Fairy Tale History at New York’s (un)Historical Society

The New-York Historical Society and the Gilder Lehrman Institute are partnering to rewrite and present to the public a revised history of slavery in the Americas and the struggle to end it.  Unfortunately, their version, at least as it is presented in the Society’s new exhibit, “Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn,” is rife with platitudes, inaccuracies, and fairy tales.

The ideological distortions in the exhibit are consistent with political direction being imposed by Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman, co-founders of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, who control the board of directors of the New York Historical Society.  They are major right-wing players in the war over what should be taught as history.  Richard Gilder is a founding member, and former chair, of the board of trustees of the Manhattan Institute.  Lewis Lehrman is a trustee of the American Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute, and the Heritage Foundation.  In a New York Times interview in 2004, Gilder acknowledged that their goal was to influence the national debate over history.  Their view on slavery, as explained by Lehrman, is that it was “an institution supported throughout the world, but Americans took the initiative in destroying it.”  Lehrman deplored the belief that “American history consists of one failure after another to deal with the issue of slavery.”  However, he believes that “One of the triumphs of America was to have dealt directly with that issue in the agonies of a civil war, and to have passed the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments.”

As a teacher and a historian I agree that the trans-Atlantic slave trade and New World slavery as well as the revolutionary movements at the end of the nineteenth century played major roles in shaping the modern world.  I was pleased that the slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue that led to the creation an independent Haiti received prominent place along with revolutions in British North America, France, and Great Britain.  However, other than the coverage of the struggle in Haiti, I was very disappointed when I visited the exhibit.

I have three major problems with what I saw.  Many of the panels offered very broad simplifications that present platitudes about the past two hundred years rather than an accurate account or historical analysis.  Some panels were more focused but equally misleading or inaccurate.  An area that I found particularly inaccurate was the exhibit’s discussion of the British campaign to end, first the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and then slavery in the British Empire.  I had to copy the text quoted below from the exhibit panels in a notepad so I apologize for any errors.

A major theme of the exhibit is that “The Age of Revolution made us all citizens of the world as well as our own nation, loyal to global ideals as well as local and group bonds.”  I only wish this were true.  If it were, slavery in the United States might not have continued into the 1860s; European imperialists might not have sub-divided and colonized Africa and Asia in the nineteenth century; the United States and other countries might not have virtually exterminated their indigenous populations; and the world might have avoided World War I, World War II, a series of genocides, and the nuclear arms race.

A second theme was that “Remaking law rather than remaking society has been the nation’s strongest instrument of change for more than two centuries.”  I think this represents a fundamental misunderstanding about the relationship between law and society.  Laws are generally a reflection of a society rather than instruments for change.  The American legal system has frequently codified social injustice.  Fugitive slave laws, black codes, Jim Crow segregation laws, and numerous Supreme Court decisions, the most infamous being Dred Scott and Plessy, supported the enforcement of slavery and racism.  The “strongest instrument of change” has been social movements to extend liberty and democracy that forced changes in the law.  These include the abolitionist, labor, civil rights, women’s, and gay rights movements.

The exhibit maintains that “gradually during and after the Revolution, and particularly in the Bill of Rights, rights were defined as ‘universal.’”  Actually, the Bill of Rights, which placed limits on the ability of Congress to interfere with religious practice, speech, assembly, and the press, placed no similar or restrictions on state governments.  Hence the legality of slavery, which is unmentioned in the Constitution, remained up to the individual states.  It was not until the 14th Amendment, approved after the Civil War in 1868, that states were forced to respect the rights of citizens of the United States, and it was not until 1920 that American women were ensured the right to vote.  Prior to the Civil War, the rights protected by the Bill of Rights were limited to a few and could be abridged by the states; they clearly were not universal.

The exhibit concludes with the statement about what the modern world owes to the Age of Revolution.  It claims the Age of Revolution “created several ‘new normals.’”  They included the contentions that “slavery was fundamentally inhuman and had to be abolished”; “Nations should have the right to govern themselves”; and “Even the poor and weak should be treated with dignity.”  But of course, these were not “normals” for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and are still not “normals” in much of the world today.  If they were, how do we explain British policy during the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s and the famine in India in the 1940s, when food was shipped overseas while people starved, and recurrent famine in Africa during the last three decades; colonized indigenous people in Latin America driven off of their homelands in the name of profit or progress; civil wars in Africa financed by outside corporate interests; control over the economies of many of the world’s nominally independent nations by banking interests based in the economically developed nations and supra-governmental multi-national agencies; and the more than twenty million who live in bondage today, more than half of whom are children.

