For nearly two decades now, historians have been debating whether it is even possible to write the history of American slavery.
Can an accurate story of a system of oppression be derived from sources created and preserved by the oppressors❓ In many ways it is a surprising controversy. For the generation of American historians working after the emergence of the mainstream civil rights movement in the mid-1950s, slavery studies represented perhaps the most exciting field of American historical scholarship, attracting an audience of general readers as well as the attention of prominent academics. Books about slavery were discussed in popular magazines and featured on the nightly news. Innovative methodologies, including demography and quantitative analysis, folklore, material culture, oral history, and family reconstitution opened new windows into the past. At the same time, changed assumptions about racial equality made the “moonlight and magnolias” South of Gone with the Wind and most earlier studies of slavery obsolete. Historians began to construct a rich and sobering narrative of the lives of both enslavers and enslaved, as well as a portrait of the system that bound them together.
It seems even odder to be having this debate now, when attacks on history by the right demand that such matters as chattel slavery be erased altogether or reconfigured to ensure an adequately “patriotic” account of the national past. Last year, several weeks after President Donald Trump instructed the Smithsonian Institution that it would have to adjust anything his administration took issue with regarding “tone, historical framing and alignment with American ideals,” he complained that the Smithsonian’s museums focused too much on “how bad Slavery was.” The National Park Service is revising interpretations at its sites to offer an upbeat rendering of human bondage, if slavery is mentioned at all. In January, the Park Service workers took crowbars to signage memorializing the nine enslaved people who worked in George Washington’s presidential house in Philadelphia.
We have never needed more to believe in—and defend—the possibility of a rigorous, fact-based telling of slavery’s history. Our nation’s future requires a clear-eyed understanding of how its aspirations for freedom and democracy coexisted with an institution defined by violence and injustice. We cannot overcome our past if we fail to document and confront it, and so we must strive to make the realities of American slavery ever more visible and undeniable.
But can we adequately document an institution whose records were overwhelmingly produced by those who built and benefited from it? In her presidential address to the American Historical Association in January 2025, Thavolia Glymph, a professor of history at Duke, insisted that this is not just a possibility but a necessity. She challenged those who assail what historians have come to call the “archive” of slavery—the manuscripts and books left by our forebears—as too compromised to be useful. Critics have argued that this record, the creation of enslavers and white supremacists, reflects the interests of the empowered and silences the enslaved, who were mostly prohibited from reading and writing and thus left unable to tell their side of the story.
Glymph readily admitted that this is the “damaged space that we historians have to work with.” Yet even with its biases she said she finds it “boisterous” and “noisy,” full of unruly voices of the subjugated, awaiting the historian’s discerning eye. Every encounter with power, she insisted, “also captures the agitation of the enslaved that led to the encounter.” In their effort to control the archive, enslavers did “a pretty bad job; indeed, they failed miserably.” Glymph’s own deeply researched work on enslaved and formerly enslaved women is testimony to her argument.
“Millions of paper tracings,” she said, “are there in which enslaved people claim for themselves more than a trace in history.”
Two recent books represent the remarkable discoveries that this archive of slavery can yield. Both recognize the distortions inherent in a record kept by those who defended human bondage and believed that Black people are inferior. Yet both employ inventive approaches to read against the grain of the nineteenth-century materials available to them. And each is clearly caught up in the spirit of the hunt and the joy of searching for hidden treasures that inspire the best historical researchers.
A professor at the University of Memphis, Susan Eva O’Donovan has immersed herself in what she embraces as “slavery’s vast archive,” exploring “correspondence, ledgers, diaries, logs, receipts, reports, contracts, complaints, bills, court cases, police blotters, and ship manifests” in order to reconstruct the experience of human bondage. At the outset of her career, more than thirty years ago, O’Donovan served as an assistant editor at the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, a pathbreaking initiative established in 1976 to identify materials relevant to the coming of freedom, chiefly in the voluminous holdings of the National Archives. No one had systematically looked for such documents before or asked the questions about the African American past that by the 1970s had come to be seen as essential. The FSSP has in the years since published six doorstop volumes of evidence about slavery and emancipation.
O’Donovan is a coeditor of two (and Glymph coeditor of two others). Few historians are more familiar with the records of American slavery and the opportunities for writing its history.
