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Slavery and the Making of America Review for the Chronicle of Higher Education Programming information and online resources regarding "Slavery and the Making of America" are available online at http://www.pbs.org/wnet/slavery/. America: Made and Unmade by Slavery by David W. Blight, Yale University The British colonies in North America were forged out of mercantile and imperial dreams as well as religious visions, on lands that produced money crops and in ports connected to the world of Atlantic commerce. They were built out of the American environment with forced labor, first of indentured servants and then of African slaves. These American colonies had the classic combination of elements for the emergence of slavery — an abundance of land and a scarcity of labor. In time the American nation forged out of a revolution against monarchy would be a political experiment born of the Enlightenment but made, so argues this new film series, by slavery. Black exploitation and bondage spawned white wealth and freedom, setting up a harrowing set of contradictions that led this experiment in republicanism down a road to destruction and a tenuous reconstruction. "Slavery and the Making of America" is a visually stunning, ambitious, four-hour documentary, to be aired on PBS February 9 and 16, 2005. The series comes in the wake of a similar film, "Africans in America," the remarkable six-hour documentary produced by Orlando Bagwell for PBS in 1998. Underwritten by the New York Life Insurance Company, and produced by WNET in New York, the new series, somewhat oddly, does not begin on the west coast of Africa with the business of the slave trade and the nearly three and a half centuries of the "middle passage" of more than thirty thousand slave ships to the Americas. Filmmakers must make countless hard decisions, both aesthetic and substantive, but that executive producer and director of the first episode, Dante James, did not use the image of the slave ship to some degree is surprising. Instead, we arrive in Dutch New Amsterdam (later New York City) in 1624 with the first eleven Africans to inhabit Manhattan Island. Geographically, this is a deft choice because most Americans still are largely unaware that slavery was very much a northern as well as a southern institution. But leaving West Africa and the slave ships out of this story deprives viewers of an awareness of the depth of the cultural and psychological rupture that Africans underwent in their descent into slavery. One of the most effective features of James' work in all four episodes is his use of dramatic re-creation. Bagwell and his associates also did so quite adeptly in "Africans," but James has taken the technique even further. Throughout, we encounter actors depicting actual historical figures, usually in slow-motion, with either the narrator, Morgan Freeman, or the voices of numerous talking-head scholars, carrying the story along. The narration, as well as most air time for historians, is taut and to the point. James, and his three co-producer-directors, Gail Pellett, Chana Gazit, and Leslie Farrell provide a visually appealing canvas on which an historical narrative can be projected. They assembled a noteworthy group of historians and writers, and at least one descendent, to provide expert commentary, with James Horton, Ira Berlin, Leslie Harris, Deborah Gray White, Nell Irvin Painter, Jean Fagan Yellin, Peter Wood, Edward Ball, and Bernard Powers playing especially important roles. But the stars of this documentary are the "characters" the filmmakers chose to put at the center of each episode. Some of the most compelling images from the colonial period include: blacks and whites together in a New York tavern in the seventeenth century where the boundaries of slavery are not yet fully defined; white indentured servants and an African slave together on a Chesapeake farm from which they run away; Thomas Jefferson depicted with his childhood friend and later slave valet, Jupiter; and a runaway slave in New Jersey named Titus, fighting valiantly with the British for his personal freedom in the Revolutionary War. As the series enters the nineteenth century, the re-creations include: a little black girl (slave) playing in a field with a little white girl (free); the scene of a slave auction block, the dark, tragic epicenter of slavery's ultimate meaning; a slow-motion whipping of a slave hanged by his hands in front of a sun-lit barn door; a sea of cotton fields wrapped around numerous slaves picking the lilly-white boles; a coffle of slaves in chains marching along a country road heading south to sale and separation; Harriet Jacobs suffering in her attic crawl space in her grandmother's house, legs almost crippled, hair over-grown, eyes sullen, as though madness had almost overtaken her; David Walker at a desk crafting his manuscript, An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World in 1829; and Robert Smalls, the slave boat pilot in Charleston harbor, stunningly portrayed stealing the ship, the Planter, and sailing it to freedom in 1862. These re-creations keep black folks, slave and free, famous and unknown, at the center of the story, acting out their own destinies. In episode one, "The Downward Spiral," we watch racial slavery itself being made. As most of us do in teaching this subject, the film relies on the evolving story of the law