Founding Myths

Founding Myths Page 21

by Ray Raphael

  As his title suggested, Nell focused exclusively on the five thousand blacks who fought on the side of the Americans. He made no mention of enslaved African Americans who fled to the British; this would scarcely have won converts to the abolitionist cause. Since he could not point to any black patriot soldiers when discussing South Carolina, he cited the celebrated revolutionary Charles Pinckney: “In the course of the Revolution, the Southern States were continually overrun by the British, and every negro in them had an opportunity of running away, yet few did.”13 Instead of running, Pinckney said, South Carolina’s slaves worked side by side with their masters to fortify against British attacks. Ironically, abolitionists at that time were in no position to dispute this idyllic picture of happy slaves during the American Revolution.14

  Following the Civil War and Reconstruction, during the Jim Crow era, blacks in the Revolution once again took a backseat. In 1891 one of the country’s foremost historians, John Fiske, spoke for his age when he ignored the historical record and stated bluntly that happy slaves had declined Lord Dunmore’s offer of freedom:

  The relations between master and slave in Virginia were so pleasant that the offer of freedom fell upon dull, uninterested ears. With light work and generous fare, the condition of the Virginia negro was a happy one. . . . He was proud of his connection with his master’s estate and family, and had nothing to gain by rebellion.15

  One writer during this time, Edward Eggleston, made an intriguing use of the “happy slaves” myth in his argument for Negro inferiority. Negroes were so lacking in mental capacities, he claimed, that they would die out from natural evolutionary processes; this was the “ultimate solution” to the “Negro problem.” As proof of their inability to fend for themselves, Eggleston offered the example of early emancipation efforts around the time of the Revolution: these resulted from “the improved moral standards” of whites, not the efforts of a “black race” too feeble to “assert its rights.” By failing to acknowledge the many and varied efforts that blacks had made to gain their freedom during the Revolution, Eggleston perpetuated one of the greatest of all historical lies: “The Negro possessed no ability whatsoever to help free himself. So long as he had plenty of food, and outlets for his ordinary animal passions, he remained happy and content.”16

  Edward Eggleston also wrote textbooks for children, and these texts included no mention of these allegedly passive blacks when discussing the American Revolution.17 Neither did any of twenty-two other school texts I surveyed that were written from the end of Reconstruction to the beginning of the civil rights movement.18 From the time of Ulysses S. Grant to Dwight D. Eisenhower, textbook writers totally excluded one-sixth of Revolutionary-Era Americans.19

  So did most professional historians. With only a few exceptions (most notably Herbert Aptheker, a Communist writing in the 1940s and 1950s), white authors ignored the black presence in the Revolution for a full century, from the Civil War to the 1960s. It fell upon black historians to tell the story.

  In 1883 George W. Williams included in his comprehensive History of the Negro Race in America, from 1619 to 1880 an extensive discussion of the Revolutionary Era. He started by exposing the hypocrisy of white Revolutionaries:

  The sentiment that adorned the speeches of orators . . . was “the equality of the rights of all men.” And yet the slaves who bore their chains under their eyes, who were denied the commonest rights of humanity, who were rated as chattels and real property, were living witnesses to the insincerity and inconsistency of this declaration.20

  Then, rather than limiting his attention to the contributions of black patriots, Williams undertook a serious investigation of the racial politics involved in military recruitment. He showed step by step how Washington and his War Council came to prohibit the enlistment of blacks during the siege of Boston, and he then explained how Dunmore’s proclamation of freedom forced them to reverse themselves. He chronicled the flight of enslaved people to the British and the feeble attempts to quell this exodus by white patriots who claimed to be “true friends” of the people they held in bondage. Suddenly, however, Williams interjected into his forthright analysis a pat display of traditional patriotism: “The struggle went on between Tory and Whig, between traitor and patriot, between selfishness and the spirit of noble consecration to the righteous cause of the Americans,” he wrote.21 Williams tried to negotiate a difficult course: he wanted to tell the story from the black perspective, but he could not evidence anti-American or pro-British sentiments.

  Despite his hesitations, Williams arrived at a truly radical con clusion:

  Enlistment in the army did not work a practical emancipation of the slave, as some have thought. Negroes were rated as chattel property by both armies and both governments during the entire war. This is the cold fact of history, and it is not pleasing to contemplate. The Negro occupied the anomalous position of an American Slave and an American soldier. He was a soldier in the hour of danger, but a chattel in time of peace.22

  This sobering assessment would not be echoed by white writers for three-quarters of a century.

