The Chronicle of Higher Education
March 9, 2007 Friday
SECTION: THE CHRONICLE REVIEW; Pg. 9 Vol. 53 No. 27
The Evil That Americans Did
by JOHN DAVID SMITH
In 1997, Rep. Tony P. Hall, a Democrat of Ohio, proposed that the
federal government offer an official apology for slavery, a proposal
that President Bill Clinton took to heart when, on June 13, 1997, he
issued an executive order establishing the President’s Advisory Board
on Race. The following day, the president commenced what he described
as "a great and unprecedented conversation about race."
Nine months later, when visiting Africa, Clinton sparked an
international debate over what has become known as the Apology.
"Going back to the time before we were even a nation," he said while
in Uganda, "European-Americans received the fruits of the slave
trade, and we were wrong in that." Echoing the thoughts of many
moderates, the Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page wrote that "as
statements go," Clinton’s "was about as safe and factually accurate
as any could be. He didn’t even apologize. Not quite. But judging by
the fallout on some radio talk shows, you might think the president
not only had apologized but called for reparations." Last fall, Brown
University again sparked debate when it reported on the role its
founders had played in the slave trade, but it offered no
institutional apology and declined to recommend reparations to
descendants of slaves.
Slavery’s unequivocal evil lies at the heart of debates over
apologizing for America’s "peculiar institution" and awarding
reparations. In The Problem of Evil: Slavery, Freedom, and the
Ambiguities of American Reform (University of Massachusetts Press,
2007), a provocative collection of original essays, the editors
Steven Mintz and John Stauffer, along with 23 contributors, admonish
scholars to place moral questions in general, but especially American
slavery and its legacy, at the center of their work.
"Slavery," writes Mintz, a professor of history at the University of
Houston, "is a historical evil that the United States has never
properly acknowledged or atoned for." Nor have historians grappled
with those issues. Stanley L. Engerman, a professor of economics and
history at the University of Rochester, and David Eltis, a professor
of history at Emory University, find it noteworthy "how little
scholarly effort has been expended on explaining how and why evil has
been redefined over time, and how much academic work assumes that the
values that hold today are somehow unchanging and universal."
As Germans have learned since World War II, coming to terms with
one’s past is a wrenching and continuing process. The flood of works
on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, according to the essay by
Catherine Clinton, currently a lecturer in history at Queens
University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, has inspired what she terms
"a booming enterprise" in the study of evil. In the past few years,
books on American reactions to 20th-century genocide, the Soviet
Union’s forced-labor camps in the gulag, and the Armenian genocide
have joined the list. Other scholars are at work on the ethnic tribal
wars in Rwanda and atrocities and war crimes in Bosnia. At Yale
University, the Cambodian Genocide Program is devoted to documenting
the murderous history of the Khmer Rouge.
Still, for all the attention paid to the subject of world and
comparative slavery (according to the essay by Joseph C. Miller, a
professor of history at the University of Virginia, 15,000 books,
articles, theses, and conference papers alone have appeared since
1991), remarkably few historians have examined the ethical and
philosophical questions that run like a leitmotif through the history
of slavery and race relations in the United States. The lacuna in the
historical literature may be because of scholars’ attempts to be
"objective," but that has meant that much of the work has undervalued
slavery’s cruelties, especially its short-term and long-term
psychological horrors.
That is not to suggest that in the wake of the Civil War, former
slaves and their abolitionist friends, and later African-American
commentators, ignored slavery’s exploitation and degradation of human
beings and its moral emptiness — what the North Carolina slave
Harriet Jacobs described as its "atmosphere of hell." In her memoir,
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself (1861),
Jacobs recorded vividly the horrors of her enslavement, the dominance
her master held over her, and her determination to be free. Rejecting
his sexual advances, she chose another white man as her lover,
remarking that "it seems less degrading to give one’s self, than to
submit to compulsion." Frederick Douglass, in his Narrative of the
Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), remembered that
slaveholders had worked systematically to destroy the slaves’ sense
of self, to diminish their humanity, to make them extensions of their
masters’ will.
No one underscored slavery as the embodiment of evil more than W.E.B.
