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historian Walter Johnson has said about New Orleans, “The whole city is a memorial to slavery.”
The Madison family held more than three hundred enslaved people over the course of their time on that property. Both of the men inscribed words that promoted equality and freedom in the founding documents of the United States while owning other human beings. Both men built a nation while making possible the plunder of millions of people. What they gave our country, and all they stole from it, must be understood together.
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.
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.
The splitting of families was not peripheral to the practice of slavery; it was central. In Soul by Soul, historian Walter Johnson writes, “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.
After the men were all sold they then sold the women and children. They ordered the first woman to lay down her child and mount the auction block; she refused to give up her little one and clung to it as long as she could, while the cruel lash was applied to her back for disobedience. She pleaded for mercy in the name of God. But the child was torn from the arms of its mother amid the most heart rending-shrieks [sic] from the mother and child on the one hand, and bitter oaths and cruel lashes from the tyrants on the other. Finally the poor little child was torn from the mother while she was
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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.
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.”
“Among North American slaves, births greatly exceeded deaths, so that the slave population expanded rapidly…Indeed, the North American pattern was probably, with a few local and sometimes short-term exceptions, unique in the history of slavery.” 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.”
“To give liberty,” he wrote in a letter in 1789, “or rather, to abandon persons whose habits have been formed in slavery is like abandoning children.”
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.” Jefferson believed that Black people, as a rule, were not capable of poetic expression. “Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry,” he wrote. “Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry. Love is the peculiar oestrum of the poet. Their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination.”
There is no story of Monticello—there is no story of Thomas Jefferson—without understanding Sally Hemings.
“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.”
“So almost twenty years now we’ve been saying on tours—every house tour—it’s a rule that we say, ‘We believe Jefferson was the father of Hemings’s children.’ But in recent years with the opening of the new exhibit, the equivocation is gone,” Brandon said, his face becoming more sober. “It’s just ‘Jefferson’s the father of Hemings’s children.’”
“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.”
She leaned forward and spoke with the same measured conviction she had used throughout our conversation. “They were dressed as enslaved people.” I almost choked on my own tongue. I uncrossed my legs and sat back in my chair. “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?”
“So many people come here without an understanding of the primary cause of the Civil War. Some people think Jefferson wrote the Constitution. I mean 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.
lining the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans that—as a result of their proximity to petrochemical plants—form what is known as Cancer Alley. Neighborhoods here have some of the highest cancer risks in the country, and chemical emissions from these plants are linked to cardiovascular, respiratory, and developmental ailments.
the Great Migration pull well over a million Black people from the South, and with them, the cheap labor many white landowners had grown accustomed to. In order to prevent the mass migration from continuing at such a high rate, Yvonne said, they started stopping trains of Black people heading north, forcing the passengers off or forcing the entire train to turn back.
This is the illogic of white supremacy; it does not need intellectual continuity.
Historian Walter Johnson aptly notes that the “language of ‘dehumanization’ is misleading because slavery depended upon the human capacities of enslaved people. It depended upon their reproduction. It depended upon their labor. And it depended upon their sentience. Enslaved people could be taught: their intelligence made them valuable. They could be manipulated: their desires could make them pliable. They could be terrorized: their fears could make them controllable. And they could be tortured: beaten, starved, raped, humiliated, degraded. It is these last that are conventionally understood to
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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.
“From fifty to sixty head of women were kept constantly for breeding. No man was allowed to go there, save white men. From twenty to twenty-five children a year were bred on that plantation. As soon as they are ready for market, they are taken away and sold, as mules or other cattle.”
“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?”
Norris had successfully led a coalition of incarcerated people, formerly incarcerated people, and their allies to end Louisiana’s practice of non-unanimous jury decisions via a ballot measure that had amended the state constitution. Up until that point, Louisiana was one of only two states in the entire country—Oregon being the other—in which someone could be convicted of a felony without the jury coming to a unanimous decision.
supremacy, was meant to funnel Black people into the convict leasing system, replacing in part the labor force lost as a result of emancipation.
Many Southern states passed so-called pig laws—in 1876, for example, the state of Mississippi established the theft of any property worth ten dollars or more and any livestock worth a dollar or more as “grand larceny” and thus subject to a sentence as high as five years. “Southerners constantly manipulated laws to drive convictions,” said Aiello. “Pig laws did create more convicts, and those convicts were overwhelmingly Black and overwhelmingly leased.”
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.”
