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THE SLAVE’S POWER  
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Drew Gilpin Faust
September 17, 2026
The New York Review of Books
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_ Two recent books employ inventive approaches to read against the
grain of the archive left by those who defended and benefited from
human bondage. _

Black teamsters guiding a group of fugitives to safety in northern
Virginia, 1862, Library of Congress

 

Reviewed:

Moving Toward Freedom: The Political Education of Enslaved Americansby
Susan Eva O’DonovanPenguin Press, 369 pp., $35.00

A Terrible Intimacy: Interracial Life in the Slaveholding Southby
Melvin Patrick ElyHenry Holt, 352 pp., $31.99

For nearly two decades now, historians have been debating whether it
is even possible to write the history of American slavery. Can an
accurate story of a system of oppression be derived from sources
created and preserved by the oppressors? In many ways it is a
surprising controversy. For the generation of American historians
working after the emergence of the mainstream civil rights movement in
the mid-1950s, slavery studies represented perhaps the most exciting
field of American historical scholarship, attracting an audience of
general readers as well as the attention of prominent academics. Books
about slavery were discussed in popular magazines and featured on the
nightly news. Innovative methodologies, including demography and
quantitative analysis, folklore, material culture, oral history, and
family reconstitution opened new windows into the past. At the same
time, changed assumptions about racial equality made the “moonlight
and magnolias” South of _Gone with the Wind_ and most earlier
studies of slavery obsolete. Historians began to construct a rich and
sobering narrative of the lives of both enslavers and enslaved, as
well as a portrait of the system that bound them together.

It seems even odder to be having this debate now, when attacks on
history by the right demand that such matters as chattel slavery be
erased altogether or reconfigured to ensure an adequately
“patriotic” account of the national past. Last year, several weeks
after President Donald Trump instructed the Smithsonian Institution
that it would have to adjust anything his administration took issue
with regarding “tone, historical framing and alignment with American
ideals,” he complained that the Smithsonian’s museums focused too
much on “how bad Slavery was.” The National Park Service is
revising interpretations at its sites to offer an upbeat rendering of
human bondage, if slavery is mentioned at all. In January Park Service
workers took crowbars to signage memorializing the nine enslaved
people who worked in George Washington’s presidential house in
Philadelphia.

 
We have never needed more to believe in—and defend—the possibility
of a rigorous, fact-based telling of slavery’s history. Our
nation’s future requires a clear-eyed understanding of how its
aspirations for freedom and democracy coexisted with an institution
defined by violence and injustice. We cannot overcome our past if we
fail to document and confront it, and so we must strive to make the
realities of American slavery ever more visible and undeniable.

 

But can we adequately document an institution whose records were
overwhelmingly produced by those who built and benefited from it? In
her presidential address to the American Historical Association in
January 2025, Thavolia Glymph, a professor of history at Duke,
insisted that this is not just a possibility but a necessity. She
challenged those who assail what historians have come to call the
“archive” of slavery—the manuscripts and books left by our
forebears—as too compromised to be useful. Critics have argued that
this record, the creation of enslavers and white supremacists,
reflects the interests of the empowered and silences the enslaved, who
were mostly prohibited from reading and writing and thus left unable
to tell their side of the story.

 
Glymph readily admitted that this is the “damaged space that we
historians have to work with.” Yet even with its biases she said she
finds it “boisterous” and “noisy,” full of unruly voices of
the subjugated, awaiting the historian’s discerning eye. Every
encounter with power, she insisted, “also captures the agitation of
the enslaved that led to the encounter.” In their effort to control
the archive, enslavers did “a pretty bad job; indeed, they failed
miserably.” Glymph’s own deeply researched work on enslaved and
formerly enslaved women is testimony to her argument.

 
“Millions of paper tracings,” she said, “are there in which
enslaved people claim for themselves more than a trace in history.”

 

Two recent books represent the remarkable discoveries that this
archive of slavery can yield. Both recognize the distortions inherent
in a record kept by those who defended human bondage and believed that
Black people are inferior. Yet both employ inventive approaches to
read against the grain of the nineteenth-century materials available
to them. And each is clearly caught up in the spirit of the hunt and
the joy of searching for hidden treasures that inspire the best
historical researchers.

