Reprinted from Politico Magazine
Without understanding the past, it is difficult to grapple with the present. This became quite clear in the wake of the tragic attack in Charleston, when public dialogue swirled with myths, wishful thinking and deeply ideological readings of history, all too often camouflaged as solid historical analysis. Now, 150 years after emancipation, it is high time to confront the legacy of slavery. No one alive today was enslaved or enslaved others, and no one bears personal responsibility for the brutal institution—but we live in its shadow, and contemporary debates on race relations cannot proceed without first acknowledging that.
Indeed, without understanding slavery, it is impossible to understand the history of the United States. Over the course of more than two centuries, millions of Americans were enslaved, producing most of the commodities—from tobacco to rice, sugar to cotton—that established America on the world scene. As I write in my book, Empire of Cotton , American slavery (and the cotton it produced) was crucial to the development of global capitalism. Slavery transformed the nation’s politics, too, eventually resulting in a devastating civil war—the most deadly war in the history of the United States. As we know, slavery left a deep legacy of inequality and racism, one that is still visible today a century and a half after emancipation. But the struggle against slavery also inspired some of the finest values and politics in American history, from Republican Thaddeus Stevens’ determined fight for emancipation to Frederick Douglass’ eloquent appeal to the enlightenment tradition of equality.
Considering the importance of “the peculiar institution” to the United States, it is not surprising that the writing on the history of slavery is rich—it is, in fact among the best researched stories of the American past. American historians have been at the forefront of disentangling slavery’s history, producing some of the most original, important and freshest historical works of the past century. These works all emphasize the centrality of slavery to the American experience, show that slavery needs to be understood as the national story that it was, describe in harrowing detail the unfathomable violence that descended upon enslaved African Americans, and demonstrate conclusively how the theft of enslaved workers’ labor and a sharpening racism has affected the nation’s society, politics and economy.
It is almost impossible to identify just 10 “must read” books—there are scores of indispensable studies—but to understand the impact of slavery on the economy, politics and society of the United States and its colonial antecedents, the following books are crucial. They take the reader into the slave quarters of Virginia and onto the cotton plantations of South Carolina, explore the most intimate gender relations within plantation households and the broader political struggles in the halls of power in Washington D.C., and illuminate the role of American slavery in the global economy as well as its role in creating some of the nation’s most cherished institutions.
Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America . A survey of slavery’s very long history in North America, showing how the institution changed over time and how it differed from state to state.
Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South explores the world of enslaved women, and, as the title suggests, focuses on their ability to resist the enormous oppression they lived under. From sewing fancy dresses to putting up a picture of Abraham Lincoln, enslaved women tried to maintain some of their dignity and push back against the overwhelming power of their captors.
Drew Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery . A careful study of one of South Carolina’s most important planters, the man who declared that cotton was “king,” this book pays close attention both to life on the plantation and Hammond’s pro-slavery politics.
Eric Foner, Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy . Foner examines the aftermath of emancipation, showing how the struggle for freedom unfolded on plantations, in state houses and within the federal government, and how formerly enslaved workers pushed for a capacious understanding of freedom that included social, political and economic rights.
Thavolia Glymph’s Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household is a brilliant analysis of the relations between black and white women, enslaved and free, in the plantation households of the South, a relationship full of violence.
Steven Hahn’s Pulitzer-Prize winning A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration charts the long-term history of African-American politics and how that politics emerged during the era of slavery. It’s an extraordinarily creative reading of political life on the plantation, and beyond.
Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market . An examination of the heart of slavery—the slave market—that provides a wrenching analysis of the processes through which millions of people were made into commodities.
Manisha Sinha’s The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina focuses on slave owners’ political mission to create a state whose central duty was the defense of slavery. Sinha shows that nowhere did the politics of slavery take on a more radical and anti-democratic form than in antebellum South Carolina.
Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832 is a dazzling (and Pulitzer Prize winning) account of the politics of slavery in Virginia in the age of revolution. Moving effortlessly from the plantation to global politics, Taylor shows how enslaved workers played an important role in the struggle with the British, and how important slavery was to both the creation of the American republic and the fault lines that would eventually result in a war between the states.
Craig Wilder’s Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities addresses slavery’s impact in a place few have looked before—the nation’s institutions of higher learning. He shows how enslaved workers helped build the nation’s most elite universities and how these institutions all too often defended the interests of powerful slaveholders and gave “scientific” legitimacy to racism.
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