The Boston Tea Party and a Tradition of Violence

Part 3 of our series on the Boston Tea Party focuses on the protest that patriots eventually carried out against the 1773 Tea Act. The actual act of dumping the tea was, in its nonviolence, unusual in Boston history.

When you read about the events leading up to the Tea Party, you quickly become a little uncomfortable with the readiness of Bostonians to physically attack people and destroy their property as the first means to their ends. Violence was sanctioned in odd ways in colonial Boston. “Pope’s Day” was an annual holiday, observed on November 5th, during which boys roamed the city knocking on doors and asking for money; if denied, they broke all the windows in the house. Later, older boys and men carried effigies of Satan and the pope, the two groups heading from North and South End and celebrating their meeting in the center of town with an enormous fistfight; the winning group then took the losers’ effigies and burned them.

This kind of “playful” violence was all too easy to organize into political violence. Here are just a few examples, again from Benjamin Carp’s fantastic Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America:

—August 1765: effigies of a British minister and an American stamp distributor (of the unpopular Stamp Act) were hung in the South End; at dusk the effigies were taken down by a crowd who then completely destroyed a building owned by the stamp distributor, went to the man’s house and threw rocks at the windows, broke in, and destroyed some furniture. When Governor Hutchinson tried to reason with the rioters, they threw bricks at him. The stamp distributor resigned the next day.

—June 1768: When smuggler John Hancock’s ship was held by authorities who suspected it had smuggled goods, a group of over 300 Bostonians attacked the customs officers, throwing bricks and stones at them, and then went to the house of one officer and broke all the windows.

—March 1770: a group of men and boys were throwing rocks at British soldiers who were competing with them for jobs (many soldiers moonlighted to enhance their income); this turned into the Boston Massacre when the soldiers opened fire, afraid for their lives as the crowd grew in size and malice.

—November 1771: customs officials seize a boat carrying smuggled tea; another boat comes up alongside and thirty armed men attack the customs officials with clubs, swords, and guns. They forced the British captain into the hold, where he nearly died of his wounds, while they took the tea and left, wounded men lying on the decks of two boats.

—November 1773: a crowd gathered outside the house of a man who had a commission to sell tea from the EIC, shouting and beating down his gate. The commissioner yelled at them from an upper window to leave, and fired a shot. The mob shattered all the windows of the house and were only turned away from assaulting the owner by the pleas of some patriots that there were women in the house.

Tea commissioners were routinely summoned to public meetings by anonymous letters which threatened their lives as well as their jobs if they did not show up. Commissioners and others deemed hostile to the patriot cause were tarred and feathered—the “American torture.”

When the tea that the Tea Act mandated be sold in America arrived in November 1773, the governor knew he could not protect the men commissioned to receive and sell it from the people; those commissioners (one of them an elderly man) fled to the British Fort William on Castle Island in Boston Harbor, and there they stayed for many months after the Tea Party, justly feaful of their lives.

This willingness to use violence got mixed reviews from patriot leaders. Some felt it was justifable because it was in protest of an unfair government. Others felt it gave the patriot cause a bad name, and attracted lowlifes who weren’t fighting for democracy. All knew it had to be carefully managed to keep it under control: at any moment a mob nominally in the service of colonial leaders could become a force that knew no loyalty and could not be controlled by anyone.

It is certainly unsettling for modern-day Americans to read about the tactics our ancestors were ready to use when they believed themselves to be crossed. Mob violence is not something we condone today, and so much of the violence in colonial Boston seems to have been based not in righteous anger but in personal habit and popular tradition that it’s hard to see it as truly patriotic.

Patriot leaders like Samuel Adams knew they would have to keep violence out of their official platform, disassociating the decisions of the General Court from the purveyors of mob violence. The Tea Party would be a triumph of this difficult position.

Next time: planning the Tea Party

The Boston Tea Party: Why was tea so important?

In part 2 of our series on the Boston Tea Party, we ask, why tea? Why was this commodity so symbolic, the one which American patriots chose to make a political stand over?

Until the 1700s, tea was a luxury item, very expensive and looked on with a little suspicion. But by 1765 tea trade represented 70-90% of the imports of the powerful British East India Company. For a very interesting description of the EIC, its role in the British government, and the debt that threatened to destroy it, all of which have a large role to play in the Boston Tea Party, see Benjamin’s Carp’s Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America, an invaluable book to which this Truth v. Myth series is deeply indebted.

Tea came to the Americas legally, through the EIC, and illegally, through American smugglers. By the mid-1700s, the price was low enough to move tea from exotic luxury to daily drink, but it retained its mystique. Tea-drinking was the center of domestic rituals in households high and low, and owning all the accoutrements of tea-making and drinking was to have status—status that was recognized on both sides of the Atlantic. As Carp describes it,

“During the eighteenth century, tea became the drink of respectable British and colonial households everywhere. The wealthiest families adopted tea ceremonies first, giving tea immense cultural cachet. …tea was a regular family event. …The woman of the house oversaw the making of tea and assigned a series of tasks and errands to other family members, bringing the family together under her direction. …Tea became a ritual of family solidarity, sustenance, and politeness. To master the tea ceremony was to announce your own virtue… The striving ‘middle class’ of tradesmen, professionals, and landowners couldn’t resist the chance to partake in this elite pastime. You didn’t have to have a hereditary title, or even be particularly wealthy, to sip respectably at the tea table. …tea had become a new necessity. Addictive, stimulating, lightweight, and easy to prepare, [tea] could conquer sleep and thereby make a person more productive: in this way tea was contributing to the growing empire’s economy.” [55-6]

We see, then, that tea was many things: it was classy; it was a shared experience; it was family togetherness; it was caffeine addiction; it was a way for people of all economic classes to show their respectability. Poor families drank tea to get them through the long work day and to show they, too, could appreciate the finer things. Middle-class families drank tea to show the rich that they were sophisticated, too. Wealthy families drank tea with expensive porcelain tea services from Europe or China itself (where the tea came from) and silver utensils to show that they were just as good as people in England, too. All this sophistication was important to Americans, who were always self-conscious about looking provincial in front of their cousins back in England. Americans wanted to show that they were just as good as English people, just as trendy, just as well-mannered.

Of course, there were naysayers. Pamphlets were published on the negative effect tea had on people’s morals, as they did whatever they had to do to pay for tea and the sugar that went with it, and basically sold their souls for fancy tea-sets. Doctors deplored spending money on something that had no nutritional value. Tea, like gin, was seen as a gateway drug to a life of laziness, vanity, vice, and immorality. Valuing any material thing so highly was bound to cause trouble.

