Historiography of slavery in the United States

The historiography of slavery in the United States has undergone profound transformation over the past century. Initially historians like Ulrich B. Phillips depicted slavery as a benign institution, relying on narratives from the slaveholder perspective largely ignoring ex-slaves. However, the rise of the Civil Rights Movement in the mid-20th century catalyzed a dramatic shift in focus—from studying slavery through the lens of policy and plantation owners to exploring the lived experiences, resilience, and agency of enslaved and free Black people drawing on new sources such as slave narratives as well as integrating the scholarship of African-American historians who had been writing in journals such as the Journal of Negro History.

As the historian Herbert Gutman noted, the Phillipsian answer to what did slavery do for the slaves was that slavery lifted the slaves out of the barbarism of Africa, Christianized them, protected them, and generally benefited them. What is apparent is that Phillips over-valued Christianity while under-valuing the sophistication of west African cultures, and had a rather limited grasp of African history in general. Scholarship in the 1950s then moved to the question, what did slavery do to the slaves, and concluded it was a harsh and profitable system. More recently, scholars such as Genovese and Gutman asked, "What did slaves do for themselves?" They concluded "In the slave quarters, through family, community and religion, slaves struggled for a measure of independence and dignity.