Uncle Tom. Mammy. Topsy. Prissy. Kunta Kinte. Fiddler. Chicken George. These characters shine as stars in the American cultural firmament of chattel slavery (with Little Eva, Simon Legree, Scarlett O’Hara, and Rhett Butler as their white cosmic counterparts). As literary characters–from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (1936), and Alex Haley’s Roots (1976)–brought to life in film adaptations, they reinforce visually the relationship between slavery, region, culture, and history so central to their novelistic precursors. But what are the connections between written representation and filmic adaptation? For example, how does Mitchell’s character of Mammy compare to Hattie McDaniel’s Oscar-winning portrayal in the 1939 film? It is often difficult to discern where the power of narrative ends and the spectacle on the screen begins.

These types of questions are at the heart of Natalie Zemon Davis’s new book, Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision, derived from her delivery of the 1999-2000 Barbara Frum Historical Lectures at the University of Toronto. Davis begins with a basic question: How can film best be used as a medium for presenting history? “Readers may well wonder whether we can arrive at a historical account faithful to the evidence if we leave the boundaries of professional prose for the sight, sound, and dramatic action of film” (3). Functioning, on the one hand, as a kind of “microhistory” and, on the other, as a “creature of invention,” the feature film wields an “historical power” that “stems from its multiple techniques and resources for narration” (5-7). It is precisely this play between fictiveness and fact so characteristic of feature film (in comparison to documentary film, docudrama, or cinema verite) which makes the genre intriguing to Davis. Although feature films have been described as having little “significant connection to the experienced world or the historical past,” this same genre also has the ability to “make cogent observations on historical events, relations and processes” (5). Davis, esteemed historian of early modern France and professor emeritus at Princeton, boasts impressive credentials to address the relation of history to film. In the early 1980s, she served as historical consultant on the French production of Le Retour de Martin Guerre(dir. D. Vigne) about a case of imposture in sixteenth-century France, wrote The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), a traditional historical account of that case, and taught graduate seminars in the 1980s and 1990s on History and Film.

Davis addresses the relationship of film to history in four ways. First, she strategically chooses five films about slavery or, more particularly, about resistance to slavery that serve as case studies. They include Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960), Gillo Pontecorvo’s Burn! (1969), Tomas Guiterrez Alea’sThe Last Supper (1976), Steven Spielberg’s Amistad(1997), and Jonathan Demme’s Beloved (1998). These films represent a forty-year span of productions in the U.S., Cuba, and Italy. They are set in a range of locales in the Atlantic World, including the West Coast of Africa, the U.S., Cuba, and the imaginary island of Quiemada, and document a range of action, from slave rebellion on land, slave revolt aboard ship, and slave resistance on the plantation. Second, she maps the classical duality between history and poetry onto the dichotomy between historical prose and historical film. “The ancient contrast between poetry and history, and the crossover between them, anticipate the contrast and crossovers between historical film and historical prose. Poetry has not only been given the freedom to fictionalize but it brings a distinctive set oftechniques to its telling: verse forms, rhythms, elevated diction, startling leaps in language or metaphor. The conventions and tools of poetry can limit its use to convey some kinds of historical information, but they can also enhance its power for expressing certain features of the past” (4). Third, she offers a dual chronology of twentieth-century historiography on classical and New World slavery and of filmic representations of slavery in the same period. She sees “shifts in cinematic treatment of slave resistance over the decades [that] were parallel to or followed on similar changes in the work of historians” (123). Fourth, Davis reads these films against their broader social and cultural contexts.Spartacus is a film about internal Roman politics and the political and social revolt against Roman elites;Burn! and The Last Supper concern political economy and local cultural customs; Amistad focuses on political struggles and the claims of property; andBeloved explores the cultural and psycho-social trauma associated with slavery. She also harnesses the personal anecdotes of these films’ filmmakers, actors, and writers to flesh out their creative contexts.

Davis continues with a follow-up query to her initial question: “what do films about slavery tell us about the past?” (19). She reveals her dual faith in the medium of film and in the possibility of making films that are “both good cinema and good history” (xi). The films she analyzes give “her new eyes with which to look once again at the plantations, uprisings, and manumissions of Suriname” at the center of her current research (xi). “As long as we bear in mind the differences between film and professional prose, we can take film seriously as a source of valuable and even innovative historical vision. We can then ask questions of historical films that are parallel to those we ask of historical books. Rather than being poachers on the historian’s preserve, filmmakers can be artists for whom history matters” (15).

While Davis’s erstwhile contention about the potential symbiosis between history and film is one that most of us can share conceptually, the history of the documentation of slavery as a subject for film is a sad and sorry one (I have included a comprehensive, though not exhaustive, list of films at the end of this review). Any visual representation of slavery in a U.S. context depends for its signification upon a complex visual and discursive network of meanings about race, class, labor, gender, and region. In this sense, what films about slavery tell us about the past is that it is incredibly difficult to talk about or conjure up images of the institution fashioned by slavery. Put differently, the symbiosis between history and film means that film can get it just as wrong as history, with more long-lasting and visually explicit results (take the visual iconography of a shiny-faced, wisecracking Mammy in Gone With the Wind as one notable example). From the nascent silent classic ofUncle Tom’s Cabin in 1903 to the technically brilliant, yet reactionary Birth of a Nation in 1915, from the audaciously repellent Operation 13 (1930s bombshell Marion Davies as a Union spy during the Civil War ‘blacks up’ as a slave maid behind enemy lines), to the shadow-filled tableaux of Jezebel of 1938 in which slaves silently tend to Bette Davis cast as an overwrought southern belle, Hollywood’s attempts at depicting American slavery seem awkward at best and plain racist at worst. Instead, the only instance in which slavery can be discussed openly is in its classical form–Hollywood’s “ancient world” is almost entirely populated by Anglo actors. In this sense, white actors Charlton Heston in Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments and Kirk Douglass in Spartacus decrying their bondage both sound and look fundamentally different from black actor Denzel Washington narrating the physical and psychic terrors of his chattel existence after joining the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment of the Union Army in the Civil War epic of Glory. By Hollywood standards, the “slavery” experienced by Jews and non-Romans in the classical era has nothing in common with the “slavery” borne by persons of African descent in the New World. Instead audiences encounter slavery in whiteface–white Hollywood stars sport burlap and chains and spout platitudes about freedom and justice.

Indeed, in this sense, Slaves on Screen is perhaps a misleading title. Readers may find the slaves on which Davis focuses–Spartacus, Jose Dolorés, Sebastián, Cinque, and Sethe–to be relative strangers in contrast to the familiar figures of Uncle Tom, Mammy, or Kunta. The slaves Davis has chosen have not been seen much at all. Only one of the five films, Spartacus, was a commercial success. BothBurn! and The Last Supper require the prodigious inventories of an art house video store just to screen them (and even here near Hollywood, I had difficulty locating them). Amistad and Beloved were box office failures–even Spielberg’s blockbuster auteur status and Oprah Winfrey’s formidable marketing power could not overcome the movie-going public’s ingrained reticence about and avoidance of the devilish details of chattel slavery.

The relative obscurity of these slave characters is reinforced by a telling omission in the broad social and cultural context drawn by Slaves on Screen. This volume would have benefited from even a cursory consideration of the efforts of black writers and filmmakers in the post-Civil Rights era to confront the history of slavery. There is little mention of Alex Haley’s Roots (Garden City, N.Y., 1976). The immensely popular television series (1977), based upon the best-selling text, has revolutionized the visual depiction of American slavery during the last twenty-five years and brought slave characters like Kunta Kinte, Kizzy, Fiddler, and Chicken George and the broad outlines of the practice of slavery into America’s living rooms. Other television movies likeThe Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974), based upon Ernest Gaines’s novel, and later independent productions, like Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991) and Haile Gerima’s Sanfoka(1993), receive no mention.

Davis’s final case study pairing Amistad and Belovedreveals how the symbiosis between film and history can go astray when its subject is chattel slavery. In other words, what happens when the power of film to impart historical knowledge is muted by broader cultural silence about and evasion of the film’s subject? She herself offers an oblique reference to the anomalous place of these two films in her broader argument. “Unlike Spartacus, which was made amid the troubles of the Cold War and the Red Scare, or Burn! and The Last Supper, which were produced in the wake of national revolutions,Amistad and Beloved were composed under the shadow of Holocaust” (69-70). I might paraphrase this last idea. These two films were made under the shadow of films of the Nazi Holocaust, particularlySchindler’s List (dir. S. Spielberg, 1993). Although the original materials for both films predate Spielberg’s epic chronicle, the filmic representations of those materials seem indelibly marked by the 1993 film. Indeed, Davis quotes Oprah Winfrey’s declaration about the film adaptation of Beloved to her scriptwriter and fellow producer: “This is mySchindler’s List.” I would argue that Winfrey’s substitution of Schindler’s List for Belovedilluminates the absence of language with which to speak about the experience of slavery in the New World on its own terms. Similarly, Spielberg’s own contention that he made Schindler’s List for his white children and Amistad for his black (adopted) children reveals the degree to which contemporary movie making about slavery may have little to do with the past it sets out to recreate. As Davis cautions her readers, “historical films should let the past be the past. The play of imagination in picturing resistance to slavery can follow the rules of evidence when possible, and the spirit of evidence when details are lacking. Wishing away the harsh and strange spots in the past, softening or remodeling them like the familiar present, will only make it harder for us to conceive good wishes for the future” (136).

Ultimately, Slaves on Screen raises more questions than it answers: What are the ramifications of the choice of slavery as the subject of this meditation on history and film? How does the absence of slavery from popular cultural discourse in the U.S. impact an audience? Spielberg’s and Demme’s attempts to fashion film narratives that would appeal to popular audiences fell flat. Moreover, when questions of history and media are present, how important is the factor of audience, whether popular or critical? What are the shifting fates of these various films in the broader entertainment marketplace? Finally, Davis’s last question about what movies about slavery tell us about the past remains largely unanswered. But I will venture a reply: these films tell us how desperately we need an oral and a visual vocabulary with which to speak about a past that is still our present and will be our future.

Additional Viewing:

The following is a list of films that deal directly with issues and history of chattel slavery and slave trade. Unless otherwise noted, films were released as features.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin (silent film, dir. E. Porter), 1903.

Birth of A Nation (silent film, dir. D.W. Griffith), 1915.

Ben-Hur (silent film, dir. F. Niblo), 1926.

Operator 13 (dir. R. Boleslavsky), 1934.

Souls at Sea (dir. H. Hathaway), 1937.

Jezebel (dir. W. Wyler), 1938.

Gone With the Wind (dir. V. Fleming), 1939.

The Ten Commandments (dir. C. DeMille), 1956.

Raintree County (dir. E. Dmytryk), 1957.

Band of Angels (dir. R. Walsh), 1957.

Tamango (France, dir. J. Berry), 1957.

Ben-Hur (dir. W. Wyler), 1959.

Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (television movie), 1974.

Mandingo (dir. R. Fleischer), 1975.

Drum (dir. S. Carver), 1976.

Roots (television miniseries), 1977.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin (television movie), 1987.

Glory (dir. E. Zwick), 1989.

Daughters of the Dust (independent film, dir. J. Dash), 1993.

Sankofa (independent film, dir. H. Gerima), 1993.

Middle Passage (Martinique, independent film, dir. G. Deslauriers), 2000.

This article originally appeared in issue 1.4 (July, 2001).

Judith Jackson Fossett is an assistant professor of English and American studies & ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is co-editor of Race Consciousness: African-American Studies for the New Century (New York, 1997), and is currently completing a manuscript entitled Illuminated Darkness: Slavery and its Shadows in 19th-century America.

Re-reading by Walter Johnson

Would I still recommend reading Roll, Jordan, Roll twenty-five years after it was published?

Absolutely.

What? You thought I was going to say no? Of course, there’s a lot to get through: the usage of stories about black people who gave the author bad directions on Southern roads in the 1950s to illustrate a point about dissimulating slaves in the nineteenth century (116-17); the full-throated celebration of the devotion of the enslaving class to its “mammies” (343); the kooky exoticism of the supposed distinction in black culture between “bad” and “baaaad” Negroes (635); the strange, unforgettable declarative sentences like, “The slaveholders were heroes,” (97) that punctuate almost its every page. All of this makes Roll, Jordan, Roll seem a bit dated today, as does its (inevitable) failure to engage issues that have emerged as central themes in scholarship in the years since 1976: the role of African culture in American slave culture; the complex interrelation of racial domination and economic exploitation in New World slave societies; the salience of gender and sexuality to any real understanding of slavery and the South.

And yet there’s no getting around the categories.Roll, Jordan, Roll is the locus classicus for some of the most powerful and important ideas that have shaped the discussion of slavery for the last quarter century. Paternalism, hegemony, the distinction between individual and collective acts of resistance, the master-slave dialectic, the triangular stress and negotiation between overseers, planters, and slaves: all of these remain key terms in the historiography of slavery, terms that it is impossible to discuss without thinking of the world Eugene D. Genovese made. In thinking aloud about why I still read, teach, and argue with this book I want to concentrate on the two concepts–paternalism and hegemony–with which I think the book is most often identified, and to both clarify Genovese’s usage of the terms, and specify what I think that usage misunderstands, elides, and sometimes simply ignores.

