Pursuing the mildly off-subject discussion of Virginia's premiere
role in developing public institutions, Louise Heite offers the
following follow-up to my earlier answer to Suzanne Spencer-Wood.


You should have also included reference to the school for the deaf and blind,
which predated similar disability-specific "training" facilities elsewhere
by at least a generation. Jefferson's Virginia was very forward-thinking in
its view of the purposes and the best methods of social engineering, but
you'd never know it from most histories of the US, even the more modern and
dispassionate ones.

Slavery has corrupted modern interpretations of that
very complex society very badly, as much as it corrupted the society where
it was practiced. We focus on that old ugly - and sexy - institution to the
exclusion of what was positive. We deny the human complexity that can
produce great works on one hand, and be oblivious to the muck around it on
the other. But then, there are homeless people curled up on the steam vents
around Independence Square right now, and the tourists look right past them
to enjoy the landscaping around the monuments.

Of course, a big part of that focus on only the bad part of Virginia's
post-Revolutionary history is that victors write the histories. Imagine how
a modern history of Europe written by victorious Nazis would read. But
another big part of that is that historians are as lazy and as much victims
of their local mythologies as any other population.

It takes a lot of work to understand a society that on the one hand
can engage in what was
leading-edge, moral, philosophically driven social reform on the one
hand, and human chattel bondage on the other.

The really hard part for a modern American, historian or not, to get his or
her mind around is that recognizing that complexity would mean admitting to
the foolish, self-righeous, and sometimes knowing, complicity of the North
in the maintenance of slavery. The guy who funded Wilberforce made his
fortune in cheap cotton cloth, including slave cloth. I can't believe that
he was that interested in disestablishing the foundation that supported his
business. I can believe that he hoped that he could get his hands on the
source of the raw material if he could create enough turmoil in the cotton
lands. That was, after all, a great age of vertical integration in
manufacturing.

Fear on the part of  landed classes in the South (and later the west)
of bankers
and idustrialists has been dismissed as romantic populism corrupted by the
grasping hands of faded aristocracy. Thing is, even paranoids have enemies.

If the abolitionists had been less shrill, and if means of freeing slaves
without costing their owners their livelihoods had been pursued with some
energy, I think the slaveowners of the south would have been delighted to
be shut of their feudal responsibility to their slave dependents.

Look at the rush at the end of the eighteenth century to free
infant slaves into indentures that lasted the length of their effective
working lives. This developed when legislatures in the Quaker colonies
required indemnification of the counties against financial responsibility
for slaves who were freed when they were too old to maintain themselves.

Indentured infants had no more freedom than their slave parents really,
but the owners were no longer responsible for their upkeep in old age. The
effect was a generation of neither freedom nor slavery, but it also
provided a very long period of transition for the economies of those
particular slave states from a slave-based economy to a labor-based
economy.

That dirty secret, and the failure of compensated emancipation, which
would have maintained the economic base of southern agriculture and
agricultural manufacturing while radically and suddenly changing the labor
base, is probably the least studied aspect of the years just prior to the
Civil War. Understanding both subjects would take such a massive effort of
demythologizing on the part of most American historians that I don't look
for it to happen for another generation or two.

Which is part of why I got out of the history business. Even my dear old
dissertation advisor couldn't grasp the level of received truth and shared
regional mythology that lubricates the profession -- and he is one of
the leading thinkers in social history. But you can see why I am not the
least surprised that Virginia's contribution to the asylum movement has
been lost in the shuffle.