How the Word Is Passed

How the Word Is Passed Plot Summary

Introduction

The year is 1865, and the Civil War has just ended. As Union General Gordon Granger stands before a crowd in Galveston, Texas, he delivers the news that would forever change America: "All slaves are free." This moment, now commemorated as Juneteenth, came a full two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. The delay itself speaks volumes about America's complicated relationship with slavery and its aftermath. How could such a pivotal announcement take so long to reach those most affected by it? This question is just one thread in the complex tapestry of America's history with slavery. From the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in 1619 to the present-day struggles for racial justice, the institution of slavery has shaped American society, economy, politics, and culture in profound ways that continue to reverberate today. The legacy of slavery is not merely a historical footnote but a living reality that manifests in contemporary disparities in wealth, education, housing, and criminal justice. This exploration takes readers through key historical sites that tell the story of slavery in America, from Thomas Jefferson's Monticello to Angola Prison, from Confederate monuments to the African Burial Ground in New York City. By confronting these physical spaces and the stories they contain, we gain a deeper understanding of how the past continues to shape our present.

Chapter 1: Founding Contradictions: Jefferson's Monticello and Early America (1770s-1826)

Thomas Jefferson's Monticello stands as a physical embodiment of America's founding contradictions. This elegant Virginia mansion, designed with neoclassical precision by Jefferson himself, was simultaneously a site of Enlightenment thinking and human bondage. During Jefferson's lifetime, over 400 enslaved people lived and worked at Monticello, producing everything from nails to textiles while enabling Jefferson's lifestyle of intellectual pursuit and political leadership. The man who penned "all men are created equal" owned human beings throughout his life, including Sally Hemings, with whom he fathered at least six children according to DNA evidence and historical records. Life for the enslaved at Monticello revealed the brutality inherent in even the most "enlightened" form of bondage. Jefferson separated families through sales when financially expedient, had people whipped for attempted escapes, and maintained detailed records of enslaved people's productivity. In his writings, Jefferson acknowledged slavery as a "moral depravity" and a "hideous blot," yet he freed only a handful of enslaved people in his lifetime, most of them related to Hemings. After his death in 1826, approximately 130 enslaved people were sold at auction to pay his substantial debts, tearing apart families who had lived at Monticello for generations. Jefferson's contradictions mirrored those of the young nation he helped create. The Revolutionary era, with its rhetoric of natural rights and liberty, created a philosophical tension with the institution of slavery that would eventually tear the country apart. Many of the Founding Fathers, including Washington, Madison, and Jefferson, expressed discomfort with slavery while continuing to profit from it. The Constitution itself contained compromises on slavery, including the Three-Fifths Clause and protections for the slave trade until 1808, embedding racial inequality into the foundation of American governance. For decades, tours at Monticello focused primarily on Jefferson's achievements and the architectural brilliance of his home, with slavery mentioned only peripherally. Today, the site has evolved to confront this difficult history more directly. Tours like "Slavery at Monticello" center the experiences of enslaved people, and the Getting Word Oral History Project collects stories from descendants of Monticello's enslaved community. This evolution in historical interpretation reflects broader changes in how Americans confront uncomfortable truths about their past. As one Monticello guide observed, "There's a difference between history and nostalgia, and somewhere between those two is memory."

Chapter 2: Plantation Economy: The Brutal Reality of Enslaved Life (1800-1860)

