UNPUBLISHED BOOK

In the summer of 1962, as readers of my Autobiography know, I wrote a short book called The Rhetoric of Deterrence, growing out of my struggles in the nuclear disarmament movement. I was unable to get it published [Harvard thought it was too political -- Harper and Row thought it was too technical], and for the past forty-nine years, it has languished on my shelf, joined eventually by two other books -- about my family -- that were by their nature not really publishable. This morning, I posted The Rhetoric of Deterrence on box.net. Perhaps, half a century later, someone will find it of interest.

AFRO-AMERICAN STUDIES: A TUTORIAL PART TEN

In 1935, Du Bois published a massive scholarly work called Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880, in which he undertook to rewrite the story that mainstream historians had been telling about slavery and its aftermath. In a brief statement “To the Reader,” placed at the very beginning of the book, Du Bois announced his intention to challenge the story accepted and repeated by America’s White scholars. Listen carefully to the last paragraph of that challenge:

"It would be only fair to the reader to say frankly in advance that the attitude of any person toward this story will be distinctly influenced by his theories of the Negro race. If he believes that the Negro in America and in general is an average and ordinary human being, who under given environment develops like other human beings, then he will read this story and judge it by the facts adduced. If, however, he regards the Negro as a distinctly inferior creation, who can never successfully take part in modern civilization and whose emancipation and enfranchisement were gestures against nature, then he will need something more than the sort of facts I have set down. But this latter person, I am not trying to convince. I am simply pointing out these two points of view, so obvious to Americans, and then without further ado, I am assuming the truth of the first. In fine, I am going to tell this story as though Negroes were ordinary human beings, realizing that this attitude will from the first seriously curtail my audience."

At the center of Black Reconstruction is a startling thesis that completely rewrites the story told by the Southern historians and their followers, North and South, about the Civil War. In their account, the slaves were perhaps the object of the war – that is to say, they were in great part what the war was fought over. But they were not subjects in the war, they did not exercise the choice, deliberation, and agency that are the mark of human beings. In the standard accounts of Du Bois’ time, the war was fought by two groups of White men. At issue were the union, or disunion, of the American Republic, and the disposition of the core of Southern property – the four million chattel slaves. But though these historians might have used less highly charged language, they all agreed with Woodward that the slaves became free “without any effort of their own.”

The core of Du Bois’ challenge is a dramatic and highly controversial claim. During the Civil War, he insisted, the slaves played an active role in the struggle against the South, and in the last years of the conflict, their actions proved the decisive element that enabled the North to win. How was this possible, confined as they were to plantations and farms where their daily lives were controlled by the whips and chains of their masters? In three ways, Du Bois suggested.

First, drawing on European theories of working-class struggles against capitalism, Du Bois argues that the slaves withheld their labor from the productive activities of Southern agriculture, thereby fatally weakening the ability of the South to supply its troops in the field. The slaves could not strike, as free workers did in the North or in Europe, but they slowed down the temp of their work, sabotaged the raising and bringing in of the crops, secretly set smokehouses and storage barns afire, and in all the ways they could, worked against rather than for their owners. This was not a coordinated effort centrally planned, of course. As Du Bois points out, the slaves were isolated in rural settings, for the most part unable and indeed forbidden by law to read or write. It was extremely difficult for them even to communicate with their fellow slaves at the next plantation down river, let alone organize across the entire South. But, Du Bois insists, the slaves understood what was happening and what was at stake, and they took every opportunity they could to sabotage the essential supply of the Confederate Army.

The second thing the slaves did was to run away from the plantations whenever the Union Army forces got close. Scores of thousands of slaves made it to the Northern army camps. There, they were put to work doing much of the essential work of maintaining an army in the field. The Northern troops were scarcely less contemptuous of Black men and women than their Southern opponents, needless to say, but they needed the labor, and understood that it weakened the South to lose so much of its labor supply.

The third, and perhaps most important, way in which the slaves fought the South was by taking up arms in the Union Army and going into battle. As the terrible war ground on, year after year, Lincoln found it ever harder to draft men into the army to replace the hundreds of thousands who were wounded or killed. The runaway slaves became an essential component of the Northern force, and by many accounts made the difference between victory and defeat in the final year of the war.

