Yale historian John Blasingame said it best in 1978 when he wrote: “The ghost of U.B. Phillips haunts us all.” Born in Georgia at the dawn of the twentieth century, Ulrich Bonnell Phillips is often credited as the first modern scholar of American slavery. His American Negro Slavery (1918) was the first comprehensive study to use source materials such as plantation journals, accounts books, and letter collections; it was also widely influential. In the decades after its release, it became the benchmark study by which a generation of Americans understood the institution of slavery.
Yet, as the Harvard-trained sociologist W.E.B. Dubois wrote in a contemporaneous review, American Negro Slavery “is not a history of American slavery but an economic study of American slaveholders.” Phillips’s basic interpretation re-fashioned the tenets of lost cause mythology into academic scholarship. He argued that masters were kind and humane, that slaves were child-like and happy, and that slavery benefited enslaved people because it acted as a civilizing institution. Phillip’s views have long been discredited, but in the 1920s, he was the foremost authority on slavery, the Civil War, and the American South. He taught at the University of Wisconsin, the University of Michigan, and in 1929, he joined Yale’s faculty as a professor of American History. Phillips’s appointment established Yale as a place where students could study topics related to Slavery and Southern History. Indeed, despite Phillips’s relatively brief tenure at Yale—he died in 1934 just five years after arriving at the university—his appointment marked a tradition of scholars joining the faculty who specialized in Southern History.
However, by mid-century, this tradition of Southern History at Yale was at the forefront of overturning many of the narratives Phillips sealed into to place. C. Vann Woodward, who joined Yale’s faculty in 1961, was perhaps the pre-eminent Southern historian of his generation. His writing on the South rejected Phillips’s romanticized view of the region, and his work uncovering the origins of Jim Crow laws gave scholarly support to the Civil Rights Movement: Martin Luther King, Jr. reportedly described Woodward’s book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, as the “historical bible of the Civil Rights Movement.” Woodward would also work alongside Southern historian John Hope Franklin and NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall as an expert witness on what would become Brown v. Board of Education. Unlike Phillips, whose consequential tenure at Yale was brief, Woodward taught at Yale for close to two decades, which meant he advised a generation of graduate students (including many Southerners), whose work carried this revised tradition forward.
It was the study of slavery, however, that received the most serious revision. By the 1960s and 70s, scholarship on slavery underwent nothing short of a revolution. Prompted by the enormous energy of the Civil Rights Movement, historians across the academy began studying slavery as never before. John Blassingame, a former Woodward graduate student at Yale and the eventual chair of Yale’s African American Studies Program, was one of the field’s true pioneers. His Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (1972) was the first to analyze slavery from the perspective of the enslaved and was one of the first to make use of first-person accounts of slavery written by enslaved people, which contradicted Phillip’s simplistic notions of slave life. In a way, Blassingame’s methodological approach became his life’s work. He would go on to edit and publish a six-volume collection of The Papers of Fredrick Douglas and become a prodigious collector of archival material featuring the voices of enslaved or formerly enslaved people.
Meanwhile, if Blassingame changed the way scholars thought about slave culture and community, David Brion Davis did the same for the study of slavery and its ideas. Davis—who began his career at Cornell—arrived at Yale in 1971 after having won the Pulitzer Prize for his The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966). It was the first installment in a historic trilogy—including The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolutions (1976) and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (2014)—which placed the history slavery at the very heart of Western society. Unique among historians of his time, Davis analyzed slavery from a hemispheric, if not global, perspective and was one of the first to study not just slavery, but what he described as the world historic emergence of anti-slavery as a social and political force. In 2014, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal, the highest honor bestowed by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Not least of all, David Brion Davis served as the founding director of Yale’s Gilder-Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition (GLC), the first of any such center that supports the scholarly investigation of historical and contemporary slavery around the world.
Image Source for Ulrich B. Phillips, C. Vann Woodward, and John Blassingame: “Slavery, Yale, and Abolition” website: https://slavery.yale.edu/tags/historiography