Thomas Jefferson: Abolitionist?

In his Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), written during the American Revolution, Thomas Jefferson identified slavery as a "blot" and "moral evil" upon the nation's existence.

Under the mild treatment our slaves experience, and their wholesome, though coarse, food, this blot in our country increases as fast, or faster, than the whites. During the regal government, we had at one time obtained a law, which imposed such a duty on the importation of slaves, as amounted nearly to a prohibition, when one inconsiderate assembly, placed under a peculiarity of circumstance, repealed the law. This repeal met a joyful sanction from the then sovereign, and no devices, no expedients, which could ever after be attempted by subsequent assemblies, and they seldom met without attempting them, could succeed in getting the royal assent to a renewal of the duty. In the very first session held under the republican government, the assembly passed a law for the perpetual prohibition of the importation of slaves. This will in some measure stop the increase of this great political and moral evil, while the minds of our citizens may be ripening for a complete emancipation of human nature.
Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 87.

His belief that slaves were treated mildly in America would form part of the foundation of the defense of the Peculiar Institution. This passage does not sum all of Jefferson's views, but is one piece that cannot be ignored. His statement that ending slavery is part of "emancipation of human nature" lends credence to the view that he may have considered the assertion that "all men are created equal" in the Declaration of Independence to include African Americans.

An exchange between Conor Cruise O'Brien and Douglas L. Wilson in the Atlantic Monthly in 1996 offers one entry into the complexities of Jefferson's legacy. O'Brien draws from statements of Jefferson's a few chapters later in Notes on the State of Virginia, as well as other texts. Wilson challenges O'Brien's reading of some of these texts.


My copy of the text is William Peden, ed., Notes on the State of Virginia by Thomas Jefferson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982 [1954]). The extract above also is available as hypertext at the University of Virginia's American Studies Crossroads Project.

Zinn, Historiography, Weapons of History

At History is a Weapon a brief audit of the role of bias in history begins, "History isn't what happened, but a story of what happened." That much should be obvious, but is worth hearing from time to time. The audit offers quick entry into some of the central questions of historiography, and stands as the welcome page to a website that presents scanned versions of several texts, including A People's History of the United States. History is a Weapon describes itself as "an online Left reader focusing largely on American resistance history." I think that's an accurate assessment for a site that is a terrific resource.

I've added a link under "American History Links."

A People’s History: the Industry

Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980) has spawned an industry of creation. His website recently announced a new comic book, A People’s History of American Empire (April 2008). This collaboration among Zinn, Paul Buhle, and Mike Konopacki tells a story of the author “from his childhood in the Brooklyn slums to his role as one of America’s leading historians” (Macmillan).

Earlier spin-offs from Zinn’s bestselling A People’s History have included George Kirschner’s collaboration with Zinn, A People's History of the United States: The Wall Charts (1995); a range of partial reproductions, such as The Twentieth Century: From the Author’s A People’s History of the United States (1998); and a children’s version, A Young People's History of the United States (2007), 2 vols., adapted by Rebecca Stefoff.

Voices of a People’s History of the United States (2004), edited by Zinn and Anthony Arnove, is designed as a companion to the main text. I discussed the second document in this text at “Fragments from Bartolomé de Las Casas.” Gayle Olson-Raymer edited a teaching guide, Teaching with Voices of a People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove (2006).

A People’s History of the United States is available as an abridged audiobook, A People's History of the United States CD: Highlights from the 20th Century (2003), read by Matt Damon. Part of a lecture Zinn gave at Reed College is available on CD as A People's History Of The United States: A Lecture at Reed College (1998). James Earl Jones lends his voice to The People Speak CD: American Voices, Some Famous, Some Little Known, from Columbus to the Present (2004). The audiobook Readings from Voices of a People's History of the United States (2006) includes twenty-one selections from the print edition of Voices.

Other People’s Histories

Chris Harmon wrote A People’s History of the World (1999), which has a new edition just out last week. Harmon is editor of the journal International Socialism. A blurb for this book from Howard Zinn has such prominence on the cover that a casual browser might mistake him for coauthor.

