The Peculiar Institution

Black Issues in Higher Education, May 24, 2001 by Paul Ruffins

New Trends and Controversies in Researching and Teaching Slavery

Because of its richness and controversy, the study of slavery has captured the interest and imagination of many different theorists. In turn, these researchers have discovered new documents and reinterpreted older sources of data. Because these scholars' sources and conclusions are themselves being subjected to new technologies and research, the study of slavery is entering an accelerated cycle that is yielding even more data to be analyzed in order to produce new theories.

COMING TO GRIPS WITH SLAVERY

"There hasn't been this much interest in slavery since 1865," says University of Maryland history professor Dr. Ira Berlin, describing a recent upsurge in interests that has made the study of slavery a growth industry on campus and a hot topic in overall American society. "Today, colleges and universities are offering courses on the history and sometimes even the literature of slavery," says Berlin. "Just a few years ago, slavery was seldom examined by itself but incorporated into courses on Southern history, or African American history. Now it's emerging as an important question all by itself."

Exploring the question of how slavery is being taught in so many different venues raises another question: Why has the issue of slavery become so popular?

"Because as a topic, slavery contains all the elements that make for drama and excitement," says Dr. Loren Schweninger, professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. "It involves murder, love, sex and violence, as well as heroes and villains, rescues and revenge."

In addition, Berlin says compared to 20 years ago, "slavery is more likely to be linked to an understanding of developments in world events, and ... scholars and lay people are realizing that coming to grips with slavery is critical to understanding the great question of the 20th century because slavery is inescapably linked to racism."

NEW SCHOLARLY THEORIES

Scholarship on slavery has always centered around arguments and counter-arguments about how slavery actually operated, or more recently, what being a slave was really like. In Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation, written by historian Dr. John Hope Franklin with Schweninger, the authors explain that more than 80 years later, scholars are still trying to correct the image of slavery posed by Ulrich B. Phillips in Life and Labor in the Old South.

Phillips' 1929 portrayal of slavery was essentially apologetic, seeing plantation life as a rational economic and social system that involved "conscript labor" but was largely benevolent, and that most slaves were docile and largely content. According to this logic, under the plantation system, management and labor weren't as alienated from each other as under the sweatshops and wage slavery of the industrialized North. It simply didn't make sense for an owner to abuse his slaves, because that would mean damaging his own property and reducing the efficiency of his labor force. Phillips' perspective could now be considered, at best, a romanticized, Gone with the Wind view of slavery, or at worst, ignorant racism. But at the time, it was well-respected and influential, earning Phillips a Pulitzer Prize.

It is fair to say that much of the research on slavery has in some way been a reaction to Phillips' portrayal. During the late 1960s and 1970s, pioneer scholars such as Herbert Aptheker (American Negro Slave Revolts, 1969) and Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman (Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, 1974) grappled with questions such as: What was the day-to-day reality of slavery? Were slaves simply victims of their situation, or to what extent did they resist or rebel? Others such as Eugene Genovese (Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, 1976) presented slaves as creative participants in the formation of American society. They actively melded religion, music and their African heritage into a unique expressive culture that helped Black people to survive slavery and oppression, and helped America to produce the blues, jazz, spirituals and oral traditions that have transformed the popular culture of the entire world.

These and other scholars laid the foundation for contemporary research into slavery and African American studies, partly by incorporating the theories and research methodologies of sociology, economics, cultural anthropology and other social sciences. The desire to view slavery through more disciplines has been a major factor in the current explosion in writing and research on the issue.

"Traditionally slavery was either taught as political science, which considers it a cause of America's most wrenching political events, which were the Civil War and Reconstruction, or taught historically as part of Southern history, or viewed economically as a system of organizing labor," says Dr. Jeffrey Stewart, associate professor of history and art history at George Mason University in Virginia.

"These perspectives often asked what factors made things so different in the North vs. the South. In contrast, today there is more of a tendency, particularly in African American studies departments, to view it from the perspective of what it was like to be a slave, and the greatest comparisons usually involve African American life before and after freedom. Some of the most creative research is being done by Black women scholars, such as Dr. Deborah Gray White, chair of the history department at Rutgers University, who are examining slavery through issues of family and gender," says Stewart.