Returning to the image with which I began these remarks, we can think of Du Bois as climbing to the crest of the hill, surveying the events on the great plain, and calling back to those below: “I see things that my fellow historians on this crest have not told you of. I see Black men and women taking their fate into their own hands. I see them struggling against great odds for their freedom. I can see that they, like their White counterparts, are capable of labor and of sacrifice, of heroism and of cowardice. In fine, I can see, and I am now able to tell you, that Negroes are ordinary human beings.”

The historical profession was not ready to hear Du Bois’ story. By and large, mainstream historians ignored it, and continued to tell the old tale well into the 1960's. As it turned out, Du Bois was just about fifty years ahead of his time. In the 1980's, a distinguished group of historians at the University of Maryland undertook a massive research project, examining, with the aid of many graduate students, two million documents lodged in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. as part of the Library of Congress. They made a selection of the documents, which dealt with the actions of runaway slaves and the Northern armies, publishing them in a series of thick volumes. Each volume was introduced by a lengthy, detailed historiographical essay, and three of those essays were published as a short book in 1992 under the title, Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War. The lead authors of this collective project were Ira Berlin and Barbara J. Fields.

Their conclusion, to sum it up very briefly, was that Du Bois had been right all those years before. There in the archives was the documentary evidence to support his claims – that the slaves had withheld their labor in the fields, that they had run away by the scores of thousands to the Northern lines, and that they had been recruited into the Union Army, enabling the North to win the war.

What is so remarkable, looking back on this evolution, is that Du Bois had virtually none of the archival materials at his disposal when he wrote Black Reconstruction. I do not think it exaggerates the case to say that the ability of Du Bois to see the truth, with only the scantiest of original materials on which to draw, is explained by his fundamental recognition that, as he put it, “Negroes are ordinary human beings.” Once we take this simple fact as our starting point, it is not difficult to find evidences of their active engagement in the unfolding of their own fate. Indeed, it would be very odd indeed if a group of people were to stand idly by while their very freedom was in the balance. Historians as distinguished as Morrison and Commager were unable to see this truth because, whatever they might say, they did not really consider Black people to be fully human.

AFRO-AMERICAN STUDIES: A TUTORIAL PART NINE

Part Two: Telling the Story of America

It is commonly said that the victors in a war get to write its history. Their soldiers are brave, dedicated patriots; the defeated opponents are craven untrustworthy cowards. Their leaders are statesmen; the leaders of their opponents are terrorists. They had every right to defend themselves; their opponents launched unprovoked and unjustified sneak attacks. So it has always been, for as long as written records have existed of the wars of the past. But by a curious twist of fate, the earliest histories of the Civil War and its aftermath, and of the institution of slavery that lay at its heart, were written by the defeated Southerners, not by victorious Northerners. Within a generation after Reconstruction, the broad outlines of the story had been sketched. For the next half century and more, that story was elaborated, repeated, simplified for school books, and given the stamp of approval by the academic establishment of White historians, northern and southern..

The story went something like this: "Before the War for Southern Independence, as the Civil War was sometimes referred to, Southern Whites had built a genteel world of refinement, culture, manners, breeding, and wealth. Lovely belles and courtly gentlemen cared in their thoughtful, parental manner for charming, happy, child-like, carefree darkies who were unable to look after themselves and were fiercely loyal to ole Massa. When the heartless, intrusive, rapacious North sought to destroy this gentle, time-honored civilization, men of honor took up their swords and rode off to defend the South, blessed as they left by their weeping wives and sorrowful Black retainers. Overwhelmed by superior forces but never defeated in spirit, the South was raped and pillaged by the Northern conquerors, who then wantonly and unthinkingly set free four million ignorant, unskilled, childlike Negroes to fend for themselves. Worse even than the destruction of its gracious houses and fruitful plantations was the despoiling of the South’s great traditions of democracy. Jumped-up illiterate former slaves, a few weeks, from the cotton fields, were tricked out in stolen finery by the Northern conquerors and told to call themselves Representative or Senator. Deprived of the guidance of their former masters, these caricatures, more to be pitied than reviled, made a mockery of the halls of government in which, for generations, educated and refined gentlemen had practiced the difficult arts of self-government. Driven half-wild by the thoughtless despoiling of everything beautiful, cultured, and genteel, a few Southerners even resorted, out of necessity, to extra-legal means of reestablishing some semblance of civilization, forming such well-meaning but in the end unhelpful organizations as the Ku Klux Klan."

