Slavery: Balanced Views
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I’m coming to believe that Thaddeus Stevens was right. I had always been taught to regard him as a man of vicious bias. But, when I see this sort of thing, I begin to wonder how else you can treat them.
– John F. Kennedy, reacting privately to the assassination of Medgar Evers, June, 1963
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The literary storm that followed an unfortunate book review in the Economist magazine has been a combination of outrage and rage. The review was critical of a book by Edward Baptist about slavery. The reviewer presented the case that the book lacked balance, neglecting to present the case in favor of slavery.
The Economist withdrew the piece. The recantation contained the review itself as a gesture toward transparency. It served as an allocution of sorts: an acknowledgment of the facts as part of an admission of guilt.
Within the withdrawn review, mention was made of another author, British Lord Hugh Thomas. Thomas had written a more clinical analysis of slavery as a business industry, with only minimal mention of the cruelties involved. The review in the Economist compared the two:
Unlike Mr Thomas, Mr Baptist has not written an objective history of slavery. Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains. This is not history; it is advocacy.
The controversy brought to mind the lessons of my youth and a larger message about history itself. When I was in grade school, we were taught about the period after the Civil War. Lincoln wanted reconciliation with the southern states. He favored a moderate course. Sadly, he was killed before he could bring reconciliation to the nation. But he had chosen a Vice President who was committed to Lincoln’s vision.
Obstructing that vision, a vindictive group of Radical Republicans wanted retribution against the south. They imposed harsh measures during a period of punishment known as “Reconstruction.” Thaddeus Stevens, the leader of the “Radical Republicans” for a time, was a bitter sort of fanatic. For a few years, the Radicals would “wave the bloody shirt,” smearing peace loving opponents who wanted a friendly welcome to the former rebellious states. Eventually, the Radicals lost power, and reconciliation reigned, just as Lincoln had wanted.
We passed vocabulary tests if we could remember the assigned definitions of such terms as “scalawag” and “carpetbagger” and “wave the bloody shirt.”
The notion that Lincoln fought hard against those supposed caretakers of his vision to get a series of Constitutional Amendments passed was largely ignored. His late, but firm, embrace of equal treatment under the law, and his advocacy of the protections of basic rights were not mentioned at all. Only later did I discover that the “harsh treatment” covered in the classroom involved voting rights, protection from lynching, and the softest beginnings of advancement toward equal employment.
When federal protection of former slaves was ended in the 1870s, the violent rage of former slave owners took over. This was presented by the books we studied as the time that the great healing began between a bitter and angry north and a subdued and peaceful south.
Why were we taught such lies? My guess is it has to do with the slow path research takes before it gets to textbooks.
The culture of the late 1800s, going well into the late 1950s, was war weary. The can’t-we-just-get-along narrative had an unspoken underlying foundation. All the getting along was to be done among white people. The unwritten adjective to “south” was “white”. The great reconciliation was between the white north and the white south.
The basic research from which later research drew was done during a time that the reconciliation narrative was in ascendancy. And that later research drenched textbooks of my time. Thus equality and protection could be introduced to our young minds as vindictive punishment.
The current below the reconstruction narrative still flows with racial assumptions. But the wind in the sails has come to be balance. How can we think that all the slave owners were on the side of evil? How can we see all the slaves as the victims of that same evil? How can only the bad side of slavery be presented? Why not the benefits?
This is only the most extreme, the most obvious case of a more general trend. The human instinct favors balance. News outlets today report based on balance. Balance is achieved, not as a result of evidence and documentation, but rather as a premise. Balance has come to be prized over truth.
More than half a century after I was first shocked and stunned and deeply saddened to hear of his own assassination, I still love John F. Kennedy. I understand his reaction to the tragic murder of Medgar Evers.
But there is additional tragedy in the fact that the conclusion “I’m coming to believe that Thaddeus Stevens was right” had to be prompted, not by historical evidence, but by the body of a hero in a driveway.
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There will always be two sides. Some may not like that but it will remain true regardless.
The lucky ones are the ones who can actually see the two sides – most can’t – or won’t.
Great article Mr D.
(and no, I don’t think slavery was a good idea – just so yer know)
There are always two sides, or more, to any story. Which one is good and which is bad can easily depend on who you are and your situation when you view the story, or stories since there are always variations.I do remember talking with a very old black lady when I was young, I think I was about 10 so it would have been about 1953. This very old lady told me that as a child she had been raised on plantation near Mobile after the Civil War. According to her the plantation owner had owned her parents as slaves before the war and when they had been freed the man had told them they were welcome to stay and live on the plantation and work for him as long as they would like. She said that her mother and father had never done anything but work the land for that plantation owner and they really had no other place to go so they stayed right where they were. She told me that she herself stayed on those plantation grounds until she was in her forties when she married her first husband and moved to Mobile and her husband worked odd jobs and she worked at a cleaning store. She said that it was really strange but she often felt homesick for the plantation because it was the only home she had ever known and she felt safe there. She said her mother had told her that even when the plantation owner owned them (the mother and father) they never really felt like slaves. Her mother said that they worked hard but the man always made sure they had plenty of food and a decent little house to live in and they never had to work on Sundays. All the slaves there could meet in a barn for church services on Sunday and worship and many of them often said they were better off than they had ever been before.
None of the above is meant to justify or reconcile slavery. History is literally filled with the brutality and viciousness of the slave practices in this country and elsewhere. I can not imagine not being a free person but, at the same time, I can picture being humane in some instances. For someone who has never known freedom at all I can see where being enslaved by a good person might not be that bad in the grand scheme of things
Great article. Not sure I agree there are two sides but good.