Her purpose in Moving Toward Freedom: The Political Education of Enslaved Americans is to demonstrate that even before emancipation the enslaved had carved out spaces of independence from their enslavers. In the years leading up to the Civil War, Black southerners were not simply victims of oppression but also a people in motion—literally across land and water and figuratively toward freedom, even when an end to slavery seemed all but unimaginable. Masters’ control was never absolute, and slaves exploited these limitations, readying themselves to take advantage of their eventual legal emancipation. Theirs was, she insists, the work of politics, an assertion of power not at a ballot box but through the events and arrangements of everyday life. O’Donovan’s arguments build on earlier work by a number of other scholars who identified a Black politics that emerged even under slavery, perhaps most notably Steven Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration, which won the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2004. But the richness of her examples and her use of the lens of motion and travel succeed in deepening our understanding.
The balance of oppression and resistance in slavery is complex, O’Donovan stresses. To overemphasize the agency of the enslaved would be to “ignore the violent character of American slavery, an institution forged to steal the labor of millions for white people’s gain.” But to minimize the influence of slaves within the system of constraints imposed on them would be yet another subjugation. The enslaved were, to borrow the parlance of the civil rights movement, “making a way out of no way.”
O’Donovan centers her analysis on examples of slaves moving beyond their places of bondage in the regular course of doing their owners’ business. The tension between freedom and total control, she shows, lies at the very heart of what southerners called “the peculiar institution.” Using unfree workers optimally and efficiently often required granting them some modicum of autonomy, some reprieve from constant scrutiny, some access to the world beyond the master’s direct purview. “To leash their laborers too tightly,” she writes, “would be to strangle themselves and their great golden goose.” Enslaved men worked as crews and as skilled pilots and stewards on steamboats, and as loggers and “wooders” providing fuel along inland waterways. On land, enslaved teamsters hauled goods—for example, cotton to market—similarly escaping the “suffocating surveillance” of the plantation. Their travels put them in contact with people from other parts of the nation and beyond, often in situations in which sharp social and racial distinctions were difficult to uphold and new ideas, including those that might challenge slavery, difficult to suppress. As the Missouri Supreme Court wrote in an 1835 case involving an enslaved drayman, “He acts as a freeman all the day.”
The movement of enslaved women tended to have a different character. Many traveled as domestic servants for the convenience of their mistresses, visiting spas like Saratoga Springs in New York or cities like Philadelphia or even London where slavery did not exist. O’Donovan ingeniously uses a federal record of all enslaved people who left or entered United States’ seaports, a register kept after 1808 to monitor possible violations of the law banning the international slave trade. She finds that such travelers were overwhelmingly female—in most cases, she argues, the attendants of elite southerners visiting abroad or embarking on the grand tour. Their journeys introduced them to new worlds. On a transatlantic steamship voyage, Frederick Douglass remarked that “all color distinctions were flung to the winds.” Enslaved workers who had witnessed free societies and seen the place of free African Americans within them no longer understood their own situation as unalterable. Travel helped produce a contagion of liberty.
Over the course of the antebellum era, boom and bust could accelerate or diminish mobility. In the 1820s and 1830s, expansion into the cotton kingdom of the Old Southwest—Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and other states—relocated hundreds of thousands of Black southerners who were transported or sold to cultivate rich virgin soils. In the 1850s, high cotton prices drove productivity, which in turn required more marketing and hauling, more teamsters and enslaved workers interacting with towns and cities beyond their plantations.
Moments of genuine activism emerged out of growing political awareness among the enslaved as sectional hostilities and attacks on slavery intensified. Anxious slaveholders worried about the “great meetings” of their unfree laborers that began during John C. Frémont’s Free Soil campaign for the presidency in 1856. O’Donovan describes protests that erupted along a canal in Rockbridge, Virginia, and along a railroad under construction in Alabama, as well as a rebellion plotted in a plantation district near Memphis. In South Carolina, a committee of slaves sent a delegation to the governor to petition for “redress of certain grievances.” As one Black southerner later recalled, in the years after the 1856 election “a great anger arose among the colored people,” and they “began to study how they would get free.”
When Union armies advanced into the South in 1861, enslaved people knew what was at stake. Some hundreds of thousands fled to Union lines because, O’Donovan argues, they had been “laying the foundations for liberation for decades.” They were ready, and they understood, in the words of an 1865 petition of the Black residents of Nashville, “the burdens of citizenship” as well as its promises. As a gathering of freedpeople declared to Union general Joseph Fullerton in July 1865, “We is come to the law now.”
In A Terrible Intimacy: Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South, Melvin Patrick Ely, a professor at William and Mary, makes clear that Black southerners had in fact been touched by the law throughout the antebellum period. Unlike O’Donovan’s sweeping study, Ely’s book is sharply focused, delving into six criminal cases in one Virginia community—the notorious Prince Edward County, which achieved an enduring place in history by closing its public schools from 1959 until 1964 rather than integrating them after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision.
