How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith

    I really liked How the Word Is Passed. Clint Smith basically travels across the United States (plus Senegal) to chart the history of slavery, but moreso the historical memory of slavery. It is less a book about history than the modern conception of slavery as an historical phenomenon. So Smith compared Monticello, where nearly all the tour guides are white and teaches also about Jefferson the founder, with the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, which is dedicated to teaching about slavery. I also really liked how well read Clint Smith is, which shows in his frequent citations of other scholarly works. The book is really seamless in transitioning from the scholarly to the personal experiences in each site.

    I've always thought it was interesting how the ambivalence toward slavery at the founding was replaced by vehement support of it in the South. I thought it was interesting that Jefferson wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia that

There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal…The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.

American slavery was unique in relying on natural increase in slaves, whereas most slaver societies maintained profits precisely by not caring for young slaves but by raiding for new slaves in their prime working years. Slavery was so large in the South that one in three Southerners was an enslaved person in 1860, over four million people. 57% of those slaves were under the age of twenty. 

Miscellaneous Fact:

• Sam Houston, the first president of the Republic of Texas, was the only governor in the Confederacy who opposed secession, and refused to swear and oath to the Confederacy. Apparently Abraham Lincoln also offered him military assistance to prevent Texas from joining the Confederacy, but Houston refused it.
• Fernando Wood, the mayor of New York City at the outbreak of the Civil War, proposed secession to protect the cotton-trading relationship with the South.