While reading Sean Wilentz’s “American Slavery and ‘the Relentless Unforeseen’,” I felt enthralled by the idea that, because the history of past events is written as something inevitable, we underestimate the frightening nature of those events as they happened during those times. It was something I had never deeply thought about before because, as Wilentz implied, people like me who had not read this before would initially regard history as a record of inevitable events. Consequently, this idea conflicts with Hannah Jones’s claim that Black people always knew that their efforts would contribute to the ideals of freedom and equality in America. While it is true that Blacks have fought for their rights and ultimately succeeded in history, there was no guarantee during the time of those events that they could have succeeded. This weakens Jones’s idea that racial inequality and the Blacks’ indignation at said inequality was the crux of American freedom and equality.
At the beginning of the article, Wilentz described how despite the popular moral indignation at slavery during the seventeenth century, it was not strong enough to encourage political action against. This raises doubt for the concept that “Blacks succeeding at their rebellion against slavery was an inevitability,” as Jones would suggest in “The 1619 Project.” One could certainly interpret the definition of the concept as, “the rebellion against slavery would have succeeded one day, just not now.” In this case, the concept could be treated as an opinion or belief rather than some sort of inevitability or “truth” of history. In light of this, it is interesting to see how the works of Hannah Jones and Sean Wilentz interact with each other; Although they both talk about the concept of slavery and what happened during the times when slavery had been utilized, they contradict each other in how they approach the subject of slavery and its historical impact.
I am also surprised and interested in the amount of descriptive detail that Wilentz provides in his article. For example, I was never aware of how even during the early stages of slavery in the Anglo-American world, there had been actual moral uproar against slavery. Before reading this, I had assumed that the populace during those times would have mostly endorsed slavery since the slaves during those times could be treated as “subhuman.” In his article, Wilentz also touches upon the modern and pessimistic view that the nation of the United States is rooted in the cruel and proliferating slavery that besmirches the American ideals of freedom and equality amongst all people. Wilentz conflicts with this view by talking about how the modern populace seems to know too little or none at all that the United States was also rooted in the actual conflict against slavery because it contradicted the ideals of freedom that encouraged the American Revolution. Through his descriptive details and analysis of U.S. history in relation to slavery, Wilentz has been able to present a sort of objective and complete view of the interactions between slavery and America as well as the rest of the world.
