Yale Lecture Notes: History of American Slavery and Abolition Movement

Today we will learn and reflect on Slavery and the Abolitionists in the years leading
up to the Civil War, using the Yale lectures on Black History and the Civil War. Yale
University has published the undergraduate class lectures for Professors Holloway
and Blight, over four dozen lectures in total. We took the best stories from the
lectures to encourage you to listen to the full set of lectures, they are spell-binding.
These were such violent times, and slavery itself was prone to such cruelties, that
these videos have a disclaimer for those who have difficulty handling this violence.

At the end of our talk, we will discuss the sources used for this video, and my
blogs that also cover this topic. Please, we welcome interesting questions in the
comments. Let us learn and reflect together!

https://amzn.to/3KRgTc1
https://amzn.to/3orcpz7
https://amzn.to/3jvz9L9
https://amzn.to/3rZHpH0
https://amzn.to/3je7rmW
© Copyright 2021
Become a patron:
https://www.patreon.com/seekingvirtueandwisdom
YouTube Channel, Reflections on Morality, Philosophy, and History:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLqDkfFbWhXOnzdjp__YZtg
https://amzn.to/3kfEXbT
Yale Lecture Notes: Slavery
https://youtu.be/kmLg8CDjOOY

The history of slavery and abolition in the years leading up to the Civil War was a
bloody history. Whites did not see blacks as real people, white masters saw their
black slaves like they were talking livestock, whites refused to treat even free
blacks with dignity as equals.
There has been an effort to white-wash and revise this history, to pretend that
slaves were well treated and happy, that slavery was the condition best suited for
them. So we will try to tell this history with stories showing American blacks, both
free and enslaved, as real people with dreams, innocent people who truly
suffered from many miscarriages of justice.
Perhaps this objective is a bit quixotic. Eric Foner once got a phone call from a
reporter who asked: “Professor Foner, when did all this revisionism begin?” And
Foner said, “Probably with Herodotus.” And the reporter asked, “Do you have his
phone number?” (Hint: Herodotus never had a phone number.) As Mencken
reminds us, Never underestimate the ignorance of the American people.

FREDERICK DOUGLAS – BLACK ABOLITION ACTIVIST
After escaping slavery in Maryland, Frederick Douglas was leader in the abolitionist
community before, during, and after the Civil War. Not only was Frederick Douglas
literate, he was an excellent writer, writing several autobiographies of his life as a
slave and his escape and many other works, and he was a spell-binding speaker in
an age where speakers were called on to deliver speeches that could last
hours. Perhaps his least noticed contribution to abolition was that he was living
proof that black men, when educated, could match their white brothers in
intellectual achievement.
Jonathon Holloway’s course opens with excerpts of a three-hour speech given by
the freed slave and thundering orator, Frederick Douglas, on July 5th, 1852, before
the Civil War, to his abolitionist friends. He was invited but refused to speak on the
July 4th holiday, arguing that for the negro July 4th was neither a holiday nor a day to
remember freedom, since the great majority of negroes were bound in chains as
slaves regarded as nothing more than intelligent livestock, property of their masters.

Frederick Douglas started his speech: “Fellow citizens,
pardon me, and allow me to ask, why am I called upon to
speak here today? What have I or those I represent to do
with your national independence? Are the great principles
of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in
that Declaration of Independence, extended to us?”
“I (as a black man) am not included within the pale of this
glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals
the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in
which you this day rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The
rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and
independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by
you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing
to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of
July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”
Frederick Douglass, July 4th speech

“To drag a man in fetters into the
grand illuminated temple of liberty
and call upon him to join you in joyous
anthems, were inhuman mockery and
sacrilegious irony. Do you mean,
citizens, to mock me, by asking me to
speak today? What to the American
slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a
day that reveals to him more than all
other days of the year, the gross
injustice and cruelty to which he is the
constant victim.”

“To him your celebration is a sham; your
boasted liberty an unholy license; your
national greatness, swelling vanity; your
sounds of rejoicing are empty and
heartless; your denunciations of tyrants,
brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of
liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your
prayers and hymns, your sermons and
thanksgivings, with all your religious parade
and solemnity, are to him mere bombast,
fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy, a
thin veil to cover up crimes which would
disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a
nation of the earth guilty of practices more
shocking and bloody than are the people of
these United States at this very hour.”