While these criticisms can be dismissed as responses to the underlying themes, interpretations, and conclusions that shaped the exhibit and as a question of point of view, I was also disturbed by ordinary misstatements that good historical work would have avoided.  For example, according to the exhibit, “With the signing of this treaty [Treaty of Paris, 1763, ending the Seven Years’ War], the stage was set for a secure period of peace.  George III and Louis XV could settle into the business of managing empires.”  At best, this statement is misleading on two counts.  This Treaty of Paris was not a permanent solution to conflicts between expanding British and French Empires.  It was only a temporary settlement of colonial boundaries and the war between the two superpowers quickly resumed in 1778 when France decided to support the American revolutionaries seeking independence.  It was the French fleet that trapped Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781 and brought the American Revolution to a successful end.  It is also unclear how much George and Louis actually governed their empires. Great Britain was governed by Parliament, which George attempted to influence but could not control.  If anything, Louis XV was best noted for political incompetence, prolific spending on his court, and sexual affairs rather than affairs of state.

The exhibit also minimizes the extent of racism in what would become the United States during and after the Revolution.  One panel states, “Despite early misgivings, the Continental Army also began recruiting enslaved men with offers of liberty.”  However, twice as many African Americans fought on the British side during the War for Independence.  While some New England militias and regiments made efforts to recruit black soldiers from the start of the war, and Alexander Hamilton advocated for the enlistment of freed blacks, George Washington ordered recruiters for the Continental Army not to enroll any deserters from the British army, vagabonds, or Negroes.

According to another panel, in Notes on the States of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson expressed his “fundamental opposition to slavery and his fear of what emancipation would bring.”  I think it would be more accurate to say Jefferson expressed his total antipathy towards people of African ancestry.  Jefferson postulated that emancipation would only be practical if the freed black population were expelled and replaced by new white immigrants.  Freed blacks could not remain in the United States because of the “deep-rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.” [Emphasis mine.]  Jefferson goes on to use pseudo-science to “document” all aspects of the racial inferiority of the African when compared to the White European.

Later in the exhibit, it states, “President Jefferson, more attentive to southern fears of slave revolt, would embargo trade with Saint Domingue.”  While this statement is accurate, it tells a very small part of the relationship between the United States and Haiti or the attitudes of Thomas Jefferson.  Thomas Jefferson feared that Haiti's revolt would inspire similar slave rebellions in the U.S.  In a letter written in 1797 about events in Haiti, Jefferson argued, "If something is not done, and soon done, we shall be the murderers of our own children."

During Jefferson’s presidency, the United States offered to help the French defeat the Haitian revolutionary forces. After independence was secured in 1804, Haiti sought closer ties with the United States because of what its leaders saw as their shared revolutionary heritage. Haitian leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines wrote directly to Jefferson, who ignored the letter.

Unfortunately, Jefferson’s prejudices were shared by later American political leaders and the government of an independent Haiti was not recognized by the United States until 1863, after it had repaid French planters for the cost of their lost slaves, and at a time when the United States and Abraham Lincoln were considering shipping millions of freed American slaves to the Black nation.

While “Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn” claims to be about the revolutions in British North America, France, and Saint-Domingue (Haiti), it actually treats British anti-slavery campaigns as a fourth “revolution.”  Its interpretation here is largely drawn from Adam Hochschild’s Bury the Chains (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2005).  In this case, I think Hochschild and the exhibit give too much credit for the end of slavery in the British Empire to idealists, religious dissenters, and parliamentary reformers.

According to the exhibit, “Britain’s economic interests weighed against abolition.  But culturally and politically, slavery became objectionable to large segments of the British public.”  In addition, “Eradicating the slave trade, and ultimately emancipating all the empire’s slaves, would assure Britons … were a people loyal to a principle as well as a homeland … Abolition wrapped British nationhood in both moral and imperial glory.”

These statements, at best, are debatable.  With the withdrawal of Saint-Domingue from the international sugar trade, British Caribbean colonies dominated the sugar market.  The continuing importation of slaves from Africa would have benefited Britain’s competitors, allowing them to put more land into production and challenge Britain’s market dominance.  It would also have increased the possibility of slave rebellions.

