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

by Clint Smith

This list is not definitive but is one attempt to acknowledge those who first traversed this land, and to do so as accurately as possible.

Loved this acknowledgment

the transatlantic slave trade was outlawed in 1808,

The echo of enslavement is everywhere. It is in the levees, originally built by enslaved labor. It is in the detailed architecture of some of the city’s oldest buildings, sculpted by enslaved hands. It is in the roads, first paved by enslaved people. As historian Walter Johnson has said about New Orleans, “The whole city is a memorial to slavery.”

I became obsessed with how slavery is remembered and reckoned with, with teaching myself all of the things I wish someone had taught me long ago.

In How the Word Is Passed I travel to eight places in the United States as well as one abroad to understand how each reckons with its relationship to the history of American slavery.

Both of the men inscribed words that promoted equality and freedom in the founding documents of the United States while owning other human beings.

What they gave our country, and all they stole from it, must be understood together. 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.

“Slavery’s an institution. In Jefferson’s lifetime it becomes a system. So what is this slave system? It is a system of exploitation, a system of inequality and exclusion, a system where people are owned as property and held down by physical and psychological force, a system being justified even by people who know slavery is morally wrong. By doing what? Denying the very humanity of those who are enslaved solely on the basis of the color of their skin.”

Having enslaved workers, David explained, helped Jefferson maintain his lifestyle, by giving him the time and space to do what he cared about most: reading, writing, and hosting guests who came to visit.

David continued to refer to the enslaved Black people living on Monticello as “human beings.” The decision to use “human” as the primary descriptor rather than “slave” was a small yet intentional move.

What reverberated throughout was the humanity of the enslaved people—their unceasing desire to live a full life, one that would not be defined simply by their forced labor.

How three of their children were born in the White House.

How these families were separated to posthumously pay off Jefferson’s debts.

The splitting of families was not peripheral to the practice of slavery; it was central.

Soul by Soul, historian Walter Johnson

“Of the two thirds of a million interstate sales made by the traders in the decades before the Civil War, twenty-five percent involved the destruction of a first marriage and fifty percent destroyed a nuclear family—many of these separating children under the age of thirteen from their parents. Nearly all of them involved the di...

Henry Bibb, in his Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, Written by Himself, which was published in 1849 (four years after the publication of Frederick Douglass’s book with a similar title). Bibb escaped slavery in Kentucky and fled to Canada, where he became a well-known abolitionist, starting a newspaper called Voice of the Fugitive.

Jefferson believed himself to be a benevolent slave owner, but his moral ideals came second to, and were always entangled with, his own economic interests and the interests of his family. Jefferson understood, as well, the particular economic benefits of keeping husbands and wives together, noting that “a child raised every 2 years is of more profit than the crop of the best laboring man.”

So was he benevolent or economically savvy? Is it possible that he was both?

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.”

stating in his 1821 autobiography, “The two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.”

As historian C. Vann Woodward wrote: “So far as history reveals, no other slave society, whether of antiquity or modern times, has so much as sustained, much less greatly multiplied, its slave population by relying on natural increase.”

Jefferson saw the beginning of this expansion, but he would not live to see how all-encompassing the “peculiar institution” became. By 1860, about one in three Southerners was an enslaved person.

upon recognition of how increasingly steadfast opposition to any semblance of abolition was in Virginia and throughout the South, he largely backed away from public admonishment of the system.

Gordon-Reed notes that in the latter half of his life, Jefferson resigned himself to the fact that slavery would not be abolished in his lifetime, and certainly not through any endeavor led by him. He believed that the project of emancipation would be carried out by another generation, and that he and his revolutionary colleagues had done their part by emancipating the colonies from Great Britain and creating the world’s first constitutional republic, a place where these questions would even be able to be grappled with in the first place.

I had also read the passage where he said of Phillis Wheatley—widely understood to be the first published Black woman poet in the history of the United States—that “the compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.”

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When I read Jefferson’s disparagement of Wheatley, it felt like he had been disparaging the entire lineage of Black poets who would follow her, myself included, and I saw a man who had not had a clear understanding of what love is.

“This is how the word is passed down,” remarked one of the descendants in an interview for the project.

