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Enslaved Human Beings as Historical Synecdoche: imagining the U.S. future through the past.

Edward E. Baptist Cornell University

Paper apresentado ao Seminrio Internacional Escravido e Capitalismo Histrico: Histria e Historiografia Brasil, Cuba e Estados Unidos, sculo XIX.

Lab-Mundi/ Programa de Ps-Graduao em Histria Social Universidade de So Paulo Sala 24 do Departamento de Antropologia 16 de Setembro de 2013 Verso provisria para discusso no Seminrio. Solicita-se no circular ou citar sem autorizao prvia do autor.

In the summer of 2013, I took a long driving trip with my daughter Lillian. Our goal was to look at the ways in which slavery was present or absent in the public spaces of the South. Lillian brought her camera, and I brought my notebook and voice recorder so that I could interview people. We traveled along the old slave traders' trail, the artery that populated the cotton South during the years between the American Revolution and the defeat of the slaveholders' breakaway republic in 1865. At the beginning of this time period, in the 1780s slavery in the U.S. was an apparently dying institution. While 800,000 people, or nearly 20% of the new postcolonial republic's non-Indian population were enslaved, and while the institution of chattel slavery existed in law and fact in every one of the thirteen United States, slavery as a political economic force was on the retreat. Indeed, we started from a town in upstate New York that had been founded around 1800 by slaveowners and their slaves. But in this town, known as Ithaca, slavery had ceased to exist by the 1810s. In state after northern state, slavery was ended or set on the road to extinction by that time. To the south, in the Chesapeake, Carolinas, and Georgia, enslaved people were much more numerous relative to the overall population. But in those places, too, slavery seemed to be receding. In Chesapeake, many enslavers were voluntarily manumitting their enslaved captives in the 1780s. Some did so because the institution seemed to have no political future in a world where the slaveowning author of the nation's founding document had not only insisted that all people were entitled to life and liberty, but who had also tried to block slavery's expansion into the nation's continental territories, the zone of future growth. And some were manumitting their slaves because the institution seemed to have no economic future, certainly not one that would justify future capital investments of the massive sort that were always necessary to make slavery expand. Economically, slavery in the southeast appeared to be decaying. World tobacco demand crumbled in the 1780s, just as Chesapeake planters started to take stock of the fact that most of them were deeply indebted. Markets for other agricultural products, like the corn and wheat consumed by slaves in the West Indies, had been closed to American producers by a British

imperial administration determined to make the Americans pay for the offence of winning their independence. Once the Haitian Revolution broke out in 1791, meanwhile, many educated people in Europe and in the Americas believed that the old model of slavery was over. The cost of sugar and other plantation commodities might too high for them, if it meant the continual replenishment of the Americas' plantations with a slave trade from Africa that brought rebels to the colonies. So many turned to trying to abolish the Atlantic slave trade, and often they believed that by so doing they would also bring an end to slavery itself.

But the world turned. An era that had looked as though it would be one of emancipation turned instead into one in which slavery grew at an unprecedented rate. Once a narrow strip of

plantations clinging to the coast, the slave South would become a massive complex subcontinental in size, imprisoning four million people in an ever-widening cage built from the steel of white folks' mutual economic interest in and political commitment to slavery. The economic interest was real, mutual, and ever-growing, because in upland cotton, Southern enslavers found a crop that they could force enslaved people to grow more efficiently than free labor could accomplish. That crop, in no small measure because enslaved African Americans churned it out at ever-increasing rates of productivity, turned out to be the most important raw material of the First Industrial Revolution. As the world's economy, or at least some sectors of it, began to break the Malthusian barriers of human social and economic organization that had bound every society in the eighty-odd centuries since the invention of agriculture, the rate of cotton-consumption only accelerated. Making all of that expansion possible was the forced movement of enslaved African Americans from the older parts of the South to the newer ones. Over the next lifetime, from the 1780s to the 1860s, U.S. enslavers would drive over one million people down one channel or another of the slave trail leading from southeast to southwest. Some went by land. Some went by sea. Some went by the rivers. Some went with their original owners. Even more went with professional slave traders, a class of entrepreneurs who emerged in full bloom by the early

1820s. Most forced migrants were young, and most were separated from loved ones and from their community of origin. Their experience was a giant collective wound on the social and cultural body of African-American life. That scar, visible in the maps of cotton production, 1860 slave population, and even the vote for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. must surely also be visible in the ways in which people along the path talked about and memorialized the past. If slave traders route had a particular origin point, it was surely in the Chesapeake region--Maryland and Virginia--but in general the forced movement of enslave people began in the older Southern states and moved southwest towards the Mississippi Valley. So from Ithaca we headed to the District of Columbia, the national capital of the United States. We moved south through Richmond and the Virginia-North Carolina Piedmont. Then we drove across the southern spur of the great Appalachian Mountains. Once we reached the Black Belt of Alabama, where the rich dirt had long ago told migrant entrepreneurs of the possibility that the region could make incredible heaps of cotton, and where the still-high population of African descent reveals that enslavers had moved in armies of the current residents' ancestors, we knew we were in a different place. That impression did not change as we moved across the breadth of Mississippi to find another landing place in Natchez, the first great cotton and banking center of the southwestern interior, settled first by the French, and then by Anglo-American planters. For the last one hundred years the city has made its money as a mecca for "Old South" tourism, as the destination of what is literally called The Natchez Pilgrimage--an occasion for white people to visit a vast array of well-preserved "great houses." Upon leaving Natchez, there was only one place left to visit, if we were interested in looking at the way the U.S. South's past was remembered. We had no choice but to continue south to New Orleans. And so we did, finishing our journey where the Mississippi River binds a city as vital as a healing wound. It should be no surprise to anyone who has visited New Orleans that there we found no shortage of people willing to talk about the city's history and culture. But we found very few who could incorporate into their narratives the fact that New Orleans was the ultimate terminus of almost the domestic slave trading route-. Indeed, there was no public memorialization of the

dozens of slave traders' pens that lined the boulevards of the CBD or Central Business District, where coffee houses now stand between federal courts and boutique hotels. There was no memorialization along the trendy streets of the Faubourg Marigny, where white hipsters and gay professionals have waved their remodelling wand and created the city's most desirable real estate. And there was no notice on the levee that runs along the French Quarter's riverfront that this was the place where many of the ancestors of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas' AfricanAmerican inhabitants were unloaded from slave traders' boats. Some had come down the river from Kentucky and Missouri, the overland one that Lillian and I had retraced by car. Some had come by the seaborne one from eastern ports Richmond, which by themselves seem to have moved more than 200,000 people through New Orleans in just the four and a half decades following 1815--almost all of them across that levee. New Orleans has a neighborhood called the "Irish Channel", whose name remembers the immigrants who came to work in the city's cotton warehouses and dig its drainage canals. But we did not find that they called the strip of piled earth and rock that protects the city from the river and once served as its main wharf by the name the "Internal Slave Trade Levee." In fact, everywhere Lillian and I traveled on this journey, we found two things. First, that the route was invisible. It was invisible in the map, and it was almost everywhere invisible in memory. And second, the route was invisible because most of the stories told in public about the history of slavery in the U.S. have focused on other things, even though the pulsing of slaverys expansion into the cotton South was at the heart of the stories that slaverys survivors told. Instead, while the stories told about U.S. slavery have changed repeatedly since the late nineteenth century, they have never really been stories about slavery. Instead, they have been driven by the specific nature of African-American engagement in the political economy of the United States at the point in time when people are telling the story. In other words, the historiography of slavery in the U.S. is a series of synecdoches. A synecdoche is a small story that is meant to represent a larger one, one more important to the teller. And so the history of slavery has been deployed again and again as a synecdoche for the political economic status of

African American people--and for what the teller of the particular tale thinks should be their future status.

