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Hasan Kwame Jeffries: On December 4, 1947, Elmore Bolling, a 30-year-old Black businessman in Lowndes County, Alabama, was murdered in cold blood near his home. An NAACP report documenting the lynching described Bolling's body as having been "Riddled by shotgun and pistol shots." Clarke Luckie, one of Bolling's white neighbors admitted publicly to having orchestrated the murder, and justified his actions by claiming that Bolling had insulted his wife over the telephone. 

But NAACP investigators uncovered the truth behind the killing. They found that Bolling was simply, and I quote, "Too prosperous as a Negro farmer." 

The lynching of Elmore Bolling was neither the first nor the last that occurred in Lowndes County during the century after emancipation. Whites lynched Theo Calloway in 1888. Will Jones in 1914. The brother Will and Jesse Powell in 1917. 16-year-old Neal Guin in 1931. Jim "Buck" Seles in 1933. Organizer Jim Press Meriwether in 1935. And Roosevelt Thompson in 1942.

I discovered these lynchings while conducting research for my dissertation about the civil rights movement in Lowndes County, and I was struck by the fact that none of the white people who had committed these atrocities hid their identities. No one wore a mask when they killed Black people in Lowndes County. And no one went to jail. So I swore that I would not only identify in my dissertation, the victims of racial terror in Lowndes County so that people would have to say their names, but I would also identify their murderers, so their names would be said, too. It was a promise I kept. I also promised a local grassroots activist that I would send her a copy of the dissertation when I was done. I kept that promise, too. 

Several years after I finished the dissertation, I received an email from Mrs. Jo McCall, the daughter of Elmore Bolling, who wrote to thank me for my research. Apparently, copies of my dissertation had been floating around Lowndes County like some kind of underground mixtape. And a friend of hers who knew she was looking into the death of her father, shared my work with her. 

Mrs. McCall explained, she was only three years old when her father was murdered. And that her only memory of him was seeing him shot dead. Her family never spoke of the killing, so she grew up not knowing what had happened. In her retirement though, she decided to discover the truth. And when she read my dissertation, she reached out for a copy of the NAACP report that I had found. This led her on a journey of discovery that culminated in her family dedicating a plaque at the site of her father's murder that documents his death as well as his life. 

The Elmore Bolling marker is less than a half-hour's drive from the newly-unveiled National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, which is dedicated to the victims of racial terror in America. Both the marker and the memorial tell a crucial part of the story of Black life in the century after emancipation. The story of the persistence of racial terror. Indeed, for a century after the end of the Civil War, the pattern and practice of exploiting Black labor to generate white wealth, which had been at the heart of the institution of slavery, continued unabated, albeit in new forms. And violence, which had been the cornerstone of slavery, continued to be the cornerstone of these new forms of slavery such as sharecropping and convict-leasing. Even today, violence is at the heart of the most common forms of un-freedom, such as mass incarceration.

The story of American slavery does not end with the ratification of the 13th Amendment, but continues into the next century and beyond. This is because a slaveholder mentality persisted. Whites throughout the South continued to believe that they were entitled to free Black labor, and had no problem using violence to get their way.

So today, we speak the names of those who were the victims of the most extreme forms of white supremacy. In Lowndes County, they were Theo Calloway, Will Jones, Will and Jesse Powell, Neal Guin, Jim "Buck" Seles, Jim Press Meriwether, Roosevelt Thompson, and Elmore Bolling.

We speak their names so we never forget what happened to them. We speak their names so we know what happened to slavery once the war was over and the constitution was amended. And we speak their names so we understand the new forms of slavery that exist today.

I'm Hasan Kwame Jeffries, and this is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery, a special series from Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. This podcast provides a detailed look at how to teach important aspects of the history of American slavery. In each episode, we explore a different topic, walking you through historical concepts, raising questions for discussion, suggesting useful source material, and offering practical classroom exercises.

Talking about students about slavery can be emotional and complex. This podcast is a resource for navigating those challenges, so teachers and students can develop a deeper understanding of the history and legacy of American slavery.

Slavery didn't just disappear in 1865. It evolved into other economic and legal systems, the legacy of which can still be seen today. And the outright practice of slavery continues throughout the world on a far greater scale than one might imagine. In this episode, historian James Brewer Stewart uses the pre-emancipation history of American slavery to make sense of modern enslavement. I'll see you on the other side. Enjoy.

James Brewer Stewart: Hey, my name is Jim Stewart, and I'm a retired professor of history who has studied the problems of slavery for a very long time, like about 40 years. Mostly interested in how slavery systems get abolished, and the more I studied that subject, the more it began to disturb me that slavery systems sometimes transform themselves without necessarily becoming abolished.

That became a realization that I thought I would work on real hard after I retired a few years ago, so I founded an organization called Historians Against Slavery. So what Historians Against Slavery does is try and take historical knowledge, perspective, and bring it to bear so that we can see this big, contemporary problem in the United States and all around the world that's really hard to focus on, which is called contemporary slavery.

And contemporary slavery has a lot of different definitions to it. It has a lot of different systems or forms connected with it. It's very complicated. It doesn't look at all like the old plantation slavery that you have been spending a lot of time coming to terms with. It does on the other hand, especially in the United States, have a great deal to do with the legacies of plantation slavery, that is segregation, marginalization, and some would argue the legacies of that slavery show up today in the discussions about the school-to-prison pipeline, in the prison-industrial complex, in a lot of issues having to do with criminal justice and law enforcement that probably are very much on the minds of your students. You've done a great deal of work working with your students to develop all kinds of knowledge about slavery in the American past and its resonance in the 21st century. And my job is to invite you to capitalize on that knowledge, their knowledge, as much as you can to be able to wrap your arms and get your students more to wrap their arms around the fact that today, across the world, there are more enslaved people than there have been in any other time in human history. That's a pretty staggering statistic. That's debated, but it's a statistic that, for the past decade, has been rising in increments of 10 to 15 percent annually.

The best analogy that you can make between the external costs of slavery, what slavery does to a society, what slavery corrupts in society, what slavery wastes in society, what slavery poisons in society, is very, very much like thinking about living next to a chemical plant. Shortened life expectancies. Loss of talent pools that normally create productive and abundant societies. Inefficiency. Driving down of wages of free people.

The whole idea that enslavement finally makes life miserable for everybody, is just like living next to a hog-slaughtering plant, or drinking polluted water, or living in Flint. The analogy between environmental consequences of the corruption of nature in the environment and the analogy to slavery as a corruption of human relationships with health consequences, production consequences, investment consequences, day-to-day living consequences, law enforcement consequences. The whole net effect of enslavement on the rest of society is like an environmental disaster. Because you've done so much work on American slavery, you do really have an opportunity when you come to this topic, to engage your students as to why history matters. You know a lot about slavery in the past, what does that tell you about now? How can we begin to tie together all kinds of information to be able to understand the current dilemma that really is one of the most important human rights issues, and one of the most difficult to deal with in the entirety of our time.

So what I'm going to do today is, present a few reasons why studying this subject can engage your students in a valuable and deep and participatory way, and also to suggest a few methods for doing that. And let's start by taking probably what would be the simplest road into the problem of contemporary slavery, which is to simply ask the question: what does it look like? And there are many, many ways that people are enslaved today. I mean, there were lots of occupational diversity in the old slavery, too. There were skilled artisans. There were field hands. There were people who were cooks. There were people who were sewers. There were people whose skills were so highly valued that they were rented out to other people to be able to do high-end craftsmanship and things like that.

In modern slavery, there's a tremendously large diversity of job descriptions as well. I mean, you can think about—a lot of it is just plain old hand-stoop labor. The idea of having to dig in the dirt with primitive tools, and tending crops or mining things, or turning raw material into crude building materials like building bricks, or mining the various products that go into making cement. The idea that this is low-end brute force industrial labor that, maybe under other conditions if you were living in a high-tech modern industrial agricultural system, would be mechanized.

These are the tasks that enslaved people will do with picking crops, harvesting cacao, going into the rainforest and tearing down trees and getting rid of the ecology, chicken plucking. The whole business of working in assembly lines and animal disassembly plants. The whole idea of working long hours over a sewing machine. You can begin to get an idea of all these different forms of semi-skilled labor that are involved with doing the work that no one else wants to do, and that can be done far more cheaply if you take labor costs and drive them down to zero.

These are disposable people. When they've run out of what they can wring out of their hands and their muscles, they're gone. So there's a lot of just brute force labor of that kind. A second kind of enslavement that you can find in a number of different places is the kind of enslavement that is involved basically with sex. The same problems that create the vulnerability to this brute labor with your hands kind of slavery that I'm talking about, that is warfare, environmental displacement, natural disasters. The fact that well, right now one out of every three people in the world lives in a condition of food insecurity. That means that you're one meal away from being able to not to have enough calories to survive. There are lots of different forms that that takes that makes you vulnerable to being enslaved in the ways that I've described, or can make you desperate enough to volunteer to go into enslavement—and this happens a lot in Central Europe—volunteer yourself to go into sexual enslavement, sell yourself to somebody, become the agent of that particular master, or to sell your children this way. There is plenty of opportunity to envision conditions where people voluntarily say "Enslave me, or I die." That's pretty wicked.

There is also a form that has a lot to do with China and India called debt peonage or debt bondage. The idea is that 10 generations ago, the great family who lived on the hill lent a bunch of money to a family that lives way down in the gully. And it was promised that, until that interest and principal was paid on that loan, those lower people would work constantly for no pay until the loan was paid off to these higher people. Debt bondage in that way is a form of slavery that can be traced, since the principal of the loan is never paid off and the interest always compounds over a period of five and six generations. That's a traditional form of slavery that takes exception to everything else that I've said about now having to do with the kind of slavery that gives you no sense of community, no sense of family, no sense of tradition.

People who are in debt peonage in China and India have the ability to create a kind of communal bond that does seem very much like what African Americans were able to accomplish in slavery in the United States.

Another way that enslavement happens, and this is sort of the horror of parents across the United States and a lot of other places, is simply by the seduction of children through the internet, through captivity, through gradual addiction, through one drug after another to the point that you become homeless, streetless. There are a good number of sexual enslaved adolescents who have been kicked out of their household because of their sexual preference. Sex work is the way to be able to survive when there's not anything else that you can do. That vulnerability makes enslavement for sex work the easiest thing for exploiters who want to be in this kind of business to do.

There are a lot of people in the world who fit the technical and legal definitions of being enslaved, and you'll find them in all kinds of places. And a great deal of the enslavement that you'll find in the world is located in several very obvious places. One of the places where it's been traditionally embedded forever and ever and ever is in India. And in Southeast Asia. And in Pakistan. And in Mainland China.

Those are places that have long, long traditions of suppressing labor through a whole set of family hierarchies, clans. In India, it's castes, where certain people are innately interpreted as being the servants of other, stronger people. These are societies that have huge hierarchical bases, and so you'll find a tremendous amount, for example, of the contemporary enslavement of people in clothing factories for example. In brickyards. In mining. And in a lot of what happens in hotels and on the streets that has to do with sexual enslavement. That basically covers Southeast Asia, India, China and so forth.

Of our 46 million people that we're talking about all together, that is maybe 25 percent of that. But if you remember that China and India are also the big industrial, post-industrial engines of a global economy, and they're the places that are exporting to us a tremendous percentage of what's in everything from our cellphones to our tires, to the clothing that we're wearing, to a great deal of the food that we eat. One of the big places where slavery is very predominant in Southeast Asia and in China, is in shrimp farming. And the whole idea of going to sea with enslaved labor to catch fish. That's a very old form of slavery that you can find in lots of places in the world. But take your first chunk and that would be it.

A second place that you'll find a tremendous amount of enslavement is in different parts of Africa. Now, Africa, as you and I like to talk about, is really a western invention. Nobody who lived in that continent ever called themselves Africans until we did. There are a tremendous number of nations. If you talk to somebody from that continent, they're first of all, going to tell you that they're a Ghanaian, not an African, or they're going to tell you they're a Nigerian.

Nevertheless, there's a great deal of enslavement that goes on there in agriculture, in cacao plantations with the whole business of chocolate. The whole business of creating a lot of different sweets that come from sorghum, from a lot of other different agricultural products, that get built into stuff that we eat off the grocery shelf every day.

One of the biggest and most difficult parts of certain regions within Africa's enslavement is child soldiers. Now, this is some of the most horrible stuff that you can think of. These are children that are captured by rebel armies, religious fanatics, indoctrinated, drugged, abused, beaten, forced to kill other people, systematic rape, 'til finally you have the zombie that you want that can walk through the woods and systematically annihilate other people and burn villages.

You hear the flipside of all that with the occasional big headline about the disappearance of several hundred Nigerian girls from a school. Those are all people who've been turned into sex slaves. And there's a lot more going on in Africa than that. There's a good deal of mercantile or fishing slavery that takes place off the Horn of Africa, in Ethiopia. And you'll find the same kind of problems happening where you begin to see areas of—regions of the world deeply displaced by warfare. You've created an untold number of Middle Eastern people who are now enslaved for labor and sex in many different parts of the world. Consequence of what's happened to the Middle East since the US invasion of Iraq way back in 2003. Much of that labor has ended up in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Bahrain, and places like that are using enslaved labor to create their big cities, and to create all the wonderful amenities that go along with wealth.

To give you an example. New York University decided that they would build a campus in Qatar. They would have a Qatar campus where all the oil gazillionaires could send their kids. They began building a campus, and all of a sudden, labor investigators are coming back accusing New York University of employing slave labor. And they did. Did they know it? No. Did they try and get rid of it? Yeah. But what we're seeing then is another form of enforced labor that has to do with public works projects, has to do with private construction. Move further into Western Europe and into Eastern Europe, and you'll find—especially coming out of places like Romania, Bulgaria, Southeast Europe, Hungary, after the fall of the Soviet Union, and the tremendous amount of disruption that happened there, there's a tremendous out-migration of really impoverished peasants, women mostly. Some of whom are children who have been sold by their own parents into the sex trade in order to find temporary income for momentary survival.

I mean, we're getting down to things that are really raw, really crude, but the whole sex trade coming out of Southern Europe is really large, and it's mostly subsumed into Western Europe and into Italy. In the western hemisphere, in Brazil, one of the principal ways of being able to make steel is by making charcoal that's hot enough to be able to take metal and begin to heat it and bend it.

Making charcoal means chopping down trees, which means getting rid of rainforest, which means working with other forms of agricultural labor to strip the forest canopy away from the land, and create places where you can basically grow agricultural products at the expense of the ecology. The people out there with chainsaws doing that labor are usually overseen by guards with machine-guns.

The relationship between ecological devastation and enslavement, that's about as good an example as I can show you of that. And it gets you into a lot of other issues once you begin to start thinking about how different forms of enslavement. Labor enslavement of course has everything to do with the migration northward of displaced people from violent nations like Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala. Which is all involved with this whole question of what we see at the border and unaccompanied children and families fleeing, seeking refugee status. There's a tremendous amount of enslavement that goes on along the way, where people are peeled off and turned into exploited labors, sex slaves, so forth and so on.

In the United States, you have all these forms of slavery going on right now, working in jobs that you wouldn't want to have in hotels, in laundromats, in fields, in factories, in agricultural labor, stoop labor, find people picking strawberries or tomatoes in the Panhandle of Florida, where the Justice Department will intervene and say, "That's slavery." Who are they working for? They're working for somebody who's called a boss, but who's actually finally implicated in working for say, Burger King.

I think the best site to look for in the United States, if you want to look at it, is the Polaris Project, and to see what forms of slavery are reported. There is a hotline number, which I should have memorized, where anybody who sees something that looks suspicious about slavery can use to call through the Polaris Project number and notify local authorities to do investigations.

As a consequence of that, Polaris has developed a series of maps of the kinds of slavery cases that have been prosecuted, how many, and where. You can get a real good profile of what slavery in the United States looks like, both as a system of exploited industrial and agricultural labor and as sex slavery by looking in sources like that.

It's a big sprawling subject that makes it very hard for you to simply assign a book. Especially if you're teaching high school kids. Which immediately raises the question, how do you find about contemporary slavery? There are terrific books, but if I had one single author to suggest to you, it would be a guy named Kevin Bales, who's written a number of really important books for general audiences introducing the problem of slavery globally, locally, in relationship to its implication in environmental disasters, tragedies and warfare, all over the world. Good English. Easy for you to read, easy for me to read. He's a great educator, but you can't assign Kevin Bales's book to an 11th grader.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: This is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery. And I'm your host Hasan Kwame Jeffries. Now that we have a better sense of what contemporary slavery looks like, Dr. Stewart is going to talk about how students can use a comparative analysis of slavery then and now to better understand both the past and the world today. Once again, here's James Brewer Stewart.

James Brewer Stewart: Slavery past. Slavery present. How can the present and the past work together in order to be able to give us an idea of how we're grounded and how we shape the future? Can what we know about the past illuminate the present directly?

Think about it for just a minute, if you can. You've been studying a system that's called a system: plantation slavery. It's got a lot of different forms. It's got a lot of different connotations, but the idea that one way or another, this is or was a system. It was located in a series of very clear places, and it was run by people who were considered perfectly respectable human beings. They became presidents of the United States for example. They became members of Congress, they were leading clergymen. And the fact of the matter today is that slavery we're finding all around us, is for the large part for most of us—except if we're participating in it—invisible. Back then, it was easy to presume, with as much racism as you want to apply to the situation, that when you saw Black people you saw enslaved people, or people who had to prove that they were free.

Today, race matters, colors of skin matter, but there is no direct correspondence at all between being enslaved and being of any particular skin color. Visibility, invisibility. How do you make the invisible visible? The way to make the invisible visible is to do, well, basically a set of comparisons. And it's revealing to think about the day-to-day living conditions of enslaved people today, as opposed to the slavery that students have been studying. The secret to the old slavery from the standpoint of living conditions was the fact that in the United States, the enslaved population reproduced itself. And this is very unusual, because this didn't happen in other Africanized enslaved systems in places like Brazil and Cuba. Parents had children. Children had to be taken care of. Older people had to be looked after.

