Slavery in the North: Forgetting History and Recovering Memory by Marc Howard Ross

Abstract

Reviewed by: Slavery in the North: Forgetting History and Recovering Memory by Marc Howard Ross Christy Clark-Pujara Slavery in the North: Forgetting History and Recovering Memory. By Marc Howard Ross. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. xiv, 304. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8122-5038-1.) Marc Howard Ross insightfully examines how and why Americans have forgotten the history of slaveholding in the North. He diligently unpacks how the nation and northerners in particular fail to recall the expansive, long, and persistent history of bondage in the northern colonies and states. By investigating the histories we have chosen to forget, Ross highlights how the stories we tell about our past convey who we want to be, rather than who we are. Ross contends that the vast majority of Americans have little to no knowledge of the practice of slavery in the North. Anyone who has ever taught, written, or participated in any public history exhibit or display about northern slavery knows this to be true. Ross carefully notes that historians, professional and lay, have been writing about northern slavery for decades and that the descendants of enslaved northerners never forgot about it. He centers the study on how people like himself—white, well-rounded, and well-educated—were [End Page 904] unaware of the long history of northern bondage. Ross asks two primary questions: “Why and how was the collective memory of almost 250 years of enslavement in the North forgotten so widely and for so long? And why and how has public awareness and a collective memory of Northern slavery been partially recovered in recent decades?” (p. 1). Ross begins by carefully defining and explaining collective memory and forgetting, and he then lays out a brief summation of slaveholding and slavery-related businesses in the North, such as the slave trade and the textile revolution. Ross then examines various memorializing efforts in the North, paying special attention to the President’s House Site in Philadelphia (where George Washington lived with nine enslaved people), black burial grounds, such as the New York City African Burial Ground, and other public spaces. I particularly appreciated his concern for various interest groups and the tensions that arise when communities decide to remember the lives of enslaved people and those who held them in bondage. Ross ends the study with some suggestions on collective recovery. Ross asserts that collective memories “are socially constructed accounts that change in response to contemporary political events and social conditions” (p. 37). He further asserts that collective forgetting is rooted in “the disappearance of narratives about past events and people involved in them,” the diminishing of rituals about them, and the “loss or destruction of visible public, commemorative landscapes and objects that earlier marked the existence of Northern slavery” (pp. 89, 90). He argues that Americans have forgotten about northern bondage because there are few stories, rituals, or commemorative sites that remind the public that people were enslaved in the North, unlike in the South where Civil War memorials and plantation tours abound. He also argues that northerners fail to remember northern slaveholding because the emancipation process was long, protracted, and complex. Unlike the end of slavery in the South, there was no major event—like the Civil War—that precipitated an end to slaveholding. Ross further contends that avoidance, self-silencing, reframing, shame, and guilt have encouraged most northerners to forget northern bondage. Ross contends that northern slavery has become more visible as African Americans have become more socially and politically prominent and as historians have increasingly focused on the experiences of marginalized peoples. Ross suggests that the recovery of the history of northern slavery necessitates compelling personal narratives, public ceremonies, and physical memorials throughout the North to educate and remind Americans that generations of Africans and African Americans lived, labored, and died in bondage in the North. Ross, however, underestimates the impact of primary and secondary education, Hollywood, and many museums. These institutions have contributed to a simplistic narrative of an abolitionist North and a proslavery South; this one-dimensional history does not allow for a complex understanding and acknowledgment of 250 years of slaveholding in the North. Slavery in the North: Forgetting History and...