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

by Clint Smith

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.”

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. 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.”

Jefferson believed that it was impossible for Blacks and whites to live peacefully alongside one another after the emancipation of the enslaved, 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.” In a letter written to his friend Jared Sparks on February 4, 1824, Jefferson reflected on the possibility of the expatriation of Black people through “the establishment of a colony on the coast of Africa.” But he had already discarded African colonization as unfeasible because of the expense. “I do not say this to induce an inference that the getting rid of them is for ever impossible. For that is neither my opinion, nor my hope,” he wrote to Sparks. “But only that it cannot be done in this way. There is, I think, a way in which it can be done,” he continued, “that is, by emancipating the after-born, leaving them, on due compensation, with their mothers, until their services are worth their maintenance, and then putting them to industrious occupations, until a proper age for deportation.” He had come to believe that the Caribbean was a promising destination. “St. Domingo is become independant [sic], and with a population of that colour only; and, if the public papers are to be credited, their Chief offers to pay their passage, to recieve [sic] them as free citizens, and to provide them employment.” What Jefferson was proposing was that the government pu...

By 1860, about one in three Southerners was an enslaved person.

I asked both Donna and Grace what they had previously been taught about all of this. “You know, we studied Jefferson,” Grace said. “The slavery part was not part of it.” “Well, it wasn’t detailed,” Donna shared. “It didn’t put any heart and thought into it. In high school and college, you didn’t think, These are families. These are moms and dads being separated from each other. So that wasn’t part of the education.”

Donna came from a family in which she said her mother had “extreme” views. When I asked her what she meant by “extreme,” Donna described her mother’s stance using a phrase that was not uncommon in the discourse of many white Southerners: “The only good one is a dead one.” The “one” here is, of course, a genteel metonym. It was a phrase I had heard from my grandparents as they spoke of the way white people had talked to them, growing up in the mid-twentieth-century Jim Crow South, where the law did not protect you from the terror of white supremacy but instead abetted it. The uncensored version of the phrase goes “The only good nigger is a dead nigger.”

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.”

Throughout his life, Jefferson valued the company of cosmopolitan guests, the time to read and write and think, the elegance of fine architecture, the flavor of savory food, and the fragrance of the natural world—a life in which he could nurture his mind and satisfy his tastes. This life was only possible because of the enslaved men and women he held, sold, and separated; because of the people he allowed to be threatened, manipulated, flogged, assaulted, deceived, and terrorized. Jefferson’s vacillation from moral repugnance to hollow justification reflects how he largely succumbed to that which he knew was indefensible. He still held hostage the men and women and children enslaved on his plantation, he still separated them, he still refused to provide freedom to more than a handful of people. But Monticello is not singularly defined by Jefferson. It could not have existed without the enslaved people who lived there, who had families there, who built a community there that spanned generations. As a public servant, Jefferson spent more than half his life away from his plantation, while many of the hundreds of people enslaved at Monticello stayed on that land for the entirety of their lives. As much as this land illuminates the contradictions of Jefferson’s legacy, it also serves as a reminder of the hundreds of Black people who made a home there. Their lives are also worthy of remembrance, and commemoration.

The French army was so beleaguered from battle and disease—by the end of the war, more than 80 percent of the soldiers sent to the island had died—that 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, especially as Jefferson had intended to approach the French simply looking to purchase New Orleans in order to have access to the heart of the Mississippi River.

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.

Poverty is common in Wallace, Louisiana, the area encompassing the Whitney, where over 90 percent of the population is Black. Wallace is also one of a series of majority-Black communities 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. Civil rights leader 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

“Their voices are forever gone and silenced,”

Most did not learn to read or write. Most did not engage in hand-to-hand combat with white slave breakers. Most did not live close enough to free states in the North to have any hope of escape.

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. In overly mythologizing our ancestors, we forget an all-too-important reality: the vast majority were ordinary people, which is to say they were people just like everyone else. This ordinariness is only shameful when used to legitimate oppression. This is its own quiet violence.

dozens of names, with each name accompanied by a date of birth and often a tribal affiliation, which, if present, indicates that the person was brought directly to the New World by the transatlantic slave trade as compared to having been born into slavery in the United States. “We divided the memorial into two

rice and indigo were the centerpieces of southern Louisiana’s plantation economy, and the French ships traveling back and forth between Louisiana and West Africa needed to bring over both types of seeds along with people who would know how to cultivate them once they arrived in North America. Enslaved Africans arrived in Louisiana largely from the Senegambia, with over 60 percent of Louisiana’s slave population having come from that region.