In other words, while there's no recognition of enslaved marriage, there's a deep recognition by the master class that there is such a thing as slave families, and that families can be systematically either rooted up if you can make money off them, or kept together if you can make money off them. The idea back then was that slavery was profitable because it involved reproduction. And you found people concentrated together having the opportunity to create enslaved communities. The idea therefore, is that there is a stable place for enslaved people to live for a long enough period of time to create relationships, to develop an informal economy, to develop their own expressions of spirituality, to create their own understanding of the relationship between work and society and nature and so forth. And by the time you're done, you've created the origins of African-American culture, which is one of the biggest, most creative, most thriving and dominant things that we have in the United States, period. Sorry, but that's just true.

And that all comes from the idea of the rootedness of the enslaved experience in the United States. Absolutely different for enslaved people today. Enslaved people are on the move, they're under the radar, they're moved from place to place. They go where the person who is trading them sells them to. They are set up in such a way as to be masqueraded to avoid authorities, except in places where enslaved prostitution is so obvious like Bangkok, where enslaved people are basically selling their bodies behind glass windows on the street.

For the most part, enslaved people live lives that are completely fractured, totally marginalized. Where there is no real strong sense of collective ability to resist. There's no way to be able to show in contemporary slavery, any form of mass upheaval against slavery, great slave insurrections like Nat Turner's or Gabriel Prosser's, because slavery is so highly fragmented and so—or agitated, so under the radar and so widely distributed.

And in that way, slavery is no respecter of skin color. The fact that African American people knew one another from the fact that they had African backgrounds, that they had become African Americans, that they were an ethnicity, that they were a new ethnicity. The first generation of enslaved people came to these shores seeing themselves as Africans. Two generations later, these are African Americans, who have a completely different collective orientation about how to deal with the world and with one another and with people who are going to oppress you.

There's no sense of that kind of ethnicity really at all, unless you take very clear exceptions like the caste system in India, where the untouchables know that they're untouchable. That's one you can set to aside. But for the most part, enslaved people live on the margin of starvation, on the margin of being completely overworked and isolated. The common problem in the United States are isolated enslaved people from one part of the world who are working as enslaved house servants, never getting out of the house, for some rich other person who comes from another country who's accustomed to having that kind of labor. So, it's a difference really between collaboration and isolation. The idea of being able to create a historical memory of your people, as opposed to not being able to do that.

I do have one suggestion for teachers so that there's at least a way to open an easy door to this complex set of comparisons between the slavery that your kids have been studying, and this awful variegated form of slavery that seems to be all kinds of different things that I'm introducing you to.

And I've suggested already that comparison is a really good but difficult thing to try. So try by offering a very simple example. You can use any element to do this, but I like to use dogs.

Okay. On the one hand, I have a Chihuahua sitting in my left hand inside of a teacup. At the meantime, I'm riding on the back of a Great Dane, okay? One I'm mounted on, the other one I'm carrying. You can't imagine a bigger set of contrast between animal organisms than a Chihuahua and a Great Dane. Got it? Good.

Okay. At the same time our mind naturally takes us to a point where we intuitively begin to understand that there is a common quality of dogness that these two very different organisms share. And you can really appreciate the Chihuahua's very small size, or the Great Dane's enormous capacity to take up space, by seeing the one through the lens of the other. Do you see what I mean? You appreciate each of them for their distinctive qualities much more if you understand that they have shared common qualities of dogness. They all have tails.

We do this sorting and comparing all the time. It's something that's inured in our minds in such a way that Plato and Aristotle used to argue about how we do it. Which was the reality? Was the reality in the distinctive features of the Chihuahua on the one hand and the Great Dane on the other? Or was the reality in the abstract essence of dogness between them? Aristotle thought the first, Plato the second. You can do the same thing with slavery systems.

The more you know about the power and detail and unity and comprehensiveness of slavery in one place—the plantation system that you've been studying, the better you're grounded in that, the more rapidly you're going to see the comparisons and contrasts with all those other systems. And you'll find at the same time that the essence of slavery is this brutalization of people, the commodification of bodies, the claim of one morally bankrupt person that he or she can control, not only the body, but the mind and the soul of someone else. Specifics, generalities.

So I think the idea of doing that kind of comparison, and starting with something very simple. You're trying to find how to see each representation of slavery for what it is by comparing it to another one. And the one you know best is the one you've been studying.

Let's just try family for one. You know some things about enslaved families in the South. Enslaved families in the South were vulnerable. Enslaved families in the South were nevertheless, to the extent that the master thought that it was in his interest, located in a certain place and capable of being able to be socially reproduced from one generation to the next, correct? Got that?

Okay. That first look seems like, and I'm going very slowly here, stability. Hop over here to a isolated young woman from Romania who is now sexually enslaved in a brothel someplace in Paris with five other younger women from many different parts of the world. The contrast between the two seem absolutely enormous, don't they? Skin color, common heritage, community, social reproduction from one generation to the other, on the one hand. Anonymity, marginalization, loss of culture, loss of linguistic ability. Remember, these people can't talk to each other because they all speak different languages. You begin to see both systems more clearly by seeing these huge colliding and contrasting differences, right? Are we clear so far?

Dig, dig, dig, dig deeper. The whole problem of sexual exploitation within slavery in the old South, first of all, it's constant. It's everywhere. And what is one of the greatest fears and debilities of enslaved families—and women particularly in the South? Having your children stolen from you? Being involved in a tremendous amount of forced sex?

The commentators at that time, from 1700s on into the 1900s, are talking over and over again about how this new mixed race of black and white is showing up in the slave society, and that's why it's important to have this one drop rule. Only one drop, supposedly, of African American blood makes you a slave. That's a huge testimony to sexual exploitation, to marginalization. It's done on the basis of intimacy. The planter lives next door. You sleep in the next room. The overseer gets drunk and comes into your cabin and takes your wife or your child. These same kind of vulnerability, of sexual exploitation, violence, criminality, can be found in the Paris brothel.

Looks different. Is different. The comparisons are important. The comparisons are absolutely necessary to understand. But at the same time, there is this essence of enslavement which involves the exploitation and violation constantly of bodies and souls. And in that sense, the brothel in Paris with five women all speaking different languages, all being exploited by anonymous men, is both profoundly different and even more profoundly the same as the situation of people living enslaved in the deep South before the Civil War.

So comparative analysis is really, really important. And the idea, remember, is to try to appreciate and see more clearly the differences between each of them from the other by doing this, while at the same time connecting them in one way or another.

There's a wonderful set of websites put out by the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati. I'll say that again, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, which is an institution, really important, that actually shows exhibits of both kinds of slavery. You step on one side of the aisle, you see a big set of representations about the African American system that you've been studying. Hop across the atrium to the other side of the aisle, and all of a sudden you see exhibits of a kind of slavery that looks so different from the one you just saw, that the question of building the bridge between them is what becomes really important. And it seems to me it's websites like that, particularly what you'll find on the National Underground Railroad Freedom site, that will allow you to start to make these comparisons.

So slavery past and slavery present becomes a way to take the knowledge that you have of the plantation system, the way it was enforced, the way people survived, the way that people in enslaved situations created culture, built institutions, were able to resist, and how they were treated in a variety of different context in the slave trade and so forth, and bring that to bear on questions of contemporary slavery today.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You are listening to historian James Brewer Stewart discuss contemporary slavery. This is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery, and I'm your host Hasan Kwame Jeffries. Do you have any questions about how to teach American slavery in your classroom? We want to hear from you, our listeners. In an upcoming episode, we are going to answer as many of your questions as possible. And if you have a story about teaching American slavery to your students, we'd love to hear that, too. You can reach us at lfjpodcasts@splcenter.org. Once again, here's Dr. Stewart.

James Brewer Stewart: The slavery that you've been studying is easy to document because it was always legal. Everything was bill-of-sale. Everything had an insurance policy. Everything had a bill of transfer. Everything had a law. Everything had a code. Slavery got into the census all over the place because it was property. When it's legal, it's easy to document, and when it's legal it's easy to define who is enslaved and who is not. If you have a price tag around your neck and somebody else has written on it, stamped on it "paid," you're enslaved.

Today, the problem is that slavery is completely illegal. It's a criminal enterprise. Theoretically, every country in the world, including North Korea, has a anti-slavery law that says, "No slavery here." Now, that doesn't mean those laws are enforced, but that does mean that every element of enslavement that you want to look at today, as opposed to the one that your students are more familiar with, is a system that operates outside the law. Is up for grabs. Can take any more of a number of different forms.

And probably the best example to give you of how different it all is, depending on legal and illegal, is the fact that in 1850 say, in Mississippi, a prime male field hand of 25 years of age, his value adjusted for inflation in today's dollars would be worth about a medium-price Lexus. Kevin Bales' first book about contemporary slavery is entitled Disposable People. A Lexus on the one hand, people you can just throw away and use up on the other hand.

In other words, when slavery is a legal system, it involves making an investment. When slavery is an illegal system, it involves a kind of exploitation with an unlimited labor supply that you really don't pay for, and that you have no real incentive to try and sustain. The average length of survival on the streets of Bangkok of an enslaved sex worker is approximately four years. By that time, either some socially-transmitted disease or just general abuse or whatever finds that person homeless, without income, and facing death. That's not what happened in the plantation South.

A way to be able to get students engaged is to just have them think about what terminology we use. How can slavery be defined? What does and does not today constitute actual enslavement? And this is very, very important. The idea of knowing what precisely slavery means today is a real problem. We use the term all the time. People can say that they're enslaved to tobacco, that they're enslaved to bad relationships, that they're enslaved to their smartphone. It's a metaphor that we use for being dependent on things. And the idea that it has to have legal standing in order to be able to prosecute people in court for having exploited, by buying and selling and trapping and coercing people so that they can't walk away, that that's a jail sentence, that that's a thing that gets you in trouble, that you've crossed a legal line because it's illegal. It's very important to have that definition really, really clear. And—and when slavery hides in the woodwork, that's a very hard thing to do. But I think it's important for people to ask questions like, "How does enslavement differ from other forms of exploitation?"

One of the ways that this all gets discussed is talking about human trafficking.

This is really, really crucial question. Human trafficking is not the same thing as slavery. If I'm a desperate person and I pay some criminal to stuff me in a boat so I can get across the Adriatic, he's exploiting me but he's not keeping me. Do you understand the difference? But human trafficking can become slavery. Or people can traffic in enslaved people, okay? I have an enslaved person. I will sell that person to you. Do you see how the term "trafficked" gets bent around in different ways? Sometimes it means slavery, sometimes it doesn't.

I think the real important thing to understand is the basis of the master-slave relationship in our time is based on nothing but pure force. You can't walk away. You have no choice but to be there. There is a great big body of law that's come out of the United Nations and a number of other places, protocols of one kind or another that define modern slavery as what it is even though it's illegal.

In other words, if—if it's illegal, the idea that you should be able not to be in it is the first thought that you have. The second thought that you have to have after that, is that what keeps you there is somebody who is, in one sense or another literally or figuratively, someone with the power to slice your throat. You don't walk away because you can't walk away. You stay there because you don't have any alternatives.

If you have an alternative, if somebody says, "Why don't you do something else?" And you're able to go home every night, cash your paycheck and come back on your own free will, then you're not enslaved, correct? I mean, if you're going to have a terrible job in a terrible place, say you're spending 16 hours a day in a chicken factory wringing chickens' necks or trying to pull feathers off them, that probably is about as bad a job as a human being can have. Is that the same thing as being enslaved if the person comes to work voluntarily every day? Now, that's a very difficult question to answer. It's a bad, bad, bad job, but you do have the freedom to leave.

Now, the person who's in that kind of situation could say back to you—and this is where it becomes very difficult—"If I leave this job, there's no other place for me to work. Either I accept these terribly low wages, because I am being paid. I take my paycheck and I walk away. I can be someplace else and report back to work, but from my point of view this is slavery anyway, because I have no other economic option." It's not like you have a gun pointed at your head or somebody about to slice your throat, but if you walk away you slice your own throat.

There are lots and lots of big problems and contradictions in what I've just said. And that's why the whole question of defining slavery as a legal crime, so that you can prosecute people in court and say, "All right, you're going away for 20 years because you did that, and that was slavery and we can prove it." You have to be able to have a body of law that proves that. You won't be able to prove that in the case that I gave you about the guy who's wringing chicken necks all day, goes home and chooses to come back because he has no other choice.

That will not be called slavery. That'll be called exploitation. That'll be called a tragedy. That'll be called a lot of awful things, but I don't think you could take the owner of that factory to court and prosecute him for slavery.

So precise terminology is really important.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: This is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery. I'm your host Hasan Kwame Jeffries. Next in our discussion of slavery today, we're going to shift our focus back to U.S. history to answer the question: what happened to the institution of slavery after the Civil War and emancipation? Did state-sanctioned slavery end in America after 1865? Spoiler alert: not exactly. Here's James Brewer Stewart.

James Brewer Stewart: Another way to begin to get students to see the, you know, have an opportunity to use history to engage the present is to address this problem of slavery not being abolished. Now this is a really hard one. One of the most important moments in the whole of the history of slavery that you've been studying is the moment of emancipation. Four million people. Four million people who represented an aggregate, the second largest capital investment in the entire U.S. economy. You know, it's really hard to think about four million people representing all that. The only thing that was more valuable than they were was land. There's a great periodization moment that happens when all of that owned labor becomes free.

Slavery is formally by the United States government abolished. That's what the 13th Amendment says. And for the people who went through that transformation, that periodization is tremendously important. It's also become a national article of faith that slavery in the United States was abolished and has been abolished forever ever since then. Now, that's not true, and that's where the complication comes. You say to yourself, "Slavery was abolished in 1865," and suddenly we are a free nation and free society. Well, we're not. Not only do we have the problem that we are contending with now, with thinking about 46 million people, many of them in the United States, but to take the question of slavery in the United States further, the fact of the matter is that slavery for African-Americans became a continuing experience after emancipation, and I'm sure you've heard about a lot of this.

One of the most important challenges facing abolitionists—and remember I'm much more a expert on people who are trying to abolish slavery and the history of those people than I am actually of slavery itself. And the biggest challenge that people who are abolishing systems of slavery or hoping to face, is the idea of what happens next? And there's a great deal of evidence to show that when systems of slavery get abolished, they reformulate themselves again, and the term that Douglas Blackmon uses, "Slavery by another name," is one thing you can call them.

The idea is, there's a very famous abolitionist whose biography I've written, and I just love this man so much, his name is Wendell Phillips, and he was a great orator and philosopher of abolition. And when the 13th Amendment was passed, he immediately remarked, "We have abolished the slave but the master remains." And that's true. All of those enslaved people were suddenly not slaves anymore, but who were they living right next to? Five and six generations of families that were accustomed to owning them. And they weren't going away. And they needed to put a crop in the ground. And they needed to get their lives back in order. And they didn't know how to do anything but grow cotton. And they didn't have any other source of labor except these same people who have just been emancipated.

What would you do under those conditions? You'd figure out as best you could, the closest thing to slavery that you could imagine, to get those people back on the plantation again and growing cotton and hoeing cotton for you. The initial push of emancipated people was for them to flee to the margins of the plantations and to start operating their own little farms, plump truck farms. Places where you could grow vegetables, places where you could begin to start to think about dairy industries, thinking about agricultural diversification, which is not the sort of thing that a plantation's really good at.

Planters had to stop that, so they did, by all kinds of uses of force and manipulations, and twistings of laws. After a while, you've got slavery by another name and a system called sharecropping. Now, sharecropping wasn't slavery but it was close. There was not slavery because the sharecropper, the person who is renting land for a very short period of time to grow cotton on for somebody who owns that land, gets to make a different deal every year and decide to move one place or another. He's not a slave.

But accompanying all that are systems of lynching, violence, disenfranchisement, stripping away of civil rights, all with the idea of creating a new labor regime that's going to approximate slavery as closely, as closely as it can be. Historians and political scientists have a name for this phenomenon, you can see it happening with the elimination of slavery systems all over the world. It's called labor substitution. Labor substitution means that you are trying to figure out what is the next available population to exploit, given the fact that the system that you've been using all this time has just been overturned.

In Cuba for example, when slavery ended, suddenly there is a tremendous influx of enslaved indigenous people from Mexico, and people from China that were suddenly growing sugar in Cuba right after emancipation. Boom. Boom. So this is all the consequences of slavery, and a good abolitionist is always trying to figure out how to keep labor substitution from working, how to make sure that the promise of freedom and equality is actually realized.

Well, when you look at the history of the American South, you'll find that from the moment of emancipation, the whole idea of creating tremendous legal disabilities against—and the actual re-enslavement of—African-Americans is everywhere, enforced by the same kind of violence that is commemorated in that big new lynching museum that everybody's talking so much about off in Alabama, which commemorates the loss of over 4,000 people to violent events that were community-sponsored and became big public celebrations all over the south: necktie parties. Are you free as a laborer when you know that around you are necktie parties? No. All this is slavery by another name, and moving forward and moving forward in time.

Is it possible to be enslaved without being owned by a master? Those are the kinds of questions that are asked over and over again about workers imprisoned for long periods of time who are working for less than 10 to 15 cents an hour and have no choice, creating goods and services for many different retail products and also for the Defense Department.

These are all questions that are open for debate. They're open for challenge. They allow students, it seems to me, to really talk about a lot of different things that are going on in their world, while at the same time having a historical basis of knowing what slavery was and was not.

Historians who are interested in the origins of today's modern prison-industrial complex, note what I've been talking about very seriously, and then begin to ask the question: Why is sentencing of people to long terms and maximum prison sentences so heavily disproportionately weighted towards dark-skinned people?

What is that makes it after those people end up in prisons, many of which are privatized prisons that are run by private corporations for profit, just like a plantation was, using free labor—labor that is free in the sense that it's not paid, not in the sense that it's liberated? Using no cost labor to produce billions and billions of dollars of goods for the retail market. For the military. The whole relationship between privatized prisons, unbalanced sentencing, differential sentences, and the prison-industrial complex and the school-to-prison pipeline, is all seen by any good abolitionist as the next set of adjustments being made in labor substitution, based at the same time on a tremendous animosity and hatred of dark-skinned people.

