NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE T here have been so many poisonous and stupid lies about Florida since 2020, it’s almost hard to keep track, but the latest may be the most outrageous.
As you might have heard thanks to the vice president of the United States among others, Florida allegedly wants to teach its students that slavery benefited slaves.
Charles Cooke has ably pointed out how false this is. The Florida curriculum on slavery is extensive and includes pretty much everything you’d want a child to know about this enormity. The occasion for the Harris smear is one line that says, “Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
This is not the first or second thing, or even the 19th, that you’d want students to learn about slavery, but it is also indisputably true and part of the record.
No one is saying the enslaved “benefited” from slavery.
It’s not an endorsement of slavery to point out that slaves looked for every crack in the system to try to improve themselves and gain some autonomy — rather, it’s an endorsement of the pluck, initiative, and resilience of an oppressed people operating in the worst of circumstances.
We are supposed to believe that enslaved African Americans strained against their awful condition in every way (as they actually did) — learning to read, protecting their family life, worshipping on their own, defying their masters when they could, creating an elaborate system of escape — but they never, ever learned a skill to their own benefit.
This is, of course, nonsense. Learning skills was another aspect of African-American agency, which was never wiped out no matter how much their oppressors tried to make it so.
The great sociologist Orlando Patterson wrote that there is “absolutely no evidence from the long and dismal annals of slavery to suggest any group of slaves ever internalized the conception of degradation held by their masters. To be dishonored — and to sense, however, acutely, such dishonor — is not to lose the quintessential human urge to participate and to want a place.”
Until the day before yesterday, this wasn’t controversial.
Some of those most honored African-American figures took advantage of whatever ability they had, while enslaved, to improve themselves and learn. In Baltimore, Frederick Douglass famously became a ship caulker and brought in $6 to $9 a week, rightly resenting “the right of the robber” exercised by his owner, who took his earnings.
In his extraordinary African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals, David Hackett Fischer brings to light other lesser-known examples — without, of course, minimizing the evil of slavery — as part of his focus on African-American achievement, dignity, and cultural distinctiveness.
Fischer notes the example of one Captain David Stodder, the leading shipbuilder in Baltimore in the late 18th century. According to Fischer, “In his own shipyard, Stodder toiled alongside a large force of workers who were African and European, bond and free. He was held in high esteem by them.”
As of 1790, about two dozen of his workers were slaves. “By his will in 1806,” Fischer continues, “Stodder gave all of them their freedom. He ordered that all his young slaves be set ‘free at the age of 25, and all my old[er] slaves be free immediately.’ Among these slaves were some of his most highly skilled workers. As one example, he also ordered that ‘my negro Lewis [is to] have all the iron and tools in my blacksmith shop.’”
Or consider George R. Roberts, who was probably born a slave in southern Maryland. He became an experienced seaman who served on a letter of marque schooner during the War of 1812. It got captured, but Roberts escaped prison and impressment at the hands of the British. He then served on a privateer, getting a double share of the prize money as a sign of his skills, and after the war stayed with the ship when it became part of the China trade. “George Roberts came home to Baltimore,” according to Fischer, “bought a small house in the happy neighborhood that is still called Canton, and became prominent in the civic life of the city.”
Or Robert Lemmons, born a slave in Texas. He learned from a rancher who employed him and became extremely adept at handling mustangs. He was freed after the Civil War. Word spread of his abilities, Fischer writes, and he began to get paid well: “He saved his profits, invested in land, built a holding of 1,200 acres, became a successful rancher, rented some of his land, added another business, and became a local money lender.”
Was slavery good for these men? Absolutely not. The point is what they accomplished despite slavery, not because of it. As free men left to their own devices, they surely would have achieved much more and been much happier. But did these men exist? Yes. Their stories shouldn’t be erased from the record to serve the politically driven narrative of the moment.
Two can play the Kamala Harris game, by the way.
In her famous 1619 Project essay, Nikole Hannah-Jones writes, “For as much as white people tried to pretend, black people were not chattel. And so the process of seasoning, instead of erasing identity, served an opposite purpose: In the void, we forged a new culture all our own.”
There she goes — making excuses for slavery and saying it served some good, that it was “seasoning.”
Imagine if the Florida curriculum said that slavery gave us African-American hair styles? There’d be outrage, but Nikole Hannah-Jones says it: “Today’s avant-garde nature of black hairstyles and fashion displays a vibrant reflection of enslaved people’s determination to feel fully human through self-expression.”
The Left wouldn’t have to deny the historical record or tie itself into knots if it weren’t so determined to lie about Ron DeSantis, but that is the imperative that overwhelms everything else.