This Guilty Land

James Oliver Horton and Lois Horton. Slavery and the Making of America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 254 pp. Maps, illustrations, and notes. $35.00. Slavery and the Making of America. series producer Dante J. James. New York: Ambrose Video Publishing, 2004. Slavery and the Making of America. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/slavery/.

What do most Americans know about the history of slavery, and where does their knowledge come from? The most likely answer is that most Americans don't know much, and what they do know is more likely to come from family history, folklore, Hollywood movies, and best-selling novels than from books written by academic historians. Enter Slavery and the Making of America (SMA), an ambitious project that aims to synthesize and represent the last generation of scholarship for "public" consumption. A four-hour PBS television documentary narrated by Morgan Freeman, a companion book written by James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, and a multidimensional interactive website all chart the diverse ways that enslaved people in North America navigated the shoals of oppression from the early 1600s through the end of Reconstruction and how their activities shaped the country they inhabited. Like much recent scholarship, SMA emphasizes compelling stories about slaves and free people of color, but this emphasis comes at the cost of attention to the overall effects of slavery on American politics, society, and culture. Equally problematic, SMA lags behind recent scholarship in reaching beyond the conventional understanding of slavery as a uniquely American dilemma. These limitations are not an inevitable result of the process of winnowing and translation that must be undertaken to reach a broader audience. They flow, rather, from the perspective of history "from the bottom up."

For academic historians, SMA presents a familiar story. It opens with the "downward spiral" in the colonial era toward a full-fledged system of chattel slavery based exclusively on the enslavement of Africans and their descendants. In its earliest years in the eastern seaboard colonies, slavery lacked a settled legal framework and existed alongside other forms of unfree labor, including indentured servitude. The first people of African descent in the colonies—many of them "Atlantic creoles" who spoke multiple languages—occupied a variety of statuses on the spectrum from slavery to freedom. As the seventeenth century progressed, slavery crystallized into a more rigid legal, social, and racial structure as its economic importance expanded. The eighteenth century proved to be the heyday of the transatlantic slave trade, which brought tens of thousands of Africans to North America, where they labored, suffered, adapted, and occasionally revolted against their masters. The first segment of the documentary ends with the 1739 Stono Rebellion. "The crushing of the Stono Rebellion was a tragedy," says historian Peter Wood in the documentary. "To me these people were freedom fighters."¹

SMA proceeds to the era of the American Revolution when African Americans used the rhetoric of liberty and the tumult of war to press for their own freedom. They used the courts, suing their owners and petitioning for their freedom. They resorted to violence, rioting in the streets and taking up arms. And thousands fled from the mainland colonies altogether in pursuit of freedom elsewhere. Few documents have more eloquently indicted the hypocrisy of the American Revolution than a 1774 petition by Massachusetts slaves, excerpted in the Hortons' book, which declared that the slaves had been "unjustly dragged by the cruel hand of power from our dearest frinds and sum of us stolen from the bosoms of our tender Parents and from a Populous Pleasant and plentiful country and Brought hither to be made slaves for Life in a Christian land" (p. 52). That many enslaved Americans sought their freedom by fighting against "patriot" owners who claimed to be on the side of liberty is a striking inversion of most Americans' conventional view of the Revolution. Perhaps an even deeper irony—unexamined in SMA—is that slavery was abolished in the British West Indies before it was...