Zinn wrote the forward to A People's History of the Supreme Court (1999) by Peter Irons. A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence (2001) by Ray Raphael is part of a New Press series edited by Zinn. This series also includes A People's History of the Vietnam War (2003) by Jonathan Neale, A People's History of the Civil War (2006) by David Williams, A People’s History of Sports in the United States (2008) by Dave Zirin, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (2008) by Vijay Prashad, and the forthcoming A People’s Art History of the United States (2009) by Nicolas Lampert and John Couture.

Zinn’s Influence?

Quite a number of histories offer the phrase “a people’s history” as part of the title, but that phrase neither guarantees Zinn’s influence, nor his imprimatur. Nor have I found reasons to believe that he has objections to any of these texts.

The title of Michael Parenti’s The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome (2003) may reflect the popularity of Zinn’s book, but the author’s Democracy for the Few (1974), now in its eighth edition, was already popular when A People’s History of the United States first appeared.

Denis R. Janz, General Editor of A People’s History of Christianity, 7 vols, does not mention Zinn in “What is People’s History.” Nor do I know Howard Zinn’s relationship to:

The Congo: From Leopold to Kabila: A People's History (2002) by Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja.
A People's History of Science: Miners, Midwives, and “Low Mechaniks” (2005) by Clifford D. Conner.
The Blood Never Dried: A People's History of the British Empire (2006) by John Newsinger.

Predecessors

A People's History of England (1938) by A. L. Morton was out before Howard Zinn came of age. Page Smith’s eight volume People’s History also precedes Zinn’s entry into this stream of titles. It began with Smith’s A New Age Now Begins: A People's History of the American Revolution in 1976 and concluded with Redeeming the Time: A People’s History of the 1920s and the New Deal (1987).

Tribal Names

Do all the people named the Sioux call themselves Lakota? Does an accent mark belong on Nez Perce? Are the Chippewa related to the Ojibwa (or Ojibwe)? Is Blackfeet plural for Blackfoot?

Each name has a history. Historians should favor the names in the primary sources from which they work, and those preferred by the tribe today. They also should learn and relate the histories of these names.

A few years ago, the Wikipedia entry for Nez Perce claimed that Nez Percé was favored by most scholars. “Ignorant scholars!” I said this phrase to myself, as I changed the article only to see it change back the next day. Back and forth the name went, until it finally stabilized after some discussion. (Also see more on historians and Wikipedia.)

For most of the twentieth century, the Yakama Nation employed the spelling Yakima—also the name of a city in Washington state—but officially changed the spelling to Yakama, which conforms to the spelling employed by Isaac I. Stevens in the treaty that some of them signed in 1855. This treaty was a principle cause of the war mentioned in passing, “stronger tribes such as the Yakimas and their allies put up a stiffer fight” (emphasis added), in James Donovan, A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn—the Last Great Battle of the American West (2008), 17. This spelling error, as I’m calling it, is not fatal to Donovan’s book, but it offers a subtle clue to a weakness in his research. If he skews toward error minor points regarding tribes far from Little Bighorn, he might do something similar for those that killed Custer. Donovan’s work on Custer’s last battle might prove more authoritative in narrating the side of those that lost the battle than of the motives and actions of the victors, and of the terrible consequences they suffered.

Two pages later, Donovan is back on the Plains among the Lakota Sioux, where he tells us, “Sioux being a bastardized French word that they despised” (19). He does not explain that Sioux is shortened from Nadouessioux, which comes from an Ojibwa word for adders (snakes) and connotes enemy. Lakota, on the other hand, means ally or friend, as does Dakota and Nakota. The Seven Council Fires that comprise the Sioux Nation (as they appear in many U.S. government documents) speak three dialects of a common language. Slight differences in pronunciation account for the variable first consonant in Lakota/Dakota/Nakota. There is no need to add the word Sioux after Lakota, as Donovan does consistently, nor is such usage inherently wrong. Combined with other nuances, such usage merely heightens my attentiveness to other possible errors of fact or interpretation.

A Terrible Glory was thoroughly researched and is well written. My quibbles with a few points of Donovan’s book have not yet led me to disagreement with Robert M. Utley’s assessment that the work is “exemplary” (from a blurb on the back of the dust jacket).

Patriot’s History

On the other hand, A Patriot’s History of the United States (2004) by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen employ the term Lakota Sioux in a manner that shatters confidence in their authority.