On the political side, some Americans worried about contributing so much money to the East India Company. They knew about the Company’s track record in India, where the lives and economy of the native people were held in little regard. American suspicions about the EIC were confirmed in 1769, when a famine hit Bengal, India, which was controlled by the Company. Over 1 million Bengalis died of starvation, the EIC refused to share its stockpiles of food, and actually raised taxes on the survivors to make up for lost revenue. “As Chatterji wrote, ‘People could die of starvation, but the collection of revenue didn’t stop.’ Warren Hastings, the new governor of Bengal in 1772, reported to London in chilling terms that revenue collection had been ‘violently kept up to its former standard.'” [Carp 11-12]

Such was the source of tea in America, and there were Americans who hesitated to put their own country in thrall to the EIC. (News of the famine and the EIC’s response to it would fan the flames of anti-tea rebellion during the 1773 protests against the Tea Act.) What would happen if America, too, became “enslaved” (as they put it at the time) to the Company? It was not as far-fetched a notion as it seemed. To pay off its mounting debts, which threatened the British government itself (because the government was heavily invested in the EIC and depended on its profits for a large part of its operating budget), the Company shipped more and more tea to the colonies. Europe and England had already had their markets saturated. Now tea rolled into America in ever-larger amounts, which brought the price down nicely for consumers, but also threatened American security because the option to purchase tea was seeming more and more like an obligation to do so. Ships that came into port carrying tea were legally required to unload that cargo—it was illegal to ship the tea back to England. It had to be sold. American commissioners, men who had signed contracts with the EIC to sell imported tea in America, were legally obligated to fulfill those contracts. If they failed to do so, the governor himself had to issue a clearance to send the tea back, but the governor would not do this without receiving clearance from the customhouse that said there was something wrong with the tea. If the tea was fine, there was no option but to unload it for the commissioners to sell. If the commissioners would not accept the tea, it was seized, along with the ship it came on—a ship usually owned by the commissioner himself. So men selling tea in America were in a bind: if they did not accept and sell the tea in America, they would lose their commission to sell tea in the future, lose their valuable ship, and lose the money they had spent to get the tea.

This smacked of coercion to many Americans. Did they really have no choice but to buy EIC tea? What would the Company do to them if they refused to buy the tea?

Granted, much, perhaps most tea for sale in America was illegally smuggled by traders unaffiliated with the EIC, men who had no commission from the British government to sell tea (legally, only the EIC was authorized to sell tea to the Americas). You didn’t have to buy Company tea. But as the Company fought for its life financially, a crackdown on smuggling began. Now Americans faced the prospect of being forced to turn in smugglers to the Company or being punished by the British government. They had to help the EIC maintain a monopoly on American tea sales, strengthening a company that had no respect for human life, as Americans saw it, and which would not hesitate to destroy America as it had destroyed Bengal if necessary. If the Company had a complete monopoly, what price might it begin to charge for tea, which was now seen as a necessity? What political power might it be given in America?

So we see why tea became the flashpoint for rebellion in America. When the 1767 Townshend Acts first put a tax on tea, it was seen as outrageous for a few reasons: a) tea was a necessity and raising the price through a tax would put it out of the reach of many; b) the Company was already making a good profit on tea; c) the new tea tax went to pay the customs officials who forced tea to be unloaded and sold in America.

Americans boycotted tea to protest the Townshend Acts. By now you realize what a huge move this was. Giving up tea was very difficult. It threatened the status of the rich and the energy of the poor. On the most basic level, the boycott led to caffeine-withdrawal headaches that confirmed peoples’ notion that tea was medicinal (since drinking tea again would soothe the headache). Given all this, it is telling that although smuggled tea was available, people did not drink it on principle. Violence escalated, and in 1768 Boston was occupied by British troops, whose presence led eventually to the 1770 Boston Massacre (more on violence in Boston in the next post). The Townshend Acts were partially repealed, but the tax on tea remained because the EIC was sinking further into debt (in part because it had flooded every market for tea). It had 18 million pounds of unsold tea in its warehouses that it could not sell. And so the Tea Act of 1773 was introduced, on top of the existing tea tax, mandating that the surplus tea be shipped to America and sold at a steep discount. Americans who were trying to keep the tea boycott alive, who knew that many Americans were dying for a chance to return to tea-drinking, were furious. They knew that if the American market was flooded with extra-cheap tea Americans would not be able to resist it, the boycott would end, and the tea tax would be entrenched—the first, perhaps, of many harmful taxes that offered no services to the colonies but simply helped the British control them more tightly. America would be enslaved to the EIC after all.

Now it was paramount to overthrow this tea scheme. In the next post, we’ll see how protest began.

Next time: a tradition of violence

Truth v. Myth: What caused the Boston Tea Party?

Hello and welcome to our series on the Boston Tea Party. This event, like Washington crossing the Delaware or the winter at Valley Forge, is familiar to all Americans—or at least the name is. Most people are hard-pressed to come up with any details on what happened and why. Here we’ll go beyond the men dressed as Indians and the tea dumped in the harbor and the refusal to pay taxes to explain how events unfolded and we’ll start by showing that one of those three details is all wrong.

Throughout, we’ll be hugely indebted to Benjamin Carp’s fantastic, must-read for all Americans Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America. If you are left wanting more after this series, buy that book and enjoy.

Let’s start, as we must, with taxes. We have all been told that British taxes on everyday American goods like paper, sugar, and tea were bitterly resented by colonists, who refused to pay them. This is an oversimplification and so, inevitably, it’s inaccurate. The issue was more complicated: after the huge expense of fighting the French and Indian War (aka the Seven Years’ War) against France both in Europe and in North America, Britain’s people were taxed to the hilt. They had helped pay for three wars against the Dutch from 1652-1674, as well as several wars with France, including the War of the Spanish Succession (Queen Anne’s War) and King George’s War between 1689 and 1748. By the end of the French and Indian War, Britons living in the British Isles could pay no more without wrecking the economic revolution developing in England at the time (the foundation of modern capitalism).

So the British turned to the Americans for help. The Americans had been the ones clamoring for Britain to put an end to the French and Indian threat on their doorstep, and they had made a lot of money selling supplies at hugely inflated prices to the British Army. Now Britain asked them to help pay up.

Most Americans supported this, with one caveat: they wished that they could have a say in how they were taxed—how much, and on what goods. But since they did not have representatives in Parliament, they could not have a say. American leaders had been petitioning formally and informally for reprentatives to Parliament for years to no avail. So after 1763, when the French and Indian War ended, Britain alone decided the tax rate and the goods to be taxed.

Most Americans would have gone along with this, at least for a while. But the real problem with the new taxation was this: the tax money went, in large part, to pay the salaries of British officials in America. That is, the tax money Americans paid did not a) get directly applied to the war debt; b) did not go to provide any services for Americans, but c) was used to pay the salaries of the royal governors, customs officials, and others.

