reviews have appeared in The Point, Liberties, The New Yorker, The New Republic, n+1, the Chronicle Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and he has published academic articles in Reviews in American History, History of Education Quarterly, and North Carolina Historical Review.
Spillman has a PhD in history from Stanford University, and before that he studied history, English, and political philosophy at the University of North Carolina (and Duke University) as a Robertson Scholar. Originally from Atlanta, he now lives in Denver with his partner and their twin daughters. He also spends part of his time in Leadville, where he serves as chair of the city’s historic preservation commission.
Spillman applied the “Page 99 Test” to Making Sense of Slavery and reported the following:
Page 99 of Making Sense of Slavery introduces Francis Lieber, an early political scientist in the United States who wrote an influential code of army conduct during the Civil War. The page gives some background on Lieber’s journey from Germany, where he was born, to the United States and shows him wrestling with the question of how war affects the status of slavery.Visit Scott Spillman's website.
This turns out to be a perfect encapsulation of my book, which is all about how scholars like Lieber have studied and wrestled with slavery over the course of American history. In fact, the specific question that interests Lieber on page 99—the question of slaves as people versus slaves as property, or the mixture of “the two ideas Man and Thing,” as he put it—is one of the central themes of the first part of the book. Lieber believed that war washed away the status of slaves as property, leaving only people whom the US government and military should consider free. This was one of the arguments that the Union used to justify emancipation during the Civil War.
The way Lieber approaches that question about the status of slavery in the midst of the war also provides a good example, I think, of the way that the book always tries to connect ideas to lived experience. In other words, this is not just a story of books or arguments flying back and forth, but of embodied people struggling to make some sense of their own lives.
In addition to ideas and individuals, the book is interested in the institutions in which they take shape. Lieber’s background on page 99 provides a nutshell summary of some of the broader changes in the landscape of American intellectual life during the early republic, particularly the influence of German ideas and educational models after the 1820s. The very bottom of the page hints at an even more transformative institutional change that will come after the Civil War—the rise of the research university. The rest of the book deals largely with how the study of slavery would become incorporated into the research university, and with what consequences.
--Marshal Zeringue
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