Category: Slavery

Removing Confederate monuments erases history–or not

We were reading a great interview with Harvard Law School history professor Annette Gordon-Reed on the recent attacks made on statues of slaveholders, conquistadors, and Confederate soldiers. You can read it all here; we’ve pulled out a few highlights.

GAZETTE: What do you say to those who argue that the removal of such statues in prominent public settings dishonors the memory of those who died fighting for the Confederacy?

GORDON-REED: I would say there are other places for that — on battlefields and cemeteries. The Confederates lost the war, the rebellion. The victors, the thousands of soldiers — black and white — in the armed forces of the United States, died to protect this country. I think it dishonors them to celebrate the men who killed them and tried to kill off the American nation. The United States was far from perfect, but the values of the Confederacy, open and unrepentant white supremacy and total disregard for the humanity of black people, to the extent they still exist, have produced tragedy and discord. There is no path to a peaceful and prosperous country without challenging and rejecting that as a basis for our society.

–This is extremely well-put and we can add nothing of value to it. The BLM protests happening all over our country are based on the truth of the last sentence.

GAZETTE: Many believe that taking the statues down is an attempt to cover up or erase history. Do you agree?

GORDON-REED: No. I don’t. History will still be taught. We will know who Robert E. Lee was. Who Jefferson Davis was. Who Frederick Douglass was. Who Abraham Lincoln was. There are far more dangerous threats to history. Defunding the humanities, cutting history classes and departments. Those are the real threats to history.

–Here Gordon-Reed addresses the argument that always irritates us as historians. As if the main vehicle of learning about U.S. history were Confederate statues! Those statues are not preserved and defended in the name of the objective study of our national history. They are preserved and defended as evidence of the Lost Cause and meant to enforce a sense of alienation from the U.S. predicated on primary identification with “the South”.

GAZETTE: What about the slippery slope argument? Many of America’s founders — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson — owned slaves. Does removing statues of Columbus or Confederate officials pave the way for action against monuments honoring those who helped create the United States?

GORDON-REED: I suppose, if people want to, everything can pave the way to some other point. I’ve said it before: There is an important difference between helping to create the United States and trying to destroy it. Both Washington and Jefferson were critical to the formation of the country and to the shaping of it in its early years. …No one puts a monument up to Washington or Jefferson to promote slavery. The monuments go up because, without Washington, there likely would not have been an American nation.

–Again, perfectly stated, and in need of no confirmation from us. But we celebrate this truth-telling, and recommend it to all Americans.

Confederate monuments fall, America rises

It’s amazing that the sudden removal of so many Confederate war monuments is just a footnote in this Spring’s news. The long and awful battles to remove these monuments to slavery and hatred are suddenly resolved, and it seems like an afterthought.

But all Americans who love liberty and justice for all are happy to hear it. We will pull from two previous posts, Confederate Monuments and the cult of the Lost Cause, and Pro-Confederate is Anti-American to celebrate, and contribute momentum to, this moment.

First, from Confederate Monuments and the cult of the Lost Cause:

There’s a great article from Smithsonian, by New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu, called “How I Learned About the Cult of the Lost Cause,” which delineates the real reason so many Confederate monuments were put up in this country, both just after the Civil War and in the 1950s and 60s. One application for federal funding to preserve three Confederate statues as historically important specifically states that the statues commemorate the Cult of the Lost Cause:

“The Cult of the Lost Cause had its roots in the Southern search for justification and the need to find a substitute for victory in the Civil War. In attempting to deal with defeat, Southerners created an image of the war as a great heroic epic. A major theme of the Cult of the Lost Cause was the clash of two civilizations, one inferior to the other. The North, “invigorated by constant struggle with nature, had become materialistic, grasping for wealth and power.” The South had a “more generous climate” which had led to a finer society based upon “veracity and honor in man, chastity and fidelity in women.” Like tragic heroes, Southerners had waged a noble but doomed struggle to preserve their superior civilization. There was an element of chivalry in the way the South had fought, achieving noteworthy victories against staggering odds. This was the “Lost Cause” as the late nineteenth century saw it, and a whole generation of Southerners set about glorifying and celebrating it.”

It’s very odd that this clear-eyed assessment of the Lost Cause as a cult and therefore a myth was successfully used to justify maintaining three Confederate statues in Louisiana. One would think that the goal of preserving acknowledged racist propaganda would be recognized as out of step with real American founding principles.

The only thing we would add is that Landrieu mentions the fact that Confederate memorials were put up in the North as well as the South. This is true; it happened directly after the war as part of an attempt to heal the breach and offer a socio-political olive branch to the South. But that misguided effort quickly died away in the North, while statues continued to go up regularly and in abundance in the former Confederacy.

 

And now from Pro-Confederate is Anti-American:

No need to do much more than to point you to James Loewen’s frank article: Why do people believe myths about the Confederacy?

But we will go ahead and also point you to our own posts on this topic: Amazing Fact: The Civil War was fought over slavery, What made the north and south different before the Civil War?, and Slavery leads to secession, secession leads to war.

The Confederate States of America were founded with the sole purpose of perpetuating black slavery. There is nothing heroic in that. The men who created the Confederacy did not care about states’ rights—they had repeatedly demanded that states’ rights be trampled by forcing northern states that had abolished slavery to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, by going into territories and voting that they enter the Union as slave states even though they were not residents of that territory, by terrorizing residents who wanted to vote anti-slavery, and by taking enslaved people into free states and forcing the free state residents to endure that slavery.

Soldiers of the Confederacy were not heroes. The old argument that most of them were poor and were not slaveholders is meaningless: they fought to protect their land and their governments, which meant protecting the slave system and the slave aristocracy that governed their land. If they won the war, those poor, non-slaveholding soldiers would have allowed slavery to keep going. They knew that. You can’t cherry-pick motives and focus on the heartwarming “they fought to keep their families safe” motive and ignore the chilling “the soldiers didn’t care if black Americans were enslaved as long as they kept their land” motive.

Secession was not allowed in the Constitution. There is no place in it that makes secession legal. So founding the Confederacy was the most anti-American action in our history.

It’s high time we became as tough on Confederacy worship as the Confederates were on America, democracy, and states’ rights.

 

 

Were there black Confederate soldiers?

It’s a new claim made by those who seek to diminish the evil of slavery: that “many” enslaved black men fought for the Confederacy in battle during the Civil War.

The truth, as ably presented by tireless truth-teller Kevin Levin, is crucially different from the myth. Yes, enslaved black men supported the Confederate army—because they were forced to, because they were enslaved. They did all the support work of cooking, cleaning, burying the dead, and caring for horses. They did everything but fight alongside white Confederates.