Period 1: from the end of Reconstruction to Kenneth Stampp It is now well-known that the Confederate South lost on the battlefield between 1861 and 1865, but won the much long war to control the way the history of the war's causes and outcomes were told. By late 1890s, the Northern U.S. had completely abandoned its all-too-brief commitment to a rich version of emancipation, in which the formerly enslaved and their descendants would participate in the Union as equal political citizens and economic actors. Instead, for a variety of reasons, not least of which the fact that racism was a deeply-seated part of white identity in the North as well as in the South, the North permitted Southern white political actors to retake the high ground of the Southern political economy in the 1870s. Within a few years, meanwhile, another startling transformation began to dawn. Union victory had been a source of pride and identity for millions of Northerners. But in the 1880s and 1890s, Southern whites launched a massive campaign to memorialize and justify not only the Confederacy--erecting statues, investing entire state budgets in supporting Confederate war veterans--but to do the same for slavery itself. The argument that slavery was not wrong, that it was selfless instead of exploitative became an article of faith in popular historical circles. And then what had been told in local political speeches and novels of the Lost Cause slowly crept upward into the brand-new history Ph.D. programs that were starting to appear in elite Northern universities. This process, explained by recent historians David Blight, Peter Novick, Gaines Foster and others, shows how the first generation of professional historians began to paint a picture of U.S. slavery as a depicted slavery as a "school" in which savage Africans were trained for civilization. The institution was paternalist and benign--at least, for enslaved people, who loved their masters and mistresses and did not possess the desire for freedom until the abolitionist snake entered the Eden of the timeless plantation. It might not have been so benign for the South's whites, whose selfless choice to maintain their inherently lazy and uncivilized

slaves in the gentle institution of the plantation--which these historians depicted as economically premodern and unprofitable. The pastoral South fell behind the industrializing North, which was led by cunning Yankees who put profits before people. The leaders of this new ideological history included famous names like Ulrich B. Phillips, who pioneered the collection and use of planter's personal and business papers, John Dunning, who trained a generation of Reconstruction historians to insist that the process of rebuilding after the war was fatally flawed by the North's enabling of "Negro domination" over more civilized whites and Woodrow Wilson--who went on to be President of first Princeton University, and then of the entire U.S. Wilson famously spoke at the Gettysburg on the 50th anniversary of Lincoln's address--which had argued that what would define the U.S. henceforward was not only emancipation but equality. And Wilson implicitly rebuked Lincoln. This revisionist historiography had a purpose, and by the early 20th century, the payoff was clear. The "Negro's" training in slavery might have futile, implied many such historians, for they clearly doubted whether people of such an inferior race were capable of living as whites' equals. But what was even less successful was Northern white interference in the relationship of the races. Abolitionism, "Northern aggression" leading to the Civil War, and radical Reconstruction had supposedly all failed, and had in fact made life worse for African Americans. Southern white historians and politicians insisted that clear evidence for their case could be found in the post-emancipation era, when supposedly black men who had listened to Northern white claims that the races had been equal took that as license to unleash their savage natures an alleged epidemic of black-on-white rape. Thus they justified the astonishing epidemic of lynching that swept the South in the years after 1890. But thus they also provided justification for "Jim Crow": the spatial segregation of life in the South. The creation of separate public facilities like black and white water fountains, the denial of access to public transportation, and above all the denial of equal economic and academic access was an attempt to denigrate African Americans and convince them to behave as if they were inferior. (It also attempted to keep African Americans from obtaining economic independence, achieving mobility, or any of the

other things necessary to escape the status of being the hewers of wood and drawers of water at the hard-labor foundation of the Southern agricultural economy.) The new historiography also worked to justify the wave of disfranchisement that swept through Southern states in the same time period. In state after state, white politicians and political activists conspired to drive African Americans en masse from the voting rolls. With grandfather clauses, literacy tests, poll taxes, and whites-only party primaries, the dramatically reduced the black vote. The new laws all disfranchised many whites as well. By the 1904 Presidential election, only 29% of all adult males, white and black, voted in the South, as opposed to 65% in the North.1 The disfranchisement of such whites was no accident, of course, since despite the stereotype of poor whites as the bearer of the most livid forms of anti-black racism, the propertyless white sharecroppers and others being economically disfranchised by the Souths postwar transformations had been the most likely to join with African-American voters in third-party movements like the Readjusters and Populists. But then, to compensate all whites for the massive shift in local and state electoral power from the hands of the many to the few, states and municipalities also fully implemented the complex laws and customs we call Jim Crow, or segregation. Thus, between 1890 and 1910, Southern whites continued to drive African-Americans into a status as close to slavery as they could manage. Of course, the reality is that without the antebellum era's legal and societal bonds, many African Americans were mobile enough to leave the South or at least change employers, while others were able to exercise the right to own property. Jim Crow and slavery were different. But the hold that the racist South had on the imagination of the broader nation was strong. For the next half-century or more, the historians' vision of the African American as someone who should be kept in the South, in the status of third-class citizen, and at the bottom of the economic pyramid was widely accepted throughout the nation. Supposedly the history of slavery, emancipation, and Reconstruction proved that equality was wasted on inherently inferior racesespecially Negroes. Immutable, biological identity made access to granting any meaningfully sovereign form of citizenship to African

Americans a futile endeavor for the whole white nation. This was the lesson Wilson drew in 1913: that fighting the Civil War had not produced a new birth of freedom. Instead, it had been a giant mistake.

The Long Era of Civil Rights Influence on Slavery Historiography After World War II, however, the way U.S. historians wrote about the experience and legacy of slavery began to change dramatically. Recently, scholars of the Civil Rights movement have begun to speak of a "Long Civil Rights Era" that began well before the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which ruled against separate but "equal" schools and which has also been seen as the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement per se. instead, scholars see the roots of both the anti-segregation commitment by organizations like the SCLC and CORE, and broad popular movements like sit-ins or the Montgomery Bus Boycott as stretching far back, even to World War I. Likewise, we should be aware that books like Kenneth Stampp's The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (1956) began well before their authors sat down in the archive and put paper to pencil. We should also pause to acknowledge the irony: that much of the vast archival base on which the multiple revisions of the historiography of slavery would henceforth be based had been collected by the architects of slaverys post facto defense. Spurred on by Ulrich B. Philips, the master historian of the master class (the master at least until Eugene Genovese changed teams and joined the right-wing noise machine in the 1990s), archivists in the South fanned out across the region in the 1920s and 30s and collected vast quantities of surviving planter records. Most of these archivists saw their job as saving the heritage of the Souths noble planter class, and manylike the greatest, perhaps, J.G. de Roulhac Hamilton, of the University of North Carolinas Southern Historical Collectionwere racist historians in their own right. Over time, while some scholars would continue to ways this vast archive in ways that Philips and Hamilton intended, growing numbers would turn the sources against the authors self-congratulatory intent.

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Meanwhile, the WPA interviews with ex-slaves, which would by the early 1970s become essential components of the archive on which a new historiography inspired by black protest movements drew heavily, were themselves part of a broad turn during the 1930s away from a national narrative dictated by the nation's business elite. Within many of the offices that directed the different statewide campaigns to interview survivors of slavery--ultimately two thousand of them--interviewers who wanted to document the brutalities of slavery clashed with those who wanted to gather evidence that slaves loved their masters. And those who believed that in the traditions of the folk--black folk included--lay wisdom stored up by centuries of ordinary people typed up their interview notes and submitted them to the same directors who also employed outright racists who tried to coerce African-American interview subjects into lampooning memory of their own elders and peers. The first viewpoint, that of people energized by the great rethinking of capitalism sparked in the Depression and Popular Front eras, was the one ratified by the utterly transformative experience of World War II. Engaged in a the greatest war of history, against two enemies who openly endorsed genocidal ideologies of racial superiority, President Franklin Roosevelt and the U.S. took up instead the mantle of human equality and rights. This required Southern and other racists to dial back the public intensity of their defense of their apartheid-like regime. Not all went along with the program, but Roosevelt--pushed by African-American activist movements and organizations--used the muscle of the state to impose desegregation on key sites of the war effort. In war factories where the weapons to defeat the Axis were being forged, the federal government imposed at least de jure desegregation. And after the war, as revelations about the German state's campaign of racist genocide against European Jewry and other peoples shocked American soldiers and others, Southern white racists infuriated the federal government with a series of vicious attacks on African American soldiers. In response to the new climate, Roosevelt's successor Truman imposed integration on the armed forces. And as the nation reignited the engines of its military-industrial complex for what proved to be a long Cold War against the Soviet bloc, the federal government and all who sought to justify U.S. international

