How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

by Clint Smith

I did not turn into Montpelier, but there was something about driving past it on the way to Monticello that reminded me that Jefferson was not singular in his moral inconsistencies; rather he was one of the founding fathers who fought for their own freedom while keeping their boots on the necks of hundreds of others.

I did not turn into Montpelier, but there was something about driving past it on the way to Monticello that reminded me that Jefferson was not singular in his moral inconsistencies; rather he was one of the founding fathers who fought for their own freedom while keeping their boots on the necks of hundreds of others.

Jefferson knew that slavery degraded the humanity of those who perpetuated its existence because it necessitated the subjugation of another human being; at the same time, he believed that Black people were an inferior class. This is where Jefferson’s logic falls apart, historian Winthrop D. Jordan wrote in 1968. If Jefferson truly believed that Black people were inferior, then he must have “suspected that the Creator might have in fact created men unequal; and he could not say this without giving his assertion exactly the same logical force as his famous statement to the contrary.”

Jefferson knew that slavery degraded the humanity of those who perpetuated its existence because it necessitated the subjugation of another human being; at the same time, he believed that Black people were an inferior class. This is where Jefferson’s logic falls apart, historian Winthrop D. Jordan wrote in 1968. If Jefferson truly believed that Black people were inferior, then he must have “suspected that the Creator might have in fact created men unequal; and he could not say this without giving his assertion exactly the same logical force as his famous statement to the contrary.”

some visitors thought the museum was trying to be too politically correct and, by portraying Jefferson more holistically, trying to change history. “We’re not changing history,” Theresa said, unfazed. “We’re telling history by telling the full story, more of the story of everyone who lived here, not just certain people who were able to tell their stories.” She continued by saying that there were those who derided her and the rest of the staff at the plantation for trying to “tear Jefferson down. “But to me, I think they put him up on a pedestal and they deny the fact that he was human. He had things about his life that were flaws, and you’ve gotta look at his life. From the moment he got up in the morning till the moment he went to bed at night, he’s relying on slave labor for every aspect.”

“There’s a chapter in Notes on the State of Virginia,” he said to the five of us, standing in front of the east wing of Jefferson’s manor, “that has some of the most racist things you might ever read, written by anyone, anywhere, anytime, in it. So sometimes I stop and ask myself, “If Gettysburg had gone the wrong way, would people be quoting the Declaration of Independence or Notes on the State of Virginia?” It’s the same guy writing.”

“I’ve come to realize that there’s a difference between history and nostalgia, and somewhere between those two is memory,” he said. “I think that history is the story of the past, using all the available facts, and that nostalgia is a fantasy about the past using no facts, and somewhere in between is memory, which is kind of this blend of history and a little bit of emotion…I mean, history is kind of about what you need to know…but nostalgia is what you want to hear.”

there are just so many ways that our public education is failing people by just not giving them the context to understand that Monticello is a plantation, and that slavery was a system that created the economic prosperity that enabled our country to exist. That is not something most people understand. I don’t really blame them, because they’re not taught to engage that history,

Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Rhode Island typically are not counted as slave states because they passed gradual abolition laws in the 1780s—but all three states still had slaves in 1790, according to the census. (Pennsylvania had 3,737; Connecticut had 2,764; and Rhode Island had 948.)

Mathurin. Cook. Gilbert. Amar. Lindor. Joseph. Dagobert. Komina. Hippolite. Charles. These were the leaders of the largest slave rebellion in US history. These were the people who decided that enough was enough.

It is remarkable to consider that hundreds of enslaved people, who came from different countries, with different native languages and different tribal affiliations, were able to organize themselves as effectively as they did.

the Haitian Revolution, in which the enslaved population in Haiti rose up against the French and in 1804 founded what became the first Black-led republic in the world.

Napoleon Bonaparte, looking to cut his losses and refocus his attention on his military battles in Europe, sold the entire territory of Louisiana to Thomas Jefferson’s negotiators for a paltry fifteen million dollars—about four cents an acre. Without the Haitian Revolution, it is unlikely that Napoleon would have sold a landmass that doubled the size of the then United States,

For enslaved people throughout the rest of the “New World,” the victory in Haiti—the story of which had spread through plantations across the South, at the edges of cotton fields and in the quiet corners of loud kitchens—served as inspiration for what was possible.

According to historian David Brion Davis, “For nearly seventy years the image of Haiti hung over the South like a black cloud, a point of constant reference by proslavery leaders.”

the Whitney stands apart by making the story of the enslaved the core of the experience.

Descendants of people enslaved at the Whitney still live in the areas surrounding the former plantation. A few now work at the Whitney—ranging from a director-level position to tour guides to the front desk.

But much of the community still suffers from the intergenerational poverty that plagues many formerly enslaved communities more than a century and a half after emancipation.

Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II put it this way when describing the landscape of factories and refineries along the Mississippi River: “The same land that held people captive through slavery is now holding people captive through this environmental injustice and devastation.”

Children sustained and embodied the institution of slavery, especially after the formal end of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808.

By 1860, there were nearly four million enslaved people, 57 percent of whom were under the age of twenty.

I thought of my primary and secondary education. I remembered feeling crippling guilt as I silently wondered why every enslaved person couldn’t simply escape like Douglass, Tubman, and Jacobs had. I found myself angered by the stories of those who did not escape. Had they not tried hard enough? Didn’t they care enough to do something? Did they choose to remain enslaved? This, I now realize, is part of the insidiousness of white supremacy; it illuminates the exceptional in order to implicitly blame those who cannot, in the most brutal circumstances, attain superhuman heights. It does this instead of blaming the system, the people who built it, the people who maintained it.

