A fight for their lives: slaves and their stories

There is considerable ground covered in the new PBS documentary series “Slavery and the Making of America” (four parts, split between tonight and next Wednesday), but it all slopes down toward a single point: that although the effects and manifestations of slavery were, and are, complicated, subtle and far-reaching -- the nation is still paying for its investment in the “peculiar institution” -- the reason for its existence comes down to the single word “money.” Whatever rationalizations, superstitions and, ultimately, “traditions” were attached to it, and whatever preexisting racial prejudice shaped it -- only black people were legally enslaved in America -- its foundations were entirely economic, and rooted ultimately in greed.

The series, which comes from New York’s WNET, is not quite the Television Event it would have been had this territory not been covered at greater length and more substantially by “Africans in America: America’s Journey Through Slavery,” a 1998 PBS documentary (from Boston’s WGBH). But seven years is, after all, not too short a time to revisit a subject so critical to the understanding of America, so bound up in its founding and sorrows, especially in a day when the word “freedom” is being tossed around like Super Bowl confetti.

Narrated by Morgan Freeman, the series offers the usual mix of talking heads, readings from primary sources, old pictures and silent dramatic re-creation, with perhaps a little too much of the last. These scenes are necessary to a degree, given the scarcity of historical imagery (and the often prohibitive cost of licensing it), but they are also key to the filmmakers’ strategy -- to make history real. And yet, though they give you something to look at besides the talking heads, that something amounts finally to actors in costume, and the re-creations do less to bring the story alive than do the talking heads themselves. The professors know their subjects backward and forward, and treat them like old friends or honored relations; their excitement in bringing these stories to light is palpable and infectious.

“Slavery” goes relatively light on facts and figures -- without scanting the important ones, such as the fact that there were slave owners in the White House for 50 of the 72 years between the election of George Washington and that of Abraham Lincoln, and that the North was tied to the slave-dependent cotton economy in what Sen. Charles Sumner (R-Mass.) called “a conspiracy of the lords of the loom and the lords of the lash” -- to concentrate instead on individuals. Because it takes a slave’s-eye view, as it were, it’s less a comprehensive history than a recounting of the ways that black people survived, and fought back, across the 250-odd years between the first slaves’ arrival in New Amsterdam and the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.

More familiar names -- Sally Hemings, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Nat Turner -- are either forgone or briefly mentioned in favor of such lesser-known figures as David Walker, whose “Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World” was a call to arms that prefigured the imagery of the Declaration of Independence; Titus or “Colonel Tye,” an escaped slave who captained guerrillas on the side of the British during the Revolutionary War; Mum Bett, who sued for her freedom and won; Harriet Jacobs, author of “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” who spent seven years hiding in an attic crawl space before escaping to the North and forming a friendship with proto-feminist Amy Post, who encouraged her to write her story.

Most intriguing of all is Robert Smalls, who, as one commentator here has it, “challenged the whole theoretical notion of slavery” by outfoxing people who believed themselves innately his superior. Smalls’ theft of a Confederate ship, laden with fellow escaping slaves, which he delivered to the Union Navy blockading Charleston harbor, was only the first of his adventures. For an encore, he joined the Army and fought in 17 battles, then after the war returned home to South Carolina, bought the house where his mother had worked as a slave and got himself elected to the state legislature and finally to the U.S. Congress, during the fascinating false dawn of Reconstruction. There is the stuff of a first-class historical epic here, Hollywood moguls.

A supplemental rather than definitive work, “Slavery and the Making of America” is not the last word on the subject. But it’s a subject on which there should be no last word.

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‘Slavery and the Making of America’

Where: KCET

When: 9-11 p.m. tonight and next Wednesday

Ratings: TV-PG-V (may be unsuitable for young children with advisory for some violence)

Morgan Freeman...Narrator

Executive producer, William R. Grant