Scott Spillman saw contemporary historical debate about slavery as “strangely narrow”

Scott Spillman is a historian whose writing has appeared in the New Republic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, n+1, and The Point. His first book “Making Sense of Slavery,” was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award in history. He has a PhD in history from Stanford University, and before that he studied history, English, and political philosophy at the University of North Carolina and Duke University. Spillman has worked in public history at the Colorado Encyclopedia, History Colorado, and the Leadville Historic Preservation Commission, and has taught at Colorado College and the University of Colorado–Denver. He lives in Denver, Colorado.

SunLit:  In your book “Making Sense of Slavery,” which was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award in history, you note that it’s not a history of slavery so much as a history of the study of slavery. Why did you take this approach, and why is it important?

Scott Spillman: I decided to look at ideas about slavery, and specifically how slavery has been studied in the United States, for a few big reasons. The most basic one is that there had been plenty of histories of slavery but no full history of how scholarly ideas about slavery evolved in America or how those scholarly ideas influenced public debates about topics such as democracy, equality, race, labor, civil rights, and memorialization. My book was intended to provide that full history. 

UNDERWRITTEN BY

Each week, The Colorado Sun and Colorado Humanities & Center For The Book feature an excerpt from a Colorado book and an interview with the author. Explore the SunLit archives at coloradosun.com/sunlit.

I thought it was important to provide that history because contemporary debates about slavery struck me as strangely narrow and divorced from their own historical lineage. They were being conducted as if Americans only recently noticed that slavery was a problem in our past. I wanted to show that there’s actually a long history to American debates about slavery, one that stretches back before the last decade and before the civil rights movement and even before emancipation. 

In fact, we have been wrestling with slavery from the very start of our history as a country, because the same Enlightenment moment that led to a new nation dedicated to freedom and equality also made slavery into a problem in a new way and gave us new social scientific tools to study it. To some extent, wrestling with slavery is the story of American intellectual history because slavery is so intimately bound up with our defining ideals of freedom, democracy, and equality. 

SunLit: As you note in the book, Western intellectual engagement with slavery goes back more than 2,000 years to philosophers like Plato and Aristotle. How did the earliest theories influence the conversation as America began to take shape in the second half of the 18th century?

Spillman: Those ancient Greek philosophers, along with a separate Roman tradition, were important because they established the basic frameworks that many Europeans continued to use to think about and justify slavery in the 18th century. From Rome came the idea that people are originally free and equal but might be reduced to slavery as the result of some accident or misfortune. This helped justify the English slave trade with Africa in the 17th and 18th centuries. And from Aristotle came the theory of the natural slave, which became a key foundation for arguments that Black people were uniquely suited to be slaves. 

Those intellectual pillars, along with some others, helped make slavery seem like a natural or inevitable part of human society, one that might be regretted but could not be eradicated. My book picks up in the middle of the 18th century, when the Americans who started the world’s first major abolitionist movement began to use Enlightenment ideas about rights and liberty along with empirical evidence about slavery to argue that slavery could and should be ended.

SunLit: There has been increasing attention in many institutions – for instance, museums like History Colorado – to how history gets told and by whom. You point out in the book how the scholars and intellectuals who originally studied slavery have been joined in the second half of the 20th century by others with different backgrounds. How would you characterize that evolution?

Spillman: The scholars who studied slavery in the early 20th century were not a particularly diverse bunch. They were mostly middle-class white men, and many of them were originally from the South because slavery, at that time, was seen largely as a branch of Southern history. Some of these men were extraordinary scholars, but many of them wrote from the prejudices of their age and portrayed slavery as a benign or even beneficent system that they could use as a foil to the turbulent racial dynamics or the impersonal industrial workplace of their own day.

After World War II, American universities became much more democratic and diverse. They expanded rapidly and began to welcome more working-class students, more Catholics and Jews, more Black students, and more women. Members of those groups went to graduate school and became professors, and they brought new perspectives to the study of slavery and to the study of American history more generally. This yielded an incredible explosion of interest in slavery, shifting it from a branch of Southern history to a key part of the national and even global story, and also opened up new ways of studying previously neglected topics such as slave culture and enslaved women.

SunLit: How would you describe the stage we’re currently experiencing in our ongoing reckoning with slavery?

Spillman: By the 1970s, the generation of slavery scholars working in the wake of World War II and during the civil rights movement had established that slavery was central to American history. This view of slavery’s centrality to American history has been widely accepted among academic historians for more than 50 years now. But the acceptance of that view among academic historians raised two big questions that remain unsettled. 