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hegemony knew that segregation's survival was incompatible with the claim that the American part of the world was "free." It was in this environment that new work on the history of slavery in the U.S., and of its end, began to appear. The first was not Stampp, whose axiomatic position that he began from the point of view that enslaved African Americans were no different than "white men in black skin" has, by the way, been willfully misinterpreted. Stampp meant that he was casting off the old claim that enslaved people, because of their racial nature, were happy to be slaves and were indeed not fit for full citizenship--and nor were their descendants. Like the students sitting at King's sandwich Shop in Durham, North Carolina in 1957 he was insisting that black people claimed the same rights as white people. And that even if those rights were denied in the harshest possible ways, as in slavery, those people were still aware of the righteousness of their claims to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Actually, the first historian in this new lineage ought to be John Hope Franklin, whose position on these issues would never change. And that was this: that enslaved African Americans were not happy to be slaves and that they were the objects of brutality inflicted by an unstable and militaristic set of violent Southern whites. From his first book, The Free Negro In North Carolina to one of his last, Runaway Slaves (with Loren Schweninger), Franklin argued that over the years opposition to slavery was constant and was enabled through alliances with free African Americans and others. What's also notable is the way that these histories, notably that of Stampp, looked fairly carefully at labor and acknowledged that violence, including that in the cotton fields, was a crucial prop of the system slavery. Indeed that violence was in the short term successful, since it enabled a disruptive and profitable system of expansion that Stampp spent nearly a chapter describing in general terms. While neither Stampp nor Franklin could be described as historians of the labor process, they acknowledged that it existed. Of course, they didnt argue that slavery equaled capitalism, or that it was a formative stage dialectically linked to the great transformations of the AngloAtlantic and even wider world in the nineteenth century. (That task was left to W.E.B. DuBois

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and C.L.R. James, although their influence was even more segregated from the history of 19th century U.S. slavery.) But perhaps it was inevitable that as the civil rights movement grew and encountered more and more violent opposition in the early 1960s, it shied away from a fundamentally economic analysis of African-American inequality. While local movements would push for equal access to jobs or to the opportunity to use credit and buy houses, the broader movement had to appeal to an American majority well-known to shy away from redistributive, much less socialist solutions. So the ongoing historiography of 19th-century US slavery, which ended in a burst of federally mandated emancipation not unparalleled in its character and ambiguous outcomes by the unsteady defenses of 1960s activists mounted by federal officials, and more clearly by the Civil Rights legislation which reached its high point under Lyndon Johnson, focused on other matters than the way that wealth was produced in slavery, and where it went. In fact, slavery tended to be depicted as economic foolishness. But instead, the historiography chewed first on the question of how change happened. And the model for change, for resistance to oppression, that is encoded deep in the U.S. psyche, is that of violent and uncompromising rebellion against would-be tyrants. For a nation birthed from a revolution against a foreign monarch, a rebellion supposedly driven by a commitment to selfdetermination of both the nation and the individual citizen, what else could the central assumption be? And going back all the way back to founders like Sam Adams was a corollary assumption: that those who were willing to die of old age as the subjects of tyranny were not worthy to live as free men. But were the enslaved sufficiently rebellious to be taken seriously as potential citizens? Some argued that they had rebelled. Earnest Marxist Herbert Aptheker combed preemancipation newspapers and court documents uncritically for decades, and produced a thick book, American Negro Slave Revolts, which listed hundreds of purported slave rebellions and plots. Yet as African historian David Johnson once put it, conspiracy-minded antebellum whites had spotted a slave revolt every time they say two negroes behind a tree having a conversation, and Aptheker accepted their reasoning.

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Meanwhile, using a bogus argument drawn from a bogus precedent, Stanley Elkins argued in American Slavery: A Problem in Intellectual and Institutional Life [1959] that just like the victims of German concentration camps, enslaved people in the U.S. slipped into an infantilized state and did not oppose slavery. The analogy was a deadline-inspired lift from Bruno Bettelhiems account of the death camps. That in turn, with its claim that camp inmates identified with their captors, surrendered their moral sense, and submitted willingly to death has been seriously questioned by those who question Bettelheims research ethics and the actual existence of his evidence. Well before the excavation of Bettelheims unethical metho ds, however, Elkins' story had spurred a firestorm of assertion of the widespread nature of black resistance under slavery. And this happened just as frustration about the slow pace of change for African Americans in the US of the late 1960s began to reach a boiling point. As progressive political leaders were felled by assassins, and as political, fiscal, and monetary costs of the Vietnam War caved in Lyndon Johnsons Great Society plans, massive white resistance to black self-assertion began to discourage and splinter the various elements of civil rights protest. Many young African-American leaders put down the mantle of nonviolent protest and took up the ideas of black nationalism. Some would even take up the gun, like Black Panthers who defended their communities against violent law enforcement activities in Alabama, Oakland, Chicago, and elsewhere. Others flirted with international revolutionary factions, read Mao, moved to Cuba, and so on. The so called Black Power turn in AfricanAmerican protest and reform was once dismissed or mourned by historians as a declension from the triumphal arc of the King-led movement. More recently, a new generation of historians has produced a series of brilliant works that set these movements alongside a vibrant explosion of creative cultural forms that in turn has fertilized the most recent half-century of relentless African-American cultural innovation. And they encouraged readers to see Black Power movements not only as a response to white aggression and the declining efficacy of nonviolent protestespecially in Northern cities against whom very little leverage could be brought, in contrast to the Southbut as a position with a deep heritage. Black nationalism had been around

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since David Walker, if not before. It had continually asserted not only equality and the need to hold violence as the stick if whites would not accept the carrot of reconciliation and permit radical change, but also the richness of African-American life, society, and culture. Responding to a changing environment in which cultural self-assertion and the flirtation with revolutionary self-defense took the headlines away from the SCLC's nonviolent confrontation of violence segregation, historians followed political currents and began to study African-American resistance to slavery. One imperative behind the new move was the desire to reject Elkins' claim that enslaved African-Americans were submissive "Sambos" who submerged their own interests in those of their "masters." John Blassingame, Robert Starobin, and others found revolutionary resistance in various places. And it was amazing how much like the radicals of the late 1960s they made Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey sound, depicting them as nationalist rebels who envisaged a pan-African rebellion against not only slavery but capitalism. All the authors needed were allies, more than Turner had been able to boast. Again, we have the appearance of synecdoche: historians painting their subjects as the models of present and future roles for African Americans. The problem, of course, was that late-60s radicals claimed that revolution of some sort had a chance. And Nat Turner never did, as anyone can see. Meanwhile, the vast majority of generation after generation had died in slavery before freedom came. In fact, as historians dug deeper and learned more about slavery in the rest of the New World, it slowly grew apparent that the U.S. had relatively fewer major rebellions than most other slave societies. Elkins himself had drawn upon the scholarship of Frank Tannenbaum and others, who compared the Catholic slave societies of Brazil and the Spanish Caribbean to the Anglo-Protestant U.S. In the latter, they found, manumission rates were miniscule. There were few legal avenues for whites to recognize and free their mixed-race children, or the childrens mothers, and anyway, cultural norms seemed to dictate against that. To these historians, Protestant churchesthe backbone of the Civil Rights movement in many parts of the South, and a key component of black political organization in the North, seemed less helpful than the Catholic church in Ibero-Catholic

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societies, where saints could disguise African gods and black confraternities provided social networks outside of enslavers direct control. This compared well to plantation churches where whites handpicked the black preacher and sat in on his sermons. To shoot down the charge that enslaved people were submissive, compliant, and complicit, and therefore poor ancestors for black nationalists and radicals who wanted to draw on a tradition of resistance, historians would have to demonstrate that enslaved people did resist, and in a meaningful way. They chose to argue that enslaved African Americans resisted in the realm of culture: specifically, that they created a separate and resistant culture that welded people transported from various corners of Africa into one people who identified with each other. You could already see this happening in John Blassingame's critique of Elkins, but it emerged most clearly in his book The Slave Community (1972). More work would follow, arguing that African Americans were the bearers of African tradition, that their speech, diet, family life, stories and traditions, religious practices were African--and later, that this cultural retention itself constituted a resistance to slavery. This was a fight against Elkins, but also against all of the postreconstruction white-supremacist claptrap which he retransmitted. Blassingame's argument was the clearest: if enslaved people saw each other as the significant others in their own lives, if they rejected their enslavers' values and practices, and if they insisted that resistance, when it happened, was morally justified, then they were indeed engaged in significant resistance. Numerous studies followed, many depicting the mix of African traditions and local adaptations that defined particular communities. They saw the world the slaves made, as Eugene Genovese subtitled his famous Roll Jordan Roll, as a world apart. This world, a nightly Brigadoon, emerged every Sundown and lasted till Sunup, to reference the title of George Rawick's individually authored work. And the best of these used extensive primary source research to unpack deep histories that surely reflected real solace and survival for millions of enslaved people. One must mention Deborah Gray White's Ar'n't I A Woman, which finally convinced historians to look at enslaved women's experiences, or Charles Joyner's Down By the Riverside, which used anthropology and folklore to detail life along the South Carolina rice