Some of you may find it a little hard to believe that this appalling series of absurdities ever won anything like general acceptance even in the South, let alone in the North, so a few selected quotations may help to provide some context for these remarks. Here first are two passages from books written early in the shaping of this story. In 1907, William Archibald Dunning published a scholarly work entitled “Reconstruction, Political and Economic.” The book was part of a long series of books with the general title The American Nation: A History, edited by a professor at Harvard University. Here is what Dunning had to say about “the Negro.”

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"The negro had no pride of race and no aspiration or ideals save to be like the whites. With civil rights and political power, not won, but almost forced upon him, he came gradually to understand those more elusive privileges that constitute social equality. [page 213]"

Six years later, William Watson Davis, in a work on “The Civil War and Reconstruction in Florida” published as part of a series by Columbia University, offered this description of slavery.

"The fact is that the Southern slave was well-fed, well-housed, well-treated, and lastly, well-watched and controlled; hence the peace about the slave quarters on isolated plantations when war was raging at no great distance. Many slaves in the white households loved “their white people” [I think he probably meant “white folks”] and in return were loved with a sincerity proven by experience. They needed no watching and controlling. It was to them that the “master” confided his women and little children when he went away to fight. [page 219]"

William E. Woodward [why are all of these historians named “William”?] offered this dismissive and contemptuous evaluation of the Negro in his 1928 book, Meet General Grant:

"The American Negroes are the only people in the history of the world, so far as I know, that ever became free without any effort on their own... They had not started the war or ended it. They twanged banjoes around railroad stations, sang melodious spirituals, and believed that some Yankee would come along and give each of them forty acres and a mule." [Quoted in Du Bois, Black Reconstruction.]

Those of you who are fans of old movies will recognize these conceptions of African Americans from the famous classic, Gone With The Wind, starring Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh, Leslie Howard, Olivia De Havilland and Thomas Mitchell.

Not surprisingly, the earliest scholars to challenge this story of slavery and Reconstruction were Black historians, who knew from personal experience, as well as from their scholarly research, that the story was simply wrong. There are many names to call here. Pride of place must be given to Carter G. Woodson, who was born in Virginia ten years after the end of the Civil War. Woodson is widely and justly considered the Father of Black History. He did extensive research on many aspects of the African-American experience, which he published in a stream of books. He founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, which continues to this day under its new title, The Association for the Study of African-American Life and History. He founded the Journal of Negro History, now the Journal of African American History. And he even originated Black History Week, which has since been expanded to Black history Month.

But I should like to speak about another scholar, whose name may in fact be known to most of you: W. E. B. Du Bois. William Edward Burghardt du Bois was born in 1868, just three years after the end of the war, in the Western Massachusetts town of Great Barrington, seven miles from the New York border. After completing high school, he went south to Fisk University, founded two years before Du Bois’ birth in Nashville, Tennessee. From Fisk, Du Bois traveled to Germany for two years of graduate studies, as did many young American scholars at that time. While in Germany, Du Bois actually met and studied with the greatest Sociologist of all time, Max Weber. On his return to the United States, Du Bois enrolled as a doctoral student at Harvard University, and in 1895, at the age of twenty-seven, he was awarded a doctorate by Harvard, the first Black person to win that honor. His dissertation became the first of his scores of books, under the title The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870.

In his long life, Du Bois wrote countless books and articles, played a major role in the founding of the NAACP, established and served as the first editor of The Crisis, the NAACP magazine that still appears regularly today, led the movement to unite the peoples of Africa with the millions of descendants of Africans scattered across the world by the slave trade, a movement known as Pan-Africanism, and he even found time to write a series of autobiographical accounts of his life. Du Bois was the greatest social scientist America has produced. Note that I did not say “the greatest Black social scientist,.” but “the greatest social scientist” simpliciter. There are a handful of stellar social scientists who might compete with him for that title – Thorstein Veblan, Margaret Mead, Robert Merton, Talcott Parsons, George Herbert Mead. But the scope, quality, and sheer volume of Du Bois’ work, and his major role in the political life of this nation, justify awarding the palm to him.

Hounded by the U. S. Government for his political views, Du Bois finally left America and spent his last years in the West African country of Ghana. There, on August 27, 1963, at the age of ninety-five, he died, one day before the historic March in Washington at which Martin Luther King delivered his “I have a Dream” oration, arguably, with Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, one of the two most famous public speeches in American history.

