Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Lesson Study
Early in the lesson, students read David Christy’s argument that mid-
nineteenth-century slavery was a global economic phenomenon from
which no one could entirely disassociate, including abolitionists (see Ap-
pendix II). Christy paints a world where absolutes do not exist and moral
ambiguity defines everyone’s participation in a world economy bound up
in slavery. Living in a time when slavery is considered morally corrupt
and its adherents are characterized as greedy, racist southerners, students
struggled to make sense of Christy’s economic and global perspective
and often applied their schema of slavery as a moral evil restricted to the
southern United States.
To make students’ thinking visible, we asked them to choose a one- or
two- sentence quotation from the selection that summarized Christy’s ar-
gument and explain why it was significant. About half the students chose
the sentences: “KING COTTON cares not whether he employs slaves or
freemen. It is the cotton, not the slaves, upon which his throne is based.”
Their reasons illustrate the power of previous narratives about slavery that
students brought to this selection and the obstacles they posed for inter-
preting complicated texts from another century. Of the students who chose
these sentences, only a handful, such as Rob and Eli,24 showed evidence of
understanding Christy’s argument that slavery was global and even aboli-
tionists could not disentangle themselves from it. Rob wrote, “King Cotton
controls the majority of the economy in America and England and no matter
who you are, abolitionists and slaveowners alike, you support cotton and
the slavery that supports it.” Eli stated, “Anyone who buys products that
had to do with cotton are supporting slavery, including abolitionists.”
More typical were students who misread or understood only part of
Christy’s argument. We speculate that many of these students had difficulty
with Christy’s argument because it did not easily fit with their prior schema
of clear-cut “good guys” and “bad guys” playing out a moral battle over
slavery in the southern United States. As Wineburg has noted, when students
draw on existing beliefs to incorporate new information, those existing
beliefs are powerful forces shaping what, if anything is learned.25
When students discussed the reading in pairs, we overheard many ask-
ing each other whether the writer was for or against slavery, indicating
they were trying to decide if he was “good” or “bad.” Such a perspective
may have been shaped by their earlier eighth-grade education and learning
from descriptions of debates over slavery that only two perspectives, for or
against, are relevant to understanding slavery in U.S. history. Writers such
as Christy, who analyzes slavery from a different position, send students
in a meaning making freefall where their prior knowledge does not help
Challenging Students’ Assumptions about Slavery in U.S. History
or hinders comprehension.
Ted was representative of students who struggled to understand
Christy’s essay. Writing about King Cotton, he said, “The quote reveals
that slavery was not necessary and it plays a role in making cotton cheap
and accessible to others.” Val and Richard wrote, “The growing of cotton
did not require slavery, therefore King Cotton did not care for slavery but
the production of cotton itself… It shows how slavery is becoming less
needed in the agricultural system.” Having previously understood slav-
ery only in a context of nineteenth-century racist ideology, Ted, Val, and
Richard struggled with Christy’s idea that slaveowners were motivated
by economics and understood Christy to be saying that slavery was not
really needed, not following the argument that slavery was viewed at the
time as the only economically viable way to produce cotton. Karen, who
understood that Christy’s economic argument departed from her earlier
understanding of slavery only as a racist phenomenon, made this contrast
explicit in her comment: “It is surprising because it is trying to tell us that
slavery is not based on racial barriers, but solely on economics. It shows
us that economics was their excuse for slavery.”
Other students, in their written comments on these two sentences, im-
ply that Christy is suggesting a colorblind view of understanding slavery.
Charles and Vivian wrote, “The cotton industry doesn’t care about color,
just as long as the industry prospers. As long as the cotton is produced
with or without slaves, the cotton industry believes that slaves have clean
hands and pure hearts.” Their commentary indicates they misunderstood
Christy’s characterization of abolitionists, not slaves, as having clean hands
and pure hearts. Their comments may also indicate a desire to distance
discussion from the racist legacy of the past, perhaps to make the classroom
“safe” by denying the salience of race.
As they read, other students brought their prior schema of slavery as
a “peculiar institution” relegated to the southern United States and sup-
ported by sadistic or greedy planters. Students in all four classes com-
mented on how dependent and essential the cotton market was to the
South, even though Christy emphasizes the global reach of King Cotton.
James understood slavery in moral terms. He wrote, “This reveals to me
the closemindedness of the people back then. People were so cruel and do
not consider people’s feelings, only money.” James’s response may have
been provoked by the discrepancy between his own strong moral views
on slavery and Christy’s focus on its economic rationale. The emotional
dimension of his response may also indicate the empathy with slaves and
others who are oppressed that he brings to this reading.
