The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
‘MUCH WORK LEFT TO DO’
Yale center takes hard look at slavery, in history and today
NEW HAVEN >> Slavery was America’s largest industry in the decades leading up to the Civil War.
The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale University exists to help Americans of today understand that legacy and how it still felt today, as we celebrate Black History Month in February.
What too many Americans don’t understand, even with greater exposure to both academic study and popular culture, is “the sheer scale of the slave trade,” said David Blight, director of the center and a professor of American history at Yale. “Roughly twelve and a half million Africans brought out of Africa over 400 years. About 1 million and a half, at least, died at sea. It’s the largest forced migration in human history.”
All this occurred in “the age of sail, thousands of ships, and they came to all over the Americas from the lower part of South
America to the U.S. and Canada. … Slaves by the late antebellum period, by the 1850s, were the largest financial asset in the entire American economy.”
What many Americans misunderstand is how powerfully slavery influenced society and the economy, both in the North and the South, for an extended period, Blight said.
“The dollar value of slavery in just the U.S. in 1860 was about $3.5 billion,” he said. That would equal about $80 billion in today’s dollars.
While slavery still exists, in other parts of the world, it was in the United States in particular that it was inextricably based on race.
“For a whole set of unique circumstances, from the first encounters of Europeans with Africans, [it] became a racial system,” Blight said.
“Slavery in the United States was based on ideological racial hierarchies that maintained that ‘white’ people were superior and that ‘black’ and other people of color were inferior — or even not quite human,” said Associate Director Michelle Zacks. “Those racist mental and legal categories did not disappear when slavery ended.”
And it wasn’t just slave owners who benefited. New Haven’s own ties to slavery include the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney, who has long been honored in the region where he prospered and died. The machine mechanically separated the seeds from the cotton bolls.
“Most people don’t think about what that means, except for Yankee ingenuity,” Zacks said. But the cotton gins, which were built so large that enslaved people used giant rakes to draw the cotton through the machines, “made it so much easier, more efficient to process cotton,” Zacks said.
Zacks grew up in Hamden and lived in the South, assuming that slavery was most important to that region. However, “coming back here, I think we can see the footprint of slavery everywhere,” she said, pointing to the evidence of seagoing trade in New Haven Harbor and on the Quinnipiac River shoreline in Fair Haven.
Even though Connecticut’s rocky soil did not encourage the practice to grow as widely as in the South, “New Haven was heavily invested in that trade with the Caribbean,” Zacks said. The state did not abolish slavery until 1848, according to slavenorth.com.
But even after slavery was abolished in the North, its economy was still largely dependent on trading in cotton. “Slavery is driving the accumulation of capital that allows us to invest
in what becomes the industrial United States,” said Thomas Thurston, education director of the center.
“There were good reasons the Southern planters by the 1850s thought cotton was king,” Blight said. “They thought they had the world by the tail.
“The 80-some years of the American experience before the Civil War was deeply infested, dominated by the power of slavery,” he said. “I think in the last 20 or 30 years we’ve made great strides in engaging a larger public in understanding these things.”
“It isn’t just a matter of slavery’s tentacles being all around us, it’s back to the political and economic power that that system … represented,” Zacks said. “It took a massive Civil War, the largest bloodletting we’ve ever experienced, to destroy it.”
Understanding has improved in recent decades, Blight said. From the 1960s to the 1980s, “an explosion occurred in scholarship about slavery,” he said. “That’s a half century that we’ve completely changed — found new sources, founded a new field.”
He said awareness about the history of slavery “really began with ‘Roots,’” a 1977 TV mini-series based on a book by Alex Haley (a new version was made in 2016). Blight was teaching high school in Flint, Michigan, at the time. “No one can ever overestimate the impact that that original ‘Roots’ had,” he said. “Everybody was learning about slavery for the first time and we could barely keep the roof on that school, there was so much uproar.”
