edward e. baptist

8/13/2019 Edward E. Baptist

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Enslaved Human Beings as H istorical Synecdoche: imagini ng the U.S. futurethr ough the past.

Edward E. Baptist

Cornell University

Paper apresentado ao Seminrio Internacional

Escravido e Capitali smo H istr ico: H istr ia e Hi stori ograf ia

Br asi l , Cuba e Estados Unidos, sculo XIX.

Lab-Mundi/ Programa de Ps-Graduao em Histria SocialUniversidade de So Paulo

Sala 24 do Departamento de Antropologia

16 de Setembro de 2013

Verso provisria para discusso no Seminrio.Solicita-se no circular ou citar sem autorizao prvia do autor.


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In the summer of 2013, I took a long driving trip with my daughter Lillian. Our goal was to look

at the ways in which slavery was present or absent in the public spaces of the South. Lillian

brought her camera, and I brought my notebook and voice recorder so that I could interview

people. We traveled along the old slave traders' trail, the artery that populated the cotton South

during the years between the American Revolution and the defeat of the slaveholders' breakaway

republic in 1865. At the beginning of this time period, in the 1780s slavery in the U.S. was an

apparently dying institution. While 800,000 people, or nearly 20% of the new postcolonial

republic's non-Indian population were enslaved, and while the institution of chattel slavery

existed in law and fact in every one of the thirteen United States, slavery as a political economic

force was on the retreat.

Indeed, we started from a town in upstate New York that had been founded around 1800

by slaveowners and their slaves. But in this town, known as Ithaca, slavery had ceased to exist

by the 1810s. In state after northern state, slavery was ended or set on the road to extinction by

that time. To the south, in the Chesapeake, Carolinas, and Georgia, enslaved people were much

more numerous relative to the overall population. But in those places, too, slavery seemed to be

receding. In Chesapeake, many enslavers were voluntarily manumitting their enslaved captives

in the 1780s. Some did so because the institution seemed to have no political future in a world

where the slaveowning author of the nation's founding document had not only insisted that all

people were entitled to life and liberty, but who had also tried to block slavery's expansion into

the nation's continental territories, the zone of future growth. And some were manumitting their

slaves because the institution seemed to have no economic future, certainly not one that would

justify future capital investments of the massive sort that were always necessary to make slavery

expand.

Economically, slavery in the southeast appeared to be decaying. World tobacco demand

crumbled in the 1780s, just as Chesapeake planters started to take stock of the fact that most of

them were deeply indebted. Markets for other agricultural products, like the corn and wheat

consumed by slaves in the West Indies, had been closed to American producers by a British


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imperial administration determined to make the Americans pay for the offence of winning their

independence. Once the Haitian Revolution broke out in 1791, meanwhile, many educated

people in Europe and in the Americas believed that the old model of slavery was over. The cost

of sugar and other plantation commodities might too high for them, if it meant the continual

replenishment of the Americas' plantations with a slave trade from Africa that brought rebels to

the colonies. So many turned to trying to abolish the Atlantic slave trade, and often they

believed that by so doing they would also bring an end to slavery itself.

But the world turned. An era that had looked as though it would be one of emancipation

turned instead into one in which slavery grew at an unprecedented rate. Once a narrow strip of

plantations clinging to the coast, the slave South would become a massive complex

subcontinental in size, imprisoning four million people in an ever-widening cage built from the

steel of white folks' mutual economic interest in and political commitment to slavery. The

economic interest was real, mutual, and ever-growing, because in upland cotton, Southern

enslavers found a crop that they could force enslaved people to grow more efficiently than free

labor could accomplish. That crop, in no small measure because enslaved African Americans

churned it out at ever-increasing rates of productivity, turned out to be the most important raw

material of the First Industrial Revolution. As the world's economy, or at least some sectors of

it, began to break the Malthusian barriers of human social and economic organization that had

bound every society in the eighty-odd centuries since the invention of agriculture, the rate of

cotton-consumption only accelerated.

Making all of that expansion possible was the forced movement of enslaved African

Americans from the older parts of the South to the newer ones. Over the next lifetime, from the

1780s to the 1860s, U.S. enslavers would drive over one million people down one channel or

another of the slave trail leading from southeast to southwest. Some went by land. Some went

by sea. Some went by the rivers. Some went with their original owners. Even more went with

professional slave traders, a class of entrepreneurs who emerged in full bloom by the early


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1820s. Most forced migrants were young, and most were separated from loved ones and from

their community of origin. Their experience was a giant collective wound on the social and

cultural body of African-American life. That scar, visible in the maps of cotton production, 1860

slave population, and even the vote for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. must surely also be

visible in the ways in which people along the path talked about and memorialized the past.

If slave traders route had a particular origin point, it was surely in the Chesapeake

region--Maryland and Virginia--but in general the forced movement of enslave people began in

the older Southern states and moved southwest towards the Mississippi Valley. So from Ithaca

we headed to the District of Columbia, the national capital of the United States. We moved

south through Richmond and the Virginia-North Carolina Piedmont. Then we drove across the

southern spur of the great Appalachian Mountains. Once we reached the Black Belt of Alabama,

where the rich dirt had long ago told migrant entrepreneurs of the possibility that the region

could make incredible heaps of cotton, and where the still-high population of African descent

reveals that enslavers had moved in armies of the current residents' ancestors, we knew we were

in a different place. That impression did not change as we moved across the breadth of

Mississippi to find another landing place in Natchez, the first great cotton and banking center of

the southwestern interior, settled first by the French, and then by Anglo-American planters. For

the last one hundred years the city has made its money as a mecca for "Old South" tourism, as

the destination of what is literally called The Natchez Pilgrimage--an occasion for white people

to visit a vast array of well-preserved "great houses." Upon leaving Natchez, there was only one

place left to visit, if we were interested in looking at the way the U.S. South's past was

remembered. We had no choice but to continue south to New Orleans. And so we did, finishing

our journey where the Mississippi River binds a city as vital as a healing wound.

It should be no surprise to anyone who has visited New Orleans that there we found no

shortage of people willing to talk about the city's history and culture. But we found very few

who could incorporate into their narratives the fact that New Orleans was the ultimate terminus

of almost the domestic slave trading route-. Indeed, there was no public memorialization of the


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dozens of slave traders' pens that lined the boulevards of the CBD or Central Business District,

where coffee houses now stand between federal courts and boutique hotels. There was no

memorialization along the trendy streets of the Faubourg Marigny, where white hipsters and gay

professionals have waved their remodelling wand and created the city's most desirable real

estate. And there was no notice on the levee that runs along the French Quarter's riverfront that

this was the place where many of the ancestors of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas' African-

American inhabitants were unloaded from slave traders' boats. Some had come down the river

from Kentucky and Missouri, the overland one that Lillian and I had retraced by car. Some had

come by the seaborne one from eastern ports Richmond, which by themselves seem to have

moved more than 200,000 people through New Orleans in just the four and a half decades

following 1815--almost all of them across that levee. New Orleans has a neighborhood called

the "Irish Channel", whose name remembers the immigrants who came to work in the city's

cotton warehouses and dig its drainage canals. But we did not find that they called the strip of

piled earth and rock that protects the city from the river and once served as its main wharf by the

name the "Internal Slave Trade Levee."

In fact, everywhere Lillian and I traveled on this journey, we found two things. First, that

the route was invisible. It was invisible in the map, and it was almost everywhere invisible in

memory. And second, the route was invisible because most of the stories told in public about the

history of slavery in the U.S. have focused on other things, even though the pulsing of slaverys

expansion into the cotton South was at the heart of the stories that slaverys survivors told.

Instead, while the stories told about U.S. slavery have changed repeatedly since the late

nineteenth century, they have never really been stories about slavery. Instead, they have been

driven by the specific nature of African-American engagement in the political economy of the

United States at the point in time when people are telling the story. In other words, the

historiography of slavery in the U.S. is a series of synecdoches. A synecdoche is a small story

that is meant to represent a larger one, one more important to the teller. And so the history of

slavery has been deployed again and again as a synecdoche for the political economic status of


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African American people--and for what the teller of the particular tale thinks should be their

future status.

