Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory
322
Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory
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Overview
In recent years, the culture wars have called into question the way America’s history of slavery is depicted in books, films, television programs, historical sites, and museums. In the first attempt to examine the historiography of slavery, this unique collection of essays looks at recent controversies that have played out in the public arena, with contributions by such noted historians as Ira Berlin, David W. Blight, and Gary B. Nash.
From the cancellation of the Library of Congress’s “Back of the Big House” slavery exhibit at the request of the institution’s African American employees, who found the visual images of slavery too distressing, to the public reaction to DNA findings confirming Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with his slave Sally Hemings, Slavery and Public History takes on contemporary reactions to the fundamental contradiction of American history—the existence of slavery in a country dedicated to freedom—and offers a bracing analysis of how Americans choose to remember the past, and how those choices influence our politics and culture.
“Americans seem perpetually surprised by slavery—its extent (North as well as South), its span (over half of our four centuries of Anglo settlement), and its continuing influence. The wide-ranging yet connected essays in [this book] will help us all to remember and understand.” —James W. Loewen, author of Sundown Towns
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781595587442 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | New Press, The |
| Publication date: | 07/19/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 322 |
| Sales rank: | 602,092 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Coming to Terms with Slavery in Twenty -First-Century America
Ira Berlin
American racial history is marked by unexpected twists and turns, and the latest bend in the road is no more surprising than most. Interest in African American slavery — an institution put to rest in a murderous civil war almost a century and a half ago — has reappeared in a new guise. The last years of the twentieth century and the initial years of the twenty-first have witnessed an extraordinary engagement with slavery, sparking a rare conversation on the American past — except, of course, it is not about the past. The intense engagement over the issue of slavery signals — as it did in the 1830s with the advent of radical abolitionism and in the 1960s with the struggle over civil rights — a search for social justice on the critical issue of race.
The new interest in slavery has been manifested in the enormous place of slavery in American popular culture as represented in movies (Glory, Amistad, and Beloved). TV documentaries (PBS's Africans in America, HBO's Unchained Memories, WNET's Slavery and the Making of America), radio shows (Remembering Slavery), monuments, indeed entire museums, along with hundreds of roadside markers and thousands of miles of freedom trails — and, of course, Web sites, CDs, and books. Slavery has been on the cover of Time and Newsweek, above the fold in the Washington Post, and the lead story in the "Week in Review" section of the Sunday New York Times. All of this marks the entry of slavery into American politics, as with arguments over apologies, the establishment of federal and state commissions on race, the filing of numerous lawsuits, and presidential visits to slave factories on the west coast of Africa. Slavery has sparked debates over flags and songs in some half dozen states, transformed a graveyard in New York and the site of the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia into contested terrain, and made the paternity of Sally Hemings's children a subject of national interest. The names of scores of schools and highways have become as much a matter of concern as the vexed matter of reparations. Without question, slavery has a greater presence than at any time since the end of the Civil War.
On one level, the reason for this is not too difficult to discern. Simply put, American history cannot be understood without slavery. Slavery shaped America's economy, politics, culture, and fundamental principles. For most of the nation's history, American society was one of slaveholders and slaves.
The American economy was founded upon the production of slave-grown crops, the great staples of tobacco, rice, sugar, and finally cotton, which slave owners sold on the international market to bring capital into the colonies and then the young Republic. That capital eventually funded the creation of an infrastructure upon which rests three centuries of American economic success. In 1860, the four million American slaves were conservatively valued at $3 billion. That sum was almost three times the value of the entire American manufacturing establishment or all the railroads in the United States, about seven times the net worth of all the banks, and some forty-eight times the expenditures of the federal government.
The great wealth slavery produced allowed slave owners to secure a central role in the establishment of the new federal government in 1789, as they quickly transformed their economic power into political power. Between the founding of the Republic and the Civil War, the majority of the presidents — from Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Jackson through Tyler, Polk, and Taylor — were slaveholders, and generally substantial ones. The same was true for the justices of the Supreme Court, where for most of the period between the ratification of the Constitution and the Civil War a slaveholding majority was ruled over by two successive slaveholding chief justices, John Marshall and Roger Taney. A similar pattern can be found in Congress, and it was the struggle for control of Congress between the slaveholding and nonslaveholding states around which antebellum politics revolved.
