I love American roadtrips. They are the ideal way to visit 96 per cent of the country, which is determinedly built (for good or ill) around the desires of the car driver. The brilliant roads, the endless motels, the hideous car lots that blight most of the cities (making parking a doddle, even if they ruin the actual towns), they all ensure that driving is easefully delightful.

Even in the most nondescript hotel in the most ahistoric corner of America, you will happen upon the surreal, haunting legacy of slavery

A roadtrip is also the best way to understand America, and my recent trip along and around the Mason-Dixon Line – the great geographical/political divide which once (still?) sunders the old Union states from the old Confederacy – taught me the depth, strangeness and profundity of white America’s guilt: vis a vis America’s slaving past.

The peak moment of eeriness probably came at sunny, splendidly situated Monticello, Virginia, which is the Unesco-listed estate designed and inhabited by the American founding father, Thomas Jefferson. Amongst other things, Jefferson was America’s third president, and he actually wrote much of the declaration of independence, with its sonorous avowal that ‘all men are created equal.’

There’s a copy of the declaration at Monticello, there’s also a death mask of Cromwell (a hero of Jefferson’s), some quaint and exquisite scientific instruments (Jefferson was a true Renaissance man), plus a pair of elk antlers brought back from the Wild West by explorers Lewis and Clark. On top of that there is a brief guided tour where the guide refers to the workers on the estate as ‘members of the enslaved community’.

I confess, when I heard this tormented phrase, I did a double take. Maybe I’d misheard. But no, the guide said it again. He avoided the simple word ‘slaves’. He called the slaves, ‘members of the enslaved community’. Like the slaves at Monticello were something like ‘the Sikh community’ in Britain, a bunch of willing migrants who casually wandered up and asked if they could wear shackles.

As I continued my tour of Monticello, marvelling at Jefferson’s enormous cellars where he kept his beloved champagnes, I think I worked out why you would use such a peculiar, ambiguous phrase. I don’t believe it is because the guides at Monticello are trying to diminish the horrors of slavery, I believe it is because they are trying to treat it as decorously, politely, and humanely as possible. And they are failing: because slavery is so cruel and outrageous it cannot be semantically neutered. The horror abides, always.

For a sense of this irredeemable wickedness you just have to wander Monticello’s leafy plantation, where you will happen upon a facsimile of Sally Hemings’ tiny wooden cabin, where she likely lived, for a while, with members of her family. Who was Sally Hemings? For a long time she was simultaneously Jefferson’s slave and ‘mistress’, and mother of several of his children (offspring who, by law, automatically became Jefferson’s property, as the enslaved children of his slave concubine – though Hemings sought their freedom).

Did Sally Hemings have much say in this arrangement? It seems doubtful to me. She was, after all, a slave. Jefferson owned her just as he owned the cattle that grazed his 5,000 acres. Perhaps it is best to call her a ‘member of the raped community’. And remember, she, like her brothers, cousins, friends, was a slave of Thomas Jefferson: the man who actually wrote ‘all men are created equal’. Did Jefferson feel a twinge of hypocrisy as he penned this in Philadelphia, or did he mentally annotate the document, without writing it down, ‘all men are created equal, apart from profitable members of my enchained community’?

It ain’t just Monticello where the weirdness and evil of slavery loomed large on my road trip. It was pretty much everywhere. Take Alexandria, a rather lovely, and unusually walkable old colonial town, a few miles south of DC. With its seafood bars and Georgian terraces, prosperous Alexandria feels like a particularly charming town in the English southwest, until you come to a plain looking house, last remnant of the infamous Franklin and Armfield slave pen, whose owners became, from their trade, some of the richest men in the USA.

There is a photo of this slaving company in its last guise. The signage casually says: ‘Price Birch & Co Dealers in Slaves’, the same way a photo of a shop in Victorian London, from the same era, might say ‘Dealers in Linens and Cloths’. The photo is indescribably chilling.