Period 1: from the end of Reconstruction to Kenneth Stampp

It is now well-known that the Confederate South lost on the battlefield between 1861 and

1865, but won the much long war to control the way the history of the war's causes and outcomes

were told. By late 1890s, the Northern U.S. had completely abandoned its all-too-brief

commitment to a rich version of emancipation, in which the formerly enslaved and their

descendants would participate in the Union as equal political citizens and economic actors.

Instead, for a variety of reasons, not least of which the fact that racism was a deeply-seated part

of white identity in the North as well as in the South, the North permitted Southern white

political actors to retake the high ground of the Southern political economy in the 1870s.

Within a few years, meanwhile, another startling transformation began to dawn. Union

victory had been a source of pride and identity for millions of Northerners. But in the 1880s and

1890s, Southern whites launched a massive campaign to memorialize and justify not only the

Confederacy--erecting statues, investing entire state budgets in supporting Confederate war

veterans--but to do the same for slavery itself. The argument that slavery was not wrong, that it

was selfless instead of exploitative became an article of faith in popular historical circles. And

then what had been told in local political speeches and novels of the Lost Cause slowly crept

upward into the brand-new history Ph.D. programs that were starting to appear in elite Northern

universities. This process, explained by recent historians David Blight, Peter Novick, Gaines

Foster and others, shows how the first generation of professional historians began to paint a

picture of U.S. slavery as a depicted slavery as a "school" in which savage Africans were trained

for civilization. The institution was paternalist and benign--at least, for enslaved people, who

loved their masters and mistresses and did not possess the desire for freedom until the

abolitionist snake entered the Eden of the timeless plantation. It might not have been so benign

for the South's whites, whose selfless choice to maintain their inherently lazy and uncivilized


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slaves in the gentle institution of the plantation--which these historians depicted as economically

premodern and unprofitable. The pastoral South fell behind the industrializing North, which was

led by cunning Yankees who put profits before people.

The leaders of this new ideological history included famous names like Ulrich B.

Phillips, who pioneered the collection and use of planter's personal and business papers, John

Dunning, who trained a generation of Reconstruction historians to insist that the process of

rebuilding after the war was fatally flawed by the North's enabling of "Negro domination" over

more civilized whites and Woodrow Wilson--who went on to be President of first Princeton

University, and then of the entire U.S. Wilson famously spoke at the Gettysburg on the 50th

anniversary of Lincoln's address--which had argued that what would define the U.S.

henceforward was not only emancipation but equality. And Wilson implicitly rebuked Lincoln.

This revisionist historiography had a purpose, and by the early 20th century, the payoff

was clear. The "Negro's" training in slavery might have futile, implied many such historians, for

they clearly doubted whether people of such an inferior race were capable of living as whites'

equals. But what was even less successful was Northern white interference in the relationship of

the races. Abolitionism, "Northern aggression" leading to the Civil War, and radical

Reconstruction had supposedly all failed, and had in fact made life worse for African Americans.

Southern white historians and politicians insisted that clear evidence for their case could be

found in the post-emancipation era, when supposedly black men who had listened to Northern

white claims that the races had been equal took that as license to unleash their savage natures an

alleged epidemic of black-on-white rape. Thus they justified the astonishing epidemic of

lynching that swept the South in the years after 1890. But thus they also provided justification

for "Jim Crow": the spatial segregation of life in the South. The creation of separate public

facilities like black and white water fountains, the denial of access to public transportation, and

above all the denial of equal economic and academic access was an attempt to denigrate African

Americans and convince them to behave as if they were inferior. (It also attempted to keep

African Americans from obtaining economic independence, achieving mobility, or any of the


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other things necessary to escape the status of being the hewers of wood and drawers of water at

the hard-labor foundation of the Southern agricultural economy.)

The new historiography also worked to justify the wave of disfranchisement that swept

through Southern states in the same time period. In state after state, white politicians and

political activists conspired to drive African Americans en masse from the voting rolls. With

grandfather clauses, literacy tests, poll taxes, and whites-only party primaries, the

dramatically reduced the black vote. The new laws all disfranchised many whites as well. By the

1904 Presidential election, only 29% of all adult males, white and black, voted in the South, as

opposed to 65% in the North.1The disfranchisement of such whites was no accident, of course,

since despite the stereotype of poor whites as the bearer of the most livid forms of anti-black

racism, the propertyless white sharecroppers and others being economically disfranchised by the

Souths postwar transformations had been the most likely to join with African-American voters

in third-party movements like the Readjusters and Populists. But then, to compensate all whites

for the massive shift in local and state electoral power from the hands of the many to the few,

states and municipalities also fully implemented the complex laws and customs we call Jim

Crow, or segregation.

Thus, between 1890 and 1910, Southern whites continued to drive African-Americans

into a status as close to slavery as they could manage. Of course, the reality is that without the

antebellum era's legal and societal bonds, many African Americans were mobile enough to leave

the South or at least change employers, while others were able to exercise the right to own

property. Jim Crow and slavery were different. But the hold that the racist South had on the

imagination of the broader nation was strong. For the next half-century or more, the historians'

vision of the African American as someone who should be kept in the South, in the status of

third-class citizen, and at the bottom of the economic pyramid was widely accepted throughout

the nation. Supposedly the history of slavery, emancipation, and Reconstruction proved that

equality was wasted on inherently inferior racesespecially Negroes.Immutable, biological

identity made access to granting any meaningfully sovereign form of citizenship to African


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Americans a futile endeavor for the whole white nation. This was the lesson Wilson drew in

1913: that fighting the Civil War had not produced a new birth of freedom. Instead, it had been a

giant mistake.

The Long Era of Civil Rights Influence on Slavery Historiography

After World War II, however, the way U.S. historians wrote about the experience and

legacy of slavery began to change dramatically. Recently, scholars of the Civil Rights

movement have begun to speak of a "Long Civil Rights Era" that began well before the U.S.

Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which ruled against separate but

"equal" schools and which has also been seen as the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement per

se. instead, scholars see the roots of both the anti-segregation commitment by organizations like

the SCLC and CORE, and broad popular movements like sit-ins or the Montgomery Bus Boycott

as stretching far back, even to World War I. Likewise, we should be aware that books like

Kenneth Stampp's The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South(1956) began well

before their authors sat down in the archive and put paper to pencil.

We should also pause to acknowledge the irony: that much of the vast archival base on

which the multiple revisions of the historiography of slavery would henceforth be based had

been collected by the architects of slaverys post facto defense. Spurred on by Ulrich B. Philips,

the master historian of the master class (the master at least until Eugene Genovese changed

teams and joined the right-wing noise machine in the 1990s), archivists in the South fanned out

across the region in the 1920s and 30s and collected vast quantities of surviving planter records.

Most of these archivists saw their job as saving the heritage of the Souths noble planter class,

and manylike the greatest, perhaps, J.G. de Roulhac Hamilton, of the University of North

Carolinas Southern Historical Collectionwere racist historians in their own right. Over time,

while some scholars would continue to ways this vast archive in ways that Philips and Hamilton

intended, growing numbers would turn the sources against the authors self-congratulatory

intent.


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Meanwhile, the WPA interviews with ex-slaves, which would by the early 1970s become

essential components of the archive on which a new historiography inspired by black protest

movements drew heavily, were themselves part of a broad turn during the 1930s away from a

national narrative dictated by the nation's business elite. Within many of the offices that directed

the different statewide campaigns to interview survivors of slavery--ultimately two thousand of

them--interviewers who wanted to document the brutalities of slavery clashed with those who

wanted to gather evidence that slaves loved their masters. And those who believed that in the

traditions of the folk--black folk included--lay wisdom stored up by centuries of ordinary people

typed up their interview notes and submitted them to the same directors who also employed

outright racists who tried to coerce African-American interview subjects into lampooning

memory of their own elders and peers.