Some students commented directly on how Christy’s argument con-
founded or contradicted their prior understanding. Chris disagreed with
Christy explicitly, writing, “This quote shows how people were fooling
Nancy Ogden, Catherine Perkins, and David M. Donahue
know. Rather than see students for what they do not understand, it allows
us to see what they do understand and how they make meaning even when
that meaning departs from the text. Making thinking visible also allows us
to track how their knowledge evolves over the course of a lesson, which
we discuss in the next section.
lesson’s six other primary and secondary sources and described them in
isolation, but not in connection to a larger understanding of slavery as a
global economic institution. Iris, for example, explained the meaning of
each document but never added the pieces together except for a conclud-
ing sentence that showed only vague understanding of their connections
to a larger phenomenon. Students such as Iris followed a pattern that
Paxton found typical of students’ history writing, “an organizational style
that essentially amounted to borrowing and slightly rewording excerpts
from the source texts, then sandwiching this information between stock
introductory and closing paragraphs.”30
We also found many students continuing to combine beliefs about slav-
ery as a moral wrong with their new knowledge of slavery as an economic
institution. While knowledge of slavery as a moral evil led some students
initially to misunderstand Christy’s economic analysis, by the end of
the lesson, students integrated both perspectives on slavery. Most often,
students taking this twin perspective in their essays focused on slavery as
an economic institution and concluded with a statement about it as a hu-
man rights abuse. For example, Joyce wrote, “Slavery was an economic
institution that affected the entire U.S. and world… but it also affected it
by having people do manual labor and back-breaking word for sacrifice
of something as simple and complex as money.”
In some cases, taking a twin perspective led to misperceptions. Mag-
dalena, for example, wrote, “Even abolitionists recognized how helpful
[slavery] was to the U.S. They never tried to really enforce laws dealing
against slavery because they knew that without slavery, the U.S. economy
would fall apart and they would not bring as much money.” Sabrina stated,
“The issue was not really about slaves or their ethnicity, it was all about
money and economic growth.” Tina concluded that slavery was “strictly
an economic issue and morals played no role in the debate.” Magdalena’s
beliefs about abolitionists’ hypocrisy may have led her to misunderstand
their position on slavery. We also note that some students, like Sabrina and
Tina, when confronted with new information, jettison the old. Rather than
understanding that abolitionists had moral and economic arguments against
slavery, students saw economic arguments supplanting moral ones.
Interestingly, only one student, Adam, explicitly connected slavery as
a global economic institution to similar phenomena today. Writing about
how people all over the world supported southern slavery regardless of
their geographic location or beliefs, he concluded, “This continues today,
except it is not slavery we support, but rather things such as child labor.”
Perhaps he did not make easy judgments because he recognized himself as
a participant in an economy where he could not say with certainty whether
his shirt was produced by children in Asia or union workers in the United
States. He was also the only student to put himself (as part of the “we”
12 Nancy Ogden, Catherine Perkins, and David M. Donahue
Cathy and Nancy did not want students to abandon their view of slavery
as a moral wrong or human rights abuse. And even if they wanted to, the
evidence from this lesson shows that such a goal would be difficult, if not
impossible. Historical understanding is not easily changed or replaced.
Rather, as students read about new perspectives on the past, they build
understandings that represent varying combinations of old and new knowl-
edge, assumptions, and perspectives. In the cases of many students, these
new understandings blended moral perspectives with new knowledge of
slavery’s economic aspects.
Nancy and Cathy did want students to see beyond simplistic notions
of good and bad when examining the past, however, and believe lessons
like this are an important step. More nuanced understanding of moral
ambiguity helps students understand slavery in the nineteenth century and,
for example, continuing abuses of child labor in the twenty-first century.
Looking at slavery as a global phenomenon rather than a peculiar institu-
tion relegated to one section of the United States also helps students see
that globalization is not a new phenomenon.
Looking at students’ work from this lesson leaves us with several ideas
for supporting their development as critical readers and challenging their
historical assumptions, two interrelated endeavors. We see the importance
of asking students to surface prior knowledge, beliefs, and values before
they read, so they can interrogate them in light of their reading and so
teachers can point out dissonance between old ideas and new reading if
students do not. We also see the benefit of asking students to make their
thinking visible to themselves and others as they work to interpret historical
texts. Had we not asked students to talk with partners after first reading
Christy’s essay, we would not have seen how their focus on the moral
dimension of slavery was shaping their understanding of his economic
arguments about slavery. As students made these initial ideas visible, they
questioned each other about how they came to those ideas and what parts
of the text supported those ideas. As students engaged in this social process
of meaning making, they deepened understanding of the text.