First, does seeing slavery as central to American history change the broader story that we tell about America—and if so, how? Second, how should scholars tell the story of slavery’s centrality to American history to a broader public beyond the academy? Those are the questions that dominate the final part of my book, and I think they continue to lurk behind many of the controversies over slavery that we see in the public sphere today, including debates among scholars about the 1619 Project and the Trump Administration’s efforts to change interpretations or even eliminate slavery from the story told at some historic sites and museums.

SunLit: What factors would you say are driving the current conversation about slavery in America?

Spillman: I think the two big questions that I mentioned above—how does slavery change the story of America, and how should scholars tell that story in public—remain important for understanding the current conversation about slavery in America. 

Those questions have become even more significant and also more fraught as the academy has tilted much harder to the left over the past 20 years, with an increasingly pessimistic view of American history and of American race relations, and as a right-wing nationalist movement devoted to an uncritical celebration of the country’s past has gained political power over the last decade. 

In the public sphere, the result has been an extremely polarized discussion of slavery and American history in which both sides spur each other to more entrenched positions. There’s a with-us-or-against-us mentality, and it can be difficult to find any middle ground.

SunLit: This book was published at a time when attempts to revise or even whitewash America’s history have raised serious concerns about who we are as a nation. What do you hope for readers to take away from your examination of the various stages of the conversation about slavery since America’s inception?

Spillman: I hope the book helps people think outside the polarized positions of our current debates so that we can have better informed discussions about slavery and American history. I also hope readers who follow my history of slavery scholars working at American universities recognize the ongoing importance of universities as laboratories for the creation of knowledge, of evidence-based arguments as a way to get us closer to the truth, and of colleges as spaces that, at their best, can model how to hold constructive conversations about contentious topics. 

I think people can reasonably disagree about interpretations of slavery and American history and slavery’s place in American history—in fact, I think it’s good for people to disagree about those things—but the right way to address those disagreements is through open debate and not by shutting down discussion.

SunLit: You mention early in the book that the language used in debates about slavery over the years can be difficult and unpleasant, though you chose to reproduce it intact. Why did you feel that was important within the context of “Making Sense of Slavery”?

Spillman: I certainly respect the decision of most major publications and now even some scholars to censor racial slurs or other offensive language. For my book, however, I believed it was essential to reproduce such language in order to capture the texture of thought in different time periods and not blunt its impact. If we hope to understand the past, I think we need to see it in full—both its beauty and its ugliness.

SunLit: Tell us about your next project.

Spillman: For more than a year after I finished “Making Sense of Slavery,” I worked at History Colorado as the senior researcher for the Colorado Black Equity Study, which aims to document the history of discrimination and other state-based practices that have caused harm to Black Coloradans since roughly the gold rush. I guided the research team and was able to draft the report up through the late 1960s before I left to start teaching at Deep Springs College in California. I remain interested in the study and am excited to see what happens when the final report is delivered to the state legislature next year.

Now I’m starting a new project about an event called the Goethe Bicentennial, which was held in Aspen in the summer of 1949 to celebrate the 200th birthday of the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Concerts by the Minneapolis Symphony and talks by the American writer Thornton Wilder, the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, and—in his only visit to the United States—the world-famous physician and philanthropist Albert Schweitzer all took place under a giant tent designed by Eero Saarinen. 

The goal, in the wake of Hiroshima and the Holocaust, was to celebrate Goethe’s humanism and universalism while also wrestling with the legacy of the Enlightenment and especially German intellectual life. The event sparked the creation of a host of institutions that laid the groundwork for modern Aspen, including the Aspen Institute and the Aspen Music Festival and School, and helped establish Aspen’s reputation as an international cultural hub. My next book will aim to tell that story in a way that illuminates postwar American intellectual life.

A few more quick items

Currently on your nightstand for recreational reading: I’m working through Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov” and Plato’s “Phaedrus” with student groups at Deep Springs College, where I now teach. But the book that’s physically on my nightstand is the Book of Common Prayer.

First book you remember really making an impression on you as a kid: Gary Paulsen’s “Sentries” was my favorite book in second or third grade, but Wilson Rawls’s “Where the Red Fern Grows” might have been the first book that made me cry.

Best writing advice you’ve ever received: A book shouldn’t just conclude; it should culminate! (from Jack Rakove, one of my professors at Stanford University) 

Favorite fictional literary character: Dorothea Brooke in “Middlemarch”

Literary guilty pleasure (title or genre): Westerns

Digital, print or audio – favorite medium to consume literature: Always print! I don’t have the attention for audio and don’t like to read anything longer than an article on a screen.

One book you’ve read multiple times: Marilynne Robinson’s “Housekeeping”

Other than writing utensils, one thing you must have within reach when you write: A cup of black coffee

Best antidote for writer’s block: A long hike or run usually works; the trick is remembering what I’ve figured out until I get home.

Most valuable beta reader: My mom has been my first reader for decades now and always provides the necessary encouragement to keep me going.