Think of it this way: today we pay taxes to get services. Our taxes fund social programs like Medicare, Head Start, and others. We may not always like our tax rate, but at least we can say the money is coming back to the people in some important way. But in America in the 1760s, tax money just went to pay politicians. It would be like state taxes going to pay the governor’s salary, the salaries of state representatives, and city mayors, and nothing else—no services.

Worse, in colonial America a large portion of the new taxes went to pay one royal official in particular: the tax collector. So American tax money went to the tax collector who then had every incentive to demand strict enforcement of every tax, and to welcome new taxes.

This was the problem with taxes in post-war America. Americans had no say in how they were taxed, and their money went to enrich the government officials who collected taxes basically as salary.

In Massachusetts, there was a way to fight back. Massachusetts, unlike most of the other English colonies, was founded as an independent colony. It was not under the control of King or Parliament. It elected its own officials, from governor to colonial legislature. In the other colonies, the governor was appointed by the king and and people had no say. This royal governor often appointed members to the colonial legislature. This way, the governor could prevent the legislature from pursuing policies that negatively impacted the crown financially or politically. When Massachusetts was at last brought under direct royal control in 1691, it struck a unique deal: its governor would be appointed by the king, with no input from the people of the colony, but its legislature would remain popularly elected. And in Massachusetts, “popular” had real meaning. Almost every white male was a freeman, with voting rights. Property ownership was not a requirement. So the colony had a truly popular legislature, which took its responsibility of representing the interests of the people seriously. The Massachusetts legislature, called the General Court, would fight the royal governor and tax officials when they attempted to enforce the new tax on tea.

Thus, Massachusetts was particularly able to mount a defense against the post-war taxation, because its legislature actually represented the people. But they were not the only colonies to do so. New York and Pennsylvania launched vigorous anti-tax protests as well, as we’ll see, and criticized Massachusetts for not being radical enough—at least until the night of the Tea Party.

In the next post, we’ll look at the reasons why tea, of all the commodities that were taxed, became the hottest issue, and we’ll explain the customs rules that led Massachusetts men to decide that dumping the tea was necessary.

Next time: why tea?

Sinners in the hands of an angry God in context

Welcome to the conclusion of our series on the 1741 Jonathan Edwards sermon “Sinners in the hands of an angry God”. Here we wrap up after our close reading in part 3 and put the sermon in its historical context.

We’ve seen in parts 1 and 2 that New England in the early-mid-1700s was going through enormous change as a) many non-Congregational outsiders moved into the colony, which had been b) newly taken over by the English government [in 1691] as a royal colony under the direct control of the King, leading to c) an upswing in political activism, the other great concern of New Englanders since 1630, and d) the original Congregational faith began to be fully transformed by the ideas of other Protestant faiths. It’s not that New Englanders no longer cared about religion. It’s just that they no longer had a traditional Congregationalism to turn to, and even if they had, it would no longer have fully met their needs. The First Great Awakening of the 1730s-40s was not a cause of the decline of traditional Congregationalism but a symptom of it.

The invaluable book Tenacious of their Liberties: The Congregationalists in Colonial Massachusetts, by James F. Cooper, Jr., puts it this way:

“The Great Awakening is better understood as an event whose onset reflected ongoing tensions within the colony’s religious life and whose consequences accelerated changes in both Congregationalism and the larger culture that had long been under way. …Many features of the New England Way had clearly become desacralized well before the 1740s, and [many] had long before decided to ignore issues like discipline and mutual watch rather than fight over them. …The emphasis on evangelism and the New Birth that fueled the Great Awakening underscored the diminished relevance of corporate ties and Congregational procedures as churchgoers focused increasingly on issues of personal piety, the individual conscience, and novel means of seeking salvation. [This was a] shift away from Congregational practices as a central means of grace…” (198)

Indeed, any sermon focused so closely on both an individual acting to save herself from eternal damnation by seeking the “remedy” on her own without the input or help of any of her friends or congregation members, and on a complete lack of concern for other people’s souls is an example of the rise of personal piety. The heart of traditional Congregationalism had been its communality: everyone worked together to discover God’s will for everyone.

There was no way to change traditional Congregationalism without weakening it. Native New Englanders held the faith of the Puritan founders in such respect that any change made to accommodate new thinking was rejected as meddling. One might almost say that New Englanders in 1740 would rather let the old religion die intact than extend its life artificially. If the Way was no longer their way, there was no help for that. Let the old Congregational faith die as it lived rather than fade away as a shadow of its old self.

And so ministers like Edwards who straddled the lines, embracing parts of Arminianism and welcoming an unreformed Anglican revivalist, could not keep their traditional posts. After the flurry of Whitefield’s revival, Edwards attempted to return his congregation to old-school Congregational practices, encouraging mutual watch (in some unpopular ways, such as reading aloud in church a list of names of people who were reading salacious books) and being very restrictive about church membership (this after the hundreds of people who were accepted into churches at a time during the Great Awakening). More importantly, he reversed the decision made by his grandfather, the Rev. Samuel Stoddard, to allow people who were baptized but not full members (as per the Halfway Covenant) to receive communion. His congregation eventually removed him, and he stepped down gradually but without rancor.

From 1750-8 Edwards ministered to the Housatonics (Native Americans) of Stockbridge, defending their property rights against white settlement. He then took the position of President of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton), but died very shortly after his installation from a smallpox vaccination; as an amateur scientist, Edwards was a strong supporter of vaccinations, which were new and treated with great suspicion by most people. His bad health, however, meant that his vaccination led to illness and his death on March 22, 1758.

Edwards might well have been surprised to know that “Sinners in the hands of an angry God” would seal his everlasting fame, outliving him by centuries. It was only one of his hellfire revival sermons, and not indicative of the bulk of his work, detailed analyses of doctrine and compliance which are very dry compared with his revival subjects. He would likely have wished that his study of the conversion process or the qualifications one needed for full church membership, or even his study of spiders or other aspects of the New England forests would have lived on instead.

As it is, we have “Sinners”. What’s important at this point is to read and recognize this sermon for what it is—a window into a time of religious, social, and political turmoil and change, and a symbol of the alternatives to Congregationalism that were developing at the time rather than an icon of Puritan beliefs.

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God: what does it mean?

Welcome to our series on the (in)famous 1741 Jonathan Edwards sermon “Sinners in the hands of an angry God”. This is a text that is taught unfailingly in American literature courses in high school and college; students read a short excerpt, one of the many that focuses all too intently on describing the horrors of hell and the wretched situation of humans living seemingly comfortable and happy lives on Earth but destined—pre-destined—to wind up scorching eternally.