The power of the slave-owning class, represented by the predominance of slaveholders in the nation's leadership, gave it a large hand in shaping American culture and the values central to American society. It is no accident that a slaveholder penned the founding statement of American nationality and that freedom became central to the ideology of American nationhood. Men and women who drove slaves understood the meaning of chattel bondage, as most surely did the men and women who were in fact chattel. And if it is no accident that the slaveholder Thomas Jefferson wrote that "all men are created equal," then it was most certainly no accident that some of the greatest spokesmen for that ideal, from Richard Allen and Frederick Douglass through W.E.B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr., were former slaves or the descendants of slaves. The centrality of slavery in the American past is manifest.
It would be comforting, perhaps, to conclude that a recognition of slavery's importance has driven the American people to the history books. But there is more to it than that. There is also a recognition, often backhanded and indirect, sometimes subliminal or even subconscious, that the United States' largest, most pervasive social problem is founded on the institution of slavery. There is a general, if inchoate, understanding that any attempt to address the question of race in the present must also address slavery in the past. Slavery is ground zero of race relations. Thus, in the twenty-first century — as during the American Revolution of the 1770s, the Civil War of the 1860s, and the civil rights movement of the 1960s — the history of slavery mixes with the politics of slavery in ways that leave everyone, black and white, uncomfortable and often mystified as to why.
Perhaps that is because most Americans do not know what slavery was. Beyond the obvious, who were the slaves and what exactly did they experience? Who were the slaveholders, the white majority who did not own slaves, and the black men and women who were not slaves? Are the slaves of American history represented by Pharaoh Sheppard, who in 1800 was rewarded with freedom for informing on the slave rebel Gabriel? Are the descendants of Pharaoh Sheppard to be accorded the same consideration as Gabriel's descendants? Does Pharaoh Sheppard, once free, represent the free black experience, or might that better be appreciated in the person of the rebel Denmark Vesey? Should the descendants of the white boatman who assisted Gabriel in his failed escape be given a special dispensation from the burden of slavery's sordid history? If the evil of slavery was unambiguous, the lives of the men and women — both black and white — who lived through the era were as complicated as any.
But there is much to learn from those complications, not the least of which is the perplexing connection between slavery and race and the relation of both to the intractable problems of race and class in the twenty-first century. Nothing more enrages black and white Americans than the race-based policies that aggravate class inequities and the class-based policies that expose deep-seated racism. The award of an equal-opportunity scholarship to the daughter of a wealthy black cardiologist angers members of the white working class, just as working-class black men and women are infuriated by the supposedly color-blind school entrance exam that excludes people of color. Conflicts of this sort stem from a system that once elevated a few white slave owners into positions of extraordinary power. It continues to shape American society today.
The lines of class do not only cross those of race between white and black. Within an increasingly diverse America — where blacks are no longer the largest minority and where many whites are foreign-born — new complexities have arisen. Whereas once the descendants of white immigrants questioned what slavery had to do with them when their fathers or even grandfathers arrived in the United States after slavery had been abolished, now the same question is broached by newly arrived black men and women. "Barack Obama claims an African American heritage," declared Alan Keyes, the black Republican candidate for an Illinois Senate seat in 2004, about his equally dark-skinned Democratic opponent. But, he contends, "we are not from the same heritage. My ancestors toiled in slavery in this country. My consciousness, who I am as a person, has been shaped by my struggle, deeply emotional and deeply painful, with the reality of that heritage." In a similar if less publicized controversy in the District of Columbia, one longtime African American leader condemned his foreign-born if equally dark-skinned challengers, noting disdainfully that "they look like me, but they don't think like me."
