This book is not about the history of American slavery. This book is about how American historians and thinkers thought about American slavery. Spillman reviews all the significant writings about the topic and traces the evolution of how slavery was presented/analyzed/rationalized. It's very thorough and complete, most of what's in here I was not already familiar with.

A couple of my favorites: A writer from Virginia, George Fitzhugh, wrote a book called 'Sociology for the South' which Spillman says was "a slave-based critique of free society". "Fitzhugh saw the growing popularity of socialist ideas as evidence that even free society's defenders knew they faced deep and perhaps intractable problems.... The oldest, the best and most common form of Socialism,' according to Fitzhugh, was slavery....Indeed, Fitzhugh took the argument for slavery in the abstract all the way to the last stop...He believed that its abolition in Europe had proven disastrous for the working class... 'We are all in the habit of maintaining that our slaves are far better off than the common laborers of Europe,' he pointed out. The logical consequence of this claim, he continued, was that those common laborers should be restored to slavery." Indeed...

Also: "In what could be read as a tacit admission that their pro-slavery interpretation of the Federal Constitution was not quite correct, the Confederates explicitly wrote slavery into their own document, substituting 'slaves' for 'persons' in several places and adding clauses protecting 'the institution of negro slavery' as well as the right to property in slaves." That about sums it up.

What this book makes clear is that after the civil war, pro-slavery historians set about defining the terms of the debate on the topic, and essentially rewrote history to justify their continued promotion of white supremacy.

Making Sense of Slavery is a historiography of slavery studies. Tracing the way in which enslavement is written about from before the Civil War to the present, it provides a narrative about how our academic understanding of the institution has changed, and how that work reflects the context in which it was written. Many of the key thinkers make an appearance, and Spillman does a great job summarizing their views. The first section includes an analysis of key writers of the 1800s, nationalist historians like Bancroft and Ramsay, but also the impact that Benezet and Stowe had. Spillman's section on the Reconstruction years is particularly strong, explaining U.B. Phillips, Pollard's Lost Cause, Turner, and Dunning. However, it was the section on consensus and New Left historians that I think was the standout one. Stampp and Hofstadter make appearances, as does Myrdal (although, I wish Spillman would have unpacked An American Dilemma more than what he did). Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll gets adequate coverage, and he does a nice job exploring Fogel and Engerman's cliometrics approach. Moynihan gets attention, in which Spillman ties the past to the present, showing how the report is grounded in ideas that have been developed throughout our history.
Spillman rounds out the work with significant, more recent works. Annette Gordon-Reed's book on Jefferson shows how historians have peeled back the curtains on some of the issues that have been kept quiet. Edward Baptist's work on the intersection of enslavement and capitalism shows how historiographical developments have been changing in our present day. Of course, Spillman ends with the 1619 project, adequately explaining the thesis and the controversy around it.
This book would best serve those who have some background in American history and the history of slavery. Spillman's work should serve as a model for other historians who might be willing to write a similar exploration of the historiography of other topics.