Not a Peculiar Institution: Challenging Students’

Assumptions about Slavery in U.S. History

Nancy Ogden, Catherine Perkins, and David M. Donahue

Hayward High, Mount Eden High, and Mills College, California

Slavery in the pre-Civil War United States is a hard topic to teach,

not only because it raises issues of racism and injustice, but also because
students assume so much.1 Often, they think all northerners were aboli-
tionists or “good guys” and southerners were “bad guys” who enslaved
African Americans because they viewed them as inferior. England, if con-
sidered at all, is seen as a champion of the anti-slavery movement, having
abolished slavery earlier in the nineteenth century. Textbooks form and
reinforce these assumptions. A chapter in an A.P. U.S. history textbook,
titled “Slavery and the Old South,”2 reinforces the notion that slavery was
unconnected to life elsewhere
Cathy and Nancy, two high school history teachers, wanted to challenge
these preconceived notions and spark students to think more deeply about
slavery. While they did not want to erase the students’ ideas about connec-
tions between race and slavery, they wanted to add an economic perspec-
tive on why and how people were enslaved. In addition, they wanted to
complicate students’ understanding of the relationship between northern
and southern people over slavery and to reveal the deep and important
connections among the economies of the southern and northern United
States and the world.
Cathy and Nancy’s goal was in keeping with scholarship framing slav-
The History Teacher Volume 41 Number 4 August 2008 © N. Ogden, C. Perkins, and D.M. Donahue
 Nancy Ogden, Catherine Perkins, and David M. Donahue

ery as more than a “peculiar” institution in the South. As David Quigley

notes in his history of the connections between slavery and New York
City, “in politics, economics, culture, and social life, New Yorkers—black
and white—remained implicated in the slave system down to the onset of
the Civil War.”3 Similarly, a report examining Brown University’s con-
nection to slavery reported that it “was not a distinct enterprise but rather
an institution that permeated every aspect of social and economic life in
Rhode Island, the Americas, and indeed the world.”4
Politically, the U.S government treated slavery as a national institution
protected by the Constitution, in effect acknowledging and supporting
a “slaveholding republic.”5 Economically, northern merchants profited
tremendously from the transatlantic cotton trade. After the War of 1812,
southern cotton on northern ships fed England’s booming textile mills
and spurred greater cotton production in the South. By 1822, half of the
goods shipped from New York were produced in the South, almost all by
slaves.6 Northern ships transported slaves, even when federal and state
laws banned such activity. Northern merchants as well as ordinary shop-
keepers and tradesmen owned shares in these slave trading voyages. New
England mills produced cheap, coarse “Negro cloth” to be used for slaves’
clothing, and New England salt cod fed Caribbean slaves. Northerners not
directly involved in slave trading, such as boatwrights, blacksmiths, and
carpenters, relied on it for their economic survival.
Southern publisher James DeBow wrote in 1860 that New York was
“almost as dependent upon Southern slavery as Charleston itself.”7 Al-
most 150 years later, historian Rachel Chernos Lin described the Rhode
Island slave trade as “literally the business of ‘the butcher, the baker,
the candlestick maker.’”8 In the twenty-first century, corporations such
as Aetna Insurance, FleetBoston Financial, and CSX have been sued as
the inheritors of northern firms doing business with slaveholders.9 While
slavery was and is a moral evil, it was also an economic phenomenon not
limited entirely to one part of the United States. As a global economic
institution, its impact was felt in the North and the South, across the U.S.,
and around the globe. Non-slave holders—even abolitionists—were caught
in its far-reaching web.
In reframing the study of slavery, Cathy and Nancy were following the
example of historians like Thomas Bender by placing U.S. history in a
larger global context.10 As part of their participation in Words That Made
America,11 a project funded by a Teaching American History grant, they
developed a lesson to help students develop more complex understanding
of U.S. slavery, and through the project’s lesson study component, inves-
tigated how their students’ understanding evolved. Looking more closely
at student work after the lesson, we explored these questions:
Challenging Students’ Assumptions about Slavery in U.S. History 


- How do high school students make sense of primary source documents

presenting a complex economic analysis of slavery, one that departs from
the more clear-cut moral presentation of slavery as evil and limited to one
section of the United States?
- How does students’ understanding of race and slavery as a racial institu-
tion, shape their reading of and learning from documents about the economic
aspect of slavery?
Not surprisingly, we found that no single lesson, no matter how well
conceived or executed, replaces students’ old understanding with a new
one. What we did learn is that students’ understanding evolves, and new
knowledge and economic perspectives mix with prior knowledge and moral
perspectives in a complex process of meaning making. Pentimento, a term
used in painting, provides a useful metaphor for understanding this process.
Just as pentimento still shows an artist’s earlier, differing conception and
execution of a subject underneath the final layer of paint, students’ new
understanding from a lesson challenging prior assumptions still includes
elements of those old ideas as they evolve. In this article, we talk about
these evolutions in understanding and their implications for teaching about
slavery in United States history.