AFRO-AMERICAN STUDIES: A TUTORIAL A DIGRESSION

Digression

Several people [NG, David Hawthorne] have posted lengthy, thoughtful comments on this tutorial, which at some point I should like to address. This interim digression is meant to speak to an interesting question that was not raised, but that may well have occurred to readers of the tutorial. To put it simply: Inasmuch as the wages paid to free laborers in the North were, for the most part, no more than subsistence wages, and since the slave owners had to protect their very large investments in slaves by feeding, clothing, and housing them at least well enough to keep them working, what economic difference did slavery make? It was, after all, common for radical critics of capitalism to refer to "wage slavery," and there was a great deal of truth in that epithet.

A number of economic historians have addressed this question, none more suggestively, in my limited experience, than Yale Professor of Economics Gerald David Jaynes in his 1986 book Branches Without Roots. Let me summarize briefly two of the important points that Jaynes makes. First of all, agriculture is a seasonal enterprise. One plants in the early Spring and, if all goes well, reaps a harvest come Fall. Thus agricultural capital is invested -- tied up -- for six months or more. This is in striking contrast with manufacturing, in which the turnover of capital is typically quite short. The Southern plantation owners, although they might live large and feature themselves great men, were in fact from an economic point of view small business owners with very little spare capital. It was the rare plantation that had as many as a hundred slaves. The owners lived [albeit well] from harvest to harvest. While the crop was in the ground, the plantation owner had to lay out money for seed and equipment, as well as for the food, clothing, and shelter required by his slaves.

What the plantation owners did, typically, was to take out a loan [or, in the lovely phrase used by Jaynes, "to hypothecate a loan"], payable at harvest time. To secure the loan, they pledged their slaves. [Not their land, for to do so was to risk, in a bad harvest year, losing the land itself on which their wealth and social position rested.] Once the Slave Trade came to an end in 1808, as required by the US Constitution, the only source of slaves, save for some illegal importation, was the internal slave market and the procreation of the slaves themselves [or the rape of slave women by their masters, which was a common and lucrative practice.] The market price for slaves rose steadily, and by the middle of the nineteenth century, it is estimated that fully one-half of the entire wealth of the Southern states consisted of slaves!

Thus the economic structure of the Southern economy was quite different from that of the Northern states. There were many, many slaves in the North, of course. Indeed, at one point New York City had more slaves among its residents than any other city in America. But the Northern economy, although it included slaves, was not a slave economy. The Southern economy was a slave economy.

Before the Civil War, the South was far and away the wealthiest region in the United States. When four million enslaved men, women, and children walked into freedom, they carried with them in their own persons half of the wealth of the South. The South plunged into economic depression, and it was almost a century before it recovered its economic strength, but even then, it never regained its preeminence as the wealthiest region in the country.

A second difference slavery made was in the organization of agricultural production. The owners of the larger plantations developed a gang system of field work that was, in a way, quasi-industrial in its organization. Slaves would be lined up at one end of a field and driven down the rows of cotton by slavedrivers wielding whips [and not, Henry Steele Commager and Allan Nevins to the contrary notwithstanding, "letting the lash fall lightly on their shoulders."] This was brutally hard work, but efficient and productive, and inasmuch as the slaves were the legal property of the plantation owners, they had no recourse against the practice in law or public opinion.

When the slaves were freed, the plantation owners faced the problem of securing a work force to plant, tend, and bring in the crops. The plantation owners very quickly discovering that their former slaves had less love for their ole massas than they had fancied, they tried offering them wages. But it there simply were no wages they could imagine themselves offering that could persuade the freedmen and freedwomen to return to the old gang method of field work. Some sort of solution was worked out, of course. After a brief, heady period of Reconstruction, lasting little more than a decade, the Southern Whites enacted a system of oppressive Black Codes that effectively reduced the newly free workers to a form of quasi-slavery that lasted almost a hundred years. Sharecropping, debt peonage, and chain gang labor kept Southern agriculture going, but not at the ante bellum levels of profitability.

AFRO-AMERICAN STUDIES: A TUTORIAL PART EIGHT

As I have already noted, in the very earliest Colonial period, almost all non-Native Americans, White and Black, were unfree. The terms of indenture were extremely severe, and were frequently lengthened by the courts as punishment for even minor infractions of the law. We ought not to be misled by the use of the term "servant," which to modern ears conjures images of housemaids, cooks, and nannies. In the days of John Locke [in whose Second Treatise one can find the claim that the labor of my 'servant' belongs to me, so that when my servant mixes his labor with a piece of the common, by tilling it, that piece becomes mine, not his], the word "servant" carried with it the meaning of "servile," "unfree," "enslaved." The treatment of indentured servants was brutally harsh and cruel, although there is some documentary evidence that even in those earliest of days Africans were treated more harshly still.

