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For American Public School District Curriculum Leaders: Understanding the broader history of slavery provides essential context for teaching American history as the nation observes the 250th anniversary of its founding. Different civilizations developed different systems of slavery, different routes of commerce and eventually very different histories of abolition.

Slavery was not invented by Europeans. Forms of slavery and forced servitude existed for thousands of years in Africa, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and the South American continent including what is now Mexico.  Within Africa, captives of war, debtors and members of rival communities were among those enslaved. Long-established African political and commercial networks subsequently became entangled with European demand for labor in the Americas, producing the extraordinarily destructive Atlantic slave trade.

This larger history does not diminish the particular brutality of American slavery or its enduring consequences. It places them within the history of a widespread human institution shaped by power, warfare, commerce and law. Teaching that larger history gives students a more complete account of human responsibility than narratives that permanently assign innocence or guilt according to ancestry.

The English-speaking world became a leading center of organized abolition. British abolitionists transformed moral and religious opposition to slavery into sustained public action and parliamentary reform. Evangelical Christians, Quakers and others were particularly important. Parliament abolished the British slave trade in 1807 and enacted the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833, with emancipation taking effect across most of the British Empire beginning in 1834. Britain subsequently committed diplomatic, financial and naval resources to suppressing the Atlantic slave trade. The Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron intercepted slave ships and liberated many thousands of captives.

The American story followed a different and far bloodier course. The United States prohibited the importation of enslaved people beginning in 1808, yet slavery expanded domestically and became inseparable from the sectional crisis that produced the Civil War. Southern states seceded in defense of a social and economic order founded substantially upon slavery. Lincoln’s Republican administration ultimately made emancipation a Union war policy, and the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery throughout the United States in 1865. Reconstruction was followed by decades of segregation and disenfranchisement in the South before the twentieth-century civil-rights movement secured another profound change in American law and institutions.

This history deserves to be taught neither as an indictment nor as an absolution of people living today. Young Americans can understand simultaneously that slavery was brutal, that racial injustice persisted long after emancipation and that societies possess a remarkable capacity for moral reform. The history of abolition is itself part of the history of slavery.

For African-American students in particular, that larger field includes considerably more than victimhood. It includes endurance, family formation, religious faith, intellectual achievement, military service, entrepreneurship, abolitionism, political organization and the long exercise of agency under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. Frederick Douglass belongs in this history alongside William Wilberforce.

As Americans continue to disagree about how this history should be taught, public schools should expect parents to examine closely the historical narratives presented to their children. Where families conclude that schools present American history principally through inherited grievance or collective guilt, some will seek alternatives through home schooling, charter schools and other forms of education. That competition should encourage every educational institution to pursue historical completeness rather than political conformity.

The better objective is neither grievance nor forgetfulness. It is historical proportion: acknowledging human cruelty without denying human achievement, recognizing inherited consequences without assigning inherited guilt and showing young people that institutions can be reformed by people possessing sufficient courage, conviction and persistence.

William Wilberforce was born on 24 August 1759 in Kingston upon Hull, Yorkshire, England.