Smithsonian visitors will therefore be forgiven if they return home without knowing that slaves, including children, often went completely naked, no matter the weather—leaving their bodies exposed not only to the elements but to the whims and impulses of their masters, overseers, and neighbors.

Ben Simpson, formerly enslaved in Georgia and Texas, testified to this treatment by his master Earl Stielszen. “We went naked, that [was] the way he worked us,” he told interviewers from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s, at the age of 90. “We never had any clothes.”

The conditions he described were worse than the treatment of modern farm animals: “We never had no quarters” either, Simpson added. “When night-time come he locks the chain round our necks and then locks it round a tree. Boss, our bed were the ground.”

The great Frederick Douglass detailed similar conditions on his plantation in Maryland, writing: “The children unable to work in the field had neither shoes, stockings, jackets, nor trousers, given to them; their clothing consisted of two coarse linen shirts per year. When these failed them, they went naked until the next allowance‐day. Children from seven to ten years old, of both sexes, almost naked, might be seen at all seasons of the year.”

After seeing the Smithsonian’s current exhibitions on slavery, visitors are also likely to go home without clearly understanding that both female and male slaves were purposely and systematically forced to reproduce without their consent, and that because each child would also be born into bondage, the greater the number of offspring produced, the wealthier their masters would become.

Barney Stone, born in Kentucky in 1847, told WPA interviewers that his own parents had been abused in this way. “My Mammy was mother to ten children, all slaves,” he reported, “and my Pappy, Buck Grant, was a buck slave on the plantation of John Grant, his Mastah.”

Stone even compared his father’s situation to that of a bull reared to sire cattle: “My pappy was used much as a male cow is used on the stock farm and was hired out to other plantation owners for that purpose and was regarded as a valuable slave.”

Ned and Constance Sublette offer the following explanation in their book American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry: “Every farm where the enslaved had children was a slave-breeding farm, if only because every newborn slave child increased an estate’s net worth…. Slaves, whose legal status was comparable to that of livestock, were expected to provide a farm owner with marketable children.”

It is crucial to note, however, that the financial incentive was only part of what made slavery so appealing. The other part was emotional and psychological. When Europeans arrived on the shores of the New World, they needed workers not only to till fields and cook meals but also for sex and companionship. This was all the easier to obtain if there was a whole class of people who were not permitted to refuse.

This power to control Black bodies with impunity led to myriad forms of sadistic torture.

Harriet Jacobs, writing in her famed 1861 narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, described how she endured this kind of torture at the hands of her female master, Mrs. Flint, who would wake Jacobs in the middle of the night by standing over her bed and whispering crude sexual propositions “as though it were her husband who was speaking to me.”

Jacobs’s account also details the treatment of a young Black man named Luke, who was chained to his master’s bed, flogged on his rear end daily, and subjected to sexual indignities that were, she wrote, “of a nature too filthy to be repeated.”

Perhaps understandably, the Smithsonian’s curators do not emphasize the pervasiveness of the sexual torture that many enslaved people endured. But in downplaying (or omitting) this component of slavery, they themselves are twisting the historical record.

If White House officials and museum curators want to present a fuller picture of the era—including, perhaps, the perspectives of white, pro-slavery contemporaries—I would point them to the hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of paid advertisements published in daily newspapers, which remain some of the richest sources of information about enslaved people and their masters. These notices, which appeared across the nation in cities big and small, include announcements for slave sales, want ads written by those seeking to purchase slaves, and requests by individual enslavers for help in recapturing runaways.

When we examine these want ads, we see that the writers often tell us why they want to acquire a slave: as a waiter, for example, or a seamstress, or a house servant. Some, however, leave the reader to speculate about the abominable reasons (there are no innocent ones) that a single adult man would seek to purchase “a young likely negro wench, about eight years old,” “a negro boy, from 10 to 15 years of age,” or “a handsome boy” from “12 to 15.” These brief notices provide confirmatory evidence for what we know already: that enslaved Black children were frequent targets for sexual abuse by grown white men, abuse legally sanctioned by the US government.

The runaway ads are intriguing in a different way: They provide some of the only surviving descriptions of the physical appearances and personalities of specific enslaved people. Of course, such descriptions were a necessity in an era before photography was widespread, and they reveal and memorialize the humanity of the enslaved while also offering a glimpse into the enslavers’ complex feelings about their human property.

It is clear that white enslavers felt a mixture of loss, longing, and desire as they pined for their missing Black slaves. We know this because they described their captives (or ex-captives) in such glowing terms, using words like “pretty,” “well formed,” “well muscled,”and “remarkably handsome.” They also routinely cited specific body parts, noting when a slave had “a good countenance,” a “beautiful set of teeth,” “a fine breast of milch [milk],” or “big buttocks.”

In 1804, a white man by the name of John W. Bronaugh offered a $100 reward for the return of Henry Brent, who had run away as a teenager five years prior. Even after so much time, Bronaugh still desperately missed Brent, gushing,“Henry was a remarkable handsome mulatto, and had a fine countenance.”

These feelings of longing were rarely reciprocated by the enslaved, and as the newspaper ads show, runaways were regularly the victims of injuries to intimate areas of their bodies. When James Henry Carter, “about 40 years of age,” escaped his master in 1785, he had scars “about his private parts.” And when Dilcey Ann, “about 22 years old, 5 feet 3 ½ inches high,” ran away in 1852, she had a scar from a burn to her breast.

Black women, men, and children were humiliated and dehumanized in this way for generations. The Smithsonian’s choice to present a more palatable version of US history for mass consumption may be understandable, but it ultimately fails to prevent the very criticism it tries to avoid in leaving some of the most horrific parts of the story untold.

The true history of US slavery may be difficult to face, but we must. For many descendants of enslaved people in the United States, the trauma still lives in our bones, and denying the truth won’t change that.