Paternalism first. For Genovese, paternalism was an ideology rooted in the political economy of antebellum slavery, particularly in the efforts between 1831 and 1861 of a group of slaveholding “reformers” to stave off the growing antislavery movement in parts of the upper South and the nation at large. Through a set of managerial reforms and emotional transformations, Genovese argues, slaveholders attempted to “humanize” slavery while at the same time consolidating the institution’s political position. Genovese gives a number of examples of what he means by slaveholding paternalism. Slaveholders, he tells us, “almost with one voice . . . denounced cruelty” (71). They “boasted of the physical or intellectual prowess of one or more of [their] blacks, much as the strictest father might boast of the prowess of a favored child” (73). They thought of their obligation to feed, clothe, and take care of their slaves as “a duty and a burden” upon themselves even as they tried to make their slaves’ work “as festive as possible” (75, 60). They described their own children and their slaves as being part of a single “family black and white” (without any apparent ironic recognition of the degree to which this was often literally the case) (73). And they were genuinely shocked, dismayed, and devastated–“betrayed” is the word Genovese uses–when their erstwhile slaves took off in search of freedom at the end of the Civil War (97). At that historic moment (as well as at a host of local moments throughout the period of slavery), Genovese argues, it became clear that the slaveholders’ actually believed what they were saying, that they “desperately needed the gratitude of their slaves in order to define themselves as moral human beings” (146). Slaveholders were themselves living lives defined and limited by slavery.

The notion of slaveholders fabricating themselves for an audience of their own slaves in a kind of Hegelian dialectic is an extraordinarily powerful one, and it illuminates countless aspects of American slavery. It does not, however, quite capture the quicksilver slipperiness with which slaveholders could reformulate the nominally beneficent promises of paternalism into self-serving regrets, reactionary nostalgia, and flat-out threats. Can it be mere coincidence that so many examples of planters expressing ostensibly “paternalist” sentiments refer to slaves who have disappeared or are in the process of disappearing? Apart from the literature in slaveholder periodocals like DeBow’s Review and Southern Agriculturalist on hygiene, medicine, housing, and nutrition, which does indeed seem to emerge according to Genovese’s reformist timeline (although to be much more characterized by the evocation of “my workforce black and white” than by any genuinely paternalist language), the most common sources of evidence for slaveholders’ paternalism seem to me to be three: statements that slaves are not governed by the lash but by the threat of sale; effusions of heartfelt feelings of loss for slaves who have just died (usually recorded in letters to other slaveholders); and the forenoted statements of “betrayal” at the hands of former slaves who took off at the end of the war (also recorded in letters between whites and other whites).

Paternalism, it turns out, as often expressed a sort of nostalgia for dead slaves and the lost cause as it did the actively governing ideology of a ruling class. In many cases it seems more properly read as a sort of a pose that slaveholders put on for one another than as a praxis through which they governed their slaves. Except, of course, in relation to the slave trade. For it was the slave trade–the threat of sale–that allowed slaveholders to formulate a system of labor discipline that relied not on torture but on terror as its axis of power. “I govern them the same way your late brother did, without the whip by stating to them that I should sell them if they do not conduct themselves as I wish,” proudly stated one Southern “paternalist” in an 1838 letter to another. To judge by this statement at least, the historical predicate for the effusion of paternalist language between 1831 and 1861 might well be seen as the expansion of the interstate slave trade into a central feature of the political economy of slavery. The paternalist ideology of “my family black and white” depended, at least in part, upon the ability of the white part of that “family” to extract labor from the black part by threatening to destroy it through separation and sale. Another way of describing the relationship of slaveholders’ effusive paternalism to the threats of family separation through which they increasingly governed their slaves is this: the slaveholders were liars.

If Genovese’s concept of paternalism continues to provoke debate and demand refinement, his discussion of slaveholders’ hegemony is the most often misunderstood element of the argument of Roll, Jordan, Roll. It is commonly seen as a denial of slaves’ “agency” which, in the common counter argument to the book, is to be rectified by “giving” it back. The transitive verb “to give” encapsulates most of the problems with this reading. First, the slaves in question are dead; it might be possible to give them a better history, but giving them agency at this point seems out of the question. Second, this sense of the giving of human agency (even in a historical narrative) to a human subject conveys some of the absurdity (and residual racism) of a historical practice in which jobs can be gained, books published, and major prizes received by historians who frame their project around the argument that a group of human beings were (mirabile dictu!) human beings, or in the canonical formulation, that they “preserved their humanity,” as if it would have occurred to them to do that, or even to do otherwise. Third, in so doing, the critique that replaces Genovese’s hegemony with the agency granted by the latter-day historian formulates the role of the revisionist historian (the grantor of agency to the slaves) in the very paternalist terms that it ostensibly repudiates. So, enough of that.

In fact, the important question and the question that Genovese is seeking to answer with the concept of hegemony is predicated upon recognition of the agency of enslaved people. What, he asks, was the field of possibility in which they acted and what were the effects of their actions? In answering those questions, Genovese has something very powerful (though, I believe, ultimately very wrong) to say.

Properly understood, the Gramscian notion of cultural hegemony is a theory of the transformation of rule into consent. At certain moments in time, the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci argued, rule by a single class can be enforced not through violence, but through general, if unwitting, assent to a set of limiting definitions of the field of the politically possible. Gramsci’s own analysis and much of the like-minded thinking that has followed it, has been particularly concerned with the ability of capitalist ruling classes to make their own dominance seem as if it is predicated upon universal participation and directed toward the common good. Following this line of argument, in Roll, Jordan, Roll, Genovese claims that slaveholders were able, through their paternalist ideology, to refigure what was fundamentally a system of class exploitation as a set of more local relationships between slaves and slaveholders–personal, familial, communal. Genovese does not argue that slaveholders always lived up to the rosiest promises of their paternalism, though he certainly thinks they tried. Rather he argues that paternalism provided the ideological mechanism through which they could disguise their exploitation of their slaves. By reformulating the class relationships of slavery as a system of reciprocal duties and obligations–you hew the wood and draw the water and I’ll (have you) whitewash the slave quarter and clean out the latrine–slaveholders exerted hegemony over slaves, claiming that they ruled not in their own interested but in the interest of those they owned.

According to Roll, Jordan, Roll this hegemonic sleight of hand was generally successful. For even when their slaves rejected this claim and resisted their masters (as Genovese freely admits they often did), their resistance generally took the form of localized challenges to their owners’ authority rather than large-scale, fully theorized collective revolts designed to overthrow slavery itself. In Genovese’s formulation, and this is the heart of the argument, slowing down, playing sick, mouthing off, burning down buildings, and, even, assaulting and murdering masters and overseers did not weaken the authority of the slaveholders, but actually strengthened it. This because, first, these types of resistance formulated the problem of slavery as a problem that occurred upon an individual plantation or farm and between a master or overseer and a slave–they localized, personalized, and naturalized what Genovese believes could only be properly understood as a hemispheric system of class exploitation. And, second, because they bled away resistance energy that might have otherwise gathered into the collective fury of revolution. Day-to-day resistance to slavery was, by this argument, at best a “prepolitical” or even “apolitical” form of “accommodation,” and at worst “pathetic nihilism.”(598, 659).

Whatever else this is, it is not an argument that denies enslaved people’s agency or the frequency of their daily resistance. It is, however, an argument that seems to me to be predicated upon (at least) three faulty premises: first, the idea that there was not a revolutionary aspiration among North American slaves; second, the notion that this alleged failure to revolt must somehow be explained in reference to the slaves’ own culture rather than the balance of force in the society–by reference, that is, to “hegemony” rather than simple “rule”; and, third, that there is a contradiction rather than a continuum between individual and collective acts of resistance.

The basic question out of which Roll, Jordan, Roll unfolds its discussion of hegemony is this: why didn’t North American slaves revolt more? And the analysis that follows is developed comparatively. The revolts associated with Gabriel (1800 in Richmond, Virginia), Denmark Vesey (1822 in Charleston, South Carolina), and Nat Turner (1831 in Southampton County, Virginia) do not, in Genovese’s view, compare favorably in their “size, frequency, intensity, or general historical significance” to revolts in the Caribbean and South America (588). And perhaps that is right.

But if we think a bit more broadly about what constitutes a slave revolt and what indexes historical importance, I think we’re led to a different conclusion about the “revolutionary tradition” among North American slaves. Part of the problem is that many of the North American revolts have been defined out of the mainstream narrative of American history. And I don’t just mean the 1811 revolt in Louisiana, which Genovese mentions, or the countless smaller uprisings like that aboard the slave ship Creole in 1841, which he ignores. I mean big, history-making military conflagrations: like the Seminole Wars, like the American Revolution, like the Civil War. These events have entered the nation’s historical record under different headings, but they were all profoundly (and at various turns decisively) shaped by the self-willed actions, both military and otherwise, of black slaves fighting for freedom, of slave rebels. It doesn’t seem a stretch to say that if we apply to the history of American slavery the terms that are conventionally applied to political and military history–that it is good politics and good strategy to take advantage of schisms in the structure of rule in order to advance a cause–then we’ve got to begin to think very differently about both the standard historical narrative of the United States and about the revolutionary tradition of American slaves.

I’d further argue that thinking about the military history of American slavery can clarify our thinking about hegemony. If the question driving the discussion is about the comparative absence of slave revolts in North America, accepting for a moment the terms in which Genovese defines a slave “revolt,” then doesn’t it make sense to look at the balance of forces on the ground before asserting a tradition of “nonrevolutionary self-assertion” among Southern slaves? Speaking strictly from a tactical standpoint, the balance of power between slaves and slaveholders in the United States was strikingly different from that which characterized the Caribbean and South America–the ratio of white to black was higher, holdings were smaller and more spread out, and the territorial sovereignty of the United States (a nation committed by a Constitutional clause drafted in the shadow of the Seminole Wars to the suppression of “domestic insurrections”) was almost unimaginably vast. Indeed, this balance of power was continually made clear to enslaved people through the periodic outbursts of vigilante and state terror that historians have labeled “slave revolt scares,” events that make the history of the antebellum slaveholding look like a counterinsurgency effort against a widespread, mobile, and, yes, vast enslaved conspiracy. Add to this episodic but continual military campaigning the daily violence through which slaveholders enforced their dominance over reluctant slaves, and it seems hard to argue that Southern slaveholders ever transformed rule into consent–that they ever, in the final instance, succeeded in ruling by anything other than force. It seems, indeed, hard to argue that they ever tried.

There is finally the question of the relationship of individual to collective acts of resistance–a question which has a much clearer formulation in Roll, Jordan, Roll than it has had in much subsequent discussion. It does seem to me to be desperately important to maintain this distinction and to think as hard about it as Genovese did. Breaking a hoe and being Nat Turner are not equivalent manifestations of human agency in either their causes or their consequences. Genovese formulates the relationship between these two types of resistance as being one of contradiction, thus missing the historical effect of day-to-day resistance in enabling collective resistance among American slaves. For it was through day-to-day resistance that enslaved people could come to know and trust one another–that they could figure out who to depend on and who to avoid as they talked about ideas and plans which could cost them their lives. Perhaps more importantly, it was through day-to-day resistance that they flushed the character of the slaveholders’ rule out into the open. All of the whips and chains and bits, all of the jails and smokehouses and slave pens, all of the threats and laws and passes: all of these were made necessary by the fact that slaveholders knew that they weren’t exercising hegemony but fighting something that sometimes looked a lot more like a war. By resisting slavery everyday, slaves, especially those who carried their own scars and stories to the North with them when they ran away, made visible the historical character of the institution, and made possible the formulation of the alliance that eventually brought about its (revolutionary) demise.

This article originally appeared in issue 1.4 (July, 2001).

Walter Johnson teaches history and American studies at New York University and is the author of Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass., 2000). He is currently at work on a book about the Mississippi River in the nineteenth century.

Re-reading by Kathleen Brown

I own three copies of Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom (New York, 1976), the legacy of a decade of teaching early American history. Although the pages of the oldest copy are no longer attached to the paperback binding, it still enjoys a prime spot on my bookshelf because of its extensive marginalia and sentimental value–this is the copy I read in graduate school, the copy that inspired my first book. I continue to assign Morgan’s classic study of British North America’s first slave society to my students, and they continue to read it with enthusiasm. Why, when so many other scholarly books can barely provide their authors with fifteen minutes of fame, has Morgan’s withstood twenty-five years of new research and changing scholarly fashion? How can we account for the persisting appeal of his narrative for students born long after it was written?