Is the prison-industrial complex slavery? That's a debatable point. Is the prison-industrial complex indebted to slavery for its existence is not debatable. In the 13th Amendment, there was what's called the exception clause, which said everybody who has been enslaved is free, except for people in prisons, people who've committed crimes. Now, you can see the logic of not wanting to free prisoners all over the United States who are kept in bondage for having committed crimes. But the fact of the matter is that that law was then bent by those same old guys who used to enslave people before 1865 to re-enslave them again after 1865 in prison convict labor, in debt peonage, in all kinds of different forms of slavery by another name. Some people call this neo-slavery, but you can see how it complicates 1865 for people. So slavery did end in 1865 and did not end in 1865. Yes and no. But. And. Well, it did. And it didn't. And history's that way.

And the idea of having your students hold in their heads the complications of what history actually challenges us to think about, is I think really an important moment of opportunity for teachers to be able to get students to start thinking about what narrative means. Does history come to a satisfying conclusion? Do things ever get settled? It's a challenge. It's not a memorization. And that's obviously what you're trying to show your students, is the real fun and the real gain in studying the past to begin with.

But you can cut through a whole lot of the confusion of when slavery was abolished, and if it was abolished, and what emancipation meant by picking up one single book. And it's a book called Slavery by Another Name. The author of that book won the Pulitzer Prize back a few years ago. His name is Douglas Blackmon. B-L-A-C-K-M-O-N. The nice thing about that book is that it's got some tremendous pictures, photos, that really do document post-emancipation slavery in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Virginia and so forth. The other thing that's important about that book is that Doug was able to parlay it into a film, which you can pick up off the internet, which is also called Slavery by Another Name. He has a website that also works with that.

Another way to be able to get into this by looking at one specific area, is to watch how a plantation in Louisiana [NB: Parchman was actually in Mississippi] called Parchman plantation that the Parchman family owned with a lot of slaves on it back before the Civil War, was immediately turned into a huge cotton field plantation prison after emancipation. It's called Parchman. The Parchman Prison. And the author of a book that writes about this is David Oshinsky, and the title of his book is Worse Than Slavery. So you have Slavery by Another Name, you have Worse Than Slavery, showing you the historical plantation slavery afterward roots of today's prison-industrial complex. And then I think if you want to really pull it all together, take one more book, take a long run at it, that would be Slavery By Another Name, [NB: title is incorrect. The book is actually titled The New Jim Crow], Michelle Alexander's book. Look it up, because there are websites that come off of it as well, and that takes the more recent origins of the prison-industrial complex.

So I've given you a few points to think about: the value of contemporary analysis, the need to define precise terminology, the vale of criticizing and accurately analyzing historical periodization, when slavery ended, 1865. So, being able to see how slavery continues, how slavery is manifested in your own life, gives you again a question of learning from history and asking the provocative question, "Do you care to do something about this?" It's not a political question that has to do with voting Republican or Democrat. It doesn't have anything to do with getting in trouble with the school board. It has everything to do with teaching social responsibility. And that, it seems to me, is also a tremendously powerful way, given students' knowledge of slavery past and present, to connect the local with the global.

Ask your students to go to a website called Slavery Footprint. This is where things get really hard and very personal, and I think good teaching can really happen. Slavery Footprint is a big computer-driven database that will allow you to input your own retail preferences for all kinds of things: shoes, shirts, jeans, food, cars, computers, whatever. And then once all that's put in there, what spits back is a profile of you and how much of what you consume is actually produced by slave labor living in the world today. The idea that slavery implicates us directly now through consumerism is, first of all, one way to be able to break down the narrative that slavery ended in 1865. It's another way to make it very personal, but in a way that is challenging rather than intimidating. For students to begin to see how the problem of slavery lives through history and comes into the present.

One of the best examples that I can think of for illustrating this point is chocolate. There's a wonderful, about 45-minute video called The Dark Side Of Chocolate, which is all about how cacao in West Africa is cultivated by enslaved children on cacao plantations and then slipped out to places like Nestle's, Cadbury, to be turned into all the different chocolates that we've become addicted to, and show up in your Snickers bar, your Mars bar, so forth and so on. And the whole question of how consumerism supports or works against slavery is really embodied in what chocolate bar you pick. Now, all of this is information that's available because their—the big industrial corporations around the world that are concerned about their reputations are, in a variety of different ways, trying to what they would say, "clean up their supply chains," by trying to keep enslaved labor out of the raw materials that create the finished goods that go into the parts that are assembled, or the food that you eat, and so forth and so on.

I'm very aware that I've been piling guilt on you guys all this time thinking about, "What do I do when Jim Stewart comes along and tells me about all these terrible dilemmas in the world, some of which I'm implicated indirectly, by the goods I consume, by the clothes that I wear? How do I as one lonely, solitary person deal with all this suffering and what's my moral responsibility if I have any at all? Or should I just feel crushed by this, and pessimistic, and should I just go back to seeing what PlayStation has to offer?"

The awful and beautiful fact about contemporary slavery is that there's contemporary anti-slavery. And that's the actual business that I'm in. Historians Against Slavery is a big group of scholars, teachers, students, activists, all together figuring out what to do about this problem. And the problem's different in every place, in every city, but there are certain common things you can do together. First thing that you can do that's really easy, is to educate other people. And educate them in such a way that you are teaching them to do something about it, rather than doing what I've been doing, which is just make you feel bad.

There are, for example on my college campus, there is an anti-slavery group which could just as easily be on your high school campus, that holds a Halloween party. And their Halloween party is something they prepare for by letting people know all kinds of things about chocolate, that subject I was talking about before. What kinds of gifts are you going to put in somebody's Halloween bag? What sort of chocolate are you going to eat on your own? Wouldn't it be good to show the film? Oh, there are these people that are boycotting Nestle's? Hmm, that's interesting.

Once you begin to dive into the problem of slavery, you get to what I think is the real miracle of anti-slavery. I started in this business when I was 72 years old when I retired from my college career, and took all the writing that I'd been doing, all those decades, about the problem of slavery and how to abolish it historically, and tried to put it in a really contemporary idiom.

You can see how I've done this by looking up HistoriansAgainstSlavery.org on the web. You'll find a lot of things there. But more important from your point of view, you'll find out that there are groups of people all over the place. They're doing fundraisers. They're doing education projects that are raising awareness of all kinds of different issues in local communities, that are connecting problems of slavery to problems of hunger, urban marginalization, high school dropouts, drug problems. Once you begin to get involved in anti-slavery, there's so much opportunity to be able to pick the thing you're good at. All of us are good at different things. Some people are very, very good at using their hands and creating art. Other people are really good at analyzing problems by using numbers and computers. Other people are, you know, on and on you can go. And the nice and really wonderful thing about antislavery, is that it's an open system where you bring what you're good at.

People love volunteers, but they love volunteers who are able to contribute something. Contributing something means not reaching out to say, "Oh, my God! What am I going to do about 700,000 debt peonage people suffering in India?" The question is instead, "What am I going to do right here?"

I think about Frederick Douglass all the time, the great African-American abolitionist, who fought so hard against slavery in the United States before the Civil War, and so hard for racial equality afterwards. While he was doing that, he knew perfectly well that there was this system of slavery that was much, much bigger than the one he was fighting against that lived in Brazil. He understood that he had certain limits about what he could do, and that the United States was his ball of wax. And more important, when you look at his life more carefully, the city of Syracuse, New York, was his ball of wax. He lived in Syracuse. A lot of other African-American activists lived alongside of him. They created as strong and vibrant a free black anti-slavery community as they could put their hands on. They tried to create for themselves, and they did succeed to a certain extent, an anti-slavery city.

The idea is that your reach and your grasp should be the same, and we're all small people and we all have short arms. But at the same time, we have strong fingers connected to those arms, and we can reach around, and grasp opportunity and grasp each other in a way that we can work together. So I think the real answer to the problem of feeling immobilized is to realize that in—in all areas of life we are really small people and we are immobilized unless we're working on a scale that's the same size as us. And fortunately, that scale is available to each and all of us. And that's what I'd recommend.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: James Brewer Stewart is the James Wallace Professor of History at Macalester College, and the founder of Historians Against Slavery. He has published a dozen books on the history of the American anti-slavery movement, as well as numerous articles and reviews about the problem of slavery and the implications of how it was abolished in the United States.

In 2002, Dr. Stewart retired from teaching and turned his attention to addressing the institutions of contemporary slavery around the world, and throughout the United States.

Teaching Hard History is a podcast from Teaching Tolerance, with special thanks to the University of Wisconsin Press. They’re the publishers of a collection of essays called Understanding and Teaching American Slavery. In each episode, we're featuring a different scholar to talk about material from a chapter they authored in that collection. We’ve also adopted their recommendations into a set of teaching materials, which are available at learningforjustice.org. These materials include over 100 primary sources, sample units, and a detailed framework for teaching about the history of American slavery. Teaching Tolerance is a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center—providing free resources to educators who work with children from kindergarten through high school. You can also find these online at learningforjustice.org.

Thanks to Dr. Stewart for sharing his insights with us. This podcast was produced by Shea Shackelford—with production assistance from Tori Marlan and Veronica Rodriguez at Minnesota Public Radio. Our theme song is “Kerr’s Negro Jig” by the Carolina Chocolate Drops, who graciously let us use it for this series. Additional music is by Chris Zabriskie. I’m Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries—Associate Professor of History at The Ohio State University and your host for Teaching Hard History: American Slavery.

Essential Ideas From This Episode

African Americans played a major role in their own liberation. This foundational lesson is essential for understanding the Black and white experience in slavery and in freedom. 

We often think of the Civil War in the context of a conflict for the end of slavery or the possible perpetuation of the institution. But it is important to go further and consider the enslaved people and the role they played, not as an abstract concept — slavery — but as individual human beings. 

As we shift our attention from the cause of the Civil War, let’s look at the way slavery’s presence in the Southern and bordering states affected the war. And let’s examine the impact of free and enslaved African Americans’ actions on the progress of the war and the course of emancipation.

Slavery is often discussed and taught only in connection to the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment, with the focus on how these historical events gave enslaved people their freedom. However, as with the causes of the Civil War, a more complex history is revealed when we examine two interrelated topics:

• The evolution of wartime Union policies relating to slavery and the ways that those policies led to the Emancipation Proclamation.
• The actions of free and enslaved African Americans on the battlefield and on the home front that hastened the end of slavery — altering Union policy, damaging the Confederacy and ultimately undermining the institution of slavery even before Lincoln’s proclamation. 

For a more comprehensive understanding of the history and legacy of slavery and the impact on our lives today, we need to correct the notion that enslaved people were given their freedom. Free and enslaved African Americans worked tirelessly to make emancipation the outcome of the Civil War. 

The Evolution of Union Policies Leading to Emancipation

Union policy initially did not support as a certainty that slavery would end as a result of the Civil War. When the war began, most people thought it would last a couple of weeks and not have a potential impact on the institution of slavery. 

Union policy relating to enslaved people evolved as the war progressed:

• Wartime policy on slavery emerged in 1861 when Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler declared that three men who had escaped to Union lines in Virginia were “contraband of war,” and therefore subject to confiscation. This was done to counter Confederate demands to return the men.
• Butler’s actions became codified in the first Confiscation Act in 1861, which was strengthened by the 1862 Second Confiscation Act.
• These acts allowed Union generals to take enslaved people as contraband of war, as enemy belongings whose service would be used against the United States.
• The Second Confiscation Act went further and explicitly declared Confederate slaves as captives of war who were forever free. It freed all enslaved people of rebel masters who made it to Union lines — not only men who could work as laborers in the military, but women and children, the old and the young.

Confiscation policies were one of the first mechanisms to drive the Union toward a general policy of emancipation. These policies were the first places in which military activities and an attack on slavery go hand in hand. 

Historian Joseph Glatthaar has argued that these policies were important to the Union effort in two main ways:

• First, these policies demonstrated that the Union Army was going to make a commitment to emancipation as an act of war.
• Second, they aided the Union Army’s war effort, while taking away from the Confederacy’s. Former enslaved people were doing some of the work of the Union Army, freeing soldiers for the front lines. And by having escaped, they were depriving the Confederacy of valuable labor. 

However, confiscation policies did not lead to Black military service at this point. Enslaved men who were confiscated as a result of these policies were generally employed in the Union Army as laborers; they were not soldiers. 

The Long Road to African Americans in the Union Army

Few African Americans were content with serving only as laborers for the Union Army. From the onset of the war, free Black people in the North clamored for a chance to serve as soldiers in the Union Army.

Frederick Douglass, whose sons would eventually serve as Union soldiers, is a good example of Black arguments for military service. 

• Douglass viewed Black service in the Union Army as essential to the war effort, and he famously said: “This is no time to fight with one hand when both are needed. This is no time to fight with only your white hand and allow your black hand to remain tied.”
• Douglass was passionate about Black military service because he knew that the outcome of the Civil War could affect the future of both free and enslaved Black people.
• Douglass emphasized: “Once let the Black man get upon his person the brass letter, U.S., let him get an eagle on his button and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, there is no power on earth that can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship.”
• Confederate politicians also recognized the implications of Black military service. Joseph E. Brown, who was the governor of Georgia, famously stated: “Whenever we establish the fact that they are a military race, we destroy our whole theory that they are unfit to be free.”

Change was slow, however, and a variety of factors combined to delay Northern actions on the point of African Americans in military service. 

• A primary reason was Northern prejudice. Lincoln was afraid white soldiers would not enlist if they saw the Civil War as a war to end slavery.
• Second was the need to keep the border states — Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri and West Virginia — in the Union. These were slaveholding states that remained loyal to the Union. Obvious threats to the institution of slavery could push the border states — and all of their resources — into the Confederacy. 

The Union policy evolved as a step toward emancipation that makes sense as an act of war. By 1862, it became clear this was not a quick fight but a brutal war. The Union Army needed to keep its numbers up, and it could do this by using African American soldiers. So that year, both emancipation and Black enlistment became official policies of the Union Army. 

• First in July 1862, Congress passed the Militia Act, which authorized Lincoln to use Black soldiers in the military.
• And in September, Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which promised freedom to enslaved people in states still in rebellion as of January 1863.

The Actions of Free and Enslaved African Americans

Movie Recommendation: Glory (1989) tells the story of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry from its founding to its actions in the July 1863 attack on Fort Wagner.

Black soldiers were quick to respond to the opportunity to fight for the Union. By the end of the war, nearly 180,000 Black soldiers had fought in the Union Army. 

• Recruiting enslaved people from Southern plantations strengthened the fighting force of the Union and denied the Confederacy their labor, weakening Southern ability to feed their military and civilian populations.
• Freeing enslaved people also helped to ensure that Britain would withhold support from the Confederacy. Always a concern for the North was whether England’s dependence, or at least perceived dependence, on Southern cotton would push them to support the South. Connecting emancipation to the Union war effort helped to keep Britain — which had abolished slavery — out of the fight for the Confederacy.

Stephanie McCurry is author of Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South.

Historian Stephanie McCurry argues that, while Lincoln may have taken a while to realize the impact the war could have on slavery, enslaved people immediately recognized the significance of the war to their personal freedom. 

• On plantations close to the front, enslaved people freed themselves in large numbers, escaping to Union lines, sometimes in groups of 60 or 80 at a time from a single plantation.
• Enslaved people freed themselves so frequently that planters were forced to acknowledge that the Union Army was not their only enemy, that those they saw as valued laborers at home were also working against the Confederate war effort.
• The pattern repeated throughout the war as Union troops moved farther into the interior of the Confederacy and enslaved peopled risked everything to make it to Union lines.

As McCurry and other historians have noted, those mass departures greatly affected the war effort. 

• First, it removed valuable laborers from the fields. At the beginning of the war, Confederate leaders thought the 3.5 million enslaved people on the home front were going to be one of their greatest resources, but they were not. By freeing themselves and moving to Union lines, people escaping slavery diminished the Confederacy’s ability to supply its army and feed its population.
• Second, perhaps equally as important, the exodus of the enslaved people had an impact on Confederate morale, especially on the home front.

Not all enslaved people could leave their farms and plantations. Often, when we talk about how African Americans aided the Union war effort, we think only about their participation in the Union Army. But that’s just part of the story. Enslaved people recognized that with the Civil War, the slave system was breaking down, and they took multiple actions to further destroy it. 

• On plantations across the South, acts of rebellion by enslaved people made it difficult for the Confederacy to supply their troops on the front and the civilian population at home.
• Enslaved people on the Confederate home front actively conspired against the Confederacy. McCurry reminds us that enslaved people often risked their own lives to provide valuable intelligence to the Union Army. They did things like giving Confederate positions to Union soldiers and telling them how many Confederate troops were waiting for them. They even provided cover for federal forces by leading them through swampy territories to surprise Confederates.
• The Confederate military had to divert forces to patrol plantations while also trying to fight the war. McCurry notes the impact of this, saying: “The slaves determined war against their masters and their master states opened an internal front in the Confederate war and demanded the diversion of military resources to fight it.” 

Fleeing to Union lines, refusing to work, sabotaging the Confederate war effort — these actions point to numerous ways in which enslaved people affected the war effort and contributed to their own emancipation.

The Emancipation Narrative

While the end of slavery is recognized as a significant outcome of the Civil War, the emancipation narrative often neglects the role free and enslaved African Americans played in bringing about that end. It’s also important to consider our larger national story of emancipation. How do we represent it to ourselves as a nation and as a people?

The famous Thomas Ball statue that’s entitled alternately Emancipation Memorial or Freedman’s Memorial is a good example of the narrative that depicts Lincoln as the “Great Emancipator,” the individual with all the power, taking action. But the more complex reality of this history shows how enslaved people were active in their emancipation.

It’s necessary to have these conversations, addressing the ways that we’ve either avoided or misrepresented our past, whether it’s done intentionally or just unthinkingly. The subject of slavery is not easy to talk about and involves complicated issues, but they’re not so complicated that we can’t deal with them historically. 

If we can deal with the historical complications of slavery, then we can also equip ourselves and young people to deal with the complicated impact that the history of slavery has had on our present-day life.

As a nation, we’ve allowed incomplete or confused narratives to play too much of a role in the way that we understand the Civil War and the end of slavery. We need to address this history because we’re living with the ramifications of our collective inaction over the past 150 years. We can’t have a productive conversation about removing Confederate statues if we don’t acknowledge what the Confederacy was about. 

Similarly, if we don’t acknowledge the massive impact slavery and enslaved people had on our past, we can’t see the impact that their legacies have had on our present. The first step toward righting the wrongs of today is getting the history right.