Farther north the mighty Lakota Sioux also resisted white incursions. Their struggle began in 1862-63 in Minnesota, a theater of the war that ended when U.S. Army General John Pope achieved victory and hanged 38 Sioux warriors as punishment.
Schweikart and Allen, 408.

Colonel Henry Sibley led the troops and usually gets credit for this victory. Yet, the authors of A Patriot’s History are not completely wrong in mentioning Pope, who was Sibley’s superior officer and had charge of the Military Department of the Northwest. Their account of the Indian side of this conflict is another matter.

The Mdewakanton and Wahpekute bands of the Santee are Dakota not Lakota. There was no Lakota uprising in Minnesota in 1862. Moreover, their struggles between accommodation and resistance did not begin with Little Crow’s uprising in 1862, but before the Treaties of 1837 and 1858. The resistance that led to war, and that led to the largest mass hanging in U.S. history, resulted from many factors. Some of the leading elements in the failures of the policy of accommodation stemmed from U.S. failures to deliver on promises made in these treaties, capriciousness by Indian agent Thomas J. Galbraith, and massive influx of non-Indian settlers.

Gary Clayton Anderson’s Little Crow: Spokesman for the Sioux (1986) offers detailed analysis.

… one might wonder why Little Crow agreed to join the war effort. He had always been an accommodationist, and had consistently used his persuasive abilities to prevent violence. … Little Crow undoubtedly concluded that by joining the soldiers, he would be reinstated in his position as speaker for the Mdewakanton tribe. … His decision to join a doomed war effort certainly contradicted his past behavior, but it did not run counter to the traditional obligation of a Sioux warrior to his community and people—that of giving his life when such a sacrifice became necessary for the benefit of the whole.
Anderson, Little Crow, 133-34.

Mdewakanton leader Little Crow was a patriot.

Founders, Slavery, Public Schools

In a coffee shop this week, I overheard criticism of public school teachers that nearly pulled me into a conversation that was mostly none of my business. Having once before jumped into other peoples’ conversations in that bistro, and remembering the mixed results, I desisted. The comments, however, came back to my consciousness this morning while browsing the archive of American Revolution & Founding Era.

Allegations of Racism in the Republic

Almost two years ago, Brian Tubbs characterized the lessons our public schools teach regarding George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and company as depicting them as racists whom we “should be ashamed to pay … any respect or honor.”

According to Lincoln, the Founders never saw slavery as consistent with the principles they enshrined in our heritage.

Rather, the Founding Fathers overwhelmingly deplored slavery and considered black Americans to be included in the Declaration's creed. Said Lincoln: “The fathers of this government expected and intended the institution of slavery to come to an end. They expected and intended that it would be in the course of ultimate extinction.”

His view is ignored or rejected in today's classrooms and in the media, but it was this very viewpoint that sustained his ultimately successful campaign to rid the nation of the evil institution he so ardently despised. But while Lincoln's argument was compelling, was it accurate?
Tubbs, “Should We Revere ‘Racists’?”

Tubbs offers several points of evidence that the Founders sought the eventual abolition of slavery and considered African Americans “men”. Indeed, his arguments remind me of those offered by my professor for a graduate course in US history from Jefferson to Jackson, in which my son’s current high school history teacher was a classmate. The professor explained that Washington intended that his slaves be freed upon his death, and he would have freed them sooner if it had been economically possible (or something to that effect—it was a few years ago).

I could draw on many sources from which to confirm, modify, and refute the points in Tubbs’ argument, but will confine myself to explicit evidence concerning classroom practice. My son’s teacher demands that the students read carefully and take notes upon their textbook, David M. Kennedy, Lizabeth Cohen, and Thomas A. Bailey, The American Pageant, twelfth edition (2002).

Does this textbook support or refute Tubbs’ allegation regarding the Founders, slavery, and historical memory?

Tubbs tells us that Congress outlawed slavery in 1808. The American Pageant, describing the debates at the Constitutional Convention, offers more detail.

Most of the states wanted to shut off the African slave trade. But South Carolina and Georgia, requiring slave labor in their rice paddies and malarial swamps, raised vehement protests. By way of compromise the convention stipulated that the slave trade might continue until the end of 1807, at which time Congress could turn off the spigot (see Art. I, Sec. IX, para. 1). It did so as soon as the prescribed interval had elapsed. Meanwhile all the new state constitutions except Georgia’s forbade overseas slave trade.
Kennedy, et al, American Pageant, 181.