Roger moved from discussing the Indigenous communities and French exploration of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries straight to post–Civil War America—skipping the period in which Angola existed as a plantation worked by enslaved Black people. He mentioned convict leasing without explaining that it was an explicit tool of economic and racial subjugation, in which men were starved, beaten, and housed in former slave quarters. 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,
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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.
but it was evident that he had little interest in talking about the role slavery had played in shaping Angola, which in its early days had a “big house” of “the old Southern plantation style” on the grounds, in which the person responsible for all of the people held here—the warden—lived with his family.
use. In a book about Angola published in 1990, Patsy Dreher, whose father was a guard captain at Angola, is quoted looking back nostalgically on her time living on the grounds: “Angola was a pleasant place to live back then. A vegetable cart came by every morning. What you didn’t get in pay, you got in benefits. You…could get inmates as cooks, yard boys, house boys; you could have two or three of them if you wanted. We had an old cook named Leon who cried like a baby when he got paroled; he said ours was the only home he had known in a long time.”
“There was a toilet in the cell but they kept the water turned off, so it didn’t work. You had to use a bucket in the corner which could only be emptied when you were let out every few days for a shower. They wanted you to smell the stench of your own body waste while eating.”
said that the men held on the Red Hat block were given the leftovers from other prisoners’ meals and that those meals were delivered to them in wheelbarrows. Sinclair described the Red Hat during the 1940s and 1950s as “Angola’s torture chamber” and outlined a culture of violence and callousness, not from the prisoners but from the guards. “Inmates sent to the Red Hats were brutally beaten by convict guards going in, beaten on a daily basis, and beaten coming out. They were fed bread and water twice a day. Some inmates were broken; others died from abuse and neglect.
Willie Francis’s reflection, an observation both profound and devastatingly youthful: “Boy, you sure feel funny when you know you’re going to die; almost like you know something only God should know.”
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.
Louisiana had taken steps to make death row a less restrictive experience for the people housed there. Roger implied that the Department of Corrections had done this of their own moral accord. What Roger did not mention was the history of recent lawsuits that appear to have pushed the state to make substantive changes to the way it treated those on death row.
Of the roughly 30,000 soldiers buried at Blandford, only about 2,200 are identified.
Perhaps it was not simply that Black people did not come to a Confederate cemetery because they didn’t want to be in the space; perhaps Black people did not come to these spaces in large part because of how the story of the Confederate cause was told.
For me, coming to a Confederate cemetery and hearing Ken speak about the beauty of a set of windows without exploring what they were meant to memorialize, was not unlike going to a plantation and listening to a talk about the decorative infrastructure of the enslaver’s house without mentioning the enslaved hands who built it.
“You can connect this directly to the Blandford Cemetery,” Levin later told me. “The Confederate counterattack that pushed back the Union advance, including an entire division of Black soldiers, began just steps from Blandford. These men were told that Black soldiers were present on the battlefield and it infuriated them. Roughly two hundred Black soldiers were murdered after surrendering either during or after the battle. There are references to the Crater inside the church. In short, the Blandford Church is on the Crater battlefield.”
For whites in the Confederate Army, seeing these Black men in Union uniforms represented a profound and infuriating turning point in the war, one that tapped into their worst impulses. The use of Black soldiers was a threat to the entire social order the South had been predicated on. Black soldiers in the Union Army did not simply reflect a new demographic composition of their military opponents; Lee’s army saw Black soldiers as participants in a slave revolt, an insurrection of the most nightmarish proportions that was being actively supported by Lincoln and the US government. The Confederate
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“Our men killed them with the bayonets and the but[t]s of there [sic] guns and every other way until they were lying eight or ten deep on top of one enuther [sic] and the blood almost s[h]oe [sic] quarter deep.” Another soldier in the same regiment wrote: “The Bayonet was plunged through their hearts & the muzzle of our guns was put on their temple & their brains blown out others were knocked in the head with butts of our guns. Few would succeed in getting to the rear safe.”
Levin argues that such violence was meant to convey to Black people still trapped in the claws of enslavement behind Confederate lines that no such insurrection, be it inside or outside the confines of war, would be allowed.
After the Battle of the Crater, captured Union prisoners—white and Black—were made to march through the streets of Petersburg. Levin argues that the display was meant as a message to civilians that this is what was at stake if the war was lost: race mixing and the end of white supremacy.
right to vote. “It is true that the people of the South, together with the people of the North and West, are, for obvious reasons, opposed to any system of laws which will place the political power of the country in the hands of the negro race,” he explained in a letter signed by other former Confederate leaders in 1868. “But this opposition springs from no feelings of enmity, but from a deep seated conviction that at present the negroes have neither the intelligence nor other qualifications which are necessary to make them safe depositories of political power.”
The song was originally written in the 1850s to be performed as part of a minstrel show in which white actors dressed up in blackface. Over time, it became the de facto Confederate anthem, and the song would play as Confederate soldiers prepared to enter battle.
“When I say that we need to make Dixie great again, some of you might have seen this on our website.
As of 2019, according to a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, there were nearly two thousand Confederate monuments, place names, and other symbols that remained in public places across the country.