I thought of how this might extend beyond the guides at Monticello, and to the visitors as well. What would motivate a Black family to come spend the day at a plantation if they were concerned about how the story of that land would be told, what kind of people would be standing alongside them as it was told, and who was telling it?

when you challenge people, specifically white people’s conception of Jefferson, you’re in fact challenging their conception of themselves.

“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.”

This is powerful.

I understand there is much to be shared and explored about his life. It makes sense that people should know about the range of his scientific work, his political work, and his family life. I wonder, however, if we can understand any of these things without understanding Jefferson as a slave owner.

“I was born in the United States of America. I served the country for thirty years, so I actually believe in the idea of America,” he said, straightening up in his chair. “Are we exceptional? No. Have we had unique advantages based on geography, based on a whole host of factors? Yes. Did a group of people come together in 1776 and conceive of an idea that was pretty radical in its time and then create a system of government, through the Constitution and its amendments, that was pretty radical and pretty novel? Yeah. Have other countries found their own way? Sure. So I believe in the idea of America. I don’t believe that this country was perfect. I don’t believe it is perfect. I don’t believe it’s going to be perfect. I believe that the journey to make this a better place is worth the effort and that the United States, if you conceive it not so much as a place to be in but an idea to believe in, it is worth fighting for.”

erudite

But it was when Niya was a junior at the University of Virginia that she realized reshaping public history was the work she wanted to do.

When she closed the door, there were photographs of all the people who had worked at this plantation on the back of the door. I caught a glimpse of the door, and the first picture I saw was my grandma. I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s my grandma.’ Next to my grandmother was my aunt. There were other members of my family on that, and I started thinking about, like, I’ve always had an awareness that they worked at these places, but I hadn’t connected it to this academic history of plantations. I was like, Do people in my community know this is here? Are they aware of how they helped shape this history that is often talked about without them?”

livery.”

“For the first thirty years of its existence,” I said, repeating what she had just told me so I could make sure I had heard correctly, “tours of the house were given by Black men dressed as enslaved people?”

“Some of them were descendants of people who were enslaved here,” Niya said. Sometimes the stories the men told about the plantation had been passed on to them by family members.

Memoirs of a Monticello Hostess, Terry Tilman, who worked as a hostess in the 1940s and 1950s and who became Monticello’s head tour guide, writes, “[T]he transition from colored guides to [white] hostesses in 1951 was not too well received, visitors resented our becoming more factual and less entertaining.”

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, and most people are not out here reading all these books that are piled on my desk.”

that she has “zero patience” for those who, when confronted with that history, contend that Monticello is attempting to tear down Jefferson’s legacy. “It’s telling the full truth of who he was,” she said. “Yes, he contributed great things. Yes, he gave us the Declaration of Independence, and the university where I got my degree, but he also owned people. He owned ancestors of people I know. That’s reality. I think in order to really understand him, and to fully understand him, you have to grapple with slavery. You have to grapple with [physical] violence and psychological violence, and family separation. We would not be doing the story justice if we don’t tell those stories.”

There are a few scattered headstones, though no visible names or inscriptions. The trees around the graves hold court for a congregation of unmarked ruins. No one knows the names of the people buried here.

Jefferson’s vacillation from moral repugnance to hollow justification reflects how he largely succumbed to that which he knew was indefensible.

When one hundred enslaved people at Monticello were auctioned after Jefferson’s death, it was “right there in the west lawn behind us,” David continued. “It happened right there. And Jefferson’s ideas about the Declaration of Independence, even though he wrote that document in Philadelphia, his whole idea of where he was going, was formulated right here on this mountaintop.”

These heads, renderings of a violent past, are an exhibit at the Whitney Plantation in Wallace, Louisiana—located

Each of the faces is nameless, with the exception of the ten that sit at the front. 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.

January 1811, Charles Deslondes, a mixed-race slave driver, led this massive armed rebellion. Composed of hundreds of people, Deslondes’s army advanced along the serpentine path of southern Louisiana’s River Road to New Orleans with a military discipline that surprised many of their adversaries. 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.

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.

William C. C. Claiborne, the governor of the territory that would become the state of Louisiana in 1812,