Americans owned slaves in all thirteen colonies in the Revolutionary War
era and for many decades afterwards. Slavery was most cruel on the large
plantations in the Southern states where hundreds of slaves, anonymous as
cattle herds, slaved in the fields.
Professor Holloway tells the little-known story of an obscure slave named
John Jack. John Jack was captured and bound in chains in Africa and
survived the Middle Passage on dark slave ships. As many as half of the
slaves died during this journey to the Americas. He was fortunate to be
purchased by a “kind master” who taught him a trade as a cobbler and
allowed him to keep a small portion of his earnings, a privilege provided to
a few slaves mostly in the Northern states. After many years he purchased
his freedom and bought a small subsistence farm, but although he was free
and a property owner, he was still denied the right to vote, he was a
second-class citizen, and eventually drank himself to death in his misery.

Plantation, Beaufort, Port Royal Island, SC, 1862

1830 painting by Johann Moritz Rugendas
depicts a scene below deck of a slave ship
headed to Brazil; he was an eyewitness.

John Jack leaves us his epitaph on his gravestone
as a testimony to his life. “God wills us free. Man
wills us slave. I will as God wills. God’s will be
done. Here lies the body of John Jack, native of
Africa, who died March 1773, aged about 60
years. Though buried in the land of slavery, he
was born free. Though he lived in a land of liberty,
he lived a slave, till by his honest though stolen
labors, he acquired the source of slavery which
gave him his freedom. Though not long before
Death, the grand tyrant, gave him his final
emancipation and set him on a footing with kings.
Though a slave to vice, he practiced those virtues
without which kings are but slaves.”
First slave auction in 1655 New Amsterdam, by Howard Pyle, 1895

In his lecture, Professor Holloway displays images of Confederate
scrip money. These scrips often have two motifs common in
Confederate mythology, images of happy black slaves carrying
bales of cotton, and images of exalted white womanhood that
deserve to be protected.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_States_dollar

When Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe, he remarked,
So you are the little lady whose little book started the Civil
War. This book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was the best-selling book by
far in 1852, eventually selling over a million copies, galvanizing
Northern opinion about the horrors of slavery. This romantic
novel was written from the point of view of ordinary slaves, and it
really promoted the concept that the lives of even slaves should
have dignity, they were not just mere property like cows or
horses, that slaves could the heroes and heroines of a tragic novel
allowing the reader to imagine the horrors of a life lived bound in
chains, of souls bound in cruel inequities, of human beings
bound in a life of unending cruelties.

The antithesis of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the Supreme
Court decision in Dred Scott vs Sanford in 1857. Dred
Scott was a slave who sued his master for his
freedom as his master moved him and his family
between slave states and free states that banned
slavery under the Missouri Compromise law.

Portrait of Dred Scott, by Louis Schultze, 1888

The Southern Chief Justice Roger Taney held
that no negro had ever enjoyed the rights of a
citizen under the Constitution. Negroes were
denied the dignity of personhood, negroes
were always property and would also remain
property, negroes were declared by the
Supreme Court decision by Taney to be “so far
inferior that they had no rights which a white
man was bound to respect.” This decision also
claimed that “Negros have shown less capacity
for government than any race of people,” and
“wherever they have been left to their own
devices they have shown a constant tendency
to relapse into barbarism.”
Matthew Brady photo of Roger Taney

This decision denied that the Constitution gave
Congress the right to bar slavery in the territories.
Chief Justice Taney and President Buchanan thought
this decision would ease tensions both in the slave-
holding south and in the country at large, but it
enraged public opinion in the North, bolstering the
popularity of Lincoln and the Republican Party.

An anti-
abolitionist
parody of
Republican
efforts to play
down the
antislavery
plank in their
1860
platform.

In the years following the Civil War the Lost
Cause myth was promoted, the claim that the
Civil War was fought over states’ rights, that the
Civil War was NOT fought over slavery. If that
was true, somebody did not properly inform
Alexander Stephens, the Vice President of the
Confederacy, about the aims of the Civil War.

Custis Lee (1832–1913) on horseback in front of the
Jefferson Davis Memorial in Richmond, Virginia on June
3, 1907, reviewing Confederate Reunion Parade

During Secession and the forming of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, a Georgian, a
slaveholder, an old friend and colleague of Abraham Lincoln’s, proclaimed in this Cornerstone
speech in 1861: “As a race, the African is inferior to the white man. Subordination to the white
man is his normal condition. He is not his equal by nature and cannot be made so by human laws
or human institutions. Our system, therefore, so far as regards this inferior race, rests upon this
great immutable law of nature.”
“The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar
institution—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of
civilization.”
President Davis'
first cabinet
(1861), Alexander
Stephens is Vice
President of
Confederacy
Photo of
Alexander
Stephens by
Matthew
Brady

In the years before the Civil War the frontier cotton plantations in
Alabama and Mississippi were more prosperous, many slaves
were sold from the older colonies to these new plantations.
Between 1820 and 1860 children born to slaves in the Upper
Southern Seaboard regions had a thirty percent chance of being
sold without their parents before they reached the age of ten.
Frederick Douglass was enslaved in Virginia and Maryland, he
confirms this.

