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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.

Resources

• Learning for Justice, Exploring Diversity and Stereotypes in Film
• Learning for Justice, Examining Multiple Perspectives in Film
• Teaching Hard History, Episode 9: Ten More: Film and the History of Slavery (podcast)

Ron Briley

• All-Stars and Movie Stars: Sports in Film and History
• The Ambivalent Legacy of Elia Kazan: The Politics of the Post-HUAC Films
• The Baseball Film in Postwar America
• LA Progressive (articles)

Transcript

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I have always loved the movies. Among my fondest childhood memories are trips with Aunt Shirley and Aunt Shelley to the old Kings Plaza Theater on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. There, I left the borough behind to explore galaxies far, far away, and phoned home when I found the Lost Ark before traipsing through the Temple of Doom.

When I was old enough to go to the movies by myself, I always tried to do the right thing and not be a menace to society, so I stuck to house parties, where I had a little bit of juice, because I wasn’t just coming to America; I was straight out of Brooklyn. After my school days at Morehouse, I spent more than a few dead presidents waiting to exhale on a Friday, chasing a love jones, but settling for some soul food with my best man at the barber shop. So, it should come as no surprise that my favorite class to teach is African-American history through film.

My film class covers the black experience from slavery through the present. Once a week, we meet at a theater on the outskirts of campus and watch a major motion picture. The last time I taught the class, we started with 12 Years A Slave and ended with Moonlight, and in between, we screened everything from Amistad and Glory to Fences and Fruitvale Station. These movies make the black experience come alive, adding depth and dimension to the famous and the forgotten, to the extraordinary and the everyday. They help students imagine the seemingly unimaginable; generating empathy by capturing and conveying deep emotion.

As much as my students enjoy these films, they alone are not enough to teach them to think critically about popular portrayals of hard history like American slavery, so I pair every movie with documentary films. Sometimes, three and four a week. I found that students who resist reading 20 minutes a night will watch a two-hour documentary in a heartbeat.

In the past, I’ve put 12 Years a Slave together with Unchained Memories, and Glory with The Abolitionists, and have paired both of these films with episodes of Africans in America. Doing so provides students with critical background information. It also challenges their basic assumption that what appears on screen must be true. This happens when what is discussed in a documentary, such as women’s resistance to slavery, fails to show up in a movie about enslaved resistance, such as the Birth of a Nation.

The old Kings Plaza Movie Theater on Flatbush Avenue closed not that long ago after a 40-year run, but the memories of my outings there are as vivid as ever, because that’s where I learned to love the movies, and that’s also where I learned about the power of film.

I’m Hasan Kwame Jeffries, and this is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery. It’s 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. For students to get the most out of movies in the classroom, they need to be able to understand what they are watching. How does a depiction of slavery onscreen compare to historical reality? What does this tell us about the time period the film was made? In the end, students need to be able to ask and answer, “How does a particular film help us better understand American slavery?”

In this episode, Ron Briley shares ideas for incorporating movies into your lesson plans. He recommends specific films that will allow you to explore topics from the Middle Passage to Reconstruction. He also suggests pedagogical techniques, such as using primary source material to help students critically analyze those films. I’ll see you on the other side. Wakanda forever.

Ron Briley: I’ve employed film in the classroom now for almost 40 years, and I’ve found it an incredibly rewarding experience. When I talk to students many years later, it is often what they remember the most from the classroom and the discussions surrounding these films, and I’d like to share with some of my fellow teachers some of those challenges and excitement of using film, especially to teach a controversial, important topic such as American slavery.

First, let me just mention, before we look at some specific films, some of the reasons for using film in the history classroom, both documentaries and feature films. First of all, for better or worse, as much as we might want students to read, unfortunately, many students learn their history through film, and thus I think it’s essential to bring film into the classroom. We might wish that they would be reading the leading historical monographs, reading scholarly journals. Instead, like most Americans, they’re going to be watching movies.

So, I think what we need to do as teachers is sort of accept that fact, and then, I think it’s important to learn some critical viewing skills and how to ask questions of the material that they’re watching. What I hope is that by using film in the classroom, this will encourage students to dig deeper and to actually do some reading assignments, and I usually give bibliographies and make suggestions as to how students can then further pursue the topic that’s been introduced through film.

Another really good aspect of film is that it introduces empathy, and I think this is so important for our students. It’s different sometimes, seeing it on the screen. Let me do a quick example. Say The Grapes of Wrath, for a moment. Wonderful book that really depicts in so many strong ways the travails of the Joad family in America during the Great Depression. However, seeing a film clip from John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath seems to drive this home even better than Steinbeck’s wonderful text. Hopefully, students would look at both, but I think the idea of the film brings such empathy, and I think that in a controversial, emotional topic such as American slavery, this is an important contribution that film can make.

Another really good aspect for using film is, when you’re looking at a film in the classroom, it’s not just the subject on the screen that you’re looking at, but you’re also looking at the values of the time period in which the film was made, how especially feature films reflect the time period in which they were made. They reflect the values of that period. Thus, a film dealing with American slavery, if it’s made after the civil rights movement, it’s often going to have a very different perspective than one that was made before the civil rights movement. So, I think you really have to look at how the values of the time period in which the film is made are also reflected on the screen, and I think that is something very important that film brings to the classroom.

Then of course, with a topic like American slavery, and probably using film in general, you’re going to get complaints sometimes from parents. On one level, it goes with the territory, especially when you teach and have the courage to teach controversial subjects. I think if you look at some of the reasons for teaching film that I’ve outlined here, and, I think, present them to the parents, I think you can win most of them over. I’ve certainly found that to be true in my teaching career, but I think film is too important to not be employed in the classroom. Again, I would really encourage teachers to use film in tackling a subject such as American slavery.

Now, obviously for an emotional subject such as American slavery, you need to very carefully prepare the students for what they’re about to see. Doesn’t mean they will necessarily be comfortable with it, but you don’t want to shock them. You want to prepare them. And, in terms of using film, preparation is essential. Of course, there are some very negative stereotypes about using film in the classroom. It’s a Friday afternoon, everyone’s tired, and you just simply put on the film and everyone just kind of takes the afternoon off.

Well, film is much more important than that, and teachers need to carefully prepare films that they’re going to use in the classroom. For example, an English teacher would not teach a book they had never read before, and I think the same thing is true for history teachers. If you’re going to use a film in the classroom, you can’t just put it up there and expect students to watch it and get something out of it. You have to very carefully screen the film first, be very familiar with the film text.

I think that preparation in regard to films is essential, and also, I think there are a few other things in regard to teaching film. I think there’s a tendency sometimes to get overly hung up on the details. Is this exactly the right uniform in a military film? You can get hung up on that sort of thing, and sometimes lose sight of the larger historical issues and truths. I think most filmmakers try to get this right, but that’s really not the thing to focus on in the classroom. It’s really these larger historical truths that are essential to engage our students.

Also, especially when using feature films, teachers need to realize that in order to tell a story within a two-hour format, it’s very important for the director, the filmmakers, to compress time, to fit it within these two hours. Also, you sometimes have to use composite characters to do this, and you don’t want to falsify history, but I think sometimes in looking at films, there’s a tendency to be overly critical of filmmakers when they don’t follow every historical detail. I think that teachers need to point this out, and students need to be educated in that regard so they continue to focus on the larger historical truths that the film is trying to get across about a subject such as American slavery.

Another aspect is time. Time is a huge consideration. Always, always crucial in the classroom. It would be wonderful if you had the time to screen an entire film, but most teachers do not have the time to show a two-hour film. Maybe occasionally you do, but most of the time, that’s not going to happen. So, what you really need to do is carefully pick out film clips. A 10, 15, probably tops-20-minute clip from the film. Students have to be introduced very carefully, prepared, say, with characters, what’s sort of going on in the plot. You need to very carefully set up that selected film clip to raise some of the points you would like to raise with the class. But it’s very important to set the context for those clips that you’re going to use.

In selecting a clip, first of all, you need to screen the film carefully, okay? That’s the first step, and be taking some notes. Think about, maybe, what are the themes that you would really like to raise with your students from this film? And look at a clip that really brings these issues to the forefront. For example, in Gone With the Wind, there is the character of Mammy, a former slave woman who is the mammy to Scarlett O’Hara, has looked after her, brought her up since she was a child, and has been like almost a mother to her.

You can pick a scene with her interaction with Miss Scarlett, and you can raise a lot of questions about the roles of women, the roles of black women, especially black women in slavery. Some of the incredible inconsistencies with slavery. How a system based on this idea of racial discrimination, inferiority then places the training of their own children in the hands of black women. Things like that can be brought out. I think it depends on what it is that, as a teacher, you’re wanting to illustrate, that you want to draw out of the film. There’s probably a lot of different issues that you could raise. Maybe look at what you think will resonate best with your students.

And then last but certainly not least, in this era in which we hear so much about fake news and people being misled by items on Facebook, et cetera, it’s so essential that we endow our students with critical viewing skills and ask difficult, challenging, critical questions of images. I think that a serious engagement with film in the history classroom is simply something we must do in order to prepare better citizens. So, for all these reasons, I think film offers a wonderful opportunity for teachers, and really is essential in the classroom.

An area where we might look at employing film in the classroom and how feature films have really influenced how we view a period is in the teaching of Reconstruction, and I think in teaching Reconstruction, you must relate that to slavery, because I think the popular perception of Reconstruction is a rather negative one. Historians such as Eric Foner have done a great job in recent years of trying to change how we perceive Reconstruction; to view Reconstruction as a great experiment, a biracial coalition seeking to promote racial understanding, trying to overcome the burden of slavery.

But instead, Reconstruction is often viewed, as author Claude Bowers put it, as the “Tragic Era,” in which the South was taken advantage of after the war by free blacks, northern carpetbaggers, the freedmen former slaves, and poor southern whites. Popular culture has often presented Reconstruction as a travesty in which white southerners were treated terribly till they rose up and redeemed the South and retook control. That is the myth of Reconstruction, and it has certainly been perpetuated by Hollywood.

I think it’s very important to look at Reconstruction because presenting Reconstruction this way, as former slaves, blacks, out of control, ends up providing a justification of slavery. In addition to the economic aspects of slavery, certainly racial control was part of the institution of American slavery, and therefore, it’s very important that this stereotype of Reconstruction be challenged as historians like Eric Foner have done.

What I would like to do is talk about some specific examples. This sort of myth of Reconstruction, which one still often finds in the history classroom and in some textbooks, has been perpetuated in films such as Birth of a Nation from 1915 and Gone With the Wind from 1939. These two pivotal films really present the negative stereotype of Reconstruction, which has permeated American popular culture, and to a great extent, American politics throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century.

Let me talk about using these two very controversial films, clips from them, in the classroom. The first one that I would like to talk about is Birth of a Nation, made in 1915, by director D.W. Griffith. The film is still shown in lots of film classes. It’s well over three hours, dealing with the Civil War and Reconstruction. It introduced many important film techniques. It is a great work of art.

Unfortunately, that work of art perpetuates racist ideas, attitudes and stereotypes, and thus, you have to very much prepare students for this. The clip that I like to use, one I think really works best, is sort of the last 20 minutes of the film. Again, it’s a well over three-hour film. So, what’s occurring at the end of the film that the teacher would want to set up is, you have two families. The Cameron family is a southern family, again, white family. The Stonemans, a northern family. The senior member of the Stoneman family is a radical Republican. Sounds like a strange term today. It’s a radical Republican who wants to institute racial equality in the South, and he has raised to prominence in the South a black man named Silas Lynch. Interesting choice of words for the character.

What happens is, Silas Lynch reveals that he wants to marry a white woman, and Stoneman seems okay with this till he finds out that the woman that Silas Lynch wants to marry is his daughter, Elsa. This sets off the entire conflict here, where Elsa is taken captive, the father is taken captive in town; meanwhile out in the countryside, freed blacks are taking over and attacking a cabin in which the Stoneman and Cameron families, other members of the family, have taken refuge.

Things look bad. Again, the emphasis here is that what the blacks want to do is break in, attack, and rape the white women. So, who’s going to ride to the rescue? In this film version, the Ku Klux Klan rides to the rescue and saves the day. The South and southern virtue is symbolized by the women who are rescued from the clutches of the blacks, and the Klan is viewed as the hero, and then the film concludes with the white families from the South and the North are reconciled while the film actually shows the 15th Amendment being openly violated, and blacks being refused the right to vote, and somehow, the North and South is reconciled with blacks once again put in their place.

Incredibly racist material based on a novel and a play by Thomas Dixon, who just also happened to be a good friend of President Woodrow Wilson. Now, the way the Klan is shown is, by today’s standards, it’s almost laughable. One has to be very careful and set this up that the students watching this really don’t laugh at this. This is very serious business, because what actually happened in America in 1915 is Americans went to the theater. Many whites saw this. Racial violence in the country increased. Lynchings increased.

What students need to realize is, what might seem somewhat ludicrous on the screen now very much influenced events in 1915 and encouraged discrimination, violence against black Americans. So you’re looking at the racism of Reconstruction perpetuated into the progressive era of 1915, when the film was made. The film was very popular. Blacks protested it. It was not actually taken out of circulation until World War I, when there was a feeling that you needed black support for the war effort. In many states, the film was withdrawn after three years.

This is a very important source to introduce to students, but also, a very troubling source. Very complicated issues. Challenging issues to deal with in the classroom, but I think important issues to deal with. The sexual politics of slavery, of Reconstruction, are very important topics, and they do resonate with students. It’s interesting that the director, D.W. Griffith, didn’t think the film was racist, even though he said that he did not want black men touching white women in the filming of Birth of a Nation. So therefore, as ludicrous as it might seem, actually, almost all of the blacks in the film are played by whites, using shoe polish and blackface.