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coast. Herbert Gutman's Black Family in Slavery and Freedom girded up its loins to take on the Moynihan Report, authored in 1965 by eventual Democratic senator Daniel P. Moynihan. The report had identified a social problem--the increasing absence of black fathers in contemporary America--and then claimed that the phenomenon was caused by slavery. Although the Moynihan Report did not say that racism and discrimination were irrelevant, it certainly implied that "cultural pathology" imbedded deep in black families rendered difficult African-American adaptation to the steady middle-class life of two-parent families, home ownership, and picket fences. It could be taken as an argument that --argue as they might for equal access to rights and opportunity, African-Americans would not take advantage of them. Gutman argued that the rates of single parenthood among African-American families in early 1970s were utterly different from what he saw in the sources from large 19th-century plantations. There, he insisted, most families were nuclear, and extended family also supported children and other kin. Again, this permitted "cultural resistance" by establishing a quasi-separate world in which boys grew up admiring their fathers and not the planter. Yet few of these works, at least those that focused on the nineteenth century, had much to say about what happened between sunup and sundown. (Those that did have something to say said it like Joyner's Down By the Riverside, which depicted task labor in the rice swamps as a negotiated compromise between black and white, one which allowed African American slaves to establish a world that overseers and owners did not do much to supervise. The discussion of labor was a way to demonstrate something about culture, not an interpretive end in itself.) Genoveses Roll, Jordan, Roll, written by a one-time Stalinist in the process of moving all the way across the spectrum to Opus Dei-style Catholic conservatism, announced that the was focused on the way in which enslaved people built a nation. He could, at the moment of writing, see that nation on the horizon in the form of radical organization and protest in the all-black ghettoes of American cities, and he drew from his voluminous notes a deep backstory for that embryonic nation. In the world of the plantation community, neither labor nor the domestic slave trade got many of the 700 or so pages his magnum opus contains. (Labor, however, was

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probably communal, and built on African traditions. Plantations and their owners were in but not of capitalism). Everything in the current of his argument ultimately swam to his conclusion that enslaved people saw each other and their appropriated Christian God as the sources of value. They created a culture that celebrated those things, and it sustained them against the forces Elkins assumed would have destroyed them. But at the end, of course, the river Jordan bent. And we saw that by accepting master as a fellowalbeit particularly sinful and unwise Christianthe slave accepted the duty not to kill his erring brother as he slept. This bound the enslaved in turn to live within the outer shell of rules of the plantation world, and even as they built its inner, rich life, they lived within the hegemony of the constraints the master class had set. They might not have been of the masters cultural patterns in their daily lives, but they were most certainly in his power. The historians of the slave community had little to say about forced migration and the slave trade. They drew most of their source material from the southeast. There was very little about cotton, which--unlike rice--was not worked by the "compromise" task system. The one body of scholarship that drew heavily on the labor and financial documentation left by planters, source material that was created to record and calibrate the exploitation of African-American labor, was the so-called "cliometric" work that centered on Stanley Engerman and Robert Fogel. These economic historians employed work gangs of research assistants and fed the data of slave labor camps via punch cards into massive mainframe computers. What came out wasn't cotton thread or sugar cane juice, but means and medians, regression coefficients, and the like. They discovered many important facts, like the extremely high profitability of slave labor camps in the cotton states--profitable even vis-a-vis Northern factories or commercial farms worked by free labor. This should've punched a hole in the old claim that slavery was unprofitable and external to the history of capitalism. Instead, Fogel and Engerman chose to focus their energies, at least at first, on a series of not-so-defensible claims that amounted to an argument that 1974 African Americans antecedents were neoliberal rational-calculators of economic welfare. Slavery's success and survival, Fogel and Engerman suggested, depended on enslavers' ability to inculcate

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a quasi-Puritanical work ethic in the enslaved. They argued that positive incentives were also important, while their masterwork Time on the Cross misread a single document to argue that the average slave on the average plantation supposedly endured only .5 whippings per year. Time on the Cross attracted initial praise from the neoliberal presseven an article in Timebut then a flood of criticism from historians. Part of the criticism was driven by the studys problematic assumptions, which were in turn dictated in part by the neoclassical temple in which the authors chained themselves. But another aspect of the critique, over time, was driven by the deepening assumption that the most important things to know about slavery, and indeed, about history in general, lay not in economics but in the dimension of culture. And that is already obvious from the turn towards slave culture as the site of autonomous creation within the slave community, the resistance to power, the place where enslaved people had agency, to use a term that was soon used with unthinking regularity. As Walter Johnson pointed out in brilliant 2003 essay, again and again historians proved in this era what was already evident, that slaves asserted their humanity. This was not really transformative history, in his rendering, for it merely proved the proposition that a=a. But the turn did have causes when it began; it came from debates in the field from those who tried to impose an interpretation of history in which enslaved people were passive and behaved like the subhuman trope of the racists and paternalists who defended slavery. It came from the shift in the political and social movement for AfricanAmerican rights, as well. In part the cultural turn in U.S. slavery history grew from a discernible trend in U.S. society: a turn towards the belief that one could choose how to affiliate oneself, and a sense that class affilations in particular could be escaped by choice. The labor historian Jefferson Cowie argues that a culture-wide move towards identification with popular culture heroes who reject their entangling working-class roots in favor of flight towards a horizon of consumption and choice was one of the major forces that undermined the U.S. organized labor movement in the 1970s. Indeed, in a Thompsonian sense, this unmade the U.S. working class, for if it was a

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process of interpreted experience that made class in the 19 th century, Americans were now refusing to interpret their experience in the same way. And if critics like Bertram Wyatt-Brown or Clarence Walker charged that those who extolled the virtues and successes of resistance by enslaved people who built an oppositional culture were erasing the realities that made slavery a brutal form of oppressionwell, one could see how they got the idea. The hope of 1960s movements turned into the frustrations of progressive political defeat in the early 1970s. The synecdoches of both the slave as citizen-likeany-other, and the one of the slave as a Black Panther, which had seemed so relevant in that stretch of the long Civil Rights era, began to fade. Instead, the face of the enslaved subject turned inward, in a circle that looked to peers. And thus the assessment of the future of race relations was also one in which African-Americans went their own way and created their own institutions.

The Achievements of Discourse The turn towards culture in the study of U.S. slavery carried on the momentum generated by the reemergence of black nationalismwhich had its own long historyin the late 60s, and it was also driven by the broader cultural currents of a nation shocked by the end of the near-total economic dominance which the U.S. had enjoyed since 1945. In the years after 1980, a set of attitudes imported from literary criticism and Continental poststructuralist philosophy swept through U.S. history departments like a cane-field fire. The critics of this philosophy already by that point were calling it as deconstruction, which was a term coined by Jacques Derrida, one the major early proponents of a new way of understanding texts. Deconstruction held, if one can generalize about so vast a phenomenon, that texts were full of political struggles. That authors tried to impose meanings on text, but that if you pulled the texts apart you would see that they were all unstable. That readers could shape interpretations as they went, that our ways of reading texts shape our worlds, and that by understanding how those processes take place, we are all shaped in turn by the unstable language

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within texts. And that ultimately, there was no meaning, for that ultimately was an attempt to impose a logos or fixed system of meaning on language, a game in which meaning always receded in slippery futility. As one of Derridas American acolytes argued Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text, but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. Its apparently solid ground is no rock, but thin air.2 The architectswell, one perhaps should not use a metaphorical term implying constructionof this philosophical trend acquired superstar status in the 1970s and 80s. Their canons were mined with devotion that seemed contradictorygiven their oft-stated design of undermining the status of the author as one who creates emotional and psychological truth. Invoking their names brought power beyond that of more ordinary forms of truth to confer. Their persons were adorned with first-class transatlantic plane tickets and young graduate and undergraduate hangers-on of all sexes and sexualities. And young people heading for graduate school flocked to study Theory with their minds set on one day adorning a dais with a Derrida, a Lyotard, a Kristeva, a Fish; on living the life of a Butler or a Jameson. The storm of deconstruction and poststructuralism convulsed literary criticism, destabilizing (a favorite term) the role of the author, making traditional projects like finding out what Ralph Ellison really meant see m quaint. For no one really can mean any particular thing, and certainly no text has a particular meaning, all of them being ultimately the product of many contending and fruitless attempts to establish meaning. It then invaded the field of anthropology, which was wide open for conquestclaiming to be a social science, but relying of the interpretive, personal attempt to establish transcultural rules. It consumed much of the history of science, systematically attempting to undermine sciences claims to a chieve objective truth via the experimental method. It redrew the world that led (for instance) from Galileo to Newton to Einstein to Oppenheimer as a movement from one paradigm to another driven by sociocultural factors, not a process of gradually unveiling unchanging physical, objective truth. And then deconstruction reached history.