Du Bois. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), he wrote that
African-Americans considered enslavement "the sum of all villainies,
the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice." Three decades
later, in Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (1935), Du Bois
blasted American historians for substituting propaganda for history
when writing about slavery and the Civil War and Reconstruction: "Our
histories tend to discuss American slavery so impartially, that in
the end nobody seems to have done wrong and everybody was right."
Many other Americans took a more circuitous path to confronting the
evil of slavery, according to some of the contributors to The Problem
of Evil, who chronicle the ambiguities of moral perception — how,
why, when, and if people came to view slavery as a moral evil. In his
essay, for example, Peter Hinks, an independent scholar, examines the
antislavery thought of the Yale president and theologian Timothy
Dwight. Recent scholars have denounced Dwight as a champion of
slavery and as an influential pro-slavery ideologue, but according to
Hinks he came to espouse "the fundamental unity of all humankind
through God." Hinks interprets Dwight as "an important transitional
figure," connecting early theologians who denied that the Bible
condoned or endorsed slavery and later abolitionists who demanded
immediate emancipation and repatriation of the freedmen beyond
America. Viewed through Hinks’s lens, Dwight recognized slavery as an
evil and underscored the "invidious racial distinctions" at its core.
In a similar revisionist take, David Waldstreicher, a professor of
history at Temple University, revises Benjamin Franklin’s vaunted
reputation as one of the new nation’s earliest antislavery
proponents. To be sure, shortly before his death Franklin condemned
slavery as "an atrocious debasement of human nature"; as president of
the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, he
submitted a petition to Congress opposing slavery and the slave
trade. However, Waldstreicher convincingly argues that for much of
his adult life, Franklin benefited directly and indirectly from
slavery. He owned slaves and profited from publishing notices of
slave auctions and advertisements for escaped slaves. When, in the
1750s and 1760s, Franklin openly attacked slavery, he did so "on
economic and racism-based, not religious, grounds, subordinated to
arguments for colonial autonomy from imperial regulations."
Antebellum Roman Catholics generally championed slavery as long as
masters respected their chattels’ marriages and provided them access
to catechesis and the sacraments. Paula Kane, an associate professor
of religious studies at the University of Pittsburgh, argues that
although the Vatican in 1839 had condemned the slave trade (but not
slavery), working-class American Catholics in the mid-1800s tended to
support it because they feared competition from free blacks, and
because elite Protestants favored abolition. In her most original
interpretation, Kane maintains that American Catholics’ "recourse to
devotions and supernatural power fortified an antimodern outlook that
accepted slavery."
The abolitionist John Brown directly confronted slavery as an evil
and sought to destroy it. But while Brown’s militant abolitionism
established him as a heroic martyr among many Northerners, as Laura
L. Mitchellacting president of the Luther Institute, in
Washingtonexplains, by resorting to violence Brown disregarded both
civil and sacred authority, thereby alienating many abolitionists.
"Eventually," Mitchell concludes, "many of Brown’s pacifist
supporters did condone his methods, but in so doing, they embraced
him only as an imperfect tool of divine justice, like a plague."
Almost 150 years later, most Americans remain uncomfortable engaging
and reckoning with their slaveholding past. Most people sneer at the
mere idea of reparations, considering the notion of awarding
compensation to the descendants of American slaves somewhere between
a scam and a pipe dream. Perhaps our distance from slavery’s
barbarities desensitizes us to its evil, blinds us from seeing how it
stained and continues to soil the fabric of American democracy.
Another problem concerns comparing slavery and genocide in the world
with America’s twin evils, slavery and racism. Drawing comparisons
invariably highlights similarities and differences, but it also risks
relativizing evil and horror. How does one juxtapose American slavery
with systematic mass murder, human-rights violations, and other
horrendous evils over time and place?
The contributors to Mintz and Stauffer’s excellent collection largely
sidestep defining and comparing degrees of evil, but they
nevertheless remind us of slavery’s timelessness and the ubiquity of
moral wrongs. Focusing on evil enables us to see, if not feel, the
wicked acts that persons inflict on one anotherwhat Stauffer, a
professor of literature and African and African-American studies at
Harvard University, eloquently terms "the dark side of the American
soul."
John David Smith is a professor of history at the University of North
Carolina at Charlotte. Among his recent books is Black Judas: William
Hannibal Thomas and "The American Negro" (Ivan R. Dee, 2002).