of slavery to chart the institution's fiendish rise to supremacy in the colonial labor market. American colonists contrived law after law to try to codify people as property. We meet John Punch, the first black indentured servant on record to be sentenced to service "for life" for the crime of running away with two white servants in the Chesapeake region. The Scotsman and the Dutch man received only sentences of additional years on their indentures. Race — as idea and reality - mattered more and more in the seventeenth century, and it too was made in ever insidious ways along side slavery. This first segment of the film also introduces Emanuel Driggus, a Virginia slave from Portuguese background, and his daughter, Frances, born of a free black mother. In colonial law, the status of the child was determined by the status of the mother; Frances successfully fought her owner in court in 1694 to prevent him from selling her into slavery. As though struggling to acknowledge the seventeenth century's complex emergence of chattel slavery, episode one suffers from a slow pace and a lack of a central theme. It ends with an interesting look at the origins of South Carolina, the first true "slave society" in North America, and the site of the bloody Stono slave rebellion in 1739. We learn the significance of rice as the crop that built South Carolina into a commercial success, achieved directly through the knowledge and ingenuity of Africans who brought the staple to the New World. Clear maps and perhaps further stress on just how culturally African slaves were in this period may have given the first episode a firmer grip on the viewer. The viewer is left understanding that mere "survival" in this raw, colonial world was the slave's greatest challenge. Spanning nearly a century from the 1740s to the 1830s, episode two, "Liberty in the Air," manages to sweep from the 1741 slave conspiracy trials in New York, through the American Revolution, to the growth of slavery in the early republic, and to David Walker's landmark abolitionist tract in 1829. Here, clear themes drive the film — modes of slave resistance, both violent and subtle; the Americanization of the slave population; and the appropriation by blacks of revolutionary language and ideology to their own cause. Several characters also carry the action in hour two. Titus, owned by a Quaker in Monmouth, New Jersey, turns 21 in 1775 and rides the "gathering storm" of the Revolution by running away to fight for the Redcoats, who promised freedom in exchange for service. "Colonel Tye," as he became known, fought as a self-styled guerrilla, liberating his family and friends and kidnapping some key Patriot leaders until he was killed in battle in 1780. Remarkably, this film portrays one of the principal black Revolutionary War heroes as pro-British. Lynne Cheney's emboldened advocates of conservative history may squirm at this fact. The film leaves no doubt: the Revolution triggered the largest emancipation of American slaves outside the ultimate freedom won in the Civil War; and most of that liberation came through flight to the enemy of American independence. No Valley Forge in this documentary, and the Minuteman is a fugitive slave. One in five Americans at the time of the Revolution was black, and these descendants of Africa were eager to become free Americans by fighting for whichever side made their liberty most likely. To some Americans, not accustomed to seeing American history through the prism of the black experience, and shy of the subject of slavery altogether, this film may seem a strange making of the America they want to imagine. When it comes to race and slavery, contradiction is at the heart of American history. The film demonstrates this by vividly pulling out phrases from some of the many petitions drafted by blacks to state legislatures and the national Congress demanding their "liberty" and their "rights" in the wake of the Founding. Three characters accent the uses of American hypocrisy. A Massachusetts slave woman, Mum Bet, sued her owner and won her freedom in court in 1781, announcing her new name as Elizabeth Freeman and helping pave the way for the Massachusetts Court's abolition of slavery in that state two years later. Mum Bet is a heroine of the American Revolution in this prime time documentary about the Founding. Then, hour two concludes with considerable slow motion portrayal of the stories of Maria Stewart and David Walker, described by an on-camera scholar as the "founding mother and father" of African Americans. Stewart was free-born in Boston and became the first American woman to speak publicly to male audiences. By the 1820s and 1830s Stewart preached a biblical brand of self-reliance and racial uplift to northern free black communities. She also boldly chastised black men for not standing up to support and defend their communities, giving her heroism a proto-feminist twist. Walker, on the other hand, born free in the South, and influenced by the Denmark Vesey slave conspiracy in Charleston in 1822, had emigrated to Boston where he wrote his manifesto. Walker's Appeal is often portrayed as the first black nationalist text in American history. This film does not take the time to define that term, and it allows a scholar to dubiously declare the work "the most important abolitionist document of the nineteenth century." More "important" than Frederick Douglass's Narrative in 1845 or Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852? The Appeal was important; it drew upon both the Enlightenment and Old Testament traditions to issue a striking jeremiad against the American people, urging them to act soon to end slavery or face their bloody doom. The pamphlet was a shock to slaveholders because it came from a black man's pen and from "outside the South." Episode two informs the viewer nicely about the sheer power of work in slaves' lives. It also demonstrates the long story of how slavery was the source of so much wealth — the "goose that laid the golden egg" as a scholar aptly puts it. And "resistance" among slaves gets its due. But Richard Allen, creator of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the 1790s (a genuine black "founder") is surprisingly missing from the film. Also quite limited is the film's attention to the process of Christianization among slaves, as well as the role of cultural life as a mode of survival among the increasingly American-born blacks. Two star characters dominate episode three, "Seeds of Destruction." One is Harriet Jacobs, the author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). The other is King Cotton, the great impersonal economic force in making the America in which Jacobs' personal story of sexual abuse and psychological suffering takes place. The choice to give so much attention to Jacobs reflects recent scholarly interest in Incidents and its author. Jean Yellin's new biography, Harriet Jacobs: A Life (2004) is the most recent winner of the Frederick Douglass book prize. Jacobs' extraordinary suffering at the hands of her North Carolina owner, her quest to save her children, and her ultimate escape to the North form the leitmotif of hour three. She is mistakenly identified as the first woman to write a slave narrative (Mary Prince holds that rank, 1832). Jacobs is the film's most heroic survivor, but she is also the model of slavery's damage to women. The choice to make Jacobs a centerpiece of the entire series is fresh and wise; most viewers will learn her story for the first time. Cotton is rightly portrayed as the inscrutable monarch whose appetites drive the massive domestic slave trade (1 million slaves sold to the deep South from the upper South in the antebellum era), and force into open political conflict the future of labor and life in the American West by the 1850s. The film persuasively shows how Jefferson's dream of an "empire of liberty" became in many ways an "empire of slavery." Hour three marks major turning points and trends in slavery's career: the invention of the cotton gin, the Louisiana Purchase and westward expansion, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and the Dred Scott decision of 1857. It also informs American viewers, so conscious of lists and rankings, that slaves were the largest economic asset in the nation by the 1850s, greater than everything else put together except the land itself. In the 1970s and 1980s, if slavery scholarship had a central theme, it was slave resistance and agency through expressive and religious culture. That great scholarly outpouring is all but missing in this film series. The bracing power of slave music, folktales, and especially of the sacred world view through which slaves forged an alternative daily universe hardly appear in this film. Instead, we encounter slavery through the terror of the masters' sexual abuse, the sale and separation of families, and the sounds of the lash. The portrayal of slaves in this documentary is certainly not a return to the old thesis of utter victimization associated with the work in 1959 of Stanley Elkins. It is too sophisticated for that. But enduring damage is the major message conveyed to the uninformed viewer; the shouts and spirituals of those slaves who conquered fear by imagining a "home in that rock," and one new verse after another of "Roll Jordan Roll" are no chorus in this film. Moreover, the hurried approach to slavery's role in the coming of the Civil War will leave many viewers unfulfilled. When Morgan Freeman declares at the end of hour three that the United States "came apart over slavery" in 1861, it is not clear how many viewers will really know why. Early in episode four, "The Challenge of Freedom," the causes of the war get more attention. An odd photo of a large mortar cannon (not used until 1864) is placed in a sequence about the opening of the conflict in 1861, but the film makes clear that secession and war exploded from the crisis over the expansion of slavery into the West. The dominant character of the final hour of the film is Robert Smalls. Smalls grew up the son of a household slave in Beaufort, South Carolina, and at age 12 went to Charleston and began to learn the ways of the sea. Enterprising and skilled as a helmsman, he seized his chance at freedom in May, 1862, when he abandoned his job working on the Confederate ship, the Planter, stole it in the dark of night, and sailed with his family and comrades out of the harbor to freedom. After the war Smalls went into politics and became an effective state legislator and U. S. Congressman. Some of the best dramatic re-recreation in the series is the depiction of Smalls' escape and later career. Episode four moves rapidly through the war and emancipation, stopping all too briefly to observe the "broadest possible interpretation" that blacks gave to the Emancipation Proclamation, as