The first viewpoint, that of people energized by the great rethinking of capitalism sparked

in the Depression and Popular Front eras, was the one ratified by the utterly transformative

experience of World War II. Engaged in a the greatest war of history, against two enemies who

openly endorsed genocidal ideologies of racial superiority, President Franklin Roosevelt and the

U.S. took up instead the mantle of human equality and rights. This required Southern and other

racists to dial back the public intensity of their defense of their apartheid-like regime. Not all

went along with the program, but Roosevelt--pushed by African-American activist movements

and organizations--used the muscle of the state to impose desegregation on key sites of the war

effort. In war factories where the weapons to defeat the Axis were being forged, the federal

government imposed at least de jure desegregation. And after the war, as revelations about the

German state's campaign of racist genocide against European Jewry and other peoples shocked

American soldiers and others, Southern white racists infuriated the federal government with a

series of vicious attacks on African American soldiers. In response to the new climate,

Roosevelt's successor Truman imposed integration on the armed forces. And as the nation

reignited the engines of its military-industrial complex for what proved to be a long Cold War

against the Soviet bloc, the federal government and all who sought to justify U.S. international


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hegemony knew that segregation's survival was incompatible with the claim that the American

part of the world was "free."

It was in this environment that new work on the history of slavery in the U.S., and of its

end, began to appear. The first was not Stampp, whose axiomatic position that he began from

the point of view that enslaved African Americans were no different than "white men in black

skin" has, by the way, been willfully misinterpreted. Stampp meant that he was casting off the

old claim that enslaved people, because of their racial nature, were happy to be slaves and were

indeed not fit for full citizenship--and nor were their descendants. Like the students sitting at

King's sandwich Shop in Durham, North Carolina in 1957 he was insisting that black people

claimed the same rights as white people. And that even if those rights were denied in the harshest

possible ways, as in slavery, those people were still aware of the righteousness of their claims to

life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Actually, the first historian in this new lineage ought to be John Hope Franklin, whose

position on these issues would never change. And that was this: that enslaved African

Americans were not happy to be slaves and that they were the objects of brutality inflicted by an

unstable and militaristic set of violent Southern whites. From his first book, The Free Negro In

North Carolinato one of his last,Runaway Slaves(with Loren Schweninger), Franklin argued

that over the years opposition to slavery was constant and was enabled through alliances with

free African Americans and others. What's also notable is the way that these histories, notably

that of Stampp, looked fairly carefully at labor and acknowledged that violence, including that in

the cotton fields, was a crucial prop of the system slavery. Indeed that violence was in the short

term successful, since it enabled a disruptive and profitable system of expansion that Stampp

spent nearly a chapter describing in general terms.

While neither Stampp nor Franklin could be described as historians of the labor process,

they acknowledged that it existed. Of course, they didnt argue that slavery equaled capitalism,

or that it was a formative stage dialectically linked to the great transformations of the Anglo-

Atlantic and even wider world in the nineteenth century. (That task was left to W.E.B. DuBois


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and C.L.R. James, although their influence was even more segregated from the history of 19th

century U.S. slavery.) But perhaps it was inevitable that as the civil rights movement grew and

encountered more and more violent opposition in the early 1960s, it shied away from a

fundamentally economic analysis of African-American inequality. While local movements

would push for equal access to jobs or to the opportunity to use credit and buy houses, the

broader movement had to appeal to an American majority well-known to shy away from

redistributive, much less socialist solutions. So the ongoing historiography of 19th-century US

slavery, which ended in a burst of federally mandated emancipation not unparalleled in its

character and ambiguous outcomes by the unsteady defenses of 1960s activists mounted by

federal officials, and more clearly by the Civil Rights legislation which reached its high point

under Lyndon Johnson, focused on other matters than the way that wealth was produced in

slavery, and where it went. In fact, slavery tended to be depicted as economic foolishness. But

instead, the historiography chewed first on the question of how change happened. And the

model for change, for resistance to oppression, that is encoded deep in the U.S. psyche, is that of

violent and uncompromising rebellion against would-be tyrants. For a nation birthed from a

revolution against a foreign monarch, a rebellion supposedly driven by a commitment to self-

determination of both the nation and the individual citizen, what else could the central

assumption be? And going back all the way back to founders like Sam Adams was a corollary

assumption: that those who were willing to die of old age as the subjects of tyranny were not

worthy to live as free men.

But were the enslaved sufficiently rebellious to be taken seriously as potential citizens?

Some argued that they had rebelled. Earnest Marxist Herbert Aptheker combed pre-

emancipation newspapers and court documents uncritically for decades, and produced a thick

book,American Negro Slave Revolts, which listed hundreds of purported slave rebellions and

plots. Yet as African historian David Johnson once put it, conspiracy-minded antebellum whites

had spotted a slave revolt every time they say two negroes behind a tree having a

conversation, and Aptheker accepted their reasoning.


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Meanwhile, using a bogus argument drawn from a bogus precedent, Stanley Elkins

argued inAmerican Slavery: A Problem in Intellectual and Institutional Life[1959] that just like

the victims of German concentration camps, enslaved people in the U.S. slipped into an

infantilized state and did not oppose slavery. The analogy was a deadline-inspired lift from

Bruno Bettelhiems account of the death camps. That in turn, with its claim that camp inmates

identified with their captors, surrendered their moral sense, and submitted willingly to death has

been seriously questioned by those who question Bettelheims research ethics and the actual

existence of his evidence. Well before the excavation of Bettelheims unethical methods,

however, Elkins' story had spurred a firestorm of assertion of the widespread nature of black

resistance under slavery. And this happened just as frustration about the slow pace of change for

African Americans in the US of the late 1960s began to reach a boiling point.

As progressive political leaders were felled by assassins, and as political, fiscal, and

monetary costs of the Vietnam War caved in Lyndon Johnsons Great Society plans, massive

white resistance to black self-assertion began to discourage and splinter the various elements of

civil rights protest. Many young African-American leaders put down the mantle of nonviolent

protest and took up the ideas of black nationalism. Some would even take up the gun, like Black

Panthers who defended their communities against violent law enforcement activities in

Alabama, Oakland, Chicago, and elsewhere. Others flirted with international revolutionary

factions, read Mao, moved to Cuba, and so on. The socalled Black Power turn in African-

American protest and reform was once dismissed or mourned by historians as a declension from

the triumphal arc of the King-led movement. More recently, a new generation of historians has

produced a series of brilliant works that set these movements alongside a vibrant explosion of

creative cultural forms that in turn has fertilized the most recent half-century of relentless

African-American cultural innovation. And they encouraged readers to see Black Power

movements not only as a response to white aggression and the declining efficacy of nonviolent

protestespecially in Northern cities against whom very little leverage could be brought, in

contrast to the Southbut as a position with a deep heritage. Black nationalism had been around


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since David Walker, if not before. It had continually asserted not only equality and the need to

hold violence as the stick if whites would not accept the carrot of reconciliation and permit

radical change, but also the richness of African-American life, society, and culture.

Responding to a changing environment in which cultural self-assertion and the flirtation

with revolutionary self-defense took the headlines away from the SCLC's nonviolent

confrontation of violence segregation, historians followed political currents and began to study

African-American resistance to slavery. One imperative behind the new move was the desire to

reject Elkins' claim that enslaved African-Americans were submissive "Sambos" who submerged

their own interests in those of their "masters." John Blassingame, Robert Starobin, and others

found revolutionary resistance in various places. And it was amazing how much like the radicals

of the late 1960s they made Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey sound, depicting them as nationalist

rebels who envisaged a pan-African rebellion against not only slavery but capitalism. All the

authors needed were allies, more than Turner had been able to boast. Again, we have the

appearance of synecdoche: historians painting their subjects as the models of present and future

roles for African Americans.

