Desmond Jagmohan

This project studies slave testimonies as constituting two forms of witnessing: political and moral. Antebellum slave narratives exemplified political witnessing by providing inculpatory evidence against slavery to aid its abolition. Postbellum slave testimonies—the thousands of WPA interviews with formerly enslaved people—constituted moral witnessing: with slavery abolished, these accounts treat testimony as morally valuable in itself. The significance is both normative and methodological. It argues that citizens have a duty to remember the experiences of survivors of national atrocities, distinct from any state duty to commemorate such events. Since states may distort public memory according to partisan whims, citizens should bear that duty to remember directly. By recovering the moral intuitions and normative arguments embedded in the memories of ordinary slaves—rather than only exceptional figures like Frederick Douglass or Harriet Jacobs—this project addresses the hermeneutical injustices around slave testimonies and offers a genuine intellectual history from below.