A Conceptual Framework for Reading History

Historians have been called “extraordinary, rather than typical, readers”12

because of the complex cognitive tasks required to make meaning from
a wide variety of primary and secondary sources. They balance general
document reading knowledge, general historical knowledge, and specific
historical knowledge from their area of expertise. As historians read a text,
they connect it with other texts to construct a larger picture. Wineburg found
that historians bring existing knowledge to reading historical texts, use this
knowledge to analyze any new text they are reading, and then develop a
revised conception of historical characters, events, and phenomena as they
incorporate understanding from the new text.13 Having studied the reading
processes of three historians, Leinhardt and Young found that, while most
readers try to make comprehension as smooth as possible, historians go out
of their way to “complicate” comprehension by raising questions, alterna-
tive interpretations, and multiple contextual framings for their reading.14
This complex understanding of reading in history draws on constructivist
theories of learning which hold that the meaning is not inherent in the text
itself waiting to be “discovered” or “unlocked,” but rather is continually
constructed and reconstructed through interactions between the reader and
the text, drawing on the reader’s prior knowledge, past experiences, and
understanding from other texts.15 Texts cannot mean whatever a reader
 Nancy Ogden, Catherine Perkins, and David M. Donahue

makes of them, however, because their meaning is shaped by the author’s

intentions and choices in writing. Emphasizing the role of writer and reader
in constructing meaning, Paxton writes, “No matter how hard we try, it is
impossible to abandon who we are when we sit down to write, or indeed
when we sit down to read. A message can not be delivered absent a mes-
senger; can not be read sans a reader.”16
Of course, most secondary school history students do not spend most
of their time reading primary source documents, but the most bland of
secondary sources, textbooks, which are written by invisible, anonymous,
authoritative authors who “typically focus tightly on facts, events, and
people, and not the kinds of questions, decisions, and heuristics historians
employ in their day-to-day practice.”17 Not surprisingly, such texts impov-
erish students’ understanding of historical complexity and nuance. They
may also lead students to believe in “ultimate history”18 or the notion that
the objective historical truth exists and can be known.
By contrast, when students read primary sources or secondary sources
with strong authorial voice, they are more likely to read like historians: to
engage in metacognitive conversations between reader and imagined or
“mock” authors and audiences.19 Metacognitive conversations bring together
affective responses, understanding derived from conversation with others
about text, mental processing, and prior and new knowledge of facts, texts,
and the disciplines so readers can construct meaning.20 As part of these
conversations, readers engage in moral as well as intellectual analysis. As
Seixas writes, “it is impossible to construct meaning from the story of the
past without making moral judgments, either implicit or explicit.”21
Theories of how knowledge is generated in history run parallel to
constructivist theories about reading. In the last quarter of the twentieth
century, social scientists began to challenge the “scientific” or “objective”
basis of history and the social sciences.22 Rather than seeing their work
as a process of incremental advances leading closer and closer to under-
standing the “truth” about the past, historians came to see their work as
based in the assumptions, values, language and perspectives (grounded
in identities like race, class, and gender) of historians as individuals and
a community. In this post-modern era, history is not seen as a positivist
report of the past, but a story where historians, intentionally or not, leave
their imprint on the telling and where readers make sense of these imprints
as part of their process of understanding texts.

Lesson Study

The lesson, artifacts, and interpretations of student learning described

in this article were all the product of lesson study, an approach to teacher
Challenging Students’ Assumptions about Slavery in U.S. History 


professional development that is popular in Japan and increasingly imple-

mented in U.S. schools and districts where teacher inquiry, autonomy,
and knowledge are valued. Lesson study, a cornerstone of the Words That
Made America project, brings together teachers to collaborate on planning,
observing, and reflecting on their lessons. It privileges teachers’ questions
about student learning and the concrete experience of students and teachers
in their own classrooms. It brings together wisdom from those inside and
outside the school and encourages collaboration and joint ownership of
curriculum. Rather than evaluating one person’s teaching, lesson study
participants claim joint ownership of the lesson and focus on examining
student learning, not teacher performance. The goal is not to develop a
perfect lesson, but to make visible what and how students learn.
Lesson study differs from most U.S. educational research.23 It is de-
signed to yield local knowledge useful to teachers who developed the
lesson; it does not yield knowledge to be generalized to all contexts,
something necessary to understand as one reads the findings in the follow-
ing sections. We do not suppose that our findings apply to all students or
all teaching situations, but we do believe they raise important questions
for us and other teachers to consider as we approach teaching one of the
most important and difficult topics in U.S. history.
In this case, Nancy and Cathy, both A.P. U.S. history teachers, worked
with Words That Made America staff and historians from Mills College
to develop the lesson (see Appendix I). At the time they developed the
lesson, they had participated in three years of professional development
with Words That Made America, including learning historical content,
interpreting primary sources, and developing curriculum. Nancy and
Cathy taught the lesson, and everyone who contributed to the lesson’s
design observed Cathy’s students’ learning in one session, specifically
focused on how the students worked to make meaning from nineteenth-
century texts and how they considered the economic aspects of slavery.
In one immediate and one follow-up session, we discussed our observa-
tions, analyzed artifacts including students’ written work and our notes
on their conversations, and reflected on the implications for re-teaching
the lesson specifically and teaching U.S. history more generally. In a
subsequent session, we analyzed written responses from 114 students in
all four classes. The students were diverse in backgrounds, approximately
55% Asian/Pacific Islander, 20% Latino, 15% White, and 10% African
American. About one-third of the students were classified as English
learners or were recently reclassified as English proficient. The follow-
ing sections describe what we observed, present what we think it means
for teaching and learning U.S. history, and raise new questions for others
and ourselves.
 Nancy Ogden, Catherine Perkins, and David M. Donahue