well as the crucial service of thousands of African Americans in the Union forces. No famous military action engaged in by black troops gets any air time (Battery Wagner, Port Hudson, the Crater). The filmmakers miss an opportunity to inform viewers that when they hear former slaves singing "America" at a reading of the Proclamation, it depicts a real event that occurred in South Carolina on January 1, 1863 among the First South Carolina Volunteers, the first black regiment formed in the South. The film does convey well the brutal discrimination blacks faced in the army, and their sense of the conflict as a "holy war" for their liberation. But the script is in such haste to get through Lincoln's reelection in 1864 and assassination in 1865, and then back to Smalls and a swiftly told story of Reconstruction, that missing links abound. The only mentions in this entire series of the greatest black leader of the nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass, come in a brief description of the growth of the abolition movement in hour three and an aside in hour four about a "conversation" between Lincoln and Douglass during the war, without any sense of what that encounter was about. Douglass's conspicuous absence is all the more astonishing given the significant time previously allotted to Stewart and Walker as key figures in black intellectual history. Sharecropping, the system of labor relations that replaced slavery across the South by the late 1860s, receives no explanation at all. The impeachment of Andrew Johnson is out of chronological order in narration about the radical Republicans rise to control early Reconstruction. The complex aftermath of emancipation breaks through from the scholars on camera who address the physical and emotional challenges blacks faced in defining what their freedom meant to them. But the Freedmen's Bureau does not receive much in the way of explanation. Of course, a film can often evoke more than it can explain. But this series is so committed to developing the stories of its characters (Smalls dominates at least one-third of hour four) that a good deal of connective history is lost. When Smalls is elected to Congress in 1874 we do not learn the crucial fact that the same year the Democrats took back majority control of that body in a landslide that spelled the doom of Reconstruction. We learn that Smalls is still in Congress at the time of the disputed election of 1876, but are not informed about the actual elements of the "Compromise" of 1877 that settled that election and in a real sense, ended Reconstruction. Removing federal troops from the South was only one small feature of the "bargain." The film does convey one significant point about the Compromise of 1877: its ultimate message was that the destiny of blacks in the minds of most whites was not linked to the destiny of the nation. By carrying the story all the way to the disfranchisement laws in the South of the 1890s the filmmakers have chosen a swift, sweeping story, punctuated by some brilliant dramatic re-creation of characters and events. The Hamburg, South Carolina massacre on July 4, 1876 is vividly reenacted; the hand of a dead black man lying on the ground, shot in the back as he fled after demanding his right to vote in the face of the "Red Shirt" vigilantes, is a compelling way to remember the enormity of Reconstruction violence against former slaves. An aging Robert Smalls leaning on a fence, pondering the demise of Reconstruction, is a powerful image. But I worry that viewers will just not know enough context to share in Smalls' anxiety. Will they understand the scale and roots of the violence perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan and its many imitators? "Slavery and the Making of America" is visually perhaps the finest documentary yet on slavery. Freeman is a compelling narrator who will capture viewers with his familiar voice. The scholars on camera help tell this story well, as much as they are allowed to. Perhaps a film that leaves us with a deep sense of slavery's damage, while also delivering several genuine, heroic survivors of its oppression, is the kind of film on this subject that our current political condition in America necessitates. Viewers may not fully understand the complexities of slave culture, how slavery actually destroyed the Union, or why Reconstruction rose and fell so fast. But they will remember Mum Bet in court and Walker at his desk, Titus on horseback and Smalls at the helm of his ship. From this series they will also know that slavery built America into a powerful, tragically flawed nation. They will have their Whiggish notions of American progress and destiny challenged. And they will see the colonial period and the first century of an American nation depicted through the experience of slaves who demanded freedom, and not merely the rising freedom of the free. This film series suggests an alternative way of seeing how property, wealth, liberty, and power came to be defined in America — it shows how the freedom of the free was purchased by the enslavement of other people. These are remarkable achievements for a mere four hours on Public Television. David W. Blight Class of 1954 Professor of American History, Director, The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, Yale University, and author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Harvard University Press, 2001)