A skeptic might be forgiven for wondering if it is a sign of the diminished expectations allowed African-Americans by newspapers like the Times that they were supposed to be mollified by the fact that Bush would “acknowledge” that there was a slave trade, that it was a terrible thing with lasting consequences, and that white people had something to do with it.  While those who had hoped Bush would apologize for slavery should perhaps have known better, so should those who apparently expected him to miss the significance of the moment.  For George Bush is no newcomer to the legacy of slavery.  Indeed, as he made clear in the speech on Goree Island , the history of slavery figures powerfully (if peculiarly) in the history that Bush himself is hoping to make.

Interestingly, there is little on first inspection which differentiates his version of history from much of the recent scholarship on slavery in the United States (certainly including my own work, though I won’t speak for the others on this panel).  He spoke on Goree Island of slave resistance and slaveholder brutality, he emphasized the separation of slave families at the hands of traders and the corruptive effects of tyranny upon the master class itself.  And then, much as he did in his inaugural address, when he described American history as “the story of a slave-holding society that became a servant of freedom,” he closed out his history of slavery with a redemptive story about freedom.  Again, there was nothing on the face of this which made it seem any different from the standard practice of historians who generally end the “first half” of the U.S. History survey in 1865, an act which subtly but insistently conveys the standard narrative of American history: slavery ended with the Civil War only to be succeeded, fitfully, tortuously, incompletely at first, but finally by “freedom.”  As the arrestingly self-opposed phrase “servant of freedom” hints, however, Bush has turned the scholarly history of slavery to purposes very different from those for which it was originally intended.  Just how different became clear on Goree Island .

Standing on the spot where a million people are estimated to have been herded from stinking pens across a small wooden bridge to be packed into the holds of ships set to make a “middle” passage that some of them thought would never end and many would not survive, the President of the United States – remarkably, brazenly, outrageously –  described the slave trade as part of God’s “Providence.”  Through their struggles against injustice, he explained, “the very people traded into slavery helped to set America free.”  Bush, that is, took the history of slavery and conscripted it into a sort of civil servitude to the history of “freedom.”  Setting aside the tautological character of the Providence described (God sent African slaves to America so that they could help end African slavery in America ) as an enduring mystery of the faith, it is worth asking on what authority he thought he could say something like that. 

One answer can be found in Chapter 53 of the Book of Isaiah, the passage commonly known as “the Suffering Servant.”  Isaiah 53 uses the imagery of servitude to convey the mystery of salvation in dense, terrifying, fantastic phrases like the following, which is taken from the fifth verse: “he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.”  While it might at first seem as if Bush was, at the very least, not doing African Americans any disservice by declaring that slavery was a wrong of Biblical proportion and by relating their ancestors’ history to that of a figure seen by scholars as an antecedent of Christ, the suffering servant remains, in Isaiah and, I would argue, in Bush, a servant to purposes larger than his own.

Indeed, Bush turned immediately from the subject of slavery to the subject of empire; not in so many words, of course, but through a lightning quick application of his version of the history of slavery to the question of the proper role of the U.S. in the world. If the fruits of the history of slavery were measured out in “lessons” learned by “Americans,” the relevance of those lessons is here defined (in what is surely a conscious reference to the old chestnut that the sun never set on the British Empire) as reaching “wherever the sun passes.”  Through Bush’s re-working of the history of slavery and freedom, what both proponents and detractors have persisted in labeling “liberal” imperialism is given a decidedly Providential cast.   On Goree Island , Bush enlisted the history of millions of lives broken by a history of imperialism justified in the name of Providence to the cause of, well, imperialism justified in the name of Providence .

It is my contention that the ease with which Bush assimilated the categories of conventional historical analysis of slavery to justify his own bungled work in the world represents a substantial challenge (if not a crisis) for the social and cultural history of slavery.  While I have written about this at greater length and in more arcane terms elsewhere, let me simply suggest that at least one of the big, argument-framing stories that historians tell about American slavery – the story of slaves “agency” in slavery – seems locked in an inescapable symbiosis with the slavery-to-freedom narrative of American history with which Bush whitewashed the history of the Atlantic slave trade.  I have argued elsewhere that the focus on “agency” in the slavery scholarship sneaks a notion of liberal individualism as the natural condition of humanity into a discussion where it does not belong.  Hence the idea that slaves asserted their “humanity” when they acted in a “self-willed” fashion which frames a sentence like the following one: “Whenever and wherever masters, whether implicitly or explicitly, recognized the independent will and volition of their slaves, the acknowledged the humanity of their bond people.  Extracting this admission was, in fact, a form of slave resistance, because slaves thereby opposed the dehumanization inherent in their status.”      

As well as collapsing the categories of humanity, liberal agency, and resistance into one another, This more-or-less exclusive attention to “freedom-as-agency-as-self-willed-action” has marginalized other versions of human being and emancipation – whether they be Marxian (from each according to his ability to each according to his needs), Christian (the troubling tale of Uncle Tom, so hard for our students to understand), African (see, for instance, the relative inattention to African cultural forms as a way that slaves interacted with one another on a daily basis as opposed to a weapon in their war against their masters ), etc.  And in so doing it has unwittingly reformatted almost everything that enslaved people did as being in some way related to white people – as (resistant) features of their own enslavement.

