Slavery helped build nation, fueled its most divisive war and still torments it

The mural in the University of Kentucky’s Memorial Hall depicting pre-Civil War white prosperity as built on the backs of slave laborers connects to a larger truth of how the expropriation of the labor of black slaves helped build this country’s economy.

That was a central reality of slavery that needs to be remembered and understood.

Over decades of teaching slavery in university classrooms, I sometimes observed both white and African-American students uncomfortable discussing slavery. But ironically in light of recent events, it was a white student at UK who one day bluntly asked “Why do history professors pay so much attention to slavery?”

Well, there is a library full of books answering that question, from slavery’s central role in the colonization of the Americas, to the slave trade’s creating enormous profits for English and colonial merchants, to slave-produced goods constituting by 1770 one-third to one-half of all goods in Atlantic trade, to slavery as a necessary cause of the Civil War, to name just a few reasons.

Neither slavery’s inhumanity nor resistance to it should be suppressed. Steven Spielberg’s film Amistad made millions around the world aware of the murderous horror of slave ships, with conditions aboard those ships in reality often worse than what the film depicted. The film also showcased the resistance and longing for freedom of the African rebels.

The slave trade’s history is important because the wealth it produced played a key role in the rise of industry, not causing industrialization but accelerating the process.

Large slave plantations themselves were like agricultural factories, thoroughly compatible with capitalist economy and profitable. Kentucky’s slaves worked mostly on small farms but many also worked in early industry.

It’s important, too, because we live increasingly in a fact-free political circus in which a candidate for president — not long ago high in the polls — can assert that the Affordable Care Act is “worse than slavery.”

Slavery was a system enforced by whippings and cruelties inhibited only by the owner’s self-interest in not damaging valuable property; slave sales routinely broke up slave families.

Burying the history of slavery plays into the hands of the Lost Cause apologists who claim the Civil War was not about slavery but about states’ rights. The secessionist states left the Union to protect slavery, period.

President Abraham Lincoln and the North went to war to bring them back; then it became a war to end slavery, an inspiration for many Union troops from the start, white and black.

Although neutral during the Civil War, Kentucky supplied more white troops to the Union armies than to the Confederacy. To keep the state neutral, Lincoln had delayed accepting fleeing slaves into Union ranks. But once the ban was lifted in the summer of 1864, thousands of Kentucky slaves streamed into Union ranks, more than in any other border state.

It is hardly a coincidence that the controversy over the Memorial Hall mural arose as a parallel debate has swirled over the statues of Confederate leaders in prominent public places.

Uncover the Memorial Hall mural and juxtapose one of African-American slaves in Union uniforms fighting for their freedom. We need as many realistic representations of slavery and resistance to it as there are statues of Confederate generals.

Racial slavery and the caste system that followed are the “wound that has never healed in the nation’s soul,” and influence the present in many ways.

One current example: Kentucky’s disenfranchisement of felons originated in the suppression of the freed people after the Civil War.

As William Faulkner wrote, “The past isn’t dead, it’s not even past.”

This story was originally published February 12, 2016 at 5:38 PM with the headline "Slavery helped build nation, fueled its most divisive war and still torments it."