First Encounter: Making Sense of Slavery as a

Global Economic Phenomenon

Early in the lesson, students read David Christy’s argument that mid-
nineteenth-century slavery was a global economic phenomenon from
which no one could entirely disassociate, including abolitionists (see Ap-
pendix II). Christy paints a world where absolutes do not exist and moral
ambiguity defines everyone’s participation in a world economy bound up
in slavery. Living in a time when slavery is considered morally corrupt
and its adherents are characterized as greedy, racist southerners, students
struggled to make sense of Christy’s economic and global perspective
and often applied their schema of slavery as a moral evil restricted to the
southern United States.
To make students’ thinking visible, we asked them to choose a one- or
two- sentence quotation from the selection that summarized Christy’s ar-
gument and explain why it was significant. About half the students chose
the sentences: “KING COTTON cares not whether he employs slaves or
freemen. It is the cotton, not the slaves, upon which his throne is based.”
Their reasons illustrate the power of previous narratives about slavery that
students brought to this selection and the obstacles they posed for inter-
preting complicated texts from another century. Of the students who chose
these sentences, only a handful, such as Rob and Eli,24 showed evidence of
understanding Christy’s argument that slavery was global and even aboli-
tionists could not disentangle themselves from it. Rob wrote, “King Cotton
controls the majority of the economy in America and England and no matter
who you are, abolitionists and slaveowners alike, you support cotton and
the slavery that supports it.” Eli stated, “Anyone who buys products that
had to do with cotton are supporting slavery, including abolitionists.”
More typical were students who misread or understood only part of
Christy’s argument. We speculate that many of these students had difficulty
with Christy’s argument because it did not easily fit with their prior schema
of clear-cut “good guys” and “bad guys” playing out a moral battle over
slavery in the southern United States. As Wineburg has noted, when students
draw on existing beliefs to incorporate new information, those existing
beliefs are powerful forces shaping what, if anything is learned.25
When students discussed the reading in pairs, we overheard many ask-
ing each other whether the writer was for or against slavery, indicating
they were trying to decide if he was “good” or “bad.” Such a perspective
may have been shaped by their earlier eighth-grade education and learning
from descriptions of debates over slavery that only two perspectives, for or
against, are relevant to understanding slavery in U.S. history. Writers such
as Christy, who analyzes slavery from a different position, send students
in a meaning making freefall where their prior knowledge does not help
Challenging Students’ Assumptions about Slavery in U.S. History 


or hinders comprehension.
Ted was representative of students who struggled to understand
Christy’s essay. Writing about King Cotton, he said, “The quote reveals
that slavery was not necessary and it plays a role in making cotton cheap
and accessible to others.” Val and Richard wrote, “The growing of cotton
did not require slavery, therefore King Cotton did not care for slavery but
the production of cotton itself… It shows how slavery is becoming less
needed in the agricultural system.” Having previously understood slav-
ery only in a context of nineteenth-century racist ideology, Ted, Val, and
Richard struggled with Christy’s idea that slaveowners were motivated
by economics and understood Christy to be saying that slavery was not
really needed, not following the argument that slavery was viewed at the
time as the only economically viable way to produce cotton. Karen, who
understood that Christy’s economic argument departed from her earlier
understanding of slavery only as a racist phenomenon, made this contrast
explicit in her comment: “It is surprising because it is trying to tell us that
slavery is not based on racial barriers, but solely on economics. It shows
us that economics was their excuse for slavery.”
Other students, in their written comments on these two sentences, im-
ply that Christy is suggesting a colorblind view of understanding slavery.
Charles and Vivian wrote, “The cotton industry doesn’t care about color,
just as long as the industry prospers. As long as the cotton is produced
with or without slaves, the cotton industry believes that slaves have clean
hands and pure hearts.” Their commentary indicates they misunderstood
Christy’s characterization of abolitionists, not slaves, as having clean hands
and pure hearts. Their comments may also indicate a desire to distance
discussion from the racist legacy of the past, perhaps to make the classroom
“safe” by denying the salience of race.
As they read, other students brought their prior schema of slavery as
a “peculiar institution” relegated to the southern United States and sup-
ported by sadistic or greedy planters. Students in all four classes com-
mented on how dependent and essential the cotton market was to the
South, even though Christy emphasizes the global reach of King Cotton.
James understood slavery in moral terms. He wrote, “This reveals to me
the closemindedness of the people back then. People were so cruel and do
not consider people’s feelings, only money.” James’s response may have
been provoked by the discrepancy between his own strong moral views
on slavery and Christy’s focus on its economic rationale. The emotional
dimension of his response may also indicate the empathy with slaves and
others who are oppressed that he brings to this reading.
Some students commented directly on how Christy’s argument con-
founded or contradicted their prior understanding. Chris disagreed with
Christy explicitly, writing, “This quote shows how people were fooling
 Nancy Ogden, Catherine Perkins, and David M. Donahue

