Semiquincentennial Reflections on Original Sin and Inevitability
[Note to readers: I am of course aware of the Trump administration's attack on Venezuela, capture of Maduro, and suggestions that further military operations could follow in order to occupy and "run" the country. DoL will include discussion of the legal and other issues raised thereby in short order. However, I wrote most of today's essay and accompanying Verdict column on Friday of last week, so it addresses different topics. I offer that as an explanation, not an apology. One of the unsettling aspects of our current reality is how one can barely focus on anything for more than a few hours because the president and his administration generate a new crisis and/or scandal at least daily. Think of today's essay as part of an effort to push back against this phenomenon.]
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During the last few weeks, I used my time off from teaching and blogging to work on a law-review-length paper, grade exams, visit with family, and do a bit more pleasure reading than more regularly scheduled time affords. Among the books I read was The American Revolution: An Intimate History, by Geoffrey C. Ward & Ken Burns. It's the book-length companion to the recent PBS documentary series by Burns and his team, going into more detail than the documentary. In today's essay, I'll briefly describe the book (which is terrific) and then draw a lesson that bears on the upcoming semiquincentennial celebrations of the Declaration of Independence.
In addition to the chronological narrative, The American Revolution intersperses essays by various scholars setting the conflict in larger contexts. I found Stephen Conway's The American Revolution as an Imperial Event the most illuminating of these. It argues persuasively that in the late 18th century, Britain's North American colonies were substantially less important to it than its more lucrative colonies in the Caribbean and its growing business on the Indian subcontinent. British policies that are puzzling in a contest for North America make more sense set against the empire's priorities.
There are other aspects to the book that, while hardly news to me, provide details that give a fuller picture of the American Revolution than what one usually encounters in a standard history course--especially one that verges on the hagiographic, as American history was taught when I was an elementary and secondary school student and as the contemporary American right is working hard to ensure it is taught going forward. For one thing, the book emphasizes the extent to which the American Revolution was a civil war, pitting patriots against loyalists--and sometimes brother against brother.
More consequentially, the book is unflinching in detailing the ways in which the patriot side was enmeshed in the original sins of the American colonial project: enslavement of Black people and ethnic cleansing of Native peoples. To be sure, Blacks and Indians fought on both sides of the war. Moreover, the British hardly had clean hands with respect to slavery, as the economies of their Caribbean colonies were utterly dependent on the labor of enslaved persons. However, on the whole, the American Revolution was probably bad for enslaved Black people and almost certainly bad for Indians. Indeed, American settlements west of the boundaries set by the British for the protection of tribal lands--settlements in which leading Americans including George Washington had financial interests--were among the causes of the war.
The American Revolution is in some respects an old-fashioned kind of history in that it focuses a good deal of attention on the battle-by-battle course of the war. It also includes substantial material on the economic and political origins of the war. The book focuses on large-scale forces and leading actors. Although one thread of the narrative is told through the experience of an ordinary young man (initially just a boy) who happened to fight at many of the major battles, it does so mostly for the purpose of advancing the narrative, not as a form of social history. Still, old-fashioned history can be, and in this instance is, valuable. What emerges from the book as a whole is an overwhelming sense that the Revolution itself was almost accidental and that victory was hardly inevitable.
History is made through the interaction of large-scale forces and small, almost random, contingencies. As to the latter, The American Revolution describes multiple circumstances in which a British general's decision not to press an advantage permitted Washington to retreat with enough of his army intact to live to fight another day. Of course, one cannot know with certainty that a different battlefield decision would have been decisive in securing British victory, but neither can one know with anything approaching certainty that any particular alternative tactical choice would not have led to such a result. It is entirely possible to imagine an alternative history of the last 250 years in which the territory that became the United States was part of British imperial holdings in the same way that Canada was.
Who knows how differently history would have unfolded in that alternative timeline? Slavery was abolished in Canada and the rest of the British empire in the 1830s, even though the economies of British holdings in the Caribbean (the "West Indies") were at least as dependent on the labor of enslaved Black people as were the economies of the Southern states. It's thus quite possible that, absent one or more of those quixotic military decisions that may have ended up costing the British the Revolutionary War, slavery in all of North America would have come to an end without the Civil War and three decades earlier than it in fact did. If so, then the semiquincentennial is less an occasion to celebrate a great victory than it is to mourn a great tragedy.
