History whitewash

Must condemn worst parts of past

Bradley R. Gitz’s column of Jan. 9 purports to correct what he believes are ignorant ideas about slavery. Instead, it presents a one-sided argument with enough misinformation to make it a whitewash of American history — in both meanings of the phrase.

It also supports several popular but mistaken concepts. One is that children will be better educated if they are prevented from learning about controversial subjects and challenging them. The other is that we must cover up the bad things that have happened in our country in order to feel good about the best things.

He points out that slavery began in the ancient world and was practiced by many countries, which is true. But at least down to the 16th century, the victims had been captured in wars and were enslaved rather than killed. Slavery for them grew out unfortunate circumstance rather than value judgments about their intrinsic worth.

American slavery, however, was based on the idea that Africans were a lesser form of human life, unfit for any sort of civilized freedom.

Thomas Jefferson’s only full-length book, “Notes on the State of Virginia,” illustrates the point. He thought Black people were an inferior “species” of humanity. Their skin color was ugly when compared with the pinkish-white variety. Their glands produced a nasty smell. They had a limited capacity for rational thought. Their artistic ability was limited to “accurate ears for tune and time.” They could be brave, but mostly from “a lack of forethought”; and love for them was mostly “eager lust,” rather than elevated sentiment.

Gitz’s column makes much of the fact that Southern opposition made it impossible for the Constitutional Convention to abolish slavery. Which means, of course, that we would not have had slavery if so many people had not owned slaves. But delegates to the convention, and the American people who voted for it, also embedded the institution into their fundamental law.

They gave the South additional representation in Congress by counting an enslaved male as two-thirds of a free one. A fugitive-slave provision allowed slave owners in the South to hunt down their human property who had escaped to the North and prevented legislatures there from doing anything about it.

American slavery was justified on racial grounds, but it existed for economic reasons. New England merchants brought Africans to the American colonies packed by the hundreds into each of their sailing ships, which were outfitted with decks so low the captives could not sit up. Many of the victims died, but enough survived to make it the most profitable shipping system.

When you don’t pay people, punishment is necessary to keep them working. Whipping was the most common means for controlling Black labor. Body-damaging whippings were unusual, but happened enough to make them a credible threat. Despite that, enslaved people fled on a regular basis; they often left for an evening with friends, sometimes to spend extended periods in nearby woods, swamps, or cities, and occasionally in the hope of permanent freedom in the North.

Between 1820 and 1860, southeastern slaveowners sold more than 600,000 enslaved men, women, and children to traders who took them to the Cotton Kingdom of the old southwest. Enslaved people were a valuable commodity, and selling them was a reliable source of income throughout the South. Owners encouraged the women they owned to have children and paid high prices for new ones believed to be good “breeders.”

Gitz argues that the articulation of personal freedom by American revolutionaries and the example of democratic government they created have had a positive world-historical significance that outweighs their acceptance of slavery.

Whether they do or not, the important thing is to condemn the worst parts of our past and celebrate the best.

Thomas Jefferson was a racist exploiter of African labor, but is justly famous for claiming that all men, and by extension all people, deserve the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Abraham Lincoln did not think that Black people were the equals of white people, but he believed in and acted on the idea that it was unjust to keep them enslaved.

I am not a disinterested party in all of this. In 1998 I published “Arkansas 1800-1860: Remote and Restless,” which was widely read in Arkansas and used in class by secondary school teachers and college professors. It contains a chapter of slavery that many people today might think of as critical race theory. And my book “Fugitivism: Escaping Slavery in the Lower Mississippi Valley, 1820-1860,” which came out a few years ago, is filled with so much grim but factual information that a friend found it too sad to finish.

They are just two examples of the many books on history, science, and other subjects, as well as a large body of fiction, that culture-war partisans want to remove from libraries and classrooms. If that happens, it will be a step back for an educational system that badly needs to move forward.

S. Charles Bolton, professor emeritus of history at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, is a historian with a specialized knowledge of slavery and also very much concerned about the present enthusiasm for banning books. He taught American history at the college level for 40 years and retired as chair of the UA-Little Rock Department of History.