This summer, a new national conversation emerged over the teaching of history. On July 19, the Florida Department of Education approved updated standards<\/a> for social studies courses. These are the first in Florida to include a distinct curricular strand on African American history. One requirement for middle school lessons attracted widespread attention: \u201cInstruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.\u201d<\/p>\n Some politicians<\/a>, teachers<\/a>, and others criticized what they saw as a defense of slavery. Last week protesters marched<\/a> to the school board\u2019s headquarters in Miami in an attempt to prevent the standards\u2019 implementation in Miami-Dade County. The political scientist William Allen and the documentary historian Frances Presley Rice, members of the task force<\/a> that wrote the standards, defended<\/a> them against the criticism. They wanted students \u201cto learn how slaves took advantage of whatever circumstances they were in to benefit themselves and the community of African descendants.\u201d Omitting this information, they feared, \u201creduce[s] slaves to just victims of oppression [and] fails to recognize their strength, courage and resiliency.\u201d<\/p>\n The debate caught my eye in part because Dr. Allen and Dr. Rice invoked a family I had mentioned in this blog. They named sixteen examples<\/a> of \u201cslaves [who] developed highly specialized trades from which they benefitted,\u201d including Lewis H. Latimer. That draftsman and inventor<\/a> was never in fact enslaved. But his parents, Rebecca and George W. Latimer, were. As I noted in January<\/a>, Millard Fillmore received a letter about their 1842 flight from Virginia enslavers. They settled in Massachusetts, where Lewis was born. It is not clear that the parents found a use in freedom for skills developed under slavery; George, assigned by his enslavers to drive a dray and to run a grocery store, found work as a paperhanger once free. But thinking about the educational controversy and this connection with our letters got me wondering how else the letters can shed light on the skills of enslaved people. That question led me away from Fillmore and toward Taylor.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Zachary Taylor grew up around the Black men, women, and children whom his parents enslaved at their plantation outside Louisville. As an adult, he inherited or purchased well over a hundred enslaved people. They served him in many capacities and locations. The writer Walt Bachman, in The Last White House Slaves<\/em><\/a>, uncovers the stories of those forced to work as personal servants for him and his White family at frontier army posts. They included children whom Taylor fathered with a woman he enslaved. Later, Taylor brought enslaved people to Washington to work in the White House<\/a>. He was the last president to do so.<\/p>\n Henry Lewis, Das illustrirte Mississippithal<\/em> [1857]. Library of Congress.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Most of the people whom Taylor enslaved lived and worked on his plantations in Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi. In his letters to Thomas W. Ringgold, a White man he employed as overseer, he often discussed the tasks he wanted them to complete at Cypress Grove Plantation in Mississippi. (We haven\u2019t yet found Ringgold\u2019s replies.) From those letters, we can learn about what skills those people developed\u2014and why.<\/p>\n As in much of the antebellum Deep South, the chief product at Cypress Grove was cotton. Taylor often instructed Ringgold to have the enslaved people plant, harvest, gin, pack, and transport the cash crop. On June 18, 1845, he summed up<\/a> his goal: \u201cI have no fears if you have your health, & the servants keep pretty well . . . you will make fully as much cotton as you can secure, in a neat & proper manner.\u201d Difficult work that drew on Eli Whitney\u2019s recent invention of the cotton gin<\/a> (which renewed cotton\u2019s profitability and promoted the continuation of chattel slavery\u2014another point made in the Florida standards), the forced cultivation of cotton created fortunes for many plantation owners.<\/p>\n Taylor also had the people at Cypress Grove grow other crops. In the same letter to Ringgold, he mentioned corn and \u201ca small parcel of Muskeet grass seed\u201d that he had ordered \u201csent to you, with directions how to propagate it, which I wish most carefully done.\u201d Ringgold probably relayed the instructions, but enslaved people certainly did the \u201ccareful\u201d job of growing grass to feed the livestock.<\/p>\n When discussing other agricultural tasks, particularly those involving timber, Taylor more explicitly recognized the skill of those whose labor he exploited. On December 16, 1845, he directed Ringgold<\/a> to \u201cselect eight or ten good axmen, & keep them getting wood & tumber [i.e., timber or lumber], such as picketts, hogshead & barrel staves, or shingles after ascertaing which was the most profitable.\u201d On February 23, 1846, he stressed the need to cover plantation expenses by selling wood. He directed Ringgold<\/a> \u201cto put six good axmen to cutting wood & keep them at it & hauling, until you want them for cotton picking.\u201d<\/p>\n In referencing \u201cgood axmen,\u201d Taylor acknowledged a skill that certain men at Cypress Grove had learned, presumably from each other. But only to the White overseer did he explicitly ascribe intelligence, telling Ringgold on<\/a> September 15, 1845, \u201cI feel easy . . . in confiding the management of my affairs to your good management-\u201d Enslaved Black people, in his eyes, performed skilled manual labor. White managers determined what labor should be done, when, and how.<\/p>\n Enslaved people on James Hopkinson\u2019s plantation, Edisto Island, SC, possibly in front of their house [1862]. Library of Congress.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Enslaved people did not learn these skills by choice or because they derived a personal benefit. Those whom Taylor claimed as his property learned to pick cotton, fell trees, serve meals in the army, or decorate the White House because he deemed that work profitable to himself or to the government. They did receive compensation of sorts. Taylor allowed them housing<\/a> (which they built), telling Ringgold<\/a> on July 11, 1845, \u201cto have their Houses dry & airy, frequently white-washed, & thoroughly cleaned.\u201d He allowed them food (which they grew), often writing of the importance of their adequate sustenance. As he noted in the first letter I quoted above, he wanted \u201cthe servants keep pretty well.\u201d Their basic physical wellbeing benefited both them and him.