Or maybe not. The problem with alternative timelines is that nearly everything about them is unknowable, and the unknowability increases with time, as butterfly effects compound. Accordingly, in marking the semiquincentennial, we probably do best to focus on what we do know actually happened. The American Revolution and the republic to which it gave rise can be seen as a key demonstration project in the possibility of self-government--limited and flawed though it was. Without the success of the American Revolution, does the Haitian Revolution occur? Does the French Revolution? We cannot know, but again, we do know that in the timeline we actually inhabit, the republican project the American Revolution launched articulated ideals worth defending.
One can celebrate those ideals without ignoring the profound ways in which they were betrayed from the beginning. Thus, while I do not disagree with the specifics of the critique Justice Thurgood Marshall leveled against the 1787 Constitution in a speech marking its 200th anniversary, I find its overall tone unduly negative. Marshall was right that the Constitution was deeply flawed in its compromises with slavery and its limited conception of We the People. But Marshall conceded too much in quoting Justice Roger Taney's Dred Scott opinion as though Taney spoke an incontestable truth when he argued that because the authors of the Declaration of Independence could not have meant to include enslaved Blacks among the all men whom the Declaration said were created equal, it followed that the antebellum Constitution must be construed to exclude Blacks from citizenship.
Yes, of course, Thomas Jefferson and other enslavers who made that profession were monumental hypocrites. But ideals set in motion take on a life of their own, imbued with meaning beyond the impure intentions of their authors. To my mind, the best way to commemorate the semiquincentennial is to mix the scorn Frederick Douglass brought to the Revolution--in his 1852 speech, What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?--with the aspirational spirit he ascribed to the Constitution--in his 1860 speech in Glasgow, The Constitution of the United States: Is It Pro-Slavery or Anti-slavery?.
Put differently, it ought to be possible to recognize that the Revolution and the Constitution were secured in substantial part for aims we rightly regard as reprehensible and at the same time make use of the lofty ideals they expressly articulated, even as those ideals were long betrayed in practice. The first seven pages of the year-end report just filed by Chief Justice John Roberts attempts something along these lines, perhaps glorifying the Revolution a bit more than warranted, but nonetheless paying more than mere lip service to the notion that ensuing justice movements were necessary to make a reality of the lofty rhetoric of the Declaration and the Constitution. Roberts notes, for example, that the Declaration "enunciated the American creed, a national mission statement, even though it quite obviously captured an ideal rather than a reality, given that the vast majority of the 56 signers of the Declaration (even [Benjamin] Franklin) enslaved other humans at some point in their lives."
In my latest Verdict column, I compare and contrast Marshall's 1987 speech with Roberts's year-end-report. I find that, perhaps surprisingly, they are more similar than they are different. Both argue that the original Constitution needed amendments and changes in popular understanding to become worthy of venerating. Marshall rightly inferred from that fact that we should not be bound by the original understanding of the Constitution. I argue in the column that Roberts ought to draw the same inference, which would call into question the history-and-tradition approach of much recent jurisprudence from his Court.
Returning to the Revolution itself, it remains to be seen whether those aspects of the official celebration of the semiquincentennial overseen by the Trump administration will admit of even a little of the kind of nuance one sees in the Chief Justice's year-end report. However, preliminary indications are not encouraging.
For example, in one video generated by the White House's Task Force 250's partner PragerU (a rightwing media producer), a creepy AI version of Thomas Jefferson tells viewers that he penned the Declaration of Independence and later, as president, made the Louisiana Purchase to fulfill his vision of an "empire of liberty," but doesn't mention slavery. AI Martha Washington tells viewers that she was at (uncanny) Valley Forge with her husband but fails to mention that both she and George were also accompanied there by the Black servants they enslaved. Creepy AI John Adams anachronistically channels Ben Shapiro to tell viewers that "facts do not care about your feelings."
Maybe not, but I do care about your feelings, dear reader. I also care about your sanity. Thus, I recommend tuning out any semiquincentennial material produced by the White House and instead reading the Ward & Burns book.
-- Michael C. Dorf