See the whole, engrossing and maddening story here, at The diaries left behind by Confederate soldiers reveal the true role of enslaved labor at Gettysburg.

Virtual visit to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice

There’s a great article on the new National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama that gives a full description and photos of this long-overdue addition to American memorials.

Known informally to most people as the lynching memorial, the NMPJ is part of an effort to officially commemorate and honor heroic actions of black Americans to gain their full civil rights as promised in the law. Here’s an excerpt of the article:

There are dozens of markers or monuments to the Confederacy in Montgomery, but it was not until the 1990s that the fuller picture of the state’s heritage was recognized, and even longer for some other Southern states.

“There was not a historic marker of where Rosa Parks was arrested,” says Lee Sentell, director of the Alabama Department of Tourism. “There was not a historic marker where John Lewis was beaten up as one of the Freedom Riders.”

Alabama now markets its civil rights trail, and Montgomery embraces a complicated story that can be summed up on a downtown block that has the site of a slave market, the department store where Rosa Parks got on the bus, and the building where the telegram was sent to instruct Confederate troops to fire on Fort Sumter.

“You’re talking about two of the most significant movements in American history literally a block apart,” says Sentell.

But he says no attraction has taken the point of view visitors will encounter at the National Peace and Justice Memorial.

“Most museums are somewhat objective and benign,” Sentell says. “This one is not. This is aggressive, political. … It’s a part of American history that has never been addressed as much in your face as this story is being told.”

Many black Americans fought with the Continental Army–sorry, Adam Ruins Everything

Hello and welcome to part 5 of our series on Adam Ruins Everything‘s “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Truth” episode, in which we address the ludicrous claim that the British army was a haven of freedom and happiness for those enslaved black Americans who risked their lives to fight therein.

AC: …while the British actively recruited slaves to fight—

British soldier: Hear ye, hear ye! All who fight for the Crown shall be free!

AC: —the patriots didn’t even allow it at first. And when they did, they made no promises of freedom:

American soldier: Hear ye, hear ye! All who fight for liberty will still be slaves. [As black Americans walk past] Sucks for you.

AC: Due to this, there were up to 20 times more slaves fighting for the British, than for the patriot side.

The show then tells the story of James, an enslaved black American in Virginia who fought for the Continental Army. He was a hero who won the admiration of the Marquis de Lafayette, and was eventually helped by the Marquis to win his freedom and become James Lafayette.

We suppose we will just mention that the show misspells Lafayette’s name as “da Lafayette” instead of “de”. It’s all part of the slipshod, half-baked research paper feel of the show.

More importantly, the episode glosses over the facts of the British offer of freedom to enslaved Americans who fought for them. The show says that after the war, which James helped to win, he was returned to slavery, which implies that if Britain had won, he would have been freed. The truth is abysmally different.

Let’s look into the article they cite—incompletely, of course, by failing to give the name of the article. All they say is “Lloyd Dobyns, Colonial Williamsburg Journal, Autumn 2007.” I think we all know from high school research paper writing that you have to include the title of the article you’re citing. We put Dobyns and the Journal into a search engine and found it: “Fighting… Maybe for Freedom, but Probably Not”  in which we read this:

Those who sided with the British were told, more or less, that they were manumitted and would be given land and self-government. They had a better hope for freedom with the British than they had with Americans. But the British found it easier to promise liberty and land than to provide them. Slaves who departed with the redcoats when the conflict was over were in their new lands—Canada, England, Australia, and Sierra Leone—still treated much as they had been before.

The first wholesale promise from the British of freedom to slaves came just as the war was starting, in November 1775. The last royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, having fled Williamsburg for his safety first to HMS Fowey and then to HMS William, offered freedom to slaves and indentured servants “able and willing to bear arms” for the British. There was, however, a catch.

Dunmore’s proclamation applied to slaves owned by rebels, not to slaves held by loyalists. His offer, the realization of an oft-repeated threat, was intended as much to terrify and punish rebels, and to furnish himself with more troops, as to help the slaves. Though slavery had been limited in England three years before—the Court of Kings Bench ruled in 1772 that slaves could not be taken out of the realm for sale—it was still legal and would be until 1834. Nevertheless, the rumor spread in the colonies that slaves had been freed in Britain, and it proved a powerful magnet for bondsmen.

Blacks who answered Dunmore’s call suffered hunger, disease, and bombardment. Eight times as many died of sickness as did of battle wounds. After Yorktown, where for practical purposes, the fighting ended six years later, they found that their sacrifices would profit them little. Yorktown meant victory for the American cause, but spelled disaster for the enslaved.

…As the war proceeded, some rebel slaves were given to loyalist slave owners or shipped to English slave properties in the Caribbean or, for that matter, sent back to their rebel owners when they proved of little or no value to the British.

—So we see that the British offer of freedom was not an honest one. Enslaved Americans were either not freed, or shipped off to barren lands to live in as free, yet utterly impoverished, people.

Those black Americans who risked all for freedom found only misery, virtual enslavement, and death:

…Carleton sent a fleet with five thousand settlers to Nova Scotia, including white loyalists and black runaways. We do not know how many of either. Historian Simon Schama identifies the episode as “a revolutionary moment in the lives of African-Americans.” It may also have been the high point in their search for freedom.

Nova Scotia, on the southeast coast of Canada, extends farther south than northern Maine and is all but surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean—basically, a flat almost-island first settled by the French in 1605. Scots came in 1621, hence the name of the place, Latin for New Scotland.

The refugees landed in a cold, sparsely settled, forested place, populated by Scots, Protestants from France, Switzerland, and Germany, and a few of the Mi’kmaq tribesmen who were the original residents. In no time at all, it was clear that whatever the American blacks were called, and whatever they had been promised, they would be treated like slaves and live a life not much better, and a lot colder, than they had lived in the American colonies.

They were segregated in housing enclaves and churches, economically oppressed, cheated, and lied to. When, infrequently, land was parceled out, theirs was the worst. One of the few ways to survive was to sign on for pitiful wages as indentured servants to white loyalists, some from the slave-owning South. The major difference was that the former slaves could and did sue for redress of wrongs in the Nova Scotia courts and sometimes won against whites. In Virginia, by contrast, blacks could not, in district courts, so much as testify against whites.

—How on earth ARE read this article and decided that the “fact” to pull out of it was that the British offered freedom to enslaved people we will never know. Especially when the same article includes this:

The Continentals, including George Washington’s troops, had such a mixture of black and white soldiers that a French staff officer referred to them as “speckled.” American combat troops were not integrated as they were in the 1770s and 1780s until the Korean War 170 years later.

