Initially, however, the study of slavery in America did not occur primarily among scholars in academic settings. Instead, it was conducted by people we might regard as gentleman amateurs. The reason was simple: Universities as we know them today did not yet exist in America. Colonial colleges functioned not to expand knowledge through new research but to pass down the wisdom of revered texts. The curriculum provided little space where slavery might be discussed, analyzed, or evaluated. Students would surely read about ancient slavery as they droned through their Greek and Latin recitations, but the primary emphasis of those exercises lay squarely on ancient languages, not ancient life. Other disciplines that we might consider a natural site for the study of slavery — economics and sociology, for instance — did not yet really exist.
When the American research university eventually took shape in the decades after the Civil War, slavery was an important subject of research almost from the start. In the fall of 1883, a German historian of the United States named Hermann von Holst came to the Johns Hopkins University to speak with the school’s graduate students in history and political science. Von Holst’s appearance was a major event. In the 19th century, German universities occupied the position that American universities have now held since roughly the middle of the 20th century: They were acknowledged leaders in nearly every field, home to the best laboratories, the biggest libraries, and the most highly regarded professors. For Americans at the time, von Holst was the embodiment of scholarly history, in part because he was the first German scholar to pay serious attention to the United States.
Strikingly, von Holst’s message to the graduate students at Johns Hopkins was to urge them to study slavery. “The history of slavery has not yet been written,” he informed them, lamenting that more attention had been paid to slavery as a subject of political controversy than to “slavery as an historic institution.” The students took up his suggestion. The subject was a perfect fit, allowing them to show how their version of scientific, supposedly objective historical study could help the country move past the bitterly divisive debates that had sparked the Civil War and inform the question of post-emancipation race relations. Soon a Hopkins student named Jeffrey Brackett gave the first talk on slavery ever delivered at the annual meeting of the recently established American Historical Association, and before the decade was out Brackett produced the first doctoral dissertation ever written about American slavery. More than a dozen followed at Johns Hopkins over the next 25 years, and the students who wrote them went on to staff emerging history departments at universities across the country.