themselves into believing slavery was ‘OK’ or acceptable. They claim

it’s for the better of the economy. It’s surprising because what they say
is opposite to reality. King Cotton was who he was because of slavery....
King Cotton made himself ignorant for the sake of his wealth.” In this
explanation, Chris draws on prior knowledge and moral arguments against
slavery. Other students were even more explicit in stating how Christy’s
text unsettled their understanding. Contrasting what she learned previously
with what Christy wrote, Susan commented, “The quote is surprising to
be me because cotton couldn’t thrive without slaves to pick it. At least
that’s what we’re taught.”
Students who quoted some other part of Christy’s essay were more likely
to have understood a central part of his argument about the global nature
of slavery. For example, students who chose the first sentence, “Slavery is
not an isolated system, but is so mingled with the business of the world,
that it derives facilities from the most innocent transactions,” were most
likely to understand Christy’s argument that slavery was global and not
limited to one part of the United States, and that participants in the global
economy, not excluding abolitionists, lent at least tacit support to slavery.
Laura and Marcy stated, “Slavery is clearly connected with the business of
the world” and then listed six specific examples. Caitlyn and Barbara noted
connections beyond the economic, including political and geographic:
Slave owners thought slavery merely dealt with cultivating crops and get-
ting work done, but it affected the entire world. The U.S. wasn’t united
because slave states and free states fought for political power. It also affected
the economy because it increased the amount of cash crops that could be
exported. It influenced politics because political parties emerged with dif-
ferent views on slavery. It inhibited expansion because of the struggles over
which new states would be slave and free. Industries flourished because
availability of cotton harvested by slaves allowed the growth of textile mills
leading to industrialization.
Caitlyn and Barbara draw on a rich schema to put Christy’s argument in
context. In this case, their prior knowledge helped them understand his
argument that slavery was deeply entwined, politically and economically,
in world affairs.
Other students quoted Christy’s sentence, “But they, no less than their
allies, aid in promoting the interests of Slavery,” that focused on the un-
witting participation of abolitionists in the global slave economy. Jessica
commented, “The irony of this shows how deeply embedded slavery was
in the American economy and how… everyone was connected to and af-
fected by the system.” Others pointed out the hypocrisy of abolitionists.
Ray said the sentence illustrated “that abolitionists are full of it because
they try and get rid of slavery but buy the cotton clothes to support it.”
Other students labeled abolitionists as hypocrites.
Challenging Students’ Assumptions about Slavery in U.S. History 


While students such as Ray appreciated Christy’s argument that the

slave economy enmeshed everyone, including abolitionists, they overlaid
a moral judgment of hypocrisy missing from Christy’s essay, a judgment
that reflects their prior schema of assigning people good and bad roles in
a fight against slavery. In this case, historical actors they understood to be
good shared qualities with others they understood to be bad, causing them
to level charges of hypocrisy rather than appreciate the moral ambiguity of
having to participate in a national and global economy. Perhaps students
were imagining that abolitionists could easily boycott cotton products or
identify products connected to slave rather than free labor. As Siexas writes,
“The problem of rendering judgments in history is complicated by the
fact that historians—and all of us—confront not the past itself but traces
and representations of the past from a position in the present.”26 From our
position in the early twenty-first century, not condemning the moral evil of
slavery may seem to leave one open to condoning or appearing “neutral”
about one of the gravest human rights abuses in U.S. history.
We see students’ reliance on moral frames of analysis for slavery as an
example of “collective memory” as opposed to “historical memory.” As
defined by Wineburg, collective memory, unlike its historical counterpart,
relies less on historians’ interpretation of evidence and mostly on “crystal-
lization in the media.”27 Collective memory about slavery is then based
not on documentary evidence as much as the images from film and other
forms of popular culture that shape our pictures of slavery. Such images
act as a filter for understanding the past.28
Our purpose in closely analyzing students’ interpretations of Christy is
not to label students as those who “get” his point and those who do not.
Indeed, our reading prompt allowed students to talk about what they saw
as significant rather than what they saw as the main point or thesis. But as
students discussed their ideas about the essay’s significance, they revealed
the constellation of prior knowledge and processes for making meaning that
they brought to a document not clearly “for” or “against” slavery. Christy’s
strong authorial voice may well have contributed to engagement with the
text, encouraging them to tap into prior knowledge and eliciting affec-
tive responses as well. As Paxton notes, “Students reading texts featuring
high levels of authorial voice tend to engage in mental conversations with
perceived authors, resulting in significantly more thought centering on the
primary historical subject matter.”29 We also believe that the discrepancy
between Christy’s economic analysis for understanding slavery and stu-
dents’ moral framing may have sparked “mock conversations” that drew
on their existing knowledge, beliefs, and values. In this sense, a text with
a contradictory moral message elicited more thinking than a text, such as
the typical U.S. history textbook, with no clear moral message.
Making historical thinking visible allows us to assess what students
10 Nancy Ogden, Catherine Perkins, and David M. Donahue

know. Rather than see students for what they do not understand, it allows
us to see what they do understand and how they make meaning even when
that meaning departs from the text. Making thinking visible also allows us
to track how their knowledge evolves over the course of a lesson, which
we discuss in the next section.

Upon Further Reflection: Making Sense of Slavery as a

Global Economic Phenomenon

In this section, we analyze students’ final writing assignment for this

lesson after looking at additional primary and secondary sources. Their
writing illustrates that the majority understood slavery as an economic
institution. A closer look at the writing revealed to us, however, that some
students still struggled with this concept. Some showed evidence of being
able to use economics to analyze slavery, but did not show evidence of
understanding it as an economic institution. And many students, perhaps
uncomfortable with analyzing slavery only as an economic institution,
wrote about how it was also a moral evil as well. Finally, some students
still drew on knowledge of slavery as a moral evil in ways that led to
misunderstandings of some of the primary and secondary sources.
To determine whether students understood slavery as an economic
institution, we looked in their writing for discussion of how slavery af-
fected more than the southern United States, how it was enmeshed in
business transactions with varying degrees of transparency, and how not
participating in an economy based on slavery was impossible for most
people, even abolitionists. Ralph was typical of students who showed such
understanding. He wrote:
Slavery is heavily involved with economics for a number of reasons.... The
institution provided the south with ample hands to pick cotton and grow
sugar. As slavery grows, so does the output of cotton, until the U.S.A.’s
main export is cotton. This cotton is not only used by the abolitionistic
north to power their businesses and supply their needs, it also goes to
England where although abolitionist polices are prevalent, there are no
qualms about taking the slave grown cotton to feed the endless hunger for
the English textile mills. Back in the U.S., slavery was an important factor
in states such as Virginia where the most money was made by raising and
selling slaves.... Thus, without the slaves, the economy would have fallen
into a heavy depression.
While Ralph’s explanation was clearer than those of some other students,
we found that more than half (83 out of 114 students) expressed ideas
similar to his.
By contrast, most students who did not show evidence of grasping
slavery as an economic institution cited economic statistics from the