The problem, of course, was that late-60s radicals claimed that revolution of some sort

had a chance. And Nat Turner never did, as anyone can see. Meanwhile, the vast majority of

generation after generation had died in slavery before freedom came. In fact, as historians dug

deeper and learned more about slavery in the rest of the New World, it slowly grew apparent that

the U.S. had relatively fewer major rebellions than most other slave societies. Elkins himself had

drawn upon the scholarship of Frank Tannenbaum and others, who compared the Catholic slave

societies of Brazil and the Spanish Caribbean to the Anglo-Protestant U.S. In the latter, they

found, manumission rates were miniscule. There were few legal avenues for whites to recognize

and free their mixed-race children, or the childrens mothers, and anyway, cultural norms seemed

to dictate against that. To these historians, Protestant churchesthe backbone of the Civil

Rights movement in many parts of the South, and a key component of black political

organization in the North, seemed less helpful than the Catholic church in Ibero-Catholic


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societies, where saints could disguise African gods and black confraternities provided social

networks outside of enslavers direct control. This compared well to plantation churches where

whites handpicked the black preacher and sat in on his sermons.

To shoot down the charge that enslaved people were submissive, compliant, and

complicit, and therefore poor ancestors for black nationalists and radicals who wanted to draw on

a tradition of resistance, historians would have to demonstrate that enslaved people did resist,

and in a meaningful way. They chose to argue that enslaved African Americans resisted in the

realm of culture: specifically, that they created a separate and resistant culture that welded people

transported from various corners of Africa into one people who identified with each other. You

could already see this happening in John Blassingame's critique of Elkins, but it emerged most

clearly in his book The Slave Community(1972). More work would follow, arguing that African

Americans were the bearers of African tradition, that their speech, diet, family life, stories and

traditions, religious practices were African--and later, that this cultural retention itself constituted

a resistance to slavery. This was a fight against Elkins, but also against all of the post-

reconstruction white-supremacist claptrap which he retransmitted. Blassingame's argument was

the clearest: if enslaved people saw each other as the significant others in their own lives, if they

rejected their enslavers' values and practices, and if they insisted that resistance, when it

happened, was morally justified, then they were indeed engaged in significant resistance.

Numerous studies followed, many depicting the mix of African traditions and local

adaptations that defined particular communities. They saw the world the slaves made, as Eugene

Genovese subtitled his famousRoll Jordan Roll, as a world apart. This world, a nightly

Brigadoon, emerged every Sundown and lasted till Sunup, to reference the title of George

Rawick's individually authored work. And the best of these used extensive primary source

research to unpack deep histories that surely reflected real solace and survival for millions of

enslaved people. One must mention Deborah Gray White'sAr'n't I A Woman, which finally

convinced historians to look at enslaved women's experiences, or Charles Joyner'sDown By the

Riverside, which used anthropology and folklore to detail life along the South Carolina rice


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probably communal, and built on African traditions. Plantations and their owners were in but not

of capitalism). Everything in the current of his argument ultimately swam to his conclusion that

enslaved people saw each other and their appropriated Christian God as the sources of value.

They created a culture that celebrated those things, and it sustained them against the forces

Elkins assumed would have destroyed them. But at the end, of course, the river Jordan bent.

And we saw that by accepting master as a fellowalbeit particularly sinful and unwise

Christianthe slave accepted the duty not to kill his erring brother as he slept. This bound the

enslaved in turn to live within the outer shell of rules of the plantation world, and even as they

built its inner, rich life, they lived within the hegemony of the constraints the master class had

set. They might not have been ofthe masters cultural patterns in their daily lives, but they were

most certainly inhis power.

The historians of the slave community had little to say about forced migration and the

slave trade. They drew most of their source material from the southeast. There was very little

about cotton, which--unlike rice--was not worked by the "compromise" task system. The one

body of scholarship that drew heavily on the labor and financial documentation left by planters,

source material that was created to record and calibrate the exploitation of African-American

labor, was the so-called "cliometric" work that centered on Stanley Engerman and Robert Fogel.

These economic historians employed work gangs of research assistants and fed the data of slave

labor camps via punch cards into massive mainframe computers. What came out wasn't cotton

thread or sugar cane juice, but means and medians, regression coefficients, and the like. They

discovered many important facts, like the extremely high profitability of slave labor camps in the

cotton states--profitable even vis-a-vis Northern factories or commercial farms worked by free

labor. This should've punched a hole in the old claim that slavery was unprofitable and external

to the history of capitalism. Instead, Fogel and Engerman chose to focus their energies, at least

at first, on a series of not-so-defensible claims that amounted to an argument that 1974 African

Americans antecedents were neoliberal rational-calculators of economic welfare. Slavery's

success and survival, Fogel and Engerman suggested, depended on enslavers' ability to inculcate


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a quasi-Puritanical work ethic in the enslaved. They argued that positive incentives were also

important, while their masterwork Time on the Cross misread a single document to argue that the

average slave on the average plantation supposedly endured only .5 whippings per year.

Time on the Cross attracted initial praise from the neoliberal presseven an article in

Timebut then a flood of criticism from historians. Part of the criticism was driven by the

studys problematic assumptions, which werein turn dictated in part by the neoclassical temple

in which the authors chained themselves. But another aspect of the critique, over time, was

driven by the deepening assumption that the most important things to know about slavery, and

indeed, about history in general, lay not in economics but in the dimension of culture. And that is

already obvious from the turn towards slave culture as the site of autonomous creation within the

slave community, the resistance to power, the place where enslaved peoplehad agency, to

use a term that was soon used with unthinking regularity. As Walter Johnson pointed out in

brilliant 2003 essay, again and again historians proved in this era what was already evident, that

slaves asserted their humanity. This was not really transformative history, in his rendering, for

it merely proved the proposition that a=a. But the turn did have causes when it began; it came

from debates in the field from those who tried to impose an interpretation of history in which

enslaved people were passive and behaved like the subhuman trope of the racists and paternalists

who defended slavery. It came from the shift in the political and social movement for African-

American rights, as well.

In part the cultural turn in U.S. slavery history grew from a discernible trend in U.S.

society: a turn towards the belief that one could choose how to affiliate oneself, and a sense that

class affilations in particular could be escaped by choice. The labor historian Jefferson Cowie

argues that a culture-wide move towards identification with popular culture heroes who reject

their entangling working-class roots in favor of flight towards a horizon of consumption and

choice was one of the major forces that undermined the U.S. organized labor movement in the

1970s. Indeed, in a Thompsonian sense, this unmade the U.S. working class, for if it was a


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process of interpreted experience that made class in the 19thcentury, Americans were now

refusing to interpret their experience in the same way.

And if critics like Bertram Wyatt-Brown or Clarence Walker charged that those who

extolled the virtues and successes of resistance by enslaved people who built an oppositional

culture were erasing the realities that made slavery a brutal form of oppressionwell, one could

see how they got the idea. The hope of 1960s movements turned into the frustrations of

progressive political defeat in the early 1970s. The synecdoches of both the slave as citizen-like-

any-other, and the one of the slave as a Black Panther, which had seemed so relevant in that

stretch of the long Civil Rights era, began to fade. Instead, the face of the enslaved subject

turned inward, in a circle that looked to peers. And thus the assessment of the future of race

relations was also one in which African-Americans went their own way and created their own

institutions.

The Achievements of Discourse

The turn towards culture in the study of U.S. slavery carried on the momentum generated

by the reemergence of black nationalismwhich had its own long historyin the late 60s, and it

was also driven by the broader cultural currents of a nation shocked by the end of the near-total

economic dominance which the U.S. had enjoyed since 1945.

