GREENSBORO – After writing about American history for over forty years, I find it surprising that anyone would seriously claim that slavery in this country was not violent, humiliating or oppressive. But there are people who make such claims. Eager to erase aspects of our shared past, they pretend that the experience of enslaved men and women was not all that unpleasant. Work on plantations, we learn, involved learning a craft, much like a technical school, and of course, masters and slaves forged bonds of loyalty.
These politically-driven arguments are nonsense. Actual enslaved people never engaged in such self-serving historical revision. One only has to read Frederick Douglass’s powerful account of the pain of bondage or W.E.B. duBois’s brilliant “The Souls of Black Folks,” to comprehend the evil of slavery. An even more moving account of this violent institution can be found in Walter Johnson’s carefully researched “Soul By Soul” which documents the horrors of slave auctions in New Orleans.
During the American Revolution, a moment in our history anchored in the defense of rights. enslaved people reminded the Founding Fathers that they too were entitled to liberty. In 1774, when Caesar Sarter, a black man living in Massachusetts, petitioned for freedom, he insisted “this is a time of great anxiety and distress among you
[the whites}, on account of the infringement…of the natural rights
and privileges of freeborn men.” After observing the daily terrors
of slavery, Sarter asked, “why will you not pity and relieve the
poor distressed, enslaved Africans?”
Other
enslaved people informed a governor, “we are a freeborn Pepel [sic]
and have never forfeited this Blessing by aney [sic] compact or agreement whatever.” Such rhetoric apparently still makes those who want an uplifting story about our country uncomfortable.
An even more uncompromising condemnation of slavery came from Elizabeth Freeman, who lived in Sheffield, Mass. She sued successfully for her freedom, and when asked about her past, she proclaimed, “Any time, any time while I was a slave, if one minute’s freedom had been offered to me, and I had been told I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it, just to stand one minute on God’s earth a free woman, I would.” We might conclude that Freeman understood the demands of slavery better than do modern commentators who want to minimize over two centuries of suffering.
Of course, erasing aspects of our history that disturb some Americans is a misguided enterprise. A healthy, functioning democracy learns from the past and looks to a common future in which citizens condemn unconscionable human exploitation.
T.H. Breen is the author of “American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People”