It’s usually presented as an example of the awfulness of the Puritans and their religion, but it’s not really a Puritan sermon at all. In this series, we’ll trace the evolution of this sermon, the Great Awakening of which it was a part, and the overall religious climate of New England in the mid-1700s.

Let’s begin with a sizing up of religious feeling and practice in New England at the time. New England had been settled by Puritans—English people who wanted to strip the Anglican church of its remaining “Catholic” practices—to purify it (much more on the Puritans throughout this site!). The church these people created in the New World came to be called Congregational, because each individual congregation was completely autonomous—there were no bishops and archbishops assigning ministers and dictating doctrine. The people attending a church had complete control over who became their minister, voting for and against candidates for that office, and each church was free from interference by the state.

When on earth, you ask, will we get to the sermon? It is coming; in the very next post we’ll get to it. But you can’t understand why Edwards’ sermon was so powerful unless you know where his congregation of 1741 was at with their religion and their souls.

This original Congregational church was strong from 1630, when the Puritans arrived in New England, until about 1700. Early on, the Puritans codified their beliefs and, most importantly, their church practices in a body of doctrine called the New England Way. One of the most important things to understand about the real Puritanism of this period, rather than the religious practice that came later in the early 1700s, is that Puritan religion was very intellectual. It required lots of thought, reading, prayer, conversation, and soul-searching done in the quiet of reflection. The New England Way laid out a series of steps one must take in order to a) open oneself to God’s grace so that b) one could realize whether one had been given God’s grace and was saved. It’s a little bald, but let’s put it into bullets:

—Puritans believed that everyone in history and in the future had already been given grace/salvation by God or had not

—There was nothing you could do to earn God’s grace/salvation; no sinful human could ever deserve it

—God decided millennia before you were born whether to give you His grace or not (this is called predestination)

—Your job was to live as good a life as you could, following Congregational doctrine as closely as you could, in order to make your fallen soul as receptive as possible to the word of God, which would

—make it possible for you to realize whether you had received God’s grace or not.

—If you realized you had been saved, you were all set. If not, you had to keep trying. Puritans, for all their strictness, were loathe to actually tell someone to give up, that they weren’t saved.

Puritans were fully committed to their Way. They saw it as a fixed doctrine, set for the ages. But in 1659, the Halfway Covenant was introduced. In the Congregational church, infants were baptized, and anyone baptized in a church could attend it. But unless they became full members, they could not take communion or take part in church votes. To become a full member, you had to complete the long series of steps toward opening yourself to God and have the realization that God had indeed saved you. Very, very few Puritans, even in the fervent early decades, did this. They took their religion very seriously, and very few people could bring themselves to think that they had been given the priceless gift of God’s grace and salvation. The Halfway Covenant allowed people who weren’t full members to have their own children baptized. They could not take communion or vote, but they could be part of the groups that sought to know God’s will. This was a compromise that kept children in the fold without corrupting the Congregational practice of requiring full membership before you took communion or voted.

Churches across New England battled in mini civil wars over whether they would accept the Halfway Covenant, and some churches were torn apart. Argument about what the New England Way really was fired the region. The Halfway Covenant was eventually accepted, but it did plant a seed of doubt in people’s minds—was Congregational doctrine really handed down from God, and unchangeable, or something created by humans that had no real authority?

This question would remain as the 17th century drew to a close. The Massachusetts Bay Colony lost its autonomy in 1691 and was made a royal colony under direct control of the English king, and many thousands of non-Puritans entered the colony. The old religion held on, but inevitably it changed. Whether you thought that change was for the better or the worse influenced how you felt about the Great Awakening, and Jonathan Edwards’ preaching, when they came.

Next time: the Great Awakening and the Sermon

Dred Scott: Slavery as “doctrine and principle”

Part three of our look at the 1857 Dred Scott decision comes to the section of Chief Justice Taney’s majority opinion in which he switches from detailing precedent—the ways in which U.S. law has had slavery written into it—to explaining why the Founders did that, why they held racist beliefs about black people, why they had no choice but to respond by writing slavery into U.S. law, and why, therefore, Taney and his Court will have no choice but to uphold that law and to uphold slavery.

Let’s resume the text of the decision; again this is not the complete text, but excerpts taken in order. All italics are mine:

“…[T]he legislation and histories of the time [when the Declaration of Independence was written], and the language used in the Declaration of Independence, show, that neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves, nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used in that memorable instrument.

“It is difficult at this day to realize the state of public opinion in relation to that unfortunate race, which prevailed in the civilized and enlightened portions of the world at the time of the Declaration of Independence, and when the Constitution of the United States was framed and adopted….

“They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery. . . He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it. This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race. It was regarded as an axiom in morals as well as in politics, which no one thought of disputing, or supposed to be open to dispute; and men in every grade and position in society daily and habitually acted upon it in their private pursuits, as well as in matters of public concern, without doubting for a moment the correctness of this opinion.”

—Here Taney is not saying, Look at how racist people were back then. He is not just describing a previous time and its beliefs. You have to remember that Taney is writing as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and he is writing about the men who founded our government. This is a civics lesson. Just as we said in the last post, this is not mere private opinion. Because these opinions about black people are in the minds and mouths of the Founders, these opinions literally become the philosophical foundation of our system of government and code of law.

The line that is almost always pulled from this opinion and quoted is the line, “the negro has no rights which the white man is bound to respect”. But notice that this not not a judgment Taney makes; he is describing not his personal opinion or a universal principle but the opinions of the Founders. We know enough by now to recognize that this is citing precedent—Taney is not making a judgment of his own. It’s not Taney saying “the negro has no rights which the white man is bound to respect”, it is the Founders and all U.S. slave law since them. We’ve mentioned in the previous post that the Taney decision actually will be “this Court has no business even hearing the Dred Scott case because he is not a U.S. citizen, therefore we decline to give a ruling.”

Taney ends that quote by saying none of the Founders ever doubted that their low opinion of black people was correct; he will reiterate this in the next paragraph, in which he expands to say that England, our founding nation, shared the same opinion, and that no one seems to have doubted that it was correct. He then cites some of the slavery laws of the American colonies, and then says,

“[T]hese laws … show that a perpetual and impassable barrier was intended to be erected between the white race and the one which they had reduced to slavery, and governed as subjects with absolute and despotic power…

“We refer to these historical facts for the purpose of showing the fixed opinions concerning that race, upon which the statesmen of that day spoke and acted … in order to determine whether the general terms used in the Constitution of the United States, as to the rights of man and the rights of the people, was intended to include them [black people], or to give to them or their posterity the benefit of any of its provisions.”