In the years after 1980, a set of attitudes imported from literary criticism and Continental

poststructuralist philosophy swept through U.S. history departments like a cane-field fire. The

critics of this philosophy already by that point were calling it as deconstruction, which was a

term coined by Jacques Derrida, one the major early proponents of a new way of understanding

texts. Deconstruction held, if one can generalize about so vast a phenomenon, that texts were

full of political struggles. That authors tried to impose meanings on text, but that if you pulled

the texts apart you would see that they were all unstable. That readers could shape

interpretations as they went, that our ways of reading texts shape our worlds, and that by

understanding how those processes take place, we are all shaped in turn by the unstable language


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within texts. And that ultimately, there was no meaning, for that ultimately was an attempt to

impose a logosor fixed system of meaning on language, a game in which meaning always

receded in slippery futility. As one of Derridas American acolytes argued Deconstruction is not

a dismantling of the structure of a text, but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself.

Its apparently solid ground is no rock, but thin air.2

The architectswell, one perhaps should not use a metaphorical term implying

constructionof this philosophical trend acquired superstar status in the 1970s and 80s. Their

canons were mined with devotion that seemed contradictorygiven their oft-stated design of

undermining the status of the author as one who creates emotional and psychological truth.

Invoking their names brought power beyond that of more ordinary forms of truth to confer. Their

persons were adorned with first-class transatlantic plane tickets and young graduate and

undergraduate hangers-on of all sexes and sexualities. And young people heading for graduate

school flocked to study Theory with their minds set on one day adorning a dais with a Derrida,

a Lyotard, a Kristeva, a Fish; on living the life of a Butler or a Jameson.

The storm of deconstruction and poststructuralism convulsed literary criticism,

destabilizing (a favorite term) the role of the author, making traditional projects like finding

out what Ralph Ellison really meant seem quaint. For no one really can mean any particular

thing, and certainly no text has a particular meaning, all of them being ultimately the product of

many contending and fruitless attempts to establish meaning. It then invaded the field of

anthropology, which was wide open for conquestclaiming to be a social science, but relying of

the interpretive, personal attempt to establish transcultural rules. It consumed much of the

history of science, systematically attempting to undermine sciences claims to achieve objective

truth via the experimental method. It redrew the world that led (for instance) from Galileo to

Newton to Einstein to Oppenheimer as a movement from one paradigm to anotherdriven by

sociocultural factors, not a process of gradually unveiling unchanging physical, objective truth.

And then deconstruction reached history.


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Now, certainly historians of slavery were well aware that the politics of texts shaped their

sources. The WPA narratives are one of the best examples, and by the 1980s a hot debate raged

about how to use these documentsconsidering that elderly African Americans interviewed in

the 1930s said very different thingsat least on the surfacedepending on the race of the

person interviewing them. Historians have always known that documents must be read in

context, that what is documented and how it is documented is also a map to political and social

realities, and that in them we often see strategies and struggles, cries and complaints structured

by ideas and power. The earliest arrivals of poststructralist papers about history usually

unfolded along this sort of first-contact script: A literary critic who had decided to write about a

historical phenomenon for their second book, examined couple of sourcesone or two books,

one set of institutional recordsand now was ready to chide historians for thinking that the

archive was transparent.

Soon, however, poststructuralist theory began to influence historiansespecially those

who looked at popular culture, or those who drew on postcolonial theory to show how cultures

and races were studied and to no small extent created and consumed in the colonizing process.

Broadly speaking, within history the deployment of Theory marshaled its forces around

questions that had to do with the politics of identity. Most famously, Michel Foucaults work on

the history of sexuality argued that identity was constructed. This meant that the identity of

members of a class, or a gender, or a racial group was a system of ideas rather than innate or

objective or fixed characteristics. It also meant that the best way to study identity was by reading

the texts that were read by the sort of people who not only read texts but also wrote them.

Further, those sorts of texts ideas about identity were deep and unconscious and revealed in the

rules their authors tried to follow and impose, for will-to-power became all mixed up with will-

to-knowledge. That identity was very important, for it supposedly structured who could

participate in the wielding of power in society and the shaping of identity through language.

And that ideas about identity could change, made these theoretical attitudespost-structuralist,

and justified a commitment to a politics of identity both in and outside the classroom. Oddly


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Those years were accounted by some contemporary critics as the Second Nadir of race

relations in the U.S., comparing the Reagan and Bush I years to the 1890s. In those years, a

Republican Party now well-trained in forming campaigns by antagonizing African Americans to

the delight of white voters set the contours of national policy. They starved cities of funding, cut

back programs for social support in the name of reducing dependence, and incited a recession

that may have killed inflation and high interest rates, but which also damaged the most

vulnerable cells of the national political economy. Increasing drug addiction, the collapse of

neighborhood communities and physical infrastructure, the murder of young men by each other,

at rates not seen since white men fought each other for political currency and honor in the slave

South, the reduction of public education to a bad joke rather than a ladder leading upward, the

collapse of nuclear families were all but symptoms of two intersecting deeper diseases.

The first was the rapid collapse of the manufacturing sector, part of a long delamination

inside the U.S. economy from 1970-2008. By the 1980s, much of the pattern was clear: the top

third or less of the workforce continued to experience real income gains (and the top one percent,

extraordinary gains) while the remaining two-thirds slipped backwards. Some plummeted, in

fact, especially in the increasingly all-black cities of the old factory nodes. There, margins were

thinner because household wealth and networks were too weak to sustain job loss. And at the

same time, multiple processes of intentional residential segregation by policy makers and real-

estate gatekeepers, white flight driven by terror of schools that became too black to sustain the

social prestige needed to advance ones children into the top ten percent where the real gains

were being made, and the relentless drumbeat of crime-focused news; all these factors left

African-Americans to fight with the newest immigrants over desolated concrete blocks where

plastic wrappers blew and glass vials crunched underfoot.

From this world Public Enemy emerged. This doesnt mean just the rap group that turned

hip-hop into a political force with their Nation of Islam-tinged nationalist vision. Rather I mean

a wider movement towards a celebration of African-American identity that focused on present

crises and historical continuities. This attitude embraced the longstanding position of being the


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excluded, separate, unfairly scapegoated and unassimilable element in U.S. society and culture.

This was paralleled by the elevation within hip-hop, the emergent and characteristic culture-form

of the era, of the second element within black musics age-old dialectic. That interplay between

popularityin which black creators and performers adapted to white media conventions only to

conquer and rewrite them, with an ultimate outcome in which non-black Americans sincerely the

performance of blacknessand on the other hand, authenticity, which demanded familiarity with

the secret inner world, identity that could only come to those for whom blackness was the mother

tongue. And so, canonizing the culture heroes of the 1960s and 70sMalcolm X, the Black

Panthers, Muhammad Ali, Bob Marley, as well as more obscure nationalists and conspiracy

theoristsan efflorescence of culture activity burst out of the most devastated sectors of New

York, Los Angeles, and elsewhere to challenge white accounts of African-American culture. By

1990, Africa pendants in red, black, and green were everywhere. Public Enemy was making the

world familiar with both the more peculiar theories of Elijah Muhammad.

But Public Enemy also checked Vesey, Prosser, Nat Turner. And meanwhile, an

Afrocentric impulsethat put Africa at the center of the understanding of African America was

changing the way history was taught in the late 1980s. The focus of much new scholarshipor

at least the most publicizedturned to identifying African origins, both among African-

American and white social structures and cultural practices. Black Athena, by Martin Bernal,

infuriated culture conservatives with its claim that the Egyptians begat the Greek, and hence

Africa created Western civilization. On a smaller scale works by Sterling Stuckey, Margaret

Washington, Michael Gomez, Robert Farris Thompson, John Thornton, and many others drew

the threads of African antecedents through the warp of slave culture. The claim that African

antecedents led to African-American culture repeated in some ways the hermetic vision of

populist Afrocentrism, which rarely flirted with supremacist fantasy (despite the truly

supremacist fantasizing of white conservatives who were only too happy to publicize the

outrageous sayings of Leonard Jeffries.). More dangerous for white conservatives, or so they

seemed to believe, was the possibility that multiculturalism would become the common


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practice of U.S. historiography and the way it was taught in schools. One supposes that then they

would know that their whiteness would no longer count as a trump card in every exchange. They

launched but ultimately fruitless campaign to force historians back into the pre-Civil Rights idea

of history as a parade of white men.