Free blacks and slaves often enlisted from New England. The First Rhode Island, a majority black unit, was well known. In the South, there was a congressionally approved plan—never realized—to arm, and eventually to free, three thousand slaves for service as a military unit for South Carolina and Georgia. Slaves sent to take the place of white owners were commonplace in the ranks, particularly in southern state militias. British commanders other than Dunmore encouraged rebel slaves to run away, and run away they did. The figures are guesstimates, but they are the best we have. Dunmore’s promise attracted eight hundred to a thousand blacks, about a third of them women, though his proclamation applied only to males. In the South, perhaps eighty thousand to one hundred thousand slaves ran to British lines.

—What’s this? The Continental Army did have black soldiers? How could ARE have missed this? All you have to do is search “black soldiers in Continental Army” and hundreds of sites come up. Let’s choose one at random for the story ARE chose not only not to tell, but to hide: Black Soldiers in the Revolutionary War.

At the start of the war, Washington had been a vocal opponent of recruiting black men, both free and especially slaves. He wasn’t alone: Most southern slave owners (and many northern slave owners), found the idea of training and arming slaves and thereby abetting a possible slave rebellion far more terrifying than the British. Black men had long served in colonial militias and probably even saw action during the French and Indian War, explained retired Maj. Glenn Williams, a historian at the U.S. Army Center for Military History, but they had usually been relegated to support roles like digging ditches. In fact, he continued, most southern militias had been created precisely to fight off slave insurrections.

As war with Britain broke out in the spring of 1775, however, Massachusetts patriots needed every man they could get, and a number of black men — both slave and free — served bravely at Lexington and Concord and then at the Battle of Bunker Hill. In fact, according to documents archived on http://www.fold3.com, a former slave named Salem Poor performed so heroically at Bunker Hill — exactly what he did has been lost to history — that 14 officers wrote to the Massachusetts legislature, commending him as a “brave and gallant Soldier” who deserved a reward. Valor like this wasn’t enough, however, and shortly after his appointment as commander in chief, Washington signed an order forbidding the recruitment of all blacks.

The British saw an opportunity to divide the colonies, however, and the royal governor of Virginia offered freedom to any slave who ran away to join British forces. Thousands took him up on it, and Washington relented almost immediately. In fact, the famous picture of him crossing the Delaware on Christmas Day, 1776, also features a black Soldier who many historians, according to “Come all you Brave Soldiers” by Clinton Cox, believe is Prince Whipple, one of Washington’s own bodyguards, who had been kidnapped into slavery as a child and was serving in exchange for freedom. Another black Soldier, Primus Hall, reportedly tracked down and single-handedly captured several British soldiers after the battle of Princeton a week later.

—Yes, Washington opposed arming black men to fight as soldiers. Knowing Washington, it was less because of racism and much more likely because he didn’t want southern states to oppose the war effort because a) they feared it would lead to a rebellion of enslaved Americans, and b) they didn’t want any avenue to be created that could justify freeing enslaved Americans.

We also see that the British did not offer freedom to the enslaved because the British were awesome. It was a cynical divide-and-conquer tactic, the true nature of which was revealed by what they actually did to their black soldiers.

…Washington still wasn’t prepared to go as far as recruiting and freeing slaves, but many northerners had begun to question how they could call for freedom and enslave others. As that terrible winter at Valley Forge dragged on, the state of Rhode Island learned it needed to raise more troops than it could supply. State legislators not only promised to free all black, Indian and mulatto slaves who enlisted in the new 1st Rhode Island Regiment, but offered to compensate their owners. Desperate for manpower, Washington reluctantly agreed, and more than 140 black men signed up for what was better known as the “Black Regiment,” according to Williams, and served until Gen. Lord Charles Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, Va., in 1781.

In fact, they fought so bravely and inflicted so many casualties on Hessian mercenaries during the battle of Newport, R.I., in the summer of 1778, that Williams said one Hessian officer resigned his commission rather than lead his men against the 1st Rhode Island after the unit had repelled three fierce Hessian assaults. He didn’t want his men to think he was leading them to slaughter.

The 1st Rhode Island was a segregated unit, with white officers and separate companies designated for black and white Soldiers. It was the Continental Army’s only segregated unit, though. In the rest of the Army, the few blacks who served with each company were fully integrated: They fought, drilled, marched, ate and slept alongside their white counterparts. There was never enough food or clothes or even pay for anyone, but they shared these hardships equally.

After watching a review of the Continental Army in New York, one French officer estimated that as much as a quarter of the Army was black. He may have been looking at the 1st Rhode Island or units from Connecticut and New Jersey, which also had high rates of black enlistment, Williams explained. Many muster roles have been destroyed so there isn’t an exact count, but Williams said most historians believe that 10 to 15 percent is a more accurate representation of black Soldiers who served in the Revolution. They served in almost every unit, in every battle from Concord to Fort Ticonderoga to Trenton to Yorktown.

“I’ve heard one analysis say that the Army during the Revolutionary War was the most integrated that the Army would be until the Korean War,” Williams said…

It was a war for freedom, not only for their country, but for themselves. After the men of the1st Rhode Island and other black Soldiers served bravely at Yorktown alongside southern militiamen whose jobs it had been to round up runaway slaves, the war gradually drew to a close. Soldiers began to trickle home. Some black soldiers like those in the 1st Rhode Island, went on to new lives as freemen. Far too many, however, returned to the yoke of slavery, some for a few years until their masters remembered promising to free them if they served, but others, having fought for freedom, were doomed to remain slaves forever.

—Clearly, we are not saying that all black Americans who enlisted in the Continental Army were treated fairly after the war. We’re saying:

a. Yes, there were black soldiers in the Continental Army. Many soldiers.

b. They were promised freedom by northern states like Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

c. This promise was fulfilled for some black soldiers, but not all.

d. It was their experience of living and fighting alongside black Americans that led many northern Americans to question, and finally abandon, race-based slavery.

And, we’d also like to say that there should be some research done on black women who contributed to the war effort—you know they did. They must have; if anyone knows of research on that, please share it.

Next time, we’ll finally conclude our close-reading of this horribly misleading and damaging episode by addressing their final pack of myths about Paul Revere.

 

Finding your roots: aka Ted Danson and more Anne Hutchinson myth-making

Way back in 2014 we turned our attention to the PBS series Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The series in itself is interesting, but we had two issues with that particular episode: it presented myths as history; and some of its guests were remarkably—suspiciously, even–ignorant of extremely well-known stories of American history. (To be fair, TLC’s series “Who do you think you are?” had the same issues.)