Yet like O’Donovan, Ely relishes the relentless quest for sources, and his excitement is evident in discoveries like the “sheaf of bluish-brown tissue-thin pages” recording the testimony at an 1854 rape trial or the rare court minute book he found in a little-used archival warehouse near the Richmond airport. He offers the reader a you-are-there approach both to his own work as a scholar and to the proceedings of a nineteenth-century courtroom.
Ely seeks to particularize the history of slavery, to embed it in the stories of individual men and women, white and Black, whose testimony, “not verbatim but very detailed,” was recorded by court clerks. Such sources have often been dismissed as partial and unreliable evidence because of laws that prohibited Black people from testifying against white defendants in southern states. But Ely shows us how much was said in spite of this prohibition, citing examples of white people on the stand relating stories they had heard from African Americans—a confounding judicial circumstance in which the admission of hearsay in some measure compensated for the limits on Black testimony. And Black people, both free and enslaved, who were not themselves on trial were frequent witnesses (if the defendant was not white) and were recorded speaking at length.
Ely, too, emphasizes the complexity of slavery as a system and as a web of human relationships. In Prince Edward County, three quarters of white households owned slaves, but in small numbers, not in large plantation-scale holdings. It was, Ely writes, “a little republic of middle-level slaveholding men” that thrust people together across class and race and condition—even in court. The “terrible intimacy” of his title refers to the closeness of Black and white people in nearly every aspect of daily life, including sexual ties across the color line and blurred family links that defied notions of racial purity. But this was, as he describes it, a “deformed” intimacy produced by a society “that exploited and abused” Black people.
To enable his readers to engage directly with the past themselves, Ely organizes his book around the reports of witness testimony for the six cases he uses to capture his slice of nineteenth-century southern life. His earlier works, he explains, simply presented his interpretation of his sources from the perspective of an omniscient narrator; he effectively asked the reader to “trust me.” But this time “I want you to walk through these stories with me—to see them unfold as they did in the community and then in the courtroom.” He adopts a familiar, conversational tone, assessing what he sees, acknowledging where he finds the record “biased and riddled with blind spots,” and using his extensive knowledge of the place and the period to help make sense of materials that might otherwise seem puzzling. Each trial unfolds step by step, often revealing surprising twists that underscore the contradictory forces of humanity and inhumanity in the everyday life of a slave society.
An enslaved man named George is acquitted of rape in an 1854 trial in which his white accuser’s lower-class status and dubious reputation sway the jury to credit the supportive testimony of white witnesses. Mary Tatum was regarded by her neighbors with contempt; George seemed always appropriately “straight-forward humble & obedient.” As one elderly white woman explained, “I thought the negro ought not to be hung for nothing.”
In a murder trial in 1861, after the outbreak of the Civil War, witnesses tell a sickening tale of cruelty inflicted on William, a man accused of killing his enslaver. The prisoner is not executed but instead convicted of second-degree murder, with his sentence commuted by the governor to life at labor on public works. Yet in the course of testimony it becomes evident that many white members of the community had long known of this owner’s “very barbarous” behavior—extracting teeth as punishment, beating William so frequently that his back became a giant scab. Yet they did nothing until their neighbor was dead and William on trial.
The southern system of slavery hid under the veneer of law, but Ely illustrates the elusiveness of genuine justice or mercy within its structures of repression. Human beings both Black and white nevertheless pushed the limits of control, motivated by a wide range of factors—pure self-interest in the case of enslavers who did not want to lose their valuable slave property to the gallows, human sympathy from individuals connected to one another even across racial lines, as well as Black Virginians’ anticipation that white people might somehow, someday be called to account as Christians and Americans.
O’Donovan notes that more than two hundred Black men and women who had been taken outside the South for a period of time by their enslavers sued for freedom in the same court that heard the famous case of Dred Scott, all arguing that once they had set foot on free soil they were legally free. Ely offers no example of such direct use of the law by African Americans in Prince Edward County. But even as the enslaved people who came into that Virginia courtroom were subjected to the display of white supremacy, they also confronted some of its weaknesses, likely emboldening them to seize their freedom when the moment arrived. Rife with the contradictions inherent in defining human beings as chattel property, slavery contained the germs of its own destruction, and both authors let us understand how those seeds might have taken root.
Did William, sentenced in 1861, labor on the public works for life? Or did he run to Union lines when Northern troops advanced and provided an opportunity? Even Ely’s prodigious research gives us no answer to these questions. The archive of slavery cannot tell us all we would like to know. But it can tell us a great deal, and it can continue to challenge us to reckon with a national past that represents human failures as well as human triumphs. We today are the products of all of those. A crowbar cannot change that.