It takes the reader of American Slavery, American Freedom forty-five pages to get to the British North American mainland, with stops in Spanish Florida and the doomed colony at Roanoke. Morgan used these pages to sketch the genealogy of the Virginia Company’s plan for the North American mainland. Motivated by an intense imperial rivalry with Spain and a desire to bring glory to the English nation, early English explorers fantasized about liberating Indians oppressed by ruthless Spanish conquistadores. When they imagined their own colonies, they pictured submissive natives, laboring cheerfully to support their colonizers. English colonies would differ from those of the Spaniards because England itself was home to a particular brand of freedom, the product of the political conflicts of the sixteenth century and Parliament’s efforts to expand its autonomy. By the early seventeenth century, the concept of a distinctive English freedom had become a self-conscious feature of English national identity and permeated all of England’s efforts to become an imperial power. It also lay at the heart of English self-delusion in Virginia.

As rendered by Morgan, English-style freedom was naive, arrogant, and ethnocentric, qualities that readers in the post-Vietnam United States might have recognized with shame. Arrogance and ethnocentrism helped Morgan explain the rage with which English settlers on the mainland killed Indian men, women, and children and destroyed their cornfields, even though they depended on this corn to survive. To lash out at those who provided necessary food was suicidal, in Morgan’s view, and could only be explained by the unsustainability of English ideas of their own superiority: “[T]he Indians, keeping to themselves, laughed at your superior methods and lived from the land more abundantly and with less labor than you did. They even furnished you with the food that you somehow did not get around to growing enough of yourselves. To be thus condescended to by heathen savages was intolerable . . . So you killed the Indians, tortured them, burned their villages, burned their cornfields. It proved your superiority in spite of your failures” (90). Echoing the evening news reports of U.S. atrocities in Vietnam, Morgan found a germ of Americanness in the rage of English colonists towards the indigenous neighbors they both needed and despised.

In the tobacco mania that overtook the Virginia Company’s outpost, yielding profits to planters large and small, Morgan found yet another American pattern: the boom-town phenomenon. Investing all they had in tobacco production, planters scrambled for laborers, worked them to death, and grabbed new lands to replace those exhausted by the “stinking weed.” While the tobacco boom made the fortunes of many, it only increased the misery of indentured laborers who complained of being bought and sold like slaves. Following the 1622 Powhatan Indian attack upon English settlements, moreover, the English hatred of Indians was no longer held in check by naive visions of peaceful coexistence. Virginia’s successful entry into the global market in tobacco fanned the flames of class tension and coincided with this incipient form of racial contempt.

Seventeenth-century Virginia continued to be a deadly place for newcomers, with premature death combining with badly skewed sex ratios to disrupt family formation and traditional lines of inheritance. In a colony with a perennial shortage of white women, wealthy widows played an important role in early class formation, creating what Morgan described as a “widowarchy” (166), by transmitting wealth from the hands of one planter-husband after another. In counties where large numbers of male servants began their lives as free men, the chances of marrying, never mind marrying up, remained slim. Young, single, and poor, these freedmen were concentrated in counties near displaced Indians. The discontent of these young men, who had managed to survive years in the tobacco fields, was aggravated by the corruption of the colony’s elite men, who squeezed profits from their government offices.

In 1676, the cauldron of class antagonism boiled over, but with an important historical lesson for a colony that had yet to embrace slave labor. Nathaniel Bacon, a wealthy kinsman of then-governor William Berkeley, turned the class anger of these discontented men against the Indian scapegoats they were already prepared to hate. Although Morgan concluded that Bacon’s Rebellion resulted in little social change, this lesson in the venting of racial hatred was pivotal in his narrative. Only in the aftermath of the rebellion would Virginia’s white planters grasp the full significance of Bacon’s use of racism as political strategy.

Morgan’s analysis of slavery and its relationship to racism, populist politics, and republican ideals of freedom begins in the final hundred pages of his book. Before 1660, he argues, white servants and black slaves suffered under similarly oppressive work regimes, ate and slept together, made common cause in running away, and even engaged in sexual relations. Enslaved Africans initially shared with their white counterparts the stigma of poverty, including intimations of their “subhumanity” that resembled the way English people of means had always viewed their own poor (325). “In Virginia, too, before 1660,” Morgan concluded, “it might have been difficult to distinguish race prejudice from class prejudice.”

With slavery, Virginia’s white planters found a cost-effective solution to their perennial labor shortage and a means of capping the population of newly freed white men, whose discontent still threatened to shake the foundations of colonial society. Slavery also promised greater productivity; arriving after the decades of the highest mortality were over, slaves of both sexes lived longer than indentured servants and could be worked for their entire lives. But slavery alone did not solve the problem of white servants making common cause with their black counterparts. The potential for class antagonism between whites remained. “The answer to the problem, obvious if unspoken and only gradually recognized, was racism,” Morgan contended, “to separate dangerous free whites from dangerous slave blacks by a screen of racial contempt” (328). Having evinced racial hatred from their earliest interactions with Indians, English planters needed no prodding to generalize their contempt to Africans and eventually to the children of interracial unions.

Morgan’s definition of racism is complex and at times contradictory. He admits that some racial prejudice was doubtless present from the very beginning of the African presence in the colony. But he is agnostic about whether racism was a necessary condition for slavery to take hold. He states obliquely, “[I]f slavery might have come to Virginia without racism, it did not . . . and the new social order that Virginians created after they changed to slave labor was determined as much by race as by slavery” (315). For Morgan, the creation of that social order is best traced in the legal codes formulated to protect slave property, prevent rebellion, and reduce confusion about the different destinies for whites and blacks.

At other times Morgan describes racism as a tool that can be used instrumentally to achieve political ends. Of the colony’s lesser white men, who enjoyed rising fortunes by the beginning of the eighteenth century, he writes, “[I]nstead–and I believe partly because of slavery–they were allowed not only to prosper but also to acquire social, psychological, and political advantages that turned the thrust of exploitation away from them and aligned them with their exploiters (344).” Somewhat less instrumentally, racism allowed white men across the class divide “to perceive a common identity,” thus making it possible for patricians to “win in populist politics” (364).

By the 1720s, Morgan argues, the conditions of slavery, freedom, and white political solidarity were all in place. The only ingredient missing was a political ideology to hold it all together. Republican ideas, which had become popular in England during the Commonwealth period, gave white Virginians “a special appreciation of the freedom dear to republicans, because they saw every day what life without it could be like” (376). Virginia’s aristocrats could more “safely preach equality” than their northern counterparts, because slavery had allowed them to solve the social problem of poverty, to absorb “the fear and contempt” that well-heeled, educated Englishmen had always felt for the lower classes. Racism thus “became an essential, if unacknowledged, ingredient of the republican ideology that enabled Virginians to lead the nation” (386).

Lurking within Morgan’s study is a big question about what these various germs of Americanness–arrogance, contempt for the poor, racism, and the vociferous defense of liberty–found in colonial Virginia, can tell us about the contemporary United States. “Was the vision of a nation of equals flawed at the source by contempt for both the poor and the black? Is America still colonial Virginia writ large?” (387). It is this haunting question, following on the heels of 387 pages of elegant writing, that keeps bringing the readers back.

As one might expect, the passage of twenty-five years has led to new research and interpretations, many of which complicate or challenge Morgan’s formulation of the Anglo-Indian encounter, the rise of slavery, and the triumph of a racist popular politics. Take, for example, what Morgan portrayed as an essentially American contradiction, the links between slavery and freedom. Studies comparing slave societies throughout history have similarly found that slavery provided a crucial foil for definitions of personhood and citizenship. Although the precise meaning of enslavement varied across time and space, nearly every slave society viewed slaves as socially dead nonpersons who lacked the human ties generated by birth and kin group membership. None of this invalidates Morgan’s analysis of slavery and freedom in the early American context, but it undermines somewhat the notion that such contradictions made American slavery distinctive.

Other studies call into question the causality and intent of Virginia planters’ turn to racial slavery. Research on the availability of white indentured servants in the second half of the seventeenth century concludes that Virginia planters did not initiate the turn away from indentured servants after Bacon’s Rebellion but were simply responding to a diminishing supply of English labor by 1680. Had white servant labor continued to be available, such studies suggest, Virginia planters would not have begun importing African slaves as quickly or in such great quantity. Morgan was aware of this, but he ranked this reason for Virginia’s “conversion” to slave labor as less important than the general decline in mortality, which made the purchase of slaves cost effective at century’s end, and the political utility of slavery for wealthy planters.

More recently, historians have emphasized colonial Virginia’s importance for antebellum Southern culture rather than for contemporary American culture. In Tobacco and Slaves (Chapel Hill, 1986), for example, Allan Kulikoff finds the defining patterns of the antebellum South–paternalism, deference, and populism–in Virginia’s eighteenth-century plantation society. Whereas for Morgan, colonial Virginia provided the template for Americanness, for Kulikoff, Virginia was the seedbed of Southern culture. This may be why so many Southern historians still hold American Slavery, American Freedom in such high regard: it illustrates that the history of the South is the history of the United States and not merely some tangent to it.

When gender scholars like myself got their hands on early Virginia, with its unbalanced sex ratios, its laws regulating the sexual behavior and reproductive capacity of female laborers, and the boisterous culture of elections, horse races, and cock fights, Morgan’s work initially seemed less promising than that of Winthrop Jordan. Jordan’s White Over Black(New York, 1968) analyzed the sexual content of early English descriptions of Africans and had been widely anthologized by feminist scholars. But Morgan’s ambitious effort to link English imperial ambitions, class conflict, and racial slavery proved irresistible, at least to me. One of the tantalizing questions left unanswered by American Slavery, American Freedom was how a culture of racism, which became a central means of social control over unruly white people, could become so thoroughly embedded in colonial society if it were merely a convenient political strategy of wealthy white planters. The stake of white women in racism and slavery helped to explain what Morgan’s argument could not. Only if white women actively promoted and reproduced the cultural values supporting slavery out of their own self-interest can we make sense of the deep and rapid proliferation of the racism.

Two and a half decades after Morgan’s book was published, scholars place less emphasis on racism as an institutionally sanctioned ideology than on the subtler mechanisms through which racial categories support relations of power. In a post-Foucauldian intellectual world, the power of race resides not only in laws and formal political uses, but in the way people in the past talked and wrote about difference in travelers’ accounts, scientific treatises, jokes, insults, and newspaper advertisements. Such an approach gives the idea of race a longer, deeper, and more powerful lineage and helps to explain why it resonated with so many white Virginians, thus enabling it to become a useful political tool for wealthy planters. Approached as a cultural category (race) rather than as the foundation for an ideology (racism), the ways that race evolved with and through class, rather than simply in opposition to it, have become more apparent.

Scholars will continue to quibble with Morgan, but only because they, like their students, continue to read his elegant book. Morgan’s effort to trace the genealogy of Vietnam-era American troubles to the cornfields and tobacco fields of colonial Virginia still makes for compelling reading. Indeed, one is hard pressed to think of a more poignant combination than a history of slavery seen through the lenses of Civil Rights struggles and anti-war activism. Few studies can boast the success of American Slavery, American Freedom, to write about the past so that readers rethink their present. We may no longer turn to Morgan for the definitive word on the history of slavery, racism, and freedom. But we do turn to him for his eloquent prose, his ability to link key concepts in American history, and his effort to bring the sensibilities of the post-Vietnam era to one of the central tragedies and ironies of American history.

This article originally appeared in issue 1.4 (July, 2001).

Kathleen Brown is associate professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1996) and numerous articles.

The challenge of representing eighteenth-century black chattel slavery is to strike a balance between being truthful and being tasteful. To be truthful means to relate enough of the story to be accurate without overloading the visitor with information. To be tasteful means presenting the information in a way that may unsettle, but does not offend the visitor. For the guest who gets offended might deny the existence of the truth. I try to paint a vivid picture of slave life, one that affects the audience’s emotional sensibilities–but not so vivid that they want to run for the nearest exit.

Striking this balance is difficult for any historical interpreter, but it is particularly hard when the subject is American slavery. Most of the visitors to Colonial Williamsburg are upper-middle-class whites. Many of them may be descendants of slave owners, people who had slaves in the family. However, if we confronted them with this truth, bluntly and publicly, most would probably deny it. To work as an interpreter of slavery is to be forever reminded of an uncomfortable fact of American life: people on both sides of the color line are unwilling to face the history of race in America. Even today, being black is still NOT OKAY in this country.

How, then, do we “role play” slavery, confront slavery, remember slavery? If American Jews have learned not to forget the Holocaust, African Americans, for the most part, still turn away from the history of slavery. For the most part, Jewish Americans have recovered financially from their World War II-era losses, have acknowledged that they were victims of Nazi brutality, and are actively working to heal their psychological wounds. In contrast, we as a people are still economically deprived, have bought into the myth that slavery is our own fault, and have very deep and in some cases unexamined psychological wounds.

Too often, what we learn in school compounds this collective denial. For most of the recorded history of the United States, African Americans and slavery were purposefully erased from grade school, high school, and even college level textbooks. You only heard about the achievements of African Americans during African American History Month (originally Black History Week). Even at Colonial Williamsburg, our reconstructed “Slave Quarter at Carter’s Grove,” now twelve years old, is still something of a secret. How often have I heard visitors to the Slave Quarter, both black and white, proclaim: “I’ve been here all week, and I’m just hearing about this. How come I never heard about this before?”