Little by little, as I have indicated, the category of "hereditary chattel slave," new to the Common Law, came to be defined by the practices, court decisions, and positive law of the Colonies. While full-blown chattel slavery was emerging from the early seventeenth confusion of bound labor, a parallel process was taking place with regard to the status of Whites. As time passed, the condition of the White indentured servants was progressively ameliorated. Laws were passed forbidding some of the more extreme forms of abuse visited by masters on their servants. Perhaps even more important, limits were placed on the practice of renewing or extending a servant's time of indenture.

Indentured servitude was not entirely eliminated by law until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865 ["Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction"], but the practice slowly died out in the early nineteenth century. Little by little, rights and protections that had originally been enjoyed only by the elite few came to be the birthright of virtually all White inhabitants of the Colonies.

This evolution of chattel slavery and free citizenship was more than merely a parallel unfolding of two unconnected ideals. Each depended in complex ways on the other. Edmund Morgan first spelled out this intimate relationship in 1975 in a book that has earned the reputation of a classic among professional historians. In his study of Colonial Virginia, American Slavery - American Freedom, Morgan details the ways in which the transformation of indentured servants into free citizens actually prompted landowners to turn to slave labor. "The connection between American slavery and freedom is evident at many levels if we care to see it," he observes. "As Virginians nourished an increasing contempt for blacks and Indians, they began to raise the status of lower-class whites. The two movements were complementary."

Recently, some authors have taken to using a rather uncomplimentary term for states that fit the description I have been developing of America. They call them White Settler States. For most of us, that conjures up pictures of British East Africa or Portuguese Angola or perhaps the South Africa of the Boers. White Americans don't like to see themselves in such pictures. They much prefer Land of Freedom, Land of Liberty, a Welcoming Home to Huddled Masses Yearning to be Free. But facts are facts, and if the shoe fits ...

Liberty and Slavery emerged from the same inchoate mixture of unfree labor, during the more than century and a half between the settlement of the first colonies and the establishment of the United States. When it came time for the Founding Fathers to craft the Constitution, they wrote into it both the assurance of extensive liberties to Whites, and the ratification of enslavement for Blacks. The liberties of Whites were guaranteed by the republican form of government and by a group of Amendments that guaranteed to all Whites [or at least to all White males] rights, privileges, and protections that a century earlier had belonged only to an elite few. As for slavery, the Framers never used the word "slave" or its cognates. Instead they spoke of "free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years" to refer to White people, and "other persons" to refer to slaves. They thus resolved in their founding document the question whether the slaves were persons, while guaranteeing that their owners could continue to treat them as property.

The standard view of America, shared by scholars, orators, and the general public, is that the nation was founded as the embodiment of an Idea of Freedom, which was cherished, celebrated, but at first only imperfectly realized. Slowly, over many generations and with the calamity of a great Civil War, the imperfections in the instantiation of the Idea were eliminated. First, and most important, was the extending to persons of color of the rights and guarantees of Freedom. Then women were granted the franchise. Later still, rights not yet fully enjoyed by the descendants of the former slaves were written into law. And today, we see the last stages of this majestic process unfolding with the extension of legal equality to gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered Americans. Each step of this long march toward Freedom has been a struggle against entrenched prejudice, but the outcome has been ensured by the deep, unbreakable commitment of all Americans to the great Idea of Freedom.

On this view, Freedom is the centerpiece, the theme, the main story line of the American experience, and the shortfalls are all marginal and temporary blemishes, requiring effort to be eliminated, but never compromising the central, organizing narrative. But the truth is completely different. If indeed there is a story of America, it is a story of the dialectical intertwining of freedom and bondage. Not only was the bondage of the slaves clarified and deepened its by contrast with the freedom of Whites; what constituted freedom for Whites was defined by its contrast with the enslavement of Blacks. When I was young, there was a catch phrase that was repeated, thoughtlessly, but significantly. If I wished to declare, defiantly, my intention of doing something that was generally disapproved, I might say, "Why shouldn't I? I am free, White, and twenty-one!" Free, White, and twenty-one. That was to say, a grownup, an American, and not Black.