Essential Ideas from this episode

Context and Historical Questions

The connections between slavery and the Civil War are significant, and controversies surrounding slavery’s role in the Civil War have been simmering since the end of the war. At the heart of discussions today about removing Confederate monuments or the appropriateness of displaying the Confederate battle flag on public buildings is the question of what the Confederacy was about. 

Was the Confederacy about an abstract Southern way of life that is removed from the question of slavery and the rights of Black Americans, or was the Confederacy intrinsically tied to the issue of slavery? Was the Confederacy, in fact, a movement whose main focus was to perpetuate the enslavement of three and a half million people? 

The frequent separation of the Confederacy and the Old South from the system of slavery is artificial and was created after the Civil War and further asserted in the 20th century. To understand how slavery was connected at the time, we need to understand the Confederacy in its own historical terms. So let’s examine the historical questions at the heart of this debate: 

• What is the connection between slavery and the Civil War?
• How does slavery relate to the issue of states’ rights?
• What role did enslaved people actually play during the war or in their own emancipation?

And just as modern-day questions are complicated, we’ll find that the history is much more complex. Specifically, let’s focus on two distinct historical moments: 

• The period leading up to secession and the ways slavery was the cause of the Civil War.
• The progress of the war through the perspective of examining how the actions of enslaved people and free African Americans influenced the outcome of the Civil War on and off the battlefield (which is something we, as a nation, haven’t considered very much). 

As the historical roots of the Civil War become clear, the historical and contemporary connections to slavery will also become clear.

The Connection Between Slavery and States’ Rights

In this short video, scholar Christy Coleman discusses the importance of slavery to the economies of Southern and Northern states, its central role in leading to the Civil War and ensuing myths about that role.

For many Americans, states’ rights is an issue that’s separate from — and an alternative to — slavery as a cause of the Civil War. However, the conversation about states’ rights and slavery as the cause of the Civil War (as though it could be one or the other) is one that evolved after the Civil War — a conversation people have had since 1877, since the end of Reconstruction 12 years after the end of the war. 

• Before the Civil War, politicians and people in the Southern states were very clear about the reasons for secession: They were seceding to protect slavery, and the issue of states’ rights was connected to the issue of slavery.

Going back to the 1850s and the decades before the Civil War can help us understand the connection between slavery and states’ rights.

From the ratification of the Constitution onwards, one of the major issues that separated Northern and Southern states was the enforcement of federal laws relating to slavery, particularly whether federal laws could compel people in the North to return escaped enslaved people to slaveowners in the South. 

• The Fugitive Slave Clause was written into the Constitution (Article 4, Section 2), and it guaranteed that enslaved people who fled to free states would still have to be returned to slavery if Southern slaveowners claimed them.
• Many Northern states disregarded this piece of the Constitution and passed personal-liberty laws, state laws that actually prevented the return of slaves hiding in their states.
• For years, Southern lawmakers railed against the actions of their Northern counterparts and argued for increased federal attention to the enforcement of returning escaped slaves.

In 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act as part of the Compromise of 1850. The act significantly increased federal enforcement power for the Fugitive Slave Act. 

• This law had an impact not only on accused runaways, but also on people in the North. It allowed the commissioners to deputize any citizen to help enforce the law. Those citizens or public officials could be fined or even jailed if they refused to cooperate.
• White Southerners were excited about the new law, and they increased their efforts to recapture those who had escaped.
• In the North, the law fueled animosity and fear. Many white Northerners were outraged that they could be compelled to enforce the law, and they promised civil disobedience, if necessary.
• Black Northerners had the most to lose. Many fugitives, even those who had been living in the North for decades, had to flee to Canada or went into hiding. The Underground Railroad to Canada had a significant impact as folks left places like Massachusetts for Nova Scotia.
• And even Black Northerners who were free and were born free worried that they might be kidnapped because the number of fraudulent claims about runaways also increased.

Cases such as those of John Andrew Jackson and Anthony Burns about enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act demonstrate the relationship between states’ rights and slavery. The Burns case is an especially dramatic chapter in the history of slavery and provides a useful counterpoint to the assumption that Southern slaveholders were always advocates of states’ rights over federal authority. 

• The Burns case demonstrates the way that slaveholders relied on the federal government protecting their enslaved “property,” in opposition to Northern states and their laws.
• When it came to protecting slaveholders, Southern politicians were firmly in favor of the federal Fugitive Slave Act, even though that law trampled on the state laws of Massachusetts and other states that protected escaped enslaved people.
• The Burns case also illustrates the tension between the Northern and Southern sections of the country over the Fugitive Slave Act. These events were a key moment in galvanizing Northern opposition to slavery.
• Because Northerners had to watch individual people be taken from their communities, slavery was no longer an amorphous, faceless something that happened elsewhere.
• The Fugitive Slave Act made Northerners complicit in the capture of fugitive slaves. For Northerners, cases like the Burns one gave faces and names to what had initially been an invisible and anonymous enslaved population.

The Fugitive Slave Act demonstrates the complicated relationship between states’ rights and slavery, and sheds light on the ways states that would become the Confederacy were not in favor of states’ rights — when those rights did not support the institution of slavery. 

In the 1850s, pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces fought throughout the decade in multiple ways:

• Over territory and what would become known as Bleeding Kansas.
• On the floor of Congress. Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner was brutally beaten at his desk in the Senate chamber by South Carolina Rep. Preston Brooks. Sumner had insulted Brooks’ relative while giving an anti-slavery speech.
• A legal battle in the Supreme Court during the Dred Scott case over whether African Americans, free or enslaved, deserved even basic human rights.

Slavery and the Secession Crisis

This festering tension and these moments of violence all came to a head in 1860 when Abraham Lincoln won the presidency. Shortly after Lincoln’s election, South Carolina passed a resolution declaring, “The Union now subsisting between South Carolina and other states is hereby dissolved.” The secession crisis had started, and within another two months, six more states (Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas) had also seceded.

Resource: Historian Charles Dew analyzed these documents and speeches in a very short and accessible book called Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War. 

As Southern states left the union, their politicians explained exactly why they had seceded in numerous documents and speeches. Examining those documents sheds light on the complicated relationship between secession, slavery and the concept of states’ rights. Historian Charles Dew has noted similar themes that emerge in many of these documents:

• One theme is that secessionists believed Lincoln’s election represented a crisis for the institution of slavery. Lincoln had been very clear throughout his candidacy, and even before that, that he didn’t believe he had the constitutional power to do anything about slavery where it existed; he actually ran on the non-extension of slavery into the territories, but apparently slaveholders didn’t believe him.
• In the numerous documents and pronouncements that Southern politicians made about secession, they argued that leaving the Union was necessary to protect the institution of slavery from Lincoln.
• South Carolina’s “immediate causes” documents said that with Lincoln’s election, Northerners conspired to elect “a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.”
• In light of Lincoln’s election, Southerners declared “that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.”
• South Carolina’s secessionists argued that Lincoln’s inauguration would mean that, among other things, “A war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States. The guarantees of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the states will be lost. The slaveholding states will no longer have the power of self-government or self-protection, and the federal government will have become their enemy.”
• The quote from South Carolina’s secessionists is one of the only references to states’ rights in the documents. South Carolinians were rallying behind the sovereignty of the state because they viewed the federal government under Lincoln as threatening their slave property. So in one of the only articulations of states’ rights in the document, we see secessionists are actually talking about slave property.
• If Lincoln’s election was the final straw pushing these states out of the union, the seceded states also argue that the long-standing failure to enforce a Fugitive Slave Act and the existence of personal-liberty laws in Northern states were also causes of secession.
• If we think about the South Carolina Immediate Causes documents as being a kind of secession counterpart to the Declaration of Independence, the failure to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act and the personal-liberty laws are among the grievances in this document. 

Secessionist documents demonstrate that Southern politicians were not always in favor of states’ rights. In fact, for the majority of the 19th century prior to the Civil War, they supported the use of federal authority over states’ rights to protect slavery. 

• When Southern states seceded, they were very clear about the reasons: They're seceding to protect slavery. They’re seceding to protect their way of life that is based on slavery.
• Political arguments that were being made in that moment, at the time of the secession crisis, reveal that states’ rights are now connected to slavery. Southern lawmakers begin saying, “Look, states’ rights are necessary if we’re going to protect slavery.”

Now that we’ve done the work of looking at the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act, looking at this moment of the secession crisis and what the seceded states are saying the reasons for their secession are, we can see how artificial it is when we continue to talk about states’ rights as an issue that is separate from, or an alternative to, slavery. 

• If we take slaveholders at their word, in their own words, we know that slavery is the reason for secession, and that it’s the preeminent cause of the Civil War.

This discussion of slavery and the Civil War continues in the next podcast episode, moving from slavery’s role as the cause of the war to examine how the actions of enslaved people shaped the war and contributed to their own emancipation.

Essential Ideas from this Episode

Hard history is not hopeless history. The many ways African Americans resisted slavery offer perspectives of great hope. Young people often find it dispiriting to think that enslaved people simply accepted their fate, so teaching about the resistance of enslaved people is key to getting students to want to learn more about slavery. 

Our understanding of resistance to slavery in the United States has changed over time — from looking exclusively at instances of rebellion to examining the numerous ways enslaved African Americans incorporated resistance into every aspect of their lives. 

Talking about resistance might at first glance seem a narrow topic, but resistance touches on every aspect of slavery and is a significant entry point for the subject. Resistance is part of the history from slavery’s beginnings in colonial America to its official legal end in 1865. 

There’s a paradox at the heart of slavery: Slavery was a horrific, exploitive and brutal institution, but despite the brutality of slavery, African American culture survived and flourished. Focusing on resistance allows learning and teaching all aspects of African American experience.

The Exploitive and Brutal Institution of Slavery

“Slavery was an institution of power,” designed to create profit for the enslavers and break the will of the enslaved and was a relentless quest for profit abetted by racism.*

Historian Daina Ramey Berry describes the sale of an infant named Rachel to explore how enslaved people were commodified. 

Slavery was an extremely brutal institution. Before we talk about resistance, we need to understand exactly the horrors of slavery. 

• We must confront the brutality of the slave trade — involuntarily bringing people from Africa into America. Examining images and records about the crowded ships and the way enslaved people were transported offers a view of the terrible experience. People were vulnerable to rape, abuse and death on these passages.
• Slavery is the context in which racism develops. Ideas about race developed from seeing African Americans degraded and enslaved. The development of racism was influenced by slavery in the U.S.
• Slavery in the U.S. was perpetual — enslaved people were enslaved for life, and so were their children; being enslaved was intended as a permanent condition.
• Enslaved people were not allowed to legally marry because they were not allowed to have claims on one another through bonds of marriage or legal rights. Enslaved people were permitted to live together and have a little ceremony, but there was no legal institution of marriage.
• Enslaved people were prevented from learning to read — in many places, it was a crime to teach an enslaved person to read — to keep them from having ideas that might undermine the institution of slavery.
• An enslaved person could be whipped or punished at any time for various transgressions.
• There was no crime of rape in slavery. For enslaved women, the only legal recourse would be if the woman’s master brought the person to court on a charge of trespass. It’s trespassing because an enslaved person was the master’s property, and someone else trespassed. If a master raped an enslaved woman — and this happened all the time — it was built into the institution and not viewed as a crime.
• Enslaved people could be moved away or sold away and separated from their families. 

There are numerous details about the tremendous brutality of the institution of slavery. Confronting this truth is an important step.

Enslaved People Created a Culture That Resisted Slavery

Enslaved and freed people worked to maintain cultural traditions while building new ones that sustain communities and impact the larger world.

Historian Ibram X. Kendi discusses how the foodways and music of enslaved Africans helped shape American culture as we know it today. 

Amid the cruelty that was slavery in the U.S., African Americans built a culture — and that is the essence of resistance. That culture played significant roles in the abolitionist movement to end slavery, the achievements during the Reconstruction era and the later fight for civil rights. And that distinct African American culture remains vibrant today.

• Despite slavery being structured so families were destroyed, families still thrived, and people tried to stay together with their families. When slavery ended in 1865, one of the first things that formerly enslaved people did was search for their families and people they loved.
• African American culture that grew out of slavery is the space in which the great rhetoric occurs — the tradition that produced the great voice of Martin Luther King Jr. We can see that tradition in the words of Frederick Douglass, a great writer and speaker. Though we can’t listen to his voice, we can read Douglass’ words.
• African Americans played a significant role in the abolitionist movement. That movement, which has inspired us, continues in the fight against racism.
• The achievements of African Americans during the Reconstruction era after the Civil War illustrate the strength of a heritage that comes out of the institution of slavery — the work to provide education, participate in politics and society, get families back together and more. And despite the repressions of segregation and the Jim Crow era, that heritage continued in the work of the Civil Rights Movement.

The African American culture that grew out of the experience of slavery is one that valued freedom and education, created tactics in the struggle for civil rights and to increase civic participation, and influenced freedom movements globally. 

How Historical Understanding Changes Over Time

Talking about historians and their perspectives on resistance to slavery, and giving students a sense that historians are important, can help teach the subject of slavery. Students need to understand that historical interpretation changes over time. 

Understanding the time in which the historian or writer of any work lived can help us understand why they held certain views and interpretations. Looking back from the context of the present affects how the past is understood. 

When we go to a library, for example, to study a subject, when we pick out a book from a certain period, the first questions we should ask are: “When was this written? What is the dominant set of ideas that occurred during this period?”

Discussing the history of slavery through a framework that examines what historians have said about slavery beginning in the 20th century and moving to the current conversation today can build deeper understanding of the subject and the changing perspectives.

Ulrich B. Phillips, a professor of history, was extremely influential in the early 1900s. More important than Phillips’ writing is the fact that he had students who continued to expand on his work; this is how professors become influential. Writings by Phillips and his students were available in libraries and major American institutions. For example, in libraries, most of the books on slavery written before the 1950s were likely by Phillips or one of his students. 

• Phillips’ basic interpretation of slavery was, as he said in one book, “A Negro was what a white man made him.”
• It is important to note that Phillips was living during segregation in the U.S. Racism among white people was intense and severe, and Phillips was part of that tradition. He was a white Southerner, so his writings about slavery come from that perspective. Phillips read all the sources; however, his interpretations were influenced by his time and perspective. Phillips’ interpretations of source documents were informed by his perspective and what he was looking for in them.
• Phillips’ basic assumption was that masters were benevolent, and slavery was where African Americans were trained and civilized — because he considered people uncivilized in Africa.
• Phillips thought of enslaved people as loyal to the masters, lazy, and basically under their masters’ control. One justification of his view was that there were few slave rebellions. In terms of enslaved people’s resistance, Phillips was only looking for rebellions, so his perspective was that there wasn’t much resistance to slavery.

There were some dissenters to Phillips’ views at the time. Carter G. Woodson, who founded the Association for the Study of Negro History and Life in 1915, was African American, and along with a cadre of African American historians, he wrote about slavery from a perspective that was very different from Phillips’. 

• Woodson’s writing and the tradition he created, which also had many writers, and the institutions and journals, such as The Journal of Negro History, were considered credible by many African Americans. But at white universities and major American institutions, these African American writers and historians were not represented.
• The view of the past and of slavery at that time, therefore, was shaped by people’s experience of segregation and the racism of the 20th century. 

The Civil Rights Movement and desegregation after the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, led to changes in historical interpretation as well. Historians began to review and rethink the perspective of slavery that came from the segregationist Phillips’ views. 

In 1956, historian Kenneth Stampp published The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South, a very different interpretation of slavery that attacked Phillips’ perspective. 

• In the chapter “To Make Them Stand in Fear,” Stampp argues that slavery was not about the kindness of masters to enslaved people; slavery was instead about the effects of whips and guns. People didn’t become nor remain enslaved because they loved their masters, but because their masters had the control of force and kept them enslaved. Force was what slavery was all about.
• Once we recognize that slavery is about exploitation and force, the idea of resistance is also reframed. 

In the changing world of the 1950s and ’60s, historians’ perspectives about slavery shifted based on the contexts of the writers. In 1959, historian Stanley Elkins wrote Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life. 

• Elkins began in the footsteps of Stampp and extended to say that slavery was one of the most brutal institutions human beings ever created. And he drew an analogy to the genocide and concentration camps of the Holocaust.
• However, Elkins then argued that the brutality of slavery led to a psychological toll that “infantilized” or made enslaved people “childlike” and destroyed the independence and character of enslaved people.
• While Phillips and Elkins had opposite views about the nature of slavery — one claiming that it was benevolent while the other saw it as one of the most brutal of institutions — their conclusions about resistance are chillingly similar. Elkins’ view is that there was little resistance because the culture and people were so completely destroyed.

Historians writing in the early 20th century generally only defined resistance as slave rebellions — when enslaved people rose up with weapons and killed the masters. As historians began to talk about resistance, they identified many rebellions that were repressed. Rebellions were often not talked about or written about, and the information was repressed. 

• Once historians began looking for examples of rebellious activities, they found more. Comparatively, however, historians noted that the rebellions in the U.S. were smaller in number, and they seemed smaller in size, than rebellions in other places.
• For example, one of the most famous slave rebellions in the U.S., the Nat Turner rebellion in Virginia in 1831, involved about 60 enslaved people who killed 55 white people. By comparison, in Haiti — which was inspired by the French Revolution and where the country had a revolution — thousands of people were slaughtered. Haiti then became the first country ruled by people of African heritage in the New World.
• Rebellions in Brazil, South America and the Caribbean were also on a much larger scale than in the U.S., which made historians question the level of African American resistance.
  However, the absence of rebellions doesn’t mean the absence of resistance; it means that resistance took other forms.
• The U.S. had a much larger white population than many of the other areas noted, and it was difficult for rebellion to spread with so many white people who could organize and stop the rebellion quickly. In the U.S., organized militias at the state and local levels could repress rebellion.
• Therefore, there were fewer large rebellions in the U.S., but not because of lack of resistance to slavery. Resistance in the U.S. took other forms. 

Recognizing Resistance in Various Forms

Enslaved people resisted the efforts of their enslavers to reduce them to commodities in both revolutionary and everyday ways.

Historian Tera Hunter discusses Henry “Box” Brown’s escape from slavery and his work as an abolitionist. 