The antebellum period witnessed the dramatic expansion of plantation slavery across the American South. The invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1793 revolutionized cotton production, making it possible to quickly separate cotton fibers from seeds. This technological innovation, combined with growing international demand for cotton textiles, transformed the American economy and intensified the brutality of the slave system. Cotton production exploded from 3,000 bales in 1790 to 4.5 million bales by 1860, driving the forced migration of enslaved people from the Upper South to the Deep South and Southwest. Daily life on plantations like the Whitney in Louisiana revealed slavery's horrific realities. Enslaved people typically worked from sunrise to sunset, six days a week, under the constant threat of violence. Field hands labored in grueling conditions, planting, cultivating, and harvesting crops under the watchful eyes of overseers ready to administer punishment for any perceived infraction. Women faced the double burden of field work and domestic responsibilities, along with the constant threat of sexual violence from white men. Children as young as five or six were put to work, with approximately 57 percent of enslaved people under twenty years old by 1860. The high mortality rates, especially on sugar plantations, led one observer to note that planters found it more economical to "use up" enslaved workers and purchase replacements than to provide adequate care. Despite these brutal conditions, enslaved communities developed remarkable strategies for survival and resistance. They created rich cultural traditions, religious practices, and family structures that provided meaning and solidarity in the face of oppression. Forms of resistance ranged from everyday acts of sabotage and work slowdowns to organized rebellions like the 1811 German Coast Uprising in Louisiana, where hundreds of enslaved people marched toward New Orleans before being violently suppressed. Resistance also took the form of escape, with thousands risking their lives to flee northward via the Underground Railroad, a network of safe houses and secret routes organized by abolitionists. The domestic slave trade became a massive industry during this period, with approximately one million enslaved people forcibly relocated from the Upper South to the Deep South between 1800 and 1860. Families were torn apart as husbands, wives, and children were sold separately. The journey south, often made on foot in chains, became known as the "Second Middle Passage." New Orleans emerged as America's largest slave market, where human beings were inspected, evaluated, and sold like livestock. By 1860, the value of enslaved people in the United States exceeded the combined value of all the nation's railroads and factories, demonstrating how central human bondage was to American economic development. The plantation economy created enormous wealth for white southerners while establishing racial hierarchies that would persist long after emancipation. Large planters formed a powerful aristocracy that dominated southern politics and culture, while smaller farmers aspired to join their ranks by acquiring enslaved people of their own. This system also shaped the development of the North, as northern textile mills processed southern cotton, northern banks financed plantation operations, and northern shipping companies transported slave-produced commodities to global markets. As historian Edward Baptist has argued, slavery was not a backward, pre-modern institution but a dynamic economic system that helped fuel American capitalism and industrial development.

Chapter 3: From Emancipation to Jim Crow: Freedom's Incomplete Promise (1863-1900)

The Civil War and emancipation represented a revolutionary transformation in American society. When Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, he set in motion the legal dismantling of an institution that had defined American life for nearly 250 years. However, freedom came unevenly across the South. Some enslaved people fled to Union lines early in the war, creating "contraband camps" where they lived in difficult conditions but as free people. Others gained freedom only when Union troops arrived in their area. In Texas, enslaved people weren't informed of their freedom until June 19, 1865 (now celebrated as Juneteenth), more than two months after the war ended. The period of Reconstruction (1865-1877) represented America's first attempt to build a multiracial democracy. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery, the 14th Amendment guaranteed equal protection under the law, and the 15th Amendment prohibited racial discrimination in voting. With these constitutional protections and the presence of federal troops in the South, Black Americans made remarkable political gains. Over 1,500 Black men held public office during Reconstruction, including 16 members of Congress and two U.S. Senators. Newly freed people prioritized education, building schools and seeking literacy with remarkable determination. They also established churches, mutual aid societies, and businesses. Land ownership became a central aspiration, embodied in the unfulfilled promise of "40 acres and a mule" that many had hoped would provide economic independence. However, Reconstruction's promise was violently undermined by white resistance. Organizations like the Ku Klux Klan terrorized Black communities and their white allies. Between 1868 and 1871 alone, thousands of people were killed in racist violence across the South. The Compromise of 1877, which resolved the disputed presidential election of 1876, led to the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, effectively abandoning Black Americans to the mercy of white supremacist state governments. This retreat from the federal commitment to civil rights would have devastating consequences for generations to come. The post-Reconstruction era saw the establishment of Jim Crow segregation across the South. States implemented poll taxes, literacy tests, and other measures to disenfranchise Black voters. In Louisiana, for example, there were 130,000 Black registered voters in 1896; by 1904, only 1,342 remained. Segregation laws separated the races in virtually every aspect of public life – schools, transportation, restaurants, hospitals, parks, and even cemeteries. The Supreme Court's 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which established the "separate but equal" doctrine, gave constitutional sanction to this system of apartheid. Racial violence reached horrific levels during this period. Lynching – public torture and murder, often performed before crowds of thousands – became a primary tool of racial control. Between 1882 and 1900, more than 1,700 Black Americans were lynched. These were not spontaneous acts but carefully orchestrated public spectacles designed to terrorize the entire Black community. The "Lost Cause" mythology emerged during this period as a deliberate effort to rewrite the history of slavery and the Civil War, portraying the antebellum South as an idyllic society and the Confederacy as fighting not for slavery but for states' rights. This revisionist narrative, promoted through textbooks, monuments, and public commemorations, helped justify the reimposition of white supremacy after Reconstruction's collapse.

