Legal Commentary

Last Friday, while freezing in New Orleans for the AALS meeting, I had the unnerving experience of eating lunch in New Orleans' former slave exchange, in which Pierre Maspero's restaurant is now housed. The building's former role as a slave market is invisible except for a discrete historical plaque. The restaurant's menu, unsurprisingly, prefers to give much greater prominence to Andrew Jackson's and the Lafitte Brothers' meeting in the building to plan the defense of New Orleans: Anyone who has read Walter Johnson's searing account of the New Orleans slave markets can imagine that eating inside a slave market can have the chilling feeling of eating inside, say, a barracks at Dachau.

But the invisibility of Maspero's slavery exchange seems par for the course in the United States: Slavery's physical landmarks and artifacts seem mostly invisible in th realm of public history. The building that houses that old Franklin & Armfield slave market in Alexandria, Virginia (on 3115 Duke Street, in case any of you are curious) is, for instance, marked only with a small plaque and a National Historic Landmark designation -- this, despite its being on federal territory until 1846 (when Alexandria was ceded back to Virginia by the feds) and, therefore, at the center of the great constitutional controversy of the 1830s over the petition campaign to end slavery in Washington, D.C. There is no museum inside explaining its role in maintaining slavery. There is a small, family-run museum with slavery-related artifacts in Milwaukee, WI -- a credit to J. Justin & Gwen Ragsdale who maintain it, but hardly what one would call a nationally visible landmark on the beaten path of public history. There are several important museums of African-American history that include material on slavery but, to my knowledge, no museum devoted solely to the study and preservation of material on slavery itself -- its victims, economics, laws, customs, etc. Such a museum has been proposed for Washington, D.C., but, to my knowledge, Congress has appropriated no funds for the project.

Why not? There is something deeply odd about the absence of a major research and educational center about slavery in Washington, D.C., New Orleans, or elsewhere on the beaten path of tourism and public history. Have African-American organizations not made the creation of such a museum a priority? Or is the existence of our "peculiar institution" still too embarrassing and emotionally painful for us to make part of the standard docent's circuit on the Washington Mall?