A very troubling moment in American history. However, in many textbooks, many teachers, presentations, this stereotype of Reconstruction has been perpetuated. And it continued with the very famous Gone With the Wind in 1939, and I use Gone With the Wind after we have screened the Birth of a Nation. The first half of the film is set in slavery; the second half of Gone With the Wind deals with Reconstruction, and Gone With the Wind is a little less over the top in its racism than Birth of a Nation. The NAACP insisted that use of, for example, the N-word, be taken out of the film, and actually, the Klan is not mentioned by name, but is certainly alluded to.

I think there’s particularly one scene there that I would like to talk about, that teachers might employ in the classroom. Let me spend a few minutes talking about that scene in Gone With the Wind. I think a useful way to view Gone With the Wind, and especially its heroine, Scarlett O’Hara, is to see Scarlett O’Hara as a symbol of the South. She is under attack in the film as the South was under attack during Reconstruction. I don’t use these words lightly, but in this stereotype, you’re really sort of looking at the rape of the South by poor southern whites, carpetbaggers from the north, and freed blacks. The saviors of the South? The Ku Klux Klan, again.

In the particular scene that I would use from the second half of the film, you have Scarlett O’Hara who has married a man by the name of Mr. Kennedy, and she has worked with him, and they’ve set up a lumber company. After the Civil War here, she has a very successful business. What happens is that she takes a shortcut while driving in her buggy, a shortcut through a shantytown. Living in the shantytown are a lot of poor whites and freed blacks. What happens is they attack Scarlett O’Hara, okay? And it looks as if she is about to be raped. She passes out.

She is rescued, however, by Big Sam, a loyal former slave from her plantation terra. He comes to her rescue and she is able to escape with Big Sam. She goes to her husband, who rewards Big Sam for his faithful service, and Big Sam says he’s had enough with these carpetbaggers. So, you haven’t shown actually northern carpetbaggers involved in the rape, but it’s very clear that they’re behind these freed blacks and poor southern whites.

Then, her husband says, “I’ll take care of this.” He says he’s going to a political meeting, and she needs to go visit her friends. By the way, it’s clear that this is not really a political meeting. The film emphasizes that he takes out his pistol, puts it in his holster, pats the gun. Clearly, he and his friends are going to go take revenge against the shantytown, and the political meeting he’s referring to really is the Klan, although the word Klan is not used in the film.

Then the film shifts to the women that evening, knowing that their men have gone out on this mission. Scarlett O’Hara doesn’t quite understand the total nature of the mission. However, Rhett Butler, a man she later marries, comes to see her and the other women, and wants to warn the white southerners that the Yankee troops are waiting in ambush. Butler, however, does not get there in time, and the ambush is completed, and Scarlett’s husband is killed. However, they did succeed in burning down the shantytown.

Again, the bad guys are the northern troops, the freed blacks, except for loyal former slaves like Sam, and this is all orchestrated by the carpetbaggers. But again, this view of Reconstruction very much perpetuated in popular culture, from Gone With the Wind down to the present.

I’m older. I went to school in the 1960s, and this was very much the view of Reconstruction that I was taught, and I still see it throughout our culture. So, I think using these films to look at how cultural stereotypes are established are very important, and encouraging students to challenge these types of cultural stereotypes. So, I think these two films looking at the myth of Reconstruction are very important to use in the classroom.

One of the things students notice is some of the difference between Gone With the Wind and Birth of a Nation. Still plenty of racial stereotyping, et cetera, but in many ways, the racist is less obvious, and students do note this. But nevertheless, they notice the connections between the two films. They notice how, oh, there seems to be a reference here to the Klan, but the Klan is not mentioned by name. They’re a terrorist organization that shall not be named, and they do pick up on these subtle differences. They pick up on these subtleties.

But what they also perceive, and they do a good job of this, of seeing, in many ways, how the film texts are similar. You still have this idea in both films of southern womanhood symbolizing southern civilization that’s under assault, and we have to protect southern womanhood. It also ties into discussion of the Lost Cause in the South, and many times leads us into discussion of Confederate monuments and how the memory of slavery, Reconstruction is molded in the American mind.

Again, I try to always bring in reading material on this that will expand these issues, and in terms of Confederate monuments, there’s a new book out by the New Orleans mayor, Mitch Landrieu, that raises many of these same issues in regard to confederate monuments. So, I think you can take these film texts and use them to take us right into contemporary, modern day discussions and subjects.

Now, I like to talk about two other feature films, and these feature films do a better job of bringing in black agency. That is the Steven Spielberg film, Amistad, and the Edward Zwick film, Glory. Let’s begin with Amistad. The film deals with a slave mutiny aboard a Spanish slave ship. What happens is, the mutiny is successful. However, after the mutiny, the ship ends up off the coast of North America, and the mutineers are taken in by the American government, and the question is, what to do with them?

Again, it’s important that the students understand that this is based on a true story and that the basic overall facts in the film are accurate, but there are a few caveats that we should take a look at. The film really focuses not so much on the revolt itself, but on the court case. What do we do with these slaves who have mutinied and have now been taken into custody by the United States government? The Spanish government wants them returned. Abolitionists take on the case and argue for the freedom of the slaves.

The film culminates in a series of court cases, but culminates in the arguments of John Quincy Adams, former president, who is now in the House of Representatives and played by Anthony Hopkins, in a role for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. It culminates in his argument before the Supreme Court, in which he basically appeals for the freedom for the mutineers and their leader, Cinqué. He says that they should be freed, and he uses primarily arguments from the Declaration of Independence. He appeals to the court using the arguments of people like Jefferson, even though he was a slave owner. His own father, John Adams, George Washington, also a slave owner. And what happens is, the court agrees, and the mutineers are freed and returned to their home in West Africa.

Now, there’s a couple of problems with the film. First of all, though, I would use it because it does show a sense of black agency, even though the emphasis is sometimes more on the court case than the actual mutiny. But one of the things that I think is very good to use with the film is, during the testimony, there is a flashback to the Middle Passage. Cinqué, through an interpreter, tells the story of what happened to his people in the Middle Passage. It shows the capture of Cinqué and many others, how they’re brought to a slave garrison, sold to a Spanish slave vessel, and there, the emphasis is then on the terrible conditions below deck.

One of the things that probably really stands out that’s very powerful is, as people get ill, they die, they throw people overboard, and they talk about actually sharks following the ship for these bodies that are going to be thrown overboard. When they think they’re going to be confronted by a vessel attempting to stop the slave trade, they have people in chains and simply throw them overboard, alive, to drown and to be devoured by sharks. It’s a very, very powerful scene. Again, I think the fact that it’s not simply told with someone just telling the story in a verbal fashion, but that it’s shown on the screen, really reinforces just the horror, well, the holocaust, of the transatlantic slave trade.

And you can read all you want to for students about the Middle Passage, but seeing this on the big screen, it’s graphic, it’s troubling, but nevertheless, I think very important for students to actually see this. So, I think the Middle Passage segment of the film is a very strong element to include in the classroom.

But something else that I would point out to students about the film is that, while it does show black agency in terms of the slave revolt and finally winning their freedom, Hollywood films often tend to emphasize the white characters. So in many ways, the center of the film becomes John Quincy Adams making his arguments before the Supreme Court, and the film tends to ignore the fact that the court, in setting these former slaves free, really was not so much using the Declaration of Independence in their reasoning. They were really talking more about property rights, which they wanted to be sure were protected. After all, this is the same Supreme Court that issues the Dred Scott decision later. Of course, that decision upheld that blacks were not citizens of the United States and therefore, there could be no restrictions legislatively put on slavery and declared them as a compromise, unconstitutional. I think that aspect needs to be pointed out in students evaluating the film; this tendency to often, even in films that are empathetic toward blacks, to still emphasize the white character.

Another film that shows black agency is Glory, and this film, again, got very good marks from historians. It tells the true story of the 54th Massachusetts regiment in the Civil War, and this was a black regiment. The North was reluctant to raise this regiment. Lincoln was reluctant. But pressured by people like Frederick Douglass, this regiment of black troops is formed, made up of free blacks from the North, made up from former slaves from the South, and they are commanded by a white Colonel Robert Shaw, who’s played by Matthew Broderick.

They present this regiment finally going into action in the assault against Fort Wagner in South Carolina, and the film very much does a good job of showing black agency as the troops want to fight for their freedom. This was not something that was just done by whites and handed to blacks. Instead, this was something that blacks took a very important role in, and essentially, the information on the attack is accurate. The attack was unsuccessful, and what you have, in a lack of respect afterwards, is sort of a mass grave in which the black troops were thrown in, their bodies.

Now, in terms of using this in the classroom, there are a couple of clips that you might use, okay? One scene that’s very powerful is how Colonel Shaw decides that he has to bring discipline to his black troops. One of them is a composite character by the name of Silas Trip, played by Denzel Washington, who won an Academy Award here for Best Supporting Actor in this role. In this particular scene, Matthew Broderick, playing Colonel Shaw, is trying to provide a sense of discipline for his black troops, and the character Silas Trip, played by Denzel Washington, who is a former slave with a rebellious streak who has run away and joined the Union army, has left the regiment without permission.

One problem for the 54th Regiment is that they lack supplies. They do not have shoes, and his feet are killing him. He’s not deserting. He is actually foraging, looking for shoes and food. When he is brought back, to instill discipline, Colonel Shaw says there’s no choice but to give him a lashing. As he is tied down to be lashed, his uniform is removed and his back is covered with scars from his experience as a rebellious slave, and you realize that he’s been beaten a great many times already as a slave, and now the Union army is also administering this beating. You can see the pain in Shaw’s face as he realizes now that he’s going to inflict more punishment upon Trip, and Trip does not cry out. Tears roll down his eyes, and the two men look at one another, and both men form a bond through this terrible scene, as actually, at the end of the film, they’re buried together in a mass grave after the unsuccessful assault on Fort Wagner in South Carolina. That’s a very, very powerful scene that one might use.

Another scene that one might use in the classroom is actually the final assault. Some have criticized the assault for perhaps celebrating violence. On the other hand, it is worth remembering that the terrible violence of the Civil War did achieve the end of slavery, and that’s certainly something to talk about in the classroom with your students. But the assault is, again, unsuccessful and in the end, you see Colonel Shaw, the white officer, thrown into this mass grave with the black troops.

It might be also worth pointing out that having black troops with a white commanding officer, that was really the standard for American Forces from the Civil War era down to World War II. That really, the American Army, American Forces, Armed Services, really only integrated by President Truman after an executive order, after the Second World War. It’s worth pointing out that for the black troops shown in the film, these are composite characters. Colonel Shaw is an actual historical character, and much of the film is based upon his letters to his parents back in Massachusetts, and these letters are often read in the film. Many times, the emphasis upon white characters also relates to the available sources as well as, to be honest, wanting the film to appeal to white audiences.

So, I would consider both Amistad and Glory feature films that present a sense of black agency. But, in terms of critical viewing skills, discussions might look at how whites remain privileged in these films. These are four feature films. There are many others. Also, excellent documentaries which one could use in the classroom. I think these four are ones that will appeal to students and introduce some very important ideas into the classroom. It’s challenging to present these images dealing with slavery. It can be controversial. But I think it’s incredibly worthwhile for what it provides students in terms of visual literacy.

I really encourage teachers to use film in the classroom. I’ve found it so rewarding both for me and for my students, and you know what? Film is a lot of fun in the classroom, too, and I think that’s allowed even when we’re dealing with some controversial subjects.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Ron Briley is a film historian who recently retired from Sandia Preparatory School in Albuquerque, New Mexico after teaching history for 37 years. He was also an adjunct professor of history at the University of New Mexico, Valencia campus for 20 years. Mr. Briley is the author of five books and numerous articles on the intersection of history, politics and film.

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 feature 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 those online at LearningForJustice.org. Thanks to Mr. Briley for sharing his insights with us. This podcast was produced by Shea Shackleford, with production assistance from Tori Marlin and Megan Camerick at KUNM 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 Zabriski.

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

• John Ford, The Grapes of Wrath (film)
• Colonial Williamsburg Foundation: Slavery and Remembrance, Middle Passage
• Victor Fleming, Gone with the Wind (film)
• Claude G. Bowers, The Tragic Era The Revolution After Lincoln
• D. W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation (film)
• Thomas Dixon, The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan
• Steven Spielberg, Amistad (film)
• Mitch Landrieu, In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History
• Learning for Justice: Texts, Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)
• Edward Zwick, Glory (film)
• University of Wisconsin Press, Understanding and Teaching American Slavery
• Learning for Justice, A Framework for Teaching American Slavery

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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.

Full Transcript of the episode

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: My uncle never took my brother and I to the movies. He took us everywhere but to the movies. We went to the Brooklyn Academy of Music to see Alex Haley, the author of Roots, and to Yankee Stadium to see South African freedom fighter Nelson Mandela on his first trip to the U.S. after being released from prison. But he never ever took us to the movies.

So when my parents told us he planned on taking us to see a movie, I knew immediately we wouldn’t be seeing the latest installment of Indiana Jones. And I was right. Glory, my uncle was taking us to see Glory. It was 1989 and just between you and I, when I heard we were going to see a Civil War movie, I was like, “What the hell?” In my infinite 16-year-old wisdom, I could think of a thousand things I’d rather do than trek up to Harlem to watch a Civil War movie. But I really had no choice in the matter. My parents’ house, my parents’ rules.