Chapter 4: Northern Complicity: How Slavery Built America's Economy (1800-1861)

New York City, despite its progressive modern image, was deeply entangled in the business of slavery from its earliest days through the Civil War. Founded as New Amsterdam by the Dutch West India Company in 1624, the settlement quickly imported enslaved Africans for labor. By 1703, approximately 42% of New York households owned enslaved people, a higher percentage than in Charleston, South Carolina. Wall Street, now synonymous with American capitalism, was partially built by enslaved laborers and became a site where human beings were bought and sold well into the 19th century. The city's economic development remained inextricably linked to Southern slavery even after New York State's gradual emancipation began in 1799. Cotton harvested by enslaved people in the South flowed through New York's ports, where it was financed by New York banks, insured by New York companies, and shipped to textile mills in Europe and New England. By the 1850s, New York merchants controlled nearly two-thirds of the cotton trade, making the city what historian Eric Foner calls "the capital of American slavery." Mayor Fernando Wood even proposed that New York secede alongside the South in 1861 to preserve these profitable commercial relationships. Northern financial institutions provided crucial capital that enabled the expansion of plantation slavery. Wall Street financiers offered loans to plantation owners, accepting enslaved people as collateral and sometimes taking ownership of them when planters defaulted. Insurance companies like New York Life and Aetna sold policies to enslavers that treated enslaved people as property to be financially protected. When ships carrying enslaved Africans were intercepted after the international slave trade became illegal, New York businessmen often served as legal representatives for the slavers, fighting to protect their investments. The textile industry in New England similarly depended on slave-produced cotton. The first successful American textile mill, established in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1793, marked the beginning of American industrialization. By the 1850s, hundreds of mills throughout New England employed thousands of workers processing Southern cotton. These factories produced cloth that was then sold back to plantations to clothe enslaved people, creating a circular economy built on forced labor. As historian Sven Beckert notes, "The factory system that many contemporaries saw as the essence of northern distinctiveness rested squarely on the shoulders of the slave-labor camps of the South." Northern complicity extended beyond economics to active participation in the domestic slave trade. New York served as a hub for "blackbirders" who kidnapped free Black people from Northern states and sold them into Southern slavery. Solomon Northup, whose memoir "Twelve Years a Slave" later became famous, was one such victim, lured from Saratoga Springs to New York City in 1841 before being drugged, kidnapped, and sold in Louisiana. Northern politicians also consistently supported the interests of slaveholders, from the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required Northerners to assist in capturing escaped enslaved people, to the Dred Scott decision of 1857, which denied citizenship rights to all Black Americans. This history of Northern complicity challenges the simplistic narrative that portrays slavery as exclusively a Southern sin. The economic interdependence between Northern capitalism and Southern slavery reveals how the entire nation was implicated in and benefited from human bondage. As historian Edward Baptist argues, "The idea that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is somehow separate from the history of American growth and capitalism is an illusion." Understanding this shared responsibility is essential for comprehending both the depth of slavery's impact on American development and the national scope of its legacy.

Chapter 5: Monuments and Memory: The Battle Over How We Remember (1865-Present)

The landscape of American memory has been shaped by competing narratives about slavery and its aftermath since the moment of emancipation. In the decades following the Civil War, organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) worked systematically to rewrite the history of the conflict. Founded in 1894, the UDC erected hundreds of Confederate monuments across the South, influenced school curricula, and sponsored public commemorations that portrayed the Confederacy as a noble cause fighting for states' rights rather than slavery. This "Lost Cause" mythology directly contradicted the Confederacy's own declarations, which had explicitly cited the preservation of slavery as their primary motivation for secession. Confederate monuments proliferated during two specific periods: the 1890s-1920s as Jim Crow laws were being implemented, and the 1950s-1960s during the civil rights movement. Their timing reveals their true purpose: not historical education but racial intimidation. Blandford Cemetery in Petersburg, Virginia, exemplifies this commemorative tradition. The cemetery contains approximately 30,000 Confederate soldiers' graves, with a memorial chapel featuring stained-glass windows designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany. Each window, commissioned by a different Southern state, depicts a Christian saint alongside inscriptions glorifying Confederate soldiers. Meanwhile, the neighboring People's Memorial Cemetery, established by Petersburg's free Black community in 1840, received far less support and maintenance—a pattern repeated across the South. Recent decades have seen significant shifts in how slavery is commemorated and taught. Sites like the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana have pioneered new approaches that center the experiences of enslaved people rather than their enslavers. The National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened in Washington, DC, in 2016, presents slavery not as a sidebar to American history but as central to understanding the nation's development. Meanwhile, projects like the Equal Justice Initiative's National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, confront the history of racial terror lynching that followed emancipation. These new memorial spaces ask visitors to engage with difficult history not just intellectually but emotionally. The debate over Confederate monuments intensified following the 2015 massacre at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Since then, more than 100 Confederate monuments have been removed from public spaces across the country. Defenders claim these statues preserve history, while critics argue they celebrate white supremacy and intimidate Black citizens. As historian Karen Cox notes, "These monuments were meant to create legitimate garb for white supremacy. Why would we continue to honor that?" The controversy reflects deeper disagreements about American identity and how to address historical injustice. Educational institutions are also reckoning with connections to slavery. Universities including Georgetown, Brown, and Harvard have investigated their historical ties to slavery and the slave trade, acknowledging how these institutions benefited from human bondage. Some have established scholarships, memorials, and other initiatives as forms of institutional acknowledgment and redress. K-12 education has seen similar reconsiderations, with growing efforts to teach slavery more accurately and comprehensively, though these efforts have sometimes faced political backlash from those who fear confronting this difficult history will diminish national pride or promote division.