The problems this time were with actor Ted Danson. Danson is descended from Anne Hutchinson. If there is one Puritan most Americans have heard of, it is Hutchinson, because we are taught in school that she was a heroic early feminist who was arrested for hosting meetings with other women in her home to pray, which was illegal in Puritan times, and that she was accused of treason and feminism. In court she ably defended herself against sexist Puritan leaders and stood up for liberty of conscience, but was cruelly banished.

If you are a constant reader of the HP you know that we have covered Hutchinson pretty thoroughly, particularly in our three-part Truth v. Myth series What did Anne Hutchinson believe? So we won’t go deeply into that here, but give you an excerpt (which is still pretty long, but not three whole posts’ worth). If you already know the truth about Hutchinson, skip this primer and move on to our episode recap below it:

Hutchinson believed that God would suddenly appear to you and let you know if you were saved. God would approach you directly. …This [made] sermons, ministers, study groups, and prayer obsolete. None of these things were necessary if God was simply going to tell you if you were saved.

Even more dangerously, Hutchinson believed that if you were saved, Christ dwelled within you—literally. You became Christ. This was her interpretation of the scripture “Jesus Christ is come in the flesh”. Therefore, those who were truly saved could not do wrong: if they lied, or stole, or even killed someone, it could not be counted as sin because all these were acts of Christ himself. Hutchinson, therefore, wanted to overthrow the law itself. Christ is not subject to human law, so no one who is truly saved can be subject to the law.

…The cult-like qualities of Hutchinson’s beliefs become clear. Anyone in her group, and of course she herself, was perfected by becoming Christ and could do no wrong, was not bound by any law, and had no social or legal obligations to anyone outside the group. She alone could tell who was really saved, and, crucially, anyone who criticized her or her followers was clearly the Antichrist…

So often Hutchinson is portrayed by historians as a generous and compassionate soul who wanted everyone to have a personal relationship with God, but was struck down by mean and sexist Puritans who told people they were dirt in God’s eyes. This comes from a failure to read the documents of her time, including her own court testimony and the petitions written by her followers, which make it very clear that there was no such thing as a personal relationship with God for Hutchinson: you either were God yourself or you were the antichrist, and she was ready to declare 90% of the Puritans to be antichrists and deal with them accordingly.

The meetings Hutchinson held in her home in which she expounded her beliefs quickly grew to include up to 80 of people at at time anxious to know their status. We are often told that the Puritan hierarchy cracked down on her because she was a woman, and women could not hold these kinds of meetings, but this is untrue. Women could and did hold meetings to discuss sermons they heard, and those meetings were allowed, even at the height of the Hutchinson controversy. The problem with Anne Hutchinson’s meetings was that she did not use them to parse sermons but to claim that all of the ministers in New England were sinners, unfit to preach, except for John Cotton, minister at Boston and her beloved mentor.

…Much is made of Hutchinson’s trial because she was a woman. But women appeared in Puritan courts constantly, as plaintiffs and defendants, and were given equal treatment. And if we read the court transcripts we see that Hutchinson was accused of exactly the same things as the men—slandering the ministers. Yes, her weekly meetings were also charged against her, but not because women couldn’t have meetings. The charges were that a) she attracted hundreds of people, which created civil unrest by fueling mobs; b) she did not use her meetings to parse sermons but to attack ministers and others; and c) that she took it upon herself to instruct men of higher rank than herself. The last point is the only one that we can describe as sexist.

…Over two days, Hutchinson was tried. She was a very intelligent person who handled her defense well, but after lengthy questioning she was accused in court by ministers who had met with her in the spring of slandering them to their faces. She denied this charge, and called on John Cotton, the one minister she had not slandered, to testify on her behalf.  He hesitated. Cotton declared that “he was much grieved that she should make such comparison between him and his brethren, but yet he took her meaning to be only of a gradual difference”. That is, perhaps what  Hutchinson had meant to say was that although the other ministers weren’t as good as him, they weren’t damned. But then Cotton said that since he did not remember everything that was said, he would take the word of the other ministers who remembered Hutchinson saying they were under a covenant of works. Perhaps Cotton trembled to commit perjury in court. Maybe he could not look at the faces of the ministers all around him and claim that they had lied. For whatever reason, Cotton validated the testimony of the other ministers, albeit as weakly as he possibly could, and did what he could to shield Hutchinson.

…Hutchinson began talking about how God had revealed herself to her, “and made her know what she had to do”. Governor John Winthrop, “perceiving whereabout she went, interrupted her, and would have kept her to the matter in hand, but seeing her very unwilling to be taken off, he permitted her to proceed.” The last thing Winthrop wanted was to give a soapbox to this charismatic woman. He saw that the Court was at last making headway on the charge of slandering the ministers, and wanted to keep that “matter in hand” now that there was sworn testimony that Hutchinson had committed sedition. We will never know what she did or said to make it clear to him that she was “very unwilling to be taken off”, but Hutchinson succeeded in being allowed to make her statement, and it is here that she condemned herself to banishment.

She began to preach her doctrine in the court, describing “the manner of God’s dealing with her, and how he revealed himself to her, and made her know what she had to do.” Hutchinson said she fought against the realization that all ministers were hypocrites for a full year until God

“…let me see how I did oppose Christ Jesus… [God] revealed to me… that [in New England] I should be persecuted and suffer much trouble… then the Lord did reveal himself to me, sitting upon a throne of justice, and all the world appearing before him, and though I must come to New England, yet I must not fear or be dismayed… The Lord spake this to me with a strong hand, and instructed me that I should not walk in the way of this people…”

Here Hutchinson is making two claims: first, that God revealed himself to her and therefore she is among the saved; second, that God showed her the whole world subjected to his justice, including New England, which God counted among the damned, and therefore she “should not walk in the way of [that] people.” Both claims are explosive. She went on to compare herself to Daniel in the lions’ den, and ended with a direct threat to the colony:

“…therefore take heed what ye go about to do unto me, for you have no power over my body, neither can you do me any harm, for I am in the hands of the eternal Jehovah my savior, I am at his appointment, the bounds of my habitation are cast in heaven, no further do I esteem of any mortal man, than creatures in his hand, I fear none but the great Jehovah, which hath foretold me of these things, and I do verily believe that he will deliver me out of your hands, therefore take heed how you proceed against me; for I know that for this you go about to do to me, God will ruin you and your posterity, and this whole state.”

Hutchinson’s speech damned her in several ways, civil and religious: it threatened violence against the state; it claimed direct revelation from God; it slandered the ministers; and it stated that Hutchinson was above human law. Any one of these claims would have justified banishment; put together, they shocked the magistrates and ministers who heard them deeply.

This easily merited the sentence of banishment. Her followers in Boston tried to save her, saying that she must have been tricked by the judges into making a statement she didn’t really believe. But when they met with her, Hutchinson reaffirmed her heresy, and made even bolder statements than before. Reluctantly, her church let her go.