With little to prepare them for what they learn at the Slave Quarter, visitors react to our presentations in a variety of ways. Some, especially older white women–I have never seen a man approach me in tears–apologize, weeping for being white, and for their ancestors’ role in the transatlantic slave trade. Other visitors–black as well as white–tell us they grew up in a house that looks like the ones at the Slave Quarter (with or without bathroom facilities). Even today, in the twenty-first century, that lifestyle is a reality for many people elsewhere in the world. Many people cry, and say they are thankful they do not have to live like that now. One of the oddest reactions of all comes from the African American university professors who visit the Slave Quarter and argue over semantics: about when it’s appropriate to use the word “slave” as opposed to “enslaved.”

Perhaps because they know no other way to express their pain, surprise, or anger upon learning about the reality of eighteenth-century slavery, some visitors simply act out. This seemed especially the case in 1999, when our annual theme, or storyline, was “Enslaving Virginia,” an examination of the institution of racial slavery in the colonial Chesapeake and the new nation, and of slavery’s pervasive influence on the lives, fortunes, and values of all Virginians. To help illustrate this point, we portrayed a free black, mixed-race family, living in town at the Tenant House. The wife, Lydia Cooper, was a mulatto. Her mother was white Irish, and while she was clearly of African descent, Lydia spoke with an Irish brogue and carried herself like a fine white lady, as her white Irish grandmother had raised her to do. She often told visitors this, and I have heard some say (even to her face) that she was “stuck up” or “uppity.” Some African American visitors commented, “Humph! She thinks she’s white.”

On occasion, Lydia’s older white cousin, Mary Delaney, would visit the family. By the way, Mary had a child with a black man. One day, when Mary was in the house alone, a white male visitor from Texas happened to visit the house, and remarked to Mary on leaving the building, “We hang ’em in Texas.” He was referring to the blacks on the site, and I do not think he knew that her character was a part of the mixed-race family. After the man left, the white interpreter who portrayed Mary burst into tears, unable to continue her work for the rest of the day. How can you be both truthful and tasteful when confronted with such comments?

I, too, have heard my share of uncomfortable responses to the uncomfortable truths we present. Last year my director passed along to me a letter from a visitor who had been infuriated by my interpretation. I highly offended her with the style of my delivery at the “Enslaving Virginia” lecture, a thirty-minute lecture/discussion forum where both interpreters and visitors can learn more about and openly discuss various aspects of slavery and its impact on us today. The woman wanted information about the slaves given in teeny, tiny bits, just a couple of little disembodied facts. She wanted facts given out of context without the meaning to the slaves or their owners. She was pleased with the interpretation she received on another tour from a white blond male on a previous trip, and from a white blond female she received on the same trip. Both apparently did that for her.

Of course, white visitors hold no monopoly on acting out. This past spring, an African American woman came to visit the “Slave Quarter at Carter’s Grove.” As she stepped across the bridge from the reception center and caught sight of the quarter, the woman began shouting to me: “Cousin Hattie! Cousin Hattie!” all the while doing the “step-and-fetch-it” walk. I was the only African American female interpreter in front of the Slave Quarter at the time, and I was standing in the middle of a group of several seated interpreters, which made me look like the elder of the group. As she approached, the woman continued shouting, “Cousin Hattie, Cousin Hattie! Don’t you remember me? I was yea high . . . I’m Susie Mae’s daughter from Indiana.” Finally, when she reached me, she said, “Cousin Hattie, now ain’t you gonna give your cousin a hug?”

What was I supposed to do? I thought to myself, “I do not know her, and nobody here seems to know her. She’s not being violent, and if I confront her with this behavior, she may become belligerent. So I will play along with her. Maybe that is what she needs to do to deal with being here.” So I hugged her, and I asked, “Now what is my cousin’s name?” The woman replied, “Carol.” She seemed happy and satisfied. From there Carol disappeared into the first slave quarter building, and we never heard another peep out of her. Perhaps she was having flashbacks to Hattie McDaniels in Gone with the Wind. Perhaps the reality of the setting was too much for her. Or, perhaps, like the white woman who wrote the letter, she could not handle this much reality at once! Was it again too truthful to be tasteful?

Some visitors, both African American and white, are surprised and even offended to see whites working at the Slave Quarters and leading Afrocentric tours and lectures, including the “Other Half” tour, the “Enslaving Virginia” tour, and the “Enslaving Virginia” lecture. A few have even gone so far as to refuse to listen to the white interpreter, preferring to either demand an African American tour guide, to wait until an African American tour guide was available, or to leave the lecture after making their feelings known. In cases like this, at the Slave Quarter, an African American interpreter usually comes forward to defend the white one, telling the visitor that none of us is in character, that the Foundation has trained all of us with the same information, and that the white person knows the subject matter.

And yet, for all that, I am still troubled by the issue: why was a white person teaching about black history? My personal answer to that question goes back to an expression I heard long ago. White people can do the watusi, but black people ARE THE WATUSI! No matter how much a white person reads about slavery in general, about the transatlantic slave trade, and about the African American experience today, those experiences are just words on a page. I am happy that America is finally discussing diversity, that many of our children do not see color, and are allowed (at least in some circles) to fully embrace their heritage. However, the danger is, if we forget our past we are doomed to repeat it.

Author’s note: The views represented here are strictly my own, and in no way reflect the official position of Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

This article originally appeared in issue 1.4 (July, 2001).

Karen E. Sutton is a historical interpreter in the African-American Programs & History Department, Division of Historic Presentations, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, where she has just completed a pilot project to identify descendants of the slaves from Carter’s Grove.

Straining to hear black voices in the records available to study slavery in early America, historians have rarely noted how difficult it is to see black faces. Even those figures who were written about relatively extensively at the time are more faceless than they are voiceless in surviving records. A case in point is Denmark Vesey, the leader in 1822 of the largest slave rebellion conspiracy in American history and arguably the most fully documented black person in the South prior to the explosive emergence of Nat Turner in 1831. More than a century and a half after the conspiracy was uncovered and its leaders executed, a number of black Charlestonians sought to memorialize Vesey’s leadership with a portrait. The artist, however, soon discovered that there was absolutely no indication in extant records of what he looked like. Unlike the leaders of the Haitian Revolution, Toussaint Louverture and Henri Christophe, there were no portraits of Vesey, which is somewhat ironic in that Vesey may have been born in Haiti and had planned to escape to that island nation as part of his plan of rebellion. The solution the artist settled on was to draw Vesey from behind as he spoke to a large audience from a raised platform.

As regrettable as dilemmas of this sort are we should not be surprised by them. Or should we? The images that have come down to us from the colonial era, particularly the colonial South, almost uniformly reflect a slave-owning perspective. Their ethnographic value is minimal at best, whether viewed in terms of what they illustrate about slavery or slave life, but especially the latter. Even when black figures appear in a painting or drawing, as when someone like Vesey appeared in the written record, we feel as though some important part of their person is missing. In fact, what is absent is any sense of their individuality. The subjective presence of blacks is so uniformly missing from the visual record created by (or for) the slave-owning community that its absence could not have been unintended. But why? Why is there not a more detailed visual record of slavery and even slave life in early America?

Generally speaking the visual record is not as barren in other New World slave societies. We have nothing comparable, for example, to the painting by Dirk Valkenburg, entitled Slave Play on Dombi Plantation (Suriname) .

For its time (1707), Dirk Valkenburg’s painting, Slave Play on Dombi Plantation, is unparalleled as an observation of slave life in the Americas. Although exceptional, its ethnographic value is not unique in the pictorial record that has survived from the first two centuries of widespread European colonization in the Caribbean, starting in the early seventeenth century. However, nothing even remotely comparable to it survives from colonial America. The closest approximation is The Old Plantation, a painting that is thematically similar to Valkenburg’s but crude in most respects by comparison.] Sensuous in its lighting–indeed, almost cinematic in its effect–the painting shows us a large group of mostly bare-breasted, African-born slaves preparing to participate in a wintidance. Away from the watchful eye of slave owners and overseers, the subjects of the painting are observed simply enjoying each other’s company. Such everyday pleasantries may seem unremarkable. Yet when compared to the pictorial record we have of the earliest century and a half of our slave past, it is nothing less than extraordinary.

Such regional disparatiesdisparities in the visual record of slavery pose more questions than they answer. Without trying to explain these variations I would like to explore why the pictoralpictorial record of colonial American slavery is so relatively barren and thus what the omissions tell us about the experience of being black in early America. I would then also like to suggest why the answer has eluded us, arguing, with the help of two very rare and anomalous paintings, that the reason has to do with how we have looked at the record and for what.

Typical of the images of slavery that have survived from colonial and early national America (primarily the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) is the portrait by John-Baptiste Paon of the marquis de Lafayette, a work that was drawn to commemorate the Siege of Yorktown (fig. 1).

This portrait by John-Bapiste Paon of the marquis de Lafayette to commemorate the Siege of Yorktown is typical of the portraiture that has come down to us from colonial America, especially the colonial South. Less well known than similar paintings of George Washington in which he is attended by his longtime body servant Billie Lee, the portrait of General Lafayette typifies the pictorial record of slavery in which black subjects are used as decorative objects to accentuate each painting’s main focus, an elite white male or members of his family.] In the portrait, a black man, James Armistead, attends Lafayette. Although both were Revolutionary heroes, Armistead was also the property of a Virginia planter named William Armistead. After the war Lafayette would praise his black orderly for his industrious and faithful service as a spy. “He perfectly acquitted himself,” according to Lafayette, “with . . . important commissions . . . [and was] entitled to every reward his situation [his owner and the American government willing] could admit of.” This testimony apparently helped in securing Armistead’s freedom after the war. No doubt that is why Armistead later added Lafayette to his name.

The marquis, naturally, is the central focus of Paon’s portrait. General of the Continental Army, he is dressed appropriately in the painting. Ralph Ellison, writing in 1974 for a bicentennial project, noted that “the young French aristocrat” is shown pointing “with enigmatic expression” toward Yorktown. He is seen standing “hatless, his powdered wig showing white against a cloudy sky in which a slight rift promises sunny days ahead.” Ellison’s description of how James Armistead is depicted in Paon’s portrait is worth quoting because it so clearly characterizes the pattern that can be found in most such portraits. As was customary, Paon, according to Ellison, “intensified the hierarchical, master-servant symbolism of his composition by rendering the black orderly’s features so abstract, stylized, and shadowy that the viewer’s attention is drawn not to the individuality of Armistead’s features but to the theatrical splendor of his costume.” While Armistead’s face remained a kind of blank, his overall appearance was rendered flamboyantly exotic. Indeed, according to Ellison, “the Florentine splendor of his garb” was such that it added “glamour and mystery even to Lafayette.”

Unlike poor whites, or non-elite whites in general, blacks frequently appear in the pictorial record that has survived from the colonial South, but only in the ornamental or decorative form described by Ellison: as objects whose function was not only to serve their owners, but to enhance their self-image. Similar images of blacks also survive in the much larger and more diverse written record left to history by the slave-owning community. Whether in plantation records, newspapers, court or legislative records, blacks appear almost exclusively as objects to be counted, contested, controlled, and in general kept track of. As rich as many of those sources are regarding slavery in Britain’s North American colonies, references to blacks as individuals in their own right occur only parenthetically as amused, exasperated, or condensing asides. Unless, of course, slaves managed to force their way into the records by rebelling or planning to or by some other equally threatening behavior.

Thus, like the portrait of Lafayette in which James Armistead appears, blacks are frequently present in surviving documents but almost always as objects of concern rather than as self-reflecting subjects. Portraits like Paon’s do not make blacks more visible as subjects. But they do illustrate for us a pattern of representation that is so ubiquitous in surviving written documents that it is easy to overlook. On its own, such an image merely suggests yet another example of slave-owning conceit or planter-class self-indulgence. However, when overlaid on the written record, portraits like Paon’s re-enact for us a critical feature of enslavement.

In order to survive in early America blacks had to accept the self-denying identity, Negro. Those who refused to do so did not survive. It was that simple and that terrifying. The process was often a brutal one, driven by physical violence and torture. Brutality was a means to an end, however, not the preferred way of achieving it. Slavery as an institution, representing the economic foundation upon which much of colonial antebellum America was grounded, could not be run as a prison camp, not day in, day out for more than two and a half centuries. Instead, physical violence was used to create a climate of terror in which the necessity of becoming a Negro, or at least convincingly pretending to do so, became a part of the slaves’ intuitive understanding of what it meant to survive, a, a self-perpetuating means of self-enslavement. The way blacks were visually portrayed, and the ways in which they were forced to project in daily life the same lack of subjectivity that comes through in these rare portraits, demonstrate this unrelenting assault on the slave’s sense of self. Unintentionally, portrait painters like Paon provided us with a glimpse of that process as it was experienced by a few survivors. The fact that Armistead, through his own initiative, was a privileged survivor only heightens the effect.