—The first lines give you hope: Taney describes slavery as despotic. He describes a barrier put between black and white and you think, for a moment, that he will describe that barrier as false and wrong. But it is not to be. Remember, the question is not whether slavery is right or wrong. The question is, Is slavery supported and enforced by U.S. law? You may hate slavery, Taney may hate it, but that is not the issue. Support it or hate it, if slavery is enforced by and enshrined in U.S. law, the Court must uphold it. The only alternative is to call slavery unconstitutional.

Why not do just that? Taney is getting to that. Is there an argument to be made that the line “All men are created equal” should now apply to black people? Notice how Taney adds “to black people or their posterity” to the last line above. It’s a quick little clause but it’s important. If the Constitution was not meant to give equal rights to black Americans living at the time of its ratification in 1787, could it possibly be changed to offer those rights to their children and grandchildren?

This is tricky because Taney is asking what the Founders intended for the future. Did they say anything that seems to open the door to freeing black people decades after 1787—i.e., 1857, the year of the Dred Scott case?

“But it is too clear for dispute, that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included… for if the language, as understood in that day, would embrace them, the conduct of the distinguished men who framed the Declaration of Independence would have been utterly and flagrantly inconsistent with the principles they asserted; and instead of the sympathy of mankind, to which they so confidently appealed, they would have deserved and received universal rebuke and reprobation.”

—Why would including black Americans as equal citizens have exposed the Founders to “rebuke and reprobation”? Because you cannot designate one group of people as inferior, incapable of understanding or law, and then give them full rights of citizenship. That cheapens citizenship, and makes democracy impossible. It’s like making people who can’t swim lifeguards. If you say black people are ignorant and incapable of law, you cannot include them without making your democracy a sham.

“Yet the men who framed this declaration were great men… high in their sense of honor, and incapable of asserting principles inconsistent with those on which they were acting. They perfectly understood the meaning of the language they used, and how it would be understood by others; and they knew that it would not in any part of the civilized world be supposed to embrace the negro race, which, by common consent, had been excluded from civilized Governments and the family of nations, and doomed to slavery. They spoke and acted according to the then established doctrines and principles, and in the ordinary language of the day, no one misunderstood them. The unhappy black race were separate from white by indelible marks, and laws long before established, and were never thought of or spoken of except as property, and when the claims of the owner or the profit of the trader were supposed to need protection.

—It was no accident, it was no oversight. The Founders deliberately excluded black Americans from the definition of citizen, based on the “established doctrine and principles” of the civilized world of their time. They had no choice but to do so—those doctrines and principles demanded it. As “great men”, the Founders could not cheapen and destroy their own democracy by including people who could not live up to it. They could not forsake the judgment of the civilized world (this will be important as we wait to see if Taney will forsake that judgment to overturn slavery). Taney adds,

“This state of public opinion had undergone no change when the Constitution was adopted, as is equally evident from its provisions and language…”

—So from 1776 to 1787 there was not change in established doctrine. What about after 1787? Taney nixes the hope that since then there has been any change in doctrine:

“…It would be impossible to enumerate … the various laws, marking the condition of this race, which were passed from time to time after the Revolution, and before and since the adoption of the Constitution of the United States. …The legislation of the States therefore shows, in a manner not to be mistaken, the inferior and subject condition of that race at the time the Constitution was adopted, and long afterwards… To all this mass of proof we have still to add, that Congress has repeatedly legislated upon the same construction of the Constitution that we have given…. ”

—Taney then broadens the scope:

“For if [black Americans were] entitled to the privileges and immunities of citizens, it would exempt them from the operation of the special laws and from the police regulations which they considered to be necessary for their own safety.”

—This is complex. Taney is saying that if his Court overturned slavery to make black Americans citizen, two things would happen: a) this would overturn myriad slave laws already in place and serving as part of the precedent of upholding slavery, and b) those laws were put in place for the protection of black Americans. The latter is an example of the popular idea of the mid-19th century that slavery helped black people by protecting them from their own ignorance and other shortcomings.

So overturning slavery as unconstitutional is the only way to break from precedent, but that is hard to do when precedent seems so well-founded in the princples and doctrine of the wisest and best men of western civilization, freedom-loving men who would clearly grant liberty to anyone who deserved it, and compassionate men who put in place laws to help protect those who did not deserve liberty from themselves. Precedent is also enshrined in dozens of state laws.

Taney is moments from his conclusion; we will cover it in the next post. For now, we see that he began by citing precedent in U.S. law supporting slavery. He then reached back to find precedent for U.S. law in colonial and English law. By doing so, he removed racism from the realm of opinion to the realm of principle. Notice again how his own Court, his own decision, has not made an appearance. Taney was not about the make a ruling on the controversial slavery issue. He knew the uproar it would create if his Court found Scott to be free or if it found Scott to be still enslaved. He resented Congress bailing on its duty to write legislation to solve the slavery debate once and for all by throwing the issue at the Court. He therefore turns back to the original legislators, the Founders, to do the dirty work for everyone and uphold slavery.

Next time: the final decision

Reading the Dred Scott Decision: Precedent, precedent, precedent

Part two of our look at the 1857 Dred Scott decision leads us to do a close reading of the words of its author, Chief Justice Roger Taney. This close reading will show and focus on Taney’s thorough, driving citation of precedent in the question of slavery and race in United States law.

Taney’s citing of precedent serves, as we shall see, two purposes: first, it puts the burden of deciding whether enslaving black people is legal and/or morally justified onto previous generations, removing it from the shoulders or conscience of the Court; second, it makes the question of enslaving black Americans moot, removing the need for the Taney Court to make a decision on this controversial issue.

Let’s begin reading Taney’s majority decision. This is not the full text! It is excerpts taken in order. The full text is far too long for this format. All the italics are my own, to highlight meaning:

“The question is simply this: Can a negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guarantied by that instrument to the citizen? One of which rights is the privilege of suing in a court of the United States in the cases specified in the Constitution[?]”

—The seemingly meaningless, boilerplate starter “the question is simply this” is actually freighted with meaning. Taney will repeat it later. It serves to say, “We are facing a legal question, as a Court. This means that we must take the issue of slavery as a legal question that has been dealt with in courts before ours, and therefore a thorough examination of precedent—how those earlier courts decided the question—is not only necessary, but will likely answer the question for us.” In our justice system, precedent is very important. If 50 courts before you have decided one way on an issue, you have no legal footing to decide a different way, unless you are going to say the law is unconstitutional and needs to be changed.

The Supreme Court does just that from time to time, of course; there are occasions when it overturns precedent and says an existing law is unconstitutional and therefore all those previous judgments were wrong. But this is rare. So when Taney brings up the definition of “citizen” as specified in the Constitution, you know he is not likely to overturn that definition.