Challenging Students’ Assumptions about Slavery in U.S. History 11

lesson’s six other primary and secondary sources and described them in
isolation, but not in connection to a larger understanding of slavery as a
global economic institution. Iris, for example, explained the meaning of
each document but never added the pieces together except for a conclud-
ing sentence that showed only vague understanding of their connections
to a larger phenomenon. Students such as Iris followed a pattern that
Paxton found typical of students’ history writing, “an organizational style
that essentially amounted to borrowing and slightly rewording excerpts
from the source texts, then sandwiching this information between stock
introductory and closing paragraphs.”30
We also found many students continuing to combine beliefs about slav-
ery as a moral wrong with their new knowledge of slavery as an economic
institution. While knowledge of slavery as a moral evil led some students
initially to misunderstand Christy’s economic analysis, by the end of
the lesson, students integrated both perspectives on slavery. Most often,
students taking this twin perspective in their essays focused on slavery as
an economic institution and concluded with a statement about it as a hu-
man rights abuse. For example, Joyce wrote, “Slavery was an economic
institution that affected the entire U.S. and world… but it also affected it
by having people do manual labor and back-breaking word for sacrifice
of something as simple and complex as money.”
In some cases, taking a twin perspective led to misperceptions. Mag-
dalena, for example, wrote, “Even abolitionists recognized how helpful
[slavery] was to the U.S. They never tried to really enforce laws dealing
against slavery because they knew that without slavery, the U.S. economy
would fall apart and they would not bring as much money.” Sabrina stated,
“The issue was not really about slaves or their ethnicity, it was all about
money and economic growth.” Tina concluded that slavery was “strictly
an economic issue and morals played no role in the debate.” Magdalena’s
beliefs about abolitionists’ hypocrisy may have led her to misunderstand
their position on slavery. We also note that some students, like Sabrina and
Tina, when confronted with new information, jettison the old. Rather than
understanding that abolitionists had moral and economic arguments against
slavery, students saw economic arguments supplanting moral ones.
Interestingly, only one student, Adam, explicitly connected slavery as
a global economic institution to similar phenomena today. Writing about
how people all over the world supported southern slavery regardless of
their geographic location or beliefs, he concluded, “This continues today,
except it is not slavery we support, but rather things such as child labor.”
Perhaps he did not make easy judgments because he recognized himself as
a participant in an economy where he could not say with certainty whether
his shirt was produced by children in Asia or union workers in the United
States. He was also the only student to put himself (as part of the “we”
12 Nancy Ogden, Catherine Perkins, and David M. Donahue

supporting child labor) in his essay. By contrast, many students, mimicking

the examples of authoritative textbooks with invisible authors, may have
left themselves out of their writing. Again following the model of their
textbooks, they relied on a “knowledge-telling” style of summarizing rather
than a “knowledge transformation” style of interpreting and analyzing.31

Implications for Student Understanding and Teaching History

Cathy and Nancy did not want students to abandon their view of slavery
as a moral wrong or human rights abuse. And even if they wanted to, the
evidence from this lesson shows that such a goal would be difficult, if not
impossible. Historical understanding is not easily changed or replaced.
Rather, as students read about new perspectives on the past, they build
understandings that represent varying combinations of old and new knowl-
edge, assumptions, and perspectives. In the cases of many students, these
new understandings blended moral perspectives with new knowledge of
slavery’s economic aspects.
Nancy and Cathy did want students to see beyond simplistic notions
of good and bad when examining the past, however, and believe lessons
like this are an important step. More nuanced understanding of moral
ambiguity helps students understand slavery in the nineteenth century and,
for example, continuing abuses of child labor in the twenty-first century.
Looking at slavery as a global phenomenon rather than a peculiar institu-
tion relegated to one section of the United States also helps students see
that globalization is not a new phenomenon.
Looking at students’ work from this lesson leaves us with several ideas
for supporting their development as critical readers and challenging their
historical assumptions, two interrelated endeavors. We see the importance
of asking students to surface prior knowledge, beliefs, and values before
they read, so they can interrogate them in light of their reading and so
teachers can point out dissonance between old ideas and new reading if
students do not. We also see the benefit of asking students to make their
thinking visible to themselves and others as they work to interpret historical
texts. Had we not asked students to talk with partners after first reading
Christy’s essay, we would not have seen how their focus on the moral
dimension of slavery was shaping their understanding of his economic
arguments about slavery. As students made these initial ideas visible, they
questioned each other about how they came to those ideas and what parts
of the text supported those ideas. As students engaged in this social process
of meaning making, they deepened understanding of the text.
To help students make empathetic historical judgments, we see the
value in making connections from the past to the present explicit. Too
often, students imagine persons in history living lives that have little to