To help students make empathetic historical judgments, we see the
value in making connections from the past to the present explicit. Too
often, students imagine persons in history living lives that have little to
Challenging Students’ Assumptions about Slavery in U.S. History 13
do with their own. Not seeing any connections between others’ lives and
their own, they are quicker to make facile judgments about the actions of
people in the past. Helping students consider how they are enmeshed in
global economic systems whose justice is ambiguous at best might have
prevented them from rushing to label abolitionists as hypocrites because
they could not remove themselves from a global cotton economy.
We also appreciate the difficulty of teaching high school history as his-
torians continually reframe the past. Textbooks rarely keep pace with such
developments, and even if they did, the contents of new textbooks cannot
erase and replace students’ old understanding. Instead, teachers need to
make explicit for students that knowledge of history in the profession at
large evolves in ways that parallel how it does for individual students in a
high school classroom: by revisiting texts with open minds, interrogating
old assumptions, engaging in conversations about meaning, and sharing
new ideas for critique. By helping students see this parallel, we can give
them not only more complex understanding of individual eras and events
in the past, but also deeper appreciation of how historical knowledge is
constructed.
Notes
1. Nancy Ogden and Catherine Perkins contributed equally to all aspects of cur-
riculum, teaching, and research described in this article. David Donahue led the data
analysis and writing. All three authors wish to acknowledge and thank Avi Black for so
ably directing the Words That Made America Project, supporting teachers as thoughtful
professionals, and making possible the work described in this article.
2. Paul S. Boyer, Clifford E. Clark, Joseph F. Kett, Neal Salisbury, Harvard Sitkoff,
and Nancy Woloch, Enduring Vision: A History of the American People to 1877 (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 2000).
3. David Quigley, “Southern Slavery in a Free City: Economy, Politics, and Cul-
ture,” Slavery in New York, eds. Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris (New York: The New
Press, 2005), 265.
4. Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, Slavery and
Justice: Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice
(Providence, RI: Brown University, 2006): 13.
5. Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United
States Government’s Relations to Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
6. Quigley, 269.
7. Quoted in Quigley, 283.
8. Quoted in Brown University, 11.
9. Matthew Kauffman, “The Cost of Slavery Was High: But Who Will Pay for
It?” Hartford Courant on the Web 29 September 2002, 3 April 2007 <http://www.courant.
com/hc-reparations.artsept29,0,5577477.story>. For additional information on northern
14 Nancy Ogden, Catherine Perkins, and David M. Donahue
business connections to slavery, see David Roediger and Martin H. Blatt, eds., The Mean-
ing of Slavery in the North (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998) and Anne Farrow, Joel
Lang, and Jenifer Frank, Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited
from Slavery (New York: Ballantine Books, 2005).
10. Thomas Bender, A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2006).
11. Words That Made America, a professional development program to increase
teachers’ knowledge of history and how to teach it, works in the Hayward and San Leandro,
California Unified School Districts with fourth-, fifth-, eighth-, and eleventh-grade teachers
who, following the state’s history-social science framework, are responsible for teaching
California and U.S. history. For more information about Worlds That Made America,
contact Avi Black, Project Director, phone: 510-670-5239 or email: ablack@acoe.org.
12. Gaea Leinhardt and Kathleen McCarthy Young, “Two Texts, Three Readers:
Distance and Expertise in Reading History,” Cognition and Instruction 14.4 (1996):
441.
13. Sam Wineburg, “The Cognitive Representation of Historical Texts,” Teaching
and Learning in History, eds. Gaea Leinhardt, Isabel L. Beck, and Catherine Stainton
(Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 1994): 85-136.
14. Leinhardt and McCarthy Young, “Two Texts, Three Readers,” 478.
15. Ruth Schoenbach, Cynthia Greenleaf, Christine Cziko, and Lori Hurwitz, Read-
ing for Understanding (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999).
16. Richard J. Paxton, “A Deafening Silence: History Textbooks and the Students
Who Read Them,” Review of Educational Research 69.30 (1999): 318.
17. Paxton, “A Deafening Silence,” 317. For more on author visibility and its
connection to student understanding of history, see Richard J. Paxton, “The Influence of
Author Visibility on High School Students Solving a Historical Problem,” Cognition and
Instruction 20.2 (2002): 197-248.