“The question before us is, whether [people of African ancestry] compose a portion of this people [described in the Constitution as citizens], and are constituent members of this sovereignty? We think they are not, and that they are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.”

—Again, we have to read this as a description of precedent, not someone’s personal opinion. Yes, Taney says “We think they are not, and that they are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution”, but what he is saying is, Because the writers of the Constitution did not intend to include black Americans as citizens, we are forced to think that they cannot now be citizens. Precedent—if the Founders did not specifically include black Americans in the definition of citizen, then that is an important piece of precedent for the Court today to take into consideration.

You may be asking at this point, Where in the Constitution does it say black Americans are not and cannot be U.S. citizens? The Constitution doesn’t say that anywhere. We will deal with that, as Taney does, in our next post. For Taney does, in the second half of his decision, provide and lengthily analyze proofs that the Founders did not include and could not ever have intended to include black Americans as citizens. So for now, let’s continue with his establishment of that precedent.

“On the contrary, they were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them.”

—This is not a burst of personal-opinion racism, but again a description of legal precedent: if the Founders who created our Constitution saw black Americans as inferior, and wrote that into our law, and did not choose to grant them the right and privilege of citizenship because of that perceived inferiority, then we, the Court today in 1857, have to take that into consideration. It wasn’t just a private belief of the Founders; they wrote it into our law. Therefore, racial inequality must be seen as part of our law, and therefore difficult to overturn.

You see how Taney is moving here. He is painstakingly setting Dred Scott up to fail. If racism is not just personal, but legally incorporated into the law of the United States by our Constitution, Taney’s Court is likely going to have no choice but to decide against Scott without even having to think about it, without having to consider Scott’s case. In the eyes of precedent, Scott’s case was heard and decided against him 70 years ago, in 1787, when the Constitution was written and ratified.

“[Therefore Dred Scott] could not be a citizen of the State of Missouri, within the meaning of the Constitution of the United States, and, consequently, was not entitled to sue in its courts.”

—This will be the eventual conclusion of this long decision. Since the Constitution says Scott is not a citizen, he has no right to even bring a case into a U.S. court. Again, precedent allows the Taney Court to dodge the controversial bullet of the slavery issue by refusing to even hear the case.

“It is true, every person, and every class and description of persons, who were at the time of the adoption of the Constitution recognized as citizens in the several States, became also citizens of this new political body… And the personal rights and privileges guarantied to citizens of this new sovereignty were intended to embrace those only who were then members of the several State communities, or who should afterwards by birthright or otherwise become members, according to the provisions of the Constitution and the principles on which it was founded…”

—So only those who were deliberately included in the definition of “U.S. citizen” when the Constitution was written in 1787 are citizens today in 1857. And, crucially, people who weren’t included in that definition (immigrants, for the most part) were only able to become citizens if doing so did not overturn the Constitution and “the principles on which it was founded”.

This is important. Taney sees that there are some people who have to become citizens of the U.S., and that they are allowed to do so. How can you give a foreign-born person U.S. citizenship? And how can you give an immigrant citizenship but not a black American, native-born right here in the U.S.? What’s the difference?

Taney is going to answer this question in the second half of his decision, which we’ll look at next time. For now, we see that he has skillfully avoided even dealing with the issue of slavery by using precedent to show that a) you cannot rule against slavery without amending the Constitution; but b) no Court has ever done that, so it’s unlikely that it should be done, and c) the Court couldn’t overturn the Constitution even if it wanted to because Scott, as a non-citizen, can’t bring a case to trial in the U.S. and therefore the case before the Court must be dismissed.

Next time: Why some people could become citizens, but not black Americans

The Dred Scott Decision: An Investigation

To say that the 1857 Dred Scott Decision is a landmark of U.S. jurisprudence, history, and civil rights is an understatement. It is one of the bare handful of Supreme Court cases and decisions that is regularly studied in U.S. schools (along with Plessy v. Ferguson, Brown v. Board of Education, and the early Marshall decisions). What most Americans learn about Dred Scott is this:

In 1857, the United States Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, declared in its Dred Scott v. Sanford decision that black Americans, whether they were considered free people or enslaved, were not citizens of the U.S. and could never become citizens because of their race. Dred Scott was an enslaved man who lived in Missouri. The man enslaving him took Scott and Scott’s wife Harriet north to the free states of Illinois and Wisconsin, then took them back to slave Missouri. Scott claimed that once he and Harriet had crossed the border into free states, they had become free, as slavery was not allowed in those states. Once a person has gained free status, whether deliberate or not, he or she cannot be returned to slavery.

Chief Justice Taney was firmly pro-slavery and his decision was based on his desire to protect slavery where it existed in the southern states and where it might be outlawed in the west. In his majority decision, Taney said that black Americans “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever profit could be made by it.”

Taney then topped this outrageous statement with the assertion that the Declaration of Independence’s ringing statement that “all men are created equal” did not apply to black people. He wrote, “it is too clear for dispute, that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration…”

Taney’s racism and determination to protect slavery led him to disallow Scott to even present a case to the Supreme Court, since he was not U.S. citizen and to reaffirm not only the legality of slavery but its righteousness. One man’s mission sentenced millions of people to slavery.

This common interpretation of the decision is not quite right. Its outcome was, indeed, that slavery was upheld. But the decision is more a careful avoidance of drawing conclusions about slavery than a pro-slavery manifesto. It is just another in a decades-long series of non-decisions that refused to get the Court involved in the impossibly dangerous slavery debate. The Court had, for years, insisted that Congress fulfill its appointed duty to legislate and create a law to solve the slavery issue once and for all. It would not accept Congress lobbing that hot potato back in its lap.

In the next post, we’ll look briefly at the context of the Dred Scott case, and see why the Court was put in the position of deciding a slavery issue, and why it resisted doing just that so vehemently.

Next time: the slave question in 1857

What did “one if by land, two if by sea” mean?

It’s one of those phrases, like “Damn the torpedoes!” or “Give me liberty or give me death!”, that all Americans know, but not everyone is sure they can explain. It’s a quick story but a good one.

In May 1774, the governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Gage, dissolved the General Court. This was Massachusetts’ popularly elected legislature, and had been since the Massachusetts Bay Colony was founded in 1630. The General Court was to be replaced by a Council of men appointed by King George III, just as Governor Gage had been royally appointed. This move overturned the system established in 1691 when Massachusetts became a royal colony: a royally appointed governor, but a popularly elected legislature.

Gage dissolved the GC because it was filled with men agitating for revolution. It was an attempt to stop the GC from fomenting rebellion amongst the so-far non-committal people of the colony. But whether or not they supported revolution, Massachusetts citizens were not going to give up their right to elect their representatives. They voted for representatives in the fall of 1774 as usual, except now those men would constitute the Provincial Congress. This Congress was illegal, according to the British Massachusetts Government Act that had dissolved the GC. It was not allowed to meet in Boston, and so gathered in Concord, northwest of the city. (Learn more about this fascinating 1774 vote at Boston 1775.)