All of which is to say that what is needed are not only new debates about slavery and race but also a new education — a short course in the historical meaning of chattel bondage and its many legacies. The simple truth is that most Americans know little about the three-hundred-year history of slavery in mainland North America with respect to peoples of African descent and almost nothing of its effect on the majority of white Americans.
Some Americans believe slavery was foisted upon unknowing and sometimes unwilling European settlers and unfortunately entwined itself around American institutions until it could be removed only by civil war. While it burdened white Americans, this basically benevolent institution tutored a savage people in the niceties of civilization. Such a view still has some adherents, perhaps more than we would like to admit, but it is on the wane and in some places totally discredited, as it should be.
It has been replaced by the view that slavery was an institution of suffocating oppression, so airtight that it allowed its victims little opportunity to function as full human beings. Slavery robbed Africans and their descendants of their culture and denied their language, religion, and family life, reducing them to infantilized ciphers. Slavery, in short, broke Africans and African Americans.
Recent studies of slavery suggest that neither view correctly represents the experience of enslaved people in the United States.
In January 1865, General William Tecumseh Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin S. Stanton met in Savannah to query an assemblage of former slaves and free people of color on precisely these subjects. The response of Garrison Frazier, a sixty-seven-year-old Baptist minister who served as spokesman for the group, offers about as good a working definition of chattel bondage as any and as clear an understanding of the aspirations of black people as can be found. "Slavery," declared Frazier, "is receiving by the irresistible power the work of another man, and not by his consent." Freedom, Frazier continued, "is taking us from the yoke of bondage, and placing us where we could reap the fruits of our own labor, take care of ourselves and assist the Government in maintaining our freedom."
Frazier's last remark — calculated to reassure the general and the secretary — spoke to the minister's appreciation of the political realities of the moment. But his definition of slavery — irresistible power to arrogate another's labor — drew on some three hundred years of experience in bondage in mainland North America. Slavery, of necessity, rested on force. It could only be sustained when slave owners — who, with reason, preferred the title "master" — enjoyed a monopoly on violence backed by the power of the state. Without irresistible power, slavery quickly collapsed — an event well understood by all those who came together at that historic meeting in Savannah.
Frazier also correctly emphasized the centrality of labor to the history of slavery. African slavery did not have its origins in a conspiracy to dishonor, shame, brutalize, or otherwise reduce black people on some perverse scale of humanity — although it did all of those at one time or another. The stench of slavery's moral rot cannot mask the design of American captivity: to commandeer the labor of the many to make a few rich and powerful. Slavery thus made class as it made race, and, in entwining the two processes, it mystified both.
No understanding of slavery can avoid these themes: violence, power, and the usurpation of labor for the purpose of aggrandizing a small minority. Slavery was about domination, and of necessity it rested on coercion. The murders, beatings, mutilations, and humiliations, both petty and great, were an essential, not incidental, part of the system. To be sure, one could dwell upon the wild, maniacal sadism of some frenzied slave owners who lashed, traumatized, raped, and killed their slaves; the record of such lurid tales is full. But perhaps it would be more instructive to underscore the cool, deliberate actions of, say, Robert "King" Carter, the largest slaveholder in colonial Virginia, who petitioned and received permission from the local court to lop the toes off his runaways; or William Byrd, the founder of one of America's great families, who forced an incontinent slave boy to drink a "pint of piss"; or Thomas Jefferson, who calmly reasoned that the greatest punishment he could inflict upon an incorrigible fugitive was to sell him away from his kin. Without question, the history of slavery is the story of victimization, brutalization, and exclusion; it is the story of the power of liberty, of a people victimized and brutalized.
But there is a second theme, for the history of slavery is not only that of victimization, brutalization, and exclusion. If slavery was violence and imposition, if it was death, slavery was also life. Former slaves did not surrender to the imposition, physical and psychological. They refused to be dehumanized by dehumanizing treatment. On the narrowest of grounds and in the most difficult of circumstances, they created and sustained life in the form of families, churches, and associations of all kinds. These organizations — often clandestine and fugitive, fragile and unrecognized by the larger society — became the site of new languages, aesthetics, and philosophies as expressed in story, music, dance, and cuisine. They produced leaders and ideas that continue to inform American life, so much so that it is impossible to imagine American culture without slavery's creative legacy.