One might imagine that this contrast died with the abolition of slavery, but nothing could be further from the truth. During more than a century after the end of the Civil War, the contrast between bondage and freedom was encoded in the Jim Crow laws that separated the races and condemned people of color to a second class citizenship. When those barriers to freedom fell, a new language was devised to mark the distinction between bondage and freedom. "Ghetto" and "underclass" communicated the same division, and once again, Whites defined themselves by their contrast with people of color, this time by identifying themselves as "Middle Class."

American political rhetoric these days is obsessed with the needs, the interests, the concerns of "Middle Class Americans." Now, taken as an economic, or socio-economic, term of art, "Middle Class American" is utterly incoherent. Households making anywhere from forty thousand to four hundred thousand dollars a year are routinely referred to as "middle class." There is no longer the slightest suggestion that "middle class" identifies people who are, in some measurable sense, "in the middle." It takes very little sensitivity to language to grasp that "middle class" now means "not living in the ghetto," "not living in the inner city," Not Black. Now that the "strivers", as Black professionals and entrepreneurs used to be called, have moved from the inner city to the suburbs, it has become acceptable to acknowledge the existence of a Black "middle class," although the election of a Black President triggered deep-rooted anxieties so powerful as to reveal the continued presence in America of this identification-by-contrast rooted in the nation's past.

It is worth reflecting for a moment on the real meaning of the outpouring of hysteria prompted by the election of Obama. It was not, in the ordinary sense, an expression of prejudice. Rather, it was a cry of desperation. Since my freedom is defined in contrast to their bondage, if they throw off all the chains of that bondage by appropriating what is ritually conceived as the most elevated position in the nation, than I am no longer free!

This, I suggest, is the our real national story. America came into existence as a site of bondage and freedom -- bondage for the many, and freedom for a handful. Over time, that dynamic duality evolved into bondage for Africans and their descendants and freedom for White settlers and their descendants. With the end of formal, legal bondage, new dualities of freedom and bondage took their place, and continue in altered form to the present.

This is the story that Black historians told as they climbed to the crest of the hill and surveyed the plain below. It is a story that has been elaborated and grounded in deep archival research by Black and White historians alike, but to this day, it has failed to replace the story told in schools and from podia of America as the embodiment of the Idea of Freedom.

In the next part of this tutorial, we shall take a look at the evolution of that historiography.

AFRO-AMERICAN STUDIES: A TUTORIAL PART SEVEN

One of the oddest and logically most incoherent practices of the slave regime was manumission, the setting free of an enslaved person. From time to time, slave masters who had become fond of their slaves, and had even, perhaps, cohabited with them or fathered them, freed them from the bondage of slavery, and declared them henceforth to be free men and women. [One is reminded of the Emperor Caligula, who made his horse a member of the Roman Senate.] We are so familiar with stories of Founding Fathers who wrote into their last wills and testaments the freeing of some of their slaves that we tend simply so say to ourselves "Oh, isn't that nice," without reflecting on how peculiar this practice of manumission was.

In America, then and now, if I own a pig, the law protects my exclusive right to the use and enjoyment of that pig. Should there come a time when I no longer want my pig, I have every right to turn it loose in the forest to run freely [perhaps not so easy these days even in rural America, what with zoning laws and such.] I might go so far as to publish an advertisement in the local newspaper declaring that henceforth I forswear all claim to the pig. But I clearly do not have the authority to forbid any other person from seeking out that pig and making it his or hers. I do not have the right to say to the world: "No one may seize that pig and declare ownership in it." In other words, I do not have the authority to declare that the pig is for all future time unownable.

But that is precisely what a slave master did by freeing or manumitting, a slave. When George Washington, in his last will and testament, freed his slaves [an act that somehow eluded Thomas Jefferson], he thereby forbade anyone in the new nation from ever enslaving them again. It is a testimony to the logical absurdity of slavery that manumission was recognized and acknowledged as a legitimate act.

The existence of free Blacks eventually became an embarrassment to the slave states, for it conflicted with the rationalization, eventually evolved for the institution, that held that persons with any "drop of Black blood" were by their nature meant to be enslaved. Some Southern states even passed laws requiring non-slave Blacks to leave, on pain of being re-enslaved. Nevertheless, right up to the end of the institution of slavery, there were free Blacks in the South as well as in the North, giving the lie to this rationale. One of my former students, Dr. Rita Reynolds, has studied in detail the lives of a group of relatively wealth free Blacks who lived in the heart of the old Confederacy, Charleston, South Carolina. One of her striking discoveries was that free Black men were more likely than their White counterparts in their wills to nominate their wives, and not a male relative, to run the business after their death.

