OAH Magazine of History
Volume 23, No 2
April 2009

Copyright ©
Organization of American Historians

Foreword

Teaching Slavery in Today's Classroom

Susan Eva O'Donovan

Twenty years ago, it would have been all but unthinkable to devote an entire issue of the OAH Magazine of History to antebellum slavery (1). Outside the cloistered walls of the academy, few Americans were giving much thought to slavery as an institution, never mind to the myriad and formative roles enslaved women and men played in the making of the nation. With the exception of a cohort of African American and Marxist scholars who for a half-century had been trying to draw attention to slaves and a rising generation of historians whose ideas had been dramatically refigured by a long civil rights struggle, the country generally remained under the spell of a narrative that had taken shape under Jim Crow. Civil War memorials made no mention of slavery; neither did the 1989 blockbuster, Glory, which slid uneasily past slavery by directing our gaze toward freedom (2). Times, however, have changed. Prompted by discoveries such as the African Burial Ground in New York City as well as new understandings about historical agentswho they were and where we might find themthe institution that was once dubbed and often dismissed as "peculiar" has become a topic of increasing public interest.

We can measure this new engagement in the proliferation of museums and exhibits that explicitly tackle the subject of slaves and slavery. In August 2004, for instance, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center opened in Cincinnati, Ohio. A year later, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers and visitors flocked to the New-York Historical Society, eager to learn about the role African Americansfree and slaveplayed in that city's early development (3). More recently, the Smithsonian Institution selected the site for a National Museum of African American History and Culture, and in Charleston, South Carolina, a city that received hundreds of thousands of slaves through the Atlantic and domestic trades, tourists can now tour the Old Slave Mart, reopened in late 2007 as a museum (4). Digital exhibits have also begun to proliferate as archivists sift through their collections, looking for and making accessible materials that illuminate the African American past. Many of these projects, including The President's HouseFreedom and Slavery in Making a New Nation, which commemorates George and Martha Washington's Philadelphia home, and the efforts made by the Mid-Atlantic Regional branch of the National Archives to draw attention to its collection of fugitive slave cases, place enslaved women and men at the center of the stories they tell (5).

These are not the only public venues in which the slave past has been making an appearance. Starting in 1994 with a summer institute sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and directed by David Brion Davis, college and high school teachers have been able to choose from a growing list of programs designed to convey the latest scholarship on slaves and slavery (6). Sponsored by local, state, and federal agencies as well as by nonprofit organizations like National History Day, programs that span anywhere from a few days to many weeks have been offered on slavery in Virginia, Alabama, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Rhode Island, and New York. They have investigated issues of health, law, labor, living conditions, culture, and family. A few have focused exclusively on the transatlantic trade, explicitly situating the African American past in a transnational context, and at least one has examined slavery as it unfolded on America's shifting frontiers (7). Testifying to the popularity of programs such as these, the Gilder Lehrman Institute plans to offer not one, but five, two-week institutes devoted to some aspect of slavery in 2009 (8). The National Endowment for the Humanities will offer a sixth (9).

Educators are increasingly keen to introduce slavery into their history curriculums. And as Dylan Penningroth observes in the opening passages of his essay on the evolution of scholarly understandings about slavery, public interest in the nation's slave past has spiked, now that we have a first lady whose family tree can be traced back to a South Carolina plantation. Michelle Obama's personal story is "a 'quintessentially American' story," Penningroth tells us. It is also, unfortunately, an often untold story, at least inside our classrooms. Despite the proliferation of summer institutes, despite Congress's 2008 apology for the "fundamental injustices" of slavery, and despite ongoing revelations about slavery's ties to businesses, banks, and Ivy League institutions, America's slave past remains a tricky topic to teach (10). Tangled up with contemporary social and political issues and distorted by years of literary and cinematic treatments (including some of Hollywood's most lucrative productions), slavery continues to loom as something of a pedagogical minefield, one that many teachers are unprepared to deal with and consequently wish to avoid (11).

Antebellum slavery can be especially difficult to teach. Whereas colonial slavery and most of the transatlantic trade took place beyond the physical and temporal boundaries of the nation, somewhat diluting their relevance to discussions about who and what we are today as a people and a polity, slavery as it existed between the Revolution and the December 1865 ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment is not as easy to dismiss. Slavery, in this period, Adam Rothman reminds us in his essay, was inextricably linked to the creation and expansion of the United States. Slavery's existence, its geography, its practices, and its morality informed debates over the introduction of new states, the governance of territories, and the deployment of federal resources. It was also a truly national phenomenon. Though generally practiced in those areas that lay south of the 36^o 30' parallel, slavery's influence routinely transcended geography. Lucy Larcom's poetic lament, which is featured in a teaching strategy developed by Rhode Island educator Marie Parys, testifies to that. As both Parys and Rothman explain, it was the quintessential slave-made product, cotton, that drove the development of New England's textile mills. Thus no matter how loathsome the factory girls of Lowell, Massachusetts, may have personally viewed the practice of human bondage, there was no getting around the fact that their livelihoods derived from slavery. Nor were the nation's textile barons alone in their reliance on slaves and the products slaves made. Insurance companies, merchant capitalists, and those who supplied the ships that transported slave-made commodities to northern and European markets also benefitted from human bondage (12). Indeed, it is fair to say that for the first 89 years of its existence, the United States was to all intents and purposes a Slave Country, a revelation that raises difficult questions about who we are as a country, and as a people (13).