Great Britain ended slavery because of the cost of suppressing slave rebellions and fear that sooner or later a British colony would become the next Haiti.  In the early nineteenth century there were major slave rebellions in the British colonies of Barbados, Guyana, and Jamaica.  In Barbados in 1816, twenty thousand Africans from over seventy plantations drove whites off the plantations during “Bussa’s Rebellion.”  In Guyana in 1823, the East Coast Demerara Rebellion was fueled by the belief among enslaved Africans that the planters were deliberately withholding news of the impending freedom of the slaves.

Orlando Patterson (The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, Development, and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica, Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson, 1969), a sociologist and historian originally based at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, argued “with the possible exception of Brazil, no other slave society in the New World experienced such continuous and intense servile revolts as Jamaica” (273).  Patterson believed this was because of a number of reasons.  Jamaica has an inaccessible mountainous interior.  There were a high proportion of Africans to Europeans, between 10 and 13 to 1, on the island.  There were an unusually large number of enslaved people, approximately fifty percent, who were born free in West Africa and raised in a highly militaristic environment in what is now Ghana and the Ivory Coast.  He also cited the general ineptitude of the planter caste and their high rate of absenteeism.  It is significant that these were very similar to conditions in Haiti prior to its revolution.  An excellent online source for exploring Caribbean history in general and slavery in the Caribbean in particular is the British National Archives.

The 1831 slave rebellion in Jamaica that shook the British Empire and led to the abolition of slavery in British colonies was centered in the area around Montego Bay in the northwest portion of the island.  It is commonly known as either the Baptist War, because its leaders were members of Baptist evangelical churches, the Christmas Uprising, because it was timed to take place following the Christmas holiday break from work, or the Great Jamaican Slave Revolt.  Its principal leader was Samuel Sharpe, a literate man and Baptist lay preacher, who was born in Jamaica rather than Africa.  The rebellion never spread to other parts of the colony and was largely suppressed within two weeks, although troop actions against suspected rebel strongholds continued until the end of January 1832.

Samuel Sharpe and his followers believed, mistakenly, that emancipation had already been approved by the British Parliament, and that local planters were refusing to obey the law.  They used their church connections to organize a general strike demanding that they be paid wages to work.  Reprisals by plantation owners transformed the work stoppage into a slave rebellion.  Twenty thousand enslaved Africans attacked over two hundred plantations in the Montego Bay area.  They burnt down plantation houses and warehouses full of sugar cane, causing over a million pounds worth of damage.  Nearly two hundred Africans and fourteen British planters or overseers died in the fighting.  Hundreds of the rebels were captured and over 750 were convicted of insurrection.  Of those convicted, 138 were sentenced to death, either by hanging or firing squad.  The rest were brutally punished and/or deported to other islands.  Sharpe was captured and publicly executed in May 832 in Market Square at Montego Bay.  Before he was hanged, Sharpe is reported to have said, “I would rather die in yonder gallows, than live for a minute more in slavery.”

Two parliamentary inquiries were launched to determine the causes of the insurrection and a week after Sharpe’s execution, the British Parliament appointed a committee to consider ways of ending slavery in the colonies (The Abolition Project).  In August 1833, the Slavery Abolition Act was approved formally ending slavery in British America.  A provision of the act was that plantation owners would receive compensation for the loss of their slaves.  No provision was made to compensate enslaved Africans for years of bondage and unpaid work. 

The Jamaican and Haitian rebellions should be treated as major historical events and given a prominent place in the global history curriculum; however, they generally are not even included.  In McDougal Littell’s World History: Patterns of Interaction (Beck, 2005), Haiti is briefly mentioned twice in sections on Napoleon (665) and the Latin American revolutions (682).  Jamaica and Sam Sharpe, the leader of the insurrection that brought down slavery in the British Empire, are never mentioned.  They receive a similar lack of coverage in Bedford/St. Martin’s A History of World Societies.

Life-sized bronze statues of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass stand at the entrances to the New-York Historical Society greeting visitors.  The Society placed the statutes there to make a statement about its mission.  But I think they are probably there as pickets, warning New Yorkers and the American public that the N-YHS has hijacked the past and if they do enter, they should be careful about the untruths inside.