Challenging Students’ Assumptions about Slavery in U.S. History 13

do with their own. Not seeing any connections between others’ lives and
their own, they are quicker to make facile judgments about the actions of
people in the past. Helping students consider how they are enmeshed in
global economic systems whose justice is ambiguous at best might have
prevented them from rushing to label abolitionists as hypocrites because
they could not remove themselves from a global cotton economy.
We also appreciate the difficulty of teaching high school history as his-
torians continually reframe the past. Textbooks rarely keep pace with such
developments, and even if they did, the contents of new textbooks cannot
erase and replace students’ old understanding. Instead, teachers need to
make explicit for students that knowledge of history in the profession at
large evolves in ways that parallel how it does for individual students in a
high school classroom: by revisiting texts with open minds, interrogating
old assumptions, engaging in conversations about meaning, and sharing
new ideas for critique. By helping students see this parallel, we can give
them not only more complex understanding of individual eras and events
in the past, but also deeper appreciation of how historical knowledge is
constructed.

Notes

1. Nancy Ogden and Catherine Perkins contributed equally to all aspects of cur-
riculum, teaching, and research described in this article. David Donahue led the data
analysis and writing. All three authors wish to acknowledge and thank Avi Black for so
ably directing the Words That Made America Project, supporting teachers as thoughtful
professionals, and making possible the work described in this article.
2. Paul S. Boyer, Clifford E. Clark, Joseph F. Kett, Neal Salisbury, Harvard Sitkoff,
and Nancy Woloch, Enduring Vision: A History of the American People to 1877 (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 2000).
3. David Quigley, “Southern Slavery in a Free City: Economy, Politics, and Cul-
ture,” Slavery in New York, eds. Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris (New York: The New
Press, 2005), 265.
4. Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, Slavery and
Justice: Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice
(Providence, RI: Brown University, 2006): 13.
5. Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United
States Government’s Relations to Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
6. Quigley, 269.
7. Quoted in Quigley, 283.
8. Quoted in Brown University, 11.
9. Matthew Kauffman, “The Cost of Slavery Was High: But Who Will Pay for
It?” Hartford Courant on the Web 29 September 2002, 3 April 2007 <http://www.courant.
com/hc-reparations.artsept29,0,5577477.story>. For additional information on northern
14 Nancy Ogden, Catherine Perkins, and David M. Donahue

business connections to slavery, see David Roediger and Martin H. Blatt, eds., The Mean-
ing of Slavery in the North (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998) and Anne Farrow, Joel
Lang, and Jenifer Frank, Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited
from Slavery (New York: Ballantine Books, 2005).
10. Thomas Bender, A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2006).
11. Words That Made America, a professional development program to increase
teachers’ knowledge of history and how to teach it, works in the Hayward and San Leandro,
California Unified School Districts with fourth-, fifth-, eighth-, and eleventh-grade teachers
who, following the state’s history-social science framework, are responsible for teaching
California and U.S. history. For more information about Worlds That Made America,
contact Avi Black, Project Director, phone: 510-670-5239 or email: ablack@acoe.org.
12. Gaea Leinhardt and Kathleen McCarthy Young, “Two Texts, Three Readers:
Distance and Expertise in Reading History,” Cognition and Instruction 14.4 (1996):
441.
13. Sam Wineburg, “The Cognitive Representation of Historical Texts,” Teaching
and Learning in History, eds. Gaea Leinhardt, Isabel L. Beck, and Catherine Stainton
(Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 1994): 85-136.
14. Leinhardt and McCarthy Young, “Two Texts, Three Readers,” 478.
15. Ruth Schoenbach, Cynthia Greenleaf, Christine Cziko, and Lori Hurwitz, Read-
ing for Understanding (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999).
16. Richard J. Paxton, “A Deafening Silence: History Textbooks and the Students
Who Read Them,” Review of Educational Research 69.30 (1999): 318.
17. Paxton, “A Deafening Silence,” 317. For more on author visibility and its
connection to student understanding of history, see Richard J. Paxton, “The Influence of
Author Visibility on High School Students Solving a Historical Problem,” Cognition and
Instruction 20.2 (2002): 197-248.
18. Edward Hallet Carr, What is History? (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961).
19. Sam Wineburg, “On the Reading of Historical Texts: Notes on the Breach
Between School and Academy,” American Educational Research Journal 28 (1991):
495-519.
20. Schoenbach, et al.
21. Peter Seixas, “Historical Understanding among Adolescents in a Multicultural
Setting,” Curriculum Inquiry 23.3 (1993): 303.
22. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1970); Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and
the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
23. To learn more about lesson study, see Catherine Lewis and Ineko Tschudia, “A
Lesson Is Like a Swiftly Flowing River: Research Lessons and the Improvement of Japanese
Education,” American Educator 22.4 (1998): 12-17, 50-52 and James Stigler and James
Hiebert, The Teaching Gap: Best Ideas from the World’s Teachers for Improving Education
in the Classroom (New York: Free Press, 1999). For a practical guide to lesson study, see
Catherine Lewis, Lesson Study: A Handbook of Teacher-Led Instructional Change (Phila-
delphia: Research for Better Schools, 2002). For an example of lesson study in a Teaching
American History project, see Stan Pesick and Shelly Weintraub, “DeTocqueville’s Ghost:
Examining the Struggle for Democracy in America,” The History Teacher 36.2 (2003):
231-247.
24. Pseudonyms are used throughout to refer to students.
25. Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 2001).

