Landmark PBS Series Chronicles Slavery In America

With 139 years separating us from the official end of slavery, the oppression that marked the first two centuries of American history may seem like an ugly, but ancient, chapter from what we read about in school books. But from the village that would one day become Manhattan to the small tobacco farms of British Virginia, from the sweltering fields of lucrative Carolina plantations to the construction sites of icons like the U.S. Capitol, it was millions of enslaved men, women and children who turned a barely charted territory with a shaky future into one of the strongest and richest nations in the world.

“Slavery was no side show in American history — it was the main event,” says historian James Horton.

“The value of slaves was greater than the dollar value of all America’s banks, all of America’s railroads, all of America’s manufacturing put together.”

Premiering on PBS February 9 and 16, from 9-11 p.m., (check local listings), Thirteen/WNET New York’s groundbreaking four-part series, SLAVERY AND THE MAKING OF AMERICA, chronicles the institution of American slavery from its origins in 1619 — when English settlers in Virginia purchased 20 Africans from Dutch traders — through the arrival of the first 11 slaves in New Amsterdam, the American Revolu-tion, the Civil War, the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment and Reconstruction.

Actor Morgan Freeman narrates the series, which features a moving score by Michael Whalen.

It’s almost 30 years since the acclaimed miniseries, “Roots,” shattered romanticized plantation images and provided the most realistic picture of slavery that most Americans had seen up to that time. Whereas “Roots” told the dramatized story of one family’s struggle to cope with enslavement, SLAVERY AND THE MAKING OF AMERICA presents it in a broad context as an American institution that helped turn a barely charted territory into one of the strongest and richest nations in the world. Twenty-five of the most prominent scholars in the field advised the producers, and/or participated in on-camera interviews.

With such unprecedented breadth come entirely new perspectives about slavery. These perspectives challenge many long-held notions (such as the idea that slavery was strictly a Southern institution; it was, in fact, a national institution) and highlight the contradictions of a country that was founded on the principle of “liberty and justice for all” but embraced slavery. The series presents American slavery as evol-ving from a loosely defined labor system in which Africans and later African-Americans could take matters to court and own property into the tightly regulated enslavement of individuals based solely on race. It also underscores the integral role slavery played in the growth of this country’s Southern and Northern states; the fact that slaves were not a monolithic group but, rather, individuals who came from many different cultures and were empowered by their backgrounds to navigate the environment into which they were thrust; and that they sought freedom in many ways, from joining the ranks of the British during the American Revolution to running off to Canada or joining rebel communities.

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