Heroic men and women crowd the pages of US history and punctuate its major events—defiant minutemen at Concord Bridge; brave pioneers plunging into the wilderness; intrepid Marines at Wake Island refusing to surrender; daring astronauts.
Africans who arrived here on ships full of enslaved people have not been part of this glorious heritage. When American courage is celebrated, enslaved people are left out. The story of their heroism has not often been told because history was recorded by those who sold, owned, or profited from their labor.
To justify their profits from bondage, the men and women who trafficked in human lives invented useful tales. They insisted Africans were an inferior breed who benefited from the culture of their European and Christian owners. Vice President John C. Calhoun, a famous South Carolina enslaver, said bondage made Africans “so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually.” To excuse kidnapping Africans from their families and homeland, Virginia planter George Fitzhugh insisted enslaved people “love their master and his family and the attachment is reciprocated.”
Fitzhugh and Calhoun claimed Africans in slavery not only enjoyed hard work in the hot sun but were happier than any other laborers in the world. To justify keeping people in chains, enslavers bent history, truth, and the Bible to their purposes. They also created their own “scientific evidence.” Dr. Samuel Cartwright of the University of Louisiana said Black people “consume less oxygen than the white” and this fact “thus makes it a mercy and a blessing to negroes to have persons in authority set over them, to provide and take care of them.”
Central to the enslavers’ reasoning was the lie that Africans willingly accepted slavery and rejected rebellion. Dr. Cartwright claimed “there had never been an insurrection” against enslaver rule. When people in bondage tried to escape, the doctor called it “Drapetomania, or the Disease Causing Negroes to Run Away.” When Black people rebelled, sabotaged production, and fought white enslavers and overseers, it was “Dysaesthesia Aethiopica,” a mental disorder “peculiar to Africans.”
The lies of enslavers did not die quickly or easily. In 1863, after thousands of Black people had fled plantations to fight for liberty in the Civil War, Confederate president Jefferson Davis still called enslaved people “peaceful and contented laborers.” The Civil War ended slavery, but scholars and textbook writers carried on the planters’ view of the happy, dull, docile slave. An ex-Confederate soldier, John W. Burgess, became a noted historian at Columbia University. He influenced generations of scholars with his views that African Americans were inferior to whites and content under slavery.
Thus, the enslavers’ version of the life of the enslaved had a lasting impact on historians from the North and South. Scholar William E. Woodward wrote that African Americans were the only people in history emancipated “without any effort of their own,” and two of this country’s most liberal and famous historians, Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager, wrote college texts that emphasized enslaved people were attached to their enslavers, “well cared for and apparently happy.”
The story of Dred Scott illustrates the way enslaved people were presented as pathetic stereotypes. Because of the Supreme Court case that bears his name, Scott has always been the one Black figure in US history courses. But little is said about him as a person—that he saw his first wife and two children sold away, that he married Harriet, and they had two children, Eliza and Lizzie, whom he desperately wanted to live in freedom.
Historians wrote about a Dred Scott who was “lazy and shiftless.” Some even ridiculed him as a carefree, stupid man with no real interest in freedom. In American Heritage, famous Civil War historian Bruce Catton said Scott was “a man without energy” and attributed to Scott such words as his “case was ‘a heap o trouble,’ ” and “he was amazed at all ‘de fuss day made dar in Washington.’ ”
In fact, Scott shouldered huge burdens to lift slavery from his family. For a time he escaped to the Lucas Swamps outside St. Louis, a haven for enslaved people seeking freedom. Then he was recaptured and brought back. After that he mainly spent time working at extra jobs, raising cash to purchase his family’s liberty. When his enslaver, Mrs. Emerson, turned down the $300 he had saved, Scott hired a lawyer and brought his case before Judge Krum in St. Louis.
Despite rapidly deteriorating health and the onset of old age, Scott pursued this legal effort for ten years and ten months. Along the way he received some financial help from antislavery whites.
Though the Supreme Court ruled against the Scotts, a new enslaver soon freed them. The Scotts worked in St. Louis, Dred as a porter at Barnum’s Hotel and Harriet running a laundry business, with Dred helping her out after hours.
The real Scott story turns out to be one of courage and endurance by a family committed to liberty. But they never really had their day in court because they faced an all-white Supreme Court stacked against them. Then later scholars emphasized this distorted, stereotyped image.
Such fantasies about people held in bondage reached generations of teachers, textbook authors, and Hollywood writers. Their words and images penetrated millions of young US minds.
The seventh and eighth graders who entered my New York City classroom in the 1950s knew their slavery lessons cold. “Slaves didn’t really mind it,” said one, “because it wasn’t so bad.” “If they didn’t like it, they would’ve revolted,” said another. “Slavery was really like a kind of social security,” said a third. No one seemed to disagree with these views that they had been taught in elementary school.
To those reared on this version, it seemed un-American to depict the evils of slavery and disloyal to talk about African American people fighting for freedom against whites. Omitting, neglecting, or suppressing the facts of enslaved people’s defiance became a lasting American tradition.
The truth about bondage was always available. Before the Emancipation Proclamation, enslaved men and women escaped and wrote more than a hundred autobiographies and published seventeen newspapers. Antislavery or abolitionist publications of the nineteenth century bulge with Black and white testimony exposing the evils of bondage. Six thousand pages of the recollections of formerly enslaved men and women are on file at the Library of Congress, and hundreds of other interviews are kept at Fisk University. Most scholars have ignored this mountain of evidence. Some flatly said that while those who profited from slavery could be objective, those who suffered from it lacked powers of observation or sufficient detachment to judge fairly.
Enslaved people’s testimony reveals a heritage of rebelliousness stretching from the kidnappings in Africa to the end of the Civil War, and this American story adds a proud new dimension to the world struggle for freedom. Africans demonstrated endurance, resilience, and bravery in the face of the most wretched conditions in the Americas. They were among the first Americans to die for the great ideal that all are created free and equal.
Today the story of resistance to slavery can be described with a high degree of accuracy through accounts left by the men, women, and children held in bondage and their relatives and friends. I have chosen to construct this book largely based on their testimony, and I have also included the recollections of white enslavers and their families, foreign visitors, military and government reports, newspapers, and legal records.
Because this book is short and focuses on the Black contribution to emancipation, white participation, since it appears in many other books, is indicated but not fully examined. It was the resistance of the people in bondage that, each step of the way, galvanized whites and free Blacks into action.
All quotations are by Black people, enslaved or free, unless otherwise identified. Some African American narrators, such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, have recently found their place in school courses. But other witnesses are largely unknown. Some left scant identification in the historical record except a few words, and a first or last name. Others left even less—a nickname, a state, a date. In telling their stories, some did not wish to give their name. More often the man or woman who took down their words did not bother to ask for one. I have included whatever information is known of these people whose surviving words bear witness to our common history.
—william loren katz