Taking effect in 1808, during Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, the United States officially prohibited the transatlantic slave trade. While the transatlantic slave trade did not come to a sudden halt, it became a criminal offense to capture and import Africans to the United States. Some ships, however, continued to smuggle in persons from West Africa and the Caribbean. Half a century later, in 1860, the number of enslaved people in Louisiana had multiplied sixteenfold, with over 331,000 enslaved.

When women were put on slave ships that crossed the Atlantic, it was common for white sailors to rape them during the journey. Sexual violence was ubiquitous throughout slavery, and it followed enslaved women wherever they went.

The illogic of it all appears to reveal a simple linear truth that is often lost—oppression is never about humanity or lack thereof. It is, and always has been, about power.

In her book The Price for Their Pound of Flesh, historian Daina Ramey Berry writes about how some of the country’s top medical schools—places like Harvard, the Universities of Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia—used the corpses of enslaved people, often purchased on the black market, as tools for their research and medical education.

Yvonne continued: “We need to also understand that if any children ever were born, that plantation owner, of course, would have been enslaving his own child, which happened all the time. So a lot of our visitors are completely ignorant of this.”

“Regardless of how these individuals fed the people that they owned, regardless of how they clothed them, regardless of if they never laid a hand on them, they were still sanctioning the system…You can’t say, ‘Hey, this person kidnapped your child, but they fed them well. They were a good person.’ How absurd does that sound?”

“If you can’t see them for being people, you can’t see me as a person. I want to get you to see them, because I know as a Black woman what my challenges in society have been. It’s stemming from this history, so if I can’t get you to see them, you can’t see the person standing in front of you.”

‘Those overseers were sadistic people. The plantations were morally bankrupt and corrupt.’ Yes, they were. But also, in Europe, once the appetite for sugar and chocolate and coffee and cheap textiles and all these things started flooding the market, and people can finally buy into this larger system of capitalism and consumption, who is at the other end of it?”

He leaned forward and brought his hands together. “I’m going to say it twice. There’s a job on the plantation that was ‘good breeder.’ She was a ‘good breeder.’ Had nine children in eleven years. ‘Good breeder.’” He shook his head. “Very few days start without me thinking about that. And that’s when I changed.

knew, if I didn’t know it, everybody I knew with this color skin didn’t know about it.” He dragged the back of his fingers down his forearm. “[It] was never in our education.”

“The problem with [this] country—and also all around the world—is…miseducation. The miseducation of the mind and hidden history.

When people leave the Whitney, Seck wants them not only to be able to connect the dots between the intergenerational iterations of violence but also to understand that the importation of Africans was responsible for both the economic foundation of this country and its culture.

“We do know, through others, that sometimes enslaved women would kill their own children, because they didn’t want them to grow up in the system. But we can’t officially say that here, because we don’t know why these children died. But that is something that we do see in this history: women making this really, really unimaginable decision because they understand, especially if they have young girls, what it would be like for them.”

The Whitney exists as a laboratory for historical ambition, an experiment in rewriting what long ago was rewritten. It is a hammer attempting to unbend four centuries of crooked nails.

It is a place asking the question How do you tell a story that has been told the wrong way for so long?

I thought of how I had grown up in Louisiana and had never been taught that the largest slave rebellion in US history happened just miles from the city that had raised me. I had never been taught that the Louisiana Purchase was a direct result of the Haitian Revolution, the uprising that laid the groundwork for all the slave revolts that followed in its wake.

The purpose of the 1898 convention, in which the new law officially became part of the Louisiana constitution, was, as summarized by the chairman of the convention’s judiciary committee, “to establish the supremacy of the white race.” A non-unanimous jury policy would invariably make it easier to convict people—and these convictions were a key part of Louisiana’s convict leasing system.

He failed to mention that the land upon which Angola is built had once been the plantation of Isaac Franklin, a man whose business, Franklin and Armfield, became one of the largest slave-trading firms in the United States.

prisoner under James’s lease had a greater chance of dying than an enslaved person did.

we met John, a fifty-three-year-old who was in charge of the vocational-training program. More than thirty years into a life sentence, he spoke thoughtfully about how, though it seemed unlikely that he would ever be released, his work made it possible to provide mentorship and life skills to men who would be going back into society. It helped give his life a sense of purpose.

I imagined there was little chance that these men would say anything unfavorable about the prison in front of a prison representative. Such dissent could lead to retribution; there is a long precedent for that. As such, there will always be a limit to the amount of candor an incarcerated person can provide in such a space.

I think of all the ways this country attempts to smother conversations about how its past has shaped its present. How slavery is made to sound as if it happened in a prehistoric age instead of only a few generations ago.

If in Germany today there were a prison built on top of a former concentration camp, and that prison disproportionately incarcerated Jewish people, it would rightly provoke outrage throughout the world. I imagine there would be international summits on closing such an egregious institution. And yet in the United States such collective outrage at this plantation-turned-prison is relatively muted.

But simply because something has been reformed does not mean it is now acceptable. And even if something is now better, that does not undo its past, nor does it eliminate the necessity of speaking about how that past may have shaped the present.

Two-thirds of the people on death row in Louisiana are Black; an estimated one out of every twenty-five people who are sentenced to death in the United States is innocent.

“I think that’s the biggest challenge more than anything else,” he continued. “Not the work but just the mindset of being there and knowing you’re kind of reliving history, in a sense. I’m going through the very same thing that folks fought and died for, so I wouldn’t have to go through it, and here it is all over again.”

The use of Black soldiers was a threat to the entire social order the South had been predicated on.

The Confederate government put in place policies that officially considered Black soldiers slaves participating in an insurrection, and thus subject to re-enslavement or execution. Their white officers, as enablers of the insurrection, could also be executed.