  Although Williams’s work was ignored by white scholars, two black scholars writing in the 1920s, Carter G. Woodson and W.E.B. Du Bois, took up where Williams had left off. Woodson, often labeled “the father of Negro history,” organized the Journal of Negro History in 1916, and in 1922 he published a comprehensive survey that became the standard text for a quarter of a century, The Negro in Our History. Woodson treated the flight of enslaved people to the British in a straightforward manner, without apologies; he also added that “a corps of fugitive slaves calling themselves the King of England’s Soldiers harassed for several years the people living on the Savannah River, and there was much fear that the rebuffed free Negroes of New England would do the same for the colonists in their section.”23 At the close of the war in the South, Woodson concluded, “There followed such a reaction against the elevation of the race to citizenship that much of the work proposed to promote their welfare and to provide for manumission was undone.”24 Gone was the fairy tale with a happy ending. The American Revolution had done as much harm as good.

  In 1924 Du Bois, a socialist and founder of the NAACP, followed Woodson’s basic line in his informal history The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America. Du Bois discussed openly the idiosyncratic “patriotism” of black soldiers:

  His problem as a soldier was always peculiar: no matter for what her enemies fought and no matter for what America fought, the American Negro always fought for his own freedom and for the self-respect of his race. Whatever the cause of war, therefore, his cause was peculiarly just. He appears . . . always with a double motive,—the desire to oppose the so-called enemy of his country along with his fellow white citizens, and before that, the motive of deserving well of those citizens and securing justice for his folk.25

  In 1947 John Hope Franklin discussed black flight to the British in his popular college text From Slavery to Freedom—but the story remained ghettoized, told only as “Negro history.” Despite the work of Williams, Woodson, Du Bois, and Franklin, blacks were still not included in the standard telling of the American Revolution.26

  Not until the 1960s were blacks once again counted as “present” at our nation’s founding. In 1961 another black scholar, Benjamin Quarles, published an account that was both penetrating and thorough, The Negro in the American Revolution.27 The broad lines of argument had been made before, but Quarles added significant detail, and his timing was perfect. Within the history profession, Quarles’s masterpiece was considered “a bombshell of a book.”28 Young white historians, influenced by the civil rights movement, embraced and built on Quarles’s work. In the decades that followed, black and white scholars have produced a wealth of monographs and in-depth studies chronicling ho
w African Americans experienced the Revolution and the impact of their actions on the politics of war. Some but not all of this new information has made its way to popular audiences. Today, as in the 1850s, Northern blacks who found freedom by fighting with the patriots are celebrated, while their Southern counterparts who fled to the British are not.

  A TALE OF TWO STORIES

  (1)In Northern states during the American Revolution, some enslaved people earned their freedom by fighting side by side with white patriots. Further, a war fought in the name of freedom triggered a gradual end to the nefarious institution of slaves from Pennsylvania northward.

  (2)In Southern states during the American Revolution, other enslaved people, many more than those who found freedom by fighting for the Americans, escaped from patriotic masters to join the British.29 After the war, white masters, having witnessed a partial breakdown of their power over the people they held in bondage, cracked down, hardening the institution of slavery in the South.30

  These are true statements, but the first set has considerable appeal for our times, while the second has none.

  If we try to cast the American Revolution as a battle between good and evil, we are faced with the undeniable fact that many of the most prominent patriots owned slaves. Slavery is America’s original sin—but when we stick to the story we like the best, we beautify this blemish on a perfect America. We preserve the good name of the founders by portraying the Revolution as a progressive force that dealt a serious blow to the institution of slavery.

  The first story appears to absolve the Revolutionaries of their sins, while the second holds them fully accountable. But to tell the first while ignoring the second requires mining the historical evidence selectively. This is done consciously, not innocently, for ever since the publication of Quarles’s Negro in the American Revolution fifty years ago, the story of the black exodus at the moment of our nation’s inception has been known and embraced within the scholarly community.

  The simplest technique is to stonewall. Of thirteen textbooks for elementary, middle-school, and high-school students surveyed for the 2004 edition of Founding Myths, only one mentioned that more blacks sought their freedom with the British than with the patriots.31 None stated that some who fought for the patriots were sent back into slavery at war’s end, or that patriot leaders in the South offered enslaved people as bounties to entice white recruits.32 Not one admitted that enslaved people fled from Washington’s Mount Vernon plantation and from Jefferson’s Monticello, or that white patriots used the fear of slave flight and slave uprisings to recruit for their cause (see chapter 9). As a partial concession to the facts, some did mention Lord Dunmore’s proclamation, but none named any individuals who fought with the British, whereas they did feature particular individuals who fought with the patriots.