In 1795, there were nearly twenty thousand enslaved people in Louisiana, almost three thousand of whom were on the German Coast. 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. Much of the increase was due to the domestic explosion of the enslaved population as a result of the internal slave trade, though some of the increase was because of the continued illegal slave trade.

Written on the wall in front of me was a quote from Julia Woodrich, born in 1851 and enslaved in Louisiana: “My ma had fifteen children and none of them had the same pa. Every time she was sold she would get another man. My ma had one boy by her moss that was my missis brother’s child. You see every time she was sold she had to take another man. Her had fifteen children after she was sold de last time.”

because, in order to really understand slavery, we have to understand what slavery meant for women.”

“I ’member how my master used to would come and get my sister, make her take a bath and comb her hair, and take her down in the quarter all night, den have de nerve to come around de next day and ask her how she feel.”

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.

Black women were seen as both undesirable and sexually objectified. This is the illogic of white supremacy; it does not need intellectual continuity. The temptation is to say that this illogic “dehumanizes” its subject, though some historians argue that such a characterization is incorrect. 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 be the most ‘inhuman’ of slaveholders’ actions and those that most ‘dehumanized’ enslaved people. And yet these actions epitomize the failure of this set of terms to capture what was at stake in slaveholding violence: the extent to which slaveholders depended upon violated slaves to bear witness, to provide satisfaction, to provide a living, human register of slaveholders’ power.”

There were laws stating that almost any crime committed by a white person against a Black person was in fact not a crime at all.

oppression is never about humanity or lack thereof. It is, and always has been, about power.

“A lot of medical schools, during the history of slavery, largely depended on cadavers of enslaved people. That’s who they practiced on … Black women’s bodies were used in experiments to advance medicine, like the field of gynecology. We learn about ‘from cradle to grave’ in history, but what about postmortem? What happened to Black people postmortem? It’s like their bodies are constantly being exploited at every age, even in their death.”

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. “The body trade was as elaborate as the trans-Atlantic and domestic slave trade that transported Africans to the New World and resold African-Americans on our soil,” she wrote in an essay for the New York Times based on her research. “But when enslaved people died, some were sold again and trafficked along the same roads and waterways they traveled while alive.” Medical schools typically used the corpses of executed criminals or unclaimed bodies from prisons and almshouses, itself an abhorrent practice, but when there were not enough of those needed bodies for their anatomy classes, schools paid people to go to cemeteries and dig up the bodies of the enslaved.

“Number one question [we get from white visitors]: ‘I know slavery was bad …I don’t mean it this way, but …were there any good slave owners?’ ” Yvonne took another deep breath, the frustration from thinking about the persistence of the question visible in her face — the look of someone professionally committed to patience but personally exhausted by the emotional toll it has taken on her. “I really give a short but nuanced answer to that,” she said. “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?” The question, even if the visitors are unaware of it, is tied to decades of mainstream historical thought, in part thanks to the early-twentieth-century historian Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, who propagated the idea that there were in fact many kind slave owners who provided a good life for their enslaved workers. Phillips’s assertion was built on the premise that chattel slavery was a largely benevolent system designed to uplift, protect, and civilize an inferior African race. In his 1918 book, American Negro Slavery, Phillips wrote, “On the whole the plantations were the best schools yet invented for the mass training of that sort of inert and backward people which the bulk of the American negroes represen...

While the majority of the staff might be Black, John, who bought the property and developed it into a museum at his own expense, is a white man in his eighties. I first met John a few months before I visited the Whitney, at his second home, an extensive plot of farmland in Middleburg, Virginia. We sat at the table in his kitchen, which smelled like ginger and green tea, as he rolled up his sleeves and leaned back in his chair, brimming with equal parts confidence and vigor. His thick white beard wrapped around the bottom half of his face. His thin-framed, rectangular glasses sat slightly crooked, sliding slowly down his nose when he became especially animated. His southern Louisiana inflection rose and fell slowly and symphonically, with long pauses situating themselves in the middle of each self-deprecating sentence. He is a multimillionaire engaged in answering the ongoing question of how to use his wealth, a white person who says he has come to understand, in the last quarter of his life, the totality of the oppression that Black people have experienced. John grew up in New Orleans and attended Catholic schools from kindergarten through college, graduating from Loyola University New Orleans with a business and law degree. He became a successful lawyer, focusing on large class-action tort cases, opening offices in New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Seattle. While he was building and expanding his law practice, John found causes beyond the court. A self-proclaimed liberal, he...