And it wasn’t just my brother and I. My uncle had gathered a half dozen sons and daughters of his friends to watch the movie too. And by the looks on their faces before the movie started, I could see I wasn’t the only one thinking, What am I doing here? But by the time the movie ended, the point of the outing was clear. My uncle wanted us, a group of Black teenagers growing up in New York City in the 1980s, to see African Americans fighting for their freedom in the 1860s. I remember him explaining to us afterward that freedom wasn’t just given to Black people, handed to them happily by Abraham Lincoln. Black people earned it. They seized it by picking up guns and laying down tools, by running to Union lines and disrupting Confederate ones. Glory didn’t capture the whole story, but it got enough of it. It was a lesson about African-American agency that was new to me, totally upending normative narratives of slavery, abolition and the Civil War, and it made sense. And I never forgot it.

A few years ago, I began teaching a course entitled “African-American History Through Film.” And for the unit on the Civil War, I show Glory. And without fail, before we watched the film, I recognize that same “What the hell?” look on my students’ faces that I had almost 30 years earlier. This is because the same myths and misconceptions about Black folk not having a hand in their own liberation still persist. But when we discuss the film afterward, I also recognize that same new understanding that I had: that African Americans played a major role in their own liberation. And this is an absolutely foundational lesson essential for understanding the Black and white experience in slavery and in freedom. This is a lesson that my students have to learn, just as I did as a teenager sitting reluctantly with my uncle in a movie theater in Harlem.

I am Hasan Kwame Jeffries, and this is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery. It’s a special series from Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. This podcast provides an in-depth 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 this episode, we’re going to continue looking at the connections between slavery and the Civil War. Specifically, we’re going to explore the role that slavery and enslaved people played in the war once it actually began. We are joined again by historian Bethany Jay, who examines how slavery’s presence in the Southern and border states shaped the war. She provides terrific lesson ideas and historical resources to help your students understand the actions that enslaved people took during the conflict and the very real effect that their actions had on the development of the war, including the pursuit of emancipation. I’ll see you on the other side. Enjoy.

Bethany Jay: We often just think of the end of slavery or the possible perpetuation of slavery as a part of the Civil War. And we don’t think about the enslaved people themselves and the role that they played, not as an abstract concept—slavery— but as individual human beings. And that’s also going to be a part of our conversation, as we think about the very real effect that individual people and their actions had on the progress of the Civil War and the course of emancipation. So with that in mind, let’s shift our attention away from the cause of the war and look at the way that slavery’s presence in the Southern and bordering states affected the war itself.

We’re used to talking about slavery when we talk about the Civil War; it’s maybe one of the only places that many students learn about slavery in the American history curriculum. Similarly, when we teach about the end of slavery, we often just talk about the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment, right? These two moments that gave slaves their freedom, in a way that we often speak about it. But just as we did with the causes of the Civil War, what we want to do is complicate this version of the end of slavery, the notion that enslaved people were given their freedom. And we can do this by looking at two interrelated things.

The first is a slow evolution of wartime Union policies relating to slavery and the ways that those policies led to the Emancipation Proclamation. And then the second is the way that the actions of free and enslaved African Americans on the battlefield and on the home front, ended up hastening the end of slavery, altering Union policy, damaging the Confederacy and ultimately undermining the institution, long before Lincoln’s proclamation. We really want to correct the notion that slaves were given their freedom. Free and enslaved African Americans worked tirelessly to make emancipation the outcome of war.

So let’s first turn our attention to Union policy in 1860. It is not a given, in fact, it would be highly unlikely that slavery would end as a result of the Civil War. In fact, Lincoln couldn’t have raised an army to fight a war to end slavery in 1861. Actually, in 1860 everybody’s thinking that the war is going to be a couple of weeks long. When the war was beginning, there was a whole lot of bluster about exactly how short it’s going to be and exactly how few lives are going to be lost on both sides. And so few people are really thinking about a potential impact for the war on the institution of slavery.

So the first thing that we will want to look at as we examine the issue of slavery and the progress of the Civil War, is the evolution of Union policy relating to slaves. This policy sort of emerges spontaneously when Brigadier General Benjamin Butler declared that the three men who had escaped to Union lines in Virginia were “contraband of war,” and therefore subject to confiscation. It’s important because Butler’s actions here become codified in the first Confiscation Act, which was strengthened by the 1862 Second Confiscation Act. And what those acts really did was allow Union generals to take enslaved people as contraband of war, the same way you might take houses, food and other things belonging to the enemy.

These confiscation policies are one of the first mechanisms that helps drive the Union towards a more general policy of emancipation. In fact, the Second Confiscation Act explicitly declares Confederate slaves as captives of war who were forever free. This is one of the first places where we start to see military activities and an attack on slavery, go hand in hand. What we see is the Union Army’s commitment to emancipation as a part of the war.

That Second Confiscation Act freed all slaves of rebel masters who made it to Union lines. So not just men who could serve or work as laborers in the military, but women, children, anybody. Enslaved people who were confiscated as a result of these early policies were generally employed in the Union Army as things like laborers: digging trenches, cutting down trees, etc. They’re not soldiers. Neither of those Confiscation Acts led to Black military service at this point.

Historian Joseph Glatthaar has argued that these policies were important to the Union effort in two main ways. First, it demonstrated that the Union Army was going to make a commitment to emancipation as an act of war. Second, it aided the Union Army’s war effort, while it took away from the Confederacy’s. So former slaves are doing some of the work of the Union Army, freeing soldiers for the front lines, and therefore those slaves are not working towards a Confederate war effort. They were depriving the Confederacy of valuable manpower. Those Confiscation Acts were really important, but as we might imagine, few Black Americans were content with serving only as laborers for the Union Army.

From the onset of the war, free Blacks 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 about military service. Again, it’s historian Joseph Glatthaar who knows that Douglass viewed Black service 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.”

The reason why Douglass is so passionate about Black military service is that he knew that the outcome of the Civil War could affect the future of both free Blacks and enslaved people. Douglass said, “Once let the Black man get upon his person, the brass letter US. Let him get an eagle on his button and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship in the United States.”

Even Confederate politicians recognize the implications of Black military service. Joseph E. Brown, who was the governor of Georgia, famously stated, “Whenever we establish that they are a military race, we destroy our whole theory that they are unfit to be free.” So even though men ranging from Frederick Douglass to the Confederate governor of Georgia recognize that Black service could have a tremendous impact on the war and the future of African Americans, change was still slow. And there’s a variety of factors that serve to delay Northern actions on this. Primarily, we have Northern prejudice. Lincoln was afraid that the white soldiers would not enlist if they saw this as a war to end slavery. Second, we have the need to keep the border states in the Union: Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri and West Virginia. Those border states are slaveholding states and they remained loyal to the Union. Obvious threats to slavery could push those border states and all of their resources and manpower into the Confederacy. All of those things combined to delay any changes in military policy regarding African Americans until 1862.

The Union policy on African-American service is incremental. It’s like this incremental step towards emancipation that makes total sense as an act of war. By 1862 it was clear that this was not going to be a quick fight. It was a brutal war. And the Union Army needed to keep its numbers up and it could do this by using African-American soldiers. So that year, we see both emancipation and Black enlistment become official policies of the Union Army. First in July, Congress passed the Militia Act, which authorized Lincoln to use Black soldiers in the military. And then in September, Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which promised freedom to slaves and states still in rebellion as of January 1863.

So together, these two policies had a big impact on the war. Black soldiers were quick to respond to the opportunity to fight for the Union. And so you see that Union enlistment really benefits from the Militia Act allowing Black soldiers to enlist. By the end of the war, nearly 180,000 Black soldiers had fought in the Union Army. Of those, 98,500 had been slaves who fled the Confederacy. This is important because recruiting slaves from Southern plantation strengthened the fighting force of the Union and denied the South their labor. So we’re seeing that it’s weakening the Confederacy on two fronts. It’s weakening them by providing service to the Union Army on the front lines, and it’s also weakening their ability to feed their military and civilian populations.

The other thing it did was it also helped to ensure that Britain would withhold their 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. And by tying emancipation to the Union war effort, that helps to keep abolitionist Britain out of the fight for the Confederacy.

The historian Stephanie McCurry argues that, while it may have taken Lincoln a little while to realize the impact the war could have on slavery, slaves immediately recognize the significance of the war to their personal freedom. McCurry has written an important book, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South, and much of what I’ll talk about next is taken from her work.

So on plantations close to the front, enslaved people ran in huge numbers to Union lines, sometimes in groups of 60 or 80 at a time from a single plantation. Those escapees didn’t just include men who were running to join the army. It also included men and women of all ages. We can think of this as slaves freeing themselves, and they did it so frequently that planters were forced to acknowledge that the Union Army was not their only enemy, that who they saw as their trusted and valued laborers at home, were also working against the Confederate war effort. The pattern repeated itself throughout the war as Union troops moved further and further into the interior of the Confederacy and slaves risked everything to make it to Union lines.

As McCurry and other historians have noted, those mass departures greatly affected the war effort. First, as I just mentioned, it removed valuable laborers from the field. At the beginning of the war, Confederate leaders really thought that the three and a half million slaves on the home front were going to be one of their greatest resources, but what we see is that they’re not. By moving to Union lines, by freeing themselves, they diminish the Confederacy’s ability to supply its army and feed its population on the home front. The mass departure of slaves meant that work was not getting done.

Second, perhaps equally as important, the exodus of the enslaved people had a devastating impact on Confederate morale. Remember, the vast majority of the war is being fought in the South. Southerners are bearing the brunt of the physical damage that is coming from the war and the personal privations that are coming from the war. And so even as that devastation is happening, those who slaveholders always claimed that they considered trusted servants or virtual members of the family, were also continuously leaving Southern farms and plantations. So the Confederates, particularly women, became increasingly demoralized as this happened over and over again.

When you read the diaries that Confederate women left, you can see the very personal effect that slave departures had on them. You can see their attitudes changing and you can use the candid recollections from their diaries and letters to explore this very personal effect of slaves’ departures.

Mary Boykin Chesnut from South Carolina is the most famous Confederate diarist. And her entries capture these particular moments and reactions. For example, on January 9th, 1864, she wrote, “The president’s man Jim.” And here she’s referring to Confederate president Jefferson Davis. “The president’s man, Jim, that he believed in as we all believe in our own servants, our own people, as we are apt to call them, and Betsy, Mrs. Davis’ maid, decamped last night. It is miraculous that they had the fortitude to resist the temptation so long. At Mrs. Davis’, the hired servants are mere birds of passage. First, they are seen with gold galore, then their wings sprout and they fly to the Yankees.” She continues to say, ‘I do not think it had ever crossed Mrs D’s brain that these two would leave her.”

Another Southern woman, Gertrude Thomas, wrote on June 12th, 1865, “I must confess to you my journal, that I do most heartily despise Yankees, Negroes and everything connected with them. Everything is entirely reversed. I feel no interest in them, whatever,” referring to her former slaves, “and hope I never will.”

There’s a lot that’s happening in both of these passages. If you use them in your classroom, ask your students how these women felt about their relationships with the slaves before the war; how has that relationship changed? Let’s identify specifically what the slaves are doing and how those women react. Students should be able to recognize the sense of betrayal, surprise and then real bitterness that existed alongside their matter-of-fact rendition of events.

Of course, not all slaves could leave their farms and plantations. Often, when we talk about how African Americans aided the Union war effort, we only think about their participation in the army. We probably show a clip of Glory in our classrooms. But that’s actually only part of the story. It’s important to acknowledge in our classroom the actions of the millions of enslaved people who did not serve as soldiers. There were other critical ways that enslaved people actively affected the war effort and the progress of the Civil War.

Slaves immediately recognized that with the Civil War, the slave system was breaking down, and they took multiple actions to further destroy it. So we can look again at Jefferson Davis’ own slaves. Jefferson Davis’ brother fled from his plantation with a group of household slaves when the Union Army got close by. The remaining slaves took control of the two Davis plantations. They helped themselves to the valuables. They refused to work for anyone other than themselves, and in general, they kind of lived as free people on the Davis plantation for the better part of the war.

And of course the Davis slaves weren’t the only ones making those decisions. Together, on plantations across the South, these open acts of rebellion made it difficult for the Confederacy to supply their troops on the front and the civilian population at home.

Slaves on the Confederate home front actively conspired against the Confederacy. Stephanie McCurry reminds us that slaves often risked their own lives to provide valuable intelligence to the Union Army. They did things like give Confederate positions to Union soldiers, tell 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.

So what happens is that the Confederate army has to divert forces kind of to patrol plantations as they’re also trying to fight the war. Stephanie 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 acts of open rebellion point to numerous ways in which enslaved people affected the war effort and contributed to their own emancipation.

All of us deal with the end of slavery as the most significant outcome of the Civil War. But many of us in the past probably haven’t considered the role that slaves played in bringing about the end of slavery. So hopefully, we’re changing the story within our classrooms by having these different discussions about the multiple actions that enslaved people took to impact emancipation. And building on this work that we’re doing in our classrooms, it’s also important to consider what our larger national story of emancipation is. How do we represent it to ourselves as a nation and as a people?

We can do this by asking our students to critique a famous Thomas Ball statue that’s entitled alternately Emancipation Memorial or Freedman’s Memorial. You can find images of it online. The statue was erected in Washington, D.C., in 1876 right at the end of Reconstruction. It depicts Abraham Lincoln standing over a shackled slave who is down on one knee. Lincoln is gazing thoughtfully towards the slave, his right hand holds a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation. His left hand hovers over the enslaved man who is kneeling, naked except for a loincloth.

To do this activity with students, it’s important to first have them look carefully at the statue. Ask them, “What do you see?” And it’s not about interpretation here. It’s not about analysis. It’s literally about what is right in front of you. How was the enslaved person dressed? How was Lincoln dressed? What’s the difference in the way their bodies are positioned? Once your students have done a good job really looking at the statue, then we can move on to those contextualizing and analytical questions. Ask the students, “What do we think is the relationship between these men? What is each one doing?” And then we can ask, “What is the statue telling us? What does the relationship between these men mean?”

