MAKING SENSE OF SLAVERY

Survey of the various ways in which slavery has been defended and rebuked by historians over the years.

In this historiographical study, Spillman proposes that the “tradition of Western intellectual engagement with slavery” has been especially active in American historical writing. This American tradition dates to the colonial era, when Anthony Benezet, an early abolitionist, assembled documents and statistics to show, as he wrote, “how by various perfidious, and cruel Methods, the unhappy Negroes are inslaved.” Among other things, Benezet extrapolated a death toll of at least 30,000 on slaving ships plying the Middle Passage. Other historians of early America were more kindly disposed toward slavery, drawing inspiration from Montesquieu’s assurance that there was a “natural slavery” that “is to be limited to some particular parts of the word.” One of Benezet’s peers, David Ramsay, wrote that slavery impoverished the slave states by decreasing the initiative of free workers, an argument countered by appeals to Thomas Malthus’ economic theories: Though supposedly economically inefficient, argued some pro-slavery writers, “slavery insulated slaves from the destructive laws of supply and demand, and provided them with the kind of comfort and security denied wageworkers.” In the mid-20th century, historians began to see slavery as America’s original sin, sometimes with a Marxist edge: C. Vann Woodward, the eminent Southern historian, considered slavery’s founders as “corrupt capitalists.” Although studies of slavery dwindled late in that century, they have since come to the fore among historians, with influence on public interpretations: Tours of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello plantation once referred to slaves as “servants” or “workers,” but they now acknowledge forced labor. In this broad-ranging study, Spillman closes with the 1619 Project, which has excited attention among historians for presumed inaccuracies and among right-wingers for daring to raise the issue of institutional racism in the first place.

A valuable addition to the literature of slavery.