The changing definition of resistance does the most to change our opinion of what resistance to slavery was all about. When we change the definition of resistance, we begin to see a different picture of slavery and resistance. 

Enslaved people resisted slavery and undermined the institution in many ways that did not involve large uprisings.

• One form of resistance was setting fire to a plantation house or a town. Another was poisoning the master. These individual acts of violence were not uprisings, but they were resistance.
• Slowing the pace of work was another form of resistance. Masters might have interpreted the behavior as “lazy,” but slowing work or breaking tools were ways people resisted. Stealing items was another example.
• Learning to read and teaching other enslaved people to read were acts of resistance. Learning to write could also lead to writing passes to leave the plantation, undermining the master’s control.
• Enslaved people created their own religious forms, services and hush harbors outside the existing churches. These “invisible churches” were the roots of religious traditions that ultimately inspired people during the Civil Rights Movement.
• Modern historians, following in the tradition of redefining resistance, have found many methods of resistance. One historian, Stephanie Camp, describes parties where enslaved people left their plantation and went to someone else’s house at night. These were illegal parties, and masters tried to stop them; these parties and secret meetings were another form of resistance.
• Running away was resistance. There were severe consequences for runaways who were caught, but the fact that enslaved people took the risks and ran away illustrates strong resistance to slavery. 

Enslaved people engaged in various acts of resistance all the time. These were not merely rare examples but daily occurrences in slavery.

And resistance to slavery includes the role of African Americans — both free and enslaved — in the abolitionist movement and actions during the Civil War that led to their own liberation. African Americans were active participants in the struggle for freedom. 

Essential Ideas from this Episode

In 1963, Malcolm X delivered Message to the Grassroots at a rally in Detroit, Michigan. In this speech, he uses a parable describing two types of enslaved persons’ experiences, the “house Negro” and the “field Negro.” However, the overly simple distinction between the “house Negro” and the “field Negro” is a false dichotomy, one rooted in a popular misunderstanding of the wide range of experiences of enslaved people. 

Historian Edward L. Ayers describes how the age and gender of enslaved people, along with the labor needs in different parts of the country, affected the domestic slave trade. 

Understanding the diverse experiences of enslaved African Americans is important for thinking critically about the form and function of the institution of slavery and about the kinds of work enslaved people performed — which enriched slaveholders and the nation as a whole.

• The experience of slavery varied and evolved based on factors such as time, location, crop, labor performed, size of slaveholding and gender.
• Understanding more about the experience of slavery requires knowing about a variety of details. For example: the work done in the house or the crops tended in the field; whether the person was enslaved on a large plantation or a small farm; the enslaved person’s gender and age, whether they were a parent or a child; whether they were new to America or several generations removed from Africa.

Examining Oral Histories and Narratives

Too often, what students have learned about slavery in the United States — from its colonial past to its abolishment brought on by the Civil War’s end — is either wrong or misinformed. Students have learned much of what they know about slavery from Hollywood films that, until recently, romanticized the Old South and sanitized the harsh and often brutal treatment enslaved people received from their owners. 

So how do we teach students about a past that shows the country’s inconsistencies regarding liberty, democracy and equality for all people? We should teach with honesty and a commitment to having open dialogue with students who will need to understand historical context. We need to expose students to the numerous primary sources that tell the diverse experiences of enslaved people.

The story of Mary Raines offers a good example of examining the experiences of enslaved people. Raines was a former enslaved person who lived in Fairfield County, South Carolina, during the 1930s. A government worker interviewed her about her life in slavery. He asked basic questions like her age and how she received her name. 

• Raines shared the following in her interview: “How old would Marse William Woodward be if he hadn’t died before I gwine to die? A hundred and twenty, you say? Well, that’s about what they figured my age was.”
• Raines then shared a story about how her birth weight pleased her master so much that he named her after his mother. She explained that her mother’s yelling from the slave quarters alarmed her white owners and their dinner guests, who were about to enjoy a sumptuous meal. A local doctor was at the table and was asked to check on Raines’ mother. Raines shared: “All dis him leave to go see Mammy, who was a squallin’ like a passel of patarollers was a layin’ de lash on her. When the young doctor go and come back, him says as how my mammy done got all right and her have a gal baby. Then him say that Marse Ed, his uncle, took him to de quarter where Mammy was, looked me all over and say, ‘Ain’t her a good one? Must weight 10 pounds.’ I’s gwine to name dis baby for your mama, William. Tell her I name her Mary for her. But I ’spects some folks’ll call her Polly, just like they call your mama Polly.”
• Ms. Raines also describes how involved slave owners were in the lives of enslaved people and had absolute control in every way. Mary’s mother was neither able to name her daughter nor give her a cherished nickname.
• Mary Raines’ oral history tells us a lot about the nature of slavery. Through her admission to her interviewer, we learned enslaved people didn’t know much about their birth dates, and often used the birth years of their masters or some significant event to mark their births. The interviewer describes Raines as 99, although she believes she’s closer to 120 years old. 

Just as multiple themes can be explored in this oral history source, we can examine how the institution of slavery was influenced by chronology or time, region or geographical location, and gender. 

Understanding the Historical Context of Slavery

Historian Ibram X. Kendi uses the case of Elizabeth Key to trace how Virginians changed British law to protect the growing institution of slavery in the 17th century. 

One significant point is understanding how American the institution of slavery was — that it was not solely Southern during the colonial period. 

By the late 1700s, slavery was becoming largely a Southern affair because of the cash crops produced in the region, including tobacco, rice, indigo, and later, cotton. However, by the mid-19th century, Northern industries profited greatly from Southern slavery, especially textile mills that relied heavily on cotton grown in the Deep South. 

We need to honestly acknowledge that the existence, growth and maintenance of American slavery was not unique to the South during the era of its emergence, and the institution affected all parts of the country.

One of the more important functions of history is to contextualize the past. And a clear definition of race and understanding race as a social construction (rather than a biological concept) is essential. Understanding American slavery begins with the changing definitions of race, especially Blackness.

• Numerous early terms were used to describe Black people — for example, Guineamen, Ethiopes, Mulattoes, Negresses and Coromantees. It’s important to contextualize how various European people thought about those of African descent. Europeans’ conceptions of Blackness were based on their prior experience, or lack thereof, with African peoples.

Starting with Christopher Columbus can help us see how historical eras matter. Columbus is typically taught as an explorer who was heralded as the founder of the Americas. As contentious as Christopher Columbus has become, he is a good example to use in the study of American slavery. 

• Columbus’ voyages to Hispaniola and the Caribbean introduced chattel slavery to the Americas — slavery in which human beings are considered movable property. In the United States and colonial British America, it also designated enslaved status for life.

The history of every nation in the Caribbean begins with sugarcane plantations. These plantations produced cash crops that shaped much of South America and later parts of the Southern United States, like Louisiana, which was colonized initially by the French and Spanish before the English took over the colony.

• White gold, as sugar was called, worked as the engine of the initial slave trade that brought millions of Africans to the Americas, beginning in the early 16th century.
• By the 16th century, West Africans became more important to New World slavery than Indigenous peoples had. Many Africans had been skilled in sugarcane cultivation, and as New World slavery developed, the labor system became increasingly associated with Blackness.

As North American colonies grew, and thousands of West and Central Africans were brought in primarily as enslaved people, the English began to codify, or make into law, the labor and preservation of slavery based on race and gender. 

• Virginia’s lawmakers were the earliest to use gender in making explicit distinctions about the work responsibilities of enslaved African men and women, and white indentured servants. Almost a century after Virginia became the first British colony in what became the United States, it established a rule that went against everything the English had believed in and enforced regarding the importance of a child’s status.
• In 1705, Robert Beverley, a legislator and historian who also grew up as the son of a prominent Virginia plantation owner, wrote a book on the history and present state of Virginia. In distinguishing the differences between indentured servants — contract workers with a defined period of time for working — and enslaved people, he wrote, “Slaves are the Negros, and their posterity [children], following the condition of the mother, according to the maxim, partus sequitur ventrem, they are called slaves in respect of the time of their servitude, because it is for life.”
• The fact that English lawmakers created an edict that went against gender norms in their country, and was rooted in economics, shows the importance of slavery. White men impregnated enslaved women routinely. If they enforced paternity and inherited statuses of children based on paternity, those men would lose money. So, they created a rule that all infants born to enslaved women, no matter the race or even the status of the father, would inherit the condition of the mother.
• The legislator also defined that enslaved people were Negros who would inherit the condition of the mother, and that all Black enslaved people, regardless of sex, would work the ground, and that English women servants were not to work on the ground.
• Ultimately, these rules about labor, race and gender had reverberations that influenced how enslaved men and women would be treated on plantations and smaller farms across colonial America. Black women were perceived as physically stronger than white women and would perform the same strenuous agricultural labor as both Black men and white men.
• Further, white women were considered a protected class, not meant to perform harsh agricultural labor. Black women, in contrast to white women, were not protected. 

Understanding the Diverse Experiences of Enslaved People

As slavery became a permanent fixture in Virginia, and more broadly, within colonial America, Black people experienced the dichotomy between freedom and slavery, especially as the 18th century progressed.

• At one point, South Carolina had the largest number of enslaved people. And in urban spaces, their numbers were often greater than white residents of the colony that later became a state. So, in urban centers like Charleston, especially as cash crops began to boom, slave owners began a trend that changed the way they lived and displayed their wealth to others. They began to demand house servants and craftsmen as an addition to the enslaved population on their plantations and large farms.
• Thus, for wealthy white men who owned large numbers of enslaved Black men and women, usually upward of 30 or more, their need for enslaved people to perform more specialized work and domestic chores also meant that more enslaved people engaged in diverse and nonagricultural labor, especially in regions like South Carolina’s Lowcountry and Georgia.
• Generally, enslaved men performed the skilled labor, such as driving, carpentry and smith work, and their abilities to do so greatly increased their economic value among white slave owners and traders.
• Like most enslaved men, bondswomen were mainly confined to field work in the late 18th century. However, there were some skilled domestic workers and slave nurses and midwives who began to appear on lists of enslaved people. Their numbers tended to be small and restricted to larger plantations. Although nursing was tedious labor for enslaved women, who continued to work in other ways, their healing work allowed them to garner respect from the members of enslaved communities, and sometimes earn money for their owners if they were sent to assist the local white community.

The Importance of Place in Studying Conditions of Slavery

The concept of place is central to other themes in the experience of slavery because understanding where and how Black men, women, and children moved across the African continent, to the Caribbean, and migrated up and down colonial America, and lastly, the United States, demonstrates that the diverse experiences of enslaved people included migration based on the development of cash crops. 

• Not all enslaved people lived on large plantations. Some lived on small, family-owned farms, where they worked alongside their owners or were released out for work.
• Until the Antebellum era, from 1810 to 1860 or so, enslaved people worked on cash crops depending upon where they lived, and most did not pick cotton until the middle of the 19th century.
• In the Piedmont and Tidewater areas in Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina, tobacco was huge.
• In South Carolina, enslaved people worked in rice fields, grew and processed indigo, and later picked cotton.
• In New York, when slavery was legal, enslaved people worked on ships and at wharfs, performed agricultural and domestic labor, and worked as craftsmen.
• In Mississippi, enslaved people primarily picked cotton during the Antebellum period, until the end of the Civil War in 1865.

Region determined culture and even skill levels in work: cotton pickers were considered largely unskilled compared to low country — South Carolina and Georgia — enslaved men, who were considered master ironworkers. 

There were commonalities that linked slavery throughout the years, but regional distinctions also emerged and are important for understanding.

Resources

• Teaching Hard History, Episode 10: Slavery in the Constitution (podcast)
• Learning for Justice, Opinion of the Supreme Court in United States v. The Amistad (1841)
• Learning for Justice, Using Photographs to Teach Social Justice | Legal Action: The Supreme Court

Dr. Paul Finkelman

• President, Gratz College
• An Imperfect Union: Slavery, Federalism, and Comity
• Editor, Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619–1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
• Editor, Encyclopedia of African American History 1896 to the Present
• Editor, Congress and the Crisis of the 1850s

Transcript

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: On a mid-August day in 1990, Uncle Johnny dropped my father and I off at New York City’s Grand Central Station, where we boarded a not quite midnight train to Georgia. That spring, I had graduated from Midwood High School in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn and now I was off to Morehouse College in Atlanta. Morehouse is one of only 100 or so historically black colleges and universities—and the only one that is all male. It was founded in 1867 at the daybreak of freedom and its mission was simple: to be the light for newly freed African-American men who had known nothing but the darkness of slavery their entire lives. Morehouse has been educating African-American men ever since.

Morehouse sits high on a red clay hill, just west of downtown Atlanta. Its campus isn’t the prettiest. Some buildings are new but most of them are old, and it isn’t very large—a couple of neighborhood blocks at best. But manicured lawns and high-tech facilities are not what drew me to Morehouse. They don’t draw anyone to Morehouse. Tradition draws people to Morehouse.

The tradition of first-year students arriving on campus a week before classes to learn the history of the school. The tradition of meeting your Spelman College sister. The tradition of playing the Negro national anthem before basketball and football games. The tradition of staying up late in dormitories named after African-American luminaries to debate the black past, argue about the black present and speculate about the black future. And, of course, the tradition of singing the soul-stirring college hymn “Dear Old Morehouse” whenever and wherever Morehouse men gathered.

There is another tradition, too. A tradition rooted in college pride but also in the black cultural practice of playing the dozens. There is a saying about Morehouse graduates, one that has more than a kernel of truth. It’s that “You can always tell a Morehouse man, you just can’t tell him much.” You certainly can’t tell him that Morehouse is not better than that other black college on a hilltop, Howard University, in Washington, D.C.

To be sure, Howard is much bigger, but it needs to be, in order to accommodate all those students who applied to Morehouse and didn’t get in. It’s worth noting, too, that Howard was led for 34 years by one of the greatest educators and religious orators of the 20th century, Mordecai Johnson. It’s also worth noting that that very same Mordecai Johnson was a Morehouse man, class of 1911, as was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., director Spike Lee and actor Samuel L. Jackson.

Now, Howard’s list of alumni is certainly distinguished. Folklorist Zora Neale Hurston got her start at Howard, while King T’Challa, Chadwick Boseman (the Black Panther—Wakanda forever!), learned his stagecraft there as well. But no list of notable Howard alumni is complete without Omarosa Manigault and Rachel Dolezal. Just saying: they’re Howard, too.

But when it comes to using the law to fight for African-Americans’ civil and human rights, there is no dispute: Howard University is the mecca. Charles Hamilton Houston laid the groundwork for black legal activism, transforming Howard Law School during the first half of the 20th century from a struggling night school into a training ground for a cadre of civil rights lawyers who transformed America—a group that included future Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall.

Houston understood the centrality of the law to the African-American experience. He knew that racial discrimination codified in law, from the Three-Fifths Clause in the Constitution to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and racial discrimination sanctioned by the Supreme Court, from the court’s ruling about black citizenship rights and Dred Scott in 1857 to its support of segregation in Plessy versus Ferguson in 1896, had to be eliminated if African-Americans were ever to enjoy equal rights.

Houston also knew that black lawyers had to be the ones to right these legal wrongs. Racist laws were certainly a problem, but so, too, were the racist lawyers who argued in defense of these laws and the racist judges who upheld them. For Houston, black lawyers were either social engineers fighting for equal justice under the law for African-Americans, or they were parasites, living off of black folks’ meager earnings.

It may be that “You can always tell a Morehouse man, you just can’t tell him much,” but no Morehouse man needs to be told about the significance of Charles Hamilton Houston. That much we understand. If anything, we want to be told more—told more about the intersection of race and law and the Constitution to better see what Houston saw, to better understand what Houston knew about the central role that the law and the courts have played in shaping America. And that’s the focus of this episode.

I’m Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries and this is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery, a special series from Learning for Justice, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. This podcast provides a detailed look at how to teach important aspects of the history of American slavery. In each episode we explore a different topic, walking you through historical concepts, raising questions for discussion, suggesting useful source material and offering practical classroom exercises. Talking with students about slavery can be emotional and complex. This podcast is a resource for navigating those challenges, so teachers and students can develop a deeper understanding of the history and legacy of American slavery.

In the United States, Lady Justice was never blind when it came to slavery. In this episode, legal historian Paul Finkelman examines the Supreme Court’s decisions regarding slavery, which span nearly a century from the Constitutional era through the Civil War. He illustrates how the politics of slavery became entangled with the opinions of the court, offering insight into the political debate surrounding key cases in early American legal history and the impact those decisions had on free and enslaved African Americans. I’ll see you on the other side. Enjoy.

Paul Finkelman: At the founding of the American nation in 1775-76, slavery is legal everywhere in what becomes the United States. In fact, slavery is legal everywhere in the New World, from the Arctic Circle to the Straits of Magellan. Every colony all across both South America and North America has slaves and slavery is legal. During the revolution, this begins to change. Americans who were fighting for their liberty are faced with the dilemma of “how can we fight for our liberty when we deny liberty to other people?” Starting in 1780, some Americans will begin to dismantle slavery.

Nevertheless, slavery influences the creation of the nation at the Constitutional Convention. It overwhelmingly influences politics from the adoption of the Constitution to even the Civil War. Indeed, if there is any theme that runs through American political history from 1776 until 1861, it is the theme of slavery and race because that is always at the back of the minds of everybody. The Supreme Court, to give you one example, hears numerous cases on the power of Congress to regulate commerce—it’s known as the Commerce Clause, the Commerce Power.

If we look at the Commerce cases, there is a subtext of slavery in all of them. In some of the Commerce Clause cases, the lawyers actually argue that the courts should decide a particular way because otherwise, it will harm slavery. Even though the cases are not about slavery, the court is hearing arguments about slavery. Slavery is a theme that runs through United States politics from the beginning until the Civil War, and it shapes the nature of the Constitution. Our constitutional law is heavily tied to the needs of protecting and preserving slavery, and many of our important constitutional doctrines that we still live with today came out of slavery.

Much of what I’m going to talk about today deals with law, deals with the Constitution, deals with Supreme Court decisions. These are often hard for students to wrap their heads around and it’s even hard for teachers to deal with it because law’s a little scary—it uses technical language and it is sometimes very complicated. But the important issue is this: the United States is a self-created nation. The Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, are, in part, political documents and, in part, legal documents that create a nation. Our nation has been shaped in part by court decisions, court interpretations of the Constitution. We created a Constitution to bring 13 states into “a more perfect union”—not a perfect union, by the way, a more perfect union. That more perfect union is woven into our history in a variety of ways.

