Slavery as a Problem in Public History: Or Sally Hemings and the "One Drop Rule" of Public History

This address was originally given at Slavery and Public History: An International Symposium, part of the Eighth Annual Gilder Lehrman Center International Conference at Yale University in November 2006.

I have crossed swords with public history as both sculptor and novelist, an accidental historian. As a writer, I backed into issues of slavery and the public by default. I discovered the Thomas Jefferson/Sally Hemings liaison twenty-five years ago and wrote Sally Hemings: A Novel, which, amongst other things, challenged public history and raised the ire of all the Jeffersonians. As a sculptor, this accident led to a whole new literary career of illuminating untold, unknown, invisible subjects left behind by public history.

I didn't have the impression when I was writing that I was producing an act of resistance to history. I only said to myself that there were things "scientific history" had overlooked or forgotten, or never written about, or suppressed for political motives, which, for reasons as important as liberation, should be written about.

Why is the subject of slavery avoided in the written and oral presentation of the history of the United States? Why is it still taboo, still so painful, still so present? One might even say omnipresent since there was a racial basis for slavery in the Americas, and racism in America remains.

Slavery defines American history. It evokes all the contradictions of our national narrative—a national narrative perfectly devoid of any reference to the black presence and what slavery represents. It can be said that there are no errors in history, only consequences. The consequence in this case is the obligatory elimination of any trace of our national secret: the birth of white freedom in the bosom of a slave society with all that that implies—self-delusion, lies, misinformation, guilt, mental acrobatics, and total amnesia—in order to render our American dream, the national image and the idea of a white man's country.

Because slavery and the persons who were subjugated to it were necessary to the creation and the survival of a viable United States as a nation and an economic entity—in other words, a raison d'etat—it was held permissible, even defendable, to retain and protect it. In order to do this, a theory of invisibility based upon dehumanization had to be invented. This was done in two ways: by psychological brainwashing and by the invention of racism—the exact opposite of the Patriot's creed of equality, liberty, and independence upon which the national identity was based. A split personality was created to keep the secrets of slavery. To mention slavery at all was to insure discomfort, guilt, and confusion in the minds of both the victims and the perpetuators. The institution was untouchable. Founding history had to be virgin—without slavery and without the black presence, which in turn, created a rhetoric all its own. A cloak of silence was invented around this untouchable institution, allowing the United States to begin its life an innocent, void of slavery and the ostensibly "contaminating" black presence, which was at the time one-fifth of the colonial population. In other words, this black fifth negated the virginity and the purity of our origins and national myth (the amazing sexual overtones of this are of course present everywhere in racist cant). The myth of a new country born of love and desire for freedom, tolerance, innocence, equality and immigration (Give me your poor, tired, weak etc.) was superimposed on this same new country that still retained chattel slavery, hereditary slavery.

Americans have fought three wars over slavery: the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the Civil Rights War, each successive war containing the seeds of the preceding one. Of the three wars fought over slavery, the American Revolution or War of Independence is surely the most contradictory and tragic. In 1776, in a country of 10.5 million colonists, one-fifth or two million and a half were black, slave or free, North or South, a fact hardly mentioned in the...