The Questions at the Heart of the Study of Slavery

With Dr. Scott Spillman

If you missed it, the Trump administration took aim at the Smithsonian a couple of weeks back. As stated in an executive order, their goal is to end the “revisionist moment” carried out by historians.

It goes without saying, but to be clear, I don’t support that executive order. On the contrary, I’m proud that this newsletter is part of the “revisionist moment.” The study of slavery, the subject of my interview today, demonstrates why revisionist history is so integral in moving us toward justice.

In Making Sense of Slavery: America’s Long Reckoning, from the Founding Era to Today, historian Scott Spillman traces historians’ evolving interpretations of slavery since the 1700s. In tracking these debates, he helps frame “the troubling new realm” we’ve entered and the challenging questions at the heart of American history.

A condensed transcript of our conversation, edited for clarity, is below. You can also listen to us on the Skipped History podcast:

People get exercised in different ways

Ben: Let’s start with the simplest question. Where did the study of slavery originate?

SS: It began with a man named Anthony Benezet in Philadelphia. His family fled France in the early 1700s to escape persecution and ultimately settled in Philadelphia in the 1730s. Benezet converted to Quakerism.

He started to write pamphlets against slavery in the late 1750s and early 1760s. Benezet took evidence he could see and also, crucially, evidence from travel writings and journals written by people involved in the slave trade since the late 1600s. In those accounts, he saw evidence of the humanity of Africans and well-developed economies and African societies, and he deployed that information to argue slavery was wrong.

Adding that empirical evidence piece is why I think Benezet marks the start of the study of slavery. He wrote to people in England and France, helping to catalyze a broader anti-slavery movement across the Atlantic world.

Ben: I love the quote from a French diplomat who said Benezet had “an intelligence, wit, and fire, and… carries his love of humanity to the point of madness."

SS: He also became a vegetarian because he didn't believe in killing animals. He was a very zealous reformer, but still had a sensibility that didn’t turn people off.

Ben: A friend of mine makes fun of me with the joke, how do you know someone's a vegetarian? Because they'll tell you.

How did you know Benezet was an abolitionist? Because he'd tell you.

SS: Ha! Importantly, Benezet’s writing provoked a response from pro-slavery folks, who now had to come up with their own evidence and arguments for an institution that they more or less took for granted as part of the human condition.

Out of that crucible—that debate—the study of slavery grew in the 1800s.

Ben: Fast forwarding to the end of the century, can you talk about the intellectual showdown between Ulrich Phillips and W.E.B. Du Bois? Their rivalry underscores some of the evolutions in the debate over slavery.

SS: Sure. Phillips was probably the first true professional historian of slavery—the first person whose whole scholarly career was devoted to the study of slavery. He was born in 1877 in Georgia, right at the end of Reconstruction.

Phillips went to the University of Georgia and then to Columbia University to get his PhD. At Columbia, he studied with a famous historian named William Dunning, who's best known today for his work on Reconstruction. He basically said Reconstruction was a failure because it didn’t deal with “the fact” of Black inferiority.

Under Dunning, in the early 1900s, Phillips conducted detailed studies of slavery, which ultimately resulted in a book called American Negro Slavery, essentially the first big synthesis by a professional scholar of American slavery. And Phillips, as you might have guessed, saw slavery as a benign, even beneficent institution. He and Dunning amplified arguments used to prop up Jim Crow regimes for decades.

Ben: Meanwhile, Du Bois had some very different takes.

SS: That’s right. Du Bois got his PhD from Harvard University in 1895, and his doctoral dissertation was about the slave trade. While Phillips approached slavery from the point of view of the slaveholders, viewing slavery as a business, Du Bois looked at it much more from the perspective of the enslaved and their social and cultural experience in it.

So Phillips and Du Bois had debates over the years. One happened in person, when Du Bois gave a talk in New York that was the extremely early seed of what would later become his famous book, Black Reconstruction. Du Bois said, No, actually Reconstruction governments based on Black political participation accomplished everything halfway good in Southern states—public schooling and various economic and social reforms.

Du Bois later wrote that Phillips was “greatly exercised” by his talk.

Ben: I noted that quote. It reminded me of this person I see at the gym who always seems to be running on the elliptical as fast as possible on the lowest setting.

SS: Ha, yeah, it’s sort of a cartoon-esque moment.

Ben: World War II marked a turning point in understandings of slavery. How did the war spark new, revisionist ideas?

SS: A bunch of things happened during and around World War II that influenced the study of slavery.

A big one was the end of scientific racism: the baseline belief that Black people are biologically inferior. That idea had been being chipped away at for a few decades, slowly, but the Nazis brought American ideas about racism into perspective. Scientific organizations in the U.S. started issuing statements that there's essentially no reason to discriminate against people based on race. That was huge.

Around this time, Gunnar Myrdal also published An American Dilemma, out in 1944. Myrdal studied what he called the “Negro Problem,” which he diagnosed not as a problem with Black people, but a problem in the minds of white Americans. They were divided between their commitment to freedom and equality on one hand, and to racist and discriminatory policies on the other—that was the American dilemma.

The challenge for scholars then became explaining why slavery occurred. You start to get scholars in the 1950s and 1960s like Kenneth Stampp. In The Peculiar Institution, which came out in 1956, he essentially turned Ulrich Phillips’ analysis on its head. Instead of seeing slavery as a socially beneficial institution that ended up being an economic failure, which is what Phillips saw, Stampp instead saw it as a profitable economic institution that was a social disaster for everybody.

Ben: I admit my first response to that sort of analysis—that slavery was bad—is, well, duh. But maybe I took my response for granted, because as you chronicle, it’s built on a lot of scholarship and thinking against the grain.

Related, I took for granted that my opposition to slavery (which feels so silly to say) is rooted in the firsthand accounts of enslaved people that scholars, especially Black women, began to document toward the end of the 20th century.

Can you talk about that development?

SS: Sure. Stampp and other folks set the stage for a huge number of books on slavery in the 60s and 70s, sort of the golden age of the field. But then, to some extent, there was a feeling that slavery studies had been mostly done.

Energy really came back into the field with the entry of a larger wave of Black women into the profession in the 90s. People like Saidiya Hartman, Jennifer L. Morgan, who recently won a MacArthur grant for her work on slavery, and Annette Gordon-Reed, whose first book on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings came out in 1997.

These authors recovered individual voices and stories, bringing new ideas and ways of approaching the archive into the study of slavery. That work has given scholarship a freshness and momentum over the past 15–20 years.

Ben: Momentum that was then picked up on and carried by The 1619 Project—and which the Trump administration is trying to stymie.

How do you make sense of where we are in debates over slavery today? It’s sort of astonishing and exciting and frightening to me that the study is still taking shape.

SS: Our debates are more public and prominent now, and since the late 70s and the 80s, questions about slavery have entered our culture wars. But in some ways, we’re still asking ourselves the same fundamental questions scholars began asking in the 1790s: What is the relationship between slavery and American history? Should we see slavery as an example of Americans struggling to live up to our stated principles? Or might its existence suggest that those principles were rotten from the start?

On the other hand, scholars are asking important new questions about Indigenous slavery, the environmental costs of slavery, the Black abolitionist movement in the early 19th century, and more. So we’ve entered a troubling new realm where we have executive orders trying to dictate how scholarly conversations occur, but the study of slavery continues to be, I think, a healthy field.