And so it goes on, as you wind along the Mason Dixon line. Slavery, the effects of slavery, the underlying evil of slavery, is ubiquitous: like a seam of dark mud left by an apocalyptic flood. In Cincinnati the line is marked by the great Ohio river which divided ‘free’ Ohio from the ‘slave state’ of Kentucky. Escaped slaves would flee across this dangerous river, but even if they made it to Ohio, they weren’t safe. For years the Fugitive Slave Act meant that slave owners were allowed to head north to recapture their straying human livestock – and northerners were obliged to assist them. Some slave owners actually came hunting for the children of successfully escaped slaves.

Even in the most nondescript hotel in the most ahistoric corner of America, you will happen upon the surreal, haunting legacy of slavery. At one point I stayed in a Holiday Inn Express in Pennsylvania, so I could go see Frank Lloyd Wright’s nearby Fallingwater house in the morning. At my generic buffet breakfast, where I served myself coffee, juice, and bad croissants, I was given a bill with options to tip 10, 15, 30 per cent, etc. There did not seem to be an option not to tip. Even though no member of the hospitality community had actually done anything to directly serve me.

Why is tipping so uniquely pervasive and ridiculous in America? A lot of tourists ask this, I can give you the answer: slavery. When the slaves were emancipated after the Civil War, millions went north to get paid work. The locals weren’t especially welcoming, so the only jobs the freed slaves could find were often in bars, hotels, restaurants. As the workers had lately been slaves, the managers felt no obligation to remunerate them properly, so they paid them a pittance, and the workers were expected to make up their wages by being so servile they were generously tipped. The tradition endured, and that’s why you have to tip everywhere and everyone in the USA, today.

Once you begin to grasp the grim and universal scars, legacies and ramifications of slavery in America, you begin to understand why Americans – white Americans in particular – are so neurotic, allergic, jittery, and guilt-ridden about the issue, and why wokeness about race, in all its religiose bizarrerie, was birthed in the USA. I have written elsewhere how slavery was universal, across history and around the world, and how some of it is absurdly ignored. Nonetheless, slavery can feel like the Original Sin of the American Republic. Slavery is actually written into America’s founding document, the US Constitution, with its opaque references to certain voters worth three fifths of proper voters. The semi-humans are the slaves in the South.

Should Britain share in this terrible sense of Original Sin? I believe not. Of course, we were a huge slaving nation, like the French, Portuguese, Arabs, Chinese, everyone else: this is a source of deep shame. But the fact is, slavery in the modern sense was forbidden in the United Kingdom.

Moreover, and more importantly, Britain made a purposeful redemption of its sins, and this is spelled out, once again, right on the Mason Dixon Line. If you go into the excellent Freedom Museum in Cincinnati, which looks across the Ohio river to the slave state of Kentucky, you can read how the British abolished the slave trade in 1807, and then spent many millions – serious chunks of British GDP – eradicating slavery in all the oceans of the world, as best we could. This is why the slavers of Alexandria got so rich: when the Brits stopped the slave boats from Africa, a huge internal US slave trade developed, marching millions of coffled slaves from Virginia and the Carolinas, down to Cottonland in the Deep South.

As for those escaped slaves who fled across the river, the museum also explains their fate: their best bet was to continue their furtive race, until they reached genuinely free territory. In other words: usually British territory. The Bahamas for some, Canada for most.

In that light, I believe Britain can look at the legacy of slavery with at least a semblance of neutrality. We did some truly evil things, but we did some genuinely good things, we therefore have no need to import the one-sided neuroses of the USA on this tragic history, any more than we should import their terrible culture wars over abortion. America, unfortunately and uniquely amongst western democracies, owns a much darker, larger slaving history, which they have to confront. Whether they can ever truly overcome it, I have no idea. But I fear that using coy phrases like ‘members of the enslaved community’ probably isn’t going to do the job.