By striking contrast two very different paintings help reinforce our understanding of the process of self-enslavement by giving us a rare view of aspects of black life that are otherwise missing from the records kept by the slave-owning community. One of them suggests the terror that permeated slave life, while the other, a pale reflection of Valkenburg’s Slave Play, illustrates a scene from the private lives of a few black slaves. These two paintings reflect another pattern of representation that can be easily identified in the written record: the unique importance of non-American eyes and pens. Only visitors to the region left written descriptions of slavery and black life that could be termed ethnographically valuable. The same is true of the visual record that has survived. French architect and engineer Benjamin Henry Latrobe composed by far the most valuable collection of drawings of blacks in the American South up to the time of his visit during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His sketches and watercolors give us glimpses of daily workaday or leisurely life in the region (primary the upper South) that are unparalleled, a sense of place that is only surpassed by the drawings of John White, who documented the flora and fauna and aspects of native life on North Carolina’s outer banks in the late sixteenth century. Latrobe’s sketches and watercolors, however, are not so much about blacks as they are about blacks as part of the social and material landscape he was attempting to record and about how that landscape was made distinctive by their presence.

We do not know if the two anomalous paintings that stand out so glaringly among the other visual images that have survived from the colonial South were painted by visitors to the region like Latrobe because both are surrounded in mystery. However, they clearly reflect the pattern of representation that Latrobe’s drawings serve so well to illustrate. In fact, they offer a much more concentrated view of blacks and their lives than Latrobe’s drawings offer. Both appear to date from the early national period–that liminal moment in American history that both links and divides its colonial beginnings to and from its national future. Though neither is dated or signed, the clothing worn by the subjects in the two paintings seems to reflect a colonial rather than an antebellum setting.

One of the two canvases captures, or attempts to capture, a social setting exclusive to black slaves. The other is divided into two scenes, one showing a white man kissing a black woman, apparently against her will, the other a white man whipping a black man (fig. 2).

As if to mimic the tendency of most Americans, including the Founding Fathers, to say as little as possible about slavery, and either to deny or avoid discussing its brutality, the painting, Virginian Luxuries appears anonymously (undated and unsigned) on the back or unseen side of another painting.] This two-part picture is hidden on the back of another painting. Written in fairly large letters at the bottom of the painting is its title, Virginian Luxuries, suggesting the scene’s location as well as a critical perspective on slavery.

By contrast there is no hint of where the gathering depicted in the other painting takes place, nor is there any indication of what motivated the painting (fig. 3).

Few colonists of early America or citizens of the nation’s early national period left descriptions of black life that could be termed ethnographically useful, even in those areas where it would have been impossible to avoid close contact with blacks. Only visitors to America left descriptions comparable to the painting,The Old Plantation, an undated and unsigned picture found in Columbia, South Carolina. The paper on which it was drawn can be dated between 1777 and 1794 by the watermark of the paper maker, which tends to confirm speculation by historians that it reflects a late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century scene. The scene itself is believed to have been observed on a plantation somewhere between Charleston and Orangeburg, South Carolina.] Was it curiosity, contempt, amusement, sympathy? And unlike Virginian Luxuries no title originally appeared on the other mysterious painting when it was found. It was subsequently named The Old Plantation rather than something more specific to its content.

Both canvases are worth puzzling over because they are so rare. Both, in fact, are unique records of their kind, visually depicting experiences that invite the viewer to consider the self-reflective dimension of the life-worlds the artists attempted to portray. We can either lament that there are so few such paintings, reflecting a similar poverty in the written record, or we can learn from the perspective they reflect as much as from what they describe. Slavery was lived, not merely imposed and endured, accommodated and resisted. It was experienced, in ways these paintings (and the others I will briefly discuss below) compel us to explore. What was the nature of the slaves’ lived or felt experience? What forms did its expression take? What bases for self-affirmation were slaves able to establish and maintain, and how were they expressed? If they resisted becoming Negroes, as we know the vast majority of them did, what was their sense of themselves as individuals–or collectively as families and communities? And how, where and when, was this sense of self expressed?

Of course asking such questions is one thing, answering them is quite another. But as daunting as the challenge seems, it may not be beyond us. It is possible, for instance, to replicate Latrobe’s drawings of blacks, using the available written documents. It would require considerable effort but it could be done. It is even possible that we could use written sources to flesh out the quotidian world sketched by Latrobe–including the atmospherics that his drawings evoke–even more fully than he was able to do. But in order to do so historians would have to be willing to think of the past more in terms of its experiential content than solely in terms of its social and material structure.

Snapshots of black life can frequently be found in reports of events that are not directly related to blacks or slavery, events like natural disasters or other curious phenomena. These glimpses of slave life are rarely as detailed as in the two mysterious paintings but they are much more numerous and are occasionally susceptible to enlargement. Thus, if we look at the records that the slave-owning community kept (especially its parenthetical and inadvertent references) in the way that Latrobe and other visitors to the region observed the landscape they traveled through, perhaps we will begin to see more of what blacks experienced. Just as Vesey’s biography–his life not his face–has become more visible the more creatively and expansively writers have looked for it. Black subjects, even those that have been cast in shadow or objectified beyond recognition, can still be seen as subjects if we look closely and if we ask the questions that these paintings encourage us to pursue, even those that objectify the black presence.

Perhaps nowhere are such questions and the myriad issues related to them more urgently felt than when we look at the few portraits of blacks, including black Southerners, that begin to appear in late Revolutionary and early national America, during a time marked by the emergence of a transatlantic antislavery movement. These images are of two sorts, those that might be termed heroic by emphasizing the dignity or status of the subject, and those that are perhaps best described as character studies, regardless of their intent. When we look at the extremely rare number of paintings in the latter group–the studio study by John Singleton Copley of the anonymous black man featured in his masterpiece, Watson and the Shark (1778), or Charles Willson Peale’s portrait of the elderly, African-bornYarrow Mamout (1819)–we rarely think of either subject as an object in relation to others but rather as self-aware individuals. We strain to think what they are thinking and to know them better. We recognize that they are black and assume their association with slavery based on their color, but are quickly drawn beyond that recognition to an interest in their person, to the feelings and experiences that give character to their faces.

The heroic portraits include those by Joshua Johnson, the free black limner who was in great demand as a portrait artist in and around his native Baltimore during the early national period. Most of his portraits were of whites, including family portraits, but a handful were of free blacks. His African American subjects no less than his Anglo-American ones reflect an inner dignity as a natural characteristic, reducing their color to an incidental feature, not insignificant but not determinant either.

The same was true, according to Ellison, of the heroic portrait that was made of James Armistead Lafayette by John B. Martin in 1818 (fig. 4).

By contrast to paintings like Paon’s portrait of Lafayette, the portrait of James Armistead Lafayette by John B. Martin focuses in heroic terms on its black subject. Armistead Lafayette, shown in the background in Paon’s portrait, distinguished himself as a spy for the American cause during the war and was subsequently freed, on General Lafayette’s recommendation, for his service.] Ellison noted that Martin, who was born in Ireland and had only recently arrived in Virginia when his portrait of James Armistead Lafayette was completed, portrayed the black Lafayette as a proud and dignified person. He appears “with his highly individualized features forcefully drawn, a dark, ruggedly handsome man looking out at the viewer with quizzical expression.” No longer attired in the exotic livery that so marked his appearance in Paon’s portrait, Martin’s Lafayette is wearing his blue military coat, the buttons of which Ellison noted were embossed with American eagles. The portrait, Ellison concluded, portrayed a man “[a]sserting an individual identity.”

Of course it is not unusual for artists to search for telling details, a “quizzical expression” that can illuminate a subject or event. Yet it remains extremely rare to find historians of slavery in early America who look for those sorts of self-expressive or self-reflective attributes, or more generally who seek to study lived experience as such. It is possible that such an interest cannot be meaningfully realized, given the sources available to us, but how will we know until we try? And aren’t we obligated to make the effort? Otherwise, to paraphrase James Baldwin, how will we ever manage to get beyond “questions of color” in order to engage those “graver questions of self” that were so important to the survival of blacks in early America?

Further Reading:

For studies that discuss a number of the representational issues raised in the text see Albert Boime, The Art of Exclusion: Representing Blacks in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, D.C., 1990); Guy C. McElroy, Facing History: The Black Image in American Art 1710-1940 (San Francisco, 1990); Allison Blakely, Blacks in the Dutch World: The Evolution of Racial Imagery in a Modern Society (Bloomington, Ind., 1993); and Kim Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, N.Y., 1995). My own study, The Punished Self: Surviving Slavery in the Colonial South (Ithaca, N.Y., 2001), is also relevant. The controversy surrounding the memorial to Vesey is discussed in David Robertson, Denmark Vesey: The Buried History of America’s Largest Slave Rebellion and the Man Who Led It (New York, 1999). Also see Douglas R. Egerton, He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey (Madison, Wisc., 1999) for a related discussion. A brief description of Valkenburg’s painting can be found on the dust jacket of Robin Blackburn’s The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern 1492-1800 (New York, 1997); see also the reproduction in Richard D. E. Burton, Afro-Creole: Power, Opposition, and Play in the Caribbean (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997). Ellison’s discussion of Paon’s portrait of Lafayette and Martin’s portrait of James Armistead Lafayette is in his essay, “James Armistead Lafayette,” in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (New York, 1995), 399-403. On other images of James Armistead Lafayette, see Fritz Hirschfeld, George Washington and Slavery: A Documentary Portrayal (Columbia, Mo., 1997). On Martin, see L. Moody Simms Jr., “John Blennerhassett Martin, William Garl Brown, and Flavius James Fisher: Three Nineteenth-Century Virginia Portraitists,” in Virginia Cavalcade (Autumn 1975): 72-79. For a close analysis of The Old Plantation see Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982). Virginia Luxuries is reproduced on the cover of Mechal Sobel, Teach Me Dreams: The Search for Self in the Revolutionary Era (Princeton, N.J., 2000) and in Kathleen M. Brown’s Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1996). The drawings made reference to in the text are reproduced in Edward C. Carter II, ed., The Papers of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Series I, Journals: The Virginia Journals of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, 1795-1798 (New Haven, 1977). Reproductions of Joshua Johnson’s work can be found in Carolyn J. Weekley, Stiles Tuttle Colwill, with Leroy Graham and Mary Ellen Hayward, Joshua Johnson: Freeman and Early American Portrait Painter (Exhibition Catalog published by the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, the Maryland Historical Society, and the Museum and Library of Maryland History, 1987).

This article originally appeared in issue 1.4 (July, 2001).

Alex Bontemps teaches African American history at Dartmouth College. His book, The Punished Self: Surviving Slavery in the Colonial South (Ithaca, N.Y., 2001), was recently published by Cornell University Press.

What are words worth in the face of a great evil, especially when the evil in question–American slavery–dwells in the distant past? Not much, Americans seem to believe. Although demands for a formal apology for slavery made headlines in 1997 and 1998, during then-President Clinton’s oft maligned “national conversation on race,” the pressure has since abated. And, despite an end-of-the-millennium global frenzy of what one pundit labeled “apologiamania”–by the Brits for the potato famine, by the Vatican for the Crusades and the Inquisition, by the Canadians and the Australians for long-ago crimes against indigenous peoples, by Clinton himself for so many, many things–no official repudiation of the legacy of slavery has been issued. Nor is one likely to be offered any time soon, in large measure because people spanning a political spectrum from Newt Gingrich to Jesse Jackson agree that words simply won’t do. Why?

The argument from the Right is predictable: such a national lamentation, conservatives hold, comes too late and risks too much. An apology, they argue, would revive ancient history–and misplace blame in the process. “I don’t know what place it has with our modern problems,” an Atlanta businessman told the Boston Globe. “Why are we responsible for what went on 200, 300 years ago? . . . I never owned a slave.”

From others, on both the Right and the Left, comes the worry that an apology would act as a proverbial camel’s nose peeking under some larger and costlier tent. Thinking more like defense lawyers than repentant sinners, those who gainsay sorry-saying fear that words of regret would amount to an admission of liability. Which, in turn, could become an obligation for payment. Thus President Clinton’s own tortured, passive-voiced, sue-proof statement on the subject: “Going back to the time before we were even a nation,” he told an audience in Uganda in March 1998, “European-Americans received the fruits of the slave trade and we were wrong in that.” Depends on what the meaning of “were” is.

Those on both sides of the political aisle who would stop short of a genuine apology concur, ironically, with African American activists, many of whom have moved past speech in their efforts to answer history. Indeed, conservatives who see an official repudiation of slavery as a flimsy pretext for a more tangible form of judgment are, in essence, correct. The cry for “apology,” no matter how heartfelt, sounds positively quaint against the hotter rhetoric today’s activists embrace: Restitution. Redress. And, especially, reparation.

As Randall Robinson, a leader in the apartheid disinvestment campaigns in the 1980s and a central figure in the growing reparations movement today, explained last year in his popular book, The Debt (New York, 2000), the legacy of slavery is monetary as well as moral: centuries of unpaid wages and lost property valued at between $700 billion and $4 trillion. The weapons needed to lay claim to such an inheritance are torts in courts, not apologies on bended knees. And so at least two organizations, the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA) and the Reparations Assessment Group, led by Johnnie Cochran and Harvard Law School’s Charles Ogletree, are readying massive class-action lawsuits against the United States on behalf of the descendants of slaves. Can mere words pay out such claims? Hardly, says Dorothy Lewis, co-chair of N’COBRA. “We’re not having a damn thing in lieu of reparations,” she told reporters. An instance, as a title of a recent collection of essays on the subject puts it, When Sorry Isn’t Enough (New York, 1999).