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Now, certainly historians of slavery were well aware that the politics of texts shaped their sources. The WPA narratives are one of the best examples, and by the 1980s a hot debate raged about how to use these documentsconsidering that elderly African Americans interviewed in the 1930s said very different thingsat least on the surfacedepending on the race of the person interviewing them. Historians have always known that documents must be read in context, that what is documented and how it is documented is also a map to political and social realities, and that in them we often see strategies and struggles, cries and complaints structured by ideas and power. The earliest arrivals of poststructralist papers about history usually unfolded along this sort of first-contact script: A literary critic who had decided to write about a historical phenomenon for their second book, examined couple of sources one or two books, one set of institutional recordsand now was ready to chide historians for thinking that the archive was transparent. Soon, however, poststructuralist theory began to influence historiansespecially those who looked at popular culture, or those who drew on postcolonial theory to show how cultures and races were studied and to no small extent created and consumed in the colonizing process. Broadly speaking, within history the deployment of Theory marshaled its forces around questions that had to do with the politics of identity. Most famously, Michel Foucaults work on the history of sexuality argued that identity was constructed. This meant that the identity of members of a class, or a gender, or a racial group was a system of ideas rather than innate or objective or fixed characteristics. It also meant that the best way to study identity was by reading the texts that were read by the sort of people who not only read texts but also wrote them. Further, those sorts of texts ideas about identity were deep a nd unconscious and revealed in the rules their authors tried to follow and impose, for will-to-power became all mixed up with willto-knowledge. That identity was very important, for it supposedly structured who could participate in the wielding of power in society and the shaping of identity through language. And that ideas about identity could change, made these theoretical attitudes post-structuralist, and justified a commitment to a politics of identity both in and outside the classroom. Oddly

22

enough, some of these battles didnt seem to change over centuries, at least according to the works of literary critics and historians. Racists kept doing the same things for hundreds of years of history, for instance. Oddly, what was often absent from these stories, as they began to shape the discipline of history through incursion points and pores like the study of the French Revolution or the history of medicine, was politics in the traditional sense. Likewise absent were macroeconomics, demography, actual diseaseone could read a serious critique of the idea that yellow fever actually existed, for after all what we found in the sources was only set of symptoms and a will to know the disease as a single entity. This was in the days before Alan Sokal punctured some of the pretensions of those (or some of those) who insisted that all was constructed: cause, effect, reality, knowledge, text. And laborin decline as a subject of historical study, even as organized labor declined as a force in the political world was also conspicuously absent. Students of the history of American slavery, like Winthrop Jordan and Edmund Morgan, had argued for years that racial identity in the U.S. was imposed by law and hence constructed, historians of slavery had always at least nodded towards the centrality of labor in the process of creating identity. Many people in history were not allowed to make key decisions about their own lives, or even to live very long at all. They were poor, hungry, and the targets of violence. But it was possible that the rules structuring what people said in books were only one of the causes that shaped those realities. In any case, the new linguistic turn in history, as some were by the early 1990s calling the incursion of poststructuralist methods, was for many years not a major influence on the history of slavery in the U.S. Instead, the turn towards seeing identity as a kind of affiliative cultural choice, and that in turn as the main subject of history (as opposed to labor, economics, politics, the rise of the nation, of a class, etc.) continued on its own path. That move was still driven by the struggle over black identity, and the enslaved subject of the stories told by historians were in the 1980s and 1990s still the normative synecdoche for the now and future African American.

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Those years were accounted by some contemporary critics as the Second Nadir of race relations in the U.S., comparing the Reagan and Bush I years to the 1890s. In those years, a Republican Party now well-trained in forming campaigns by antagonizing African Americans to the delight of white voters set the contours of national policy. They starved cities of funding, cut back programs for social support in the name of reducing dependence, and incited a recession that may have killed inflation and high interest rates, but which also damaged the most vulnerable cells of the national political economy. Increasing drug addiction, the collapse of neighborhood communities and physical infrastructure, the murder of young men by each other, at rates not seen since white men fought each other for political currency and honor in the slave South, the reduction of public education to a bad joke rather than a ladder leading upward, the collapse of nuclear families were all but symptoms of two intersecting deeper diseases. The first was the rapid collapse of the manufacturing sector, part of a long delamination inside the U.S. economy from 1970-2008. By the 1980s, much of the pattern was clear: the top third or less of the workforce continued to experience real income gains (and the top one percent, extraordinary gains) while the remaining two-thirds slipped backwards. Some plummeted, in fact, especially in the increasingly all-black cities of the old factory nodes. There, margins were thinner because household wealth and networks were too weak to sustain job loss. And at the same time, multiple processes of intentional residential segregation by policy makers and realestate gatekeepers, white flight driven by terror of schools that became too black to sustain the social prestige needed to advance ones children into the top ten percent where the real g ains were being made, and the relentless drumbeat of crime-focused news; all these factors left African-Americans to fight with the newest immigrants over desolated concrete blocks where plastic wrappers blew and glass vials crunched underfoot. From this world Public Enemy emerged. This doesnt mean just the rap group that turned hip-hop into a political force with their Nation of Islam-tinged nationalist vision. Rather I mean a wider movement towards a celebration of African-American identity that focused on present crises and historical continuities. This attitude embraced the longstanding position of being the

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excluded, separate, unfairly scapegoated and unassimilable element in U.S. society and culture. This was paralleled by the elevation within hip-hop, the emergent and characteristic culture-form of the era, of the second element within black musics age-old dialectic. That interplay between popularityin which black creators and performers adapted to white media conventions only to conquer and rewrite them, with an ultimate outcome in which non-black Americans sincerely the performance of blacknessand on the other hand, authenticity, which demanded familiarity with the secret inner world, identity that could only come to those for whom blackness was the mother tongue. And so, canonizing the culture heroes of the 1960s and 70sMalcolm X, the Black Panthers, Muhammad Ali, Bob Marley, as well as more obscure nationalists and conspiracy theoristsan efflorescence of culture activity burst out of the most devastated sectors of New York, Los Angeles, and elsewhere to challenge white accounts of African-American culture. By 1990, Africa pendants in red, black, and green were everywhere. Public Enemy was making the world familiar with both the more peculiar theories of Elijah Muhammad. But Public Enemy also checked Vesey, Prosser, Nat Turner. And meanwhile, an Afrocentric impulse that put Africa at the center of the understanding of African America was changing the way history was taught in the late 1980s. The focus of much new scholarshipor at least the most publicizedturned to identifying African origins, both among AfricanAmerican and white social structures and cultural practices. Black Athena, by Martin Bernal, infuriated culture conservatives with its claim that the Egyptians begat the Greek, and hence Africa created Western civilization. On a smaller scale works by Sterling Stuckey, Margaret Washington, Michael Gomez, Robert Farris Thompson, John Thornton, and many others drew the threads of African antecedents through the warp of slave culture. The claim that African antecedents led to African-American culture repeated in some ways the hermetic vision of populist Afrocentrism, which rarely flirted with supremacist fantasy (despite the truly supremacist fantasizing of white conservatives who were only too happy to publicize the outrageous sayings of Leonard Jeffries.). More dangerous for white conservatives, or so they seemed to believe, was the possibility that multiculturalism would become the common

