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What follows here is the invocation offered by Yale Dean and distinguished historian of early American religion Jon Butler, at the Frederick Douglass Book Prize Dinner, held at the Yale Club, in New York, February 23, 2006. The eloquence and wisdom of these remarks seemed to the editors of this newsletter to transcend the celebratory occasion at which they were uttered and to speak to the core of what all historians, in their finest moments, aspire to achieve. We thank Professor Butler for allowing Uncommon Sense to share the gift of his insight with his Institute colleagues.

We are here tonight to celebrate scholarship—those who support it and especially those who create it. Yale University has been the fortunate recipient of major support from Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman that created and has sustained the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition since 1998. Put simply, the Gilder Lehrman Center is one of the glories of Yale.

The Gilder Lehrman Center also is one of the glories of the American historical profession. It has tackled the tragedy, triumph, and struggle of slavery, resistance, and abolition with a resolute purpose unmatched in history centers, particularly in a subject matter that has so roiled American life for three centuries. It also has uplifted a transforming historical scholarship that contests the commonplace wisdom that scholarship, perhaps history especially, plays little role in reshaping society and the lives we live.

As we think about the achievements that will be honored tonight and especially about the scholars who attained them, we might be instructed by an episode in American musical and cultural history. In Andrew Ward’s wonderful history of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Ward describes how a brave troupe of young men and women traveled America in 1871 in a desperate effort to salvage an infant Fisk University dedicated to educating emancipated slaves.1 The Jubilee Singers often opened their performances with the spiritual “Steal Away,” which they sang in pianissimo and in unison. The task presented exceptional musical difficulties for the singers; it is not easy to sing softly and in unison to near ethereal effect. For many listeners, the words in “Steal Away,” seemingly so innocuous now, proved unsettling, all the more when they had to lean forward to hear African-Americans singers open a program with verse challenging in content and volume simultaneously:

Steal away,
Steal away,
Steal away to Jesus.
Steal away,
Steal away home.
I ain’t got long to stay here.

The Fisk Jubilee Singers scarcely could have chosen a simpler, more defiant opening song. “Steal Away” contested every conceit taught in slavery and in the new struggles about emancipation and the contested meanings of religion.

Its startling opening word had been the lightning rod for violent discipline for more than two centuries of the New World slave experience. The spiritual’s verse proclaimed African Americans as the authors of their own freedom, who could “steal away” themselves with no one’s permission; the road “home” was theirs alone to journey, theirs alone to possess.

Historians and history sing too. Their voices are not musical but narrative, analytical, and documentary. We have heard them in the work of many scholars, from W. E. B. Du Bois to John Hope Franklin, Sylvia Frey, John Blassingame, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, and David Brion Davis. And we hear them in the work of Frederick Douglass Prize winners, tonight’s being that of Laurent Dubois, through his gripping account of the Guadeloupe rebellions that abolished slavery 1794.

Scholarship sings through human complexities compellingly narrated. Scholarship limns truth through new evidence won with ingeniously creative and staggeringly intense research. Scholarship flourishes in and through communities whose oxygen of labor flows through the quiet example of others, past and present. Historical scholarship transforms who we are because it challenges who we have imagined we have been. It transforms the present by recovering the past in its startling bluntness, sweet surprises, and possibilities obscured by the encrustations of time and convenient memory alike. And it is scholarship that indeed, and perhaps sometimes unintentionally, provides our best and most thoughtful glimpses of the humane future that is ours to shape in the historical time we inhabit today.

This gift of scholarship thrives because individuals and institutions sustain the capacity for research, dialogue, and, especially, contemplation. These are the capacities that the Gilder Lehrman Center has so generously funded. And they are the capacities that all of us must continue to sustain if the “home” we seek is as much shaped by thoughtful, considered intelligence as the home proclaimed by the Fisk Jubilee Singers was shaped a century ago by resilient commitment to freedom and justice.

Tonight we celebrate not only a book and a group of books but transforming scholarship, through which we see who we are with a light that beams the persisting dream of human achievement.

Transforming scholarship is what the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition is about.

Transforming scholarship is the only legacy all of us individually and collectively can responsibly leave to our heirs as neighbors and as students.

The unique and transforming gift of scholarship, then, is what this wonderful evening of celebration is about. Like the gift of song in the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the scholarship and historians we honor epitomize the larger purpose we are proud to proclaim by shout and unison pianissimo alike: that truth and justice only flourish amidst knowledge and its practice, and that together they are the compelling reasons for what we do and why we do it.

Yale University