There is almost nothing important in the United States that doesn’t sooner or later end up in courts. We are a people who are ruled by the rule of law. We are a people who turn to law. We are a people who turned to the Constitution, to the fundamental principles of the Declaration of Independence, to the Bill of Rights. Americans all know “their rights.” “I know my rights,” and that’s incredibly important to understanding the way the Constitution and Supreme Court interacted with the politics of slavery and race and ultimately, the ending of slavery and then the struggle against segregation in the 20th century.

Slavery came before the U.S. Supreme Court in a variety of ways. In the early years, the District of Columbia, Washington, D.C., did not have a Supreme Court. Rather, all cases from the District of Columbia could be appealed to the United States Supreme Court. Thus, in the period from 1801 until 1835, the Supreme Court heard a number of cases in which African-Americans in the District of Columbia claimed that they were legally entitled to be free. There are actually 14 cases in the court involving the freedom of slaves. Curiously, Chief Justice John Marshall, often called “The Great Chief Justice,” wrote the opinion of the court in seven of these cases. In each of these cases, the slaves lost.

In a couple of them, they had actually won at jury trials because a jury of 12 white men in Washington thought that this particular slave was free, either because of a will or because some other legal technicality or because the person was never a slave to begin with. In one case it was proven that a slave’s mother had always been a free person, so he couldn’t have been a slave at birth, but Marshall overturned every one of these verdicts.

In a number of the other cases not decided by Marshall, slaves got their freedom. These, of course, were minor cases. They didn’t involve big issues of American politics, but they did involve, of course, big issues for the particular slaves who either got their freedom or didn’t get their freedom, depending upon the court.

The court also heard a number of cases involving the African slave trade. While Congress could not prohibit the African slave trade before 1808, Congress could rein it in and regulate it in a variety of ways. One of the regulations was that American ships were not allowed to participate in the slave trade. Nevertheless, many Americans wanted to participate because it was a very lucrative business. So, slave traders were sometimes captured, their ships would be seized and they would be subject to prosecution. And, they would appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Generally, the U.S. Supreme Court supported the rights of slave owners and slave traders more than the federal law. Again, curiously, Chief Justice John Marshall never ruled in favor of the government in a slave trading case—always seemed to find some technicality to let the slave trader go free. So, slaves were illegally brought into the United States and no one was punished for it. Again, these were not major cases. They did not lead to gigantic emotional issues or political issues in the country.

Three big issues that did lead to huge political questions involved a Spanish ship known as the Amistad (which probably all of you have heard of ), the question of fugitive slaves and the status of slaves in the territories. Let me start with the Amistad. The Amistad was a Cuban ship transporting slaves from Havana to other parts of Cuba. The slaves took over the ship, killed a number of the crew members and forced the remaining whites to steer the ship east towards Africa. But at night, they would reverse course and go north and west, hoping to reach the United States South. Instead, the ship ended off the coast of Connecticut, was towed into Connecticut and the question is, “What is the status of these slaves?”

It turned out that all of them had been illegally imported into Cuba with the exception of the cabin boy on the ship, who was a Cuban-born slave. After a number of trials and a number of decisions, the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where Justice Joseph Story wrote an opinion saying that these Africans, by this time called the Amistads for the name of the ship, were entitled to go back to Africa because they had been illegally imported into Cuba. The entire case turned on the interpretation of a treaty with Spain and on the interpretation of Spanish law banning the importation of slaves to Cuba.

It is not an anti-slavery case in any real way. Story doesn’t condemn slavery. Story doesn’t attack slavery, but, of course, for the Amistads, it’s an anti-slavery case because they get to go home. The poor Cuban cabin boy did not get to go home, again showing that it’s not about liberating slaves. It’s about something else. Nevertheless, the anti-slavery movement uses this case to teach the American people about the horrors of slavery, and the Amistad becomes an iconic moment in helping Americans understand just how awful slavery actually is.

Fugitive slave cases were more complicated. They almost always involved African-Americans who made it to free states and then were grabbed by slave catchers and dragged back to the South. The first big fugitive slave case was Prigg v. Pennsylvania. Prigg was a Marylander. With three other men, he went to Pennsylvania. He grabbed a woman and her children, brought them before a justice of the peace in Pennsylvania and said, “These are Maryland slaves. We are bringing them back to Maryland.”

The justice of the peace listened to the evidence and said, “You have to let them go.” It turned out the woman, Margaret Morgan, had lived her life entirely as a free person in Maryland and, later, research shows that in 1830, she was declared to be a free black person by the U.S. Census. By the way, the census in Maryland was taken by the local sheriff, so local authorities in Maryland said she was free. It also turns out that at least one and maybe two of her children had been born in Pennsylvania and thus, they were free by birth.

Nevertheless, after the judge ruled that they should go free, Prigg and his friends kidnapped them and brought them to Maryland. Prigg was later prosecuted for kidnapping in Maryland, convicted, appealed to the Supreme Court, and, as I mentioned earlier in this talk, the Supreme Court overturned his conviction by saying that Pennsylvania had no right to protect the liberty of its own citizens, no right to interfere with fugitive slave cases and Justice Story said that a slave catcher has “a common-law right of re-caption.” That is, has a right without going into any court to recapture his property and bring it south.

This led to a number of Northern laws in which the Northern states, specifically, prohibited state officials from becoming involved in fugitive slave cases. That led to a number of Northern state judges refusing to help Southerners capture fugitive slaves, and that led to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. A draconian law with heavy penalties for people who helped fugitive slaves, the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 prohibited the alleged slave from testifying at a hearing on her behalf or his own behalf. If you were seized as a fugitive slave, you could not even stand up in court and say, “You got the wrong person. I’m not the person you are looking for.”

The law allowed for the Army, the Navy, the Marines, the state militia, to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law. It led to enormous conflicts between local authorities and federal authorities. Fugitive Slave Law was upheld in a number of decisions; perhaps the most important was Ableman v. Booth. Ableman was the U.S. Marshall. Booth was an abolitionist in Milwaukee. Booth had led a mob, which helped a slave escape through Marshall Ableman. Marshall Ableman then arrested Booth, and the Wisconsin Supreme Court declared that the Fugitive Slave Law was unconstitutional and let Booth go. Eventually, it goes to the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice Taney says no, the Fugitive Slave Law is constitutional, and Sherman Booth goes to jail for helping a slave escape.

There were other similar cases involving fugitive slaves—far too many to discuss here. It is safe to argue, however, that the conflict over the Fugitive Slave Law was one that undermined the Union and led to enormous conflicts between the North and the South. Southerners saw the opposition to the return of fugitive slaves as a direct violation of the constitutional compact, a violation of the agreement between the states to support the Constitution. Northerners saw the Fugitive Slave Law as an outrageous denial of liberty, due process of law, a violation of the Bill of Rights, an overreaching of the federal government and simply said we cannot allow this kind of behavior by the national government.

One could have imagined a compromise. One could imagine a Fugitive Slave Law where the alleged fugitive is allowed to testify, where the fugitive is guaranteed a jury trial, where the writ of habeas corpus could be used to bring the case to a higher court. But none of these things were allowed in the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. It is generally considered to be one of the most outrageous denials of rights of any statute ever passed by Congress.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: This is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery. I’m your host, Hasan Kwame Jeffries. Politics and ideology shaped Supreme Court decisions regarding slavery, but the court’s decisions also sparked deep cultural resentment about the legality of slavery in pre-Civil War America. The Dred Scott case is the most significant example, but to understand Dred Scott, we need to talk about the westward expansion of slavery. Once again, here’s Dr. Paul Finkelman.

Paul Finkelman: The other big constitutional issue is the status of slavery in the territories. To understand the status of slavery in the territories, we have to go back to the nation before the Constitution was written. One of the oddities of American political history from, really, the time of the Constitutional Convention until the Civil War is that the debate over slavery is often the debate over slavery where it isn’t, rather than where it is.

At no time does Congress debate whether it should abolish slavery in Virginia or Mississippi because that was clearly the province of the states, so the debate is always about slavery in the territories. Do you allow slavery into Ohio? Do you allow slavery in Illinois? Do you allow slavery west of the Mississippi? Do you allow Missouri to become a slave state? What do you do with the territories acquired from Mexico during the Mexican War? In all of these debates, there is this strong issue of whether you allow slavery in these places.

While the Constitutional Convention is meeting in Philadelphia, the Congress, under the Articles of Confederation, is meeting in New York City. There, the Congress passes something called The Northwest Ordinance, which allows for the creation of a government in the territories north and west of the Ohio River, which today encompasses the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and the very eastern tip of Minnesota. The law said that “There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude” north and west of the Ohio River in the Northwest Territory. This was the first federal ban on slavery somewhere.

Implicit in this was that you could have slavery in the Southwest territories, which become Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi. As long as the United States ended with the Mississippi River, there’s no conflict. The Northern part of the country would become free; the Southern part will probably become slave. And that’s what happens. Ohio comes in as a free state; Mississippi comes in as a slave state. Indiana comes in as a free state; Alabama comes in as a slave state. Then, of course, during this period, the United States buys Louisiana.

When Missouri seeks to enter the Union in 1819, the question is, “Will Missouri be a slave state or a free state?” Northerners argue that Missouri should come in as a free state because under the Northwest Ordinance, it had to be free. Southerners argued this is complete and utter nonsense because the Northwest Ordinance didn’t apply to west of the Mississippi, and the Ohio River ended at the Mississippi, so how could anything be either north or west of the Ohio River?

But the real debate is not about geography and when you think about this, when you teach this, you shouldn’t get caught up in where the Ohio River ends or begins. What you should see is this is the first great political debate over whether or not slavery should spread into the West. What the Northerners are really saying is it’s time to stop the spread of slavery west by not letting Missouri come in as a slave state. Southerners are saying we demand the right to carry our slaves to any part of the country, to all of the new territories.

In the end, a compromise is reached. Missouri comes in as a slave state. Maine breaks off from Massachusetts to come in as a free state. So, you have the same number of slave and free states. The Missouri Compromise says “There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude” north and west of the southern boundary of Missouri. Missouri sits out there like a thumb sticking in the air from the rest of the South. But around Missouri, what becomes the states of Kansas and Nebraska and Iowa, will be free states, and everything north of Iowa will always be free.

This is maintained until the war with Mexico in 1847-48. Suddenly, the United States is much bigger because we’ve acquired vast new territories, some of which are south of the Missouri Compromise line, like New Mexico and Arizona, parts of Nevada, and some of which are north of the Missouri Compromise line. California, of course, is divided by the Missouri Compromise line.

After the war with Mexico is over, Congress spends two years almost totally paralyzed by what to do about the territories. Northerners now have enough votes to stop anything in the House of Representatives. Southerners are insisting that all of the new territories be open to slavery. Northerners are insisting that none of the new territories be open to slavery, and in the meantime, Gold is discovered in California. The California Gold Rush suddenly brings in a huge population to California. Overnight, it has a population of 100,000—far more than it needs to be a state, and California is insisting on coming into the Union as a free state. There are almost no slaves in California, and the sentiment in California is hugely in favor of a free state.

Meanwhile, Southerners are complaining about the lack of effective fugitive slave laws because, under Prigg, Northern states are ignoring the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 and Texas is demanding that all of New Mexico should become part of Texas. Furthermore, Texas is complaining that it has debt because the Republic of Texas was deeply in debt when it became part of the United States, and so Texas is literally asking for, what today we would call, the first federal bailout. Texas is begging the rest of the nation to bail it out of its debt because it had huge debts. It spent more than it took in in taxes and it wants the rest of the nation to rescue it.

All of these are thrown into a series of laws, which become the Compromise of 1850. In the Compromise of 1850, after a summer of debate, we settle the Texas boundary with giving a substantial portion of New Mexico to Texas. The United States government agrees to pick up the Republic of Texas debt. Slavery is allowed in New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Nevada, and slavery is also allowed in parts of what are today Colorado and Wyoming.

In other words, slavery is allowed in all of the territories acquired from Mexico, except California, which is admitted as a free state. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 is passed and as a stop to the North, Congress bans the public sale of slaves in Washington, D.C. The only problem with that is it’s not going to prevent the private sale of slaves, and it doesn’t prevent masters from simply taking their slaves across the river to Virginia and selling them there. That’s the Compromise of 1850.

Following the Compromise of 1850, Southerners insist that much of the Missouri Compromise be repealed, so that slaveowners can move into Kansas and Nebraska, where slavery had been banned under the Compromise of 1820, which is also known as the Missouri Compromise. That leads to the Kansas Nebraska Act of 1854, which opens up Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, most of Montana and some of Wyoming to slavery.

Sometimes, historians have looked at these debates and thought everybody was crazy. “Why would you debate whether you could have slavery in Montana?” historians would say, since, after all, you couldn’t grow cotton, you couldn’t grow tobacco, you couldn’t grow any of the slave crops in Montana.

But the answer is this: historically, slaves had always been used for mining. They had been used for raising cattle. They had been used for growing wheat. The Roman Empire grew wheat with slaves. The Roman Empire mined with slaves. There’s no reason to believe that the great mining strikes of the West— the silver, the gold, the copper—couldn’t have been mined with slaves. It’s wrong to think of slavery as geographically bound to warm climates. Slavery is profitable wherever free labor can turn a profit.

If you looked at a map in 1855, a year after the Kansas-Nebraska Act, what you would find is that every place in the West is open to slavery, except Minnesota, which is not yet a state, and what is today Washington, Oregon and part of Idaho. Everywhere else, slavery is legal in the West, except California, which is a free state. You could take your slaves to Colorado, Wyoming, the Dakotas—Slavery is everywhere.

In this mix comes the most famous slave case, Dred Scott. Dred Scott was a slave living in Missouri when his owner, an Army captain, who was also an Army doctor, took him to Illinois where he lives at Fort Armstrong for about a year and a half or two years. Now, Illinois is a free state. Presumably he became free the moment he was brought to Illinois because you can’t bring slaves into Illinois. He is also not on the base for much of this time. He is working on private land that his owner, Dr. John Emerson, owns.

Dr. Emerson is then transferred to Fort Snelling in what is today St. Paul, Minnesota, where, again, slavery is illegal, according to the Missouri Compromise. Nevertheless, Dred Scott is kept there for a while. Dred Scott later goes all the way down the Mississippi River with his slave wife and then all the way back up the Mississippi River back to Fort Snelling. While they are on their way to Fort Snelling, his wife gives birth to a daughter, who is born on the Mississippi River between the free state of Illinois and the free territory of Iowa. Presumably this will be a free birth.

The Scotts end up in Fort Snelling, then they end up back in St. Louis, and when Dr. Emerson dies, Dred Scott offers to buy his freedom. He has some white friends who are the sons of his former owner before he was sold to Dr. Emerson, and these white friends are willing to come up with the money so he can buy his freedom for his family and himself. Mrs. Emerson refuses to sell Dred Scott, and so, instead, he sues.

He wins in a jury trial. A jury of 12 white men in St. Louis say Dred Scott is free because he lived in Illinois where slavery is illegal. He lived in what is today Minnesota where slavery is illegal. He is free.

Mrs. Emerson appeals to the Missouri Supreme Court and in 1852, the Missouri Supreme Court says, “No, Dred Scott is still a slave,” and the court explicitly says, “We will no longer follow our own precedents. We will no longer follow our own rules—the old rules—that if you take a slave to a free state, the slave becomes free.” Dred Scott remains a slave.

At this point, a lot of strange things happen. Mrs. Emerson is remarried, moved to Massachusetts. She marries a doctor in Springfield, Massachusetts, named Chaffey, who is anti-slavery. He will later become a Republican Congressman, and he is an anti-slavery Congressman. He doesn’t know that his wife is technically the owner of a family of slaves in Missouri when he marries her.

She immediately transfers ownership of Dred Scott and his family to her brother, a man named John Sandford. John Sandford, while living in Missouri and owning slaves in Missouri, moves to New York, where he’s a business agent for his father-in-law, who is based in St. Louis. This is all very complicated, but the bottom line is this: Sandford’s living in New York and he’s become a resident of New York.

Scott and his family are living in Missouri as slaves and Scott’s new lawyer sues Sandford in federal court saying that “I am illegally held in slavery by a resident of New York, John Sandford.” Therefore, it’s a federal case because it’s between citizens of two states, Missouri and New York, and therefore, the federal courts can hear it. “I’m entitled to my freedom because of the Missouri Compromise.”

The local judge (the local federal judge) in St. Louis allows Dred Scott to sue. He says, “If you are free, then you are entitled to sue in federal court as a citizen of Missouri.” Mr. Sandford’s lawyers argue that even if Dred Scott’s free, he can’t sue because free blacks can never be citizens of Missouri. When it goes to trial, Sandford wins. The judge and the jury rule that they should follow the Missouri Supreme Court and Scott remains a slave. He then appeals to the Supreme Court. He appeals the decision that he is not free.

Sandford does not appeal the ruling that a black can sue in federal court because Sandford won, so he doesn’t have to appeal anything. It goes to the Supreme Court. It is argued in the spring of 1856, and the court refuses to decide it; 1856 is an election year. Many people speculate that the court does not want to decide it before the election.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You are listening to legal historian Paul Finkelman as he discusses the relationship between liberty, slavery and the courts in the new nation. This is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery, and I’m your host, Hasan Kwame Jeffries. Along with this podcast, you can find a detailed framework for teaching slavery with sample units and primary source material at LearningForJustice.org/HardHistory. Here is Paul Finkelman.

Paul Finkelman: James Buchanan is elected president that fall. Buchanan runs arguing that slavery should be legal everywhere in the federal territories. Even though he’s a Pennsylvanian, he’s what’s called a doughface. He’s a Northern man with Southern principles. He’s a pro-slavery, Northern Democrat. Buchanan wins in a pretty close election against a brand-new political party, the Republican Party, running a national hero named John C. Fremont, who had mapped the route to California, and he had been one of the heroes in the Mexican War in the 1840s.