More than a dozen pages earlier, in a section that begins with the Declaration’s “All men are created equal,” the textbook addresses why the Founders did not eliminate slavery in the new nation: “the fledgling idealism of the Founding Fathers was sacrificed to political expediency” (167). They quote Madison.

“Great as the evil [of slavery] is,” the young Virginian James Madison wrote in 1787, “a dismemberment of the union would be worse.” Nearly a century later, the slavery issue did wreck the Union—temporarily.
Kennedy, et al, American Pageant, 167.

(I will refrain from commenting here on the power and meaning of the phrase, “one nation indivisible,” that was routinely spoken as part of the Pledge of Allegiance until 1954 when the phrase was broken up in the war of rhetoric against godless communism.)

The American Pageant neither presents the Founders as demigods, nor as demons. It does, however, employ the term “demigods”—always in quote marks—which the authors attribute to Thomas Jefferson’s observation regarding the “extraordinarily high” (178) quality of the fifty-five participants in the 1787 Constitutional Convention. The text notes that they were “a conservative, well-to-do body” and nineteen owned slaves (178). The revolution “did not suddenly and violently overturn the entire political and social framework” (166). The “conservative-minded delegates” in Philadelphia, recalling Shay’s Rebellion, “deliberately erected safeguards against the excesses of the ‘mob’” (181).

The general theme of the text—hence of the curriculum now employed in my alma mater—highlights the possibilities and limits of the revolutionary era that created and established the United States. The years of the Confederation and Constitution resulted in “accelerated evolution rather than outright revolution” (166). The text highlights such anti-slavery achievements as Elizabeth “Mumbet” Freeman’s successful lawsuit to win freedom from slavery in Massachusetts in 1781, and the founding of “the world’s first antislavery society” in 1775 (167). It demonstrates that slavery was a controversial aspect of eighteenth century American society, continued to be a source of much conflict well into the nineteenth century, and emancipation did not eliminate all racism and sectional conflict.

From Jefferson to Lincoln

Tubbs makes much of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, validating Lincoln’s view of the Founders. The American Pageant presents a sidebar quoting Lincoln in his first debate with Douglas.

… there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to those rights as the white man.
Kennedy, et al, American Pageant, 421.

However, the text also prompts allegations that Lincoln, too, might have been a racist in the first words of the extract: “I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong, having the superior position” (421). Much earlier in the text, on the other hand, an 1865 quote of Lincoln’s is presented in the caption to a picture illustrating a slave auction: “Whenever I see anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally” (358). The text undermines simplistic caricatures of Lincoln.

It appears to me that The American Pageant does not tell students that they should be ashamed of the Founders and of Lincoln, nor does it urge that they venerate these men without a sense of their human flaws.

Brian Tubbs offers several examples—some quite specific, some vague—documenting his assertion that there is a “chorus of contempt and condemnation sung by scholars, students, politicians, judges, talk show hosts, authors, and everyday Americans concerning the sins of our nation's past” (“Should We Revere ‘Racists’?”). Such a generalization goes further than the evidence he presents: a caller’s statement to C-SPAN and a History Channel poll, both recalled years after the fact; a quote from a “biography” of Jefferson by Conor Cruise O'Brien (perhaps The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785-1800); and a quote from “civil rights activist Ralph Abernathy” (source not cited). I prefer to see better support for such assertions.

Tubbs’ discussion leaves many gaps, but is far more nuanced than the assertion I heard in a coffeehouse. There, parents disgruntled with their children’s school alleged that many teachers could not pass the much scorned WASL (Washington Assessment of Student Learning) for which they must prepare students. Relating the comment to some teachers, I suggested that they ought to take up the challenge because there is a huge difference between high school and college education—they would easily pass. The WASL tests what the state would like high school students to know before they graduate; teachers must know quite a bit more.

I too have observed problems with schools over the years, and have been vocal about these. Nevertheless, I get a little incensed when I hear assertions that teachers cannot pass the tests given to students or that schools teach that the Founders were little more than a bunch of racists. Those criticisms are inaccurate.