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HOW BAD SLAVERY WAS  
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Robert Kuttner
August 26, 2025
The American Prospect
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_ Donald Trump joins a long line of apologists for America’s
peculiar institution, falsifying history in the interest of
whitewashing slavery. _

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Last week, in a post on Truth Social, Donald Trump took the
Smithsonian’s museums to task for emphasizing “how bad slavery
was.” The White House staff followed up on August 21 with a
statement titled “President Trump Is Right About the Smithsonian
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flagging several objectionable exhibits, including one, weirdly, on
Anthony Fauci.

Trump is in eminent company. For nearly a century, between the 1860s
and the 1950s, defenders of slavery succeeded in creating a dominant
narrative in the nation’s textbooks, trying to show that slavery
wasn’t so bad and that the real outrage was the abbreviated period
of Reconstruction.

The whitewashing of slavery began as early as 1867, with publication
of a book by Edward Pollard, titled _The Lost Cause_. In this
account, slavery was mostly a benign system that uplifted Blacks;
plantation owners were typically kindly. This echoed a century of
antebellum Southern propaganda. Pollard contended that the Civil War
was not really about slavery; it was a war over states’ rights.

_MORE FROM ROBERT KUTTNER_
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As public education systems became more widespread in the South after
the Civil War, states of the former Confederacy set standards to
ensure that textbooks for public schools would portray a sympathetic
view. These laws influenced Northern publishers. Meanwhile, some
prominent Northern scholars embraced the Lost Cause view. The most
notable of these was William Archibald Dunning of Columbia University.

Dunning became the leader of what became known as the Dunning School
of studies on slavery and Reconstruction. He served as president of
both the American Historical Association, in 1913, and the American
Political Science Association, in 1922. More a theorist than an
empirical research scholar, he nonetheless supervised dozens of
dissertations, and the Dunning School became the dominant influence on
the next generation of historians.

In Dunning’s view, slavery was mostly benevolent, and Reconstruction
was a vicious scheme to deny the South’s leading citizens their
rights, operated by a vengeful Union army and manipulated by
opportunistic “carpetbaggers” from the North and local
“scalawags” who collaborated with the South’s Northern
oppressors and corrupt Blacks. The trampled rights of freedmen were
largely ignored in these accounts. D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film _The
Birth of a Nation_, replete with outrageously racist stereotypes,
dramatized these fictions and was seen by tens of millions of
Americans, both Northern and Southern.

This version of history, which was dominant from the 1860s through the
first half of the 20th century, chimed perfectly with the use of Jim
Crow laws and court decisions that wiped out the last vestiges of
Black civil rights and Black representation in Congress and in local
Southern governments. It chimed as well with state terrorism and
lynchings as the necessary way to maintain a racist order that was
slavery in everything but name.

John Kennedy’s famous book, _Profiles in Courage_, written in 1956
(and ghostwritten by his aide Ted Sorenson), which helped establish
Kennedy as a contender for the presidency, adopted the Dunning view of
the Lost Cause. The fact that the book won a Pulitzer shows the
persistence of Dunning’s influence.

In one of his eight profiles, Kennedy lionizes Sen. Edmund Ross of
Kansas for refusing to vote to convict President Andrew Johnson for
defying Congress on Reconstruction after the House impeached him. Had
Ross voted to convict, Johnson would have been removed from office.
Ross’s vote was really a profile in cowardice. Kennedy awarded
another profile in courage to Sen. Daniel Webster, a Northerner, for
bravely supporting the Fugitive Slave Act, part of the Compromise of
1850, allowing escaped slaves to be hunted down in free states.

As late as the 1960s, when I went to high school, a popular exam
question was whether the Civil War was about abolishing slavery or
about states’ rights and preservation of the Union. The
“correct” answer was the latter.

It was only with a new wave of historians, beginning with W.E.B. Du
Bois as early as the 1930s, that the standard narrative of the Lost
Cause began to be overthrown by scholarly evidence. The work of John
Hope Franklin, Eugene Genovese, Kenneth Stampp, Stanley Elkins, and C.
Vann Woodward (and later, Eric Foner), among others, went deeper into
how slavery actually functioned, the arduous journey from slavery to
freedom, and the forgotten contributions of Black intellectuals and
elected officials after the Civil War. Contemporary works such as the
autobiography of Frederick Douglass were rediscovered, and the true
picture of the dehumanizing brutality of slavery emerged.

The Trump who took offense at the Smithsonian’s emphasis on “how
bad slavery was” is the same Trump who said of the pro-Nazi riot at
Charlottesville, in 2017, that there were “good people on both
sides.” Trump’s blurting out what he really thinks, and his
whitewashed view of slavery, provide a window into his crusade against
DEI. Evidently, for Trump, Black people have had things too easy,
going all the way back to slavery times, while whites have been
oppressed.

Let’s see. It was in Trump’s own lifetime that President Truman
integrated the armed forces; that Jackie Robinson became the first
Black player allowed in the major leagues; that strict segregation of
Southern schools was overturned by the Supreme Court (though massive
de facto segregation persists); that Emmett Till, among many others,
was lynched, often with the complicity of local law enforcement; that
Congress finally, belatedly, passed three great civil rights acts,
after the heroism and civil disobedience of the civil rights movement;
and that Southern Blacks could finally vote.

And then the progress went into reverse, as progress so often does,
abetted by Republican appointees to the Supreme Court and now
supercharged by Trump’s war on DEI.

We now await the tribute to William Archibald Dunning, and the exhibit
at the National Museum of African American History and Culture,
curated by Trump, on all the great things about slavery.

The Trump who took offense at the Smithsonian’s emphasis on “how
bad slavery was” is the same Trump who said of the pro-Nazi riot at
Charlottesville, in 2017, that there were “good people on both
sides.” Trump’s blurting out what he really thinks, and his
whitewashed view of slavery, provide a window into his crusade against
DEI. Evidently, for Trump, Black people have had things too easy,
going all the way back to slavery times, while whites have been
oppressed.

Let’s see. It was in Trump’s own lifetime that President Truman
integrated the armed forces; that Jackie Robinson became the first
Black player allowed in the major leagues; that strict segregation of
Southern schools was overturned by the Supreme Court (though massive
de facto segregation persists); that Emmett Till, among many others,
was lynched, often with the complicity of local law enforcement; that
Congress finally, belatedly, passed three great civil rights acts,
after the heroism and civil disobedience of the civil rights movement;
and that Southern Blacks could finally vote.

And then the progress went into reverse, as progress so often does,
abetted by Republican appointees to the Supreme Court and now
supercharged by Trump’s war on DEI.

We now await the tribute to William Archibald Dunning, and the exhibit
at the National Museum of African American History and Culture,
curated by Trump, on all the great things about slavery.

_Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect,
and professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School._

_Used with the permission. The American Prospect, Prospect.org, 2024.
All rights reserved. Click here
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* slavery
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* U.S. history
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* US Civil War
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* History
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* Donald Trump
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