United States Slavery

Slavery is the most controversial topic in American history. Most establishment historians argue it caused the War for Southern Independence. At the very minimum, everyone can agree that it was an important issue in antebellum America, and with the rise of presentism in the twentieth century, its lasting impact on modern society cannot be downplayed.

But why? This leads to several important questions:

1. What was American slavery like? Was it a unique institution in the history of the world?

2. Who profited from the institution? Were slave holders capitalists or something else?

3. What impact did the institution have on American society, North and South, both before and after the War?

4. Did slavery define America?

Historians began critically writing about the institution in the late nineteenth century, but before that, both Northerners and Southerners spilled a lot of ink on both pro and anti-slavery arguments.

Much of this was born from discussion about the ultimate causes of the War, but Southern historians took the lead in analyzing American slavery from an economic and practical position. After all, by 1860, there was only one slave State remaining north of the Mason-Dixon, and slavery seemed to be a dominate part of Southern life, even for non-slave holding whites.

By the 1960s, the political focus on the Civil Rights movement led other historians to reexamine basic assumptions about the institution. This led to some startling conclusions, many of which made people uncomfortable, both then and now.

This class is going to take a deep dive into the historiography of slavery and review what decades of work about the institution has revealed, both for white Americans and black Americans.

You won't think of American slavery in the cartoonish image from Roots, The Woman King, or Django Unchained again.