Most of the children here died as toddlers—died very young.” She scanned the names on the granite slabs. “Most of them died of malnutrition and disease. “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.”

About fifty yards from the slave cabins was a large bell, its cylinder of cast iron widening at the lip as if trying to get a better look at the earth beneath it, its color dulled by years of exposure to the elements. A coiled rope, its pale brown fibers braided tightly together, was tied to the top of the bell and hung down at its side. Historically, the role of the bell on a plantation served two purposes. It was used to signal when it was time to go out into the fields at the beginning of the day and when it was time to return at the end of it. It was also used to summon enslaved people, often when someone was about to be punished, an audible marker of the terror that enslavers maintained. At the Whitney, this bell has been repurposed, reclaimed. As visitors move through the different parts of the plantation, they are invited to ring the bell in honor of all the people who lived here and died in the struggle for freedom. I pulled on the rope. The bell’s metal tongue swung inside its body, as its chime reverberated like a heavy heart.

In Louisiana, in order to ensure there were more convictions, and thus more prisoners available for labor, in 1880 the state legislature shifted the requirement for juries from unanimous to non-unanimous. This way courts could allow a few Black people to serve on the jury—in accordance with their new rights as freed persons—but by requiring only nine of the twelve jurors to convict someone of a crime, they effectively subverted any political power Black people, or those sympathetic to them, might otherwise have had. Those responsible for the change did not equivocate in their rationale. 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.”

The Advocate, a newspaper in Baton Rouge, found that upon reviewing nearly one thousand felony convictions between the years 2011 and 2016, 40 percent of convictions by twelve-member juries had one or two jurors who did not agree with the verdict. Additionally, they found that in these cases, Black defendants were about 30 percent more likely to be found guilty than their white counterparts. Innocence Project New Orleans, an organization committed to exonerating wrongly convicted people, has found that in the last thirty years split juries played a role in upwards of 45 percent of exoneration cases in Louisiana that were eligible for a non-unanimous verdict.

(Angola is where every license plate in the state of Louisiana is made). I thought about the cruel irony of people so restricted in their own movements creating something that facilitated mobility for so many others.

Roger’s “I can’t change that” seemed to provide the pretense of acknowledgment while creating distance from personal culpability. It was reminiscent of a refrain laced throughout our country’s conversations about the history of racism. I thought about all of the times, growing up, when I had sat in class and heard a white classmate say, “Well, my ancestors didn’t own slaves,” or heard a political commentator on television say, “Why are we still talking about slavery? People need to get over it.” Or a politician say, “We can’t wallow in the past. It’s time to focus on the future.” When I hear these deflections, 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. It’s not that people don’t know. Angola prison has been regularly and casually referred to as a plantation by state authorities and media for over a century. When many people say “Angola is a prison built on a former plantation,” it is often made as an unsettling observation, not as a moral indictment. Is it because our collective understanding of slavery, and its inherent violence, is so limited? Or is it that violence experienced by Black people is thought less worthy of mourning? White supremacy enacts violence against Black people, but also numbs a whole country—Black and white—to what would in any other context provoke our moral indignation.

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.

Louisiana began using the electric chair in 1941. The original electric chair was known by the men at Angola as “Gruesome Gertie.” At first, the chair was not based at a single location but traveled to the parish where the condemned person was imprisoned. In 1957, however, Gruesome Gertie retired from its traveling and found a home on the Red Hat cell block at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. The chair has the infamous distinction as the site of the country’s first-known botched execution by electrocution. Willie Francis, a seventeen-year-old Black boy from Saint Martinville, Louisiana, was placed in the electric chair on May 3, 1946. He was charged with murdering a pharmacist named Andrew Thomas in 1944, but in the decades following his death, serious questions were raised about Willie’s culpability. Months after Thomas was killed, the Saint Martinville police had failed to apprehend anyone for the murder. Saint Martinville’s sheriff called the chief of police in Port Arthur, Texas, and told him to arrest “any man” from Saint Martinville found in Port Arthur, in a last-ditch effort to resolve the case. Willie, visiting one of his sisters in Port Arthur at the time, had been arrested, mistakenly, on a separate drug charge. The charge was dropped, but the police began questioning Willie about Thomas’s murder in Saint Martinville instead. Soon police had a signed confession from Willie. The boy had no counsel present. Given his age and the circumstances of his arrest, it is...

