[Mb-civic] EXCELLENT: Whitewashing the Founding Fathers - H.D.S. Greenway - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  Whitewashing the Founding Fathers

By H.D.S. Greenway  |  April 25, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

LAST YEAR in Britain I went to hear Simon Schama of Columbia University 
lecture about his book, ''Rough Crossings," which has just been 
published in the United States. The British-born professor's tale was 
music to British ears, but could make an American a little uncomfortable.

His story is the story of thousands of blacks in the 13 American 
Colonies who rallied to the British lines during the Revolutionary War 
because they believed that is where freedom lay. It is a tale not often 
told in the United States, where, if blacks are mentioned at all, it has 
most often been in the context of blacks and whites together fighting 
against the tyranny of King George.

In America, Crispus Attucks, who fell to British bullets in the Boston 
Massacre of 1770, is celebrated here while Newton Prince, a Boston 
barber who testified on behalf of the British soldiers who shot Attucks, 
is not. The ''redcoats" were acquitted, with the help of their lawyer, 
John Adams. Prince, however, was tarred and feathered by indignant 
Bostonians.

When the war came, Prince, not surprisingly, joined the British side. 
Later, when the British began to actively recruit blacks by promising 
them freedom, thousands followed Prince into the King's service -- not 
only slaves, but freed men too,

The Continental Congress was ambiguous about blacks on the American 
side, even though many African-Americans had died for the American cause 
at Bunker Hill and in Rhode Island. General Washington said he needed 
all the men he could get, but in 1776 Congress told him that although he 
could keep the freed blacks he already had, he could not recruit any 
more. Slaves were to be excluded altogether.

Although it was mostly in the slave economies of the South that whites 
objected to black soldiers fighting on their side, Northerners were not 
much better. New Hampshire excluded ''lunatics, idiots, and Negroes," 
from their militias. In contrast, the British offered unambiguous 
freedom. As a result, hundreds of American blacks fought to keep America 
British.

While the Patriots' rhetoric railed against the sins of George III, many 
American blacks decided that the English King, as Schama put it, was 
their ''enemy's enemy, and thus their friend, emancipator, and 
guardian." For blacks, our ''vaunted war for liberty was . . . a war for 
the perpetuation of servitude." Schama said.

One can say that the offer of freedom was a cynical move to undercut the 
American cause, and that slavery still existed elsewhere in the British 
Empire. But when the British lost the war, and the Americans demanded 
their slaves back, the British lived up to their obligations and 
evacuated the black men, women, and children who had rallied to their 
side -- along with white loyalists -- to resettle them in Canada. One 
black man even changed his name to ''British Freedom." But the blacks 
who sailed away with the American ''Tories" didn't find the promised 
land in Canada.

Later, the British would take many of those who wanted to resettle in 
Africa to Sierra Leone, where their descendants live to this day.

The Founding Fathers of the United States knew well the double standard 
embedded in the liberty they preached. Patrick 
''give-me-liberty-or-give-me-death" Henry admitted that he might be 
against holding slaves in principle, but ''I'm drawn along by the 
general inconveniency of living without them."

Schama wondered aloud how his book would be received in America. For 
although there are plenty of books critical about this or that aspect of 
American history, by in large the Founding Fathers have been deified in 
this country. Schama joked that he would not look good in an orange 
Guantanamo jumpsuit.

Do we Americans glorify our Founding Fathers too uncritically? 
Certainly, a great many biographies have been worshipful. Thucydides and 
Herodotus, the fathers of history, did not ''whitewash the past," Schama 
said. The story of the Peloponnesian wars ''is the story of a cock-up," 
he said.

Do we, as a nation of immigrants, need whitewashed founding legends to 
unite us? Do Americans, in these morally ambiguous times of Abu Ghraib, 
Guantanamo, and the secret prisons into which our prisoners disappear 
without trial or hope, long for heroes and heroic times? Perhaps 
Americans feel a need to hang on to the glory days of our national 
youth, when all our leaders were brilliant, brave, and beyond reproach, 
even if it is not always entirely true.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/04/25/whitewashing_the_founding_fathers/
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