Since then, the portrayal of U.S. slavery has improved, he said. Recently, the Academy Award-winning movie “12 Years a Slave” and film “The Free State of Jones” have brought accurate depictions of the institution into popular culture. Last year, the novel “Underground Railroad” by Colson Whitehead helped increase understanding of slaves’ resistance.
“I work with teachers in the Greater New Haven area and we spend a fair amount of time talking about slavery and the abolition movement,” said Thurston said. “There is more time being spent teaching about Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws, the Civil Rights Movement and the present-day mass incarceration of black men.”
Thurston said mass incarceration is the natural outgrowth of laws passed during Reconstruction, such as vagrancy laws, “things that a white man would not be guilty of. There’s a continuing economic value in unfree labor that many historians argue continues to this day” in the nation’s prisons, he said. To a large degree, Thurston said, “slavery created the modern world.”
Perhaps the most profound evidence of slavery’s influence in the United States can be found in the Constitution, based in large part on compromises with the slave-holding Southern states. “It was deeply solicitous and powerful” in the way it supported slavery, Blight said.
In fact, Blight said, Americans have lived under three “constitutions”: The first was built on compromises “embedded deep” in the document, such as counting slaves as three-fifths of a person in determining how many representatives each state would send to Congress.
The second, created by the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, ended slavery, enshrined due process for all and gave voting rights to every American. However, because those rights still were not respected, especially in the Deep South, a third “constitution” was needed, created by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Blight said.
“There’s a continuum here, but it’s broken up brutally, tragically along the way,” Blight said. Now he’s concerned about the rights of African Americans and other minorities being whittled away. “What’s going to survive the right wing coming into power? Our center exists to study that whole story.”
Blight noted that, “twothirds of all the presidents before Abraham Lincoln were slaveholders. Approximately two-thirds of all the members of the Supreme Court were slaveholders. Vice President John C. Calhoun has become notorious as his name on a Yale residential college is being debated, but eight other colleges are named for men who benefited from the slave trade, as did Elihu Yale, Blight said.
“Universities have dug deeply into their own past,” Zacks said. “Any universities 150 years or older are going to have some ties in their past to slavery.”
While the center is largely focused on the system of slavery Zacks said enslaved peoples’ resistance and abolition are important as well.
“Although slavery was this massively oppressive and brutal system, it’s not like enslaved people stopped being human beings,” she said. “Right from the get-go the enslaved people resisted in overt and more subtle ways, and there’s so much to understand about that.”
The center’s work goes beyond American slavery to bring to light modernday practices such as human trafficking in the sex trade and people forced to work on shrimping ships or in brickmaking. “The estimates of the numbers involved in this are richly debated,” Blight said, but may be as high as 30 million people worldwide.
In 1998, the Gilder Lehrman Center “was founded to be essentially a research institution,” Blight said, but goes beyond research to include work with schools, as well as lectures and other events open to the public. As part of its mission, the center sponsors 10 fellowships for scholars in the field, with an 11th planned, and awards the Frederick Douglass Book Prize for the year’s best book about slavery, abolition or anti-slavery movements.
“We will have scholars come, we’ll take teachers to South Africa … and Sierra Leone … to talk about their shared histories” in a threeyear cycle, Blight said. Freetown, Sierra Leone, is a sister city of New Haven’s.
Some may question why slavery still deserves study. Blight said, “There’s always been this issue. … Why do we have to keep talking about slavery? Why do we have to keep going all the way back to misery, back to travail?”
But while the history of black Americans reached high points in the Civil Rights Movement and the election of Barack Obama, the first African-American president, “You can’t know how we ever got there if you don’t go back to this original system of exploitation,” Blight said.
Obama’s presidency is not without its lessons about slavery’s legacy, Zacks said. “In the public sphere, both the president and first lady Michelle Obama were subjected to virulently racist caricatures and slurs — imagery and language that echoed the same racist discourses that underpinned slavery and the Jim Crow aftermath,” she said. “I would say that we are making progress as a nation in understanding and confronting the racial hierarchies that are entrenched in our institutions on so many levels. But there is much work left to do, now more than ever.”