After Buchanan is elected, the court hears another set of arguments in the case and after Buchanan is inaugurated, the Supreme Court finally decides the case. The curiosity is this: at his inauguration, when Buchanan got up to give his inaugural address, Chief Justice Taney stood up and shook his hand. These guys were old friend—they had been Jacksonian Democrats since the 1830s. Taney whispered something to Buchanan.

There, in front of the whole audience, Taney, the Chief Justice of the United States, is shaking hands with the president-elect and whispering something to him, and then Buchanan gets up and says that the question of slavery in the territories has bedeviled the nation, but it is not a political question. It’s a judicial question.

This is fascinating because since 1787, Congress has been passing laws on slavery in the territories. The Northwest Ordinance, the Compromise of 1820, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, various territorial laws creating territories all over the country had always regulated slavery in the territories, and suddenly, Buchanan says, “Oh, no, no, this is not political.” Even though, as a U.S. senator, he voted on some of these laws, “It’s not political, it’s judicial.” Then he says, “I will abide by whatever the Supreme Court decides.”

Two days later, the court says that Congress cannot pass any laws regulating slavery in the territories and that no black can ever be a citizen of the United States. Immediately, Republicans complained that Buchanan must have known about the outcome of the decision because, after all, why would he say he’ll support whatever the court does without knowing what the court was going to do? Lots of people say that in this whispering, as they call it, Buchanan was told what the court’s going to decide.

Today, we in fact know that Buchanan did know the outcome, that at least two justices, and probably three, had already told Buchanan what the outcome was going to be. We know, in fact, he had been told months before and two days later, the court says, “no bans on slavery in the territory” and that no black can ever be a citizen of the United States. This wasn’t even argued; the court just decided it.

The court says that, even though blacks are citizens of some states. They could vote in half a dozen states. They had held public office in states. There had been a representative in the Vermont state legislator who was black. There had been an elected official in New Hampshire who was black. There was a judge in Massachusetts who was black. They were lawyers; they were doctors. They were voters in a number of states. Even though all of this is going on, Taney says, “They are not citizens of the United States.”

This, by the way, raises a really peculiar issue because if you were a black voter in Massachusetts or Rhode Island or New Hampshire or Vermont or Maine or New York, you could vote in the presidential election. You could vote for members of Congress. What Taney is saying is non-citizens are being allowed to vote for the president, and that’s okay because the rules for voting were determined by the states—very peculiar.

The other thing is that, at the time of the ratification of the Constitution, blacks could vote in at least six states, and so the question is if blacks were voting to ratify the Constitution, presumably they were citizens of the United States at the time. But Taney says, “No, no, no, blacks have never been citizens of the United States. They can’t be citizens.”

This leads to an enormous backlash in the North. Even Northerners who are racist, even Northerners who don’t like the idea of blacks living in their neighborhoods, are shocked by these two holdings. One, that blacks cannot be citizens of the United States, and two, that you can’t ban slavery in the territories.

This becomes an enormous boost to the new Republican Party, and the most articulate critic of the Dred Scott decision is a fairly obscure, mostly failed politician from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln. By this time, Lincoln had had one term in the House of Representatives. He had served a number of terms in the Illinois legislature. He had quit politics, basically, in 1850—stopped becoming involved, stopped running for office. He was concentrating on his law practice, and then Dred Scott comes along, and Lincoln spends the next three years criticizing Dred Scott. That catapults him to the White House.

Meanwhile, Taney is vilified. His decision is overwhelmingly racist. He says things about blacks, which are, by modern standards, horrifying. He says, “They have no rights that the white men need respect. They are not entitled to any rights.” People are shocked by this, and this helps set the stage for the election of Lincoln, the election of the Republican Party. That, in turn, sets the stage for secession.

The final thing to understand about the Constitution is that secession in 1860-61 is about slavery. It is not about states’ rights because, as we’ve seen, the Southerners hate states’ rights because states’ rights are what Northerners are using to fight slavery. In fact, in their secession documents, a number of Southern states complained about Northerners allowing abolitionists to speak freely about Northern criticism of slavery. That Northerners won’t let Southerners travel through their states with slaves. In other words, they complain that the Northerners are using states’ rights to preserve freedom.

Southerners also say, “We are seceding,” as South Carolina says, “because a man has been elected president who believes that slavery should ultimately be put on the road to extinction.” The Texas Secession Convention says that “Slavery will exist forever in the state of Texas.” Mississippi says, “Slavery is the most important institution in the world,” and they’re seceding to preserve slavery. That is what secession is about.

The other thing secession is about is a racial ideology. The Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, gives a speech on the eve of the Civil War, after secession but before the war has started. He says that in the North, people believe in racial equality. Whether this is true or not is irrelevant. This is what he says. Then he says, “Our government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.” Thus, our new government “is the first in the history of the world based upon this great physical, philosophical and moral truth.” Then he goes on to say that Northerners assume that the Negro is equal and “we do not.”

The South becomes the first country in the history of the world to be created on the basis of racial inequality and racial subordination. In addition, of course, Stephens goes on to say that the cornerstone of the Confederacy is both slavery and racism. This becomes a new Confederate nation.

When we see the revival of the Confederacy, when we see the demands for a Confederate Heritage, what we are sadly looking at is a heritage that is deeply steeped in hate and in racism and in slavery. This doesn’t mean that every Confederate soldier felt that way. Most Confederate soldiers, like any other soldiers, don’t think a lot about politics. They are in the Army because everybody in their town is in the Army. I’m talking about the leadership. I’m talking about the generals, the people who went to West Point, the people who were educated by the dollars of Northerners and Southerners and then made war on their own country, not to protect states’ rights, but to protect slavery, and they said so over and over again.

Moreover, they are sometimes putting up monuments to war criminals because many of the Confederate officers allowed the murder of black Union troops who were surrendering. They allowed for the enslavement of free blacks in the North. When Lee’s army marched into Pennsylvania, it captured free black people and dragged them to the South and enslaved them. This was a violation of every known rule of war in the Western world. It violated the Confederate military codes. When free black soldiers surrendered at Fort Pillow, they were massacred. They were shot. Some of them were buried alive. General Lee and President Jefferson Davis did nothing to reprimand the Southern commanders who did this.

When Southerners insist on flying the Confederate flag over their state capital or insist on having monuments to the leaders of the Confederacy, they are, in fact, supporting a regime. They are, in fact, remembering a regime that was created to support and preserve white supremacy and slavery.

If they look at their own secession documents, they see the Southern states saying, “We are seceding to protect slavery.” When they put up monuments to “the heroes of the Confederacy,” they are putting up monuments to men who fought and killed, and sometimes died for, the preservation of slavery. They may or may not know that Alexander Stephens said the Confederacy was created to preserve white supremacy and to preserve the subordination of blacks to white people. But, certainly, that concept is inherent in part of our cultural DNA, and it is what makes race so difficult to deal with in this country.

The new Confederate nation goes to war because they have lost the presidential election. For the first time, at least since the election of John Quincy Adams, but maybe the first time ever, the United States has a president who is openly opposed to slavery. That leads to secession and Civil War, and the end result, of course, will be the complete rewriting of the Constitution, ending slavery and creating racial equality, and ultimately, guaranteeing that people should be able to vote without regards to race.

The legacy of slavery is still with us. In the Constitution, we still have the electoral college, created to make sure that slave owners got a bonus in electing presidents, but more precisely, to deny fundamental democracy to all Americans. In the constant tension over race, we have the problem that, for so many generations, so many decades, so many years, Americans viewed black people as inherently dangerous, as an inherent threat to the legal and political and social order and, at least where slavery was preserved and working, as fundamentally inferior. We have written into our constitutional law, Chief Justice Taney’s decision that “blacks have no rights that whites need to respect.” These are theories of law, these are theories of race, that are built into our DNA.

What is the takeaway from all of this grim history? What do we take away from a nation built on slavery? What do we take away from a region of the nation that made war on the rest of the nation to preserve slavery? Part of the takeaway, I think, is that we have to learn how to overcome our past. We can only move on and move forward if we know where we are coming from. We can’t obliterate the past. I wouldn’t ban the teaching of the Civil War, but I wouldn’t memorialize traitors, either, and I wouldn’t memorialize people who fought against their nation to preserve slavery.

But what I would do is say you have to understand what their motives were, and that means, in part, getting rid of the nonsense that the Civil War was about states’ rights or the Civil War was about Northern economic power versus Southern economic power, about agrarian versus industrial. If it was agrarian versus industrial, it would have been New York City against upstate New York. If it were about the Northern oppression of the South, why is it that all the Northern industrialists didn’t want the war?

It’s not about that. It’s about slavery, and that’s part of our dark, ugly past. In a sense, the only way we can deal with our modern world is to understand how we got to where we are. My friends used to say, “You are what you eat,” and that’s true for nutrition. For history, you are where you have been. This history tells us where we have been. It’s not pretty, but it’s who we are, and it’s what we have to deal with.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Paul Finkelman is the president of Gratz College in greater Philadelphia. He received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago and later studied at Harvard Law School. He’s the author of more than 50 books and over 200 scholarly articles. The U.S. Supreme Court has recognized his legal expertise by citing him in four of its decisions. Teaching Hard History is a podcast from Learning for Justice, with special thanks to the University of Wisconsin Press. They are the publishers of a valuable collection of essays called Understanding and Teaching American Slavery.

In each episode, we are featuring a different scholar to talk about material from a chapter they authored in that collection. We’ve also adapted their recommendations into a set of teaching materials, which are available at LearningForJustice.org. These materials include over 100 primary sources, sample units and a detailed framework for teaching about the history of American slavery. Learning for Justice is a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, providing free resources to educators who work with children from kindergarten through high school. You can also find these online at LearningForJustice.org.

Thanks to Dr. Finkelman for sharing his insights with us. This podcast was produced by Shay Shackleford, with production assistance from Tori Marlon and Jonathan Jennings at Gratz College. Our theme song is “Kerr’s Negro Jig” by the Carolina Chocolate Drops, who graciously let us use it for this series. Additional music is by Chris Zobriski.

If you like what we are doing, please let your friends and colleagues know, and take a minute to review us on iTunes. We always appreciate the feedback. I am Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, associate professor of history at the Ohio State University and your host for Teaching Hard History: American Slavery.

References

• NAACP, Charles Hamilton Houston
• U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 9: Slave Trade Clause (The Commerce Clause)
• U.S. Supreme Court, United States v. The Amistad (1841)
• U.S. Supreme Court, Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842)
• The Compromise of 1850, The Fugitive Slave Act
• U.S. Supreme Court, Ableman v. Booth (1859)
• U.S. House of Representatives, The Northwest Ordinance of 1787
• Library of Congress, Missouri Compromise: Primary Documents in American History
• U.S History, Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854
• Learning for Justice, Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)
• Bill of Rights Institute, Roger Taney and Injustice
• Smithsonian, The Human Factor of History: Dred Scott and Roger B. Taney
• The Avalon Project (Yale Law School), Confederate States of America : Documents

Return to Episode Listing 

Resources

• Teaching Hard History, Episode 11: Slavery in the Supreme Court (podcast)
• Learning for Justice, Human Rights and the Constitution
• Learning for Justice, U.S. Constitution: Articles I, IV, V
• Learning for Justice, Preamble to the US Constitution
• Learning for Justice, Article 1, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution
• Learning for Justice, Exploring American Identity through the Constitution

Dr. Paul Finkelman

• President, Gratz College
• An Imperfect Union: Slavery, Federalism, and Comity
• Editor, Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619–1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
• Editor, Encyclopedia of African American History 1896 to the Present
• Editor, Congress and the Crisis of the 1850s

Transcript

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: The title of my first book is Bloody Lowndes. It tells the remarkable story of the transformation of rural Lowndes County Alabama from a citadel of violent white supremacy into the center of Southern black militancy during the height of the civil rights movement. But Bloody Lowndes does not begin in the 1960s as one might expect but rather a century earlier at the moment of emancipation. You see, to understand the African-American freedom struggle in the 20th century, you have to understand the African American freedom struggle in the 19th century.

Like most places in the Alabama Black Belt, Lowndes County is resource-poor, making the preservation of local records a luxury the county cannot afford. When I asked the probate judge if they still had rest ledgers from the 19th century, I was not surprised when he took me to a long-neglected shed containing county records scattered about and piled high in no particular order.

After a fair bit of climbing, crawling, sifting and sorting, I actually found what I was searching for, Lowndes County’s register of arrests from the 1880s. These turn-of-the-century records revealed a pattern and practice of police misconduct and judicial malfeasance that made a mockery of criminal justice. African-Americans were routinely arrested on trumped up charges and convicted in sham trials and when they could not pay the exorbitant court cost, they were leased to plantation owners and mine representatives who could. It was slavery by another name.

I was especially struck by the ridiculous charges that landed black people in jail, charging black folk with abusive language was a favorite because it could be applied to any black person saying anything to any white person at any time. Another equally absurd charge was reckless eyeballing, when a black person made and maintained eye contact with a white person for too long. No matter the charge, the accused had little recourse. They were at the mercy of Lady Justice and she was not wearing her blindfold.

A few years ago, I watched US Attorney General, Eric Holder, deliver an update on federal investigations in Ferguson, Missouri. He described Ferguson as a community where local authorities consistently approached law enforcement not as a means for protecting public safety but as a way to generate revenue.

Eric Holder: Revenue, a community where both policing and municipal court practices were found to be disproportionately harmful to African-American residents. A community where this harm frequently appears to stem at least in part from racial bias, both implicit and explicit and a community where all of these conditions, unlawful practices and constitutional violations have not only severely undermined the public trust, eroded police legitimacy and made local residents less safe, but created an intensely charged atmosphere where people feel under assault and under siege by those who are charged to serve and to protect them.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: As I listened to Attorney General, Eric Holder, I thought immediately about what I had found in that courthouse shed in rural Alabama. The parallels were striking. Holder could just as easily have been talking about Lowndes County more than a century earlier when he concluded that Ferguson’s emphasis on revenue generation through policing had fostered unconstitutional practices and contributed to constitutional violations at nearly every level of law enforcement.

Lowndes County, Alabama, and Ferguson, Missouri, are not anomalies. They are reflections of a legal system that has consistently failed to provide African-Americans with equal justice under the law. This historical reality begs the question when it comes to African-Americans is America’s legal system broken or is it working just the way it was designed to? Let’s find out.

I’m Hasan Kwame Jeffries and this is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery. A special series from Learning for Justice: A Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. This podcast provides a detailed look at how to teach important aspects of the history of American slavery. In each episode, we explore a different topic, walking you through historical concepts, raising questions for discussion, suggesting useful source material and offering practical classroom exercises. Talking with students about slavery can be emotional and complex. This podcast is a resource for navigating those challenges, so teachers and students can develop a deeper understanding of the history and legacy of American slavery.

The United States was founded on the principles of freedom and liberty. It was also founded on a Deep and abiding belief in the institution of slavery. These conflicting ideas are enshrined in the United States Constitution, which created the legal foundation of our nation. Understanding how America protected slavery in law and treated enslaved people in court is so important that we’re going to spend a couple of episodes on this topic.

In this installment of Teaching Hard History, legal historian, Dr. Paul Finkelman, explains the role that slavery played in the founding of the United States. He explores how the institution informed both politics and laws during the Revolutionary Era and outlines how the politics of slavery shaped the U.S. Constitution in ways that are still evident today. I’ll see you on the other side, enjoy.

Paul Finkelman: The irony of American history is that we’re one of the few countries in the world that begin with the stated purpose: we hold these truths to be self-evident that we’re all created equal. England doesn’t have a statement “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all Englishmen have the rights of Englishmen.” France doesn’t say this is what it means to be French. The French Declaration of Rights says that, but that’s well after France became a country, but we state it.

The Declaration of Independence says “We’re all created equal. We’re all endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” and yet the man who wrote those words, Thomas Jefferson, owned about 150 slaves when the revolution began. In the rest of his lifetime, he would own many, many more slaves, dying with over 200 slaves.

Slave-owners are all over Continental Congress, which is adopting it and so there is this inherent tension from day one between the rights of slave-owners to be free and to have liberty, including the liberty to own other people, to buy and sell other people, to whip other people, to treat other people like property and other Americans who find this to be immoral and appalling and horrible and that’s the tension that comes in with the creation of the United States. So how do we balance slavery and freedom in a nation that on one hand begins with assertions of freedom and rights of liberty and on the other hand these assertions are actually being written by slave-owners?

So, let’s start with that problem. During the American Revolution, the English intellectual, Samuel Johnson, sarcastically asked, “Why do we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?” and, of course, it’s a very valid question. If we think of the heroes of the revolution, while many of them are opposed to slavery, John Adams, Samuel Adams, John Jay, the young man, Alexander Hamilton, many of the other leaders of the revolution, Washington, Jefferson, Patrick Henry, the Pinckneys in South Carolina, they all owned huge numbers of slaves and indeed, probably a majority of the revolutionary leadership in terms of sheer numbers were slave-owners and this is a question that very few people in the revolution wanted to think about.

Now, as the revolution began however, liberty began to spread in some parts of the nation. At the battles of Lexington and Concord, there were black soldiers fighting along white soldiers in the Massachusetts militias and at the Battle of Bunker Hill, one of the heroes was a black soldier. When George Washington arrived in Cambridge to take command of the American troops, he was shocked to discover that there were hundreds of black soldiers in his new regiments. Obviously, for a Virginia slave owner, the sight of black men with muskets and bayonets was something he had never encountered and something that he probably always feared and worried about.

But gradually, George Washington came to the conclusion that black soldiers were just like white soldiers, some were cowards, some are heroes. Most were simply men doing their jobs as good soldiers and by the end of the revolution, one of Washington’s favorite regiments was the First Rhode Island, which was about 50% black and 50% white and most of the blacks in the First Rhode Island had been slaves when the war began. So we see during the revolution a transition from slavery to freedom.

Some northern states began to dismantle slavery. Pennsylvania passes the first piece of legislation in the history of the world to end slavery, the Pennsylvania Gradual Abolition Act of 1780. The law worked in this way. The children of all slave women would be born free and thus literally, slavery would die out in Pennsylvania. Eventually, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey and even the Canadian province of Upper Canada, today known as Ontario, would adopt a gradual abolition act, based on the Pennsylvania law.