Focus on African origins for black cultural patterns like secret societies, or drum majors

subject might seem trivial, and the more extreme, non- or quasi-academic practitioners could be

caricatured as crackpots. But the African-continuities quest changed the way that slavery was

taught in the U.S. It made it impossible to ignore African culture in accounts of slavery. It

connected African-American students to the idea of an alternative, and not an inferior heritage.

It also changed the politics of the late 1980s classroom. Empowered, even radicalized by new

scholarship, African-American students challenged instructors and students. More than one

history class turned into a shouting match that pitted clueless white apologists for the slave trade

(as a fortunate chance for Africans transported to the New World instead of being trapped in the

intense disease environment of West Africa, for instance) against African Americans wielding

Black Athena.

In other ways, however, the modes of argument and analysis remained resistant to the

cultural turn for many years, or at least to the other variety, the one cooked up on Rue de

Sorbonne and not Lenox Avenue. But cultural theory, at least of the linguistic-turn variety, was

always more persuasive at the lower register. For in unusual ways it moved in harmony with

other changes in the American classroom, academy, and other spaces of bourgeois access. At

first these changes cut against the broad downward grain of black communities in the post-Great

Migration U.S. Later, as the Clinton boom of the 1990s lifted some boats, more African

Americans were able to escape the declining inner urban cores and Southern rural districts where

they had been trapped. Clawing their way up through the education system, often against the

odds, surviving at times their parents own failure to survive, they entered the interstices of an

economy that did offer more access points for persistent and well-educated African Americans

than it had a half century before. Some made their way into academe. Among some of them,


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and among some of their white contemporaries who began to publish in the late 1990s, a new

bend in the cultural turn brought into view at last a junction where slavery history would meet

poststructuralism. Or, at least, a particular iteration of the latter, one that permitted the readers of

these historians works, rightly or wrongly, to construct a new synecdoche of the slave as the

shrewd African-American student making his or her way upward through an unfriendly white

world.

In the new histories, identity and action were both complex; documents are texts that

reveal contestation, the attempt of the enslaver to impose a control revealed by that very attempt

of imposition to be unstable. Bringing that statement, which proceeds from a set of theoretical

assumptions about what is important to know about history, and how we can know it, was the

key achievement of Walter Johnsons Soul By Soul, certainly the most acclaimed work on U.S.

slavery in the Clinton-Bush years. His book was not a simple literary-scholars reading of a

few documents, with predictable theoretical exercises and evolutions resembling the required

program on gymnastics apparatuses. But among all of the many documents about the internal

slave trade in the 19th

century, he focused in particular on fugitive slaves narratives and the

court records of New Orleans cases in which buyers were trying to claim that particular slaves

were flawed. And in these documents, he found, identity was always a mask, question and

answer were strategies of feint, attack, retreat. In his book, students and other readers were often

struck most vividly by a particular chapter in the middle of the text. Here Johnson discussed the

way in which slaves in traders yards who tried to sell themselves by convincing prospective

buyers that they would be the ones to fulfill the white purchasers hope of remaking his or her

word by buying the right slaves.. His slaves were self-making their way to better deals: kinder

buyers, promises of good treatment, laying thick strategies and stories that would peel off

eventually into outcomes over which they had more control. This accountwhich was not even

the core of his argumentwas the one people often remembered, for it struck so many chords in

the zeitgeist.


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Other key historians who led the way, for instance, included Paul Gilroyno historian,

but a literary and cultural critic. IN his The Black Atlantic, the interesting people in the first

century or more of Anglo-Atlantic slavery were not the masses of enslaved below the hatches or

in the fields, but those who became free and in some cases served as sailors on the slave ships.

In general, the small minority of Africans who broke the field slave mold and criss-crossed the

Atlantic were creators of a new modern culture, one that continually changed. Vincent Carretta

took things a step further in one iteration within a series of unmaskings that supposedly

stripped away the veil of pious orthodoxy surrounding African-American slaves as historical

subjects. (Another was Michael Johnsons revisiting of the documents and secondary literature

about the Denmark Vesey slave insurrection scare in Charleston in 1822 .) Though Caretta was

too coy to draw the argument out in so many wordsothers would show less modestyhe won

great publicity with his spectacular claim that Olauduh Equiano was born in South Carolina. To

some, the claim seemed to undercut Equianos claim to speak with authority about the slave

trade itself. Equiano was also one of the main sources historians used to understand the culture

of eighteenth-century southeastern Nigeria, his claimed homeland. With his biography

demystified and delegitimated, it would be hard to draw antecedents in slave culture from that

area of Africa.

It was surely no accident that the new generation of historians wrote about complex

relationships between individual enslaved people and racial (and other forms of status-related)

identity. The Theory was there, was part of their academic upbringing. Home training in the

graduate seminars of the 1990s required close attention to shifting cultural politics Shifting

trends of theoretical fashionability were also important. One was expected, at least by some

professors and peers, to know not only ones Homi Bhaba and Edward Saidthough perhaps not

Saids antagonist Noam Chomskybut to also know who trumped who. Yet less flippantly, one

must recognize that structural factors in the intellectual history of the profession in that era

moved people towards a new interpretive stance. Even as U.S. schools rapidly resegregated

themselves in the 1980s and 1990s, the historians who chose to study slavery at top U.S. grad


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schools were disproportionately likely to have experienced secondary and university

backgrounds where a narrow band of high-achieving African-American students had made their

way through doors that had been closed to previous generations. In some cases they had been

those African-American students; in other cases they had been white students who had witnessed

the clashes over identity politics that had shaped the all-too-brief era of Public Enemy and Black

Athena. Those clashes had taken place between black and white students, but also between

black students and other black students. The latter clashes, in particular, were sometimes over

questions of group solidarity against sometimes openly hostile majority-white student

communities. Often the question posed by African-American students to each other had been

understood as this: will you sit with us and us only, or will you assimilate?

So when historiansmost of them young onesemerged from personal histories

suffused with individual African-American achievement in white universities, and personal

histories in which both white racists and black nationalists were major pains in the ass, it was no

surprise that these scholars would question what were now old views about the slave community

as one thing and African-American identity as essentially uniform. It was no surprise that they

would not only deconstruct such ideas, but that they would also show enslaved people trying to

deconstruct the oppressive and annoying structures around them. The enslaved heroes and

heroines of their accounts could thus be read as synecdoches of themselves and their friends as

they moved from adolescence and young adulthood. They passed first through university towns

suburban-styled high schools or big-city magnet schools or private boarding schools (the latter

concealed in some cases in the peculiar humblebragging in which graduate students sorted out

their social hierachies) and on into elite universities that bragged that their African-American

student body had reached six percent.

The reality, of course, was that black solidarity in those settings was always far less

coercive than white solidarity could become. But black unity was seen as a social Problem. In

the 1990s and early 2000s, people of African descent who critiqued the myth of black unity

about this from the inside could often find a wide audience. Of course, most conservative think-


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tanks had long kept a black-conservative intellectual in-house to inoculate themselves against

charges of casual racism. Now what they were directing was a broad cultural assault, not a set of

policy bulwarks being erected against the logical outcomes of post-New Deal liberalism.

Instead of resisting the clear policy implications to be drawn from a) a national commitment to

access to opportunity for all and b) proof of exclusion, conservative political forces sensed that

the momentum for fulfilling the implicit promises of liberalism was utterly spent. Now they

accepted the idea that identity can be chosen, that texts-- like the text of our livesare malleable,

and that therefore those who failed in the game of life had chosen to fail by adopting antisocial

identities like thug or unwed mother..