Challenging Students’ Assumptions about Slavery in U.S. History 15

26. Peter Seixas, “Confronting the Moral Frames of Popular Film: Young People
Respond to Historical Revisionism,” American Journal of Education 102 (1994): 264.
27. Wineburg, Historical Thinking, 242.
28. Seixas, “Confronting the Moral Frames.”
29. Paxton, “A Deafening Silence,” 329.
30. Paxton, “A Visible Author,” 233.
31. Paxton, “A Deafening Silence,” 322.

Appendix I

Beyond Face Value: A Document-Based Lesson on the Economics of Slavery

Abstract:
Students study nineteenth-century slavery in the United States as part of a larger global
economic phenomenon. They examine Confederate currency illustrated with images of
slavery to begin thinking about slavery’s connection to the economy, read primary and
secondary sources that examine the economic aspects of slavery, and draw their own
conclusions about the role of economics in sustaining slavery in the United States into
the 1800s.

Focus Question:
How was slavery a global economic phenomenon?

Understanding Goals:
Through this lesson, students should understand that:
• Slavery was more than only a “peculiar institution” related to one section of
the United States
• Slavery was part of a complex economic system in addition to being part of
political, social, and racial systems
• Moral ambiguity characterizes participation in complex economic systems

Activities:
Part 1: Money and imagery
Ask students to look at a dollar bill or other currency they brought to class.

What is on the bill?

Why is it there?

Facilitate the discussion so students understand that nations place important political
and economic symbols on their currency.

Next, show students examples of confederate currency illustrated with slavery.

Examples can be found at http://www.cwc.lsu.edu/BeyondFaceValue/beyondfacevalue.
htm, the link to Beyond Face Value: Depictions of Slavery on Confederate Currency, an
online exhibit of the United States Civil War Center at Louisiana State University. The
16 Nancy Ogden, Catherine Perkins, and David M. Donahue

exhibit includes images of over 100 banknotes and accompanying text. Select five to
ten examples.

What do you see on these bills?

Why are these images there?

Help students understand that confederate currency included images of slavery because
it was a pervasive and important part of the confederate economy.

Part 2: An introduction to an economic analysis of slavery

Ask students to read by themselves David Christy’s 1855 essay on the cotton economy
(See Appendix II). This is a challenging text, even for A.P. students. To help students
unpack the essay’s meaning, ask them to discuss it with a partner for 10 minutes.
Focus the pair discussion by giving students a 4x6 card. Ask them to quote one or two
sentences from Christy’s essay on one side. They should quote an excerpt that they
believe speaks to something significant about U.S. history. On the other side of the 4x6
card, they should briefly explain why they believe the excerpt they quoted is significant.

After the paired discussion, engage the whole class in a discussion of the article’s
meaning and significance.

What parts of Christy’s essay did you quote?

Why did you choose those parts as significant?
What are Christy’s main ideas?

As students share their ideas, encourage them to connect their own quotations or
explanations of significance to ideas already shared by other classmates.

Part 3: Going deeper with an economic analysis of slavery

Ask students to read the following documents (See Appendix III for each of the
documents):

Document 1: Value of Cotton Exports as a Percentage of All U.S. Exports, 1800-1860

Document 2: Impending Crisis/1860 Georgia Governor’s Message
Document 3: Slave Trade as Big Business
Document 4: Price of Male Slave over the Life-Cycle, Old South, 1850
Document 5: Slavery and Economic Development, Part 1
Document 6: Slavery and Economic Development, Part 2

To guide students’ reading, ask them to complete the chart in Appendix IV. The chart
helps students connect each reading to Christy’s main ideas about the connection
between economics and slavery. This part of the lesson can be completed either
individually or in pairs.

Assessment:
Ask students to write their answer to the question: How was slavery an economic
institution in the United States and the world? OR How do the documents support
Christy’s claim that slavery was a global economic phenomenon?

Challenging Students’ Assumptions about Slavery in U.S. History 17

Appendix II

David Christy on the Cotton Economy, 1855

Source: James J. Lorence, Enduring Voices, Volume 1 to 1877, (Boston: Houghton

Mifflin, 2000) 242.

Slavery is not an isolated system, but is so mingled with the business of the world,
that it derives facilities from the most innocent transactions. Capital and labor, in Europe
and America, are largely employed in the manufacture of cotton. These goods, to a great
extent, may be seen freighting every vessel, from Christian nations, that traverses the seas
of the globe; and filling the warehouses and shelves of the merchants over two-thirds of
the world. By the industry, skill, and enterprise, employed in the manufacture of cotton,
mankind are better clothed; their comfort better promoted; general industry more highly
stimulated; commerce more widely extended; and civilization more rapidly advanced,
than in any preceding age....

KING COTTON cares not whether he employs slaves or freemen. It is the cotton, not
the slaves, upon which his throne is based. Let freemen do his work as well, and he will
not object to the change. Thus far the experiments in this respect have failed, and they
will not soon be renewed. The efforts of his most powerful ally, Great Britain, to promote
that object, have already cost her people many hundreds of millions of dollars: with total
failure as a reward for her zeal....

KING COTTON is a profound statesman, and knows what measures will best sustain
his throne. He is an acute mental philosopher, acquainted with the secret springs of human
action, and accurately perceives who will best promote his aims. He has no evidence that
colored men can grow his cotton, but in the capacity of slaves. It is his policy, therefore,
to defeat all schemes of emancipation.