Shortly after Pennsylvania passed its Gradual Abolition Act, Massachusetts adopted its 1780 Constitution, which declared that all men were born free and equal and by 1783, after their Constitution was adopted, the Massachusetts courts ruled that this meant that slaves could no longer be held in Massachusetts. New Hampshire had a similar clause in its Constitution and states that joined the Union after the revolution, like Vermont and Ohio, simply prohibited slavery in their new constitutions.

At the time of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, only Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Rhode Island had passed gradual abolition acts and only Massachusetts and New Hampshire had ended slavery. Slavery was legal in all of the other states and while we think of slavery as being a southern institution, there were substantial number of slaves in both New Jersey and New York at the time the Constitutional Convention met.

The U.S. Constitution was, of course, a complicated document, written by a nation in which slavery was legal and prosperous in most of the states. At the convention, slavery is debated throughout the summer of 1787. At the very beginning of the convention the question is, “How do you allocate representation in Congress?” and immediately there is a debate between those people who say allocation of representation should be based on the whole number of free people and those who would like it based on the whole number of people.

The difference, of course, is critical because Virginia has the largest population in the nation if you count slaves and free people, but if you only count free people, Pennsylvania has the largest population. Thus, the debate in the convention is about political power. Does the South get political power for its slaves or is the national government going to be based only on the contributions of free people and thus, only free people will be counted for representation?

We all know, of course, that in the end the Constitutional Convention adopts something called the Three/Fifths Clause. The Three/Fifths Clause says, “That representatives and direct taxes would be allocated in the country by counting the whole number of free people, including indentured servants and others who have some sort of servitude but are not slaves and Three/Fifths of all other persons.” So, the Constitution requires that you count up all the free people and then you count up all the slaves and multiply them by Three/Fifths, 60% and that becomes the basis for representation.

Now, this clause is often misunderstood. The Three/Fifths Clause does not say that black people are 3/5th of a person. It says that political power will be allocated to the states by counting slaves under a Three/Fifths rule rather than a full rule. The irony of this is as follows. Those who opposed slavery did not want to count slaves at all for representation.

After all, if you counted slaves for representation, it simply gave the slave-owners more power. It didn’t give the slaves any power. One of the delegates at the convention mocked the idea of counting slaves and said, “Does a voter in Virginia get as many as votes as the number of slaves he owns?” and, of course, this was laughable and not what was going to happen, but it did indicate the political issue at stake.

On the other hand, Southerners said, “You should count all slaves for representation.” This didn’t mean that Southerners thought black people were equal. It certainly didn’t mean they thought slaves were equal. What it meant was the South wanted to get more political power for its slaves and the way to do this would be to count all the slaves. If this had been done, then the southern states would have had probably a majority in the House of Representatives at the beginning of the nation. However, by doing the Three/Fifths ratio, the southern states don’t get a majority, although they have close to a majority.

The other place where the Three/Fifths Clause matters a great deal is, of course, the election of the president. During the debate over electing a president, James Madison says, “The fittest things.” That’s the language he uses. Of course, “Fittest means the best thing, “he said, “would be for the people themselves to directly elect the president,” but then Madison says there are a couple of problems with that. One of the problems is that were different rules for voting in different states, so that would mean that if you had a popular vote, the state which had the most expansive voting rules, what they called the “franchise” at the time, that that state would have more votes in the presidential election.

But you could have easily have solved that problem. You could have simply said that every free adult male in the country could vote. No one was considering that women could vote at the time, so that would not have been on the table. But Madison said the other problem was if you counted just the popular vote, our slaves won’t count. He actually says, “We won’t get any power because of our Negroes,” and of course, what he means by that is if you have a direct election of the president, the North with a much larger population of free people is going to overwhelm the South.

One of the delegates at the convention actually put an asterisk in his own private notes and said that Madison was really trying to make sure that Virginians got elected president because if Virginia can’t count its slaves and election of the president, then a New Yorker or a Pennsylvanian or a man from Massachusetts is going to get elected president.

The end result was that the Three/Fifths Clause is folded into that monstrosity called the electoral college. Now, why do we have the electoral college? Not because of states’ rights, not because the delegates didn’t trust voters, we have the electoral college because it was the only way they could figure out how to count the numerical power of slaves in a country where slaves, of course, wouldn’t vote. And so the electoral votes that every state got was based on the number of members of the House of Representatives that each state had and that was based on the Three/Fifths Clause.

If you look at the presidential election of 1800 between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, between a man, Adams, who had never owned a slave and hated slavery and had written the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, which ended slavery in Massachusetts and on the other side you have Thomas Jefferson, who by 1800 owns at least 200 slaves, including a few who are his own children who he fathered with his own slave, Sally Hemmings, you see the power of the Three/Fifths Clause in the electoral college.

If it had been a popular vote, Adams probably would have one because the population of the North was so much bigger than the population of the South if you excluded the slaves. In fact, if you took away from Jefferson all the presidential electors he got by counting 3/5th of the slaves’ representation and therefore for electors and did the same for Adams, Adams would have won the electoral college as well. So here is an example where this bargain over slavery in the Three/Fifths Clause affects not only Congress but also affects the President of the United States.

If you look at subsequent debates, if you look at the debate over the Missouri Compromise, which allows slavery to spread into Missouri west of the Mississippi, north of where the Ohio River reaches the Mississippi, the Missouri Compromise could not have been passed if the South had not had a significant number of representatives based on counting slaves as three-fifths of the population for representation. Similarly, it’s impossible to imagine in 1850 that the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 could have been passed if there had been no Three/Fifths Clause because the votes weren’t there.

So, what the Three/Fifths Clause does is to change the political dynamic by giving southern whites, slaveholding Southerners, greater political power than northern voters had and this will continue from the beginning of the nation right up until the Civil War. It is not insignificant that almost all of the presidents elected under the Constitution before Abraham Lincoln were slaveholding Southerners and among the Northerners who become president, you discover that three of them came from slaveholding families.

Martin Van Buren was from New York, but he had owned slaves in New York before New York completely abolished slavery in 1827. William Henry Harrison was elected from Ohio, but, of course, the Harrisons were Virginia slave owners and William Henry Harrison had owned slaves for much of his life. Finally, oddly, in 1856, James Buchanan who was elected president, turns out to have come from a family in Pennsylvania that owned slaves and continued to own the descendants of slaves in long-term indentures well after Pennsylvania had passed the Pennsylvania Gradual Abolition Act of 1780.

If you look at the presidency, what you discover is of the 12 presidents between Washington and Buchanan, only four of them, the two Admases, Fillmore and Pierce had not either owned slaves or come from slaveholding families. This, again, indicates the power of slavery in the political process, which comes from the Three/Fifths Clause in Article I of the Constitution.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: This is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery. I’m your host, Hasan Kwame Jeffries. We’ve been listening to Dr. Paul Finkelman discuss the relationship between liberty, slavery and the law in the new nation. People continue to explore the specific provisions in the Constitution that protected the institution of slavery and the interest of slaveholders. Once again, here’s Dr. Paul Finkelman.

Paul Finkelman: The other big debate at the Constitutional Convention concerned the African slave trade. Almost everybody in America realized that the African slave trade was horrendously awful and immoral, even people who believed in slavery, even people like Jefferson, who had owned slaves all his life, who would buy and sell human beings throughout his life, who had fathered children with his own slave, even some like Jefferson found the African slave trade to be immoral and wrong.

On the other hand, Georgia and South Carolina had lost thousands of slaves during the American Revolution and when the British troops left the United States, tens of thousands of African-Americans went with them to freedom somewhere else, some to Canada, some to England, some to the British West Indies. Sadly, some were re-enslaved in the British West Indies but most of these former American slaves lived their lives with liberty.

So at the Constitutional Convention, the delegates from Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina insisted that the African slave trade get an explicit, specific protection because these delegates knew that the Congress would abolish the African slave trade immediately because it was popular and because most Americans thought the African slave trade was just horrible and wrong.

Thus, the Constitution provides, and I will read the clause because it’s such a convoluted clause and it gives you an idea of how hard the delegates worked to hide what they were doing. The Constitution provides in Article I - Section IX “The migration or importation of such persons as any of the states now existing shall think proper to admit shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the year One Thousand Eight Hundred and Eight.”

If you read this today, you might have no idea what they are talking about “Importations of such persons.” What the Constitution is saying is the Migration and Importation Clause, which we refer to as the African Slave Trade Clause, provided that Congress could not end the African slave trade until at least 1808. However, the clause did not require that the African slave trade ended in 1808. Sadly, many historians, some political scientists and legal scholars don’t understand this and often write in textbooks that the clause required an end to the African slave trade. It did not. It says it cannot be ended before 1808.

The Deep South delegates, the South Carolinians, the Georgians, they believed that by 1808 the Deep South would have a bigger population than the North. They believed that this American population was moving south and west and thus, states like Alabama and Mississippi would have been brought into the Union by 1808 and the South would have essentially a veto power over a ban on the African slave trade. Luckily, it didn’t work out that way. Luckily, Ohio came into the Union, but Alabama and Mississippi did not. Luckily, by 1808 the northern population was substantially larger than the southern population and so we can ban slave trade in 1808.

What happened in the meantime? At least 60,000 slaves are brought into the United States between 1803 and 1808. This is the largest importation of slaves into what became the United States in the entire history of the country. From the colonial period to 1803, you never had 60,000 slaves brought in in five years and then from 1803 to 1808 you got at least 60,000 slaves. This is the debate over the slave trade.

Towards the end of the convention, Southerners demanded a clause to allow them to recover runaway slaves and Northerners, without any great debate, without very much thought seemed to be worn out by these constant debates over slavery and they are so worn out that they allow for the Fugitive Slave Clause to be inserted into the Constitution. Like the clause on the African slave trade, the Fugitive Slave Clause is almost impossible to understand and is convoluted.

The clause read “No person held to service or labor in one state under the laws thereof, escaping into another shall in consequence of any law or regulation therein be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.” This is Article IV - Section II - Paragraph III of the Constitution. It doesn’t mention the word “slave.” It doesn’t mention the word “fugitive.”

But the impact is clear. If a slave runs away from Virginia to Pennsylvania, he cannot become free under Pennsylvania law. If a slave runs from Kentucky into Ohio, she does not become free under Ohio law. Rather, Ohio or Pennsylvania are obligated to return this upon the claim of the person to whom such service or labor may be due and, of course, how do you prove that claim? How do you prove you own someone else?

In 1793, Congress passes the first Fugitive Slave Law, which has almost no protections for people claimed as fugitive slaves, but it doesn’t work very well in part because many Northerners simply don’t help Southerners capture runaway slaves. In 1842, the Supreme Court will hear its first case on the Fugitive Slave Law. It’s remarkable that the law’s passed in 1793 and there’s no case that reaches the Supreme Court before 1842.

But in a case called Prigg vs. Pennsylvania, the court holds that no state can interfere in the return of a fugitive slave. That Congress has the constitutional power to pass the Fugitive Slave Law, although there were many people who said that Congress did not have this power. They thought that this was a regulation of state to state relations. Furthermore, the court ruled that a master had a right to seize a slave anywhere the slave was found without any judicial process. A slave catcher could simply grab someone and say, “This is my slave. I’m taking him or her back to my state,” and the free state had no right to interfere.

Now what this led to was a remarkable response by northern states. Northern states immediately passed laws prohibiting their state officials from helping in the return of fugitive slaves, prohibiting the use of jails for fugitive slaves. Well, it was one thing to cross from Maryland into Pennsylvania, grab your fugitive slave and go back to Pennsylvania. That you could do in an afternoon. Quite another to go up to New York or even to Philadelphia or to Ohio and grab a fugitive slave and try to bring that slave all the way back to the south. You can’t do it easily and you can’t do it without the help of local officials.

An example of how this worked occurred in Boston in 1842 when a fugitive slave named George Latimer was seized by a slave catcher and put in the Suffolk County Jail. The jailer accepted the fugitive slave until public pressure forced the jailer to let him go because the sheriff of the county was, of course, an elected official and it was clear the population would not stand for allowing Massachusetts’ jails to house runaway slaves. Once Latimer was released, his master found that there was no safe place to keep him in Boston and for a small amount of money, he agreed to free him. So, this is an indication of the crisis that occurred in some northern states when the Supreme Court said that states could not protect free Blacks from kidnapping.

This ultimately led to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, the first national law enforcement act in the history of the United States. It provided for a federal commissioner to be appointed in every county in the United States. The federal commissioner had the authority to authorize the return of fugitive slaves. The commissioner had the authority to call up the Army, the Navy, the Marines, the Coast Guard or local militias to protect an owners’ interest in a fugitive slave and it led to about a thousand African-Americans being returned to the South between 1850 and 1860.

One of the ironies of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 is that it completely violated states’ rights because the 1850 law, as well as the Prigg decision in 1842 said that the states had absolutely no power to protect their own citizens from being wrongly seized as fugitive slaves. And when we think about the debates of the 1850s and the claim that secession is about states’ rights, it turns out to be the opposite.

The southern states did not secede to protect states’ rights. They seceded because they were fed up with northern states’ rights. They were fed up with northern states that were trying to protect their citizens, their neighbors, their friends from being seized as fugitive slaves. Sometimes the people seized were not actually fugitive slaves at all. Other times they were. But for Northerners, it didn’t matter. If your neighbor was living next door to you peacefully, you saw no reason why that person should be dragged to the south as a fugitive slave.

So, the irony is that the first federal law enforcement apparatus was an anti-states’ rights law passed by Congress at the insistence of Southerners for the protection of slavery. So, these are the kind of the major provisions of the Constitution that play-out with regard to slavery. But there are a couple of others that are worth noting.

There are two places in the Constitution where the document provides for the suppression of rebellions and insurrections. Article I of the Constitution - Section VIII says, “Congress shall have the power to provide for calling forth a militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions.” Article IV of the Constitution says, “The United States government can do the same thing against insurrections in the states.”

Now here’s the interesting thing. Why do we have double protection against insurrections and rebellions? The textbooks all say, “Well, they’re thinking about Shay’s Rebellion in Massachusetts,” and certainly, they were thinking about Shay’s Rebellion in Massachusetts, but the Southerners were thinking about slave revolts. They were worried about their own slaves.

When southern delegates go back to the ratifying conventions after the Constitution, they say, “We should support this Constitution. We should ratify it because it’s going to protect slavery,” and one of the ways it protects slavery is that the national government will suppress insurrections and rebellions. And when is the militia called out? When is the army called out?

After Nat Turner’s rebellion, the U.S. Navy hunts for slaves who had been part of Nat Turner’s rebellion. When John Brown organizes a raid into Virginia, now West Virginia, to help free slaves, the local Virginia authorities don’t have the power to suppress John Brown. They have to wait for the US Marines to arrive, led by an Army Colonel named Robert E. Lee and so John Brown is suppressed by the US Army.

So again, the interesting thing is while Southerners talk about states’ rights, they are in fact delighted to have the federal government send troops to Virginia, send troops to what is now West Virginia, send troops to Louisiana, send troops to anywhere where there might be a slave rebellion. And so again, the Constitution protects slavery by guaranteeing that the United States government will suppress slave rebellions.

Finally, most people who were at the Constitutional Convention argued that the convention was a government of limited powers and as a result, the national government could not interfere with slavery where it existed and this becomes very important for understanding the nature of what the Southerners thought they were ratifying. They argue over and over again that the national government can never interfere with slavery, but that the national government can protect slavery.

Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, a general during the revolution, the hero of South Carolina and the head of the South Carolina delegation to the convention, returns to South Carolina after the convention. He tells the state legislature, “We have a security that the general government can never emancipate them. For no such authority is granted and it is admitted on all hands that the general government has no powers but what are expressly granted by the Constitution and that all rights not expressed were reserved to the several states.”

The delegates who come back from the convention are thrilled with what they’ve won. They have one a Constitution, which gives them political power for their slaves, protects the African slave trade for at least 20 years, guarantees that their political power to elect members of Congress will also affect the election of the presidency, guarantees the national government will suppress slave insurrections and rebellions and guarantees that their fugitive slaves can be captured and returned to the southern states.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Dr. Paul Finkelman is the president of Gratz College in Philadelphia. He received his PhD in history from the University of Chicago and later studied at Harvard Law School. He’s the author of more than 50 books and over 200 scholarly articles. The US Supreme Court has recognized his legal expertise by citing him in four of its decisions. We’re going to continue his discussion of liberty, slavery and the law in our next episode, moving from how the institution of slavery shaped the U.S. Constitution to how the Supreme Court dealt with cases about slavery prior to the Civil War.

Teaching Hard History is a podcast from Learning for Justice, with special thanks to the University of Wisconsin Press. They are the publishers of a valuable collection of essays called Understanding and Teaching American Slavery. In each episode, we’re featuring a different scholar to talk about material from a chapter they authored in that collection. We’ve also adapted their recommendations into a set of teaching materials, which are available at LearningForJustice.org. These materials include over 100 primary sources, sample units and a detailed framework for teaching about the history of American slavery.

Learning for Justice is a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, providing free resources to educators who work with children from kindergarten through high school. You can also find these online at LearningForJustice.org. Thanks to Dr. Finkelman for sharing his insights with us. This podcast was produced by Shay Shackleford, with production assistance from Tori Marlan and Jonathan Jennings at Gratz College.

Our theme song is “Kerr’s Negro Jig” by the Carolina Chocolate Drops, who graciously let us use it for this series. Additional music is by Chris Zobriski. If you like what we’re doing, please let your friends and colleagues know and take a minute to review us in iTunes. We always appreciate the feedback. I’m Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, associate professor of history at the Ohio State University and your host for Teaching Hard History: American Slavery.

References

• Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt
• United States of America, Declaration of Independence
• France, The Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789)
• Pennsylvania, An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery (1780)
• Massachusetts, Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (1980)
• U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 2: Three-Fifths Clause (1788)
• U.S. Congress, Fugitive Slave Act of 1793
• The Compromise of 1850, The Fugitive Slave Act
• The Slave Trade and the Constitution, Article I, Section 9: Migration and Importation Clause
• Teaching American History, U.S. Constitution: Article IV, Section 2I: Fugitive Slave Clause
• U.S. Supreme Court, Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842)
• Asa J. Davis, The George Latimer Case: A Benchmark in the Struggle for Freedom
• Learning for Justice, Lesson, Nat Turner
• Learning for Justice, John Brown's Speech to the Court at His Trial

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