How the Word Is Passed
A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
Book Edition Details
Summary
In Clint Smith's masterful exploration of America's shadowed history, the nation’s landscapes become a tapestry of untold stories. From the cobblestones of New Orleans to the silent graves of Blandford Cemetery, Smith weaves a narrative that confronts the legacy of slavery etched into the very soil of the United States. Through vivid storytelling and meticulous research, "How the Word Is Passed" unveils the uncomfortable truths of landmarks like Monticello and Angola Prison, challenging readers to reevaluate the narratives they've inherited. With a voice both haunting and hopeful, Smith invites us to rediscover our past, urging a collective reckoning that illuminates the path to understanding.
Introduction
Standing in Thomas Jefferson's study at Monticello, visitors often experience a jarring cognitive dissonance. Here, surrounded by books on philosophy and natural rights, the man who penned "all men are created equal" managed a plantation worked by over 400 enslaved people. This contradiction lies at the heart of America's ongoing struggle with its slavery legacy—a struggle that plays out not just in history books, but in the physical spaces where this history unfolded. Across the American landscape, from Louisiana's sugar plantations to New York's financial district, the question of how we remember slavery remains deeply contested. Some sites have courageously centered the experiences of enslaved people, forcing uncomfortable reckonings with historical truth. Others continue to offer sanitized narratives that minimize the brutality and centrality of human bondage to American prosperity. These memory wars reveal fundamental tensions about national identity, historical responsibility, and the ongoing impact of slavery on contemporary society. This exploration speaks to anyone grappling with America's complex racial legacy, educators seeking honest historical narratives, and citizens wondering why debates over Confederate monuments and reparations generate such fierce emotions. Understanding how different communities remember or forget slavery provides essential insight into why America continues to struggle with racial inequality more than 150 years after emancipation. The past is not past—it lives in the spaces around us, shaping our present in ways both visible and hidden.
Founding Contradictions: Liberty Built on Bondage (1619-1776)
The American experiment began with a fundamental contradiction that would define the nation's character for centuries. When the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, they entered a colonial world where human bondage and liberty would grow together, each reinforcing the other in ways the founders could never fully resolve. By 1776, slavery had become so embedded in colonial society that the very men who proclaimed universal human rights could not imagine ending it without destroying their fragile new nation. Thomas Jefferson embodied this contradiction most starkly. At Monticello, he crafted soaring rhetoric about human equality while simultaneously owning over 600 people throughout his lifetime. His meticulous plantation records reveal not the benevolent paternalism of Lost Cause mythology, but a calculated system of human commodification where children were given as gifts and families separated to pay debts. Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman who bore him several children, exemplified the power dynamics that made consent impossible under slavery's legal framework. The economic foundations of colonial prosperity rested firmly on enslaved labor. New York's Wall Street was literally built by enslaved hands, while the city's merchants grew wealthy from the slave trade. Southern plantations produced the tobacco, rice, and indigo that funded colonial development, creating a web of economic relationships that connected every region to human bondage. Even in New England, where slavery was less central to agriculture, merchants, shipbuilders, and manufacturers profited from the trade in human beings and slave-produced goods. This period established patterns of historical memory that persist today—the tendency to celebrate founding ideals while minimizing slavery's role in creating national wealth. The Revolution's promise of freedom was delivered selectively, leaving four million people in bondage even as the new nation proclaimed its commitment to liberty. These founding contradictions created fault lines that would eventually tear the country apart, demonstrating that a nation conceived in liberty but built on bondage could not long endure without a fundamental reckoning.
Industrial Enslavement: Plantation Expansion and Resistance (1776-1865)
The early republic witnessed slavery's transformation from a colonial labor system into the backbone of American economic power. The cotton gin's invention in 1793 made short-staple cotton profitable across vast territories, creating insatiable demand for enslaved labor that would drive westward expansion for decades. By 1860, nearly four million enslaved people represented the country's most valuable asset, worth more than all manufacturing and railroads combined. This period saw the emergence of industrial-scale plantation complexes where human beings were bred, bought, and sold with ruthless efficiency. Louisiana's sugar plantations exemplified this system's brutal logic. During grinding season, enslaved people worked eighteen-hour days in conditions so dangerous that planters calculated it was cheaper to work people to death and buy replacements than to ensure their survival. Children as young as ten labored in the fields, while mothers watched helplessly as their offspring were sold to distant plantations. The domestic slave trade separated an estimated one million families, creating a forced migration that dwarfed the original Middle Passage in scope and devastation. Yet resistance flourished alongside oppression, revealing that enslaved people never accepted their condition as natural or permanent. The 1811 German Coast Uprising in Louisiana saw hundreds of enslaved people march toward New Orleans, seeking to overthrow the system that bound them. Though brutally suppressed, with heads mounted on spikes as warnings to others, such rebellions exposed the constant tension underlying plantation society. Daily acts of resistance—work slowdowns, tool breaking, escape attempts, and cultural preservation—demonstrated the persistence of human dignity under the most dehumanizing conditions. The plantation system's westward expansion intensified national tensions over slavery's future, forcing Americans to confront the contradiction between democratic ideals and human bondage with each new territory. Political compromises like the Missouri Compromise and Kansas-Nebraska Act proved temporary fixes for a fundamental moral crisis. By 1860, the nation could no longer contain these contradictions, setting the stage for a war that would finally force a reckoning with slavery's central role in American development.