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practice of U.S. historiography and the way it was taught in schools. One supposes that then they would know that their whiteness would no longer count as a trump card in every exchange. They launched but ultimately fruitless campaign to force historians back into the pre-Civil Rights idea of history as a parade of white men. Focus on African origins for black cultural patterns like secret societies, or drum majors subject might seem trivial, and the more extreme, non- or quasi-academic practitioners could be caricatured as crackpots. But the African-continuities quest changed the way that slavery was taught in the U.S. It made it impossible to ignore African culture in accounts of slavery. It connected African-American students to the idea of an alternative, and not an inferior heritage. It also changed the politics of the late 1980s classroom. Empowered, even radicalized by new scholarship, African-American students challenged instructors and students. More than one history class turned into a shouting match that pitted clueless white apologists for the slave trade (as a fortunate chance for Africans transported to the New World instead of being trapped in the intense disease environment of West Africa, for instance) against African Americans wielding Black Athena. In other ways, however, the modes of argument and analysis remained resistant to the cultural turn for many years, or at least to the other variety, the one cooked up on Rue de Sorbonne and not Lenox Avenue. But cultural theory, at least of the linguistic-turn variety, was always more persuasive at the lower register. For in unusual ways it moved in harmony with other changes in the American classroom, academy, and other spaces of bourgeois access. At first these changes cut against the broad downward grain of black communities in the post-Great Migration U.S. Later, as the Clinton boom of the 1990s lifted some boats, more African Americans were able to escape the declining inner urban cores and Southern rural districts where they had been trapped. Clawing their way up through the education system, often against the odds, surviving at times their parents own failure to survive, they entered the interstices of an economy that did offer more access points for persistent and well-educated African Americans than it had a half century before. Some made their way into academe. Among some of them,

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and among some of their white contemporaries who began to publish in the late 1990s, a new bend in the cultural turn brought into view at last a junction where slavery history would meet poststructuralism. Or, at least, a particular iteration of the latter, one that permitted the readers of these historians works, rightly or wrongly, to construct a new synecdoche of the slave as the shrewd African-American student making his or her way upward through an unfriendly white world. In the new histories, identity and action were both complex; documents are texts that reveal contestation, the attempt of the enslaver to impose a control revealed by that very attempt of imposition to be unstable. Bringing that statement, which proceeds from a set of theoretical assumptions about what is important to know about history, and how we can know it, was the key achievement of Walter Johnsons Soul By Soul, certainly the most acclaimed work on U.S. slavery in the Clinton-Bush years. His book was not a simple literary-scholars reading of a few documents, with predictable theoretical exercises and evolutions resembling the required program on gymnastics apparatuses. But among all of the many documents about the internal slave trade in the 19th century, he focused in particular on fugitive slaves narratives and the court records of New Orleans cases in which buyers were trying to claim that particular slaves were flawed. And in these documents, he found, identity was always a mask, question and answer were strategies of feint, attack, retreat. In his book, students and other readers were often struck most vividly by a particular chapter in the middle of the text. Here Johnson discussed the way in which slaves in traders yards who tried to sell themselves by convincing prospective buyers that they would be the ones to fulfill the white purchasers hope of remaking his or her word by buying the right slaves.. His slaves were self-making their way to better deals: kinder buyers, promises of good treatment, laying thick strategies and stories that would peel off eventually into outcomes over which they had more control. This accountwhich was not even the core of his argument was the one people often remembered, for it struck so many chords in the zeitgeist.

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Other key historians who led the way, for instance, included Paul Gilroyno historian, but a literary and cultural critic. IN his The Black Atlantic, the interesting people in the first century or more of Anglo-Atlantic slavery were not the masses of enslaved below the hatches or in the fields, but those who became free and in some cases served as sailors on the slave ships. In general, the small minority of Africans who broke the field slave mold and criss-crossed the Atlantic were creators of a new modern culture, one that continually changed. Vincent Carretta took things a step further in one iteration within a series of unmaskings that supposedly stripped away the veil of pious orthodoxy surrounding African-American slaves as historical subjects. (Another was Michael Johnsons revisiting of the documents and secondary literature about the Denmark Vesey slave insurrection scare in Charleston in 1822 .) Though Caretta was too coy to draw the argument out in so many wordsothers would show less modestyhe won great publicity with his spectacular claim that Olauduh Equiano was born in South Carolina. To some, the claim seemed to undercut Equianos claim to speak with authority about the slave trade itself. Equiano was also one of the main sources historians used to understand the culture of eighteenth-century southeastern Nigeria, his claimed homeland. With his biography demystified and delegitimated, it would be hard to draw antecedents in slave culture from that area of Africa. It was surely no accident that the new generation of historians wrote about complex relationships between individual enslaved people and racial (and other forms of status-related) identity. The Theory was there, was part of their academic upbringing. Home training in the graduate seminars of the 1990s required close attention to shifting cultural politics Shifting trends of theoretical fashionability were also important. One was expected, at least by some professors and peers, to know not only ones Homi Bhaba and Edward Saidthough perhaps not Saids antagonist Noam Chomskybut to also know who trumped who. Yet less flippantly, one must recognize that structural factors in the intellectual history of the profession in that era moved people towards a new interpretive stance. Even as U.S. schools rapidly resegregated themselves in the 1980s and 1990s, the historians who chose to study slavery at top U.S. grad

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schools were disproportionately likely to have experienced secondary and university backgrounds where a narrow band of high-achieving African-American students had made their way through doors that had been closed to previous generations. In some cases they had been those African-American students; in other cases they had been white students who had witnessed the clashes over identity politics that had shaped the all-too-brief era of Public Enemy and Black Athena. Those clashes had taken place between black and white students, but also between black students and other black students. The latter clashes, in particular, were sometimes over questions of group solidarity against sometimes openly hostile majority-white student communities. Often the question posed by African-American students to each other had been understood as this: will you sit with us and us only, or will you assimilate? So when historiansmost of them young onesemerged from personal histories suffused with individual African-American achievement in white universities, and personal histories in which both white racists and black nationalists were major pains in the ass, it was no surprise that these scholars would question what were now old views about the slave community as one thing and African-American identity as essentially uniform. It was no surprise that they would not only deconstruct such ideas, but that they would also show enslaved people trying to deconstruct the oppressive and annoying structures around them. The enslaved heroes and heroines of their accounts could thus be read as synecdoches of themselves and their friends as they moved from adolescence and young adulthood. They passed first through university towns suburban-styled high schools or big-city magnet schools or private boarding schools (the latter concealed in some cases in the peculiar humblebragging in which graduate students sorted out their social hierachies) and on into elite universities that bragged that their African-American student body had reached six percent. The reality, of course, was that black solidarity in those settings was always far less coercive than white solidarity could become. But black unity was seen as a social Problem. In the 1990s and early 2000s, people of African descent who critiqued the myth of black unity about this from the inside could often find a wide audience. Of course, most conservative think-

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tanks had long kept a black-conservative intellectual in-house to inoculate themselves against charges of casual racism. Now what they were directing was a broad cultural assault, not a set of policy bulwarks being erected against the logical outcomes of post-New Deal liberalism. Instead of resisting the clear policy implications to be drawn from a) a national commitment to access to opportunity for all and b) proof of exclusion, conservative political forces sensed that the momentum for fulfilling the implicit promises of liberalism was utterly spent. Now they accepted the idea that identity can be chosen, that texts-- like the text of our livesare malleable, and that therefore those who failed in the game of life had chosen to fail by adopting antisocial identities like thug or unwed mother.. Yet what new historians wrote could sometimes fall into uncanny resonance with those who wanted to say that race was over. With those who now had the confidence to Sister Soulja any open claim that federal government policy on welfare was systematically racist, or that New York Citys crime management policy was self-evidently a violation of constitutional rights. Of course, the way they were read was often not what they said. Peningroth, who focused on conflict among black communities, agreed with Peter Kolchin and Wilma Dunaway that a counterrevision of whitewashing of internal conflict was needed. Like Brenda Stevenson, in her account of African-American women and families in northern Virginia, he excoriated historians who assumed that there was some sort of slave community to which all enslaved people subscribed. He could be heard, and was deployed, as support for the claim that where violence, family disruption, and general devastation existed in contemporary African-American society, African Americans should be blamed more, and white racism or government policy or the history of slavery should be blamed less. But he was also pushing historians to confront their seemingly predilection for understanding and assessing the nature of race relations into the core subject of enslaved peoples history. Likewise, no one, save a few scholars who wrote about the slave trade, seemed interested in transforming their histories of slavery (much less of capitalism in the U.S.) around Johnsons most sweeping argument: that in the antebellum South all slaves were always in the market.