Yet what new historians wrote could sometimes fall into uncanny resonance with those

who wanted to say that race was over. With those who now had the confidence to Sister Soulja

any open claim that federal government policy on welfare was systematically racist, or that New

York Citys crime management policy was self-evidently a violation of constitutional rights. Of

course, the way they were read was often not what they said. Peningroth, who focused on

conflict among black communities, agreed with Peter Kolchin and Wilma Dunaway that a

counterrevision of whitewashing of internal conflict was needed. Like Brenda Stevenson, in

her account of African-American women and families in northern Virginia, he excoriated

historians who assumed that there was some sort of slave community to which all enslaved

people subscribed. He could be heard, and was deployed, as support for the claim that where

violence, family disruption, and general devastation existed in contemporary African-American

society, African Americans should be blamed more, and white racism or government policy or

the history of slavery should be blamed less. But he was also pushing historians to confront their

seemingly predilection for understanding and assessing the nature of race relations into the

core subject of enslaved peoples history.

Likewise, no one, save a few scholars who wrote about the slave trade, seemed interested

in transforming their histories of slavery (much less of capitalism in the U.S.) around Johnsons

most sweeping argument: that in the antebellum South all slaves were always in the market.


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They focused instead on the image of negotiation by slaves being sold in the slave market to

argue that everything was a constant interplay of master and slave. Of course, not everything fits

into the category of these histories of exceptions, of negotiations and ambivalence, of individuals

constructing individual identity as the main story of history. Vincent Browns devastating

account of violence and slavery in eighteenth-century Jamaica, like Stephanie Smallwoods work

on the transatlantic slave trade, uses close readings of texts in a way that is clearly shaped by

poststructuralist anthropology and other influences, but refuses to let the reader believe that all

meanings were malleable and everything was a text. A slave rebels severed head remained the

evidence of an act of extraordinary immorality. Now, however, we understood why it had been

severed. Stephanie Camps work on resistance, meanwhile, particularly female resistance,

mapped a kind of black solidarity that would later be given philosophical form by the

philosopher Tommy Shelby. It acknowledged conflicting interest and even conflict between

enslaved people. Yet even though some enslaved peoplemost, in fact, at one point or

anothercould not or would not risk all for resistance, all understood however that the forces

that confronted them were implacable and that all were targeted by it.

It would be unfair to say that the new authors intended all the uses that were made of

their work, or even that all of those interpretations were reasonable. (With Ann Patton Malone,

and with William Dusinberres devastating study of mortality in the slave communities of the

Carolina-Georgia rice plantations, he reminded readers of the extraordinary suffering of children

and anyone else vulnerable in the low-calorie, high-disease, high-family-disruption environment

of U.S. slavery.) But his point about the physical devastations of slavery was not attractive or

useful to some of those taken with his insistence that African Americans were individual and that

the idea of a slave community could be a form of internal coercion. In an environment in which

politicians and media figures appeared on television every night claiming to speak for forty

million people of African descent, this argument could be used to complicate the public debate in

useful ways. Just as often, however, it could be misused to argue that when contemporary


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African Americans complained about systematic disfranchisement in political processes, or

systematic exclusion from the benefits of a growing economy, they were peddling false claims.

This sort of move was in the air by the late 1990s, at least up at the rarefied heights of

Manhattan literary agencies, television and newspaper newsrooms, and Ivy League history

departments. Skepticism about claims that slavery was primarily responsible for continuing

African-American equality was the new fashion. Historical novels by successful authors like

Edwidge Danticat or Fred DAguiar were panned when they engaged too much with the

tiresome story of racial oppression. On the other hand, more interesting were books about

black slaveholders. Or the works of a new series of cosmopolitans like Zadie Smith, the later

Paul Gilroy, Colson Whitehead, or Kwame Anthony Appiah, who questioned the need to identify

with universalizing African or African-American identities. There was always a complication,

another fold, and white America ate it up.

Lashed by the Invisible Hand

But by the time many of these works had appeared in print, the world had turned, again.

In 2000, the Republicans replayed a tried and true strategy, one that had been working

since 1968. Get out the Southern white vote, suppress African-American turnout. Yet this time,

they could win the presidency against an unpopular Democratic candidate only by massive fraud

and the Supreme Courts most indefensible decision tothat point in history. Among the many

lessons to be drawn from the Republicans increasingly difficult time winning elections between

1996 and 2008 is that of demographic change. In large part due to the effects of changes in

federal immigration law passed in 1965, America was becoming less white, and the Census

Bureau began to predict that whites would drop below the 50% level by 2040. This would

certainly make race relations between black and white less crucial to national identity. It also

promised to weaken the equation made by so many, that whiteness=American-essence. So more


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diverse versions of slavery history, ones not so bound to the idea of seeing in the character of the

enslaved person an image write small and in the past of the future of not only African Americans

but white Americans might be possible. Whether this would be a salutary development is a

question for debate, but it is possible that historians slavery would no longer be hijacked by

contemporary debates that distort the past while offering no exit strategy leading to equal

opportunity, reparation, full access to rights, or reconciliation.

Second, on September 11, 2001, Islamic fundamentalists murdered thousands of

Americans. Their attacks became the pretext for two wars, including one in Iraq waged almost

entirely on false pretenses and at great human, financial, and moral cost. The reality of that

attack, these wars, and the way in which they were engineered was a massive shock. It came

after a decade of complacency in which self-styled progressive academics often complained that

there was no policy difference between the two parties, and that they voted Democrat for the

culture-politics parts of their platforms. Some began to consider that violence and war could be

agents or even causes (though cause was still a word to be avoided) of massive

transformationtransformation on a scale and of a non-negotiability different from the world of

the nuanced and contested text. Likewise torture and mass imprisonment now seemed more

immediate issues for many white progressives. They were not new for those living-while-black,

of course.

Listening to those who had spent their career undermining moral absolutes with the tools

of moral and/or epistemological relativism make an attempt to draw clear lines against torture

was awkward. Even more awkward was watching conservatives who in the previous two

decades had posed as defenders of moral absolutes come out of the closet and reveal themselves

to be wild-eyed Nietszcheans. Most famously: the Bush administration official who scoffed at a

reporters complaint that every word the administration said about Iraqi WMDs had been false,

replying that the reporter and the Democrats were all trapped in reality-based thinking. We

create our own realityour own rhetorical text, and then we impose it on the world, which

comes to believe it. Suddenly, progressives discovered that reality-based thinking including


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previously scoffed-at fields like statistical analysis and science, had truth claims that theyd

rather not dismantle and demystify.

The effect of the impulse on progressive politics was salutary and energizing, at least for

a time. Old internecine debates calmed down, and political organizers and bloggers made a

valiant effort to create a structure of communication and argument alternative to the TV and

mainstream mediawhich had been largely captured by the Right and its terms of argument.

Thus practical political organization and participation, activities in which reveling in ambiguity

was decidedly not conducive to success, were a third social force that might have been pushing

historians of slavery towards a rethinking of some of their persistent habits of argument and

rhetoric. More of them could have followed the leads suggested by Steven Hahn, Stephanie

Camp, and Walter Johnson: suggesting that historians should look more closely at enslaved

peoples networks and rethink the politics that grew and spread through such networks.

The massive organizing effort made by Obama For America over the years between 2006

and 2008 showed that it was possible, at least under the right circumstances, to organize a

massive popular majority in the face of Republican advantages in the media, in gerrymandered

districting, and artificial limits on the electorate. The Obama victory, which built around a

brilliant rhetorician with a compelling biography, might have also provided an indication that the

United States had accomplished exactly what Obama himself suggested it could do. And that

was to transcend at last the central idea of whiteness: that people of African descent were not

equal and that every quantum of increase in their practical access to rights was a quantum of

decrease in the rights and power and freedom of white people.

As the next few years would show, the depths of white resentment were not yet drained.

