Let it never be said that I do not think slavery in all its forms is abhorrent. Its modern incarnations - typically going under different names - are as morally bankrupt as past versions.
But there are lessons to be had that can help us today. Lessons that can help us better understand our own political, racial, sexual conflicts. If we learn those lessons, they might even help us make progress in our journey toward becoming a more just and equitable society.
Over the past two years, I have been involved in the study of slavery in New York, and in particular the church’s role in perpetuating it. I have given lectures, been on panels, written articles, even written a theater piece exploring slavery in New York.
The more I read and write, the more I marvel that the arguments between abolitionists and defenders of slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries sound very much like the firestorms of contemporary political discourse. Thus I think we can revisit the slave era, the people, the arguments, the results… and learn.
First a quick primer on northern slavery - in particular New York. New York was the first northern colony to introduce slavery on any kind of a large scale. Yes, other colonies enslaved people from Africa and, to a lesser degree native peoples. But nobody did it on the scale of New York. By the early 18th century, New York had the second largest slave market in the country, and a higher percentage of New Yorkers owned slaves than anywhere else.
Worse, New York slavery was uniquely horrible. Not only did we practice brutal treatment of those we enslaved (including burning at the stake far more often than I’d like to think about), but because most New York enslavers only had between one and three slaves, it was nearly impossible for the enslaved to have a family. Even when they were allowed to marry, couples rarely got to live together, and children were sold off (frequently down south) once they reached a marketable age.
Even after slavery in New York ended, New Yorkers profited from it hugely and defended the institution with angry words and violence. The primary source of profit was Wall Street. The cotton and tobacco produced by the enslaved had to be traded - and it was done on the stock market. New York banks provided loans to southern plantation owners so they could purchase more slaves. A large percentage of New Yorkers protested the entry into the Civil War and defended slavery right through the end of that war.
Most New Yorkers have no idea that we even had slaves here - we always think of ourselves as the good guys. And that’s why we need to learn these lessons. So what have I learned?
Lesson Number One: Americans don’t know history. In his award-winning book, “Lies My Teacher Told Me,” author James Loewen tells us that much of history is whitewashed to make our country look good. Slaves are called “workers”, the Lincoln/Douglas debates are trivialized to a discussion of their relative heights, and the virtual extermination of Native Americans is minimized to the point of nonexistence.
If we want to talk about race in America, we have to look at our own history first. After a recent talk I gave to the Rotary Club, someone said, “This all happened long before any of us was born. What is my responsibility now?”
My response (much longer than I’ll give here, but here’s the essence): We are not responsible for what others did in the past. We did not create slavery - nor did we run the Underground Railroad or fight to end it. But we do live with its ongoing effects, and our responsibility is to understand the connection between what happened back then and where we are today.
This is crucial because our current tensions are directly connected to the past. Mass incarceration, the school-to-prison pipeline, red-lining - none of these just appeared out of nowhere. Neither did Black Lives Matter or NFL kneeling. They have history, and every single citizen has the responsibility of understanding how we got where we are today.
Lesson Number Two: We don’t want to learn our history. We always think of ourselves as a forward-looking people, but the reality is, we are just unreflective people. It requires work to know the past and its connections with the present. I come to this conclusion based on conversations with those who wonder why I would bother with slavery more than 150 years ago. They feel nothing that happened fifty years ago, let alone three times that time, could have anything to do with us. We live in a society that values action and consumption, and if you’re not doing one of those two things, you’re wasting time.
Lesson Number Three: We are frightened of what we might find if we examine our history too closely. We are afraid of finding skeletons in the closet. There is a natural human desire to be proud of our forebears. We all want to be related to Washington or Lincoln or at least some local hero. Nobody wants to hear that their ancestor bought and sold other human beings, ripping small children from their wailing mother’s arms - or burning innocent people at the stake just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
As they say, history is taught by the winners, and we all want to be winners. Granted, this isn’t exactly about the slave era, but look at those Confederate statues. Sure, they have a nefarious purpose of glorifying the era when blacks were put in their place - but they also serve that human need for being proud of those who came before us.
Lesson Number Four: Studying the slavery era and its aftermath teaches me that we don’t have to feel guilty for the sins of those who came before. A couple of months ago, I gave a lecture to the local Rotary Club about New York’s slavery. Two comments that followed it were telling. One man came up and said, “Wow, I feel miserable about how horrible we are.” A second man said, “This all happened long before I was born. What responsibility do I have for what they did?”
We are not responsible for what people of a bygone era did. That’s on them. You don’t have to feel guilty for what you didn’t do. Great great grandpa might have done some bad stuff, but that’s between him and God - not you. What you and I are responsible for is knowing what happened. And we are responsible for our own actions (or lack thereof) based on that knowledge.
Lesson Number Five: We need to understand the connections from past to present. We need to understand how the arrogance of the European invaders (some call them explorers) led them to first see Native Americans as cheap sources of labor, then, when that didn’t work they way they wanted, turn to other non-European sources, in this case, Africa. We need to see how the Native American genocide and Slavery are connected, and how both of those are directly connected to the current unsatisfactory conditions we experience today.