So the Provincial Congress was in Concord, led by John Hancock, and a network of secret spy posts quickly went up between Boston and Concord. These were organized and manned by the Sons of Liberty’s Committee of Safety, which had one very active member named Paul Revere. The northwest precinct of Cambridge, a village called Menotomy (today’s Arlington) was just about at the halfway mark, and the Committee of Safety established a post at the White Horse tavern there. The posts were meant to send news from Boston to Concord about British plans and troop movements.

When the patriots in Boston found out from their spies that the British were planning to go out to Concord to seize an arms and ammunition cache, then arrest the members of the PC, Paul Revere, William Dawes, Samuel Prescott, and a few men whose names are lost to history made ready to ride out to Concord along the spy road to warn the town and the Congress. Word came that the British would set out from Boston on the night of April 18th. Now all they needed to know was what route the soldiers would take out to Concord.

This image, from the Paul Revere house website, shows the two possible routes:

The “land” route is in green. The green line that begins in Boston actually covers up the thin, long neck of land that connected the city to the mainland, but there was a land line, and if the British went south, that would be going “by land”. This was a longer, more roundabout way to Concord, but it avoided the difficulties of the sea route.

The “sea” route is in blue. The little blue boat covers up the Charles River that lay between Boston and Charlestown. Taking this route, the British got to Concord a little sooner, but also got very wet embarking and disembarking and then marching through swamp land on the shore.

Dawes actually took off first, before Revere, going by way of the land route just before the British army sealed off the city. Revere snuck across the Charles River to Charlestown, illegally crossing the river at night, to warn the citizens that the army might be coming through at any moment. Revere and the citizens of Charlestown whom he had alarmed then waited for a signal from Robert Newman, sexton of the Old North Church in Boston, about whether the British were indeed on their way, or taking the southern route.

One lantern for the southern route; two for the river crossing. Two lanterns appeared in the steeple for less than a minute, lest they be sighted. The men of Charlestown began their preparations, hiding horses that could be commandeered by the British and getting word to their militia men to start for Concord. Revere got on his horse and tore down the spy road through Menotomy and Medford, “alarming” the citizens that “the Regulars are out!” (This referred to the soldiers of the British Regular Army.) When he arrived in Lexington, and the house Hancock and Samuel Adams were staying at, a man in the house was waked up by Revere shouting. He asked Revere why he was making so much noise in the middle of the night. “Noise!” retorted Revere. “You’ll have more noise than this before long! The regulars are coming out!”

The rest is history. The British completed their sea route to Concord, and a famous standoff ensued—more on that another time. For now, “one if by land, two if by sea” is fully explained for all, and makes a satisfying addition to our store of knowledge on our country’s founding.

“Born Fighting”: Truth v. Myth, part 2

Part 2 of our Truth v. Myth on Sen. James Webb’s take on Scots-Irish history in America, the broadcast of “Born Fighting” recently aired on the Smithsonian Channel, finds us in post-Revolutionary War America, following the Scots-Irish in their ever-westerly travels.

Webb reaffirms the group’s “hatred of tyranny… and the belief that personal freedom should be a right, not a privilege.” Again, continuing with the theme of this investigation, it seems one could say that of any and all Americans, barring slaveholders, and one could point out that the entire population of the new nation had just ratified a federal government dedicated to the principle that freedom is a right. So it would not be just the Scots-Irish who felt this way. But Webb, a Senator, is anti-government, as he makes more and more clear in this documentary, and so he separates the principle of freedom being a natural right from the government and locates it fully in this one particular group.

Webb also says that the Scots-Irish believed that “only ability should dictate success”, and uses this as a springboard for talking about his greatest Scots-Irish hero, Andrew Jackson. We have dealt with Jackson here and here, and hopefully laid aside the idea that he was any kind of hero. But Webb buys into Jackson’s self-created propaganda that he was a man who stood up for the rights of the downtrodden, and gave power to the average American, the frontiersman, and the little guy. To do so, Webb first says that, thanks to Jackson, all white males had the right to vote by 1840.

Universal white male suffrage had begun long before Jackson’s Administation: Vermont had always had full white male suffrage, and New Jersey, Maryland, and South Carolina had it by 1810; states entering the Union after 1815 either offered universal white male suffrage or an extremely low landowner’s tax requirement (a small farm would count to pay this tax); by 1821 Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York had universal white male suffrage. So the white male suffrage revolution did not come after 1828 but before it, and it benefited Jackson rather than being a gift he gave the nation.

Webb says Jackson’s populism “undermined aristocratic elites and protected the weak… Jackson said the poor and humble require the arm and the shield of the law.” The Americans Jackson enslaved on his plantation in Tennessee might not have realized he felt that way. Neither would the Chickasaws whom he “removed” from their land, which he then sold and made a fortune on. Neither would the Cherokees, whom he did his best to destroy after they proved they had the right to stay on their lands. Perhaps it is only the poor and humble white frontiersman whom Jackson wanted to protect. Webb’s one nod to this reality is his statement that Jackson’s “legacy isn’t flawless—he was a product of his time… but he stopped the notion of a permanent aristocracy.” Excusing slaveholding because someone is “of his time” is perhaps the emptiest of all defenses. Plenty of abolitionists were of the same time. And it’s not as if people did not debate the morality of slavery during Jackson’s time. Finally, no one group defines “permanent aristocracy” in “their time” like slaveholders, whom Jackson sought to shore up at every turn. Jackson was “of his time” as well in his reliance on political machines to control who got into office, and his insistence on giving political office to and pushing through legislation for party loyalists, many of them rich business men in the East.

We reach the Civil War. Webb states that the Scots-Irish enlisted in droves for the Confederacy, but, predictably, that “few fought to preserve slavery… they fought against invasion, to save their homes, and protect their families.” We’ve dealt this this idea here; we can sum up this stance that the average Confederate did not fight for slavery this way: revisionists say that while powerful southerners fought for slavery, the average Confederate in the trenches was a poor man who didn’t own any enslaved people, who only fought because his homeland was invaded. Most notable in spreading this idea was Shelby Foote in Ken Burns’ documentary The Civi War, who quotes a Confederate telling a Union soldier that he fought “because you are down here.” This is the argument put about now—that the average Confederate soldier did not fight for slavery, and therefore bears no shame for his part in the war. But why was the Union “down there” in the first place? Because the southern states had seceeded so they could continue slavery. If the average poor Confederate really did have nothing in common with, and even hated and resented the rich whites who held slaves, why fight their war? Why fight and die so those rich whites could continue to control society and politics, have slaves, and keep poor white people poor? No war is simple. There’s no one reason why poor southern men fought for the Confederacy. They fought, as all people do, for a mix of reasons; in this case, fear and anger at being invaded, a sense of having no choice but to enlist once war began, wanting to join their friends in the army, loyalty to rich white leaders in their own towns and counties, excitement at the prospect of war, resentment of the North’s “anti-southern” policies, and a host of other, private reasons. Union soldiers had the same mix, and many of the same inducements. But no matter why they fought, they fought, and they fought to preserve the Confederacy, which was a slave society. There’s nothing noble about that.