Winthrop stayed the sentence of banishment that November because Hutchinson was pregnant. She did not leave Boston until March. Anne Hutchinson went to Rhode Island, where she managed to alienate even Roger Williams, and then to Long Island, where she died in an attack by Native Americans in 1643.

The judges in Hutchinson’s trial were tough, and they were hard on her. No quarter was given her for being a woman. They treated her as they would any heretic. But it’s hard to say she was treated unfairly. She got the same treatment as the men who came before her, and the same chance to lighten her sentence. She refused to recant, and expressed scorn for those who tried to reason with her both after her trial and months later, during her banishment, when a group was sent down to meet with her and see if she could be brought back into the fold.

There is the true story of Anne Hutchinson in a nutshell. We firmly believe that she would be bitterly disappointed, even outraged, to find out that she is remembered as a feminist fighting for women’s rights, or as a crusader for freedom of religion. Hutchinson was promoting something much, much larger—the godship of believers, and her own being as Christ on earth. She would not have considered herself a woman, but Christ made flesh, above the human body and human law. And she did not believe in any kind of religious freedom.

Ted Danson, however, was fed a pack of myths about his ancestor Anne Hutchinson. To watch the episode, from which we quote below, go to the Finding Your Roots website.

Gates begins with a truthful retelling of the story of Hutchinson’s beloved minister John Cotton and his flight from persecution in England to New England. But then, as Gates focuses on Hutchinson, it goes downhill:

GATES: Anne wasn’t your ordinary Puritan. Soon after her arrival in Massachusetts, she began organizing meetings in her home to pray with other women. She was taking a huge risk. This was not done. She was organizing women to think, to read. To interpret.

DANSON: Well done. Well done. I like that.

GATES: And not everyone, Ted, was amused.

DANSON: No, I imagine not. How’d her husband do?

GATES: Let’s find out how the whole town did.

DANSON: Oh really? Oh no, don’t burn her. Please don’t burn her.

—We realize, at this point, that Ted Danson has no idea who Anne Hutchinson is. This is so surprising. She is, as we’ve said, the one Puritan you can be sure everyone has heard of. But Danson has no idea that Hutchinson even got into trouble for her “illegal” meetings, let alone that she became famous for them.

We should stop to say that we liked Ted Danson a lot in this episode, notably when he refused to soften his rejection of a slaveholding ancestor even as Gates tried twice to get him to do so since that ancestor let the person he enslaved work for wages and buy his freedom. “No, I get it,” Danson said, cutting Gates off. It just didn’t change things, and we appreciated seeing Danson stand by that understanding.

Gates continues with a bit of truth: that Hutchinson began using her meetings to criticize the ministers. If he was told this by his researchers, why did he pretend that her meetings caused trouble because she encouraged women to “think and read”? Clearly the Finding Your Roots team knows zero about the Puritans, or else they would know that all Puritans, man and woman, boy and girl, were not only urged but required to learn to read, so they could read their Bibles, and that “thinking” and interpreting were the bread and butter of all Puritan society and religion–for everyone.

“It was heresy, man, it was so radical,” Gates continues, but he doesn’t know why. He thinks it was heresy and radical because she was a woman. But as we see from the many men who also stood trial, anyone who slandered the ministers was in trouble in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Slander was, and is, a crime. The heresy wasn’t about feminism, it was about theology.

“This woman is famous,” Gates remarks; “Big-time famous.” But Danson does not get any light bulbs. “I love this,” he says, clearly referring to the fact that he is learning about this woman for the first time. It’s just baffling. Zooey Deschanel on TLC had never heard of the Fugitive Slave Act, and Mary Steenburgen, in the same PBS episode as her husband Danson, had never heard of the infamous and horrific Andersonville prisoner of war camp of the Civil War, and that’s pretty bad. But Anne Hutchinson? We thought everyone had heard of her by now.

Gates says that Hutchinson created a crisis by claiming that God spoke to her directly and by saying that she could interpret Scripture on her own. Again, the first is true, and the second was beyond commonplace for women in Puritan New England. It was something you were required to do—it’s fair to say that a Puritan woman who failed to interpret Scripture was more likely to be hassled by her society.

Gates has Danson read a bit of the trial transcript, including Winthrop’s statement that Hutchinson was on trial for her meetings which were “not comely in the sight of God, nor fitting for your sex.” Those are two separate things: meeting to slander the ministers was not acceptable in the sight of God. Teaching men in the meetings, as she did, was not fitting for a woman. But Gates repeats the last statement to “prove” that the trial was all about women not being allowed to meet, read, or even think, which leads Danson to say “Shame, shame on them.”

Gates then says Hutchinson was arrested for disturbing the peace, slandering the ministers, holding unauthorized home meetings, “and finally, just being a woman with too much sass.” The truth is that she was tried for slandering the ministers only, and the sass comment really denigrates not only the true story of Hutchinson, but her intelligence and integrity: even if her views were fairly repellent, she was honest about them and believed in them. She believed she was on a godly mission. None of this has anything to do with being a “sassy lady,” and calling her that erases Hutchinson as a person and replaces her with a stereotype that is, ironically, sexist.

“The men who judged her came to America for religious freedom,” Gates goes on. “Talk about hypocrites!” The first claim is not true—the Puritans came to America to practice their own religion freely, which is very different–and the second is ridiculous. Slander has nothing to do with religious freedom. She did slander the ministers, but it was the act of slander, not the target of the slander, that mattered.

Sadly, this pack of lies does a terrible number on Danson, who says “It’s funny; I’m more emotional now and angry about this than pretty much anything I’ve read so far.” That includes the story of his ancestor being a slaveholder. Shockingly, Gates replies, “Yeah, you should be.” If anyone should walk away from this show angry about something, it’s breeding human beings for sale, not some cooked-up story about puritan sexism.

Gates then has Danson read a section of the trial transcript we have above in our excerpt:

DANSON: “You have no power over my body, neither can you do me any harm…” [emotional sound] Wow. “…for I am in the hands of the eternal Jehovah my savior, I am at his appointment therefore take heed how you proceed against me; for I know that for this you go about to do to me, God will ruin you and your posterity, and this whole state.”

Well, she fought back! “You may kill me, but you and the whole state are going to do down.”

GATES: Yeah.

DANSON: I love the first part: “You have no power over my body, neither can you do me any harm, for I am in the hands of the eternal Jehovah my savior.”

GATES: It’s extraordinary.

DANSON: It almost felt like Joan of Arc–you have no power over my body.

GATES: Very much a Joan of Arc kind of figure.

DANSON: Very happy, very happy about that.