There are many signs in the earliest records of what we today would call racial prejudice. Nevertheless, it would be a very bad mistake to suppose that Africans were exploited, oppressed, and used as cheap labor because of racial prejudice. The central fact of Colonial America was unfree labor -- bondage -- and Africans were brought here by force from their homes for the same reason that English men and women were bound by indenture -- because those who ruled the Colonies had an insatiable need for forced labor. As my UMass colleague John Bracey said to me one day when I was going on in our doctoral Major Works Seminar about racial prejudice in the early days of America, "Bob, when the English got to North America, they didn't look around and say, 'This is an ideal place, a perfect place to create a new society. We've got everything we need except some Black people to dislike. Let's go get some and bring them over here so that we can discriminate against them'." It sounds pretty silly when you put it that way, but John was making an important point, especially in light of the current view in some quarters that African-Americans are not good workers. The Africans were kidnapped and brought here because the colonists believed they would be productive workers, despite the necessity of forcing them to that work by whippings and even mutilations.

Indeed, as Dr. Tanya Mears has shown in some groundbreaking archival research on what were called "last words" -- the sayings of those condemned to death in Colonial New England, along with sermons preached about them and poetry written about them -- the language used to describe condemned criminals of African descent was not noticeably different from that used to describe White criminals. Sermonizers such as the famous Jonathan Edwards went out of their way to insist that the White members of the congregation, before whom the fate of the condemned was held up as an object lesson, were in as much danger as the Black criminal of ending on the gallows, and after that in hell, unless they changed their ways.

In some parts of Colonial America, Africans were preferred over other forced laborers precisely because of their special skills. In South Carolina, for example, where rich rice plantations were established along the Waccamaw River, it was the agricultural skills of West Africans that made the profitable enterprises possible. Charles Joyner tells the story in his beautifully evocative study, Down By The Riverside. It is worth listening to him for a bit. "Africans were in South Carolina from the beginning of settlement and played a major role in establishing rice culture....The early technological knowledge was supplied by Africans, not Europeans. To support this statement it is not necessary to establish that all, or even most, of the Africans who came to South Carolina were experienced in rice culture. All that is necessary is to point out that none of the Europeans, whether from the British Isles, Western Europe, or the Caribbean, had any experience with rice culture at all. ... Rice...was plentiful along the entire West African coast... especially in the Senegal-Gambia region that supplied nearly 20 percent of the slaves imported into South Carolina."

More generally, slaves performed much of the skilled labor, both craft and agricultural, in the North and in the South. Slaves tilled the fields, and they made the farm equipment. They drove teams of draft animals, and they shod them. Slaves tricked out in livery posed on carriages to show off their owners' wealth, and they also made the carriages, repaired them, even designed them. The magnificent mansions that we associate with the high point of Southern plantation life were all built by slaves. Indeed, it is even the case that slaves were rented out by their owners to work in the new factories being established in America, alongside free Whites and a handful of free Blacks.

There is so much to tell about the institution of slavery that this tutorial could easily run to the length of many books, were I to allow it to do so. I will return to some of this material when I come to talk about the evolution of the historiography of slavery, but my principal purpose here is to call into question the exceptionalist claim that America was established as the embodiment of the idea of freedom, so let me restrict myself for a bit to that important question.

THE TUTORIAL RESUMES: PART SIX

The first Africans came to North America in 1619, but it was several generations before there were significant numbers of them in the colonial workforce. It seems natural to refer to that first group of twenty, and all who followed, as slaves, and they most certainly were unfree. But it would be half a century or more before the term "slave" acquired the full sense that we associate with the word. The earliest records of the colonies reveal a considerable confusion and uncertainty about the status of the African forced laborers, as compared with that of their unfree White fellow workers. The problem -- if I can put it that way -- was that the traditions of the English Common Law had no concept of chattel slavery. [We have already encountered this fact in our discussion of the ideological interpretation of Mansfield Park.] Bondage had a long and well-established history, but the Common Law lacked the useful idea of a human being as a piece of property, having no legal rights or standing in a court, and subject to being bought and sold like a horse or a plow or perhaps -- a touchy matter this -- like a piece of land. From the arrival of the twenty Africans to the final, bloody termination of chattel slavery in 1865, the lawyers and the courts first of the Colonies and then of the States struggled with this conundrum.