And at the end of this questioning, students should realize that Lincoln is the one who has all the power. He is the only one who is active in the statue. Lincoln is emancipating the slaves. And then we can ask them, “Thinking back on our discussion so far, is this accurate?” Students love to critique things and so they will most likely pull this statue apart. It’s supposed to be the Freedman’s Memorial, but it’s really more of a memorial to Lincoln himself. I love Lincoln and we call him the Great Emancipator, but he’s not the only one who was active. There were multiple Great Emancipators in this story.

As your students are doing this critique, you should ask them to provide evidence from your discussions of Abraham Lincoln, the free Black population and the enslaved the population to support their responses. Having determined the ways in which the statue is inaccurate, students should consider the implications of this narrative of emancipation. If we don’t recognize the ways that African-American people contributed to the end of slavery, what impact might that have on the political future of African Americans? You can also extend this discussion by asking students to use their existing knowledge to create their own Emancipation Memorial. What should it look like?

After this memorial exercise, you can begin to conclude your classroom discussion of slavery and the Civil War with an examination of Abraham Lincoln’s eloquent Second Inaugural Address. Lincoln was sworn into office just three weeks before the end of the Civil War. When he addressed the crowd, he acknowledged that everyone knew that slavery was somehow the cause of the war, and he admitted that few believed the institution would end even before the conflict. But Lincoln continued on to posit that the war’s terrible human cost may have been God’s way of forcing the United States to serve penance for the sin of slavery. Lincoln said, “Yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsmans’ 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword. As was said 3,000 years ago, so still, it must be said, the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

Lincoln’s words are eloquent, so much so they’re carved in the wall of the Lincoln Memorial. But his remarks remain ambiguous in somehow describing slavery as the cause of the war and his attribution of Divine Will in determining the end of slavery, Lincoln leaves historians unsatisfied.

Through this work, we can help students to flesh out the ways that slavery was at the heart of the succession crisis. By highlighting those extant sources that we discussed surrounding the Fugitive Slave Acts and the secession crisis, students can now articulate the complications that come with using states’ rights as an alternative explanation for the conflict. And by examining the ways that slaves seize the opportunities that came with the chaos of the war to free themselves and to proclaim their loyalty to the union cause, teachers can also complicate the narrative of slaves being given their freedom, and instead help students to understand the ways that slaves help to bring about and mold their own emancipation.

It’s really necessary for us to have these conversations, addressing the ways that we’ve either avoided or misrepresented our past, whether it’s done intentionally or just unthinkingly. As history teachers, we want to give our students the opportunity not only to understand and engage in the past, but also to contribute to and impact the present. This subject, it’s not easy to talk about. These are complicated issues, but they’re not so complicated that we can’t deal with them historically. And if we can deal with their historical complications and understand those, then we can also equip ourselves and our students to deal with the complicated impact that the history of slavery has had on our present-day life.

As a nation, we’ve allowed these partial, incomplete or confused narratives to play too much of a role in the way that we understand the Civil War and the way that we understand the end of slavery. We need to address this history because we’re living with the very real 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 that slavery and the enslaved had on our past, we can’t see the impact that their legacies have had on our present. And maybe the first step towards righting the wrongs of today is getting the history right.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Bethany Jay is an associate professor of history at Salem State University where she teaches courses on 19th-century American history, African-American history and history education. She is also co-editor of the informative book that this series is based on.

Teaching Hard History is a podcast from Teaching Tolerance, with special thanks to the University of Wisconsin Press. They’re 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 tolerance.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 those resources online at tolerance.org.

Thanks to Dr. Jay for sharing her insights with us. This podcast was produced by Shea Shackleford, with production assistance from Tori Marlene and Gregory Dan at Rockpile Studios. 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 Zabriski.

If you like what we’re doing, please share it with your friends and colleagues and consider taking a minute to review and rate us on iTunes. We appreciate the feedback.

I’m Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, associate professor of history at The Ohio State University and your host. You’ve been listening to Teaching Hard History: American Slavery.

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.

Resources

• SPLC, Teaching the Hard History of American Slavery
• Teaching Hard History, A Framework for Teaching American Slavery

Kenneth Greenberg

• History, Suffolk University
• Honor and Slavery: Lies, Duels, Noses, Masks, Dressing as a Woman, Gifts, Strangers, Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Rebellions, the Proslavery Argument, Baseball, Hunting and Gambling in the Old South
• Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory

Transcript

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Soon after we launched this podcast, I received a direct message on Twitter from a middle school educator. The message began:

Izzy Anderson: “Good morning, Mr. Jeffries. I am a school librarian in the Arkansas Delta. In addition to being a librarian, I also teach a small gifted and talented literacy class, which is made up primarily of black sixth grade boys. My students do not get a full year of social studies at my school, so I’m modifying my curriculum to teach black history to my students this month, and probably for the rest of the year. I am starting with slavery, so I’ve been listening to your podcast for ideas.”

“I am a white educator, and I’m concerned about teaching history in a way that is honest and true, but avoids traumatizing my young students. My students live in an area of the country that, in many ways, is still experiencing the reality of Jim Crow. I think it’s really important for them to understand their own history, but I don’t want to do an information dump on them without also caring for their hearts. I’d appreciate any suggestions you might have, Izzy Anderson.”

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I knew exactly where Ms. Anderson was coming from, both as an educator, and as an African American who had mostly white teachers in elementary and high school. I appreciated her candor and concern, as well as her commitment to teach more than what was required. So I messaged her back, “Hi Izzy, thank you very much for your thoughtful note. I suggest beginning the conversation in the present by explaining to your kids that you have to look to the past to understand current times. That will help get them interested, and don’t avoid talking about the harshness and brutality of slavery. No one who watches television is unaware of violence, but it needs to be explained that slavery was so brutal, because black people were constantly resisting in every way imaginable.”

“Explain to them how central slavery was to American growth, and you can’t emphasize enough that there is real pride to be found in this history, the pride of surviving a horribly unjust system, the pride of knowing their ancestors resisted, the pride of knowing that black people were right in their insistence that slavery was wrong, and the pride of knowing that the enslaved never gave up hope, they never surrendered their humanity. Be clear with them, too, about what was right and wrong, about who showed true strength and courage, and they’ll get it.”

It’s not going to be easy, as they will have a range of reactions and emotions, but affirm those feelings. Tell them, ‘Yes, this makes me mad too,’ and always redirect them toward drawing inspiration from the enslaved who endured, who fought, who survived despite all odds. Good luck.” Two days later I received another message from Ms. Anderson, an update on what had been going on in her class.

Izzy Anderson: “Thank you so much for such a long and thoughtful message. Since I’ve read it, I’ve been really leaning into letting students express their emotions as we read and learn.”

“What I didn’t expect is the amount of anger they are expressing. They’re angry, wondering, ‘Why haven’t I learned this before?’ and I think the anger is righteous. My job now is to help them express it constructively.”

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: “And that’s the thing,” I wrote back, “Your students’ reaction, their righteous anger, is consistent with the reaction of my students in college, both black and white. When they are exposed to the truth in a thoughtful and honest way, they get pissed off, but not at the truth teller, but rather at those who withheld the truth from them. Now you have to capitalize on that anger,” I said. “Use it as motivation for them to learn more about what others aren’t going to teach them. I promise, you will be the teacher who they will remember because you told them what others wouldn’t. Peace, Hasan.”

There is nothing more dispiriting to students than to think that the enslaved accepted their fate, so teaching resistance is the key to getting students to want to learn about slavery. Hard history, you see, is not hopeless history, and there is no greater hope to be found in those dark days than in African Americans’ resistance to slavery, and that’s what we’ll be exploring here. I’m Hasan Kwame Jeffries, and this is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery. It is 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.

Our understanding of resistance to slavery in the United States has changed over the years. In this episode, Kenneth Greenberg explains the evolution from looking exclusively at instances of rebellion, to examining the numerous ways that enslaved African-Americans incorporated resistance in every aspect of their lives. He also offers several examples that you can use to explore resistance with your students, and stay tuned at the end of the episode for advice from Ms. Anderson for teaching these topics and techniques for the first time. I’ll see you on the other side, enjoy.

Kenneth Greenberg: When we talk about resistance to slavery, at first glance you might think this is a narrow topic, since slavery is such a big, big subject, but it turns out that you’re actually touching on every aspect of slavery. It’s the most probably revealing way of entering the subject. There is resistance during the entire time, from 1619 or so, when the first African-Americans are brought into Virginia, until slavery is officially legally ended in 1865. I think it’s important to have in mind that there’s a paradox at the heart of slavery.

Slavery is this horrific, exploitive, brutal institution on the one hand, and on the other hand, African American culture flourishes in the institution of slavery, survives the institution slavery, despite the brutality of slavery, and you want to teach both those things when you teach students about the institution of slavery. If you focus on resistance, you can teach both those things at the same time.

One side of slavery is it is an extremely brutal institution. Every student’s going to know that slavery is an exploitive institution, but the details of that exploitation I think are always worth talking about. Even before we talk about resistance, you’ve gotta make sure that students understand exactly the horrors of slavery.

First of all, there’s the slave trade, involuntarily bringing over people from Africa into America. They’re on these crowded ships, there’s a very famous image, it’s an image which comes from the way enslaved people are supposed to be stored on a ship. They’re basically in coffin-size containers, and they sleep that way, and they don’t move from those spots, and you traveled across the ocean in a spot like that. This is before modern sanitation is part of this, disease and death are part of this. These are terrible experiences, but what people don’t realize, is the image which everybody’s familiar with, and your students I’m sure in every textbook that you can find, they have this image, that image is the reformer’s image. That’s an image of how it’d be more humane to transport people across the ocean in these coffin-size spaces, not what actually happened.

People are vulnerable to rape, to death, on these passages. It’s the worst horror you can possibly imagine. Then, of course, slavery is the context in which racism develops. People don’t come with ideas about race until you actually see people degraded, and you see them as slaves, and that gets fully developed in the United States because of slavery. Another feature of slavery is that it’s perpetual. Once you’re in it, it’s for your life, and then, if you have children, it’s for the lives of your children, and they pass it on to their children. There’s basically no way out of the institution.

Another feature of slavery, which, again, this is on the horror side of slavery, is there’s no such thing as legal marriage in slavery. Because marriage is a claim that two people can make on each other, it often involves property claims, and masters don’t want to concede that there’s anybody who has a property claim on the human beings they own, other than the masters, and therefore they don’t allow people to be legally married. They can permit two people to live together and have a little ceremony, which they’ll abide by until they don’t want to abide by it, but there is no legal institution of marriage.

Throughout much of slavery it’s a crime to teach someone how to read who was an enslaved person, because reading is seen as the way in which people can learn about the rest of the world, and get ideas, which might undermine slavery. An enslaved person can be whipped at any time for various transgressions, or other kinds of punishments like that. There’s no crime of rape in slavery. If you’re a woman and you’re enslaved, and a white man sexually assaults you, you can’t go to the police, you can’t go to courts of any sort. That’s not a crime.

In fact, this is one of the great ironies of slavery, because if you’re a woman and you’re owned by a master, no matter who rapes you, the only legal recourse would be if your master thought there was a violation, and your master could bring the person who raped you to court on a charge of trespass. It’s trespassing, it’s his property, and someone else has trespassed on his property. But, if a master rapes you, and this happens all the time, it’s built into the institution, or anybody on the plantation who’s white, that’s not a crime. It’s not a crime if blacks rape you as well, so women are extremely vulnerable in slavery.

You don’t need a license to own anybody in slavery. There are crazy people, because there is no requirement, there are crazy people, there are sadists. A certain portion of the population are sadists who take pleasure in watching the pain of others, but even if you find some kind people who happen to be masters because you’re born into it basically, that master can die, that master can go bankrupt. You have to live your whole life with the uncertainty of into whose hands you might fall.

If you move, if the farm you’re on involves movement, this happens to whites, the big movement West is one of the great movements of American history. If you move—well, if you’re a free person, you move with your family. If you’re an enslaved person, unless your family happens to be on the plantation that also moves, and that is not as common as you might think, because usually families exist across plantations. When I say family, it’s not the legal marriage we’re talking about, but it is relationships of love which exist, and people have children and so forth. When your farm moves, you may be leaving behind large parts of the people you love.

So, that’s the one side of slavery, which is the tremendous brutality of slavery, and you can go on and on describing this to students. On the other hand, there’s another side of slavery, and this is the other part you have to keep in mind. What is that? Well, that is that within the institution of slavery, the people who were enslaved create a culture, which has become one of the most wonderful cultures on earth.

When you look around you, and you see the wonderful thing that African-Americans do in our society today, where does that all come from exactly? The culture that forges those wonderful institutions—the music, the religion, for example—all those things happen in the institution of slavery. Somehow in the midst of this exploitation, there is tremendous achievement that goes on at the same time. That’s the essence of resistance. There’s obviously the church, and this has always been a central part of African American life, extraordinary devotion to religion.

Some of the great African-American thinkers went through the church, Martin Luther King, or Malcolm X, the church is the place where African-Americans thrive. The family, now you might say as I said before, that the horror of slavery is there’s no legal marriage, but people fall in love. We know that they tried to do what they could to stay together. When slavery ended in 1865, one of the first things that people did who had once been enslaved was they searched for their relatives, they traveled, and they search for people who they loved.

