OAH Magazine of History
Volume 23, No 2
April 2009

Copyright ©
Organization of American Historians

From the Editor

Antebellum Slavery

Carl Weinberg

On March 26, 2009, just as the recent annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians (OAH) opened in Seattle, we received some sobering news: pioneering historian John Hope Franklin had died. He was 94 years old. To a generation of young black historians coming of age in the 1960s and 70s, inspired by his brilliant example, Franklin was known simply as "the prince." To a wider group of colleagues who worked with Franklin at Brooklyn College and the University of Chicago, where he chaired history departments, and later at Duke, and who associated with him at scholarly gatherings of all kinds, Franklin was fondly known as "John Hope." To a broad American public, Franklin was the man appointed by President Clinton to chair the advisory board for his Initiative on Race in 1997 (and to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995). By that point in his career, Franklin was not only the author of landmark studies, such as From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African-Americans (which has now sold more than three million copies in eight editions); he also had served as president of the Southern Historical Association, the American Historical Association and the OAH. Looking back on his rise to celebrity status, Franklin recalled that around the time he received the Medal of Freedom, he was standing in a hotel lobby, whereupon a man handed Franklin a set of car keys and told him to retrieve his car. With his legendary good humor and tact, Franklin replied that he was a guest at the hotel, as he assumed the man was, and that he had no idea of the whereabouts of his car. "And in any case," he added, "I'[m] retired." To that one man in the hotel lobby, Franklin was neither prince, nor "John Hope," nor celebrity historianhe was simply an old black man assumed to be working as a valet.

That one moment revealed much about the history and legacy of slavery that John Hope Franklin and others have labored so hard to reconstruct and study. For Franklin, who grew up near Tulsa, Oklahoma, that legacy also included the murderous assault on the Greenwood section of that city in 1921, in which dozens, if not hundreds, of blacks were wantonly killed and an entire neighborhood, including Franklin's father's house and legal office, was burned to the ground. It included as well the refusal of the University of Oklahoma to accept young John Hope as a student, despite the fact that, at the age of sixteen, he was class valedictorian at Booker T. Washington High School in Tulsa. He attended Fisk University, an historically black institution, instead. And the rest, as they say, is history.

On the subject of slavery, John Hope Franklin said and wrote many things, but one of these seems particularly relevant for introducing this issue of the OAH Magazine of History on antebellum slavery. "We should never forget slavery," he said in 1994, when a controversy was raging over the reenactment of a slave auction at Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. "We should talk about it every morning and every day of the year to remind this country that there's an enormous gap between its practices and its professions." As guest editor Susan O'Donovan notes in her fine Foreword to this issue, coming to grips with antebellum slavery has been particularly difficult for Americans. Unlike colonial slavery, which is more remote in time and can be pinned on the British Empire, the institution of slavery as it existed from the Revolution until the Civil War is intimately tied up with the making of America as a nation and consequently with our national feeling of who we are. In his article in this issue, Adam Rothman makes a powerful argument for considering the United States a "slave country." In her teaching strategy on ties between slavery and New England textiles, Marie Parys augments that point by focusing on the interrelation between northern "free" labor and the southern slave system.

While antebellum slavery legally ended in December 1865 with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, its legacy continued to powerfully affect the way Americans think and act, as John Hope Franklin witnessed in that hotel lobby just a decade ago. As Leon Litwack's new work How Free is Free? reminds us, the legal end of chattel slavery was followed by a century of Jim Crow, lynching, and discrimination. But just as John Hope Franklin taught us in life, that the oppressed can make an impact on history despite the obstacles, so historians are learning more about how the enslaved people of the antebellum era made their mark as well. In daily acts of resistance, as Thavolia Glymph recounts, in attempts to keep family together despite the most horrific conditions, as Calvin Schermerhorn describes, enslaved men and women fought to maintain their dignity despite great odds. Gretchen Catron's teaching strategy on runaway slave advertisements offers a window into the world of the human beings who sought to escape from slavery and those who attempted to recapture their human property.

As Dylan Penningroth notes in his comprehensive essay on the changing scholarship of slavery, one of the thorny issues that have engaged historians is the question of "agency--to what extent were enslaved people active agents in shaping their own lives?" The very wording of this question--"enslaved people" as opposed to "slaves"--signals a subtle but significant shift in the way historians now write and think about slavery. "Enslaved people" suggests a condition of servitude rather than an all-encompassing identity defined by that servitude. Slaves, that is, were individual human beings. As he also notes, the cost of this conception of "agency" is the danger of downplaying the real power relations that constrained and shaped the lives of those who lived in chattel slavery. This tension emerges in the article by Tanisha Ford and myself, which explores the meaning of documents that focused on the relationship between Richard Mentor Johnson and his enslaved common-law wife Julia Chinn. In a different way, it also arises in my closing "History Today" article on the reenactment of slavery at Conner Prairie, a living history site in central Indiana.

With the increased willingness of the nation to face up to the complex and painful history of antebellum slavery has come a profusion of new scholarship, including many rich online sources. Callinda Taylor's article does a fine job of showcasing some of the best of those sites. Don't forgetthe Magazine itself is also online. OAH members can download a pdf version of any issue of the Magazine since 2003. Use them to generate homework assignments, in-class handouts, or background readings. Web links inside these issues are live and appear in color. Selected articles from current and back issues are also freely available to anyone visiting our website: <http://oah.org/pubs/magazine/>. Visit the site to access two additional teaching resources on antebellum slavery (see inset on page 41).

Thanks to guest editor Susan O'Donovan for a great issue. We hope you enjoy it.

—Carl R. Weinberg