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They focused instead on the image of negotiation by slaves being sold in the slave market to argue that everything was a constant interplay of master and slave. Of course, not everything fits into the category of these histories of exceptions, of negotiations and ambivalence, of individuals constructing individual identity as the main story of history. Vincent Browns devastating account of violence and slavery in eighteenth-century Jamaica, like Stephanie Smallwoods work on the transatlantic slave trade, uses close readings of texts in a way that is clearly shaped by poststructuralist anthropology and other influences, but refuses to let the reader believe that all meanings were malleable and everything was a text. A slave rebels severed head remained the evidence of an act of extraordinary immorality. Now, however, we understood why it had been severed. Stephanie Camps work on resistance, meanwhile, particularly female resistance, mapped a kind of black solidarity that would later be given philosophical form by the philosopher Tommy Shelby. It acknowledged conflicting interest and even conflict between enslaved people. Yet even though some enslaved peoplemost, in fact, at one point or anothercould not or would not risk all for resistance, all understood however that the forces that confronted them were implacable and that all were targeted by it. It would be unfair to say that the new authors intended all the uses that were made of their work, or even that all of those interpretations were reasonable. (With Ann Patton Malone, and with William Dusinberres devastating study of mortality in the slave communities of the Carolina-Georgia rice plantations, he reminded readers of the extraordinary suffering of children and anyone else vulnerable in the low-calorie, high-disease, high-family-disruption environment of U.S. slavery.) But his point about the physical devastations of slavery was not attractive or useful to some of those taken with his insistence that African Americans were individual and that the idea of a slave community could be a form of internal coercion. In an environment in which politicians and media figures appeared on television every night claiming to speak for forty million people of African descent, this argument could be used to complicate the public debate in useful ways. Just as often, however, it could be misused to argue that when contemporary

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African Americans complained about systematic disfranchisement in political processes, or systematic exclusion from the benefits of a growing economy, they were peddling false claims. This sort of move was in the air by the late 1990s, at least up at the rarefied heights of Manhattan literary agencies, television and newspaper newsrooms, and Ivy League history departments. Skepticism about claims that slavery was primarily responsible for continuing African-American equality was the new fashion. Historical novels by successful authors like Edwidge Danticat or Fred DAguiar were panned when they engaged too much with the tiresome story of racial oppression. On the other hand, more interesting were books about black slaveholders. Or the works of a new series of cosmopolitans like Zadie Smith, the later Paul Gilroy, Colson Whitehead, or Kwame Anthony Appiah, who questioned the need to identify with universalizing African or African-American identities. There was always a complication, another fold, and white America ate it up.

Lashed by the Invisible Hand

But by the time many of these works had appeared in print, the world had turned, again. In 2000, the Republicans replayed a tried and true strategy, one that had been working since 1968. Get out the Southern white vote, suppress African-American turnout. Yet this time, they could win the presidency against an unpopular Democratic candidate only by massive fraud and the Supreme Courts most indefensible decision to that point in history. Among the many lessons to be drawn from the Republicans increasingly difficult time winning elections between 1996 and 2008 is that of demographic change. In large part due to the effects of changes in federal immigration law passed in 1965, America was becoming less white, and the Census Bureau began to predict that whites would drop below the 50% level by 2040. This would certainly make race relations between black and white less crucial to national identity. It also promised to weaken the equation made by so many, that whiteness=American-essence. So more

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diverse versions of slavery history, ones not so bound to the idea of seeing in the character of the enslaved person an image write small and in the past of the future of not only African Americans but white Americans might be possible. Whether this would be a salutary development is a question for debate, but it is possible that historians slavery would no longer be hijacked by contemporary debates that distort the past while offering no exit strategy leading to equal opportunity, reparation, full access to rights, or reconciliation. Second, on September 11, 2001, Islamic fundamentalists murdered thousands of Americans. Their attacks became the pretext for two wars, including one in Iraq waged almost entirely on false pretenses and at great human, financial, and moral cost. The reality of that attack, these wars, and the way in which they were engineered was a massive shock. It came after a decade of complacency in which self-styled progressive academics often complained that there was no policy difference between the two parties, and that they voted Democrat for the culture-politics parts of their platforms. Some began to consider that violence and war could be agents or even causes (though cause was still a word to be avoided) of massive transformationtransformation on a scale and of a non-negotiability different from the world of the nuanced and contested text. Likewise torture and mass imprisonment now seemed more immediate issues for many white progressives. They were not new for those living-while-black, of course. Listening to those who had spent their career undermining moral absolutes with the tools of moral and/or epistemological relativism make an attempt to draw clear lines against torture was awkward. Even more awkward was watching conservatives who in the previous two decades had posed as defenders of moral absolutes come out of the closet and reveal themselves to be wild-eyed Nietszcheans. Most famously: the Bush administration official who scoffed at a reporters complaint that every word the administration said about Iraqi WMDs had been false, replying that the reporter and the Democrats were all trapped in reality-based thinking. We create our own realityour own rhetorical text, and then we impose it on the world, which comes to believe it. Suddenly, progressives discovered that reality-based thinking including

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previously scoffed-at fields like statistical analysis and science, had truth claims that theyd rather not dismantle and demystify. The effect of the impulse on progressive politics was salutary and energizing, at least for a time. Old internecine debates calmed down, and political organizers and bloggers made a valiant effort to create a structure of communication and argument alternative to the TV and mainstream mediawhich had been largely captured by the Right and its terms of argument. Thus practical political organization and participation, activities in which reveling in ambiguity was decidedly not conducive to success, were a third social force that might have been pushing historians of slavery towards a rethinking of some of their persistent habits of argument and rhetoric. More of them could have followed the leads suggested by Steven Hahn, Stephanie Camp, and Walter Johnson: suggesting that historians should look more closely at enslaved peoples networks and rethink the politics that grew and spread through such networks. The massive organizing effort made by Obama For America over the years between 2006 and 2008 showed that it was possible, at least under the right circumstances, to organize a massive popular majority in the face of Republican advantages in the media, in gerrymandered districting, and artificial limits on the electorate. The Obama victory, which built around a brilliant rhetorician with a compelling biography, might have also provided an indication that the United States had accomplished exactly what Obama himself suggested it could do. And that was to transcend at last the central idea of whiteness: that people of African descent were not equal and that every quantum of increase in their practical access to rights was a quantum of decrease in the rights and power and freedom of white people. As the next few years would show, the depths of white resentment were not yet drained. And in the meantime one more significant phenomenon occurred, one that also emphasized the inability of the most popular ways of thinking about the history of slavery to explain the events that were happening in the U.S. That, of course, was the detonation of long-laid landmines in the U.S. financial sector. The chain reaction caused by bad debts in securitized mortgages had been caused by both greed among financial-industry insiders who had already captured untold wealth,

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and by foolish dogmas run amuck in the regulatory realm. The idea that markets, especially markets in innovatively constructed debt and credit, could regulate themselves has been proven foolish again and again. But then that is the kind of mistake that can be made when historians do not study economic history. As everybody knows, the explosion in the U.S. financial markets in 2008 spread throughout the world economy. The broader economic crisis produced political and other tremors in Europe and elsewhere. The neoliberal Washington consensus, accepted by or imposed on much of the worlds economy in the years since 1991, was called into question in multiple ways that at writing remain unresolved. However, the takeaway for historians of slavery in the U.S. ought to be this: we would do well to think much more seriously about financial history and the history of capitalism. Because, to return to the beginning of this essay, the expansion of U.S. slavery was deeply embedded in the creation of the worldwide capitalist economic system whose most recent storm spun off tornadoes that affect people around the globe. And recent events should remind us to consider the implications of that fact. Here are some of those key implications, none of which can be fully comprehended through any of the cultural-history paradigms that have garnered most of the attention and energy in the last century or more of historiography. First of all, slavery in the U.S. was enmeshed in the history of capitalisms expansion especially once cotton textile factories became the central point of creative destruction that drove the emergent industrial sector. And, of course, once enslavers in the U.S. created a new system for producing cotton through slave labor, a system that would encompass a vast subcontinental region, produce 80% of the worlds supply of its most widely traded product, and drive most competitors from the field. That enmeshment in turn meant that the history of U.S. slavery must be understood in relationship to the development of capitalism. The implications of this are many. They demand new kinds of learning and new tools, including a much closer engagement with world economic history, greater attention to political economy (which could incorporate