18. Edward Hallet Carr, What is History? (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961).
19. Sam Wineburg, “On the Reading of Historical Texts: Notes on the Breach
Between School and Academy,” American Educational Research Journal 28 (1991):
495-519.
20. Schoenbach, et al.
21. Peter Seixas, “Historical Understanding among Adolescents in a Multicultural
Setting,” Curriculum Inquiry 23.3 (1993): 303.
22. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1970); Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and
the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
23. To learn more about lesson study, see Catherine Lewis and Ineko Tschudia, “A
Lesson Is Like a Swiftly Flowing River: Research Lessons and the Improvement of Japanese
Education,” American Educator 22.4 (1998): 12-17, 50-52 and James Stigler and James
Hiebert, The Teaching Gap: Best Ideas from the World’s Teachers for Improving Education
in the Classroom (New York: Free Press, 1999). For a practical guide to lesson study, see
Catherine Lewis, Lesson Study: A Handbook of Teacher-Led Instructional Change (Phila-
delphia: Research for Better Schools, 2002). For an example of lesson study in a Teaching
American History project, see Stan Pesick and Shelly Weintraub, “DeTocqueville’s Ghost:
Examining the Struggle for Democracy in America,” The History Teacher 36.2 (2003):
231-247.
24. Pseudonyms are used throughout to refer to students.
25. Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 2001).
Challenging Students’ Assumptions about Slavery in U.S. History 15
26. Peter Seixas, “Confronting the Moral Frames of Popular Film: Young People
Respond to Historical Revisionism,” American Journal of Education 102 (1994): 264.
27. Wineburg, Historical Thinking, 242.
28. Seixas, “Confronting the Moral Frames.”
29. Paxton, “A Deafening Silence,” 329.
30. Paxton, “A Visible Author,” 233.
31. Paxton, “A Deafening Silence,” 322.
Appendix I
Abstract:
Students study nineteenth-century slavery in the United States as part of a larger global
economic phenomenon. They examine Confederate currency illustrated with images of
slavery to begin thinking about slavery’s connection to the economy, read primary and
secondary sources that examine the economic aspects of slavery, and draw their own
conclusions about the role of economics in sustaining slavery in the United States into
the 1800s.
Focus Question:
How was slavery a global economic phenomenon?
Understanding Goals:
Through this lesson, students should understand that:
• Slavery was more than only a “peculiar institution” related to one section of
the United States
• Slavery was part of a complex economic system in addition to being part of
political, social, and racial systems
• Moral ambiguity characterizes participation in complex economic systems
Activities:
Part 1: Money and imagery
Ask students to look at a dollar bill or other currency they brought to class.
Facilitate the discussion so students understand that nations place important political
and economic symbols on their currency.
exhibit includes images of over 100 banknotes and accompanying text. Select five to
ten examples.
Help students understand that confederate currency included images of slavery because
it was a pervasive and important part of the confederate economy.
After the paired discussion, engage the whole class in a discussion of the article’s
meaning and significance.
As students share their ideas, encourage them to connect their own quotations or
explanations of significance to ideas already shared by other classmates.
To guide students’ reading, ask them to complete the chart in Appendix IV. The chart
helps students connect each reading to Christy’s main ideas about the connection
between economics and slavery. This part of the lesson can be completed either
individually or in pairs.
Assessment:
Ask students to write their answer to the question: How was slavery an economic
institution in the United States and the world? OR How do the documents support
Christy’s claim that slavery was a global economic phenomenon?
Challenging Students’ Assumptions about Slavery in U.S. History 17
Appendix II
Slavery is not an isolated system, but is so mingled with the business of the world,
that it derives facilities from the most innocent transactions. Capital and labor, in Europe
and America, are largely employed in the manufacture of cotton. These goods, to a great
extent, may be seen freighting every vessel, from Christian nations, that traverses the seas
of the globe; and filling the warehouses and shelves of the merchants over two-thirds of
the world. By the industry, skill, and enterprise, employed in the manufacture of cotton,
mankind are better clothed; their comfort better promoted; general industry more highly
stimulated; commerce more widely extended; and civilization more rapidly advanced,
than in any preceding age....
KING COTTON cares not whether he employs slaves or freemen. It is the cotton, not
the slaves, upon which his throne is based. Let freemen do his work as well, and he will
not object to the change. Thus far the experiments in this respect have failed, and they
will not soon be renewed. The efforts of his most powerful ally, Great Britain, to promote
that object, have already cost her people many hundreds of millions of dollars: with total
failure as a reward for her zeal....