This happened all over the South when slavery is over, and so one of the great stories of slavery is despite the fact that it’s structured so that families are destroyed, in fact families are not destroyed, they thrive, and people try to stay together with their families. The distinct forms of African-American music and dance come into existence in the institution of slavery. This is the place where the great rhetoric occurs. Where did Martin Luther King, where does that voice come from exactly? It comes from African-American culture, and that culture is formed in the institution of slavery.

You can see it when you read Frederick Douglass. Frederick Douglass is one of the great writers, he was also a great speaker, but we haven’t got his voice, but you can read Frederick Douglass, and you can hear an incredibly educated man who is also able to communicate extraordinarily. Then the abolitionist movement, the movement for freedom in the United States, of which African-Americans played a big role. It’s an interracial movement, but African-Americans play a huge role in that.

That movement, which has inspired us all, then it continues as the fight against racism continues after slavery. There’s the reconstruction period once slavery is ended, the brief period when African Americans are able to do things, provide for education and so forth, and get their families together. That is part of the great heritage that comes out of the institution of slavery. The civil rights movement, again, that’s one of the later fights during the 1960s. It’s the ending of segregation in America, the movement to end legal segregation, but the great story there is that has its roots in the institution of slavery.

The African-American community creates the tactics which will inspire all Americans as to the love of freedom. What did I just say? Two things happen in slavery: tremendous exploitation, and at the same time, a flowering of African-American culture. The two don’t quite mesh, but of course you can’t do one without the other. Those are central things you want students to recognize. I think the best way to approach this subject is first to talk about historians, what historians have said about this topic of resistance.

Now you might think, “Well, that’s a little bit of a diversion, right?” You really want to focus first on the African-American experience, listen to the voices of African-Americans who were resisting, but I think there’s something prior to that because historians in a sense determine how we view the past in a way. They’re read by other historians, they write the histories that people read. If you just read documents and you don’t have any framework, you’re simply lost, and you never learn anything.

One of the important things, I think, is to give students a sense that historians are important. Another point you can make, which is related, is that ... Now, this is a funny thing to say, but I think if you can get your students to realize this, this is important—that history changes over time. That’s a strange thing to say, that history changes over time, because you’d think that an event that happened in 1830 is dead and doesn’t change over time. What can someone possibly mean when you say history changes over time?

It means that when you bring modern eyes, and they’re constantly changing, the eyes of someone who was alive in 1950 is different from those alive in 1970, and different from today. As your eyes change, you can go back and look at a date in the past, you can look at an event in the past, and you can see different things. When you go to a library for example to study the subject, when you pick out any book during a certain period of time, the first question you ought to ask—your students ought to ask, is, “Well, when was this written? What is the dominant set of ideas that’s occurring during this period?”

That’s the framework I’d like to give you now, okay? What I want to talk about briefly is, beginning in the 20th century, what historians have said about slavery and how that shaped the framework, and then point out where the conversation is today in modern times. The first historian I’d like to look at is—a man who was extremely influential at the turn of the 20th century—is a man named Ulrich B. Phillips. He was a professor of history, and he wrote a series of books, but more than that he also had students.

This is the way professors get to be influential. Professors, the ones who award the Ph.Ds. to people, who go on to teach at other universities, and therefore his influence became widespread. If you go into a library today, for example, and pick out any book on slavery written before the 1950s, 9 times out of 10 you would discover that they were either written by Phillips, or by a Phillips student, so he was extremely influential. His basic interpretation of slavery was, as he says in one of his books, and this is a quote from him now he says, “A Negro was what a white man made him.”

Now remember Phillips is living at a time when we had the period of segregation in America. Racism among whites was extremely intense and severe, and Phillips is just in that tradition. He’s a white Southerner, and so all this writing he does about slavery comes from that perspective. He read all the sources, people recognize he’s a careful historian, and you can find a lot in the sources. It’s the same way you can read the Bible and find many different things in the Bible. Phillips found what he was looking for in these documents.

His basic assumption is masters were nice people, they were benevolent, slavery was a school where African-Americans are trained and civilized because he considered them uncivilized in Africa. African Americans he thought of as they were loyal to the masters, they were lazy, and basically they were under the control of the masters. One of the symptoms of that, was that there were very few slave rebellions. That there was, in terms of the topic of resistance, there wasn’t that much resistance to slavery, and in his mind the resistance he was looking for was slave rebellions.

This is a whole package, right? This is a vision of African-Americans as loyal to the masters, as masters being kind, and the fact that there were few slave rebellions. There were some dissenters at the time, and there’s a wonderful man named Carter G. Woodson who founded the Association For The Study of Negro History and Life in 1915. He was African-American, and a whole cadre of African-American historians were writing about slavery, and they were writing from a very different perspective.

We have Black history month, and he is the founder of Black history month basically at an earlier time. He was writing something different, and then there were a few other historians who also looked at the past and were writing something different as well. No, I mean, he creates an institution, and he creates a tradition, and there are writers who are in that tradition. There’s journals, the Journal of Negro History dates from that period. They were considered very credible by many African-Americans, but if you went to a white University, major American institutions, and you walked into their library, you would get Phillips, and those people who are with Carter G. Woodson wouldn’t be in those libraries basically.

That was the case during much of the era of segregation in the United States. That view of the past, the view of slavery, was shaped in a sense by people’s experience in the 20th century of segregation, and the racism of the 20th century. Then things began to change, so what happens is you begin to get the beginnings of the civil rights movement in the 1950s. The entire structure of laws, which created segregation in America, comes under attack. The most famous attack is in segregated schooling, where for much of this earlier period in the 20th century, it was legal to segregate the schools.

Then in 1954, in the famous Brown v. Board of Education case, the decision was made by the Supreme Court that if you separate the races, you can never give them an equal education, and therefore segregation was unconstitutional. That was just one of many, many decisions, but the great movement which extended into the 1960s and beyond, which attacked segregation, that changed the world. Remember when I said that history changes over time? History is going to change as well, because you can’t have the attack on segregation just sitting there alone.

People then go back, and they relook at slavery. They say, “The segregationist Ulrich B. Phillips, he wrote the history, but what if we looked at it again, but looked at it with different eyes? What if we tried to see the places where maybe there was more resistance, or maybe the nature of slavery was misunderstood?” Therefore, they go back. The key figure here is in 1956 a man named Kenneth Stampp wrote a book, and it was another interpretation of slavery, in which he attacked the interpretation of Ulrich B. Phillips.

The most famous section of that book is a chapter called, “To Make Them Stand in Fear.” He says slavery was not about the kindness of masters to enslave people, actually what slavery was about was whips and guns. The only reason why people became slaves was not because they loved their masters, it was because their masters had the control of force and kept them in slavery, and that’s what slavery was all about. It was not about kind and gentle relations between masters and slaves.

Once you go down the road of saying that slavery is about exploitation, it’s about brutality, it’s about force, it’s about whips and guns. Once you go down that road, then you begin to look at the issue of resistance differently as well because you wonder, “Okay, what about resistance?” You see, you can understand why there would be no resistance if you thought of slavery as benevolent, and masters as kind, but once you have the image of slavery as brutal, then you expect some additional resistance to pop up.

The world is changing, and the world of the 1950s is changing, and the 1960s is changing, and when they look at the period of slavery, they’re going to change their image of what that’s all about as well. Then what happened was, shortly after Stampp wrote, it was followed by another book, which was extremely influential in the 20th century. It set off huge conversations, and that was in 1959 by a historian named Stanley Elkins, and it was called, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life.

He thought he was following in the footsteps of Stampp. Stampp said slavery was extremely brutal, and Elkins went along and said, “You know what? Not only was it brutal, it was one of the most brutal institutions that human beings have ever created.” He simply went down the road of brutality, and extended it, and he actually drew an analogy, an interesting analogy between the concentration camp, which the world had just experienced during that period, the concentration camp designed to exterminate Jews in Europe by the Nazis, and they had images from there when those camps were liberated, and the terrible atrocities that’s went on there.

He said that slavery was like that, it was as brutal as that. Therefore, he said, what happens is it has a tremendous psychological toll, it has a tremendous psychological effect, which is destructive to the people who experience it. In fact, there was evidence that that was the case in the Nazi concentration camps, and he said if you go back and look at slavery, what you discover is, yeah, they’re not revolting, because they’re ... He used the phrase infantilized, they become childlike. They have psychological defenses against this kind of brutality, and he said, “It happened to Jews as well, in Nazi Germany, that you identify with the master and so forth.”

Now this is chilling actually, when you go back and you read this. It’s quite unbelievable, you see, because on the one hand I was describing a moment in time when the dominance of Ulrich B. Phillips, who described slavery as this benevolent institution, that dominance was being challenged, it’s about to be overthrown. Yet what Elkins does is he says that slavery, oh, it’s brutal. He goes down the road that Stampp went down, but he goes further, and he says it’s so brutal that it destroys the people who were enslaved. It destroys their independence and character, and therefore, the odd thing about the Elkins interpretation is they came at the subject of slavery from completely different perspectives.

Phillips on the one hand, Elkins on the other hand—completely different perspectives. Phillips saying it’s a benevolent, kind institution, Elkins saying it’s the most brutal institution, but their conclusion about resistance was chillingly the same. Elkins said there wasn’t much resistance because the culture was so completely destroyed.

So, in a way, you see, given that I’ve said that the thing about slavery is it’s got these two sides, right? It’s got the brutality side, and you can see that Stampp and Elkins are going down the brutality side of things, and then it also has this survival of African-American culture, and this amazing results of cultural flourishing, which also goes on in slavery and after slavery is over. What’s happening is when Elkins writes, he’s wiped out the second part. He’s rejecting the idea of benevolent masters, but he’s saying is it was so brutal that it destroyed African-American culture and society.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You’re listening to Kenneth Greenberg as he talks about slave resistance in this episode of Teaching Hard History: American Slavery. I’m your host Hasan Kwame Jeffries. This podcast is a companion to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s reportwood on teaching slavery in American schools. You can find the report at LearningForJustice.org/HardHistory. Now back to Kenneth Greenberg.

Kenneth Greenberg: All these historians writing in an earlier time generally defined resistance as slave rebellions. That’s the iconic moment of resistance, when someone rises up with a gun, or an ax, or a sword, and kills the master. That’s an act of resistance which is violent, and that can lead to slave rebellions if you get other people to do it as well. That’s the iconic moment of resistance. What happened was, as people after Stampp, and even before Stampp, began to talk about resistance, they said there were more rebellions than people had thought about, and they identified many rebellions which got repressed.

Masters didn’t want to talk about rebellions, didn’t want to write about rebellions, that information was repressed. Once you’re a historian who realizes, who was on the lookout for more rebellious activity, you discover that there is more rebellious activity. On the other hand, if you put rebellions in a comparative context, in other words, not just looking at them in the United States, but say you compare rebellions in other slave societies to rebellions in the United States, every historian who looks at this says, “The American rebellions are smaller in number, and they seem to be smaller in size.”

To take one example, one of the most famous slave rebellions, is the Nat Turner rebellion in Virginia in 1831. That involves maybe 60 rebels who kill 55 white people, and you compare that to Haiti, which is inspired by the French Revolution, where the entire country undergoes a revolution. Thousands and thousands of whites are slaughtered in this revolution, and Haiti becomes the first country ruled by Africans in the New World. Russian surf rebellions, Russian serfdom is very much like slavery, and there are hundreds of thousands of people involved in those rebellions.

Brazil is full of these gigantic rebellions of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, or Caribbean rebellions and so forth. You go back to the Nat Turner rebellion, one of the biggest—not the biggest—but one of the biggest American rebellions, and it involves 60. You get back to this question of, well, where is the resistance exactly? Well first there was this huge outpouring saying, “Well the absence of rebellions doesn’t mean that there wasn’t resistance, it means that resistance took other forms.”

For example, in the United States, the United states had a much larger white population than many of these other areas, and it was hard to have a rebellion in an area where there were so many whites who could organize and repress the rebellion right away. The whites in the United States were organized in powerful militias at the state level, and at the local level, and they could just jump in and repress rebellion. Plantation sizes were much smaller, so the units were smaller.

The terrain is inhospitable to rebellions, the places where you get lots of rebellions. You can hide in the mountains, you can hide in the swamps, and the United States had comparatively fewer of those areas. Therefore, the feeling is, well, there are fewer big rebellions in the United States, but that has nothing to do about resistance to slavery. Resistance to slavery in the United States took other forms. Of all the things that you want to be able to teach students, it’s this: it’s the changing definition of resistance, which does the most to change our opinion of what resistance to slavery is all about.

As long as you focus on rebellions, all those historians who were of that era, they were looking for rebellions. Only when you change the definition of what resistance is do you begin to get a different picture of what slavery is all about. If you want to engage in rebellion, and rebellion meaning “rise up and kill the masters,” if you weren’t going to do that, how could you resist slavery? Now let me give you examples, okay? You can ask your students to come up with these examples.

One thing is you could light a town on fire. It doesn’t take much. You’re a lone person, you hate your master, and you simply light up a portion of the town, and the whole town burns, or the plantation house burns. Again, no one’s writing about there’s just been a tremendous slave rebellion there, on the other hand it can be very destructive. Southern cities burned all the time, and we don’t know why they burned, but I can tell you that they burned in part because of resistance to slavery.

As an individual you could put ground glass—if you’re a cook—you can put ground glass in your master’s oatmeal. People can be very creative about the ways in which they resisted institution. You don’t need to rise up. If you rise up with swords and axes and hatchets, you die, but if you put ground glass in your master’s oatmeal, your master will die.