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culture and rhetoric, of course, more thought about the implications of slavery for long-term transfers of wealth, and above all, engagement with these three issues. Historians of U.S. slavery must engage financial history. The expansion of U.S. slavery, like the expansion of U.S. consumption since 1970, demanded a massive build-up and transformation of the Atlantic worlds financial links and capacities. The result was a series of transformation that shaped slavery on the ground, the political conflict that ultimately brought down U.S. slavery, and the economies of all trading partners. The effects are still with us, and are part of everybodys history. Indeed, Lehman Brothers, the Wall Street bank whose collapse triggered the chain reaction of September 2008, began its history as a cotton-trading firm in Alabama during the 1840s. It was founded in order to capitalize on an opportunity. The collapse of a great bubble in securitized mortgage debt albeit on mortgages on slaves, not on suburban homesin 1837-1839 had left a tremendous opportunity for new firms to soak up market share in the trading of cotton. Second: Lehman Brothers is no morejust like many of the New Orleans and Natchez and Mobile (and New York, and Philadelphia) banks and merchant firms that made vast sums and borrowed even vaster ones during the 1830s, before the crisis. But the source of cotton, the commodity whose earnings were supposed to pay off the debts incurred to buy slaves and transfer them to the deep South states was of course the labor of the slaves themselves. Labor has vanished as a central analytical subject in the historiography of U.S. slavery. At most, it has been a means to social and cultural analysis, like the claims that slave labor relied on African collective-labor antecedents. A close lookeven a cursory oneat the labor process in the cotton field reveals not only the ridiculousness of that specific assessment, but that labor in the cotton field was of tremendous significance to the wider development of the U.S., the formation of African-American culture and society, and the growth of modern capitalism. Whether we look at production, finance, or consumption, every path traveled by slave trader or cotton bale or bill of exchange or mortgage document or political plan for expanding slavery geographically each one leads to the cotton field. And not between sundown and sunup, but during the long

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hard daylight hours during which, day after day, year after year, millions of people were systematically robbed. Third, looking at U.S. slavery from the perspective of the history of capitalism will require us to reconsider the epistemology and hermeneutics of historical documents. The recent economic explosion reminds us that economic dynamics have power not entirely different from natural forces. It reminds us that that numbers and flows can act as causes in ways that cannot be entirely accounted for by the claims of social constructionism upon which much the linguistic turn in history ultimately rest. This is not to say that economics is a science like physics, no matter what economists say. But it is to say that while culture modifies economics, economics can modify culture and can use forces (like simple supply and demand) that are not words or texts. Likewise, the claims of behavioral economics, which can be read to imply that physical structures in the brain have effects on behavior, including decisions about buying and saving, earning and spendingthese merit consideration as well. Yet resistance to the necessary rethinking of the relationship between economic change and the way we do history is strong. As many cultural historians have noted, paradigms shape the rules of what can be known or said. Ill briefly relate an anecdote. I presented to a faculty seminar a paper that argued that the rapid increase in the production of cotton in the 1830s rendered unpayable the debts enslavers had incurred in order to ramp up cotton production. The results included the 1837-39 worldwide financial mentioned before, the collapse of many merchant firms and banks, the shift of banking power out of the South, the disruption of many enslaved peoples lives, and the emergence of both political abolitionism and Southern secessionism. Afterwards, a historian at least as well-versed as me in the intricacies of Theory took me aside and gently explained that I had used the term economy in an insufficiently unproblematized way. I had written as if the economy was an entity that existed in some objective sense. But as Tim Mitchells recent book about oil production and Keynesian political economy after World War II had shown, the concept economy wasnt really in use by policymakers until about 1950s.

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Whether or not that is an accurate analysis of the history of a specific term, the assumpt ion was clear. If there was no concept economy in 1837, it is of no value to us as an analytical term for understanding 1837. For if it did not exist as a term, it could have no influence on thoughts or events. In that particular analytical framework, there is no room for concepts and forces and phenomena that act outside of the world of language and of the text. In fact, it may also be implied that there is no room for concepts not named and recognized by important text-writing people.

I think that view of history is of no use to us anymore. Instead, I submit that historians of U.S. slavery need to engage with the history of world capitalism, to understand financial history, to study the labor of enslaved forced laborers, and to challenge a hermeneutics of historical interpretation that walls historians off from the social and natural sciences. The irony is that what we have learned about cultural history will be of great use to us along these paths. How people understand the world always shapes their own attempts to shape it, and their experience of it. All of these points of departure would link the history of slavery in the U.S. more effectively to other Second Slavery societies. Above all else, they would lead us to understand better the way that the travels and toils of the enslaved people whose climb up the levee at New Orleans is still unmarked are fundamental to the history of the rise of capitalist modernity and the US as capitalisms foremost state. And thus they would link the past t o the present in a way that is more helpful to us than a simple synecdoche of what some people in the present should be the future role of African Americans in the endless but constraining interplay between whiteness and American national identity. But these tasks will not be easy. It would be pleasant to imagine that the many transformations of the United States over the years between 2001 and 2014 had finally broken the link between the history of U.S. slavery and the idea that African Americans ought to be the players in someones script. This synecdochal move repeatedly puts the onus on African Americans and distances them, makes them appear different and on a different historical

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trajectory from other Americans. It would be nice to imagine that the end had come for the long pattern of rendering the portrait of the historical enslaved as a synecdoche of an idealized African American who at some future date was no longer a problem. But the last clause points to the heart of the matter: the fact that the national identity of the U.S. has for centuries included the caveat that African Americans are different. Whether this means that they are the objects of nationwide reviling by a massive white majority, or whether this means that many whites see African Americans as the objects of national charity, or whether this means that American whites cycle between the two positions does not much matter. The story tends to be read backwards in ways that support a contemporary rendering of national problems, especially the state of black America and the lives of black Americans, as a product of African American essence. This is an ahistorical reading that moves backwards in time to shape the past around the presents needs, like a science fiction device. Yes, this often happens, but rarely is it an unalloyed good to render the past solely for the needs of a few in the present especially when the need of the present has so often been that of scapegoating, or other processes of whiteness. The repeated pattern of turning the past into present day whites blackface passion play also takes analytical and interpretive focus away from some specific processes that need attention. For they are still shaping all of us.

I now find that only upon reaching the end of this draft have I figured out where I ought to have begun my journey. Usually that is a signal that major rewriting is in order, and no doubt such is the case for this iteration of this particular essay. But when I found on the New Orleans levee no acknowledgment that the world had been pivoted there, and that millions of people had been crushed, my mind cast back to Richmond, Virginia. There, ten days before New Orleans, Lillian and I found that years of dedicated work by politicians, activists, lay historians, and professional historians had built a slave trail. This network of markers, memorials, and excavations, mapped online and on paper, allowed visitors and students to learn how the domestic slave trade was the business that made Richmond wealthy in the 19th century. It

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showed the networks and links that made up the trade and also made many others wealthy. It opened a window onto the experience of the people bound in this prison, and it also made their emancipation process all the more meaningful in both the affective and analytical sense. Lillian and I sat by the excavated site of Robert Lumpkins slave jail and talked with Dolores McQuinn, the city councilwoman who has led much of the slave trail process. And when we were done talking, all three of us walked one hundred yards to the embankment of I-95, a massive concrete highway that runs from Boston and New York all the way to Miami. As cars and trucks thundered above us, filled with people and goods on their own journeys, we looked at a small sign t hat noted that under the highway somewhere were the bones of Richmonds African Burial Ground. There those hanged after the 1800 Gabriel Prosser revolt scare had been buried, and here had been buried those who died in the slave jails awaiting shipment to the southwestern cotton fields. We stood on the other side from the past. We knew it had made us.

J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restrictions and the Establishment of the OneParty South, 1880-1910 (Yale University Press, 1974). 22 J. Hillis Miller, "Stevens Rock and Criticism as Cure," Georgia Review 30 (1976), p. 34.