To think and write and teach about slavery in the abstract, however, misses much of what and who made it an always dynamic, always evolving institution. People, including enslaved people, mattered. Indeed, antebellum slavery is fundamentally a human story, for it was King Cotton's most exploited retainers, a population that grew to nearly four million men, women, and children by the eve of secession, who produced the millions of pounds of cotton that New England's machinery annually turned into cloth. And what wrenching work it was, Calvin Schermerhorn explains. Fatigue and fear constituted the daily lot of America's enslaved people. Buffeted by market forces and slaveholders' whims, parents never knew from one day to the next when they might last see or speak with each other or a beloved child. Disease tore time and again through the nation's plantations, leaving a wake of dead and dying. Babies suffered from chronic malnutrition. Women (and men, too) were subject to rape. And always, blows fell on black people's backs, driving the human components of the nation's incipient capitalist system to greater and greater exertion. "We [had] dread constantly on our minds," one of slavery's survivors would recall later.

But dread and exploitation should not be reduced to a literal "social death" (14). America's enslaved were very much alive, Schermerhorn, Thavolia Glymph and Gretchen Catron remind us. No less agents of historical change than those who professed to own them, enslaved women and men played key roles in shaping the world in which they lived. They were what W. E. B. Du Bois described in 1935 as "ordinary human beings" (15). Penningroth observes that several decades passed before historians accepted and applied Du Bois's advice. But when we did, when we began to view the enslaved as individuals who laughed, loved, wept, and wonderedexperiences to which all of us, including our students, can relatea very different history opened up and unfolded: a story of profound oppression that is simultaneously a story of creativity, resilience, and above all, survival.

The "push back," if you will, came in myriad forms as enslaved women and men adamantly and occasionally with force of arms or fleet feet, refused to become what slave masters so badly wanted: cogs in a very large economic wheel. Insisting with every breath they drew that they were people, not property, individuals not things, America's enslaved women and men doggedly formed and reformed the communities, families, and friendships that the forces of bondage kept yanking apart. Rarely, however, were they able to replicate what they had known in the past. The new relations that emerged were forged on new ground, among new faces, and to meet new needs, changing slavery in small and sometimes large ways even as they struggled to survive it.

Keenly aware that their very existence often depended on knowing all they could about the people and places around them, especially as the nation's expansionist energies swept them out of old homes and into new, enslaved women and men kept careful track of their surroundings, building maps in their heads of the ground under their feet and of those who lived on it. For some, including the fugitives around whom Gretchen Catron developed a teaching strategy, those mental maps could be used to plot routes back to families or perhaps onwards to freedom. Others used this information to improve their immediate condition, learning perhaps from one another where to find the best place to fish or how to lay an effective trap. Some, however, used what they heard or saw to push back at slaveholders more directly. The most famous of these acts of "resistance" were, of course, the rebellions launched by Gabriel Prosser, Nat Turner, and, allegedly, Denmark Vesey. But as Thavolia Glymph explains, countless more were small, almost imperceptible actsbreaking tools, for instance, to slow the pace of laborthat under the right kind of conditions could not only open up breathing room but allow the enslaved the possibility to live more like people (16).

As enslaved people pushed, as they fought to advance their own interests as mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, and children, they inexorably forced slaveholders to respond. Thus while whips would continue to fall through and often beyond the legal end of slavery, and while much of slaveholders' response would initially take the form of restrictive law, the nation's four million slaves not only formed the subject of increasingly heated political debate, they helped shape, reshape, and eventually destroy the institution critics once dubbed "peculiar" (17). That is the lesson this issue is meant to help teachers convey. For when we as educators approach the problem of antebellum slavery as a problem faced by peopleDu Bois's ordinary human beingsone of the most complicated features of American history almost teaches itself. Moreover, in approaching an institution through those who composed it, we also teach the best practices of history. For in asking students to view this history from the vantage point of Charles Ball, Lucy Larcom, and Josiah Henson, we are teaching them how to think and read critically, how to tease out meaning, identify assumptions, weigh evidence, and arrive at their own conclusions. Most of all, in asking our students to view antebellum slavery from the perspective of those who lived it, we teach them how to understand the past on its terms and not their own. What better gift can we give to our country's youth, a population who, like us, must make their way in a complex and contested world.