Hard to disagree. Yet it’s worth pointing out that such an understanding of the relative value of words and things is itself deeply historical, a product of our own place in time. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries–the very period that witnessed the twinned growth of European settlement and African slavery in the future United States–many plaintiffs would have preferred an apology to other forms of redress. Including money. In an age before markets were mature and widespread, cash didn’t buy much. But words–and the reputations they made and broke–counted for a great deal. Worth a thousand pictures, you might say, even if the pictures in question were portraits of kings and queens on currency. Not to mention the value of words on writs of manumission, forged passes, abolitionist lectures, and proclamations of emancipation.

Times have changed of course–often, though not always, for the better. Still, perhaps our forebears were onto something where the power of apology was concerned. Recent episodes remind us that even in these days of 24/7 multimedia chatter, words can still act like weapons. Even, or perhaps especially, words about slavery.

How else to understand the almost atavistic reaction to leftist-turned-rightist David Horowitz’s witless and inflammatory advertisement entitled “Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea–and Racist Too“, which ran in nine college dailies last March? Too patently specious to merit serious rebuttal, Horowitz’s paid screed nonetheless prompted not just heated speech (op-ed writers on the Right and the Left had a field day with the episode), but swift action as well. At Brown University, outraged students destroyed a whole press run of the school’s Daily Herald and stormed the paper’s offices to demand further redress. Mere words, it seems, can still wound.

But can they still heal? Consider that one of the most common remedies in the Horowitz case was that age-old salve, the formal public apology, which several college newspapers offered in earnest. Meanwhile, the arguments that ultimately cleared the way for the publication of The Wind Done Gone (Boston, 2001), Alice Randall’s parody of the iconic Gone with the Wind, reveal at once the harmful power and redemptive potential of words. Gone with the Wind, Randall’s publisher explains, “has harmed generations of African Americans.” Randall’s own counter-novel, in contrast, “might help heal some of our culture’s oldest and deepest wounds.”

If words are still weapons, then, maybe they’re medicine, too. And if a formal government apology for slavery rings hollow, what about the words that make up history? The legal struggle to publish The Wind Done Gone, as Toni Morrison points out in her brief to the court, is a battle over nothing less than “who controls how history is imagined” and written–about “who gets to say what slavery was like for the slaves.” In this special slavery issue of Common-place, scholars, novelists, archivists, activists, and museum professionals all take their turns answering Morrison’s profound and difficult charge.

Who gets to say what slavery was like? Don’t be left speechless. Join the discussion on our Republic of Letters. Power for words, indeed.

This article originally appeared in issue 1.4 (July, 2001).

Follow Link to Video by Larry Young

Further Reading

Material in this performance is based on several sources. In Builders of the Mass Bay Colony (Princeton, N.J., 1934), Samuel Eliot Morison was one of the first modern historians to attempt to paint a kinder, gentler picture of the Puritans. Percy A. Scholes’ thorough and persuasive book The Puritans and Music in England and New England (London, 1934) remains invaluable. Music historians Barbara Lambert, Joy Van Kleef, and Kate Van Winkle Keller expand upon Scholes’ work with their lively and well researched contributions to the subject in the massive collection of articles in Music in Colonial Massachusetts 1630-1820, Vols. I and II (Boston, 1980). Also extremely useful is Bruce C. Daniels’ Puritans at Play-Leisure and Recreation in Colonial New England (New York, 1995). Also see William Wells Newell’s Games and Songs of American Children (New York, 1883). Lastly, I highly recommend J.A. Leo Lemay’s New England’s Annoyances-America’s First Folk Song (Newark, Delaware, 1985).

This article originally appeared in issue 13.2 (Winter, 2013).

Larry Young is a performer who has long been fascinated with the music of colonial America. He pursued music at Dartmouth College where he studied music history with Charles Hamm and violin with Andrew Jennings. He is passionate about bringing history to life with his costumed performances of period music, for which he has appeared on PBS. He has published two CDs, Lovely Nancy and Other Popular Musick of 18th Century America and Salem’s Musick: Songs and Dances of the Puritan. He maintains the website www.historicfiddler.com.

If you dare take the Ghost Talk, Ghost Walk in Savannah, Georgia, and are willing to fork out ten dollars for an evening’s entertainment, guide Chris Connelly will try to horrify you. Pointing to the placid Savannah River, he will paint a scene of frightened slaves disembarking their stinking ships, trudging in chains toward a tunnel, leading to a holding area where they will suffer the indignity of intimate examinations before being auctioned to labor-hungry Georgia planters. Connelly, an earnest young man with a soft Georgia accent, will tell you that even today people who stand on this spot hear the ca-tink, ca-tink of clanking chains and the moans of miserable slaves carried on the wind.

Few historians will be surprised to learn that slavery caused untold suffering in Savannah. After all, this was the town about which the African-born slave-turned-abolitionist Olaudah Equiano said, with considerable understatement, “I had not much reason to like the place.” Equiano had traveled the world from Africa to the Caribbean, from Turkey to Greenland, and perhaps in no place was he subjected to greater cruelty than Savannah. There he was beaten within an inch of his life in 1765, threatened with flogging in 1766, and, even as a free man in 1767, spent a night in a Savannah jail for no real cause.

What is surprising is that Connelly tells his horrible ghost story at all. Mainstream heritage tourism in Savannah shies away from slavery the way a Southern matron avoids the subject of money in polite conversation. Brochures and tourist offices would rather focus on Spanish moss hanging lazily from live oaks and the lovable oddballs of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. If they venture into the world of early American history at all, Savannah’s mainstream tour guides are most likely to wax eloquent about the heartwarming friendship between Georgia founder James Oglethorpe and Creek leader Tomochichi.

This is the strange position of ghost tours in the U.S. and Canada today. Compared with most heritage tourism, ghost tours—by turns campy and didactic—offer visitors unblinking and, no doubt, at times unwelcome views of the skeletons in the closet of early American history: slave coffles, Indian massacres, debtors’ prisons, and the sundry other sad and sorry fates of people you might expect would want to haunt America’s cities.

Ghost tours are a relatively recent phenomenon in North America. Such tours have been around in England for as long as anyone involved in the trade can remember, but the first on this side of the Atlantic was Richard T. Crowe’s Chicago Supernatural Tours, which started in the mid-1970s. Crowe was well ahead of his time: the real boom in ghost tours began only a few years ago.

Today, it seems, every city with a vigorous tourist trade has ghost tours year-round (or nearly so). Savannah, Charleston, New Orleans, Boston, Philadelphia. Sure, all those make sense. But Orlando? Is there a less spooky city in America? Yet there in the town that Mickey built, a “professional, costumed guide” leads weekly, year-round tours. If you’re lucky the guide will tell you about the time spooks took over the controls at Walt Disney World’s Haunted Mansion and replaced the usual soundtrack of screams and moans with something even more horrifying: a never-ending loop of “It’s a Small World After All.”

And once October rolls around every even vaguely historic hamlet looks to cash in on the craze. In my own little corner of western New York, Halloween means hunting spooks in the sleepy Erie Canal town of Lockport, listening to ghost stories in Forest Lawn Cemetery, or summoning the courage to visit “Fortress Possessed” (or Old Fort Niagara as it’s known the rest of the year) to hear guides work through their psychological issues related to years of dealing with poltergeists within the fort’s dark stone confines.

Perhaps because of the remarkable growth of ghost tours in a short period of time, they follow a fairly standard format. You go to a designated location in the city of your choice: a haunted hotel, perhaps, or a landmark on the site of a grisly murder. Evening tours are most common but daytime tours are not unheard of. You pay your fee, in cash, usually ten to twenty dollars—kids under five free! The guide then tells you ghost stories while taking you on a short stroll. And I mean short in distance, not time: either in deference to Americans’ appalling lack of fitness, or because garrulous guides prefer talking to walking, ghost tours rarely cover much ground, even though they last two or even three hours.

Let me be frank: even for me, who confesses to a nearly bottomless fascination for history, ghost tours can be tedious. Guides vary widely in their historical knowledge and storytelling ability. And, because the tours follow geography rather than chronology, they offer a jumble of anecdotes covering several centuries with no particular connecting thread, except that the tales all relate to a single, small city neighborhood.

But, other than restless toddlers strapped into strollers, skeptical and disappointed paying customers seem to be in the minority on most tours. On ghost tours I’ve taken in the last few months, I’ve paraded through spooky streets with mostly contented customers. In San Francisco, a local mother and her ten-year-old son, celebrating the boy’s birthday, traded stories with the guide about ghosts they’d seen. In Toronto, a hulking Filipino-Canadian man named Raff insisted quite earnestly that he felt the presence of a spirit as we trudged through the cold rain past a haunted house in Chinatown. For those open to the possibilities of the paranormal, ghost tours offer a pleasant blend of haunts and history, not to mention a sense of community, as they can meet others similarly inclined to ascribe unusual feelings or events to the activity of ghosts.

If you ask guides why they think there has been such a proliferation of ghost tours, they sound more like sociologists than ghost hunters. Some point to the flowering of New Age beliefs in angels and spirit communication (what religious studies folks call a turn toward “spirituality” rather than “institutional religion”). Others mention the broader growth of heritage tourism, of which ghost tours are a relatively small part. In a postindustrial world, cities manufacture not transmissions and tires but images of their historic past.

Another reason there are so many ghost tours is that it requires very little capital to start a tour outfit. Jim McCabe, founder and chief storyteller of New England Ghost Tours, looks like a banker because he was one, until the Bank of New England went belly-up in the recession of the early 1990s. Rooting around for something more fulfilling than credits and debits, McCabe thought historical tours were a perfect match for his love of history and his Gaelic flair for spinning tales. Other tour outfits were similarly put together on a shoestring and have since grown into thriving operations. But many guides still aren’t about to give up their day jobs in museums and retail sales.

Students and salesmen: ghost tour guides are a more ordinary lot than you might have imagined. Indeed, most go to great lengths to distance themselves from the psychics of late-night TV that many tourists seem to expect. Chris Connelly of Savannah has the demeanor of a librarian (and a degree in architectural history to go with it). My tour guide in Washington, D.C., Elaine Flynn, has as much of the air of the paranormal as a suburban soccer mom. And the founder of Toronto’s A Taste of the World, Shirley Lum, wears dark-rimmed glasses and carries a three-ring binder and looks uncannily like a graduate student.

Ghost tour guides like to present themselves as historians. Even the kookiest tour guide I’ve encountered highlights his scholarly approach to research. Jim Fassbinder of the San Francisco Ghost Hunt dresses for his tours in an all-black outfit that conjures the image of a nineteenth-century itinerant preacher—or maybe a patent-medicine huckster. Fassbinder has a goatee and flowing locks, a tall top hat, a long leather Dickensian coat, and a black bag with the words “GHOST HUNT” in silver studs.

He gets plenty of attention in this garb, even in San Francisco. But once Fassbinder begins his tour, he adopts a scholarly demeanor. He starts by assuring us, “all the stories you hear are very well documented.” Later he re-emphasizes the thoroughness of his research: he knows a particular woman did not die in the Queen Anne Hotel because he “checked all the records.”

And like professional historians, ghost tour guides accuse one another of plagiarism. Jim McCabe of Boston is one of the most affable fellows you’re likely to meet, but his voice turns icy when he tells me about being ripped off by a rival tour outfit. According to McCabe, a more established tour group sent a representative to take his tour and, unbeknownst to McCabe, the man was a mole, complete with tape recorder. The rival group now runs a suspiciously similar tour—they even copied his promotions!

Like historians, ghost tour guides are also outsiders to mainstream heritage tourism. Even though they are part of the heritage tourism industry, they generally have no chamber of commerce connections and no particular incentives to put their cities in a favorable light. Indeed, their focus on the paranormal requires them to delve into the seamier side of history. This means not just unsolved murders and grisly suicides, but slave pens and violations of Indian burial grounds. I suspect that for many tourists the resulting picture of early American history is very different from what they received in high school. For some tour guides this educational purpose is not merely incidental. As Elaine Flynn of D.C. proudly told our group of twenty-two tourists, such subject matter “is not just politically correct but correcting political history.”

Consider the story told by Mike Brown of The Original Charleston Walks. Drawing on the lowcountry’s culture of Gullah—a creole language with African and English elements spoken by slaves and their descendants—Brown gives tourists chills with his description of boo hags. These freaky vampires without skin enter your house through a keyhole or crack, sit on your chest while you sleep, and suck your breath. If successful, the boo hag inhabits your skin and causes you to hunt for more victims.

The climax of Brown’s story is that the presence of boo hags is tied to Charleston’s long history of racial inequality. Much of Charleston today is built upon reused land, some of which was colonial-era slave graveyards. Boo hags are most often found, Brown insists, above these displaced burial grounds. Tourists come away with a striking metaphor for how Charleston’s past racial sins suck the life out of its present self-satisfied sense of heritage-based dignity.

