Making Sense of Slavery: America’s Long Reckoning, from the Founding Era to Today

by Scott Spillman

An “essential” (James Oakes, author of The Crooked Path to Abolition) history of the study of slavery in America, from the Revolutionary era to the 1619 Project, showing how these intellectual debates have shaped American public life

In recent years, from school board meetings to the halls of Congress, Americans have engaged in fierce debates about how slavery and its legacies ought to be taught, researched, and narrated. But since the earliest days of the Republic, political leaders, abolitionists, judges, scholars, and ordinary citizens have all struggled to explain and understand the peculiar institution. 
 
In Making Sense of Slavery, historian Scott Spillman shows that the study of slavery was a vital catalyst for the broader development of American intellectual life and politics. In contexts ranging from the plantation fields to the university classroom, Americans interpreted slavery and its afterlives through many lenses, shaping the trajectory of disciplines from economics to sociology, from psychology to history. Spillman delves deeply into the archives, and into the pathbreaking work of scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Annette Gordon-Reed, to trace how generations of Americans have wrestled with the paradox of slavery in a country founded on principles of liberty and equality. 
 
As the debate over the place of slavery in our history rages on, Making Sense of Slavery shows that what is truly central to American history is this very debate itself. 

Genres: History, Social Justice

448 pages, Hardcover

Published March 4, 2025

About the author

Scott Spillman is an American historian and the author of the book Making Sense of Slavery: America’s Long Reckoning, from the Founding Era to Today (2025). His essays and reviews have appeared in The Point, Liberties, The New Yorker, The New Republic, n+1, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and he has published academic articles in Reviews in American History, History of Education Quarterly, and North Carolina Historical Review.

Scott has a PhD in history from Stanford University, and before that he studied history, English, and political philosophy at the University of North Carolina (and Duke University) as a Robertson Scholar. Originally from Atlanta, he now lives in Denver with his partner and their twin daughters. He also spends part of his time in Leadville, where he serves as chair of the city’s historic preservation commission. When he is not reading and writing, he enjoys running in the mountains.

Reviews

[Bean · Rating 5 out of 5]

A succinct yet comprehensive overview of the historiography of slavery in the United States, that is a meta discussion of the academic AND public debate around slavery since the 1700s. Clear, readable style, objective and insightful.

I stumbled upon this book by good luck in a random little book store-- "good luck" because for more than 2 years now, I have been particularly exploring US history as pertains to slavery, the lead up to the Civil War (and the war, of course), and the 1800s in America. This book came at a perfect time for me, when I was already somewhat familiar with the historical discussion on slavery (Berlin, Stampp, Elkins, Phillips, for example), but I also wanted more ideas about what to read next. The book provided a comprehensive overview that answers the following questions: Who has studied, researched and written most extensively about slavery in US history? What are/were the academic and public critiques of their work? How did these books and studies influence the way Americans think about slavery in the country's history?

What I didn't expect, that I also got, was thoughtful discussion throughout, of the way that the study of history is always fundamentally crucial to society, because it informs us about our relationship to our past, and because it reveals a great deal about our values and priorities.  The discussion around slavery and race in particular in the US has always been a powderkeg for vitriolic and at times dogmatic screeds from US political factions, and the author covers this well, keeping an admirable objectivity somehow while doing so. 

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is not about the history of American slavery. This book is about how American historians and thinkers thought about American slavery. Spillman reviews all the significant writings about the topic and traces the evolution of how slavery was presented/analyzed/rationalized. It's very thorough and complete, most of what's in here I was not already familiar with.

A couple of my favorites: A writer from Virginia, George Fitzhugh, wrote a book called 'Sociology for the South' which Spillman says was "a slave-based critique of free society". "Fitzhugh saw the growing popularity of socialist ideas as evidence that even free society's defenders knew they faced deep and perhaps intractable problems.... The oldest, the best and most common form of Socialism,' according to Fitzhugh, was slavery....Indeed, Fitzhugh took the argument for slavery in the abstract all the way to the last stop...He believed that its abolition in Europe had proven disastrous for the working class... 'We are all in the habit of maintaining that our slaves are far better off than the common laborers of Europe,' he pointed out. The logical consequence of this claim, he continued, was that those common laborers should be restored to slavery." Indeed...