From David Blight’s lecture: “It’s amazing to read the
letters and the language of slave traders when they write
to each other, the complacency, the mixture of just pure
racism on the one hand and just business language on
the other.”

Slave Auction in Virginia. Illustration for The Illustrated London News, 1861

(REPEAT):
“I refused a girl 20-years-old at $700.00 yesterday,”
one trader wrote to another in 1853. “If you think
best to take her at 700, I can still get her. She is very
badly whipped but has good teeth.”

Professor Blight, from slave traders: “I refused a
girl 20-years-old at $700 yesterday,” one trader
wrote to another in 1853. “If you think best to
take her at $700, I can still get her. She is very
badly whipped but has good teeth.”

(REPEAT):
“Bought a cook yesterday,” wrote another trader,
“She was about to go out of the state. She just made
the people mad, that was all.”

“Bought a cook yesterday,” wrote another trader,
“She was to go out of the state, she just made the
people mad, that was all.”

(REPEAT):
“I have bought a boy named Isaac,” wrote another
trader in 1854, “for $1100.00. I think him very prime.
He is a house-servant, first-rate cook, and splendid
carriage driver. He is also a fine painter and varnisher
and says he can make a fine panel door. Also, he
performs well on the violin. He is a genius. And
strange to say, I think he’s smarter than I am.”

“Bought a boy named Isaac. I think him very prime.
He is a house-servant, first-rate cook, and splendid
carriage driver. He is also a fine painter and
varnisher and says he can make a fine panel door.
Also, he performs well on the violin. He is a genius.
And strange to say, I think he’s smarter than I am.”

In 1860 Abraham Lincoln was elected President, but in 1859 the self-designated
savior of the slaves, John Brown, organizes a small band of blacks and whites that
captures the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. Frederick Douglass told
him he was crazy. Harriet Tubman thought he was crazy. John Brown did not have
much of a plan, after he seized the weapons in the arsenal, he had no way to
spread the news of the slave rebellion to the slaves in the surrounding plantation,
and how many would swarm to the arsenal anyway? US Army Colonel Robert E
Lee easily put down the rebellion, John Brown is wounded, but he is allowed to
deliver many long soliloquies during his trial, after which he is hanged.
John Brown was a martyr, to this day there are many who think he was black,
sometimes you can’t budge some blacks from this belief, but he was the rare white
martyr willing to sacrifice his life to attempt a black uprising.

Tragic Prelude,
John Brown, by
John Stuart Curry,
painted 1938

David Blight covers John Brown in several
lecture: “John Brown was a troubled man, he
was a morbid man, he was an Old Testament
man, but he probably was not crazy, as so
many people said at the time, and people have
said ever since. His altruism on behalf of black
people was not utterly selfless, but he was an
extraordinary example of an American, a white
American, who put his money where his
mouth was–he didn’t have any money–put his
life where his mouth was and took it into the
South. Now, he was executed, hung out in a
field, outside of Charleston, Virginia, guarded
by some 3,000 American troops. There were
all kinds of fears of attempts to break him out
and seize him by Northern Yankee bands.
There were all kinds of threats.”
The Last Moments of John Brown, by Thomas
Hovenden, painted 1884

David Blight continues: “John Brown was
the South’s oldest, greatest, worst fear. An
abolitionist from the North with a band of
men and a bunch of weapons invading the
South and trying to incite slave insurrection
–they’ve been kind of predicting this all
along and lo and behold it happened. In a
trunk of stuff back at the farm in Maryland
that he had rented for several months,
where his men had gathered, after his
capture was found a whole stash of letters
and maps. The old man had kept all kinds
of maps of the South. He had maps of
sections of Alabama, Georgia. He even had
x’d certain towns on those maps.”
19th Century woodcut depiction of
the Southampton Insurrection, aka
Nat Turner’s slave rebellion, in 1831.