Thirty-five miles west of Boston, Jim McCabe’s “Colonial and Native American Spirits” tour likewise connects past injustice with present pain. In the Scratch Flat section of Littleton (immortalized in John Hanson Mitchell’s 1984 environmentalist classic Ceremonial Time), McCabe weaves a tale grounded in millennia of Indian occupation. Many Indian spirits haunt the area, according to local residents. One reason for all this ghostly activity is the tragic history of Nashoba, a “Praying Town” of Christian Indians established by the Puritan missionary John Eliot. During King Philip’s War of 1675-76, many Puritans saw Christian Indians as a dangerous fifth column. So the entire village of Nashoba was rounded up and herded to Deer Island in Boston Harbor, the infamous prison isle where hundreds of Indians were interned and dozens of Indian corpses were interred. One Nashoba Indian in particular, Tom Dublet, is said to have cursed Nashoba—now Scratch Flat—because of the shabby treatment he received.

Ghosts linger above Scratch Flat, tormenting the locals and providing plenty of fodder for McCabe’s tales. One of his favorites is that the ghosts seem to have disrupted several development attempts, including a massive office park planned but never completed by Cisco Systems. McCabe and residents seem to believe the story of the antidevelopment spirits, but a spokesperson for Cisco is less impressed by the ghost of Tom Dublet. “We don’t have a policy,” she says, “regarding predictions from medicine men.”

Like Scrooge meeting Clio, Ghosts of History Past haunt these tours. In their quest for spooky stories, ghost tour guides mine sources overlooked by most other heritage tour operators. We could do worse than a ghost tour for a lesson in local history.

This cautiously celebratory reading of ghost tours must be tempered, however, by the recognition that such tours ultimately reproduce some of the most troubling facets of early American society. Euro-American colonists, like tour guides today, were fascinated by the deathways of Others they encountered in North America. Whites collected Indian ghost stories, drew pictures of slave funerals, and recorded the deathbed words of countless Indians. Sometimes this Euro-American interest was respectful and driven by a desire for cross-cultural understanding. Experience Mayhew, an eighteenth-century Christian missionary to the Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, immersed himself so fully in Indian society—spending his entire life on the island and speaking Wampanoag like a native—that he seems to have absorbed the Indian belief in ghosts’ presence at deathbeds and forgotten the orthodox Protestant skepticism toward the same. He recorded without comment the appearance of “two bright shining Persons, standing in white Raiment” at the deathbed of an elderly native woman named Ammapoo.

Sometimes, though, there were darker motives in Euro-Americans’ descriptions of nonwhites’ deathways. African American funeral practices were often Exhibit A when authors made the case for slaves’ alleged barbarity and lack of fitness for freedom. Such was the intent of British proslavery writer Bryan Edwards when he wrote about people of African descent in the West Indies in the late eighteenth century. According to Edwards “their funeral songs and ceremonies are commonly nothing more than the dissonance of savage barbarity and riot.” Even antislavery authors like Frederick Law Olmstead betrayed their racism when they described African American funerals. In 1861 Olmstead was impressed by what he viewed as the primitive simplicity of slave funerals: “I was deeply influenced myself by the unaffected feeling, in connection with the simplicity, natural, rude truthfulness, and absence of all attempt at formal decorum in the crowd.” Olmstead’s condescending attitude turned downright hostile when he discussed the slave preacher at this funeral: “I never in my life, however, heard such ludicrous language as was sometimes uttered by the speaker.”

In parallel fashion, Indian ghosts haunted early American literature, as Renée Bergland’s The National Uncanny (Hanover, N.H., 2000) has recently demonstrated. From the beginning of the colonial period, many whites equated the Indian inhabitants of North America with a satanic presence. As Cotton Mather wrote in 1692, witches “generally say [the Devil] resembles an Indian.” By the nineteenth century, dead and dying Indians—along with their spectral incarnations—helped perpetuate the tragic and romantic myth of the vanishing Indian. Many Euro-American colonists seemed most comfortable with Indians once they were dead; their very deaths seemed to prove Indians’ incompatibility with the march of Euro-American civilization. Fictional Indian characters were often rendered speechless as they died, as was Uncas in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and Wind-Foot in Walt Whitman’s Franklin Evans; or, The Inebriate (1842). Granted no dying words by their white authors, Uncas and Wind-Foot were the epitome of the vanishing Indian.

Today, ghost tours aren’t so obviously implicated in these patterns. But they do tend to exoticize all things Indian and African, including their dead. That tour outfits profit from the grim history of interracial misunderstanding is still another disturbing legacy.

And there’s another, simpler reason ghost tours sometimes make my skin crawl. Despite the power of stories like the boo hag and the curse of Tom Dublet, tour guides feel the need to keep the patrons happy and the banter light. So they jump from deep reflections on the meaning of history to goofy jokes and magic tricks. History Dark, History Lite.

Sit some day in Warren Square, one of Savannah’s beloved little parks. Gaze across the street at the understated beauty of the early-federal-style John David Mongin House (1793). Admire its graceful entryway and its classic sense of proportion and symmetry. And then think of those in chains who toiled in the sticky heat to build this house, think of those who died in the fields at Bloody Point on Daufuskie Island to give the Mongin family its wealth, and try to keep the goose bumps from rising on your arms.

This article originally appeared in issue 3.1 (October, 2002).

Erik R. Seeman, associate professor of history at SUNY-Buffalo, is writing a book entitled Final Frontiers: Cross-Cultural Encounters with Death in Colonial North America.

Poor George Washington. Life among the eighteenth-century Virginia gentry was hard enough, what with the strains of wilderness surveying, the challenges of managing (if not actually working) Mount Vernon’s eight thousand acres, and the hazards of fighting all those pesky colonial wars—not to mention the daily indignities of contending with his dreadful dentures. But the twenty-first century may be crueler still to the nation’s first president. Washington, it seems, just wasn’t man enough for our times. Or not, at least, the right kind of man. Lacking both the whiff of sexy scandal that trails Thomas Jefferson in the post-Hemmings era (think Bill Clinton), and the aura of hardscrabble virtue that accompanies John Adams in the post-McCullough era (think Harry Truman), Washington’s TVQ remains low (think Dwight Eisenhower). Grim-faced (the teeth!) and remote, Washington comes across as a stranger, an alien—almost, you might say, as a person from a radically different place and time, a past that’s a foreign country.

Fear not, Sons and Daughters of Cincinnati. Help is on the way. Lest our Founding Father remain shrouded in the mists of the time, a pair of unlikely allies is working diligently to drag Honest George, kicking and screaming, into the twenty-first century. The summer of 2002 witnessed two major Washington makeovers, one at the hands of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union, which has owned and maintained the first president’s Virginia home since 1858. The other makeover artist is Mary Higgins Clark.

That Mary Higgins Clark, you ask—America’s self-proclaimed “Queen of Suspense”? The very same. Clark, doyenne of the airport mystery, took last summer’s beach readers on a (very) little trip to the eighteenth century with Mount Vernon Love Story: A Novel of George and Martha Washington (a rerelease of her first-ever novel, Aspire to the Heavens, originally published in 1969). Dedicated to the proposition that all men are created red-blooded and sexy—that Washington was not “pedantic and humorless” but rather “a giant of a man in every way” (ahem)—Clark’s prefatory letter to her readers promises an intimate portrait of “two people I came to respect and love.”

Before you conjure visions of Fabio playing George Washington in the inevitable TV movie, be forewarned: Clark breaks this promise. What Mount Vernon Love Story offers are not steamy sex scenes, of which there’s nary a one (was it the teeth?), but countless moments spent in the throes of hot, throbbing interior decorating. This George Washington, content with chaste blushes and tender embraces in his romantic life, becomes “frantic with desire to see Mount Vernon.” Mount Vernon Love Story is shelter pornography. In the big-screen version, Clark’s Washington might best be played by Martha Stewart in drag.

Far from being pedantic and humorless, Clark’s Washington is henpecked and timorous, the son of an overbearing, whip-toting, Joan Crawford of a mother (First Mommy Dearest?), and the husband of an overprotective, child-toting, porcelain doll of a wife. “[H]eld down, checked, the object of his mother’s whims,” his “teeth [again with the teeth!] set on edge” by the “chaos” of her “grossly untidy” house, the young Washington takes refuge in tract mansion dreams befitting today’s soccer moms. He swears that one day, one day by God, “his home would be warm and welcoming. It would have fine papers on the walls and a marble chimney, papier-mâché on the ceilings and neat mahogany tables . . . George spent much time envisioning that home.”

Luckily, time is one thing Clark’s Washington has plenty of. He doesn’t have to worry about working the land; his trusty and contented servants (almost never called “slaves”) do that. And, fiddle-de-dee, he doesn’t have to worry much about politics, either; some other book can do that. We hear vague murmurs about “troubled days” in the 1770s, or the odd “squabble between Congress and the cabinet” in the 1790s. But for the most part, Clark’s Washington gets to sweat the small stuff: “where flower beds would eventually grow,” the regrettably “hodgepodge effect of the décor at Mount Vernon,” the “dust in the corners” of his quarters in Cambridge. In sum, Clark’s Washington is a hero “suffering the agonies of a housewife”—which apparently include repeated bouts with hemorrhoids and a nervous stomach.

Where the Washington of Mount Vernon Love Story fluffs pillows, the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association wants a Washington that busts heads. Last April, Mount Vernon announced an $85 million public awareness campaign “to close an alarming, growing information gap . . . about the nation’s greatest hero.” Concerned, much as Clark was in 1969, that today’s Americans have “lost touch with the real Washington,” Mount Vernon will soon break ground for a new orientation center that will wow the site’s 1.1 million annual visitors with “computer imaging, LED map displays, lifelike holograms, . . . surround-sound audio programs, ‘immersion’ videos, illusionist lighting effects, dramatic staging and touch-screen computer monitors.” At the beating heart of the new facility, two theaters will be devoted to continuous showings of a new “fast-paced 15-minute film.” Produced by Steven Spielberg and Dreamworks SKG, the movie “will provide an action-oriented insight into Washington’s life story.” (Saving Private Washington?) According to the New York Times, the film will be projected “in a theater equipped with seats that rumble and pipes that shoot battlefield smoke into the audience.” Not much room for politics here either, I’m afraid. Forget about the complex ideas Washington was fighting for, and zoom in on a tight shot of a musket.

Surely you’ve already guessed the target demographic for this action mini-epic: where Mary Higgins Clark limns a Washington for women of a certain age, the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association is courting fourteen-year-old boys. As Jim Rees, the executive director of Mount Vernon, told the Times, the site needs “to reach not just the minds but also the hearts of eighth graders.” Combining the tools of the plastic surgeon and the forensic scientist with “the latest age-regression techniques,” Mount Vernon wants to restore not only life but youth to Washington. “Most Americans envisage George Washington as a stoic elder statesman,” notes Rees. “But Washington at age 23 was already the action hero of his times.” Who will play this eighteenth-century road warrior? Sly Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger are clearly too old for the job; even Keanu Reeves may be a little long in the wooden tooth. Will Vin Diesel be Spielberg’s Washington, or will Spielberg have the guts to cast Will Smith?

Washington as action hero, Washington as domestic goddess: will the American public buy this silliness? The verdict, so far, is mixed. Mount Vernon would do well to remember that The Patriot, the last major attempt to turn eighteenth-century revolutionaries into box-office gold, bombed with critics and eighth graders alike.

Mount Vernon Love Story may not fare much better. Despite a marketing barrage by Simon & Schuster (the publisher, not coincidentally, of John Adams as well as Clark’s entire oeuvre), Clark’s slim volume nudged its way onto bestseller lists for just a week last summer—mere spray across the bow of McCullough’s juggernaut. History buffs don’t seem to have touched it; a search on Amazon.com reveals that “customers who bought this book” favor the works of Danielle Steele and James Patterson, not those of Joseph Ellis and Gordon Wood. Yet diehard Clark fans hate it. “I have read all of the author’s books and found this one dull,” writes a reader in Cleveland. “Good thing it was small, or I might not have finished reading it.” Notes another “disappointed” fan from Flagstaff, “The only thing Washington truly showed any outward passion for was his home, Mount Vernon . . . he would definitely be in therapy if he was alive now.”

Maybe a session or two on the couch could help poor old George resolve his newfangled split personality. (Diesel or Martha? Martha or Diesel?) Or maybe he’d just beg his therapist for a tonic to relieve the rigors of time travel. Enough with the politics of character, I imagine him pleading. Give me the politics of politics. Put my life back in its times!

This article originally appeared in issue 3.1 (October, 2002).

In November 1849 Dr. George Parkman, a physician and scion of one of Boston’s richest families, was allegedly beaten to death and dismembered by a Harvard professor of chemistry named John Webster. A week after Parkman’s disappearance, the janitor of the Harvard Medical School discovered body parts hidden in Webster’s laboratory. Webster was put on trial in a spectacle that drew tens of thousands of onlookers, as well as journalists from as far away as Europe. Webster was convicted and hanged. But his guilt is one of many uncertainties that have confounded those attempting to tell the story of the Parkman case for the past 150 years, including historian Simon Schama, who explored the case in his aptly named 1991 study, Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations) (New York, 1991).