A professor at the University of Memphis, Susan Eva O’Donovan has
immersed herself in what she embraces as “slavery’s vast
archive,” exploring “correspondence, ledgers, diaries, logs,
receipts, reports, contracts, complaints, bills, court cases, police
blotters, and ship manifests” in order to reconstruct the experience
of human bondage. At the outset of her career, more than thirty years
ago, O’Donovan served as an assistant editor at the Freedmen and
Southern Society Project, a pathbreaking initiative established in
1976 to identify materials relevant to the coming of freedom, chiefly
in the voluminous holdings of the National Archives. No one had
systematically looked for such documents before or asked the questions
about the African American past that by the 1970s had come to be seen
as essential. The FSSP has in the years since published six doorstop
volumes of evidence about slavery and emancipation. O’Donovan is a
coeditor of two (and Glymph coeditor of two others). Few historians
are more familiar with the records of American slavery and the
opportunities for writing its history.

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Her purpose in _Moving Toward Freedom: The Political Education of
Enslaved Americans_ is to demonstrate that even before emancipation
the enslaved had carved out spaces of independence from their
enslavers. In the years leading up to the Civil War, Black southerners
were not simply victims of oppression but also a people in
motion—literally across land and water and figuratively toward
freedom, even when an end to slavery seemed all but unimaginable.
Masters’ control was never absolute, and slaves exploited these
limitations, readying themselves to take advantage of their eventual
legal emancipation. Theirs was, she insists, the work of politics, an
assertion of power not at a ballot box but through the events and
arrangements of everyday life. O’Donovan’s arguments build on
earlier work by a number of other scholars who identified a Black
politics that emerged even under slavery, perhaps most notably Steven
Hahn’s _A Nation_ _Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles_ _in
the Rural South from Slavery to the_ _Great Migration_, which won the
Pulitzer Prize in History in 2004. But the richness of her examples
and her use of the lens of motion and travel succeed in deepening our
understanding.

The balance of oppression and resistance in slavery is complex,
O’Donovan stresses. To overemphasize the agency of the enslaved
would be to “ignore the violent character of American slavery, an
institution forged to steal the labor of millions for white people’s
gain.” But to minimize the influence of slaves within the system of
constraints imposed on them would be yet another subjugation. The
enslaved were, to borrow the parlance of the civil rights movement,
“making a way out of no way.”

O’Donovan centers her analysis on examples of slaves moving beyond
their places of bondage in the regular course of doing their owners’
business. The tension between freedom and total control, she shows,
lies at the very heart of what southerners called “the peculiar
institution.” Using unfree workers optimally and efficiently often
required granting them some modicum of autonomy, some reprieve from
constant scrutiny, some access to the world beyond the master’s
direct purview. “To leash their laborers too tightly,” she writes,
“would be to strangle themselves and their great golden goose.”
Enslaved men worked as crews and as skilled pilots and stewards on
steamboats, and as loggers and “wooders” providing fuel along
inland waterways. On land, enslaved teamsters hauled goods—for
example, cotton to market—similarly escaping the “suffocating
surveillance” of the plantation. Their travels put them in contact
with people from other parts of the nation and beyond, often in
situations in which sharp social and racial distinctions were
difficult to uphold and new ideas, including those that might
challenge slavery, difficult to suppress. As the Missouri Supreme
Court wrote in an 1835 case involving an enslaved drayman, “He acts
as a freeman all the day.”

The movement of enslaved women tended to have a different character.
Many traveled as domestic servants for the convenience of their
mistresses, visiting spas like Saratoga Springs in New York or cities
like Philadelphia or even London where slavery did not exist.
O’Donovan ingeniously uses a federal record of all enslaved people
who left or entered United States’ seaports, a register kept after
1808 to monitor possible violations of the law banning the
international slave trade. She finds that such travelers were
overwhelmingly female—in most cases, she argues, the attendants of
elite southerners visiting abroad or embarking on the grand tour.
Their journeys introduced them to new worlds. On a transatlantic
steamship voyage, Frederick Douglass remarked that “all color
distinctions were flung to the winds.” Enslaved workers who had
witnessed free societies and seen the place of free African Americans
within them no longer understood their own situation as unalterable.
Travel helped produce a contagion of liberty.