It is difficult to imagine what a person feels in the moments before they are to be executed. Willie’s words provide a small piece of insight into an otherwise unfathomable experience: Everybody was watching me as I walked out. I looked at the Sheriff and he nodded, so I walked across the room and sat down in the chair. He took the handcuffs off and the men began strapping me into the chair. They put one strap around my leg and around my waist and tied my arms down, too. I knew then how real it was to have to die. I had it in my mind deep. It was so quiet in there everybody was looking at me so funny. It was the realest misery I ever knew, to see them watching me. It seemed like they would come close to my eyes and then move away from me. I wished they had kept still because I was already dizzy. I was cold and my hands were all wet. I couldn’t feel my neck and my head but they say I was soaking with perspiration. They kept on fixing the machine and connecting the wires to my head and to my left leg. But the machine Willie was being connected to had been improperly assembled. The prison guard responsible for its assembly, Captain Ephie Foster, along with a prisoner assisting him, had been drunk while setting it up earlier that day. As a result, the electrocution did not kill Willie, but it did torture him. The best way I can describe it is: Whamm! Zst! It felt like a hundred and a thousand needles and pins were pricking in me all over and my left leg felt like somebody was ...

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.

Robert E. Lee was a slave owner who led an army predicated on maintaining and expanding the institution of slavery. A letter Lee wrote to his wife in 1856 is often used as a means of demonstrating that Lee couldn’t have fought for the Confederacy in order to protect slavery because he believed slavery was “a moral & political evil.” Devoid of additional context—and an acknowledgment of the fact that Lee owned enslaved people—this assertion might seem to shield Lee from allegations of racism and bigotry. And yet two sentences later: I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is Known & ordered by a wise & merciful Providence. Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild & melting influence of Christianity, than the storms & tempests of fiery Controversy. While Lee believed slavery would one day come to an end, he also seemed to believe it was up to God when that happened. It was a view common of those in Lee’s world. He, and his fellow enslavers, had no control over it. Everyone, including the enslaved, were simply meant to wait for divine intervention...

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. In the years following the war, Robert E. Lee did not become open to the creation of a society based on racial equity; he actively opposed it. He argued, for example, that Black people should not have the 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.”

In 1931, W. E. B. Du Bois attacked the decision to erect Confederate monuments as ahistorical and irresponsible: The most terrible thing about War, I am convinced, is its monuments—the awful things we are compelled to build in order to remember the victims. In the South, particularly, human ingenuity has been put to it to explain on its war monuments, the Confederacy. Of course, the plain truth of the matter would be an inscription something like this: “Sacred to the memory of those who fought to Perpetuate Human Slavery.” But that reads with increasing difficulty as time goes on. It does, however, seem to be overdoing the matter to read on a North Carolina Confederate monument: “Died Fighting for Liberty!”

The myth of the Lost Cause does not begin or end with the Confederate monuments. The myth seeps into many other facets of state-sanctioned life. In eleven states there are a total of twenty-three Confederate holidays and observances. As of 2020, in both Alabama and Mississippi there is Robert E. Lee Day, Confederate Memorial Day, and Jefferson Davis’s birthday; in South Carolina there is Confederate Memorial Day; in Texas there is Confederate Heroes Day. In both Alabama and Mississippi, Robert E. Lee’s birthday is celebrated on the same day as Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

The myth of the Lost Cause has also been propagated through media, literature, and postwar propaganda. These fictions often have included denying that the war was ever about slavery, or depicting slavery as a benign or even mutually beneficial institution. On February 22, 1896, thirty-five years after Jefferson Davis’s inauguration as president of the Confederacy, former Confederate general Bradley T. Johnson explained that slavery w...

After the war ended, white Southern writers took the baton from Confederate leaders and continued to paint slavery not as an institution defined by violence and exploitation but as a mutually beneficial arrangemen...

The Lost Cause was not an accident. It was not a mistake that history stumbled into. It was a deliberate, multifaceted, multi-field effort predicated on both misremembering and obfuscating what the Confederacy stood for, and the role that slavery played in shaping this country.

The idea of using enslaved people during the war had been suggested by Confederate general Patrick Cleburne, but the proposal was scoffed at by the majority of Confederate leadership because it undermined the entire basis upon which the war was being fought. Leadership found themselves in a position in which they could choose to perpetuate slavery or give everything they had to win the war and secure independence—a choice many Confederate leaders were unwilling to accept.

The idea that slavery was “just a very small part” of why the Civil War began is not unique to Jeff; it is reflective of decades of Lost Cause propaganda.