Chapter 6: Institutional Legacies: From Plantations to Prisons (1865-Present)

Angola Prison, officially the Louisiana State Penitentiary, represents one of America's most disturbing examples of how slavery evolved rather than ended after the Civil War. Located on 18,000 acres of former plantation land once owned by Isaac Franklin, one of America's largest slave traders, Angola continues to confine predominantly Black bodies to forced labor. The prison sits on the same soil where enslaved people once harvested cotton, and today, incarcerated men still work those fields under the watch of armed guards on horseback, earning between two and twenty cents per hour. The transition from plantation to prison occurred after the Civil War through the convict leasing system, which exploited the Thirteenth Amendment's exception allowing involuntary servitude as punishment for crime. In 1880, former Confederate Major Samuel Lawrence James purchased the land and secured a 21-year lease from Louisiana to control all the state's prisoners. Under his management, mortality rates among leased convicts exceeded those of enslaved people before emancipation. This system, alongside "Black Codes" and later "Jim Crow" laws that criminalized minor offenses, effectively reconstituted slavery under a new name. The prison system became a primary mechanism for controlling Black labor and mobility after emancipation. Throughout the South, vagrancy laws allowed authorities to arrest Black people who could not prove employment, forcing them into convict labor. Prisons like Angola, Parchman Farm in Mississippi, and others operated as profit-generating enterprises that provided cheap labor to private companies and state projects. Incarcerated people built railroads, harvested timber, constructed levees, and worked in mines under conditions that were often more deadly than slavery had been. As historian David Oshinsky notes in "Worse Than Slavery," this system represented "a form of bondage distinctly worse than slavery" because lessees had no long-term interest in preserving the lives of the leased convicts. The legacy of this history is evident in contemporary mass incarceration. The United States imprisons more people than any other nation, with approximately 2.3 million people behind bars and another 4.5 million under some form of correctional supervision. Black Americans are incarcerated at more than five times the rate of whites, a disparity that cannot be explained by differences in crime rates alone. Michelle Alexander's influential book "The New Jim Crow" argues that mass incarceration functions as a system of racial control analogous to earlier systems like slavery and segregation, creating a permanent underclass of people marked by criminal records and denied full citizenship rights. The economic exploitation that characterized slavery continues in modern prisons through prison labor programs. The prison industry generates billions of dollars annually through both public and private facilities. Incarcerated workers produce goods and services for major corporations, fight wildfires, answer customer service calls, and perform countless other tasks for minimal compensation, often just cents per hour. This labor is not protected by minimum wage laws, workers' compensation, or the right to organize. As civil rights activist Bryan Stevenson observes, Angola functions as "a slave plantation where the slaves are not expected to die." The connection between slavery and modern incarceration extends beyond labor practices to geographic and architectural continuities. Many Southern prisons, like Angola, were built on former plantations. Northern prisons like Attica in New York were designed with similar principles of surveillance and control that characterized plantation management. The racial demographics of prison populations, the exploitation of labor, and the restriction of rights all echo slavery's fundamental characteristics. Understanding these continuities is essential for addressing the structural inequalities that persist in the American criminal justice system and for imagining alternatives based on rehabilitation and restoration rather than punishment and profit.