Over the course of the antebellum era, boom and bust could accelerate
or diminish mobility. In the 1820s and 1830s, expansion into the
cotton kingdom of the Old Southwest—Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas,
and other states—relocated hundreds of thousands of Black
southerners who were transported or sold to cultivate rich virgin
soils. In the 1850s high cotton prices drove productivity, which in
turn required more marketing and hauling, more teamsters and enslaved
workers interacting with towns and cities beyond their plantations.

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Moments of genuine activism emerged out of growing political awareness
among the enslaved as sectional hostilities and attacks on slavery
intensified. Anxious slaveholders worried about the “great
meetings” of their unfree laborers that began during John C.
Frémont’s Free Soil campaign for the presidency in 1856.
O’Donovan describes protests that erupted along a canal in
Rockbridge, Virginia, and along a railroad under construction in
Alabama, as well as a rebellion plotted in a plantation district near
Memphis. In South Carolina, a committee of slaves sent a delegation to
the governor to petition for “redress of certain grievances.” As
one Black southerner later recalled, in the years after the 1856
election “a great anger arose among the colored people,” and they
“began to study how they would get free.”

When Union armies advanced into the South in 1861, enslaved people
knew what was at stake. Some hundreds of thousands fled to Union lines
because, O’Donovan argues, they had been “laying the foundations
for liberation for decades.” They were ready, and they understood,
in the words of an 1865 petition of the Black residents of Nashville,
“the burdens of citizenship” as well as its promises. As a
gathering of freedpeople declared to Union general Joseph Fullerton in
July 1865, “We is come to the law now.”

In _A Terrible Intimacy: Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South_,
Melvin Patrick Ely, a professor at William and Mary, makes clear that
Black southerners had in fact been touched by the law throughout the
antebellum period. Unlike O’Donovan’s sweeping study, Ely’s book
is sharply focused, delving into six criminal cases in one Virginia
community—the notorious Prince Edward County, which achieved an
enduring place in history by closing its public schools from 1959
until 1964 rather than integrating them after the Supreme Court’s
_Brown_ v. _Board_ _of Education_ decision.

Yet like O’Donovan, Ely relishes the relentless quest for sources,
and his excitement is evident in discoveries like the “sheaf of
bluish-brown tissue-thin pages” recording the testimony at an 1854
rape trial or the rare court minute book he found in a little-used
archival warehouse near the Richmond airport. He offers the reader a
you-are-there approach both to his own work as a scholar and to the
proceedings of a nineteenth-century courtroom.

Ely seeks to particularize the history of slavery, to embed it in the
stories of individual men and women, white and Black, whose testimony,
“not verbatim but very detailed,” was recorded by court clerks.
Such sources have often been dismissed as partial and unreliable
evidence because of laws that prohibited Black people from testifying
against white defendants in southern states. But Ely shows us how much
was said in spite of this prohibition, citing examples of white people
on the stand relating stories they had heard from African
Americans—a confounding judicial circumstance in which the admission
of hearsay in some measure compensated for the limits on Black
testimony. And Black people, both free and enslaved, who were not
themselves on trial were frequent witnesses (if the defendant was not
white) and were recorded speaking at length.

Ely, too, emphasizes the complexity of slavery as a system and as a
web of human relationships. In Prince Edward County, three quarters of
white households owned slaves, but in small numbers, not in large
plantation-scale holdings. It was, Ely writes, “a little republic of
middle-level slaveholding men” that thrust people together across
class and race and condition—even in court. The “terrible
intimacy” of his title refers to the closeness of Black and white
people in nearly every aspect of daily life, including sexual ties
across the color line and blurred family links that defied notions of
racial purity. But this was, as he describes it, a “deformed”
intimacy produced by a society “that exploited and abused” Black
people.

