[On Valentine’s
Day, I gave a Fitchburg
State University Harrod Lecture on my book in progress: Exclusion & Inclusion: The Battle to
Define America. These histories and stories couldn’t be more important
to me these days, so I wanted to spend the next couple weeks highlighting some
of them. Starting with this year’s version of my annual
non-favorites series, focused on exclusionary moments from across American
history. Add some of your least favorite histories, stories, or figures for a
crowd-sourced weekend airing of grievances!]
On important
historical contexts for a frustrating founding text, and why the frustrations
remain nonetheless.
In this July
4th, 2015 piece for Talking Points Memo, my second-most viewed
piece in my year and a bit of contributing bi-monthly columns to TPM, I highlighted
and analyzed the cut paragraph on slavery and King George from Thomas
Jefferson’s draft version of the Declaration of Independence. Rather than
repeat what I said there, I’d ask you to take a look at that piece (or at least
the opening half of it, as the second half focuses on other histories and
figures) and then come back here for a couple important follow-ups.
Welcome back! As
a couple commenters on that post noted (and as I tried to discuss further in my
responses to their good comments), I didn’t engage in the piece with a
definitely relevant historical context: that the English Royal
Governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, had in November 1775 issued (from on
board a warship anchored just off the Virginia coast) a prominent
Proclamation both condemning Virginian and American revolutionaries,
declaring martial law in the colony, and offering the prospect of freedom to
any African American slaves who left their owners and joined the English forces
opposing them. A number of slaves apparently took Dunmore up on the offer, and
so when Jefferson writes that “he [King George] is now exciting these very
people to rise in arms among us,” he might have been attributing the idea to
the wrong Englishman but was generally accurate about those English efforts.
Yet of course Jefferson’s misattribution is no small error, as it turns a
wartime decision by one English leader (and a somewhat unofficial one at that,
as it’s not at all clear to me that Dunmore had the authority to make such an
offer nor that the Crown would necessarily or consistently have upheld it) into
a defining feature of the relationship between England and the colonies.
There are
significantly bigger problems with Jefferson’s paragraph than that
misattribution, however. And to my mind, by far the biggest is his definition
of African American slaves as a foreign, “distant people,” not simply in their African
origins (and of course many late 18th century slaves had been born
in the colonies) but in their continued identity here in America. Moreover,
Jefferson describes this distant people as having been “obtruded” upon the
colonists, an obscure word that means “to impose or force on someone in an
intrusive way.” And moreover moreover, Jefferson then directly contrasts the
slaves’ desire for liberty with the colonists’ Revolutionary efforts (and thus
their desire for liberty), a philosophical opposition that excludes these
Americans from the moment and its histories just as fully as his definitions
and descriptions exclude them from the developing American community. As I’ll highlight
in one of next week’s posts, a number of prominent slaves—from Crispus
Attucks and Phillis
Wheatley to Elizabeth
Freeman and Quock Walker—had already proved and would continue to prove Jefferson
quite wrong. But for as smart and thoughtful a person as TJ, it shouldn’t have
required such individuals to help him see how much African American slaves were
an integral,
inclusive part of Revolutionary Virginia and America.
Next
anti-favorite tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other anti-favorites you’d highlight?
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