-

anovsk. They were frightened, some

were drunk, and they were breaking

into shops to steal alcohol and food.

I heard this from others too, and it is

consistent with stories from all over

Russian- occupied Ukraine. The Rus-

sians appear to have anticipated a

lightning victory and now it has slipped

from their grasp, so they are stepping

up the violence against civilian areas,

while at the same time their troops are

running out of food and fuel. It is clear

that, for the moment at least, Russian

military supply chains are breaking

down.

“Whatever their original intentions,

it is clear they have failed,” says Mykola

Kapitonenko, a regional security spe-

cialist. “Now it seems they are not sure

what to do next.” After fourteen days

they had captured only a few small

towns and no major urban areas. Their

devastating attacks on the center of

Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city, might

have been revenge, not just for being

pushed out of the city center when

they tried to take it, but because they

expected that the Russian- speaking

population there would welcome them.

Maria Avdeeva, an analyst there who

has been taking videos of the ruins

close to her home, says she would not

be surprised if Putin believed his men

would be welcomed as liberators, be-

cause that is what he had been told, and

money that could have been allocated

for influencing opinion there had been

stolen. In any case, she said, everyone

had seen how miserable life was in the

Russian- controlled breakaway regions,

so no amount of money could persuade

people that welcoming the Russians

was a good idea.

Since the invasion began on Febru-

ary 24, the citizens of Kyiv have been

bracing for attack, but except for a very

few missiles the center of the capital

has remained unscathed. Every day

there are rumors of a major assault,

but as of the morning of March 9 it had

not come. The defense lines on every

main road into Kyiv are being built and

strengthened. Zelensky, the Jewish co-

median turned unlikely president, has

stunned his people and especially his

skeptics by growing overnight into an

inspirational wartime leader. Putin, by

contrast, comes across as isolated and

verging on insane, raging that Zelensky

is a drug- addled Nazi. For now, since

there are no independent media left in

Russia, many Russians believe him, but

it can only be a matter of time before

hundreds, or if you trust the Ukraini-

ans and now the CIA estimates, thou-

sands of coffins of young soldiers reveal

to Russians that something very differ-

ent is happening in Ukraine than what

they are being told.

In the short term, simply not losing

is winning for Ukraine, and that means

Ukrainian morale is soaring. We see

videos from small occupied towns of

residents demonstrating in front of

and defying Russian troops. It seems

extraordinary that the planners of

this war perhaps believed that, like in

2014 in Crimea and the Donbas, entire

parts of local governments would start

to serve them. It is unimaginable that

Putin will walk away from the catastro-

phe he has caused without something

he can claim as a victory. Thus far all

he has done is strengthen Ukrainian

resolve to resist, and even formerly

pro- Russian parties from whose ranks

he might have expected to draw collab-

orators for a puppet government have

rallied to the Ukrainian cause. Some

sort of deal to end the fighting looks

unlikely for now and so, says Kapi-

tonenko, “most probably we could be

facing a long conflict.”

The very first article I wrote about

Ukraine, ten years ago, was from Irpin.

I had gone there while reporting on the

2012 general election. In the article I

quoted an elderly woman complaining

about her pension, which seems pos-

itively quaint now. But I also quoted

Leonid Kozhara, a former ambassador

and foreign affairs specialist for the then

pro- Russia Party of the Regions. After

the election he became foreign minis-

ter, only to be ousted during the 2014

Maidan Revolution. In 2012 though, at

an elegant restaurant in Kyiv, finger-

ing the buttons on his jacket sleeve, he

told me, “Kazakhstan and Belarus are

like buttons on a sleeve,” but “for Rus-

sia, Ukraine is the sleeve and you can’t

walk around without your sleeve.” That

is why, he explained, his country had

such geopolitical importance.

It was a wonderful metaphor, but

who in their wildest imagination

could have foreseen that Russia’s ac-

tions a decade later would leave the

whole arm bleeding and as good as

amputated? Then again, who could

have foreseen that in 2020 the urbane

Kozhara would be arrested and tried

for murdering one of his oldest friends

during a quarrel after a six- hour drink-

ing binge in his kitchen? I am sure

there is another metaphor for Russian-

Ukrainian relations somewhere in that

story, even if it is not clear exactly what

it is. Q

—March 9, 2022

LETTERS

THE CONSTITUTION & THE

SLAVE TRADE

To the Editors:

In his review of Woody Holton’s Liberty Is

Sweet: The Hidden History of the American

Revolution [NYR, January 13], Sean Wi-

lentz presents an array of statistics about

the slave trade that require correction.