We need to see how slavery affected the formation of the United States and its government (for example, it’s highly unlikely that there would have ever been an Electoral College without slavery), how it led to the Civil War, led to KKK, led to Jim Crow with all its lynching, led to segregation - and the Civil Rights Movement, led to the school-to-prison pipeline - and to Black Lives Matter and NFL kneeling.
But we also need to know that the arguments used back in the 18th and especially 19th centuries to perpetuate slavery are remarkably similar to those used today to perpetuate red-lining, revocation of voting rights, police brutality and unequal sentencing, and the rise of white nationalism. It is all connected, like a tapestry, and when you pull on one thread, you will surely be led to others. This is a complex issue - and it is interconnected with countless other complex issues. Poke one, and you make others flinch.
Lesson Number Six: We are not as self-determinate as we would like to believe. We did not make ourselves out of nothing. We are affected by what came before us - AND THERE’S NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. That’s just life.
What that means for us, however, is that we need to know when we enjoy privilege, and we need to understand how others are not quite the slackers we think they are. There is a video going around on FaceBook and YouTube these days which has a group of people getting ready to run a race. The organizer then tells the racers there are a few rules changes. Then he gives a series of commands to the runners, telling some that if they grew up in a tw0-parent home to step forward, if they had never been stopped by a cop while walking down the street to take more steps… and so on. The end result, of course, was that the white runners were far ahead of the black runners before the race ever started.
The video was designed to show how white privilege works. Of course, it ignited a firestorm of criticism by those who said, “Life isn’t fair. You start where life puts you and you don’t whine.” Those are the comments of people who believe they are supposed to feel guilty for having received a leg-up. Rather, the video can help us see that indeed, we simply DO have a leg up if we’re white. It just is. It’s nothing to be ashamed of OR proud of. We didn’t earn our position nearly as much as we inherited it. The same is true for others who simply are born into less advantageous situations - largely (but not entirely) because of the history. That is, if you’re black, you will face more obstacles. Period. All the research shows it.
And yes, many black people overcome those obstacles, but it is still much harder, and when they achieve success, they face even more discrimination. But not everyone can be that fantastic exception. That’s just not how people are.
The only important question is, what do you do with that information, and are you willing to level the playing field.
Lesson Number Seven: People are complicated. We are not all good or all bad. There were abolitionists who were misogynists or thieves or hotheads. There were slave owners who built hospitals and schools, using their own money to educate the poorest. There were even slave-owners who thought slavery was evil but did not know how to get out of it because the laws in some states were so complicated that it was - to them - more work than they were willing to give. There were those who thought African Americans could never get a fair deal in the US and advocated for “colonization,” a process by which they were sent back to Africa. A bunch of rich white men even pooled their resources to purchase an entire country (which is today known and Liberia). Of course, many of those who were for colonization just wanted to rid the country of black people altogether and make America purely white (with the native peoples segregated in their reservations).
Lesson Number Eight: Wrong is wrong regardless of the era. Today you might hear the argument that slaveowners were simply people of their time. It was how things were, and you can’t judge. By that standard, you could never judge right from wrong in any era. The fact is, lots of people - from the very beginning - knew that slavery was wrong, especially as it was practiced in America. American/European slavery, you see, was not like slavery in other places. It was not a temporary state based on poverty, crime, or war, the usual sources of slaves in the past (serfdom in medieval Europe is another topic altogether). It was not an indentured servanthood like, say, many Irish who came here as bonded servants for a specific number of years. Our slavery was one in which we traveled to a different continent, kidnapped people and transported them under the harshest of conditions like cattle, where we worked them to death, where we bred them like cattle, then ripped their children or spouses from them when the price was right. Our slavery was one where we officially declared the enslaved to be less than human.
People at the time knew this was wrong and from early on, even if very quietly, protested its inhumanity. Sure, there were many who were taught from childhood that slavery was good and just, but the voices declaring it to be wrong were always there, and they were often silenced violently. Even in that era, people knew that treating other human beings as animals was wrong.
Lesson Number Nine: We are motivated by financial loss. In a parallel with modern society, we can note that many slave owners were actually willing to free those whom they enslaved. They did not do so primarily for financial reasons. First, it was cheaper to have a slave than to pay a laborer. Second, freeing a slave was expensive. It could cost hundreds of dollars paid to the state to set someone free.
You can guess how many people, especially those on less steady financial ground, were willing to take a huge financial hit for some slave most people considered barely human. This is just as common today, where we often desire to do what it right (use renewable energy, for example) but don’t want to cough up the extra cash to do so. It is valuable to be aware of this about ourselves. Truly, the love of money is the root of evil.
Lesson Number Ten: We will often do anything to avoid looking like bad guys. Including become really bad guys.
Sometimes that means we hide our history, alter it, or declare abhorrent behavior of the past to be normal. Many to this day embrace the very attitudes of those who thought slavery was fine, finding news ways to express the idea that the people they enslaved were (and their descendants are) subhuman. Sometimes it only means that we refuse to look - and then wonder why those people can’t get their acts together.
The rise of white nationalists is a frightening symptom of that avoidance. There is a direct link between them and our failure to fully address the fallout of slavery.
It's only when we face the world AS IT IS, including the whole story as told in our history, with honesty and humility, and without a need to defend, that we can move forward as a society together.
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