[ Some folks celebrate American exceptionalism and resist dwelling
on horrors like slavery or settler colonialism. Others primarily see a
centuries-long saga of white supremacism and oppression. ]
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AMERICAN HISTORY IS A PARADE OF HORRORS — AND ALSO HEROES  
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Stephanie Coontz
August 14, 2022
Los Angelos Times
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_ Some folks celebrate American exceptionalism and resist dwelling on
horrors like slavery or settler colonialism. Others primarily see a
centuries-long saga of white supremacism and oppression. _

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As a historian in the age of the 1619 Project and the debates over
“critical race theory,” I find many of the audiences I address
fall into one of two camps. Some celebrate American exceptionalism and
resist dwelling on horrors like slavery or settler colonialism. Others
primarily see a centuries-long saga of white supremacism and
oppression.

The shameful institution of slavery must loom large in any honest
account of American history. But so should the struggle of both Black
and white abolitionists to end that institution. Recognizing those who
fought from the very beginning to extend the ideal of equality beyond
white men is essential to understanding the American story. We
shouldn’t be afraid of schoolchildren learning why our nation needed
those heroic reformers.

And yet, since January, legislators in more than half the states have
introduced bills forbidding schools from teaching that America’s
founding documents had anything to do with defending slavery or from
discussing any other “divisive concepts.” Typical is the wording
of the Florida and South Dakota bills, which prohibit use of material
that makes anyone “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other
form of psychological distress” on account of “actions committed
in the past by other members of the same race, color, sex, or national
origin.”

This is a new twist on old efforts by political demagogues to stoke
white racial anxieties. Over the past 100 years we have heard that
“they” are coming to rape “our” wives and daughters, take
“our” jobs, waste “our” tax money, steal “our” wallets,
and murder us at random. Now, it appears, they’re coming to hurt our
feelings!

But although studying the history of slavery and settler colonialism
ought to be disturbing, it doesn’t have to be demoralizing. We need
to tell the full story of slavery because without doing so there is no
way to understand the heroism of those who fought for equal rights.
The only people who should feel “discomfort” in learning American
history are individuals who refuse to build upon the efforts of those
early visionaries. A case in point is the difference between today’s
White evangelical leaders and their forbears, who
actually _did_ believe that Black Lives Matter.

In the era when our nation was founded, it truly was revolutionary to
claim that _all _human beings had the right to be treated humanely
and equally. For most of history the morality of slavery was never
questioned. People resisted _being_ enslaved, but they did not
condemn the existence of slavery. And because people believed it was
perfectly acceptable to kill or enslave those they conquered, they
felt little need to claim their victims were inherently inferior.
Subordination was the way of the world, with citizens subject to
kings, wives to husbands and slaves to masters.

Profit, not racism, was the primary impetus for the expansion of the
African slave trade and the establishment of an African labor force in
the Americas. But racism gradually became the primary_ defense_ of
slavery.

Slave owners responded to an emerging global market by combining the
ruthlessly impersonal profit calculations of mass production with the
cruel intimidation required to extract maximum effort on exhausting
tasks while forestalling resistance by enslaved people, who vastly
outnumbered overseers and owners.

But at the same time, the rise of capitalism and the overthrow of
autocratic rulers challenged traditional justifications of social
hierarchy. More and more people asserted that “the whole human race
is born equal.” Some would go on, for the first time in history, to
build a movement to abolish slavery, not merely to emancipate an
individual or a specific group.

When American revolutionaries claimed an “inalienable” right to
liberty without demanding an end to slavery, many people pointed out
the contradiction. In 1774, an anonymous “Son of Africa”
challenged the rebel colonists to “pull the beam out of thine own
eyes.” Caesar Sarter, who was once enslaved, urged the
revolutionaries to liberate all slaves as “the first step” toward
freeing themselves.

Some white Americans rose to the challenge. Vermont abolished slavery
in 1777, giving Black men the vote. In 1781, two Massachusetts slaves,
Elizabeth Freeman and Quok Walker, sued their masters for freedom.
Both managed to convince white jurists that slavery violated the
state’s constitution, which stated that “all men are born free and
equal.” Anti-slavery sentiment became widespread during and after
the American Revolution.

But there was an ironic backlash. Once revolutionaries articulated
mankind’s right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness,” those who supported — or just tolerated — the
subjugation of other human beings were put on the defensive.

Very few people like to admit it when we put selfish interests ahead
of moral convictions. Patrick Henry, the famous orator who supposedly
once declared “Give me liberty, or give me death,” strikes me as
an exception that reveals something important about the psychology
that helped create American racism.

In 1773, a Quaker abolitionist sent Henry an antislavery pamphlet.
When I first began reading Henry’s answer, I thought the pamphlet
had done its trick. In line after line, he describes slavery as an
“Abominable Practice … a Principle as repugnant to humanity as it
is inconsistent with the Bible and destructive to Liberty.”