Professor Wilentz questions Holton’s claim

that nearly a million Africans were trans-

ported to the Americas between 1783 and

1792. A closer look suggests that Holton
      is a little cavalier on the numbers— the
      slavevoyages.org estimates for this period
      are 873,000. But Holton is mistaken in as-
      suming that the War of Independence had
      any effect on the overall slave trade. The
      massive Portuguese, British, French, and
      Spanish slave trades were growing before
      the War of Independence, and they re-
      sumed their growth to peak levels after


1793. The peak year for the transatlantic
      slave trade was 1829.
      One problem with Wilentz’s estimates is
      that he excludes arrivals to the US from the
      Caribbean. He states that “between 1786
      and 1795... an estimated 10,006 enslaved
      Africans disembarked in what had been
      British mainland North America.” That fig-
      ure is correct for the number who arrived
      here directly from Africa. However, it fails
      to include those who arrived in the same
      period via the intra- American slave trade.
      When we add in the 6,916 Africans arriv-
      ing indirectly, the total for that decade
      dramatically increases by a whopping 70
      percent.
      Suppose we widen our lens somewhat
      and look at the number of arrivals between
      1780 and 1808, the year the legal slave

trade ended. In that case, the total number

of enslaved Africans who arrived in the

United States is estimated to have been

116,277— 101,048 directly from Africa and

15,229 from other ports in the Americas,

which amounts to 25.4 percent of the total

of 457,348 enslaved Africans who arrived

in mainland North America over the entire

course of the legal slave trade.

The growth in the trade is apparent if

we look at the numbers of imports in the

early nineteenth century. Professor Wi-

lentz says that the Constitution permitted

“South Carolina to reopen its slave trade

in December 1803, which led to the arrival

of an estimated 63,862 enslaved Africans...

to the Carolinas and Georgia” before 1808.

(The slavevoyages.org estimate for this pe-

riod and region is slightly higher, 66,795:

64,512 directly from Africa and another

2,238 through the intra- American trade.)

1807 saw the historical peak of the slave

trade to North America when Charleston

received more enslaved people (28,892)

than the British Caribbean combined

(26,855). As this suggests, despite state and

federal legislation, American merchants

dramatically reconstituted their trans-

atlantic slave trade in the 1790s, with an

epicenter, first, in Rhode Island and then

Charleston.

Even with these important adjustments,

Professor Wilentz’s numbers also fail to

account for American participation on

US- flagged vessels from Africa to foreign

ports, an issue that has received insuffi-

cient attention. Adding those numbers, we

can see that American involvement in the

slave trade progressively increased to an

astonishing degree. For example, we can

add another 70,646 Africans caught up in

this traffic to the 116,277 who arrived in

the United States between 1780 and 1808.

Overall, Americans were responsible for

nearly 5 percent of the total transatlantic

slave trade between 1783 and 1808, not

the 2.4 percent that Wilentz claims. In

the last decade of the legal traffic, the US

was the third- largest slave trader in the

Atlantic world after the Portuguese and the

British.

The central issue of the review is whether

the Constitution “facilitated a postwar

boom in the forced transportation of Afri-

cans to the Americas.” Holton says it did;

Wilentz says it ultimately enabled aboli-

tion. The Constitution upheld the institu-

tion of slavery by protecting the rights of

slaveholders. But it also opened a venue

for Congress to end the transatlantic slave

trade. In Holton’s support, we have shown

that, indeed, there was an exponential

growth in enslaved Africans carried to the

postrevolutionary US. But that increase

also confirms Wilentz’s point on the impor-

tance of the decision to abolish the trade at

a time when ever more Africans were ar-

riving. Without such legislation, prices for

the enslaved would have remained low and

American merchants would have continued

importing captives to the US, and indeed to

the rest of the Americas.

David Eltis

Professor Emeritus

Emory University

University of British Columbia

Vancouver, British Columbia

Jorge Felipe- Gonzalez

Assistant Professor

Department of History

University of Texas at San Antonio

Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Alphonse Fletcher University Professor

Harvard University

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Sean Wilentz replies:

My thanks to Professors Eltis, Felipe-

Gonzalez, and Gates for clarifying the sta-

tistics on the intra- American slave trade. A

total of 16,922 enslaved Africans arrived in

the US between 1786 and 1795, not 10,006.

The letter writers’ figures and sources also

affirm my conclusions about the Constitu-

tion and the slave trade. This is the crucial

point, underscoring the scholarly refutation

of the doctrinaire nonsense about the sup-

posedly pro- slavery Revolution.

The letter writers reinforce my review in

concluding that Woody Holton on the slave

trade is “a little cavalier on the numbers.”

Holton’s effort to tie the Constitution to

the entire transatlantic slave trade for the

decade after 1783 is “highly deceptive,” as I

wrote, starting with the fact that the Consti-

tution only came into effect in 1788.

Unfortunately, some of the letter writ-

ers’ other observations are mistaken. For

instance, they have me holding Americans

responsible for just 2.4 percent of the en-

tire transatlantic slave trade from 1783 to

1808. My review, though, states something
      entirely different, that US- flagged vessels
      accounted for “about 2.4 percent” of the
      trade in slaves from Africa, but only “to the
      rest of the Americas,” and only between
      1783 and 1792.
      This muddle probably explains, in turn,
      their assertion that I fail to include the en-
      slaved people carried by “US- flagged ves-
      sels from Africa to foreign ports.” But the
      sentence they garble does exactly what they
      charge I don’t do.
      That error regrettably misrepresents my
      view of the US Atlantic slave trade. Be-
      tween 1780 and 1808, their figures show,
      the number of enslaved people sent directly
      from Africa to the US and those sent to
      foreign ports under the US flag— which

JudahLetters 52 _ 54 .indd 53 3 / 10 / 22 4 : 31 PM