In speaking of the economical connections of Slavery with the other material interests
of the world, we have called it a tri-partite alliance. It is more than this. It is quadruple.
Its structure includes four parties, arranged thus: The Western Agriculturalists; the Southern
Planters; the English Manufacturers; and the American Abolitionists! By this arrangement,
the Abolitionists do not stand in direct contact with Slavery: –they imagine, therefore, that
they have clean hands and pure hearts, so far as sustaining the system is concerned. But
they, no less than their allies, aid in promoting the interests of Slavery. Their sympathies
are with England on the Slavery question, and they very naturally incline to agree with
her on other points. She advocates Free Trade, as essential to her manufactures and com-
ers; and they do the same,.... England, we were about to say, is in alliance with the cotton
planter, to whose prosperity Free Trade is indispensable. Abolitionism is in alliance with
England. All three of these parties, then, agree in their support of the Free Trade policy. It
needed but the aid of the Western Farmer, therefore, to give permanency to this principle.
His adhesion has been given, the quadruple alliance has been perfected, and Slavery and
Free Trade nationalized!
18 Nancy Ogden, Catherine Perkins, and David M. Donahue

Appendix III

Documentary evidence on slavery and economics

Document 1: Value of Cotton Exports as a Percentage of All U.S. Exports, 1800-

1860
Source: James J. Lorence, Enduring Voices, Volume 1 to 1877 (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Co., 2000).

By 1840 cotton accounted for more than half of all U.S. exports.

Document 2: Impending Crisis/1860 Georgia Governor’s Message

Source: Hinton Helper, The Impending Crisis of the South, 1857; Paul S. Boyer,
Enduring Vision: A History of the American People to 1877, 2000.

Notwithstanding the fact that the white non-slaveholders of the South are in the
majority as five to one, they have never yet had any part or lot in framing the laws
under which they live. There is no legislation except for the benefit of slavery and
slaveholders.

In 1860, Georgia’s governor sent a blunt message to his constituents, many of them
non-slaveholders: “So soon as the slaves were at liberty thousands of them would leave
the cotton and rice fields.... and make their way to the healthier climate of the mountain
region [where] we should have them plundering and stealing, robbing and killing.”
There was no mistaking the conclusion. Emancipation would not merely deprive
slaveholders of their property, it would jeopardize the lives of non-slaveholders.

Document 3: Slave Trade as Big Business

Source: Paul S. Boyer, Enduring Vision: A History of the American People to 1877,
2000.

The profitability of cotton and sugar increased the value of slaves. From the declining
plantation states of the Upper South to the booming Lower South became a huge
business. “Virginia,” an observer stated in 1832, “is, in fact, a Negro raising State for
other States; she produces enough fro her own supply, and six thousand a year for sale.”
Without the sale of its slaves, he concluded, “Virginia will be a desert.”

Document 4: Price of Male Slave over the Life-Cycle, Old South, 1850
Source: Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The
Economics of American Negro Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1974).

Document 5: Slavery and Economic Development, Part 1

Source: Steven Mintz, “Was Slavery the Engine of Economic Growth?” Digital
History, 2003, 14 November 2006 <http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/
con_economic.cfm>.

Nevertheless, slavery was indispensable to European development of the New World.

It is inconceivable that European colonists could have settled and developed North
and South America and the Caribbean without slave labor. Moreover, slave labor
did produce the major consumer goods that were the basis of world trade during the

Challenging Students’ Assumptions about Slavery in U.S. History 19

eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: coffee, cotton, rum, sugar, and tobacco.

In the pre-Civil War United States, a stronger case can be made that slavery played a
critical role in economic development. One crop, slave-grown cotton, provided over
half of all U.S. export earnings. By 1840, the South grew 60 percent of the world’s
cotton and provided some 70 percent of the cotton consumed by the British textile
industry. Thus slavery paid for a substantial share of the capital, iron, and manufactured
goods that laid the basis for the American economic growth. In addition, precisely
because the South specialized in cotton production, the North developed a variety of
businesses that provided services for the slave South, including textile factories, a meat
processing industry, insurance companies, shippers, and cotton brokers.

Document 6: Slavery and Economic Development, Part 2

Source: Mintz, “Was Slavery the Engine of Economic Growth?”

There can be no doubt that opponents of slavery had come to view the South’s “peculiar
institution,” as an obstacle to economic growth. Despite clear evidence that slavery
was profitable, abolitionists—and many people who were not abolitionists—felt
strongly that slavery degraded labor, inhibited urbanization and mechanization,
thwarted industrialization, and stifled progress, and associated slavery with economic
backwardness, inefficiency, indebtedness, and economic and social stagnation. When
the North waged war on slavery, it was not because it had overcome racism; rather, it
was because Northerners in increasing numbers identified their society with progress
and viewed slavery as an intolerable obstacle to innovation, moral improvement, free
labor, and commercial and economic growth.
20 Nancy Ogden, Catherine Perkins, and David M. Donahue

Appendix IV

Slavery and its economic connections

How does this document

support Christy’s claims
Document Main Idea Summary
about slavery as an
economic institution?

Document 1:
Value of Cotton Exports
as a Percentage of All U.S.
Exports, 1800-1860

Document 2:
Impending Crisis/1860
Georgia Governor’s
Message

Document 3:
Slave Trade as Big Business

Document 4:
Price of Male Slave over the
Life-Cycle, Old South, 1850

Document 5:
Slavery and Economic
Development, Part 1

Document 6:
Slavery and Economic
Development, Part 2