David Blight continues: “When these
Southern maps were found, and the press
got hold of these, all over the South,
these stories spread, and local
newspapers would print stories about the
maps of their county or their section of a
state. There was hysteria. Northern
teachers, working in the South, were
tarred and feathered. An itinerant piano
tuner in Tennessee was lynched because
he was from Massachusetts. Fear set in
across the South that there were going to
be other abolition emissaries–that was
always the term used. And there were
predictions and threats of all kinds,
especially in South Carolina. John Brown
when he–and he did read some of these
newspapers–must have smiled.”
Discovery of Nat Turner, Unsuccessful Slave Rebellion, 1831

The picture is the capture of Nat Turner, who led an unsuccessful slave
rebellion in 1831. Because Nat Turner had been literate and well
educated, and was a preacher, Southern slaveholders persuaded state
legislatures to make educating black slaves a crime, lest their education
would lead them to long for freedom.
Later in 1860, at the Democratic National Convention, the Democratic
Party split into a southern and northern wing over the issue of
slavery. In addition to these two parties and the Republican Party, there
was also a Constitutional Union Party of the border states. In the
national elections Abraham Lincoln won the majority of votes in the
Electoral College, although since there were four parties in that pivotal
year, Lincoln did not win a majority of the popular vote. Several
southern stated seceded before Lincoln was inaugurated, the Civil War
had begun.

Douglas/Johnson
Democratic Party
Bell/ Everett
Constitutional Union Party
Breckinridge/ Lane
Southern Democrats
Lincoln/ Hamlin
Republican Party
1860 Presidential Election: The Southern States walked out of the convention and
formed their own party. Four parties fielded candidates; the Constitutional Union
Party appealed to the Border States who wanted to preserve the Union.

SOURCES: Jonathon Holloway was a Yale professor
whose chosen academic field is black history, a topic
he chose as a teenager. These are his undergraduate
lectures on African-American history.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fp6mjKumW2g&list=PLh9mgdi4rNeyqnC6Gj5VCZERhhy9CC1S6
Jonathon Holloway was a
Yale professor whose
chosen academic field is
black history, a topic he
chose as a teenager. These
are his undergraduate
lectures on African-
American history.
Classroom notes and suggested reading:
https://oyc.yale.edu/NODE/46

Professor David Blight’s lectures on The Civil War and
Reconstruction Era 1845-1877 have a different perspective. He
gives us background on Southern culture for the first few
lectures, the following history lectures quickly pick up the
pace. He covers many topics more important for American
history like the pre-Civil War history of the Polk administration
and the acquisition of Texas and California, Henry Clay and the
Compromise of 1850, and how the Republican Party formed
from the ashes of the Whig, Free Labor and other parties.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXXp1bHd6gI&list=PL5DD220D6A1282057
Professor
David Blight’s
lectures on The
Civil War and
Reconstruction
Era from 1845
through 1877.
Classroom notes and suggested reading:
https://oyc.yale.edu/history/hist-119

In addition to the slave narrative of Frederick Douglass, we also have cut
videos on the lives of the former slaves, Booker T Washington and Father
Augustine Tolton. Booker T Washington was the second generation of
black leaders, he was freed as a teenager at the end of the Civil War.
Booker T Washington founded the Tuskegee Institute and nurtured black
colleges in the worst of the KKK years of Reconstruction and Redemption.
Father Augustine Tolton was also freed as a young man during the Civil
War, although he was illiterate he learned to read and write in English,
German, Greek and Latin, and was the first ex-slave to be ordained a
priest in the Catholic Church.
WEB Dubois was born free in Massachusetts and was the third
generation of black leaders, he was a co-founder of the NAACP and wrote
the famous history, Black Reconstruction, documenting the pivotal role
blacks played in the Civil War and Reconstruction.

These are the two paintings used for our thumbnail, we have the Lost Cause of
the bucolic depiction of happy slaves at work, overwhelmed by the
righteousness indignation and rebellion by the fiery John Brown, who helped
spark the Civil War with his unsuccessful raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s
Ferry.

A cotton plantation on the Mississippi, 1884

https://www.patreon.com/seekingvirtueandwisdom

To find the source of any direct
quotes in this blog, please type in
the phrase to the search box in
my blog to see the referenced
footnote.
YouTube Description has links for:
• Script PDF file
• Blog
• Amazon Bookstore
© Copyright 2021
Blog and YouTube Description
include links for Amazon books
and lectures mentioned, please
support our channel with these
affiliate commissions.
Link to blog: https://wp.me/pachSU-pP

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLqDkfFbWhXOnzdjp__YZtg/

Yale Lecture Notes: History of American Slavery and Abolition Movement

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

What's hot

What's hot (16)

Similar to Yale Lecture Notes: History of American Slavery and Abolition Movement

Similar to Yale Lecture Notes: History of American Slavery and Abolition Movement (8)

More from Reflections on Morality, Philosophy, and History

More from Reflections on Morality, Philosophy, and History (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Yale Lecture Notes: History of American Slavery and Abolition Movement