<\/p>\n Sometimes he gave them more than the basics. On June 18, 1845, he directed Ringgold<\/a> to give ten dollars to enslaved people who had done extra work transporting cotton. That November 13 (as quoted in the Louisville Daily Courier<\/em>, October 25, 1848), he had the overseer \u201cDISTRIBUTE AMONG THE SERVANTS AT CHRISTMAS . . . FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS.\u201d But Taylor granted them basic survival needs and occasional gifts within the context of their enslavement. Black people followed the directions of those who considered them property and received back a minute portion of the wealth they created when the self-described owners chose to give it. Never were they given the option of leaving their enslavement to use their skills elsewhere.<\/p>\n As you\u2019ve probably noticed, all the letters I\u2019ve mentioned are by White men: Taylor\u2019s surviving letters and Ringgold\u2019s missing ones. None are by the enslaved Black people themselves. There\u2019s a reason for that. Literacy was not among the skills that enslavers valued among Blacks. Many associated the ability<\/a> to read and write (and particularly the ability to study the Bible) with the potential for rebellion. Colonial Georgia, in 1770, passed a law forbidding anyone to teach enslaved people to read or write. In the 1830s, motivated by antislavery rebellions led by literate Blacks, other states followed suit. Although Mississippi, the location of Taylor\u2019s Cypress Grove, did not, enslavers there nonetheless discouraged Black literacy.<\/p>\n Yet some Americans forced into servitude did gain an education. Frederick Douglass<\/a> began learning \u201cthe A, B, C\u201d from one of his enslavers and continued studying after her husband ended the lessons. A British visitor to Cypress Grove<\/a> in 1849 met a \u201cvery remarkably intelligent-looking youth\u201d who \u201chad taught himself<\/em> to read and to write.\u201d According to Taylor\u2019s son, who had spied on the young man, he had \u201csaved every candle-end he could find, and deprived himself of sleep night after night to accomplish his design.\u201d Linking literacy with rebellion and invoking the name of a Haitian revolutionary, the Briton speculated that this man might \u201cbecome a Toussaint l\u2019Ouverture in time.\u201d Some enslaved people even wrote letters. James K. Polk, Taylor\u2019s presidential predecessor and a fellow Mississippi planter, received one shortly after his election from Long Harry<\/a>, a blacksmith he enslaved. Likely dictating to an amanuensis, Harry reported on November 28, 1844, that he had campaigned for Polk, winning him \u201csome votes,\u201d and had won money and goods by betting on the White man\u2019s election.<\/p>\n So, yes, Americans who were considered property and forced into lives of perpetual servitude did develop skills. They learned and taught each other agricultural and mechanical skills that profited those claiming to own them and that preserved the institution that deprived them of freedom. But the lessons came about neither by the Black people\u2019s choice nor for their benefit. Enslavers dictated them for their own purposes and rewarded them as they unilaterally deemed fit. (Refusal to perform the skills, as when a man repeatedly escaped from Polk\u2019s plantation, was rewarded with an instruction<\/a> to \u201cbeat him well.\u201d)<\/p>\n Learning to read\u2014or, for that matter, to escape\u2014was, indeed, Black Americans\u2019 choice. They did hope to benefit from those skills, whether as free men and women who could earn an independent living or as enslaved ones who could spread religion and perhaps start an uprising. Those chosen and potentially beneficial lessons, however, were not the purposes of slavery. They were its antithesis. Enslavers and lawmakers\u2014even those, such as Taylor, who expressed a commitment to enslaved people\u2019s health and contentment\u2014had an interest in those people\u2019s staying put and developing skills that cultivated cotton and timber, not ideas and rights.<\/p>\n Eventually, slavery ended. Most who lived under it never saw that happen. A few, including Douglass, successfully escaped. For the rest, it ended when Union troops went south and masses of Blacks joined their camps during the Civil War. Thereafter, within the strict limits of an incipient sharecropping economy, formerly enslaved Americans could use their abilities for purposes of their choosing. We know little, so far, of the postwar fate of those whom Taylor had enslaved. Matilda Graham died in Cincinnati in 1875 (Cincinnati Daily Times<\/em>, June 22), and C. A. Combs died in St. Paul, MN, in 1896 (at the age of 112, according to the Ely Miner<\/em>, April 22), but they left few records of their activities. Bachman, in The Last White House Slaves<\/em>, concludes that Taylor\u2019s theretofore enslaved son William H. Taylor was sent to Ontario, Canada, and became a farmer when his father became president.<\/p>\n Beyond the Taylor communities, freedpeople could now potentially use their skills for \u201cpersonal benefit.\u201d But the emancipation that enabled this, like reading and fleeing during slavery, was antithetical to the system that had taught those skills. Besides, the vast numbers of formerly enslaved Americans who built and attended schools<\/a> and colleges<\/a>, so they could learn new skills, shows that they considered those acquired under slavery to be wholly inadequate. Slavery, unintentionally, had helped teach them the benefits of the skills they were denied.<\/p>\n Black students at Howard University [1867\u20131920], photograph by Joshua W. Moulton. Library of Congress.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This summer, a new national conversation emerged over the teaching of history. On July 19, the Florida Department of Education approved updated standards for social studies courses. These are the first in Florida to include a distinct curricular strand on African American history. One requirement for middle school lessons attracted widespread attention: \u201cInstruction includes how […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":54740,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12032],"tags":[13716,17066,11654,17069,17068,1140,3910,5241,17067],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-54739","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-american-history","tag-benefit","tag-correspondence","tag-developing","tag-fillmore","tag-millard","tag-personal","tag-skills","tag-taylor","tag-zachary"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"plantation](\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2020\/02\/Taylor-Plantation-book-LoC-cropped-1024x781.jpg\")
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