Endnotes

1. The OAH Magazine of History did, however, devote nearly half of its Fall 1985 issue to slavery with the publication of a pair of essays exploring cinematic treatments of slaves and slavery; see William L. Van Deburg, "Do TV Slavery Dramas Reflect Recent Scholarship," and Robert Brent Toplin, "On the Set of Solomon Northup's Odyssey," OAH Magazine of History 1 (Fall 1985), 13-14, 17-19. Eighteen years would pass before the Magazine of History would return to the topic with the April 2003 publication of an issue on colonial slavery.
2. John A. Latscher, "OAH and the National Park Service," OAH Newsletter (Aug. 2000), <http://www.oah.org/pubs/nl/2000aug/latschar.html>. This is not to say that slavery was entirely absent from public discussion; it had been cropping up at intervals for decades, most notably upon the publication of William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner (New York: Random House, 1967), and the 1977 release of the Roots television miniseries adapted from Alex Haley's Roots (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976).
3. Edward Rothstein, "Slavery's Harsh History is Portrayed in Promised Land," New York Times, August 18, 2004, and "The Peculiar Institution as Lived in New York," New York Times, October 7, 2005; Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris, eds., Slavery in New York (New York: The New Press, 2005), 3-27.
4. Lynette Clemetson, "Smithsonian Picks Notable Spot for Its Museum of Black History," New York Times , January 31, 2006; Brian Hicks, "Old Slave Mart Museum will Reopen Wednesday," Charleston, South Carolina, The Post and Courier , October 30, 2007.
5. The President's House in Philadelphia, <http://www.ushistory.org/presidentshouse/index.htm>; National Archives and Records Administration: Mid Atlantic Region, <http://www.archives.gov/midatlantic/>.
6. David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 3-4.
7. See, for example, Virginia Historical Society, Past Teachers Institutes, <http://www.vahistorical.org/education/pastinstitutes.htm>; Penn State University, George and Ann Richards Civil War Center: For Teachers, <http://www.richardscenter.psu.edu/Programs/teachers.htm>; Brown University, Watson Institute for International Studies, "Watson's Choices Program Conducts Nationwide Outreach to High Schools on Slavery in the North," <http://www.watsoninstitute.org/news_detail.cfm?id=557>; Frontier Culture Museum: Teacher Institute Summer 2008,
   <http://www.frontiermuseum.org/education/teachers/institute.php>.
8. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History: Summer Seminars for Teachers, <http://www.gilderlehrman.org/teachers/seminars1.html>.
9. NEH: Summer Institutes for School Teachers Summer 2009, <http://www.neh.gov/projects/si-school.html>.
10. Darryl Fears, "House Issues Apology for Slavery," Washington Post , July 30, 2008. Brown University's ties to slavery are among the best documented. But as student researchers revealed last spring, Harvard too has its own slave history; see Brittany M. Llewellyn and Alexandra Perloff-Giles, "Slavery Ties Left Unexplored," Harvard Crimson 25 (April 2008).
11. Even today, four years after New York State formed a commission to promote the teaching of African American history (which would presumably include lessons on slaves and slavery), nothing has been done. Indeed, according to a recent article in the New York Times , the project has "become a modern-day symbol of bureaucratic inertia." See Winnie Hu, "4 Years After Black History Panel's Birth, Its Work is Still Deferred," New York Times , February 12, 2009. The nation's colleges and universities have not moved much faster. Not until shortly before his 2001 retirement, did Yale emeritus David Brion Davis offer that university's first undergraduate lecture course on New World slavery; see Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 4.
12. Sven Beckert, Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), chapter 4; Seth Rockman, "Slavery and Abolition along the Blackstone," in Landscape of Industry: An Industrial History of the Blackstone Valley (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, forthcoming 2009).
13. Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005); David Brion Davis bluntly declares that "far from being a marginal misfortune, African American slavery pulsated at the heart of the national economy and thus at the core of American political culture." See Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 175.
14. In an unpublished essay, Vincent Brown writes that it is "often forgotten that the concept of social death is a distillation from [Orlando] Patterson's breathtaking surveya theoretical abstraction" not meant to "describe the lived experiences of the enslaved." See Brown, "Social Death and Political Life in Some Recent Histories of Slavery," in possession of the author.
15. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (1962; repr., New York: Athenaeum Publishers, 1935), vii.
16. Historian Michael Johnson has convincingly cast doubt on the claim, long accepted by historians, that Denmark Vesey and fellow slaves were conspiring to stage a revolt in Charleston, South Carolina in 1822. See Michael P. Johnson, "Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators," William and Mary Quarterly 58 (Oct. 2001): 915-976; and Michael P. Johnson, "Reading Evidence," William and Mary Quarterly 59 (Jan. 2002): 193-202, in which Johnson effectively replies to his critics.
17. Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African American Slaves (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); Steven Hahn, Steven F. Miller, Susan E. O'Donovan, John C. Rodrigue, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867, ser. 3, vol. 1, Land & Labor, 1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), especially chapter 1.