I want to spend some time discussing this rather specialized topic-- the legal status of "slave" --because as we shall see, a good deal turns on it in our critique of the doctrines of American exceptionalism and the notion that America was founded as the embodiment of the Idea of Liberty. Those interested in pursuing this topic further might consult either of two books: In the Matter of Color, by the distinguished jurist Leon Higgenbotham, and Southern Slavery and the Law by Thomas Morris. The latter book is an especially rich source for detailed information about the many, many legal problems surrounding the institution of slavery.

The English colonists brought with them their traditions of Common Law, and insofar as possible, sought to apply its teachings and precedents in the resolution of disputes in the Colonies. Among the many problems posed by the Common Law was the well established rule that the legal status of the child follows that of the father. In England, a son sired by a well-born father on a scullery maid was still well-born, for all that he might have to forego his claim to a share of the paternal estate. But once chattel slavery began to develop in the New World, it occurred to the masters that they would be turning their backs on valuable property if they were to allow their bastard sons and daughters to claim the status of freemen and women. Like all legal subjects, it would seem, this matter is almost unmanageably complicated, but eventually the principle came to be established that the children of a slave mother were the property of her owner, regardless of whom the father was [including the owner himself.] In the Latin of the law courts, the rule came to be partus sequitur ventrum [the issue follows the womb].

A second question of very great importance to wealthy slave owners was what sort of property slaves were understood to be in the law: chattels personal or chattels real. If slaves were chattels personal, like furniture, clothing, and carriages, then they were eligible to be sold off first to satisfy debts when an estate was being settled, and this could work a very great hardship on the widow, who might find herself to have inherited fertile land with no slaves to work it. But in the Common Law, it was well established that real property -- land -- was to be the last part of an estate to be sold to clear the debts of an estate. So despite the conceptual anomaly involved, the courts of some Colonies ruled that slaves were to be classified, for purposes of inheritance, as real property. I trust I do not have to keep repeating that in these arcane debates, the needs, desires, or interests of the slaves were not pertinent.

The central incoherence of slavery, of course, was the fact that it treated human beings as livestock, furniture, or land. The moral problems thus posed did not concern the slave owners overly, but there were legal as well as theological issues that required attention. The theological issues were raised by the seeming obsession of the slave owners with converting their slaves to Christianity. There was no question of converting their horses or sheep, of course, but when it came to their slaves, the owners just could not resist the temptation to bring them to Jesus. Ministers were hired to preach the message of the Gospels, with due care taken to emphasize those passages that counseled prayerful submission. Colossians 3:22 was a favorite: "Servants obey in all things [your] masters according to the flesh; not with eyeservice, as menpleasers; but in singleness of heart, fearing God." But the slaves, most of whom did in fact receive the Word and take it to their hearts, found quite a few passages in the Old and New Testaments that spoke in rather dangerous ways to their unquenchable thirst for freedom.

The legal problems arising out of the treatment of slaves as objects were endless, and throughout the entire two hundred and thirty-six year history of American slavery, never did get satisfactorily resolved. One of the trickiest questions was the status of the slaves in a court of law. They had no rights, of course, so there could not be a legal cause of action by a slave against either another slave or, it goes without saying, a White man. But since the slaves, laws or no laws, were actually sentient, rational people, they saw things, heard things, and knew things that could be pertinent to a legal deliberation. Suppose, for example, that one White man hired a team of horses belonging to another White man, for the purpose of doing some plowing. And suppose further that the team of horses were returned damaged in some way. The slave who was given the job of driving the team in the fields might be the only witness in a position to say whether the borrower had abused the lender's property. If the lender sued the borrower for damages to his team, could the slave be called to testify in court? On the one hand, why not, if indeed he was in a position to say what he saw? But on the other hand, surely a slave could not be sworn in and put on oath and called to testify any more than a horse or a chair could.

Even after the establishment of the United States of America in 1789, there was no Federal law of slavery. The thirteen States, formerly Colonies, regulated that institution, and almost everything else that was dealt with in courts, by a combination of Common Law traditions and positive [i.e., enacted] state laws. These issues remained a matter of great variation and contention until the institution of slavery itself was ended by the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1865.