Apologizing for Slavery

Mark Graber

The University of Maryland is debating whether to apologize for slavery. An only slight exaggeration of the state of the debate is that the University will apologize if the evidence demonstrates more than one-hundred slaves toiled on campus, are undecided about an apology if the number was between ten and a hundred, and will not apologize if the number was less than ten.

While knowing the number of slaves who toiled at the University of Maryland would be interesting information, the legacy of slavery cannot be measured strictly in terms of how many slaves were and were not in particular places. Consider the themes of two wonderful recent books. Robin Einhorn in American Taxation, American Slavery demonstrates that state tax policies and collection practices were substantially influenced by the presence or absence of slavery. The historic low funded of southern higher education, in this sense, may be another legacy of human bondage. Howard Schweber in The Creation of American Common Law similarly highlights how the presence or absence of slavery determined crucial doctrines of nineteenth century tort law. Free states wanted trains and fashioned tort doctrine that facilitated speed. Plantation owners feared the industrialization promised by speed, and so fashioned tort doctrine that discouraged trains. More broadly, the contemporary historian consistently finds that you smell slavery’s influence no matter where you scratch in antebellum America. To take an example from the Dred Scott text, the House of Representatives, Presidency, and federal court system were structured in ways thought to magnify the influence of slaveholders. Similar studies have been done of South Carolina and Virginia. I have little doubt that a good history of Maryland will similarly demonstrate that some governing institutions were designed in ways to provide slaveholders with more power than their numbers warranted.

I do not know whether all of this warrants an apology or reparations. On the one hand, neither resolves an extraordinarily deeply rooted problem. On the other hand, no better immediate solution exists. Perhaps the best we can do is convert demands for apologies for slavery and investigations into the direct presence of slavery into investigations of the pervasive influence of slavery and race on all aspects of American social, political, and life. Slavery and race were not the sort of warts on the American polity that could be easily excised by the 13th Amendment or Civil Rights Act of 1964. They are cancers that are so entwined with normal practices as to resist almost all efforts at social, legal and political eradication. Our students need to be aware of just how pervasive slavery and racism were and are, and this knowledge cannot be gained by limiting the debate to whether or not a specified number of slaves worked in specific places in specific times.
Posted 9:04 PM by Mark Graber [link]