To enable his readers to engage directly with the past themselves, Ely
organizes his book around the reports of witness testimony for the six
cases he uses to capture his slice of nineteenth-century southern
life. His earlier works, he explains, simply presented his
interpretation of his sources from the perspective of an omniscient
narrator; he effectively asked the reader to “trust me.” But this
time “I want you to walk through these stories _with_ me—to see
them unfold as they did in the community and then in the courtroom.”
He adopts a familiar, conversational tone, assessing what he sees,
acknowledging where he finds the record “biased and riddled with
blind spots,” and using his extensive knowledge of the place and the
period to help make sense of materials that might otherwise seem
puzzling. Each trial unfolds step by step, often revealing surprising
twists that underscore the contradictory forces of humanity and
inhumanity in the everyday life of a slave society.

An enslaved man named George is acquitted of rape in an 1854 trial in
which his white accuser’s lower-class status and dubious reputation
sway the jury to credit the supportive testimony of white witnesses.
Mary Tatum was regarded by her neighbors with contempt; George seemed
always appropriately “straight-forward humble & obedient.” As one
elderly white woman explained, “I thought the negro ought not to be
hung for nothing.” In a murder trial in 1861, after the outbreak of
the Civil War, witnesses tell a sickening tale of cruelty inflicted on
William, a man accused of killing his enslaver. The prisoner is not
executed but instead convicted of second-degree murder, with his
sentence commuted by the governor to life at labor on public works.
Yet in the course of testimony it becomes evident that many white
members of the community had long known of this owner’s “very
barbarous” behavior—extracting teeth as punishment, beating
William so frequently that his back became a giant scab. Yet they did
nothing until their neighbor was dead and William on trial.

The southern system of slavery hid under the veneer of law, but Ely
illustrates the elusiveness of genuine justice or mercy within its
structures of repression. Human beings both Black and white
nevertheless pushed the limits of control, motivated by a wide range
of factors—pure self-interest in the case of enslavers who did not
want to lose their valuable slave property to the gallows, human
sympathy from individuals connected to one another even across racial
lines, as well as Black Virginians’ anticipation that white people
might somehow, someday be called to account as Christians and
Americans.

O’Donovan notes that more than two hundred Black men and women who
had been taken outside the South for a period of time by their
enslavers sued for freedom in the same court that heard the famous
case of Dred Scott, all arguing that once they had set foot on free
soil they were legally free. Ely offers no example of such direct use
of the law by African Americans in Prince Edward County. But even as
the enslaved people who came into that Virginia courtroom were
subjected to the display of white supremacy, they also confronted some
of its weaknesses, likely emboldening them to seize their freedom when
the moment arrived. Rife with the contradictions inherent in defining
human beings as chattel property, slavery contained the germs of its
own destruction, and both authors let us understand how those seeds
might have taken root.

Did William, sentenced in 1861, labor on the public works for life? Or
did he run to Union lines when Northern troops advanced and provided
an opportunity? Even Ely’s prodigious research gives us no answer to
these questions. The archive of slavery cannot tell us all we would
like to know. But it can tell us a great deal, and it can continue to
challenge us to reckon with a national past that represents human
failures as well as human triumphs. We today are the products of all
of those. A crowbar cannot change that.

_DREW GILPIN FAUST is President Emerita and Arthur Kingsley Porter
University Research Professor at Harvard. She is the author of This
Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, among other
books._

_THE NEW YORK REVIEW was launched during the New York City newspaper
strike of 1963, when the magazine’s founding editors, Robert Silvers
and Barbara Epstein, alongside Jason Epstein, Robert Lowell, and
Elizabeth Hardwick, decided to start a new kind of publication—one
in which the most interesting, lively, and qualified minds of the time
could write about current books and issues in depth. _

_Readers responded by buying almost every copy and writing thousands
of letters to demand that the Review continue. From the beginning,
the editors were determined that the Review should be an independent
publication; it began life as an editorial voice beholden to no one,
and it remains so today._

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