So I was shocked when Henry goes on to admit that he himself owns
slaves and has no intention of freeing them, due to the “general
inconvenience of living without them.” He labels his conduct
“culpable,” saying “I will not, I cannot justify it.” At his
death in 1799, he still owned 67 slaves, whom he bequeathed to his
wife and sons.

Very few people can live with that level of cognitive dissonance.
Racism offered one way to resolve it.

In the late 18th century, and especially in the first half of the
19th, a sustained campaign was launched to explain away the
contradiction between the rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence
and the reality of a Constitution that tolerated slavery. Black
people, Indians and other non-European groups began to be described as
less than fully human, incapable of exercising the responsibilities of
liberty.

So even as abolitionism gained momentum, racist invective, which
historian Van Gosse notes had been “episodic prior to the 1810s,”
became far more common and considerably more vicious. In the South,
free Black people faced increasing restrictions. Violent riots against
them flared up in the North, reaching a high point in 1863, when
demonstrators against the Civil War draft vented their fury on Black
neighborhoods.

But to my mind these terrible trends make the resistance to such
behavior by a courageous minority of Americans all the more inspiring.
And resistance there was. Two recent books, “The Slave’s Cause
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by Manisha Sinha and “Standard-Bearers of Equality
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Paul J. Polgar, describe how a “radical, interracial movement”
consistently advocated for racial equality from the 18th century
onward, gaining support even as racism hardened and slaveholders
pushed their interests more aggressively.

Black social reformers like Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth and
Sarah Parker Remond rallied huge followings of white and Black
Americans in support of racial equality. By the 1840s, legislators in
Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire were routinely defying
racially-exclusionary federal regulations. In the free states,
interracial crowds spontaneously formed to rescue men and women caught
up by slave catchers. The 1840s and 1850s saw interracial rescues in
nearly every free state, with dramatically large turnouts in Chicago,
Syracuse, Detroit and Buffalo. When a fugitive captured in Boston in
1854 was returned to slavery, 50,000 protesters lined the streets
shouting “Shame! Shame!”

Then the war itself turned many skeptical white Northerners into
strong supporters of abolition and equality. Union soldiers’ diaries
and letters show this transformation occurring as young Northern men
saw slavery up close, while fighting alongside Black comrades.

Legislators who worry that schoolchildren who learn an unexpurgated
version of history will “denigrate
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our founders are probably right to fear that youths who discover
Patrick Henry’s choice of convenience over conscience will be
unimpressed by his “liberty or death” oratory. But there are
plenty of other heroes — Black, brown and white — to take his
place. In fact, many young white people will find some groups of their
ancestors more worthy of admiration than their modern-day
counterparts.

During the first half of the 19th century, for example, many white
evangelicals were ardent abolitionists who would have been horrified
by the recent migration of prominent white evangelicals into the camp
of white Christian nationalism.

Jonathan Blanchard, founder of Wheaton College, the pre-eminent
Christian evangelical college in America, spent a year in Pennsylvania
working as a full-time “agitator” for the American Anti-Slavery
Society. He called slave-holding “a social sin” that could be
addressed only by immediate abolition.

And then, of course, there was John Brown, the devout Reformed
Evangelical whose militia battled slavery proponents in the Kansas
territory and who led an attack on a federal armory in Virginia in
1859 in an attempt to arm slaves for an uprising. He was tried for
insurrection and hanged. Yet his stand against slavery inspired later
Union troops to march into battle singing “John Brown’s body lies
a-mouldering in the grave, but his soul goes marching on.”

Evangelical abolitionists opposed other injustices as well. In 1838
several white Baptist and Methodist preachers not only protested the
forced relocation of the Cherokees but also marched with them along
the Trail of Tears. Others joined the Liberty Party, which opposed the
war with Mexico and condemned the exploitation of Native Americans and
Chinese, Mexican and Irish laborers. Many evangelicals were early
supporters of female equality.

If our histories refuse to acknowledge the extent and brutality of the
injustices that accompanied our nation’s founding, how can we or our
children honor the idealism and courage of those who struggled to
implement and enlarge the revolutionary demands for equal rights? And
if we don’t understand the way people’s belief systems can change,
how can we hope to build on the best parts of our heritage and rise
above the worst? That’s why an unflinching account of American
history can actually give us hope for the future.

_Stephanie Coontz
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a professor emerita of history at Evergreen State College in
Washington, is the author of the forthcoming book “For Better AND
Worse: The Problematic Past and Uncertain Future of Marriage.” This
piece is adapted from the essay “_Why Learning the History of
Slavery in America Doesn’t Have to Be Depressing
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* 1619 Project
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* U.S. Slavery
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