David Brion Davis: The Importance of History
I’m concerned with the erosion of interest in history -- the view expressed by even some leading teachers and intellectuals that we should “let bygones be bygones,” “free” ourselves from the boring and oppressive past, and concentrate on a fresh and better future.
I’m passionately committed to the cause that distinguishes us from all other animals -- the ability to transcend an illusory sense of NOW, of an eternal present, and to strive for an understanding of the forces and events that made us what we are. Such an understanding is the prerequisite, I believe, for all human freedom. In one of my works on slavery I refer to “a profound transformation in moral perception” that led in the eighteenth century to a growing recognition of “the full horror of a social evil to which mankind had been blind for centuries.” Unfortunately, many American historians are only now beginning to grasp the true centrality of that social evil –- racial slavery --- throughout the decades and even centuries that first shaped our government and what America would become.
The goal of much of my work since 1994 and what led me to write my current book, Inhuman Bondage, is to “de-localize” the central AMERICAN, not Negro, problem; to find ways of envisioning and understanding what I term THE BIG PICTURE.
In order to appreciate the importance of correcting profound misconceptions regarding American slavery, I should at least mention the “moonlight and magnolias” mythology that I was taught as an undergraduate, a mythology propagated by respected historians, in popular literature and by major films such as “Birth of a Nation” and “Gone With the Wind.” In this mythology, the slaveholding South counteracted its military defeat by winning the ideological war -- or in other words, the way the twentieth-century American public understood racial slavery and the Civil War.
To summarize some of the points concisely: by the 1930s a strong consensus had emerged to the effect that the Civil War had little if anything to do with slavery. One school of thought held that the war had been waged over economic issues and resulted in the triumph of Northern capitalism. A second school argued that the war had been a needless and avertable tragedy, brought on by abolitionist fanatics and a few Southern extremists. Virtually all American whites agreed that slavery had been an inefficient, backward institution, increasingly marginal to American life; and though maintained as a form of racial control, it would have soon ended, without a war, since slavery contained its own economic seeds of extinction.
And to give you a concrete example, my very liberal-minded but self-educated parents were delighted in 1936 or 1937 by a new, well-written, and immensely popular survey of American history, written by W. E. Woodward (no relation to the great and late C. Vann Woodward). According W. E. Woodward’s A New American History:
"The slave system did incalculable harm to the white people of the South, and benefited nobody but the negro, in that it served as a vast training school for African savages. Though the regime of the slave plantations was strict, it was, on the whole, a kindly one by comparison with what the imported slave had experienced in his own land. It taught him discipline, cleanliness and a conception of moral standards."
Despite some little-known works by African-American and Marxist historians, the views I’ve summarized persisted well into the 1960s, even among some of the most respected white historians. When, thanks to the GI Bill, I joined Dartmouth College’s undergraduate class of 1950, I took a course on post-Civil War U.S. history which was deeply racist in outlook. We learned that Reconstruction was a disaster, since hoards of carpetbaggers and scalawags quickly corrupted the ignorant Negroes and even put them in state legislatures. The professor presented a humorous picture of the Ku Klux Klan, an organization needed, he claimed, to keep the peace by scaring the highly superstitious Negroes as the hooded Klansmen would knock on a black family’s door and then hoot out the sounds of ghosts.
Things were not much better when I attended Harvard Graduate School from 1951 to 1953. Lecture courses on American social history, on the history of immigration to America, and on the history of religion in America, gave little attention to slavery and antislavery, though they were excellent in other respects....
Read entire article at Oxford University Press Blog
I’m passionately committed to the cause that distinguishes us from all other animals -- the ability to transcend an illusory sense of NOW, of an eternal present, and to strive for an understanding of the forces and events that made us what we are. Such an understanding is the prerequisite, I believe, for all human freedom. In one of my works on slavery I refer to “a profound transformation in moral perception” that led in the eighteenth century to a growing recognition of “the full horror of a social evil to which mankind had been blind for centuries.” Unfortunately, many American historians are only now beginning to grasp the true centrality of that social evil –- racial slavery --- throughout the decades and even centuries that first shaped our government and what America would become.
The goal of much of my work since 1994 and what led me to write my current book, Inhuman Bondage, is to “de-localize” the central AMERICAN, not Negro, problem; to find ways of envisioning and understanding what I term THE BIG PICTURE.
In order to appreciate the importance of correcting profound misconceptions regarding American slavery, I should at least mention the “moonlight and magnolias” mythology that I was taught as an undergraduate, a mythology propagated by respected historians, in popular literature and by major films such as “Birth of a Nation” and “Gone With the Wind.” In this mythology, the slaveholding South counteracted its military defeat by winning the ideological war -- or in other words, the way the twentieth-century American public understood racial slavery and the Civil War.
To summarize some of the points concisely: by the 1930s a strong consensus had emerged to the effect that the Civil War had little if anything to do with slavery. One school of thought held that the war had been waged over economic issues and resulted in the triumph of Northern capitalism. A second school argued that the war had been a needless and avertable tragedy, brought on by abolitionist fanatics and a few Southern extremists. Virtually all American whites agreed that slavery had been an inefficient, backward institution, increasingly marginal to American life; and though maintained as a form of racial control, it would have soon ended, without a war, since slavery contained its own economic seeds of extinction.
And to give you a concrete example, my very liberal-minded but self-educated parents were delighted in 1936 or 1937 by a new, well-written, and immensely popular survey of American history, written by W. E. Woodward (no relation to the great and late C. Vann Woodward). According W. E. Woodward’s A New American History:
"The slave system did incalculable harm to the white people of the South, and benefited nobody but the negro, in that it served as a vast training school for African savages. Though the regime of the slave plantations was strict, it was, on the whole, a kindly one by comparison with what the imported slave had experienced in his own land. It taught him discipline, cleanliness and a conception of moral standards."
Despite some little-known works by African-American and Marxist historians, the views I’ve summarized persisted well into the 1960s, even among some of the most respected white historians. When, thanks to the GI Bill, I joined Dartmouth College’s undergraduate class of 1950, I took a course on post-Civil War U.S. history which was deeply racist in outlook. We learned that Reconstruction was a disaster, since hoards of carpetbaggers and scalawags quickly corrupted the ignorant Negroes and even put them in state legislatures. The professor presented a humorous picture of the Ku Klux Klan, an organization needed, he claimed, to keep the peace by scaring the highly superstitious Negroes as the hooded Klansmen would knock on a black family’s door and then hoot out the sounds of ghosts.
Things were not much better when I attended Harvard Graduate School from 1951 to 1953. Lecture courses on American social history, on the history of immigration to America, and on the history of religion in America, gave little attention to slavery and antislavery, though they were excellent in other respects....