—The full quote from Hutchinson, of course, is more damning and less “Joan of Arc”. The part Danson skipped is in bold:

…therefore take heed what ye go about to do unto me, for you have no power over my body, neither can you do me any harm, for I am in the hands of the eternal Jehovah my savior, I am at his appointment, the bounds of my habitation are cast in heaven, no further do I esteem of any mortal man, than creatures in his hand, I fear none but the great Jehovah, which hath foretold me of these things, and I do verily believe that he will deliver me out of your hands, therefore take heed how you proceed against me; for I know that for this you go about to do to me, God will ruin you and your posterity, and this whole state.

It’s pretty clear why this part was carefully trimmed by the researchers for Danson. It shows Hutchinson speaking as Christ in the flesh. She has no esteem for “any mortal man” because she is no longer mortal. She says, once again, the God has spoken directly to her, having “foretold me of these things.” And, as Danson ironically very clearly perceives, she is threatening the state (“the whole state is going to go down”). It is treason to threaten the civil state, and in the puritan civil state it was heresy to say God spoke to you directly and to call down his judgment on the state.

Gates concludes his fanciful retelling of the story by saying that Hutchinson spent the rest of her life “moving around the eastern seaboard”—a euphemism for being thrown out of Roger William’s colony in today’s Rhode Island for causing the same kind of civil and religious strife she had in Massachusetts. And he goes on to do two things at once: compound the error of his myth-making, and once again fail to awaken Ted Danson to the fact that Hutchinson is very famous. “This is a real heroine,” he says; “I mean, I learned about her in elementary school.” But Danson just replies by saying that while he admires men, he would always rather be with and talk to women. “It’s really interesting to know about Anne,” he concludes, still seeming to think she is a figure plucked from the darkness of history.

How we wish that Danson would learn the truth about his ancestor. He would learn about the first serious challenge to the puritan state in America, how it rose to that challenge and used it to craft the first separation of church and state in English America, and how one intelligent and charismatic person can turn a society on its head. He doesn’t have to be ashamed of Hutchinson. But knowing the real story would tell him so much more about who she really was, and why she really matters, within his family tree and beyond.

How the cotton gin advanced slavery

We’re going to get from Eli Whitney to your smart phone in one post here, so look sharp.

We all learn about Eli Whitney’s cotton gin in high school. It was a cotton-cleaning machine that could pull the seeds from the cotton itself, a job that used to be done by hand and took a very long time. Whitney introduced his machine in 1794, it caught on in isolated tests, and by the 1820s it was being mass-produced.

This image is the one we usually see, even though it is a proto-gin that came before Whitney’s invention:

The artist clearly had a positive view of slavery as well as the gin. The enslaved man on the left gazes in happy wonder as the gin cleans the cotton, and the enslaved woman on the right is similarly content. The enslaved child looks on with curiosity, perhaps hoping his day to run the gin will come soon.

What we really want to focus on, though, is the scale: one enslaved woman is hauling one bale of cotton to one machine run by two men. The enslaved Americans work in a small area and have a small basket to catch the cleaned cotton (the woman on the right is carrying it away). Okay, we have to interrupt for one small note on sex: why are the women doing the heavy work of hauling while two men get to do the easy work of running the machine? Clearly sex and gender stereotypes are preserved, even for enslaved black Americans, as men do the “technical” work that women are not smart enough to do.

That said, we move back to scale, and the real impact of the cotton gin. It made cleaning cotton faster. Cotton is a perishable crop. It rots. It was urgent to get cotton out of the fields, cleaned, and baled for sale and a long overland or sea voyage to the northern  factories that would spin it into cloth before rain and heat and insects ruined it. Cotton growers had to set aside weeks for cotton cleaning, which meant they had to reverse engineer the crop: grow only as much cotton as their enslaved laborers could quickly harvest, then clean and bale.

The cotton gin changed all that. Growers did not have to set aside weeks for cotton cleaning, and so they took that saved time and put it into planting and harvesting. Seeds of Conflict says that the cotton gin expanded cotton production from 750,000 bales in 1830 to 2.85 million bales in 1850.

If cotton growers are planting, harvesting, and cleaning more cotton, and they rely on slave labor, then clearly they need to enslave more people to do that work. Jeremy Smith says that “the number of slaves [sic] rose in concert with the increase in cotton production, increasing from around 700,000 in 1790 to around 3.2 million in 1850.”

So if any enslaved Americans were happy to be relieved of the tedious and high-pressure job of cleaning cotton by hand, that happiness was short-lived, as enslavers increased their efforts to generate more enslaved workers. The U.S. had ended its participation in the African slave trade on January 1, 1808, which meant there were no longer ships carrying Africans to be enslaved in the U.S. arriving multiple times a year. New enslaved people had to be created through “natural increase”–enslaved people having children. The true engine of slavery, breeding human beings for sale, went into high gear, as enslaved Americans were forced to reproduce, and even those who had children outside of forced breeding were forced to give them up for sale. There could not be anything less “natural” than the methods by which enslavers increased the enslaved population.

Too often that real and horrible impact of the cotton gin is ignored or underplayed in history books. The story of human history since the dawn of the Industrial Age is one of living in a manichean world wherein the undeniable benefits of industrialization come inextricably entwined with the undeniable crimes of industrialization. No one wants to live in a world without industrialization, and there’s no reason to, because the benefits don’t really have to be accompanied by injustice and slavery. Refusing to turn a blind eye to all of the impacts and implications of technology is the key.

So to jump to the 21st century, the next time you’re tempted to upgrade your smart phone every year for no reason, think about the electronic waste you’re creating, and the (mostly) child labor force in Asia that melts down that waste in the “recycling” process, exposing themselves to heavy metal poisoning, and do something to help break up the unholy marriage of technology and injustice.

The 2017 Fugitive Slave Act

We’re re-running this post because, sadly, it is more relevant than ever after the blow to DACA this past week. People who participate in DACA give all of their information (country of birth, birth date, any IDs like a driver’s license, home address, relatives’ names and addresses, etc.) to the federal government in return for its aid. Now that information might be used against them, to locate and deport them and their families. It’s one more way in which a federal act filters down to local law enforcement, which filters down to all of us, just as the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act did:

 

We’re interrupting our series on Barack Obama’s Farewell Address once again, but this time not because it was removed from whitehouse.gov, along with pages on civil rights, healthcare, and climate science, by the Trump Administration. Instead, we are struck by how much the war on Latin American immigrants (and this one group is the real focus of  anti-immigrant activism in this country) reminds us of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act (also known as the Fugitive Slave Law).