But Webb buys into the blameless Confederate soldier myth, quoting what he calls a “beautifully put”Confederate war memorial in Arlington Cemetery as saying the Confederate fought “in simple obedience to duty, as he understood it.” This monument was installed in 1912 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy; here is a description:

“Completing the frieze are six vignettes illustrating the effect of the war on Southerners of all races. The vignettes include a black slave following his young master; an officer kissing his infant child in the arms of her mammy; a blacksmith leaving his bellows and workshop as his sorrowful wife looks on; a young lady binding the sword and sash on her beau; and a young officer standing alone. The base of the memorial features several inscriptions. On its front face are the seal of the Confederacy and a tribute by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, followed by the Latin phrase: “Victrix Causa Diis Placuit Sed Victa Caton.” This phrase means: The Victorious Cause was Pleasing to the Gods, But the Lost Cause to Cato.”

This is the sort of revisionist, pro-Confederate insult statuary that flourished from the end of the Civil War to basically the 1960s. It celebrates slavery as a benign, even good institution, and states that while the terrible heartless North may have won, the truly righteous were on the pro-slavery side. “Simple obedience” to that kind of duty is no honor.

Now Webb really lays into the current United States by lambasting the North for its overwhelming cruelty to the South after the war. “The North would go on to enjoy the victor’s spoils, while the South was left a devastated wreck… two-thirds of Southern wealth disapeared…[and the south was]occupied and controlled by the North… economic decline suffocated individual opportunity… Economically, it resembled a colony” owned and controlled by outside forces. This was the sad state of things until WWI.

It’s truly astonishing that a U.S. senator would make these statements. First, because they are so patently false; second, because they are anachronistically pushing a radical right, Tea Party agenda into the late 1800s, and third, because they are part of his lengthy attack on the validity of our federal government.

The North had few “spoils” to enjoy. Its industry continued profitably as it had done before and during the war. Its farms prospered as they had always done. In other words, regular life went on. The South didn’t lose 2/3 of its wealth to the North; it lost the bulk of that wealth because it lost its slaves. The majority of that figure is loss of slave labor and investment in slave trading. And one can only wish that the north had occupied the south like a colony, instead of abandoning it and the Reconstruction effort in 1877, because then the return to slavery in all but name and the grinding decades of economic decay the south experienced would not have happened.

Instead, the federal government (“the North”) did not re-distribute plantation land, which all remained in the hands of the original slaveholding owners; pardoned all Confederate soldiers and politicians except for those in high office; and allowed former Confederates to be elected to state governments and to Congress. There was temporary military rule in 1867, which was necessary to keep whites from stopping black Americans from voting for the first time. Southern leaders refused to industrialize or give up the plantation system, using sharecroppers instead of slaves, and local white southern merchants were the ones who gouged the poor, black and white, by miring them in unpayable debt.

It was the north deciding to wash its hands of the south, feeling that enough money and blood had been spent there, that led to the south being ground down into poverty and misery. The refusal of the white power elite to give up plantation agriculture with strictly human labor guaranteed a future of poverty. Their refusal to grant blacks their full rights guaranteed generations of crime, fear, and hate.

Webb clearly feels the federal government has not changed since the war and that it is an instrument of oppression. As we move away from his clenched-jaw description of the south’s self-inflicted wrongs, we move west once again with the Scots-Irish. Leaving the south, to Webb, means that Scots-Irish culture “became the basis for its greatest American legacy. New European immigrants gravitated toward the embrace of the Scots-Irish, their values spread wherever they went: self-reliance, equality, fighting any domination from above [see federal government]… their values and traditions were re-shaping America from the bottom up… over time, they lost their Scots-Irishness and became harder and harder to identify. They became more and more the mainstream of American development. Against all odds, the Scots-Irish working class ethics are now basic American values.” All country music is Scots-Irish, and everyone in the military is, too. Basically, any time you see a church, you are looking at the Scots-Irish.

So in fact you are Scots-Irish if you don’t know you are, the entire middle class is basically Scots-Irish, and those fight, sing, drink, pray values that no other group on Earth shares are the American Way. Of course, as always, we can say the same things of almost every group of Americans, every ethnicity: the Germans, the Irish, the English, the Dutch, the Italians… every group has intermarried beyond recognition and fanned out across the country with ethics of hard work and independence. Because they are all Americans.

“Over the centuries,” Webb goes on, “the Scots-Irish defined mainstream American life.” If you are individualistic and ambitious, you are Scots-Irish. Rosa Parks was Scots-Irish (through her great-grandfather; how might that have happened?). The Scots-Irish are “the molten core at the very center of the unbridled, raw, rebellious spirit of America… they faced the world on their feet, not on their knees. They were born fighting, and if their cause is right (like colonizing for Britain, killing Indians for their lands, or fighting for slavery) they will never give it up.”

This relentless emphasis on rebellion, fighting, and the sins of the federal government sound all too familiar to us today. This is the mantra of the far right, the Tea Party, which tells Americans their government is a terrible mistake and must be destroyed; terrible because it regulates business and provides social services and makes sure our water and air are safe. Americans, this theory goes, must always reject every demand on them—taxes, regulation, equal opportunity laws, etc. What Americans do is shoot guns, fight the government, and look out for themselves first and foremost.

This is not really America. This is not our “molten core.” These are not our core values. We don’t have an unstable, dangerous, molten core, we have a core of law, justice, and democracy. We cooperate to create a fair government that can protect everyone in this country without taking away our basic freedom. We do not primarily fight and drink. We all pray in different ways, or not at all. We all sing everyone’s songs. We are not all Scots-Irish, and the Scots-Irish are not as they are described here, as people who fight only for their own profit rather than for ideals of communal justice and freedom. People who hold slaves are not heroes of liberty. People who prevent their fellow citizens from exercising their full civil rights cannot blame someone else for the problems that causes. Re-writing history to validate whatever people do because of their ethnicity is not history. “Born Fighting” is a slur on the Scots-Irish, our government, and our nation that we hope will continue to be countered by factual histories of this nation and its people.