Memory Wars: Lost Cause Myths vs Historical Truth (1865-1960s)
The end of slavery marked the beginning of a new battle over how Americans would remember their past. During Reconstruction, formerly enslaved people celebrated freedom with Juneteenth festivals and other commemorations that centered their experiences of liberation. However, as federal troops withdrew from the South, a powerful counter-narrative emerged that would reshape American historical memory for generations. The Lost Cause mythology transformed Confederate defeat into a noble struggle for constitutional principles, systematically erasing slavery from the war's origins and portraying enslaved people as content with their condition. This revisionist history found physical expression in thousands of Confederate monuments erected between 1890 and 1920, during the height of Jim Crow segregation. These statues served as more than mere memorials—they were assertions of white supremacy designed to intimidate Black communities and normalize racial hierarchy. Organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy systematically rewrote textbooks, funded monuments, and promoted sanitized versions of slavery that depicted it as a benevolent institution. Children across America learned that the Civil War was fought over tariffs and states' rights, not human bondage. The consequences of this historical amnesia extended far beyond academic debates. As monuments to Confederate generals rose in town squares, African Americans faced systematic disenfranchisement, economic exclusion, and violent intimidation. Lynching, convict leasing, and segregation became new tools of racial control, justified by narratives that portrayed Black freedom as a historical mistake. The same communities that celebrated Confederate heritage implemented laws designed to maintain racial subordination through legal means. Meanwhile, sites of actual historical significance fell into neglect or were deliberately obscured. Plantation houses became museums focused on architectural details and white family genealogies, while slave quarters crumbled or disappeared entirely. This selective preservation ensured that future generations would inherit a distorted understanding of their past, one that minimized slavery's centrality to American development while romanticizing the very system that had held millions in bondage. The battle over historical memory became a battle over America's soul.
Contemporary Reckonings: Truth-telling in Modern America (1960s-Present)
The civil rights movement sparked a fundamental reconsideration of how America remembers slavery and its aftermath. As activists challenged segregation in the streets, scholars began excavating the buried history of enslaved people's experiences. The Federal Writers' Project interviews with formerly enslaved people, conducted in the 1930s but largely ignored for decades, suddenly became invaluable primary sources. New institutions like the National Museum of African American History and Culture emerged to tell stories systematically excluded from mainstream historical narratives. This historical awakening created spaces for honest reckoning with slavery's legacy. The Whitney Plantation in Louisiana broke with tradition by focusing entirely on enslaved people's experiences rather than celebrating plantation grandeur. Monticello began acknowledging Sally Hemings and the enslaved community that built Jefferson's mountaintop estate. These changes reflected growing recognition that slavery was not peripheral to American history but the foundation upon which the nation's wealth and power were constructed. Yet resistance to historical honesty remains fierce. Confederate monument defenders invoke heritage while opposing efforts to provide context about slavery's role in the Civil War. Some plantation museums continue offering sanitized tours emphasizing architecture over human suffering. The debate over removing Confederate symbols reveals how contested historical memory remains, with some Americans viewing such efforts as necessary corrections while others see them as attacks on their identity and values. The struggle over historical truth extends beyond monuments to contemporary policy debates. Understanding slavery's role in creating racial wealth gaps, residential segregation, and educational disparities is essential for addressing ongoing inequalities. Yet many Americans resist connecting past injustices to present conditions, preferring to view slavery as ancient history with no bearing on contemporary life. This tension between historical truth and political comfort continues shaping debates over reparations, criminal justice reform, and educational curricula, demonstrating that the battle over slavery's memory remains far from resolved.
Summary
The journey through America's contested memory of slavery reveals a nation still struggling to reconcile its founding ideals with historical realities. From Monticello's contradictions to contemporary monument battles, these struggles demonstrate how slavery's legacy persists in both physical spaces and collective consciousness. The central tension emerges clearly: America cannot fully realize its democratic promises while refusing to honestly confront the system of human bondage that built its prosperity and shaped its social structures. The contemporary memory wars over Confederate monuments, plantation tourism, and educational curricula reflect deeper questions about national identity and historical responsibility. Some communities have embraced difficult conversations about slavery's centrality to American development, creating spaces for genuine reckoning and healing. Others cling to sanitized narratives that minimize slavery's brutality and lasting impact, perpetuating myths that prevent honest assessment of ongoing inequalities rooted in this history. Moving forward requires supporting institutions that center enslaved people's experiences rather than romanticizing plantation life, demanding historical accuracy in public spaces and educational materials, and connecting slavery's legacy to contemporary challenges like racial wealth gaps and mass incarceration. Only by honestly confronting this history can Americans build the inclusive democracy that has long remained an unfulfilled promise. The memory wars continue because the stakes remain high—nothing less than the soul of American democracy hangs in the balance.
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By Clint Smith