Another way to resist, is you can slow the pace of work. What masters thought they were seeing was a lazy group of slaves in the institution of slavery, but actually what they were looking at were people who were resisting by slowing the pace of work. Why would you work at a fast pace if you were an enslaved person? You could break tools, the wagon. Masters were always talking about this, “My tools, somehow, they break all the time,” and of course enslaved people don’t have an interest in making sure that these things work properly, and that’s another kind of resistance. You could also resist by feigning illness, you could say, “I’m sick today, I can’t work.” Now masters, of course, tried to fight that, and they had all kinds of techniques, but nonetheless that certainly happened enough.

You could engage in thievery at night when the plantation, the masters, were asleep, the whites were all asleep on the plantation, you could quietly break in and steal something if you wanted food for example. Another kind of resistance is you could learn to read. Remember there were those laws that said you weren’t allowed to read in the institution of slavery, and you were an enslaved person, you knew that this is something that the masters used to keep you under control, and therefore learning to read, figuring out the ways in which you could learn to read, would be another form of resistance.

Of course, if you could learn to read and to write, then one way they had of keeping you on the plantation was masters needed to write a pass. If you wanted to leave the plantation, the master would have to write a pass saying you were authorized to leave, where if you could write the pass yourself, well, that undermines a significant portion.

You could practice your own religion. Now I mentioned religion already, but, you see, masters wanted enslaved people to have religion, but the religion that masters had in mind was the religion in which you looked at the Bible, and you got messages about how God wanted you to obey your earthly masters. That’s the religion, and so masters tried to control what slaves learned about religion as much as possible. We know that didn’t happen. It didn’t work that way. Slaves created their own religious forms, had their own religious services, and hush harbors outside the existing churches. It’s called the invisible church that was created, and that’s the church which ultimately is going to inspire people like Malcolm X become part of that tradition, and Martin Luther King as well.

Marriage and family—again, the master will, at his indulgence, might let you have a relationship, but if you have those relationships on your own, fall in love on your own, that’s another way of resisting. Running away—slavery is not a prison, there are no walls around plantations. Every night, when the master goes to sleep, there are no armed guards guarding the plantation. You can walk away from that plantation. Now there are consequences. The whole society is keyed to catch you and so forth, but nonetheless, at night you can go into the woods, you can meet your friends, you can meet the people you love.

Slavery is full of those kinds of meetings, so what I’m describing here is this recognition. You see how what I’m talking about is the movement away from thinking resistance to slavery is all about slave rebellions. I’m telling you that resistance to slavery is all about religion, learning to read, running away. Those are the acts of resistance which people engaged in all the time. It’s not that these were rare, these were daily occurrences in slavery. If you were an enslaved person, you had millions of ways of resisting your masters.

This also led to—ultimately, as historians write about this—to a role for women in resistance. You see, if you defined resistance only as slave rebellion, we know that, for a variety of reasons, slave rebellions is mostly a male enslaved person’s activity. There are some women who get involved, and they’re interesting stories, but the typical slave rebellion involves men, and therefore women are left out of the issue of resistance. Modern historians today, following in the tradition of redefining resistance, have said, “There’s an amazing thing.” One wonderful historian, Stephanie Camp, who describes parties, what I’ve just been describing, where you leave your own plantation and you go to someone else’s house, and you party together at night. They’re illegal parties, and masters tried to stop these all the time, and Stephanie Camp is a historian who says, “Well this is another form of resistance.”

Also, sexual exploitation—remember, it’s built into the institution of slavery. It is at the heart of slavery in many ways, and women resisted those in a million ways. They resisted by force, but they resisted in many other ways as well. The other thing about resistance to keep in mind is that the consequences of resistance were huge. In fact, the way to think about slavery ending is that the resistance of people who were enslaved helps bring about maybe the central cause of the end of slavery.

Now, this is an important point. It’s the easiest thing in the world for students to say something like— well, if you ask a student, “How did slavery end?” They know about the Emancipation Proclamation, or they knew about the constitutional amendments, and they talk about Abraham Lincoln ended slavery. That would be reconfirming that African-Americans had nothing to do with their own liberation.

We now know that’s not the case. It’s these acts of resistance which create circumstances which lead to the collapse of slavery. I’ll just give you a few examples of this, but this is really important—running away. Now at first you think, well what’s running away? You leave your plantation at night, and often you’d go back during the day, okay? That doesn’t seem like it’s going to bring slavery to an end. But what if you run away to the North? There are some number of people, there are thousands, tens of thousands, of enslaved people who run away to the north.

The North does not have slavery at least by this period of time—they had it earlier. You could run away to the North, and then the United States Constitution says that states have an obligation to return runaway slaves, because the slave states wouldn’t join the union unless they were sure that once enslaved people ran away to a so-called free state, that they had to be returned. There are laws passed at the federal level to ensure that an escaped enslaved person who is found in the North is brought back into the South.

The act of running away under those circumstances means that the North is implicated in slavery. You can go to a place like Boston. You could leave Virginia as an enslaved person, you could find your way to Boston, and seek friends in Boston. Again, you wouldn’t be free, right? You’d be protected by people, if they caught you, you could be sent back, at least till just before the Civil War. The question is, what’s gonna happen? Well, you’re going to get arrested if they find you.

Your master will try to find you in the North, and therefore you could be in Boston, which thinks of itself as a part of a free state, and you discover you’re not really free of slavery. Some Northerners, who otherwise might not get excited about slavery, say, “Well this is Southerners extending slavery into the North,” and there were people who will violently defend the freedom of enslaved people. That’s how— think of what I just said—the act of running away, done on the scale of moving from South to North, creates circumstances, which leads to conflict between North and South.

Of course, that’s going to lead to the Civil War, ultimately, and lead to the end of slavery. Even during the Civil War itself, think about this, at first when Northern armies are fighting Southern armies, one of the goals of the war is not to end slavery. In fact, when Lincoln is inaugurated, he doesn’t want to have the South succeed, he doesn’t want to end slavery at that time at least. In his inauguration he says, “I’m not going to abolish slavery,” in fact it would have been told as probably unconstitutional at that point, but he says, “I’m not going to abolish slavery, that’s not my goal.”

He’s interested in the extension of slavery in the territories, which is another subject here. Lincoln doesn’t want that, so at the beginning of the Civil War, it’s not a war to end slavery, but if you’re an African-American, and the Northern soldiers go past you, what are you then? Are you a slave at that point, or are you free? If you’re still in Virginia, and the Northern armies extend—or in Louisiana, or Mississippi—and the Northern armies have conquered that area and occupied that area, who are the people who are in that area?

They still have slavery, they’re still legally slaves, so the question is, what are the armies going to do? What is the President going to do about this kind of a situation? Are the Northern armies going to arrest an enslaved person who finds himself behind union lines, or runs away from a Southern plantation? Are they going to arrest that person, and force him back to his master? Who initiates the end of slavery under those circumstances? It’s the person who runs away, who creates circumstances, which make it impossible for slavery to survive.

If you want to look at the way slavery ends, it’s this kind of resistance, not slave rebellion. The simple act of running away, and there are many other acts like this basically, which create circumstances which are going to strain slavery, and lead ultimately to the end of slavery.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: 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 along with sample units and primary sources at LearningForJustice.org/HardHistory. Again, here’s Kenneth Greenberg.

Kenneth Greenberg: I’d like to end by saying a few words about how to teach this to students because it’s important that a teacher have these concepts in mind and know where they’re going with the teaching, but you’ll also want material that students can read, and appreciate things for themselves. My general advice is don’t read historians, that creates too much of a distance with students. They need to read the original documents, and my recommendation is that they read the words of African-Americans.

If you want to learn about resistance, that’s the place to go, so I have three recommendations, and what you can do is take excerpts from these books generally. They’re mostly too big for students to read in their entirety, but if you show them excerpts, it can reveal a great deal. The first suggestion I have is that there’s an amazing document called, The Confessions of Nat Turner. This refers back to the rebellion of 1831, and I’ve actually edited those confessions.

They’re only about 20 pages or so, but I’ve edited them with some other documents of the period. Trial records of the rebels, newspaper accounts, a document written by a Northerner from Boston, who is talking about the need to use violence to end slavery, an African-American man named David Walker.

A diary from the governor of Virginia, and then someone writing a summary of the debate in the Virginia legislature. They were so frightened in Virginia by the Nat Turner rebellion, that they actually considered abolishing slavery as a result.

They didn’t, but that was an interesting thing, so I recommend that you pick excerpts from a few of those documents, and in particular, The Confessions of Nat Turner. This is a slightly side thing, but this is an interesting thing, when you read, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and you see all the documents of the period, the one thing you need to emphasize with students I would say, of all others, is that they need to pay attention as to whose voice they are hearing. Now you might say, “Well what exactly is, The Confessions of Nat Turner?”

Well, let me tell you how it got made. Nat Turner escaped capture for two months after the rebellion. He hid out in the woods. Finally, when he was captured, it was two months after the rebellion. He was brought to his jail cell, and there were about 10 days or so between when he was captured, and when he was tried and hanged 10 days later. While he was in his jail cell, he had a white visitor, a lawyer—not his lawyer—but a white visitor named Thomas Gray. Thomas Gray met Nat Turner in his jail cell and wanted to find out the real story of the rebellion and basically interviewed him.

What The Confessions of Nat Turner, are, are the result of those interviews. If you read it, it sounds like it’s Nat Turner’s voice, except there are some places where Gray intentionally says, “Well, here’s the situation.” He’s using his voice basically, but most of it is written as if it’s Nat Turner’s voice. One question you have to ask students is “How do you know it’s Nat Turner’s voice?” Nat Turner doesn’t actually write this down. There is no tape recorder, right? It’s Thomas Gray who writes everything down, organizes the confessions, so one of the great puzzles of doing any document from the past like this is to ask the question of whose voice do you hear?

Let me just read you a section of this. It’s worth thinking about. This is from the beginning of the confessions. I’ll read you this because it can be used to illustrate a couple of things—the issue of voice, but other things as well. This is Nat Turner describing his childhood, and he says the following, “In my childhood, a circumstance occurred, which made an indelible impression on my mind, and laid the groundwork of that enthusiasm, which has terminated so fatally to many, both white and black, and for which I’m about to atone at the gallows.”

In other words, this is in Nat Turner’s voice, right? Well when I read this, and again, your students won’t pick this up right away, I think that you have to point this out to them. Have them linger over this. Did Nat Turner really say this? Did he refer to the fact that he’s about to atone at the gallows? Everything I know about Nat Turner, and if they read some more about this, will discover that he’s a man thinking that he was sent by God to end slavery. For him to say that he refers to this enthusiasm, meaning (a religious enthusiasm was a negative term basically) he calls himself a fanatic there basically, and it ended up killing so many people, black and white, and he’s about to atone at the gallows. I know Nat Turner didn’t say that.

So, one of the lessons you want to teach your students is they need to be, not only when they read works of history, as to who the historian is, and when they wrote, but when they read a primary source as well, they need to know who wrote it. Actually, if they read anywhere, all these other documents which are included in the volume on The Confessions of Nat Turner—newspaper accounts, trial records—those aren’t unmediated African-American voices.

What’s a trial record? We have a few sentences that purport to be African-American voices, but if you’re an African-American captured under these circumstances, and you’re testifying at a trial, are you speaking freely of what’s on your mind? My guess is not, so, again it’s important to teach students how to read a source like this and to be skeptical about something like this.

Then there are places where you definitely hear Nat Turner’s voice, and here’s one, and this gets at the religious angle of things, too, how important religion is. Listen to what he says here. He’s describing his religious visions, he thinks that God has chosen him to free his people from enslavement. He thinks of himself as a prophet, kind of like Moses. This is Nat Turner purportedly speaking. “As I was praying one day at my plow, the Spirit spoke to me saying,”—and here’s a quote, he’s quoting the Spirit, “Seek ye the kingdom of heaven, and all things shall be added unto you.” Then Gray inserts his voice, and he says, “What do you mean by the Spirit?”

Then Nat Turner answers, “The Spirit that spoke to the prophets in former days, and I was greatly astonished, and for two years prayed continuously when my duty would permit. Then I had the same revelation again,” so when you get these revelations, this is Nat Turner’s voice, and you can see the power of the religion. Nat Turner has the strength to undertake this because of his religion, it’s part of the larger way of attacking slavery. There’s another moment too in the confessions, and this is probably ... If you want to read, if you want to go over one thing with your students, it’s this extraordinary moment in the volume I edited, it’s on page 46.

Gray is talking to Turner, who’s describing the rebellion, and Gray says, “Do you not find yourself mistaken now?” See, Gray wants to be reassured too, he’s hoping that Nat Turner’s going to say, “You know, this was a stupid idea, everybody got killed, I’m about to get killed.” That’s what he wants Turner to say, okay? Here’s what Turner does say, and this is where I hear his voice, and see if your students hear the same voice. When Gray says, “Do you not find yourself mistaken now?” Nat Turner answers, “Was not Christ crucified?” Was not Christ crucified?

It just sends chills up and down your spine. Here’s a guy who knows he’s going to be killed, who’s surrounded by his enemies, who has no chance of survival, and he has the tremendous confidence to speak back to Gray in that jail cell, and says—compare himself to Christ, saying, “Christ was crucified. You could lose, you could die, and still be on the right side of things.” It’s an extraordinary moment, and again, it’s the power of religion in here mixed in.

Now, it’s a rebellion, that’s certainly the case, right? The other thing about the confessions is you get to see, he talks about his family, the influence of his parents telling him he’s a special person. He talks about learning to read. Again, these are other forms of resistance, which lead up to the rebellion. He runs away at one point. He uses running away as a tactic. The rebellion begins because he gathers with a few friends, and they have a roast pig in the woods, and they all bring various things to a party in the woods, and that’s how the rebellion begins.