We learn about the FSA when we learn about the Compromise of 1850, of which it was a part. To pacify proslavery forces who were angry that California was allowed to enter the Union as a free state, the Compromise allowed slaveholding and trading to continue in Washington, DC, and upheld the “rights” of slaveholders to their “property”—enslaved people—throughout the Union.

This meant that if you lived in, say, Wisconsin, and had voted to pass personal liberty laws in your state outlawing slavery, those laws were overturned. Slavery would be upheld in “free” states, because slaveholders were allowed to enter free states and reclaim escaped people, and even pick up black citizens who had never been enslaved—the word of the slaveholder was accepted over the word of the black citizen and even the white citizens of the state. Whites were forced by the law to help slave-catchers, they were fined and jailed for failing to do so, or for helping an escapee, and whites were forced to live with the rescinding of the personal liberty laws they had voted for on a state level. Thus, slavery was basically enforced in every state of the Union, and outrage over this was expressed by many Northerners who had previously been publicly neutral about slavery.

If the Fugitive Slave Act was all about enslaved blacks, asked Northerners, why was it fining, jailing, and threatening free whites? Why did it seem to focus just as much on attacking the liberties of northern white citizens as it did on preventing black Americans from gaining their liberty? It was just another example of the slave power perverting democracy and threatening free government.

When we hear people today, in 2017, talking about the laws and acts they are going to put in place to stop the alleged democracy-killing overflow of Spanish-speaking immigration to the United States, they sound a lot like people who would have liked the Fugitive Slave Act. Here is an NPR interview with Brandon Judd, president of the union that represents U.S. Border Patrol agents, the National Border Patrol Council, which endorsed Trump during the campaign, from yesterday:

INSKEEP: What do you think about the president’s effort to compel, if he can, local and state authorities to be more helpful to the Border Patrol and immigration authorities in doing their jobs and rounding up people who are here illegally?

JUDD: Well – so my understanding is that he’s not compelling them to help us round them up. But what he is saying is if they come in contact, if a police officer, say, from Phoenix Police Department – if a police officer from the Phoenix, Ariz., police department comes in contact with somebody that he knows is here or suspects that is here illegally, then his responsibility is to contact an immigration enforcement officer to come in and find out. It’s the same with me. As a Border Patrol agent, if I make a vehicle stop and I find that illegal activity is taking place outside of the laws that I enforce…

INSKEEP: Drunk driver for example.

JUDD: Exactly – it’s my responsibility to call the local law – the local law enforcement so that they can come out and take care of the problem.

INSKEEP: Are we not actually arguing about that much then? Because there are local authorities who are saying, yeah, yeah, if we find somebody who’s obviously in violation, we have to turn them over, but we do not want to make that our job. We don’t want it to be our job to seek them out or to hold people when otherwise there would not be reason to hold them.

JUDD: And it’s not going to be their job. It’s not going to be their job to go seek out illegal immigrants in the United States. That is immigrations officers’ jobs and it’s not theirs. But if they do come in contact with people that are in the country illegally, they should have a responsibility and duty to report people that are breaking the law.

Judd’s statements are disingenuous. How would that police office in Phoenix “know” that someone he meets is “here illegally” without a mechanism in place to track all immigrants and make their data available at all times to police, and require the police to consult it? There’s no way to “know” someone is a legal immigrant or not without looking up their information, which means asking/forcing the person you have “come in contact with” to give you their name, address, etc. And of course, “come in contact” with is blandly disingenuous as well: when do police officers “come in contact” with people? We’d wager that 95% of the time it’s by stopping them on the premise of a violation of the law. Judd himself puts contact in the context of a vehicle stop. So already we have a question of who is being stopped and why which has, of course, been asked for over a century in this country, beginning with black Americans stopped by police for no reason and extending to brown Americans getting the same treatment.

The reporter’s characterization of police officers resisting being turned into immigrant-catchers is in line with all white Americans being forced into being slave-catchers in 1850. Judd says it won’t be the police officer’s job to “seek out illegal immigrants”, but reiterates that police officers who don’t turn in people who are here illegally are violating their duty and the law. If you get in trouble for failing to do something, you will find ways to do it. If police officers will be sanctioned for failing to turn in illegal immigrants, they will begin turning in illegal immigrants. They will look at the data, identify people here illegally in their cities and towns, stop them on another pretext, and turn them in.

And if the police must do this, eventually they will enlist the general public in helping them to do this. They will paint all immigrants here illegally as murderers, as Judd does later in the interview by saying “I think the country is going to be a lot safer. I really do, yes, absolutely. I mean, I was there with what they call the angel families, families that had children that were killed by persons that were in the United States illegally.” And once all illegal immigrants are child-murderers, it will be against the law not to seek them out and turn them in, for everyone.

And then we are all slave-catchers.

George Washington had slaves

We depart from our long-held commitment to refusing to talk about black slavery in America in order to make a point and address a worryingly common argument.

When Trump said yesterday that the anti-Nazi protesters in Charlottesville were worse than the Nazis, he put it this way:

…there were people protesting very quietly the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee. …the following day it looked they had had some rough, bad people–neo-Nazis, white nationalists, whatever you want to call them, but you had a lot of people in that group who were there to innocently protest…

So this week, it is Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?

This is the insidious poison of fascism: making false equivalences. We have to admit that when we first heard this, we thought that Trump was saying Lee and Jackson, Confederate generals, were heroes in the same way Washington was–military leaders, great Americans.

But it’s actually worse than that: he gives voice to the false equivalence that since Washington enslaved people, he and the Confederates had the same beliefs, the same goals, and the same impact on this nation.

This lie was ably debunked by Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University, on NPR news:

SIEGEL: What clearly distinguishes a Robert E. Lee statue from a George Washington statue or a Thomas Jefferson statue since all those men owned slaves?

SOMIN: There are two big distinctions. One, nobody honors George Washington precisely for the fact that he owned slaves, whereas the Confederate leaders, when they’re honored, are honored almost entirely for their service to the Confederacy, which was created for a purpose of perpetuating and extending slavery.

Second, while I think it’s very much correct to criticize the Founding Fathers for owning slaves, those of them who did, they also had great achievements in other areas which do legitimately deserve honor. By contrast, the Confederate leaders – very few of them would be remembered today but for what they did in the Civil War to protect slavery.

When we honor Washington, we honor him for his selfless devotion and unceasing effort in the fight to establish democracy in this country. We honor his refusal to become king when it was offered to him. We honor his wise leadership.

The list of achievements accruing to Confederate leaders is quite different. They promoted slavery, first and foremost. They were traitors to their country. They helped create the de facto enslavement of black Americans in their states after the Civil War.

