As the movie 12 Years a Slave accumulates richly-deserved awards, including two awards from the British BAFTA and nine nominations for tonight's Academy Awards, a caution is in order. The film is, of course, based on a memoir that appears to be true, and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was a historical consultant to ensure that the movie portrayal was accurate. Even in its dramatic portrayal of the horrors of slavery, however, the film risks reinforcing persistent myths about the slavery system that warp our national conversation on slavery and race.
Follow me below the fold.
Myth #1: Slavery was a Southern phenomenon. In the movie, as in the US history we learned in the 4th grade, Southern slavery is contrasted with Northern freedom.
In fact, even in 1841 when Solomon Northup was taken captive, slavery was the American economy, North, South, and West. Well into the early Republic, enslaved labor was used by urban furniture-makers, stone-carvers, rope-makers, and blacksmiths in Boston, Newport, New York, and Philadelphia, and by farmers throughout the Northeast. New York did not abolish slavery until 1827. Rhode Island, like other Northern states, declared as free those born after a set date (1784). But it did not free those already enslaved, unless their owners manumitted them voluntarily; the 1840 census still showed a handful of slaves in Rhode Island. And slave-holders from South Carolina regularly spent summers in Newport, bringing their household servants with them. Slavery looked different in households with five to ten slaves rather than hundreds. But it was slavery nevertheless.
The slavery economy was also deeply intertwined with the financial and commercial growth of New York and other cities. Insurance brokers, cotton merchants and shippers, and banks grew wealthy providing essential services to slave-owning planters. The North-versus-South narrative became embedded in history books (which were written beginning in the 1830s, mostly by scholars at Harvard and Yale), and continues to dominate both school textbooks and popular discourse. But it hides the complexity and interconnectedness of the national economy.
Myth #2: Slavery was caused by bad individuals. The slavery system was above all an economic structure. Many of the people who owned or captained slaving ships, traded slaves for money or sugar or bills of exchange, sold insurance on slaving ships, and used enslaved labor on their farms or in their workshops were decent, thoughtful, church-going people, who simply accepted the norms of the society they lived in. In his memoir, Solomon Northup described his first owner, William Ford, as a “kind, noble, candid, Christian man.”
A slave-trading merchant like Newport Quaker Thomas Robinson could write dispassionately (in 1755) to request insurance on “the sloop Dolfin & Cargo [sic], Isaac Howland master,” to the coast of Africa, and thence to the West Indies. He then cautioned Capt. Howland, “pray be exceeding Carefull in feeding your slaves as there health depend much upon it & not omit bring aplenty of Provisions for them when you leave the Coast,” lest they lose too many during the passage and lose money on the venture.
Hannah Arendt’s description of “the banality of evil” applies as well to slavery as to the (other) Holocaust. Some slave-owners were genuinely concerned about the well-being of their workers; others, like their factory-owner counterparts, cared only for getting the most production out of workers at the lowest possible cost. One did not have to be a distasteful character like Northup’s final brutal owner, Edwin Epps, to participate in and profit from slavery.
Myth #3: Slavery ended because of the selfless philanthropic actions of white abolitionists. Without the diligent (and risky) actions of Canadian abolitionist Samuel Bass, Solomon Northup’s story might well have ended differently. But it is disheartening to have yet another narrative, like Amistad, Amazing Grace, and Lincoln, which gives disproportionate credit to white agents. Scholarship about the anti-slavery movement, both in Britain and in the United States, increasingly elevates actions taken by enslaved persons themselves, ranging from arson to mid-ocean rebellions to flight (self-emancipation).
Myth #4: Free blacks like the Northups enjoyed a comfortable middle-class lifestyle and the respect of their communities. In fact, very few were able to achieve any degree of material success. There were some – Paul Cuffe, Robert Purvis, Sarah Mapps Douglass -- and their stories need telling. But for the vast majority, “freedom” meant a scramble to earn a living, often on the margins, in the face of increasing restrictions on freedom of movement, overtly racial curfew laws, substandard housing, voting restrictions, exclusion from education and from many manufacturing jobs, and outright mob violence. In the 1820s the predominantly black neighborhood down the street from my Providence home was known, appropriately, as “Hardscrabble.” While Solomon Northup was enslaved, his wife and children had no better option than going into domestic service at the New York mansion of a wealthy widow who summered in Saratoga Springs.
So go see the movie. If you have already seen it, see it again. But remember that it is a partial story, and push back against the myths, so that we gain a more accurate and nuanced understanding of the place of slavery in our national narrative.