Chapter 7: Global Connections: America's Slave Trade in World Context (1619-1808)

The transatlantic slave trade represented one of history's largest forced migrations, with approximately 12.5 million Africans transported to the Americas between the 16th and 19th centuries. Of these, about 10.7 million survived the brutal Middle Passage across the Atlantic. While the United States received only about 3.5% of all enslaved Africans brought to the Americas (approximately 388,000 people), the nation's slave population grew to nearly four million by 1860 through natural increase and the domestic slave trade. This demographic pattern distinguished the United States from other slave societies in the Americas, where higher mortality rates and continued importation created different population dynamics. Gorée Island, situated just two miles off the coast of Dakar, Senegal, serves as one of Africa's most powerful memorials to the transatlantic slave trade. This tiny landmass functioned as a processing center where captured Africans were held before being shipped across the Atlantic. Today, the island's most iconic structure, the House of Slaves (Maison des Esclaves), attracts thousands of visitors annually, including prominent figures like Nelson Mandela, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush. Its famous "Door of No Return" has become a symbol of the slave trade's brutality, though historians debate the extent of Gorée's actual role in the trade compared to larger ports like Ouidah in present-day Benin or Elmina in Ghana. The slave trade operated as a complex international network involving African kingdoms, European powers, and American colonies. Contrary to simplified narratives, many African societies were active participants in the slave trade, with powerful states like Dahomey and Asante capturing people from neighboring groups to sell to European traders. European powers established trading posts along the African coast, where they exchanged manufactured goods, weapons, and alcohol for enslaved people. This commerce transformed African political structures, encouraging warfare and raiding to capture potential slaves while undermining traditional social systems. The Middle Passage itself represented an unprecedented horror in human history. Enslaved Africans were packed into ships under conditions designed to maximize profit rather than sustain life. They were chained together in spaces so tight they could barely move, with inadequate food, water, and sanitation. Disease spread rapidly in these conditions, and mortality rates averaged 15-20% per voyage. Many captives resisted through rebellion, suicide, or self-harm, leading slavers to implement brutal measures to maintain control. Those who survived arrived in the Americas traumatized, disoriented, and separated from their families, communities, and cultural contexts. The international slave trade created a new economic system that historian Walter Johnson calls "racial capitalism." European powers established plantation colonies in the Caribbean and South America, where enslaved Africans produced sugar, coffee, and other commodities for global markets. These plantations generated enormous wealth that fueled European industrial development and financed imperial expansion. The triangular trade between Europe, Africa, and the Americas created interconnected markets that laid the groundwork for modern global capitalism. As historian Edward Baptist argues, "The expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States." Though Congress outlawed the international slave trade in 1808 (the earliest date permitted by the Constitution), American involvement in slavery continued to shape global economic and political developments throughout the 19th century. American cotton, produced by enslaved labor, fed British textile mills that employed thousands of workers, creating what historian Sven Beckert calls "war capitalism" – a system that combined the violence of slavery with the wage labor of industrial production. The American Civil War disrupted this global cotton network, contributing to economic crises in manufacturing centers around the world and demonstrating how deeply international capitalism had become dependent on American slavery.

Summary

The story of American slavery and its aftermath reveals a central tension that has defined the nation since its founding: the contradiction between professed ideals of freedom and equality and the reality of racial hierarchy and exploitation. From the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in 1619 through the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the civil rights movement, and into the present day, this tension has manifested in different forms but has never been fully resolved. The economic foundations of American prosperity were built significantly on enslaved labor, creating wealth disparities that persist generations after emancipation. The ideology of white supremacy that justified slavery evolved to support segregation, discrimination, and ongoing systemic racism even as legal slavery ended. Confronting this history honestly offers a path toward healing and transformation. First, we must acknowledge that slavery was not a peripheral issue but central to American development, shaping our political system, economy, culture, and geography in profound ways that continue to influence contemporary society. Second, we need to recognize that addressing this legacy requires more than symbolic gestures – it demands concrete policy changes to address structural inequalities in housing, education, criminal justice, healthcare, and economic opportunity. Finally, we must understand that reconciliation requires both truth and justice. Without an honest accounting of history and meaningful efforts to repair harm, the wounds of the past cannot heal. The ongoing struggle over how we remember slavery reflects a deeper struggle over American identity itself – whether we will continue to evade uncomfortable truths or finally build a society that truly embodies the ideals of freedom and equality for all people.

About Author

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Clint Smith

Clint Smith is the author of the narrative nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, which was a #1 New York Times bestseller, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism, the Stowe Prize and selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 best books of 2021. He is also the author of the poetry collection Counting Descent, which won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. His is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

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