The New York Times Magazine 49Among the converts was Edmund Morgan himself, who noted in a 1972
address that ‘‘American historians interested in tracing the rise of liberty,
democracy and the common man have been challenged in the past two
decades by other historians, interested in tracing the history of oppres-
sion, exploitation and racism. The challenge has been salutary, because
it has made us examine more directly than historians have hitherto been
willing to do the role of slavery in our early history. Colonial historians, in
particular, when writing about the origin and development of American
institutions, have found it possible until recently to deal with slavery as an
exception to everything they had to
say. I am speaking about myself but
also about most of my generation.’’
To be more precise, Morgan might
have said that white historians had
‘‘found it possible’’ to hold slavery
and the creation of American democ-
racy entirely apart. Black historians,
working outside the mainstream for
a hundred years, tended to see the
matter more clearly. For during this
whole evolution in American histo-
ry, from Bancroft through the 1960s,
there was another scholarly tradi-
tion unfolding, one that only rarely
gained entry into white-dominated
academic spaces.
It began, like all historiographies,
with the work of non-historians, the
sermons, poems, speeches and memoirs by Black writers of the revolu-
tionary period and beyond. The antebellum historians William C. Nell and
William Wells Brown wrote scholarly accounts of Black participation in
the American Revolution. But the fi rst work by a Black author generally
considered part of what was then the emerging fi eld of professional his-
tory was George Washington Williams’s ‘‘History of the Negro Race in
America From 1619 to 1880: Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers and as Citizens,’’
published in 1882.
Williams was an innovator. He had to be. In writing his landmark book,
he pioneered several research methodologies that would later re-emerge
among the social historians — the use of oral history, the aggregation of
statistical data, even the use of newspapers as primary sources. His view
of the centrality of slavery was also far ahead of its time:
No event in the history of North America has carried with it to its last
analysis such terrible forces. It touched the brightest features of social life,
and they faded under the contact of its poisonous breath. It aff ected legis-
lation, local and national; it made and destroyed statesmen; it prostrated
and bullied honest public sentiment; it strangled the voice of the press,
and awed the pulpit into silent acquiescence; it organized the judiciary of
States, and wrote decisions for judges; it gave States their political being,
and afterwards dragg ed them by the fore-hair through the stormy sea of
civil war; laid the parricidal fi ngers of Treason against the fair throat of
Liberty, — and through all time to come no event will be more sincerely
deplored than the introduction of slavery into the colony of Virginia during
the last days of the month of August in the year 1619!Like so many Black historians, Williams was writing against the grain,
not only in his insistence on the infl uence of slavery in shaping American
institutions but in something even more basic: his assumption of Black
humanity. This challenge he faced is made clear from the fi rst chapter
of Volume I: ‘‘It is proposed, in the fi rst place, to call the attention to the
absurd charge that the Negro does not belong to the human family.’’ In a
nation backtracking on the promise of Reconstruction, this was an inher-
ently political statement. Just one year after ‘‘History of the Negro Race’’
was published, the U.S. Supreme Court would invalidate as unconstitu-
tional the protections of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which barred racial
discrimination in public accommodations and transportation. A country
that denied Black people the rights of citizens could not also see them as
signifi cant historical actors.
‘‘History is a science, a social science, but it’s also politics,’’ the historian
Martha S. Jones, who contributed a chapter in the new 1619 book, told me.
‘‘And Black historians have always known that. They always know the stakes.
In a world that would brand Africans as people without a history, Williams
understood the political consequence of the assertion that Black people have
history and might even be driving it.’’
We can see evidence of this in the decades of Jim Crow that followed
Reconstruction, when Black people were not only prevented from voting
and denied access to a wide array of public accommodations but also, for
the most part, kept out of the mainstream history profession. Nevertheless,
a rich Black scholarly tradition continued to unfold in publications like The
Journal of Negro History, founded by Carter G. Woodson in 1916, and in the
work of scholars like W. E. B. Du Bois, Helen G. Edmonds, Lorenzo Greene,
Luther P. Jackson, Rayford Logan, Benjamin Quarles and Charles H. Wesley.
Quarles’s book ‘‘The Negro in the American Revolution,’’ published in 1961,
was an important part of that decade’s historiographical reassessments. It
was the fi rst to thoroughly explore an often-overlooked feature of that war:
that substantially more Black people were drawn to the British side than the
Patriot cause, believing this the better path to freedom. Quarles’s work posed
profound questions about the traditional narrative of the founding era. While
acknowledging that for some
white people the ideals of the
Revolution had ‘‘exposed the
inconsistencies’’ of chattel slavery
in a nation founded on equali-
ty, he also observed a deeply
uncomfortable fact: ‘‘They were
far outnumbered by those who
detected no ideological incon-
sistency. These white Americans,
not considering themselves
counterrevolutionary, would
never have dreamed of repudi-
ating the theory of natural rights.
Instead they skirted the dilemma
by maintaining that blacks were
an outgroup rather than mem-
bers of the body politic.’’
The story told by Quarles and
his predecessors amounted to a counternarrative of American history, one
in which, contrary to what many white historians had argued, slavery was
essential to the development of the colonies; Black soldiers played an import-
ant role on both sides of the American Revolution and in the Union victory
in the Civil War; and Reconstruction was an idealistic attempt to make the
United States an interracial democracy, not a failed experiment that served
only to demonstrate the folly of giving Black people the right to vote.
It is no coincidence that this counternarrative began to break through
in the 1960s, at the same time as Black Americans fi nally won that right,
one that the 15th Amendment to the Constitution sought to guarantee in
1870 (for men), only to see it abrogated in all the Southern states by the
turn of the century. As Bancroft demonstrated and Jones noted, history is
not simply an academic exercise — it is inherently political. Those without
political standing in the present are generally discounted as historical actors
in the past. In the 1960s, after hundreds of years, American democracy had
been made to include Black people; now American history would, too.It’s one thing for scholars to face the ‘‘salutary’’ challenge that Morgan spoke
of and quite another for the nation as a whole to reckon with a new history thatBenjamin QuarlesGeorge Washington Williams