Morison and his
Growth of the American Republic co-author Henry Steele Commager were asked by delegations of African Americans to remove racist passages from the 1950 edition of their widely used history textbook. The following is an excerpt from the passages targeted as a false and objectionable justification for slavery.
As for Sambo, whose wrongs moved the abolitionists to wrath and tears, there is some reason to believe that he suffered less than any other class in the South from its ‘peculiar institution.’ The majority of slaves were adequately fed, well-cared for, and apparently happy. Competent observers reported that they performed less labor than the hired man of the Northern states. Their physical wants were better supplied than those of thousands of Northern laborers, English operatives, and Irish peasants; their liberty was not much less than that enjoyed by the North of England ‘hinds’ or the Finnish torpare. Although brought to America by force, the incurably optimistic Negro soon became attached to the country, and devoted to his ‘white folks.’ Slave insurrections were planned -- usually by the free Negroes — but invariably betrayed by some faithful black; and trained obedience kept most slaves faithful throughout the Civil War. . . If we overlook the original sin of the slave trade, there was much to be said for slavery as a transitional status between barbarism and civilization.
According to several sources, the entry was not removed until 1962 despite requests for change to the earlier editions that began in 1944.
In the Spring 2004 edition of
History of Education Quarterly, Jonathan Zimmerman wrote the following:
Starting in 1950, for example, African Americans petitioned well-known race liberals Henry Steele Commager and Samuel Eliot Morison to revise their popular textbook, Growth of the American Republic, which declared that the American slave...or "Sambo," as the text called him...was "adequately fed, well cared for, and apparently happy." Privately, the authors joked about Black complaints..."bushman squawks," Morison called them...against their book. "Felix the nigger-baiter is funny!" Morison told Commager, using the latter's nickname. Miffed by attacks upon his own liberal credentials, Morison stressed that his daughter was married to Jewish NAACP President Joel Spingarn...and that "Sambo" had been Morison's childhood nickname. Eventually, Morison agreed to remove the term "pickanninies"; in future editions, he quipped, Black children would be described only as "nice little seal-brown darlings." But he insisted upon retaining "Sambo," "Uncle Daniel," and several other images of slave docility. "I will be damned if I will take them out for ... anybody," Morison told Commager.—Zimmerman
The authors finally removed the passage in the 1962 version of their text book. The passage echoes the thesis of
American Negro Slavery (1918) by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips. This view, popularized by most white historians until the mid twentieth century, relied on the one-sided personal records of slave-owners and portrayed slavery as a mainly benign institution.
"The Phillips school of slavery historiography was not limited to the South or to a faction within the historical profession; as recently as 1950, for instance, Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, of Harvard and Columbia Universities respectively, propagated the traditional interpretation in one of the leading college textbooks of the era," according to the American Social History Project at the City University of New York.
Pulitzer Prize winning historian Leon F. Litwack found the widely used textbook offensive, saying;
"The textbook was my first confrontation with history. I asked my 11th grade teacher for the opportunity to respond to the textbook’s version of Reconstruction, to what I thought were distortions and racial biases. (I had already read Howard Fast’s Freedom Road.) The research led me to the library...and to W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, with that intriguing subtitle: An Essay Toward a History of the Part which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860—1880. Armed with that book, I presented what I thought to be a persuasive rebuttal of the textbook."—Litwack
