slavery existed there—in the heart of plantation Virginia! Very few adults
today realize that our society has been slave much longer than it has been free.
Even fewer know that slavery was important in the North, too, until after the
Revolutionary War. The first colony to legalize slavery was not Virginia but
Massachusetts. In 1720, of New York City’s population of seven thousand,
sixteen hundred were African Americans, most of them slaves. Wall Street was
the marketplace where owners could hire out their slaves by the day or week.^22
Most textbooks downplay slavery in the North, however, so slavery seems
to be a sectional rather than national problem. Indeed, even the expanded
coverage of slavery comes across as an unfortunate but minor blemish,
compared to the overall story line of our textbooks. James Oliver Horton has
pointed out that “the black experience cannot be fully illuminated without
bringing a new perspective to the study of American history.”^23 Textbook
authors have failed to present any new perspective. Instead, they shoehorn their
improved and more accurate portrait of slavery into the old “progress as
usual” story line. In this saga, the United States is always intrinsically and
increasingly democratic, and slaveholding is merely a temporary aberration,
not part of the big picture. Ironically, the very success of the civil rights
movement allows authors to imply that the problem of black-white race
relations has now been solved, at least formally. This enables textbooks to
discuss slavery without departing from their customarily optimistic tone.
While textbooks now show the horror of slavery and its impact on black
America, they remain largely silent regarding the impact of slavery on white
America, North or South. Textbooks have trouble acknowledging that anything
might be wrong with white Americans or with the United States as a whole.
Perhaps telling realistically what slavery was like for slaves is the easy part.
After all, slavery as an institution is dead. We have progressed beyond it, so
we can acknowledge its evils. Even the Museum of the Confederacy in
Richmond mounted an exhibit on slavery that did not romanticize the
institution.^24 Without explaining slavery’s relevance to the present, however,
its extensive coverage is like extensive coverage of the Hawley-Smoot Tariff
—just more facts for hapless eleventh graders to memorize.
Slavery’s twin legacies to the present are the social and economic
inferiority it conferred upon blacks and the cultural racism it instilled in
whites. Both continue to haunt our society. Therefore, treating slavery’s
enduring legacy is necessarily controversial. Unlike slavery, racism is not over