Robert Greene II on Scott Spillman’s *Making Sense of Slavery: America’s Long Reckoning, From the Founding Era to Today*

There is no book in recent memory that has done a better job of capturing the long and unrelenting tension between America’s past and the study of that past than Scott Spillman’s Making Sense of Slavery: America’s Long Reckoning, From the Founding Era to Today. A book on how Americans have written and thought about the so-called “Peculiar Institution,” Making Sense of Slavery is a tour-de-force in a number of historical subfields: the history of slavery, the history of American education, and the intellectual history of race and racism in American life. Where these, and other topics, could have been unwieldy and overwhelming for most other writers, Scott Spillman’s deft handling of a wide range of topics—under the umbrella of the historiography of slavery—makes Making Sense of Slavery one of the landmark works of intellectual history in this decade.

Spillman, who has written for publications such as The New Republic, Liberties, and The Point magazine, offers up an exciting narrative that helps readers to understand that debating the history of slavery is as old a pastime as the existence of the nation itself. He argues “that the nature of its development and the shape of its arguments were influenced by intellectual logic as well as institutional setting, political climate, social situation, and personal quirks” (xii). While this may not be surprising to most historians, what is unique about Spillman’s work is how he unites the fields of American intellectual history with memory studies, the histories of American higher education, and public history to deliver a new narrative of how Americans understand their past. Starting as he does with the debate over slavery in colonial America, Spillman is able to develop a narrative that demonstrates that, not only did conditions in American society affect how people wrote and thought about slavery, but those writings and arguments, in turn, impacted how society thought about slavery and its victims, people of African descent.

In some ways, Making Sense of Slavery could have been titled Making Sense of Black Americans. They are always present in the book, but Spillman makes clear that often, the study of slavery did not necessarily mean a study of what the people suffering through slavery thought about their own plight. At the same time, the role of historians in a democracy forms the heart of Spillman’s work. During the colonial and antebellum periods, the historical study of slavery was never detached from the real-world debates about the institution and its impact on the new United States.

Again, a major strength of the work is how adept Spillman is at weaving together so many historians, journalists, and writers in a cohesive narrative that never loses sight of the main point of the book: that the discussion of slavery in the United States has always carried major implications for how Americans see themselves and the nation. The nature of how historians do history is also a key part of the narrative. For example, as Spillman explains how history in the post-Reconstruction era became more of a social science and focused almost exclusively on objectivity, he notes how this impacted the study of slavery and other controversial topics. Historians at Johns Hopkins University, a center of the study of the American South in the late 19^th century, “depoliticized slavery by saying that disinterested scholars could present a more truthful view of slavery than partisans who pressed a side and by focusing on institutional evolution instead of political debate” (148).

It sounds like a broken record to state this, but Making Sense of Slavery makes clear just how much the profession of history is tied to larger political, social, and cultural events going on at the same time. It is no coincidence, for example, that the post-World War II push in the academy against a biological basis of race also witnessed historians and other scholars revisiting earlier assumptions about slavery and race in American history first put forward by U.B. Phillips and other historians of the Dunning School of American historiography. Indeed, the work on the latter half of the 20^th century of historiography of American slavery makes for some of the most compelling reading in the entire book. Precisely because so many of the names and debates are familiar to the majority of the readers of this blog—Woodward, Hofstadter, Elkins, Stampp, and Genovese, among others—it is useful to see just how all of their work related to each other, and how their arguments about the history of slavery still shape the field in the first decades of the 21^st century.

Making Sense of Slavery deserves to be read alongside other works about the historiography of African American life, and also the growth and change of memory in American life. The works of Pero Dagbovie, Richard Slotkin’s A Great Disorder, Ana Lucia Araujo’s Slavery in the Age of Memory, or Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Gross’s A Black Women’s History of the United States, among so many other important works, should be read alongside with, and put in discussion with, Making Sense of Slavery. That the book ends with a discussion of The 1619 Project is fitting. The book itself makes it clear that The 1619 Project was nothing more than the latest, and perhaps most public, grappling with the legacy and history of slavery that historians and the lay public alike have done. With the coming arrival of the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and ongoing debates about just what Americans collectively remember—or disremember—about the nation’s past, Making Sense of Slavery is a powerful and necessary work about race, memory, and the creation of history in a fragile, multiracial democracy.