And in the meantime one more significant phenomenon occurred, one that also emphasized the

inability of the most popular ways of thinking about the history of slavery to explain the events

that were happening in the U.S. That, of course, was the detonation of long-laid landmines in the

U.S. financial sector. The chain reaction caused by bad debts in securitized mortgages had been

caused by both greed among financial-industry insiders who had already captured untold wealth,


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and by foolish dogmas run amuck in the regulatory realm. The idea that markets, especially

markets in innovatively constructed debt and credit, could regulate themselves has been proven

foolish again and again. But then that is the kind of mistake that can be made when historians do

not study economic history.

As everybody knows, the explosion in the U.S. financial markets in 2008 spread

throughout the world economy. The broader economic crisis produced political and other

tremors in Europe and elsewhere. The neoliberal Washington consensus, accepted by or

imposed on much of the worlds economy in the years since 1991, was called into question in

multiple ways that at writing remain unresolved. However, the takeaway for historians of

slavery in the U.S. ought to be this: we would do well to think much more seriously about

financial history and the history of capitalism. Because, to return to the beginning of this essay,

the expansion of U.S. slavery was deeply embedded in the creation of the worldwide capitalist

economic system whose most recent storm spun off tornadoes that affect people around the

globe. And recent events should remind us to consider the implications of that fact. Here are

some of those key implications, none of which can be fully comprehended through any of the

cultural-history paradigms that have garnered most of the attention and energy in the last century

or more of historiography.

First of all, slavery in the U.S. was enmeshed in the history of capitalisms expansion

especially once cotton textile factories became the central point of creative destruction that drove

the emergent industrial sector. And, of course, once enslavers in the U.S. created a new system

for producing cotton through slave labor, a system that would encompass a vast subcontinental

region, produce 80% of the worlds supply of its most widely traded product, and drive most

competitors from the field. That enmeshment in turn meant that the history of U.S. slavery must

be understood in relationship to the development of capitalism. The implications of this are

many. They demand new kinds of learning and new tools, including a much closer engagement

with world economic history, greater attention to political economy (which could incorporate


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culture and rhetoric, of course, more thought about the implications of slavery for long-term

transfers of wealth, and above all, engagement with these three issues.

Historians of U.S. slavery must engage financial history. The expansion of U.S. slavery,

like the expansion of U.S. consumption since 1970, demanded a massive build-up and

transformation of the Atlantic worlds financial links and capacities. The result was a series of

transformation that shaped slavery on the ground, the political conflict that ultimately brought

down U.S. slavery, and the economies of all trading partners. The effects are still with us, and

are part of everybodys history. Indeed, Lehman Brothers, the Wall Street bank whose collapse

triggered the chain reaction of September 2008, began its history as a cotton-trading firm in

Alabama during the 1840s. It was founded in order to capitalize on an opportunity. The collapse

of a great bubble in securitized mortgage debtalbeit on mortgages on slaves, not on suburban

homesin 1837-1839 had left a tremendous opportunity for new firms to soak up market share

in the trading of cotton.

Second: Lehman Brothers is no morejust like many of the New Orleans and Natchez

and Mobile (and New York, and Philadelphia) banks and merchant firms that made vast sums

and borrowed even vaster ones during the 1830s, before the crisis. But the source of cotton, the

commodity whose earnings were supposed to pay off the debts incurred to buy slaves and

transfer them to the deep South states was of course the labor of the slaves themselves. Labor

has vanished as a central analytical subject in the historiography of U.S. slavery. At most, it has

been a means to social and cultural analysis, like the claims that slave labor relied on African

collective-labor antecedents. A close lookeven a cursory oneat the labor process in the

cotton field reveals not only the ridiculousness of that specific assessment, but that labor in the

cotton field was of tremendous significance to the wider development of the U.S., the formation

of African-American culture and society, and the growth of modern capitalism. Whether we

look at production, finance, or consumption, every path traveled by slave trader or cotton bale or

bill of exchange or mortgage document or political plan for expanding slavery geographically

each one leads to the cotton field. And not between sundown and sunup, but during the long


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hard daylight hours during which, day after day, year after year, millions of people were

systematically robbed.

Third, looking at U.S. slavery from the perspective of the history of capitalism will

require us to reconsider the epistemology and hermeneutics of historical documents. The recent

economic explosion reminds us that economic dynamics have power not entirely different from

natural forces. It reminds us that that numbers and flows can act as causes in ways that cannot be

entirely accounted for by the claims of social constructionism upon which much the linguistic

turn in history ultimately rest. This is not to say that economics is a science like physics, no

matter what economists say. But it is to say that while culture modifies economics, economics

can modify culture and can use forces (like simple supply and demand) that are not words or

texts. Likewise, the claims of behavioral economics, which can be read to imply that physical

structures in the brain have effects on behavior, including decisions about buying and saving,

earning and spendingthese merit consideration as well.

Yet resistance to the necessary rethinking of the relationship between economic change

and the way we do history is strong. As many cultural historians have noted, paradigms shape

the rules of what can be known or said. Ill briefly relate an anecdote. I presented to a faculty

seminar a paper that argued that the rapid increase in the production of cotton in the 1830s

rendered unpayable the debts enslavers had incurred in order to ramp up cotton production. The

results included the 1837-39 worldwide financial mentioned before, the collapse of many

merchant firms and banks, the shift of banking power out of the South, the disruption of many

enslaved peoples lives, and the emergence of both political abolitionism and Southern

secessionism. Afterwards, a historian at least as well-versed as me in the intricacies of Theory

took me aside and gently explained that I had used the term economy in an insufficiently

unproblematized way. I had written as if the economy was an entity that existed in some

objective sense. But as Tim Mitchells recent book about oil production and Keynesian political

economy after World War II had shown, the concept economy wasnt really in use by policy-

makers until about 1950s.


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Whether or not that is an accurate analysis of the history of a specific term, the

assumption was clear. If there was no concept economy in 1837, it is of no value to us as an

analytical term for understanding 1837. For if it did not exist as a term, it could have no

influence on thoughts or events. In that particular analytical framework, there is no room for

concepts and forces and phenomena that act outside of the world of language and of the text. In

fact, it may also be implied that there is no room for concepts not named and recognized by

important text-writing people.

I think that view of history is of no use to us anymore. Instead, I submit that historians of

U.S. slavery need to engage with the history of world capitalism, to understand financial history,

to study the labor of enslaved forced laborers, and to challenge a hermeneutics of historical

interpretation that walls historians off from the social and natural sciences. The irony is that

what we have learned about cultural history will be of great use to us along these paths. How

people understand the world always shapes their own attempts to shape it, and their experience

of it. All of these points of departure would link the history of slavery in the U.S. more

effectively to other Second Slavery societies. Above all else, they would lead us to understand

better the way that the travels and toils of the enslaved people whose climb up the levee at New

Orleans is still unmarked are fundamental to the history of the rise of capitalist modernity and the

US as capitalisms foremost state. And thus they would link the past to the present in a way that

is more helpful to us than a simple synecdoche of what some people in the present should be the

future role of African Americans in the endless but constraining interplay between whiteness and

American national identity.

But these tasks will not be easy. It would be pleasant to imagine that the many

transformations of the United States over the years between 2001 and 2014 had finally broken

the link between the history of U.S. slavery and the idea that African Americans ought to be the

players in someones script. This synecdochal move repeatedly puts the onus on African

Americans and distances them, makes them appear different and on a different historical


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trajectory from other Americans. It would be nice to imagine that the end had come for the long

pattern of rendering the portrait of the historical enslaved as a synecdoche of an idealized

African American who at some future date was no longer a problem. But the last clause points

to the heart of the matter: the fact that the national identity of the U.S. has for centuries included

the caveat thatAfrican Americans are different. Whether this means that they are the objects of

nationwide reviling by a massive white majority, or whether this means that many whites see

African Americans as the objects of

edward e. baptist

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