What makes slavery so difficult for Americans, both black and white, to come to terms with is that slavery encompasses two conflicting ideas — both with equal validity and with equal truth, but with radically different implications. One says that slavery is one of the great crimes in human history; the other says that men and women dealt with the crime and survived it and even grew strong because of it. One says slavery is our great nightmare; the other says slavery left a valuable legacy. One says death, the other life.
Mastering that contradiction is difficult, but even when it is accomplished there is more to be done. The lives of slaves, like those of all men and women, changed over time and differed from place to place. Thus slavery was not one thing but many. Like every human being who ever lived, the slave was a product of his or her circumstances, only one part of which — to be sure, a significant part — was that he or she was owned. Knowing that a person was a slave does not tell us everything about him or her. It is the beginning of the story, not its end.
What were these circumstances that shaped slaves' lives? Ask most Americans and they would probably say three things: cotton, the deep South, and African Christianity. Like most such conventional wisdom, this is not wrong, as there was a moment — an important moment — when most slaves grew cotton, lived in the deep South, and embraced Christianity. But that moment — the years immediately prior to the American Civil War — was just a small fraction of slavery's history in the United States. For the most part, Americans have read the history of slavery backward, freezing slavery in its death throes. This perhaps is a tribute to the abolitionist movement and its ability to shape popular understandings of the history of slavery, but it is a disservice to the experience of the slaves and to those who try to come to terms with ground zero of American race relations.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Slavery and Public History"
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Copyright © 2006 James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton.
Excerpted by permission of The New Press.
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Table of Contents
ALSO BY JAMES OLIVER HORTON AND LOIS E. HORTON,
Title Page,
Introduction,
Chapter 1 - Coming to Terms with Slavery in Twenty -First-Century America,
Chapter 2 - If You Don't Tell It Like It Was, It Can Never Be as It Ought to Be,
Chapter 3 - Slavery in American History: An Uncomfortable National Dialogue,
Chapter 4 - The Last Great Taboo Subject: Exhibiting Slavery at the Library of Congress,
Chapter 5 - For Whom Will the Liberty Bell Toll? From Controversy to Cooperation,
Chapter 6 - Recovering (from) Slavery: Four Struggles to Tell the Truth,
Chapter 7 - Avoiding History: Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and the ...,
Chapter 8 - Southern Comfort Levels: Race, Heritage Tourism, and the Civil War ...,
Chapter 9 - "A Cosmic Threat": The National Park Service Addresses the Causes ...,
Chapter 10 - In Search of a Usable Past: Neo-Confederates and Black Confederates,
EPILOGUE: REFLECTIONS,
NOTES,
CONTRIBUTORS,
INDEX,
Copyright Page,
What People are Saying About This
Americans seem perpetually surprised by slavery—its extent (North as well as South), its span (over half of our four centuries of Anglo settlement), and its continuing influence. Slavery and Public History will help us all to remember and understand, so we can remove the vestiges of slavery that still affect us."—James W. Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong and Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism
An invigorating book, written by historians who have emerged from the archives to grapple with misleading and hurtful tales that have been part of our national tradition. In these vibrant accounts boring history becomes lively practice, and the American public shows that it can embrace new research, more complex understandings, and more honest interpretation. I'll never take the words on a historic marker for granted again."—Linda K. Kerber, author of No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship
The history and the continuing resonance of slavery is one of the last great unmentionables in public discourse. This grand and groundbreaking volume does much to illuminate the challenges, ambiguities, and risks faced by those who dare to interpret the 'peculiar institution' outside of the academy. As this work clearly demonstrates, public history is not for the faint of heart."—Lonnie G. Bunch, founding director, National Museum of African American History and Culture
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