Also: "In what could be read as a tacit admission that their pro-slavery interpretation of the Federal Constitution was not quite correct, the Confederates explicitly wrote slavery into their own document, substituting 'slaves' for 'persons' in several places and adding clauses protecting 'the institution of negro slavery' as well as the right to property in slaves." That about sums it up.

What this book makes clear is that after the civil war, pro-slavery historians set about defining the terms of the debate on the topic, and essentially rewrote history to justify their continued promotion of white supremacy.

Ultimately, I cannot finish this book right now, in the first month of the new presidential term. What's described in this book is happening all around me - up is down, black is white, etc. I mean it as a compliment to the book that I cannot read it at the moment. The truth is here. Maybe someday people in America will care about the truth. I'm not going to say 'again' because it's clear from this book that in many ways Americans never cared about the truth.

Thanks to NetGalley for letting me read a pre-publication copy of this book. I'm not going to mark it Abandoned because I don't abandon it due to disliking it.

[Jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just a fantastic book, an intellectual history of American thinking about slavery that is also cultural (how and where does thinking about slavery fit into the period context?) and social (how did the historians involved relate to one another? Turns out Stampp and Hofstadter ate lunch together a lot early in their careers), with a bunch of great/disturbing pulls from scholars' private papers to show how they were thinking about what they were doing (especially a bunch of Eugene Genovese's letters as he's writing Roll, Jordan, Roll, which, ugh), or trying to do, as they did it. And it spills into all sorts of areas, some of which you'd expect--public history, say, and the question of how stories get told at Monticello--and others that hadn't occurred to me, for whatever reason--such as the need for "social sciences" to develop for there to be people aiming to write historical/sociological accounts of slavery.

Lots to chew on here, including some surprising bits where racist slavery historian Ulrich Phillips supports Carter Woodson's pioneering efforts to write Black history, the heroic struggles to preserve records from crumbling county courthouses in the 1920s and 30s (because, right, who even conceived of all of this paperwork, bills, and laws as the stuff of history?) and notions that Elkins's much-abused 50s take might actually have gotten some things right (70s social historians busily celebrating autonomy and resistance ran into the problem that they started to imply that slavery wasn't that bad, which I knew, but I hadn't made the link back to Elkins). Also some funny asides about how nobody gets rich writing history books (though curious about how John Hope Franklin and Genovese did, not to mention Howard Zinn), and this swipe not at Fogel and Engerman's legendarily problematic numbers in Time on the Cross but at their acting as if they'd invented the wheel: "In [their] telling, everyone was racist except for them; they alone recognized that Black slaves were productive and efficient workers, a finding they presented as dangerous and slightly illicit..." Heroes include, I'd say, the first generation of Black historians (William Wells Brown, say), and then Elkins, Moses Finley (the ancient historian who gave us the society with slaves/slave society dichotomy), David Brion Davis, Saidiya Hartman, and Annette Gordon-Reed.

Most of all, what I take from this is enormous respect for the seriousness and hard work of generations of good-hearted scholars doing their best to find materials, truly think through what they meant and how a person might make sense of slavery--who and what did it implicate, or maybe better, who and what didn't it implicate?--in the larger courses of American and world history. As, most of all a tribute to the profession, and one more people (despite his disclaimers) are going to read than, say Novick's That Noble Dream--which I very much enjoyed in grad school, admittedly--this does wonderful work of reminding those not in the profession not just why history matters but all the work people did 150 years ago to make it matter in the first place.

[Chelsea Knowles · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this. It is different to other books on slavery because it talks about the study of slavery and it was interesting to see what early researchers on this subject thought. It was also interesting to see how people’s attitudes changed as more research was done on this topic.

[Ellen Gwynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent history of the study of slavery in the US, first begun by abolitionists & pro-slavery advocates, then by scholars in the universities.