America’s failure to allow African Americans equal rights led eventually to
the struggle for civil rights a century later.
The subject also pops up where we least suspect it—at the Alamo,
throughout the Seminole Wars, even in the expulsion of the Mormons from
Missouri.^10 Studs Terkel is right: race is our “American obsession.”^11 Since
those first Africans and Spaniards landed on the Carolina shore in 1526, our
society has repeatedly been torn apart and sometimes bound together by this
issue of black-white relations.
Over the years white America has told itself varying stories about the
enslavement of blacks. In each of the last two centuries America’s most
popular novel was set in slavery—Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher
Stowe and Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. The two books tell very
different stories: Uncle Tom’s Cabin presents slavery as an evil to be opposed,
while Gone With the Wind suggests that slavery was an ideal social structure
whose passing is to be lamented. Until the civil rights movement, American
history textbooks in this century pretty much agreed with Mitchell. In 1959 my
high school textbook presented slavery as not such a bad thing. If bondage was
a burden for African Americans, well, slaves were a burden on Ole Massa and
Ole Miss, too. Besides, slaves were reasonably happy and well fed. Such
arguments constitute the “magnolia myth,” according to which slavery was a
social structure of harmony and grace that did no real harm to anyone, white or
black. A famous 1950 textbook by Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele
Commager actually said, “As for Sambo, whose wrongs moved the
abolitionists to wrath and tears, there is some reason to believe that he suffered
less than any other class in the South from its ‘peculiar institution.’”^12 Peculiar
institution meant slavery, of course, and Morison and Commager here
provided a picture of it that came straight from Gone With the Wind.
This is not what textbooks say today. Since the civil rights movement,
textbooks have returned part of the way toward Stowe’s devastating indictment
of the institution. The discussion in American History begins with a passage
that describes the living conditions of slaves in positive terms: “They were
usually given adequate food, clothing, and shelter.” But the author immediately
goes on to point out, “Slaves had absolutely no rights. It was not simply that
they could not vote or own property. Their owners had complete control over
their lives.” He concludes, “Slavery was almost literally inhuman.” American
Adventures tells us, “Slavery led to despair, and despair sometimes led black