UR prof provides historical lens for present

University of Rochester history professor Thomas P. Slaughter is a firm believer that history is a good way to start understanding today's problems.

Some of his six books have looked at flash points in history — be it the American Revolution, a rebellion against a tax on liquor during the early days of the Republic, or armed resistance to an effort to put the shackles back on escaped slaves.

His probing insights into the past provide a clear lens for looking at such issues as race and inequality and fairness in taxation.

And while Slaughter's analysis — drawing from different disciplines — gives a big-picture view of history, he also steers away from oversimplifying.

"The history profession has grown quite specialized, but Tom has broken down artificial barriers between fields — and creatively blends the social, cultural and political," said UR history professor Joan Shelley Rubin about her colleague.

Slaughter has an eye for making the past accessible to the public in an original way.

He is doing this with some of the more than 150,000 pages of letters, diaries and other documents housed at UR concerning William Henry Seward and his family. Seward settled in the Cayuga County community of Auburn in the early 1820s and went on to serve as governor of New York, U.S. senator and President Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of State.

Slaughter is spearheading a collaborative effort with UR's Digital Humanities Center and Department of Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation of Rush Rhees Library to transcribe and put online some of these documents. The public will be able to view them and, by clicking on names in the transcribed documents, be connected to additional information about the people mentioned and customs of the day.

Well-versed in a variety of topics, Slaughter teaches courses that range from the History of Eating and Food to America and the World.

Although his specialty is early American history, Slaughter plans — probably in 2016 — to teach a course, The History of Now, using newspapers as the text for the course.

"All the problems on the front page have historical roots," Slaughter said.

Slaughter's new 487-page work, Independence: The Tangled Roots of the American Revolution, published earlier this year, has been described by the Kirkus Review as a "finely researched, arduously plotted study" about an "out-of-touch motherland."

The British government, Slaughter maintains, brought the Revolutionary War upon itself by making increasing demands on the colonists and not fully understanding that the settlers exercised a degree of independence all along.

"The battle for hearts and minds did not end with the Declaration of Independence, nor would it with victory, the peace treaty, or the new Constitution that embodied both the new nation's principles and flaws," Slaughter writes.

Lessons of history

Like a detective trying to understand the intricacies of American history, Slaughter's earlier work includes an analysis of 18th-century Quaker abolitionist John Woolman, whose writings influenced the anti-slavery movement in the following century.

Slaughter has also delved deeply into archives to examine an attempt to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, which led to an 1851 rebellion when the federal government tried to seize four runaway slaves in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

In researching his book, Bloody Dawn: The Christiana Riot and Racial Violence in the Antebellum North, Slaughter ended up reviewing court records for more than 100 years of violent crimes in Lancaster County and found that African-Americans were more likely to get prosecuted, convicted and given a longer sentence than white people arrested for similar crimes.

Such treatment helps explain police-community relations today.

"The bigger lesson is that historical relationships have a great impact on current attitudes and confidence in the judicial system. It makes sense to me that some people don't trust the judicial system," Slaughter said in an interview.

Slaughter, 63 — who is not related to U.S. Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-Fairport — grew up in Newtown, Pennsylvania, east of Lancaster. After graduating from the University of Maryland with a bachelor's degree in history and political science, Slaughter witnessed some of the inequities of the justice system working for a year as a paid intern helping to handle parole and probation cases for the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.

"It left me extremely frustrated with the judicial system because it struck me that decisions about prosecution and sentencing were arbitrary," Slaughter said about the year he spent at this job.

Slaughter then spent two years in the Volunteers In Service To America program, helping to organize groups for community service on college campuses. During this time, he earned his master's in American history from the University of Maryland.

In 1978, he started his doctoral studies at Princeton University, earning a Ph.D. in American history in 1983.

His first book, The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution, told of an uprising of settlers in western Pennsylvania against a liquor tax.

About 500 armed men burned the home of a federal tax collector in the region. And while President George Washington dispatched about 13,000 troops to the area, this tax was not collected west of the Appalachian Mountains.

Roots of revolution

Slaughter's new book about the American Revolution looks at divisions as much as common goals of the colonists over the 150 years leading to the revolution.

Thomas Paine, the radical pamphleteer whose Common Sense was published on the eve of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, called for a break with Britain.

But separating from Britain was not in the works until the colonies faced new demands from Britain, which Slaughter says was frustrated with its inability to get the colonies to help pay the bills.

"Smuggling and tax evasions rendered ineffectual every effort to raise revenues and enforce the law," writes Slaughter. "The tradition of disregard was by this time so embedded in the relationship between London and the colonies that it would take invigorated enforcement to reverse things, and that alone would undoubtedly provoke resistance."

And resistance was indeed provoked.

The Stamp Act of 1765, which imposed a tax on a variety of goods and transactions, became a form of taxation without representation that was denounced by the representative bodies in the colonies —and led to the repeal of this act a year later.

But other attempts by the British government to raise revenue and tighten its rule were met with resistance.

Most notably, the imposition of import taxes on tea, along with the privileged position the British gave the East India Company in the colonies, sparked the Boston Tea Party. Colonists dumped about 340 chests of tea from British ships into the Boston Harbor.

The British mistakenly believed that cracking down on Massachusetts would keep the rebellion from spreading.

Grass-roots history

Slaughter joined the UR history faculty in 2008, after teaching seven years at the University of Notre Dame and 19 years at Rutgers University.

In addition to his published writings. Slaughter has given the history department higher visibility by serving as editor-in-chief of Reviews in American History, a quarterly published by the Johns Hopkins University Press.

The Seward Family Project will give the public a look at 19th-century upstate history that goes well beyond the big names of history.

With a $360,000 grant from the Fred L. Emerson Foundation, which is a family-based charity in Auburn, a dozen UR students — both graduate and undergraduate — are now working on the project.

A digital image of the document will appear on the left side of the computer screen and the transcribed version on the right.

The viewer can click on a name and be connected to additional information about the person. UR has acquired databases — Ancestry.com and findagrave.com — to help compile information about the people mentioned in the Seward papers.

"Some of these are amazingly alive," said Slaughter.

Teaching about the environment is another of Slaughter's passions.

Growing up in rural Pennsylvania, Slaughter developed an attachment to the environment that is reflected in his book, The Natures of John and William Bartram, a look at a father and son who were leading botanists of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Slaughter has been teaching courses in environmental history for two decades.

"I think it's the major problem that this generation of college students will face in their lifetime because of what we know about global climate change," he said.

JGOODMAN@DemocratandChronicle.com

Twitter.com/Goodman_DandC