Parkman’s murder was nothing if not infamous. Edmund Pearson, the historian of homicide, called the Parkman case “America’s most celebrated murder.” Edward Everett, a president of Harvard from 1846 to 1849, said it was “the most painful event in our domestic history.” And when Charles Dickens visited Boston in 1867, one of his first requests was to see the room where Dr. Parkman was murdered. Even by today’s numbingly sensationalist standards, the grisly tale is shocking and disturbing.

It’s a riveting story, but can it be a riveting documentary film? I hope so. For the past two years, my colleague Melissa Banta and I, along with Schama, have been developing a sixty-minute television documentary about the Parkman murder. (We are also designing an interactive Website, whose prototype is currently online.)

To our endless frustration, this most mysterious crime is made even more mysterious by a dearth of images: Parkman’s murder took place just a few years before the advent of popular photography. Fortunately, because the case was so celebrated, a number of woodcuts, maps, and other illustrations have survived. And some of the principal characters were illustrious enough to have had oil portraits painted of themselves. A search of the archives also yields a few later photos of some of the buildings–including the Harvard Medical School, where the crime took place.But a short stack of drawings, portraits, and photographs of buildings does not add up to a compelling film. Although I’ve produced documentary films for more than ten years, The Murder of Dr. Parkman is my first time tackling a subject that predates photography. And it’s led me to wonder: when the very building blocks of documentary film are images, is it even appropriate to make a documentary about a subject that has left behind only a tiny handful of visual traces?

Thinking about The Murder of Dr. Parkman has also led me to take another look at how other documentary filmmakers have approached the problems of portraying pre-photographic stories. In my admittedly cursory survey, I’ve looked particularly at historical documentaries that rely on “reenactments”–putting people in costume and having them act out an historical scene or event. While reenactments share important conventions, they range widely in quality–and credibility.

Documentary reenactments are almost always shot without dialogue, through fog or haze, or in a shadowy half-light. The camera often focuses only on close up details–a hand on a quill; feet running through the woods; a sword being buckled on–and almost never on an actor’s face. (The American Experience film, George Washington, the Man Who Wouldn’t Be King [1992], by David Sutherland, is a good example.) Or, conversely, the reenactments are shot so wide that we see only a distant figure on horseback wearing a three-corner hat–à la Ken Burns’s Thomas Jefferson (1996).

These visual cues send several important messages: that the reenactment is not fictional (if it were, there would be dialogue); that the reenactment is only a “suggestion” of what might have happened (signified by the ambiguous fog or haze); and that the actors are not portraying specific people so much as representing them (e.g., this pair of hands is not George Washington’s hands, but hands that represent his; the figure on horseback could be Jefferson). Each of these devices, it bears mentioning, also saves money. Speaking roles require skilled actors and directing; scenes that portray actual events require sound stages, expensive locations, props, and costumed extras.

The trouble with reenactments that rely on the camera slowly panning across interior spaces where something important once happened and hazy shots of quills, weapons, and detached body parts is that they leave viewers feeling distanced from the action instead of closer to it. Too often reenactments come across as just what they are–halfhearted attempts to make history come alive in a dramatic way without using the elements that make for dramatic storytelling: language, facial expression, bodies reacting in relation to one another. Burns’s Thomas Jefferson is in many ways a thoughtful essay on a fascinating man, but is it really a film? Do the endless slow-moving images of Monticello, the pans across portraits and drawings, the tilts down documents, and the occasional distant figure on horseback really add up to something that is driven by visual images which in turn are supported by spoken words? I think it’s the other way around–an illustrated lecture that could have worked equally well as a lavish magazine spread or coffee-table book.

The question of how to visualize the past–pre- or post-photographic–brings into sharp focus the central issue of putting history on film: is it entertainment or is it some form of serious inquiry?

Do reenactments ever work? Sometimes. For dramatic moments like the fatal confrontation between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton in a recent American Experience documentary, The Duel (2000), reenactment works quite well because the filmmakers, Carl Byker and Mitch Wilson, actually break the PBS convention and let the camera dwell on the actors’ faces. Rather than watching decapitated stand-ins we get to see complete human beings we can come to think of as Burr and Hamilton, even though we know the duelists didn’t look quite like that. Some of the reluctance of documentary filmmakers to show actors’ faces comes from the fact that in a documentary–unlike a feature film–portraits are usually included, so viewers can’t help but notice the differences between the actors and the likenesses. But part of the fun of watching any film is suspending our disbelief long enough to be sucked into the story. After all, we know Elizabeth I looked nothing like Cate Blanchett, but is that the point?

A dramatic moment like the Burr-Hamilton shoot-out is so violent, passionate, and dramatic I could imagine it working as a reenactment in many different ways. But how can documentary filmmakers bring alive the important moments that are quiet and small but nonetheless crucial: for example, the inner struggle of a Revolutionary-era colonist deciding to become a patriot? In another departure from the increasingly hackneyed conventions of reenactments, Muffy Meyer and Ellen Hovde, co-directors of the public TV series Liberty, the American Revolution (1997), selected letters and diary or journal entries by well-known and not-so-well-known participants in the events, from Ben Franklin to Joseph Plumb Martin, then had actors perform the words of the journals and letters while looking directly into the camera. The use of letters and journals is certainly not new. But the usual convention is to have the letters read in voice-over, as Burns did, usually to great effect, in The Civil War (1991). Yet voice-over is always a trifle distancing, and particularly so when the language of the 1770s sounds so archaic to our ears today. Hearing Revolutionary-era letters in voice-over would have been simply a bore. But when a skillful actor is performing the reading, a smile or smirk, a pursed lip, a furrowed brow give the words flair and interpretation–in a word, drama! Although all depends on the actors (and there are some duds), overall it’s a successful device that brings some immediacy to the otherwise remote events surrounding the Revolution and stands out as a welcome breath of innovation.

Yet both reenactments and dramatic readings strike many people–some academic historians among them–as detracting from the seriousness of the material at hand and blurring the line between history and fiction. But where is that line, exactly? And more to the point, does it ever serve the purposes of historical inquiry to blur it–perhaps even to cross it altogether?

This isn’t simply a matter of stylistic approach. The question of how to visualize the past–pre- or post-photographic–brings into sharp focus the central issue of putting history on film: is it entertainment or is it some form of serious inquiry? Can it ever be both?

In his book Visions of the Past: the Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), historian Robert Rosenstone’s critical but friendly look at historical documentaries, he tells an anecdote from his experience as a collaborator on The Good Fight, the 1984 documentary about the Spanish Civil War. Part of the story he thought was critically important was left out of the film because the filmmakers had no visual materials with which to tell it. Drawing from his own experience, Rosenstone concluded that history on film can never be analytical, theoretical, or critical; it is instead “history as homage.”

He’s absolutely right. But had I been the filmmaker behind The Good Fight, I, too, would have asked Rosenstone, “OK, but what will we be seeing?” It’s a question that has become my mantra. Whenever I work with nonfilmmakers as collaborators I have to take time to get across the most obvious but not always appreciated fact of the medium: for every word uttered, there has to be footage on the screen. And not just any footage, but the right image. In fact, ideally it is the image that will drive the words (this is, after all, filmmaking–not an illustrated lecture).

Rosenstone attempted to convince the directors of The Good Fight to include material on terrorism among the Stalinist Left–a complicated twist in the already complex story on intra-Left battles. The filmmakers told him there was simply no visual material and that getting into the issue would lengthen the film and slow down the narrative. I’m inclined to agree. In my own experience making films about the American Left of the 1930s, I’ve found that it’s a big enough struggle first of all to convince viewers there ever was an American Left. Getting into the differences between the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, the Stalinists, and the Trotskyites is practically impossible. There are reels and reels of wonderfully evocative newsreel footage of the many street demonstrations of the 1930s, but, to modern viewers, whether the demonstrators are socialist or CP, Lovestonite faction or Browderites, it all looks the same.

Abstract points introduce even greater challenges. In a film I made about Jesse H. Jones, a little known financier who ran the New Deal’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation, we had to explain issues of financing and credit (boring no matter what–even with images); why banks were afraid to make loans during the Depression (showing somebody NOT doing something does not work on film); and Jones’s contradictory role as a staunch capitalist who also believed in activist government intervention in financial affairs (inherent contradictions are especially hard to convey on film–strong pictures do not often carry mixed messages). Abstract points again require “talking heads.” But of course talking heads are widely known to bore viewers. Sometimes, inevitably, the best decision–the decision the directors of The Good Fight made–will be to skip the point.

Rosenstone’s experience reminds us that, from the moment film is the format chosen for telling a piece of history, a huge act of selective storytelling has taken place. From that moment on, the process is a matter of jettisoning detail, nuance, and evidence in order to make the historical events fit the visual material available.

To an historian’s ears, “making the events fit the material” sounds like blasphemy, like doing history backwards. But I would argue that, on the contrary, the difficulties of making a satisfying hour or ninety minutes of history come alive on screen push filmmakers to find artful and inventive ways of presenting stories that–when they work well–rival the best written historical narratives (if not for completeness, at least for compelling storytelling).

One of the best examples of how well a mostly pre-photographic documentary can work is Ric Burns’s The Donner Party (1992). Though Burns uses the usual techniques–David McCullough’s narration, diaries and letters read in voice-over, maps, drawings and a few photos, and newly shot images of mountains and blizzards–the pieces come together into a riveting story that’s impossible to switch off.

But it is storytelling first and foremost. And while it could be argued that the story of the Donner Party is too atypical to be really useful in understanding the larger history of westward expansion, there’s no question that in its uniqueness it captures one small part of what drove people west and the price they paid to get there. Like so many historical documentaries The Donner Party can be accused of reducing history to a kind of ad hominem experience, or as Rosenstone says, history as homage. But film works best when it tells smaller stories about just a few people, and for that reason film or TV can never take the place of books and articles in serious history; the scale is usually too small and the tools are simply too blunt and imprecise for the job. Even when we’re lucky enough to have massive archives of photographs, newsreel, and film and video footage at hand, filmmakers start from a completely different premise than historians do. By choosing to use visual materials to convey information, the filmmaker is already jumping into history with one hand tied. Imagine writing a history book using only the most minimal one or two sentences of explication between the documentary selections. Tricky work, indeed, and probably a trickier read.

In making a film, it’s only one kind of document–those we can see–that carry the weight of presenting evidence; the brief explications only make connections or transitions between subjects. And the explications can themselves be a problem, largely because most take the form of the dominant convention in documentary filmmaking: narrative voice-over. In most historical documentaries, expert talking heads intercut with archival film and photos, all stitched together by the omniscient narrator who provides transitions and keeps the narrative humming along with the occasional reenactment added for dramatic effect. This is not a format that easily provides room for divergent points of view, for messily contradictory evidence, or indeed even for important aspects of the historical events at hand that may not have obvious visual images connected with them.

So why bother? Because, despite these obstacles, history on screen simply does some things better than history on the page. Reaching the millions, for one. What history on TV and film does best is entertain and engage while issuing an invitation to the viewer to learn more. What it lacks in depth it makes up for in reach. Few books or articles will ever have the sheer impact of The Civil War series, nor even the audience of millions that will watch a reasonably popular American Experience offering. If for no other reason than this, putting history on film will always be worthwhile.

But there is another reason. Screened history can have a different kind of impact than most written history does. It hits us in a different place: someplace deeper, more emotional, more visceral. We feel–and remember–images differently than we do words. Moving images, in short, are moving. I don’t think I ever truly understood the sheer cruelties of New World colonialism as well as I did after watching Black Robe, Bruce Beresford’s 1991 movie of Brian Moore’s historical novel about French missionaries in mid-seventeenth-century Canada. In this dark movie, the sun never shines on French Canada–all the events take place under oppressively leaden skies. Sure it’s hyperbole as metaphor, but it’s a potent example of what the power of images can achieve. After watching Black Robe I will forever associate the European conquest of the New World with chill gray drizzle, dampness, and death.

What story will we make visual in our documentary about the murder of Dr. George Parkman? One that, we hope, will be as riveting as the first accounts of it to hit Boston newspapers in 1849. We’re solving the footage problem by using actors in speaking roles–but we’re cheating: all the action takes place through the imagination of historian Simon Schama, who also appears on camera. Is it history or drama? Does the fact that it comes from the head of an historian make it history? Does the fact that he’s imagining make it fiction?

We’re not sure ourselves. We only hope that it will be entertaining enough to keep viewers from switching the channel and, if we really do our jobs, intriguing enough to send them to a library.

This article originally appeared in issue 1.3 (March, 2001).

Eric Stange is an award-winning independent documentary film producer, director, and writer who specializes in history and science subjects. His films include Zamir: Jewish Voices Return to Poland (2000), Brother, Can You Spare a Billion? (2000), Love in the Cold War (1992) and Children of the Left (1992).