KING COTTON is a profound statesman, and knows what measures will best sustain
his throne. He is an acute mental philosopher, acquainted with the secret springs of human
action, and accurately perceives who will best promote his aims. He has no evidence that
colored men can grow his cotton, but in the capacity of slaves. It is his policy, therefore,
to defeat all schemes of emancipation.
In speaking of the economical connections of Slavery with the other material interests
of the world, we have called it a tri-partite alliance. It is more than this. It is quadruple.
Its structure includes four parties, arranged thus: The Western Agriculturalists; the Southern
Planters; the English Manufacturers; and the American Abolitionists! By this arrangement,
the Abolitionists do not stand in direct contact with Slavery: –they imagine, therefore, that
they have clean hands and pure hearts, so far as sustaining the system is concerned. But
they, no less than their allies, aid in promoting the interests of Slavery. Their sympathies
are with England on the Slavery question, and they very naturally incline to agree with
her on other points. She advocates Free Trade, as essential to her manufactures and com-
ers; and they do the same,.... England, we were about to say, is in alliance with the cotton
planter, to whose prosperity Free Trade is indispensable. Abolitionism is in alliance with
England. All three of these parties, then, agree in their support of the Free Trade policy. It
needed but the aid of the Western Farmer, therefore, to give permanency to this principle.
His adhesion has been given, the quadruple alliance has been perfected, and Slavery and
Free Trade nationalized!
18 Nancy Ogden, Catherine Perkins, and David M. Donahue
Appendix III
By 1840 cotton accounted for more than half of all U.S. exports.
Notwithstanding the fact that the white non-slaveholders of the South are in the
majority as five to one, they have never yet had any part or lot in framing the laws
under which they live. There is no legislation except for the benefit of slavery and
slaveholders.
In 1860, Georgia’s governor sent a blunt message to his constituents, many of them
non-slaveholders: “So soon as the slaves were at liberty thousands of them would leave
the cotton and rice fields.... and make their way to the healthier climate of the mountain
region [where] we should have them plundering and stealing, robbing and killing.”
There was no mistaking the conclusion. Emancipation would not merely deprive
slaveholders of their property, it would jeopardize the lives of non-slaveholders.
The profitability of cotton and sugar increased the value of slaves. From the declining
plantation states of the Upper South to the booming Lower South became a huge
business. “Virginia,” an observer stated in 1832, “is, in fact, a Negro raising State for
other States; she produces enough fro her own supply, and six thousand a year for sale.”
Without the sale of its slaves, he concluded, “Virginia will be a desert.”
Document 4: Price of Male Slave over the Life-Cycle, Old South, 1850
Source: Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The
Economics of American Negro Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1974).
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: coffee, cotton, rum, sugar, and tobacco.
In the pre-Civil War United States, a stronger case can be made that slavery played a
critical role in economic development. One crop, slave-grown cotton, provided over
half of all U.S. export earnings. By 1840, the South grew 60 percent of the world’s
cotton and provided some 70 percent of the cotton consumed by the British textile
industry. Thus slavery paid for a substantial share of the capital, iron, and manufactured
goods that laid the basis for the American economic growth. In addition, precisely
because the South specialized in cotton production, the North developed a variety of
businesses that provided services for the slave South, including textile factories, a meat
processing industry, insurance companies, shippers, and cotton brokers.
There can be no doubt that opponents of slavery had come to view the South’s “peculiar
institution,” as an obstacle to economic growth. Despite clear evidence that slavery
was profitable, abolitionists—and many people who were not abolitionists—felt
strongly that slavery degraded labor, inhibited urbanization and mechanization,
thwarted industrialization, and stifled progress, and associated slavery with economic
backwardness, inefficiency, indebtedness, and economic and social stagnation. When
the North waged war on slavery, it was not because it had overcome racism; rather, it
was because Northerners in increasing numbers identified their society with progress
and viewed slavery as an intolerable obstacle to innovation, moral improvement, free
labor, and commercial and economic growth.
20 Nancy Ogden, Catherine Perkins, and David M. Donahue
Appendix IV
Document 1:
Value of Cotton Exports
as a Percentage of All U.S.
Exports, 1800-1860
Document 2:
Impending Crisis/1860
Georgia Governor’s
Message
Document 3:
Slave Trade as Big Business
Document 4:
Price of Male Slave over the
Life-Cycle, Old South, 1850
Document 5:
Slavery and Economic
Development, Part 1
Document 6:
Slavery and Economic
Development, Part 2