  The record since that time is mixed. One high-school text published in 2013 makes clear distinctions between North and South, telling the story with great precision: “Because slaveholders led the revolution in the Southern colonies, their slaves saw the British as the true champions of liberty. Thousands of enslaved people sought their freedom by running away to join the British forces.” In the long run, the authors continue, the Revolution triggered emancipation in the North, “where slavery was not critical to the economy and slaves numbered only 5 percent of the population,” yet “although laws eventually banned slavery in the northern states, many northern masters sold their slaves to the South before they could become free. Emancipation failed in the South, where slaves amounted to about one-third of the population and were essential to the plantation economy.”33

  This is refreshingly honest, yet several recent texts, published between 2012 and 2014, continue with skewed presentations. Through selectivity of evidence, authors lead students to believe that more blacks found freedom with the Americans than with the British. A fifth-grade text, which emphasizes individuals, speaks of James Armistead (“a spy for George Washington”), Peter Salem (“among at least five African Americans who fought the British at the Battle of Concord”), and James Forten (“just 14 years old when he joined the Continental Navy”), but it features no enslaved people who went to the British, even though we know many names and several life stories. The same text also displays a dramatic illustration depicting the all-black First Rhode Island Regiment in combat. (The faces on individual soldiers do not look too black, however.) “Close to 5,000 enslaved African Americans fought for the Continental Army,” the authors explain. By contrast, when “the British governor of Virginia promised freedom to all enslaved people who fought for the British, “more than 300” responded, wearing “patches that said Liberty to Slaves.”34 Yes, both strands are included, but the numbers tell a story in themselves. Although many more than five thousand enslaved people would seek freedom with the British by war’s end, fifth-grade readers, understanding that five thousand is greater than three hundred, will infer a conclusion based on the evidence presented: slaves preferred the patriots.

  By taking facts out of context, authors present false impressions without making false statements. A middle-school text states, “Washington pleaded with the Continental Congress for more troops. He even asked that the Congress allow free African Americans to enlist.”35 This is true, but it ignores the fact that General Washington, upon taking command of the Continental Army in July 1775, had banned new enlistments of “any stroller, negro, or vagabond.” After that, in November, he proclaimed that even free blacks already serving in the army would be ineligible for reenlistment. Only when Lord Dunmore recruited slaves for the British, and when the Continental Army failed to attract enough white recruits, did Washington rescind his order. To relate the final act without providing the relevant background is not a forthright rendering of history.36

  Even some college textbooks mislead. After telling of Dunmore’s proclamation to liberate slaves willing to serve in the British army, one states categorically: “In fact, the British treated slaves as captured property, seizing them by the thousands in their campaigns in the South.” Again, this is partially true: enslaved people who worked plantations seized by the British were treated as property. But the phrase “in fact” leads readers to believe that those who responded to Dunmore’s proclamation were not freed but treated as property, which is not true. (The text conflates and confuses three distinct scenarios: Dunmore’s offer of freedom in 1775; General Henry Clinton’s Philipsburg Proclamation in 1779, which did not actually promise freedom but still triggered a far greater flight than did Dunmore’s proclamation; and the plight of enslaved people still working on plantations seized by the British in 1779–1781.) Then, after producing the impression that the British reneged on their deal, the text relates how the Revolution placed slavery “on its way toward extinction,” even in Virginia.37

  By applying a double standard, these texts are able to tell one story and suppress the other. They pronounce proudly that the Revolution, with its rhetoric of “freedom” and “slavery,” cracked the institution that held half a million Americans in bondage. In 1777 Vermont stipulated that all slaves born thereafter would be freed upon reaching their maturity (age twenty-two for males and eighteen for females). In 1780 Pennsylvania followed suit with more conservative age limits (twenty-eight for men, twenty-one for women), and by the early nineteenth century all Northern states had taken steps toward the termination of slavery.38

  The makers of The Patriot were so taken with the Northern version of the African American saga that they used it in South Carolina, where it has no place. They did not wish to tell the Southern story, even though their movie was set in the South. Slaves fleeing from famous patriots like Washington and Jefferson would not play so well to a modern audience. Imagine an alternate plotline: halfway through the movie, Benjamin Martin’s slaves run off to fight under
Colonel Tavington, the film’s sinister British villain; in the next battle scene, Martin, the patriot hero of the tale, kills three of his former bondsmen along with the usual seven Redcoats. This is not what we wish to see.

  SEEKING FREEDOM ANY WAY THEY CAN

  There is another way of looking at these stories. If we focus on the black experience rather than how the stories portray whites, the two suddenly blend into one.

  African Americans in both the North and South used the Revolution to foster the cause of black freedom. In a war between whites, they sided with whichever side offered the best hope of emancipation. They acted strategically in their own best interests, not from any prior commitment to the Americans or the British. In the North, where the British were weak and where the patriots were looking for soldiers, they cast their lot with the Americans. In the South, where the British offered them new lives and appeared (at least in the later years) to be able to make good on that promise, they flocked to the royal standard. Freedom was the name of the game, and they played it however they could.

  That’s the simple version; the actual plotline has many twists and turns. In the North, slaves had to negotiate carefully to ensure that their contributions to the patriots’ cause would actually result in their freedom; in many cases, whites tried to renege on their promises after the war.39

 

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