There was a time for the story of black slaves as liberal agents: in its own way it was essential to the new-world-making efforts of the Civil Rights movement.  Or to put it another way, it was the necessary past to a present moment which identified “Black Freedom” with “Civil Rights.”  But the achievements of both the New Social History and Civil Rights Movement – marvelous if incomplete – have made it both possible and, I believe, necessary, to start a new sort of dialogue between the past and the present.  To say so is not to say that we should turn away from the New Social History’s mandate to write history from the bottom up, only that we should attend to the way in which the terms of the master narrative of American history have insinuated themselves into even the most insistent efforts to displace or transform that narrative. 

There is in Bush’s remarkable phrase “servant of freedom” a key to another understanding of the history of slavery and the politics of the present as they might be viewed from the vantage point of Goree Island .  Whose service is it, we might ask, that produces freedom?  And where?  And for whom?  To ask these questions is to treat “freedom” as a social relation – as a set of capacities which are based upon the subordination of others – rather than a constitutional or even natural condition.  The question of how the freedoms of some were produced out of the servitude of others is not a new one – it frames the work of C. L. R. James, Eric Williams, and W. E. B. DuBois as well as Sidney Mintz, David Brion Davis, Eugene Genovese, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Amy Dru Stanley, Adam Rothman, and Saidiya Hartman.  But I think this question has a strikingly new relevance in an age of black politics increasingly focused on the question of reparations. In its various manifestations, the case for reparations has since at least the 1969 “Black Manifesto” hinged on the argument that slavery remains a living presence in black lives and insisting upon repayment for the historical role of black servitude in the production of white freedom.  In so doing, I would argue, the reparations argument connects the history of slavery to the politics of the present in a way that poses a radical challenge to both the standard slavery-to-freedom narrative of academic history and the Providential imperialist use to which it was so easily subordinated in the President’s speech on Goree Island .  Rather than posing the relation of slavery to freedom as being one of temporal supercession, it places those terms in dynamic tension, pushing us to recognize the own patterns of dominance and dependence which frame the “freedom” we daily experience.

Without being overly prescriptive about addressing a narrowness in the slavery literature which I think is sufficiently incised for there to be any number of ways to work around it, I think there are wonderful models for how we might write the history of slavery after agency.  I think that Nell Painter’s work on “soul murder and slavery” and Brenda Stevenson’s work on discord within enslaved families – on the depression and self-directed violence that were the concomitants of the daily abuse to which slave were subjected – points a path in the history of slaves’ experience of slavery which is neither an effort to “deromanticize” black history nor an effort to smooth out its cultural multiplicity, complicated internal politics, gendered power relations, etc. into an unvariagted (read liberal) notion of “agency.”  Likewise, I think that Mintz’s Sweetness and Power as well as newer work like that of Stephanie Smallwood, Vince Brown, Sharla Fett, Stephanie Camp and Jennifer Morgan points the way back to the question of social reproduction – the bare-life conditions under which the exploited labor and reproduce themselves. And they do so through detailed accounts of sensation – of the way a global mode of production registered its effects in the bodies of all of those whom it touched. 

In this work on bodies and souls – black and white – locked together in a mode of production and system of exploitation which determined their most intimate capacities, I think a much deeper version of the notion of “the social construction of race,” one that treats both whites and black in the same analytical field – be it psychological (as in Painter’s work) or economic and physiological (as in Mintz’s) – and treats socially determined racial identity in all of the intimacy of its psychological and physical effects.  Indeed, I would go so far as to say that in this work we see the beginnings of a history of the meaning of humanity under the conditions of slavery which will transform a set of histories framed by the practice of conflating liberal agency with humanity and then seeking to index whether or not slaves were able at any given moment in time to “preserve their humanity” by seeing how often they acted in a fashion the historian identifies as being sufficiently self-determined.

Finally, I think that the work of scholars like Deborah Gray White, Alex Byrd, Herman Bennet, James Sidbury, Edward Baptist, Dylan Penningroth, Robert Gudmestad, and Phillip Troutman starts to illuminate the ways that slaves and slaveholders experienced, expressed, and perhaps most importantly argued among themselves over slavery (and everything else): the contested process by which they used cultural forms to translate their everyday experience into ideology.  I emphasize the contest because I think that each of these scholars in their own way critically addresses the culture v. society framing of the New Social History by treating “culture” as more of a process than an inheritance.  Rather than treating cultural history as a set of index points measured (mostly by the actions of men) along a foreordained path from African to African-American slave culture or from patriarchal to paternalist slaveholding, they treat culture as an open argument over who had the power to determine elements of a shared past should be applied to a given present.  They treat the process of the formation of historical subjectivity as being essentially social, cross-cut by the politics of age and sex and class, and incomplete.

I want to return in closing to the question of reparations, which I believe provides a template for the type of slavery scholarship we should be seeking to write.  There are a lot of things to say about the complexities and limitations of reparations as a form of politics, perhaps the most salient from my perspective at least is that it seeks to redress a wrong that cannot be undone through the work of man.  As a historical argument, however, I think the case for reparations has much to teach us.  It directly contests the progressive slavery-to-wage-labor-and-voting-rights-as-freedom narrative of American history by insisting on a deeper set of historical continuities – continuities which directly relate the wrongs of the present to those of the past, which, indeed, treat episodes conventionally designated as the “past” and the “present” as emerging from the same historical moment: a centuries-long “Black Holocaust.”  Viewing the work in the world of the self-designated “servant of freedom” and considering the fact that there are twenty-seven million slaves in the world today, it might do us good to try for a while to imagine our history framed not by the story of “freedom” but by that of slavery.