You see how when you say it’s a rebellion, it’s true, but it has all the elements of things which I’ve been describing as a rebellious activity leading up to it as well. Another book that I recommend you read with your students is a book by Harriet Jacobs. It’s called, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. This is an amazing book because most people who ran away from slavery were men. When you run away from slavery and then you write your life story, what typically happens is you run to the North when you’ve learned to read somehow, then you write your story, or you tell it to somebody else who writes it down for you, but that’s the story.

Most people who did that, who wrote their stories, who escaped from slavery that way, were men. Women tended not want to leave their family behind, they sometimes had children they refused to leave as well, so it was men who tended to do it much more. This, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, is one of the few books written by a woman where you can see what resistance to slavery is all about from the perspective of a woman. I want to give you a sense of a woman in slavery, and how vulnerable they were to attack within the institution of slavery.

Here’s a section. It’s on page—in the volume I’m using, it’s on page 470. It says the following—she’s describing being vulnerable, sexually vulnerable to her master. This is tricky because this is 19th-century language, right? She’s not gonna get too explicit here, but you know what she’s talking about. She says, “He tried his utmost,” (the master) “tried his utmost to corrupt the pure principles my grandmother had instilled.” Again, she had a very powerful grandmother, a free black woman actually who taught her morality basically.

“He,” meaning the master, “peopled my young mind with unclean images, such as only a vile monster could think of. I turned from him with disgust and hatred, but he was my master. I was compelled to live under the same roof with him, where I saw a man 40 years my senior daily violating the most sacred commandments of nature. He told me I was his property, that I must be subject to his will in all things. My soul revolted against the mean tyranny, but where could I turn for protection? No matter whether the slave girl be as black as ebony, or as fair as her mistress, in either case there is no shadow of law to protect her from insult, from violence, or even from death. All these are inflicted by fiends who bear the shape of men.”

This book describes a woman who is vulnerable to sexual exploitation, and she also describes her ways of resisting. Now the ways are amazing. She goes to her grandmother—her grandmother’s a free person. She tries to get another white man who’s in the neighborhood. She has an affair with that man, which she believes she chooses voluntarily—that’s not so clear whether it’s voluntary—and he’s powerful, and she hopes to use his power against the master. She’ll resist physically by force. So, she has a million ways of resisting.

As she describes it, she successfully resists rape by her master, but some historians have looked at that and they said, “She just doesn’t want to write about this,” because she’s writing for an audience of Northern middle-class white women who don’t want to hear about a woman getting raped and expected her to choose death rather than submit to rape. Nonetheless, it’s a complicated story, but it’s a story of a woman, and the vulnerability of a woman in the institution of slavery, and the way she resists.

She does not, in the end, resist by creating a rebellion. Unlike Nat Turner, she does resist by running away, ultimately, in the end. Before she runs away, she actually hides in her attic for seven years. I know this sounds incredible, but her grandmother’s attic—her grandmother had an attic. She could look out the window and watch her children grow up. She never revealed herself to them, but to get away from the master, she chose that. Before she ran away, she actually did that. Many people read this, and they said, “It couldn’t happen. That sounds like a crazy story.” There’s a wonderful historian who has gone over this, and she’s confirmed virtually everything that Harriet Jacobs said about this experience.

The last person I want to talk about is Frederick Douglass, who wrote his narrative of his experience in slavery called, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. It got published in the North, and one of the key moments in that document is something where he’s describing being an enslaved person and the ways in which he resists.

One big way is he learns to read, and he understands reading as resistance. At first, he has a kind mistress who starts to teach him to read. The master says, “This is going to undermine slavery.” He stops the mistress from doing this, and so Douglass is a resilient man and discovers a way to learn to read without the mistress. He actually—whatever money he can collect, or objects he has, he gets poor white kids, he gives them things, and they teach him the alphabet, and teach him how to read basically, but he does this himself, and understands reading as an act of resistance.

There’s another amazing moment, too. He is sent at one point—because he resists slavery—he is sent at one point to someone known as a slave breaker. It’s a really tough guy, his master wasn’t tough enough, and so this is someone who will brutalize him and treat him so poorly that they’re hoping to break the spirit of Frederick Douglass, but Douglass is not so easily broken. This man’s name is Mr. Covey, and at one point in his narrative, Douglass describes the confrontation. He decides he can’t take this anymore, he’s just beaten over and over again, the demands on him are irrational excuses for beating him, and so he decides he’s going to stand up to Covey.

Now in his mind, he’s gonna lose his life. This is almost like a rebellion, okay? He stands up to Covey, and when Covey starts to beat him, he beats Covey back. The two of them fight each other for a long period of time, probably for hours, and they’re hitting each other back and forth, and back and forth, and back and forth. We don’t know what was in Covey’s mind during this whole time. He tries to get other enslaved people to join him to try to subdue Douglas, but they won’t do it. They said, “We’re not here to do that kind of work for you.”

So, this is, basically, from Douglass’s point of view, it’s a draw. He stands up, and then his experience is Covey no longer beats him after that. In other words, he has resisted slavery—no longer beats him. The way Douglass describes the feeling of having stood up to Covey is he says, “From that day forward, I no longer felt I was a slave.” Even though legally he was a slave, even though he was in slavery, Covey himself understood what his limits were and couldn’t subdue Frederick Douglass.

Douglass didn’t even have to flee to the North to get the sense that he was liberated somehow, that this act of resisting, this willingness to die basically, to stand up as an individual. Not a slave rebellion, not the Nat Turner rebellion, but just standing up gives him the sense of freedom. The other moment is when he runs away, but actually the key moment in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is the moment when he stands up to Covey, and he gets this inner sense of his own worth and freedom.

Those are examples that you can teach with students about the acts of resistance, of which enslaved people were capable of. It’s an amazing story, and you have an obligation to inspire your students with these acts of resistance. They inspire me, they should inspire you, and they should inspire your students.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Kenneth S. Greenberg is a distinguished professor of history at Suffolk University. He is also the author of, Honor and Slavery, and the editor of Nat Turner: And Related Documents. Before we wrap things up, I wanted you to hear from another educator who’s starting to expand her slavery curriculum with her students, so once again, here’s librarian Izzy Anderson who teaches middle school in the Arkansas Delta.

Izzy Anderson: I have nine boys and one girl in this class. I was going to do a quick overview of black history, but I realized that my kids don’t really know anything about slavery, and they also don’t have a concept of a timeline. They don’t understand the distance between Martin Luther King and slavery, or how long slavery had been around. They just didn’t know anything about it, so I was, “Oh, we have to stop here,” because slavery is understanding the black experience, and their experience in the world as black people that live in the deep South.

Black people whose grandparents, and great-great-grandparents didn’t leave during the great migration after slavery. They’re the ancestors of the people who stayed here, and so I was like, I feel like they really need to understand slavery and that experience in order to understand where they came from. I’m like, “Okay, I’m not the person that should be teaching them about where they came from. I’m not the person who should be teaching them about this trauma, but I’m the only person that’s here who’s going to do it, so I have to figure out how to do it right.”

My concern was that they were just going to be like, “This is horrible, and it makes me feel really bad, and I feel really bad about this,” because obviously conversations about slavery, and being like, “Your ancestors were slaves, your ancestors were abused and murdered for a really long time, and mine weren’t.” It’s a really hard conversation to have, and I was really worried, okay if I’m gonna lay this out on the table for them, am I going to traumatize them? Am I going to give them all this horrible information, and they’re going to hear about all this horrible stuff, and all this rape and stuff as sixth-graders, and then they’re just going to have nightmares, and it’s going to be horrible, and I’m going to get angry calls from parents, because their kids can’t sleep?

Should I whitewash it a little bit? Should I sanitize it a little bit for them, because they’re young, but still have the knowledge that nobody else may ever teach them about this again, and that sanitized version of it may be all that they learn about it? Should I just put it out on the table, and assume, or hope that it’s something that they can cope with? I feel like I need to talk to somebody who actually knows about this, and so that’s where I ended up finding this podcast, and then reaching out, and that really gave me a direction to go in.

I’m going to focus on resistance movements. I’m going to focus on the development of culture in the face of people who really didn’t want slaves to develop culture. Not to avoid those really, really tough topics— that our kids are exposed to violence and things in their real lives, and in media all the time. For us to assume that they can’t handle it is probably not giving them enough credit, and that I can tell them about these things as long as I frame it in the context of resistance, in the context of survival, of being like, “Okay, yes, black people endured this, but they also survived it, and thrived, and created a culture, and resisted all the time.”

If I teach it to them, all these things to them, in that context, then it’s going to be really powerful for them. That’s the direction that I’ve taken it. Once I really dove in and started to have these really scary conversations with kids, and telling them about these really scary things, they handled it much better than I thought that they were going to. They expressed that they were really happy to know this, and they took out of it what I had hoped that they could take out of it, which is this anger, but it’s a righteous anger.

I think looking at the people who change the world, there are often people that have righteous anger. I think if I can engender that, or help kids develop that anger, because there’s a lot of things now that they should be angry about. If that anger can be formed in a base of history and understanding of the world, then I hope that kids can go out, and my kids can go out and be advocates. That anger that I see in them is the right kind of anger, it’s what I wanted, and it’s what I want to continue to develop as I keep talking to them about these things.

I understand wanting to skirt around really tough topics, especially if your kids are younger, but just in general, those conversations can be really, really hard to have. You can be worried that you’re going to do something wrong, but I try to operate under the assumption that I have no idea whose classroom my kids are going to be going into in the future. What kind of person’s classroom, what they’re gonna teach them, whether or not what they’re gonna teach them is true.

We know history books leave huge chunks of things out, or make slavery seem fun, or make the Trail of Tears look like people were just happily migrating, because the white people asked them to, or whatever. I don’t know whether or not people are going to teach that, and I think for our kids to be informed citizens of the world, for our kids to understand and go out into the world, and be the advocates that we so desperately need, that we have to dive in. We have to teach them, because they have to know.

Even if it’s scary, I think just seeking out resources, and making sure that we’re asking the right questions of our fellow educators, and looking for the right resources, that it’ll be okay, because somebody’s got to do it, and it’s gonna have to be you, because you never know if it’s gonna be anybody else.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Teaching Hard History is a podcast from Learning for Justice, with special thanks to the University of Wisconsin Press. They’re 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 those online at LearningForJustice.org. Thanks to Dr. Greenberg for sharing his insights with us.

This podcast was produced by Shea Shackleford, with production assistance from Tori Marlan, and Chris Dwyer at Suffolk University. 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. If you like what we’re doing, please let your friends and colleagues know, and take a minute to review us on iTunes. I’m Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Associate Professor of History at the Ohio State University, and your host. You’ve been listening to Teaching Hard History: American Slavery.

References

• Teaching Hard History: Text Library, Frederick Douglass Describes Enslavers
• The New York Times, The Historian Behind Slavery Apologists Like Kanye West (Ulrich B. Phillips)
• SPLC report, U.S. Education on American Slavery Sorely Lacking
• Association for the Study of African American Life, Founders of Black History Month: Carter G. Woodson
• Learning for Justice, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas
• Kenneth M. Stampp, Peculiar institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South
• Stanley Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life
• Learning for Justice: Lesson, Nat Turner
• Kenneth S Greenberg (editor), The Confessions of Nat Turner: And Related Documents
• History News Network, Stephanie M. H. Camp
• Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
• Learning for Justice, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Return to Episode Listing 

Resources

• Learning for Justice, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
• BlackPast, Malcolm X, "Message to the Grassroots" and "The Ballot or the Bullet" (1963)
• American RadioWorks, Malcolm X, "The Ballot or the Bullet"
• Learning for Justice, Lessons of 1964: The Movement Continues
• Learning for Justice, Creating a Culture: the Music of Enslaved People

Deirdre Cooper Owens

• 21st Century Griot
• Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology
• History, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Transcript

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: (rapping) The soundtrack of my youth began and ended with New York City hip-hop. It started with “Rapper’s Delight,” the 1979 rap classic by the Sugarhill Gang—its opening lines as memorable as any (rapping). And it ended with “Fight the Power,” Public Enemy’s protest anthem for a generation of African Americans who came of age during the Reagan era. Who can forget “1989, the number, another summer, sound of the funky drummer”? (rapping). “Music hitting your heart, because I know you got soul, brothers and sisters.” But the soundtrack of my younger years was composed of more than just fresh beats and dope lyrics. It also featured the stirring oratory of Black Power prophet Malcolm X.

When I was ten years old, I stumbled upon four albums of Malcolm’s speeches buried in my father’s record collection. Included were “Message to the Grassroots” and “The Ballot or the Bullet.” And when I listened to them, I was transfixed, hypnotized by Malcolm’s wit and wisdom, by his ability to make it plain. When nothing was on television, and it was either too cold or too wet to play outside, I would drop the needle on one of his albums, stretch out on the sofa, and listen to Malcolm over and over again. I was especially taken by Malcolm’s allegory of the house negro and the field negro. “There were two kinds of enslaved people,” explained Malcolm in “Message to the Grassroots.” “There was the house Negro and the field Negro. The house Negros, they lived in the house with master.”

Malcolm X: The house Negro, they lived in the house with master. They dressed pretty good.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: They dressed pretty good.

Malcolm X: They ate good.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: They ate good.

Malcolm X: Because they ate his food, what he left. They lived in the attic or the basement, but still didn’t live near their master. And they loved their master more than the master loved himself. They would give their life to serve their master’s house quicker than the master would. The house Negro, if the master said, “We got a good house here,” the house Negro would say, “Yeah, we got a good house here.” Whenever the master said “We,” he said, “We.” That’s how you can tell a house Negro.

If the master’s house caught on fire, the house Negro would fight harder to put the blaze out than the master would. If the master got sick, the house Negro would say, “What’s the matter, boss? We sick. We sick. ”He identified himself with his master more than his master identified with himself.