That’s why statues of these people should never have been allowed to stand in this country. Somin goes on to address this:

SIEGEL: One of the arguments that’s heard is that a statue of Robert E. Lee reminds us of a dark chapter in our past, that it’s part of our history. Removing it is akin to erasing history. Does that argument hold any water for you?

SOMIN: I don’t think so. We should definitely remember this period in our history. And in fact, nobody proposes that we forget. But there’s a big difference between remembering history and honoring people who fought in defense of slavery. And what these statues do is they honor these people. They don’t simply commemorate them. If the goal was just simply to remember what happened, that could be done with museums, or that could be done with more appropriate public monuments, ones that actually acknowledge the evil of slavery.

The statues of Lee, Jackson, and all the rest of them are not reminders of the past, they are loving tributes, often hysterical in their lamentations over the Lost Cause. The honor and courage of all Confederates are consistently vaunted, as on this memorial in Tampa, Florida:

confederate 2

Enough is enough. It’s time to end the myth that the Civil War was begun by the Confederacy for any other reason than to promote slavery, and to end all false equivalencies that would connect George Washington with men who had no qualms about enslaving their fellow Americans.

Robert E. Lee was not a hero, white supremacists are not Americans

There is no need to be careful about this. Anyone who served in the armies of the Confederate States of America was a traitor to the United States; anyone who led those armies all the more so. They were part of an armed rebellion against the U.S., which is the definition of treason.

That in itself is enough. But the fact that Confederates were fighting to protect and advance slavery, to create a slave state, means their rebellion was not just political, against the political entity that was the United States, but ethical, moral, and philosophical. They specifically rebelled against the U.S. move to end slavery of black Americans, and just as American abolitionists and antislaveryites based their work to end slavery on moral principle enshrined in the Constitution—that “all men are created equal”–American proslaveryites based their work to continue and expand slavery on a rebellion against that American principle.

The Confederacy was explicitly founded to protect and promote slavery. Its leaders made absolutely no secret of that at the time (see Charles Dew’s Apostles of Disunion for all the evidence from primary sources that you need). As Confederate vice-president Alexander H. Stephens said in his famous “Cornerstone speech“,

…the new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution — African slavery as it exists amongst us — the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. [Thomas] Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the “rock upon which the old Union would split.” He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. …The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. …Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the “storm came and the wind blew.”

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition. [Applause.] This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind — from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics; their conclusions are right if their premises were. They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be logical and just — but their premise being wrong, their whole argument fails.

I recollect once of having heard a gentleman from one of the northern States, of great power and ability, announce in the House of Representatives, with imposing effect, that we of the South would be compelled, ultimately, to yield upon this subject of slavery, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics, as it was in physics or mechanics. That the principle would ultimately prevail. That we, in maintaining slavery as it exists with us, were warring against a principle, a principle founded in nature, the principle of the equality of men. The reply I made to him was, that upon his own grounds, we should, ultimately, succeed, and that he and his associates, in this crusade against our institutions, would ultimately fail. The truth announced, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics as it was in physics and mechanics, I admitted; but told him that it was he, and those acting with him, who were warring against a principle. They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal. [our emphasis]

We quote Stephens at nauseating length to show that the Confederacy was explicitly dedicated to the anti-American principle that non-white people are biologically inferior to white people. The Confederates themselves expressed it this way, as a rejection of and rebellion against the Founders’ plan and hope that slavery would inevitably end the United States because it was “wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically”, and the United States would not tolerate this because the nation was founded on the principle of equality.

Why does this matter now, on August 16, 2017? Because Stephens still has followers in this country. The Confederacy still has supporters. There are still people living in this country who do not support our Constitution or our law, or any of our founding principles. They call themselves Americans, and most were born here, but they are not. Americans are dedicated to the founding principles of the United States of America, which include the premise that all men are created equal. Anyone who fights this is not American.

And the man currently holding the title of President of the United States is one of them. Donald Trump is no American. He is, clearly, a Confederate president, taking up the torch from Alexander Stephens. In his press conference after a white supremacist/KKK/Nazi rally in Charlottesville, VA in which one woman was killed while protesting against the racist rally, Trump said that Americans protesting fascism were just as bad, and in some ways worse, than Nazis posing as Americans, and he took the fascist side:

What about the people of the alt-left, as they came charging at the alt-right, as you call them? [shouts] What about the fact that they came charging, they came charging with clubs in their hands swinging clubs? Do they have any problem? I think they do.

As far as I’m concerned, that was a horrible, horrible day… wait a minute; I’m not finished. I’m not finished, fake news. That was a horrible day. …I will tell you, I watched this closely, more closely than any of you people, and you had a group on one side that was bad and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent. And nobody wants to say that, but I’ll say it right now. I think there’s blame on both sides and I don’t have any doubt about it and you don’t have any doubt either.

…there were people protesting very quietly the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee. …the following day it looked they had had some rough, bad people–neo-Nazis, white nationalists, whatever you want to call them, but you had a lot of people in that group who were there to innocently protest…

So this week, it is Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?

Our quotes for all but the last paragraph were taken from video on Fox News’ website. So far as we saw the Fox News coverage did not include the last statement. Their commentator did describe these statements by Trump as part of a “brave and honest press conference, he pulled no punches… brutally honest, maybe too honest.”

Honest. We can’t help thinking of Stephens gloating that the premise that all people are created equal had finally been debunked as a fantasy, as fanaticism. If it’s “honest” to say that American protesting fascism are the criminals, and the fascists are the true Americans, innocent Americans, then we have entered a second civil war—or a second Confederate States of America, brought into being without a shot fired in official war.

For over 150 years, the citizens of the United States perpetrated a dangerous wrong by allowing statues of traitors who fought against the U.S. politically and morally, traitors who were dedicated to the lie that all people are not created equal, to stand. “Oh, it’s not about slavery,” people would say; “it’s just their culture.” We once heard someone say there are no statues to Nazi leaders in Germany. Why are there memorials to Confederate leaders in the United States? Now we see the result of 150 years of dedicated fighting after Appomattox by people who will never be real Americans, and a concentrated effort over the last 50 years, since the Civil Rights movement, to revive the Confederate States of America.

Needless to say, we can’t give in. While Trump has basically invited and urged Nazis to show up when the statue of Jackson is taken down, and has given new hope and excitement to Nazis in America, we Americans have to fight. It’s much harder to fight a guerrilla war than it was to go into actual battle during the Civil War. Right now the best path is to meet the Nazis wherever they go, and not remain a silent majority.

Every nation has a fraction of its population that urges fascism and hatred. Sometimes they manage to monopolize the microphone and take up more space in the media than their numbers justify. Now is such a time in the U.S. Now is the time to muscle these people back into the shadows if we can’t drive them out of the country. That’s the “brutally honest” truth.