An Old Creed for the New South: Proslavery Ideology and Historiography, 1865-1918

5. The Study of Slavery at Johns Hopkins

5 The Study of Slavery at Johns Hopkins I While Rhodes, Hart, and the other Nationalist historians worked to counterbalance the rhetoric of the post-Civil War proslavery spokesmen, a movement was under way to remove partisanship from slavery scholarship altogether. Trained in the new "scientific" history of their day at The Johns Hopkins University and other pioneer graduate schools, young historians began to take a dim view of antebellum writings on slavery. They frowned, too, on the blatant chauvinism exhibited by both sides in the postwar slavery debate. At Johns Hopkins in particular, graduate students and faculty alike worked to produce what they perceived to be detached, unemotional studies of slavery. In the process they greatly advanced the level of scholarship on the subject and left amateurs like Rhodes forever in their wake. The students of slavery at Johns Hopkins challenged the preexisting canons of American historiography. Despite Rhodes's genuine contributions to the literature of slavery, his work fell clearly in the tradition of the "romantic" historian George Bancroft and the utilitarianism of Richard Hildreth. The new generation of "scientific" historians at Johns Hopkins worked to abandon anything that smacked of sectional, partisan history. Significantly, Rhodes, Holst and their fellow Nationalist historians also had dedicated themselves to the tenets of "scientific" history . But when they approached the emotion-laden subject of black 138 The Formative Period of American Slave Historiography slavery, these scholars ultimately abandoned that ideal. How would the students at Johns Hopkins avoid the pitfalls of historical chauvinism? How would they successfully apply the "scientific" method to the study of slavery when others had failed? Professor Herbert Baxter Adams led them, carefully guiding the graduate students at Johns Hopkins through the treacherous eddies inherent in the study of slavery. Adams's approach to history-tracing the evolution of legal institutions such as slavery-smoothed their path. He implored his students to cleanse their writings of identification with any sect, section, or political philosophy. As a result of his brilliant training, his students contributed important monographs and gained for their institution a reputation as the leading research center on slavery. 1 Adams, trained at the University of Heidelberg in the 1870s, imported German "scientific" history to Johns Hopkins in 1876. He considered his seminars there "laboratories where books are treated like mineralogical specimens." Armed with primary, nonpartisan sources as evidence , "scientific" historians eschewed value judgments. Yet, according to Professor William P. Trent of the University of the South, objectivity on the slavery question was at best a pipe dream. "How is a Southerner, or a Northerner," Trent asked in 1895, "to approach any portion of our history involving the subject of slavery and the late war without a parti pris?' , Nevertheless "scientific" historians at Johns Hopkins, in their determined quest for objectivity, went about their business under Adams's direction. They traced black slavery's generic origins principally on the colonial and state levels.2 Adams realized that the availability of primary materials on slavery held the key to the success or failure of the new "scientific" research on slavery. Many practitioners of "scientific" history believed that the records of the past should be allowed to speak for themselves. Respecting the integrity of documents, they insisted, would guarantee impartial, unbiased history. They failed to consider the natural bias that investigators bring to every historical problem. And they ignored the methodological dilemmas involved with sorting and marshaling evidence selectively. Nonetheless, armed with this faith in historical objectivity , historians at Johns Hopkins canvassed the South in search of the records of slavery--especially statutes, pamphlets, plantation records , newspapers, and diaries. These became the analytical tools, the test tubes, of the "scientific" historians of slavery. As the case of Rhodes illustrated, serious problems confronted the The Study of Slavery at Johns Hopkins 139 historian of slavery who never left his study on Beacon Street in Boston. Primary sources on slavery were so widely scattered at this time that major difficulties awaited even the most disciplined "scientific" scholar. Adams and his colleagues worked hard to acquire slavery-related materials at Johns Hopkins. In 1891, for example, the school accessioned the Birney and Scharf Collections. The former contained over one thousand books and pamphlets on the peculiar institution gathered by General James G. Birney, including Jesse Torrey's rare Portraiture ofDomestic Slavery (1817). At the time, the Birney Collection was judged to be the largest and most complete group of...