And if you came to the house Negro and said, “Let’s run away, let’s escape, let’s separate,” that house Negro would look at you and say, “Man, you crazy. What you mean, separate? Where is there a better house than this? Where can I wear better clothes than this? Where can I eat better food than this?” That was that house Negro. In those days he was called a “house nigger.” And that’s what we call him today, because we’ve still got some house niggers running around here.

On that same plantation, there was the field Negro. The field Negro, those were the masses. There was always more Negros in the field than there was Negros in the house.

Audience: That’s right.

Malcolm X: The Negro in the field caught hell. He ate leftovers. In the house they ate high up on the hog. The Negro in the field didn’t get nothing but what was left of the insides of the hog. They call them chitlins nowadays. In those days they called them what they were: guts. That’s what you were, a gut-eater. And some of you all still gut-eaters. The field Negro was beaten from morning till night. He lived in a shack, in a hut.

Audience: That’s right.

Malcolm X: He wore cast-off clothes, and he hated his master. I say he hated his master. He was intelligent. That house Negro loved his master. But that field Negro, remember, they were in the majority, and they hated the master. When the house caught on fire, he didn’t try and put it out. That field Negro prayed for a wind, for a breeze. When the master got sick, the field Negro prayed that he’d die. If someone come to the field Negro and said, “Let’s separate, let’s run,” he didn’t say “Where we going?” He said, “Any place is better than here.”

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: The house Negro and the field Negro parable was vintage Malcolm, powerful and persuasive, humorous and hard-hitting. There was just one problem. As I later learned, this history was not true. To be sure, the political analysis of the rebellious spirit of the enslaved masses was spot-on, but the house Negro/ field Negro binary was a false dichotomy, one rooted in a popular misunderstanding of the wide range of experiences enslaved people had. Experiences that shaped their actions and beliefs.

Knowing whether an enslaved person worked in the house or in the field is not nearly enough to understand their lived experience. You also have to know what kind of work they did in the house, what kind of crops they tended in the field, whether they were enslaved on a large plantation or a small farm, in a port city or an inland community, in a northern colony or in a southern state. You have to know whether the enslaved was a man or a woman, a parent or a child, whether he or she was new to America or several generations removed from Africa. Reducing the manifold experiences of enslaved African Americans to a simple binary might be good for making political points. But it obscures far more than it reveals.

The soundtrack of my youth was shaped by when and where I was born, by my race and my gender, and by my parents’ political leanings. And to hear it, all you have to do is know where to listen. Enslaved African Americans have their own soundtrack, one that wasn’t captured on wax, but echoes through time nonetheless. And like my own, it too can be heard, all you have to do is know how to listen. And that’s what we’ll be talking about today.

I’m Hasan Kwame Jeffries, and this is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery. It’s 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.

Understanding the diverse experiences of enslaved African Americans is important. It teaches students to think critically about the form and function of the institution of slavery, about the kinds of work the enslaved performed, which enriched slaveholders and the nation as a whole. In this episode, Deirdre Cooper Owens shows how the experience of slavery varied and evolved based on such factors as time, place, space and gender. I’ll see you on the other side. Enjoy.

Deirdre Cooper Owens: When you’re teaching your students about slavery in America, do you feel comfortable? Are you satisfied that the history you’re teaching is accurate? How do you determine fact from mythology? I’ve taught college students across the country about United States slavery, from its colonial past to its abolishment brought on by the Civil War’s end. I’ve had students share their insights with me about slavery, and unfortunately, much of what they know is either wrong or misinformed.

For example, I have had students believe that enslaved women were only allowed to perform domestic work, while enslaved men did all the agricultural work. I have also been told that very light-skinned black or biracial black slaves were called mulattoes, were house slaves, and all dark-skinned slaves were in the fields. My students also 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 you teach students about a past that shows the country’s inconsistencies with liberty, democracy and equality for all people?

You do so with honesty, a commitment to having open dialogue with your students who will need to understand historical context, and expose them to the numerous primary sources that tell the diverse experiences of the enslaved.

I’ll begin with a story from Mary Raines. She was a former slave who lived in Fairfield County, South Carolina, during the 1930s. A government worker interviewed her about her life in slavery when she was a much older woman. He asked basic questions like her age, and even how she received her name. Ms. Raines shared the following in her interview.

She stated, “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.” She then shared a story about how her birth weight pleased her master so much that he named her after his mother. Ms. Raines explained that her mother’s yelling from the slave quarters alarmed her white owners and their dinner guests, who are about to enjoy a sumptuous meal. A local doctor was at the table and was asked to check on Ms. Raines’ mother. Ms. 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.”

Mary Raines’ oral history tells us a lot about the nature of slavery. Through her admission to her interviewer, we learned the slaves had no real knowledge of their birth dates, and often used the birth years of their masters or some significant event to mark their births. The interviewer describes Ms. Raines as 99, although she believes she’s closer to 120 years old. Also, she likens her mother’s screams from childbirth to being whipped by patrollers. These were typically poor white men who worked for slave owners to keep watch for enslaved people who ran away or left their plantations without permission.

Ms. Raines also describes how involved slave owners were in the lives of their slaves and had absolute control in every way imaginable. Mary’s mother was neither able to name her daughter nor give her a cherished nickname. Just as there are multiple themes that can be explored in this oral history source, I intend to emphasize how the institution of slavery was influenced by chronology or time, region or geographical location, and gender. First, however, you must establish definitions and provide basic facts for students to understand the institution so that everyone is on the same page.

Initially, I introduce the concept of race to my students. Secondly, I link American slavery to other international institutions of slavery, especially those that emerged in the Atlantic world. Those are the nations that border the Atlantic Ocean. Lastly, I follow a chronological and region-based approach that demonstrates how salient slavery was to the United States of America and its government through the exploration of various industries, with a particular emphasis on gender.

One of the major objectives that I outline for my students is how utterly 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, like 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. Thus, teachers can have students acknowledge that the existence, growth and maintenance of American slavery was not unique 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. By doing so, it helps sharpen critical thinking skills and also helps students to understand differing viewpoints. They begin to understand quite clearly that the past was dynamic and not static. One of the best methods for addressing the proverbial elephant in the room is to first provide students with a clear definition of race and its social construction. Often, students believe race is a biological concept and find it difficult to view it as an idea that has undergone transformation in different regions and areas.

Understanding American slavery must begin with the discussion centered on the changing definitions of race, especially blackness, because students can be confused about the early terms used to describe black people hundreds of years ago. 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 is an effective way of discussing how historical eras matter. You can also tie in a lesson around race and labor. 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, because his voyages to Hispaniola and the Caribbean introduced chattel slavery to the Americas—slavery where human beings are considered movable property, and in the United States and colonial British America, it also designated that one would be a slave for life.

As a young man, Christopher Columbus was trained in the Madeira Sugar Trade on behalf of the Spanish crown, working in sugar plantations in Porto Santo Island off the coast of Portugal. He brought this experience to the islands he called the West Indies. During his second voyage to the New World in 1493, Columbus introduced sugar cane to the Caribbean. He literally established the first successful cash crop for a European nation that used native people—that means people born on the island—and African born slaves.

Indigenous people were not good laborers on sugar plantations for many reasons, particularly because so many became sick and died as a result of disease and violence. The Spanish, in turn, began to primarily use African slaves much as the Portuguese had done in Madeira. 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. The history of every nation in the Caribbean begins with sugar cane 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.

Profits from the sugar trade were so significant that it may have even helped America achieve independence from Great Britain. During the American Revolutionary War, Britain devoted much of its military defense to the protection of its Caribbean sugar colonies, as compared to the colonies on the North American mainland. By the turn of the 16th century, West Africans have become more important to New World slavery than indigenous Indian groups had. Many Africans had been skilled in sugar cane 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 slaves, the English began to codify, or make into law, the labor and preservation of slavery based on race and gender. We’ll now talk about the first British colony in what becomes the United States, Virginia.

Virginia’s law makers 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 we later called the United States, they established a rule that went against everything the English had believed in and enforced regarding the importance of a child 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, and these were contract workers with a defined period of time for working, and slaves, he wrote, and I quote, “Slaves are the Negros, and their posterity,” that means their 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.

Another feature of Beverley’s book was, he wanted to attract more English men and women to immigrate to the British colony. He assured potential colonists that they would not enter Virginia as slaves, and he distinguished between the labor of slaves and indentured servants. He wrote, “Because I have heard how strangely cruel and severe the service of this country is represented in some parts of England, I can’t forebear affirming that the work of their servants and slaves is no other than what every common freed man does.” So, in terms of the work that black slaves and English servants were to perform, the legislator stated, “The male servants and slaves of both sexes are employed together in tilling and manuring the ground, in sowing and planting tobacco, corn, et cetera.”

The legislator also defined that slaves were Negros who would inherit the condition of the mother, and that all black slaves, 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, and were akin to black men in terms of the farming work they did. As slavery became a permanent fixture in Virginia, and more broadly, within colonial British America, black people experienced the dichotomy between freedom and slavery, especially as the 18th century progressed.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: This is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery. And we’re talking about the diverse experiences of enslaved African Americans. I’m your host, Hasan Kwame Jeffries. This podcast is a companion to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s report on teaching slavery in American schools. You can find the report at LearningForJustice.org/HardHistory. Now, we’re going to turn our attention to Charleston, South Carolina, and the practice of urban slavery. Again, here’s Deirdre Cooper Owens.

Deirdre Cooper Owens: At one point, South Carolina had the largest number of slaves. And in urban spaces, their numbers often predominated over 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 slave population on their plantations and large slave farms.

Thus, for wealthy white men who owned large numbers of black men and women, usually upwards of 30 or more, their need for slaves to perform more specialized work and domestic chores also meant that more of the enslaved engaged in more diverse and non-agricultural labor, especially in regions like South Carolina’s low country and Georgia. Largely, 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 too. However, there were a few skilled domestic workers and slave nurses and midwives who began to appear on slave lists. Their numbers tended to be small and restricted to larger plantations. Although nursing was tedious labor for enslaved women, who continued to work in fields, their homes, took care of their families, their healing work allowed them to garner respect from the members of their slave communities, and sometimes earn money for their owners if they were sent to assist the local white community.

Teaching students to view slave labor through the lens of gender allows them to examine slavery more complexly. By understanding American slavery from various vantage points, ultimately aids students to broaden their views about the kinds of work men and women were supposed to do in early America. This teaching framework allows students to develop a fuller and more critical understanding of American slavery’s diversity. For instance, region or place is really important. The life of a North Carolina slave on a tobacco plantation would be very different from that of a domestic slave who lived in Delaware.

Place is central to other themes mentioned, 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 the enslaved included migration based the development of cash crops. All slaves did not live on large plantations. Some lived on small, family-owned farms, where they worked alongside their owners or released out for work.

Until the Antebellum era, from 1810 to 1860 or so, slaves 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, slaves worked in rice fields, grew and processed indigo, and later picked cotton. In New York, when slavery was legal, enslaved people worked on ships, at wharfs, performed agricultural and domestic labor, and worked as craftsmen. Whereas in Mississippi, enslaved people primarily picked cotton during the Antebellum period, until the end of the Civil War in 1865.

Region determined culture. Language, like the West African-influenced Gullah Geechee language spoken by many slaves in isolated parts of South Carolina, the Georgia coastal region, and Florida. 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 iron workers. Even blues music that came out of Mississippi has origins in slavery from that region. There were commonalities that linked slavery throughout the years, but also regional distinctions emerged as well.

What teachers of American slavery must emphasize for their students is how varied the experiences of the enslaved were over three centuries. Teaching American slavery does not have to be a task fraught with difficulty. It is one of the subfields of United States history that has flourished for many decades. With a plethora of primary and secondary sources available, teachers can employ a variety of approaches that reveal how the enslaved lived through and responded to their bondage over time. I’ll list four that I find really helpful for my students.

Harriet Jacobs, who was a former slave, wrote a memoir, Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl, that spoke about her experiences and escape from slavery in North Carolina. The Works Progress Administration Slave Narratives was a collection of over 3 thousand interviews of men and women who were formerly enslaved, and that source can be found on the Library of Congress’s website. Pioneering historian, Deborah Gray White, wrote, Aren’t I A Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South, that speaks about the unique experiences of black women across the South, living in bondage. And lastly, Ira Berlin’s Generations of Captivity: A History of African American Slaves provides a wonderful backdrop of the development of slavery in what becomes the United States of America.

Through an examination of race, region, place, labor, gender and a host of other topics and themes, students are able to move past the one note generalizations that describe the enslaved found in popular culture and media representations. They can think deeply about how slavery was not solely a southern phenomenon, but began as a colonial American institution that had international implications. As such, slavery informed how the United States would ultimately treat people of African descent who lived within its borders, even after the labor system was abolished. For history teachers, the reward in teaching these kinds of lessons about American slavery is that a new generation of Americans can appreciate how all members of society contribute to the building of a nation, even those considered the most oppressed.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens is an assistant professor of history at Queens College, City University of New York. She’s also the author of Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology, published by the University of Georgia Press.

Teaching Hard History is a podcast from Learning for Justice, with special thanks to the University of Wisconsin Press. They’re 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 those online at LearningForJustice.org. Thanks to Dr. Cooper Owens for sharing her insights with us. This podcast was produced by Shae Shackleford, with production assistance from Tori Marlin and Robert Auld at the Radio Foundation Studios in New York.

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. 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. You’ve been listening to Teaching Hard History: American Slavery.

References

• Mary Raines (Federal Writers' Project), South Carolina Narratives, Volume XIV, Part 4
• Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia
• Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
• Library of Congress, Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1938
• Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South
• Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves

Return to Episode Listing 

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

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