U.S. history, interpreted

Ever since my daughter Leila’s wedding some 12 days ago, I’ve been sort of tour-guiding various aspects of US history and culture for, serially, two of my three sisters. Last week, I got to accompany my sister Hilly and her partner around “Independence Hall” and various other sites in Philadelphia, and this week I got to accompany my sister Diana around Thomas Jefferson’s historic home Monticello, which is located near my hometown here in central Virginia.
Both of these are sites that I’ve visited before. But I think that the “interpretation” of historical sites is something that is often done extremely well here in the US. So I was quite happy to line up in each of these places and go and take the tours again. Plus, I find it interesting to see how the interpretations change over time.
And I wasn’t disappointed. The US National Park Service guide who took us round Independence Hall last week, and the guides from the privately-run Monticello Foundation who led the two tours we took there this week, all did a good job: informative, well-considered, and interesting.
What I found new in the NPS tour we got in Philly was the nuance the guide gave regarding the whole historical episode of the Anglo colonists’ 1770s-1780s fight against the British Crown. I was prepared for something like the anti-George III rant that is often found in US textbooks, but this guide told the story in a much more nuanced way. First, he stressed that all the (white) settlers who settled in this part of the continent in the 1600s and early 1700s came under the jurisdiction of the British Crown, whatever land they might have come here from. And as subjects of the British Crown they enjoyed, and valued, many important rights that dated back to the Magna Carta…

He showed us, for example, around the courtroom first designed and used in the days of british rule here. The defendant got to openly face both the judge and his accusers– plus, all the proceedings were held in full public view. The courtroom didn’t even have any doors between it and the lobby of the government building it was in: observers could come and go as they pleased.
So when George III, in order to pay for his wars in the American interior against the French colonists and their native-American proxies, imposed new taxes on the people of the Anglo-origin colonies, without giving the colonists any voice in Parliament in London over the matter, the colonists thought that their rights as British subjects were being infringed. So that, according to this version we were told, was the first rallying cry of the colonial leaders: for full respect of their rights within the British system…
But in time, as the Crown did nothing to meet this essentially reformist demand, the tide in the colonies shifted toward “revolution” (i.e. secession), instead…
Well, that was an interesting description, and pregnant with all kinds of relevance for today. (From my perspective, I was particularly interested to see the layout of the British-era courtroom that we were shown. The only philosopher of punishment who makes any sense at all to me is a Scottish specialist called Tony Duff. His central thesis is that a criminal proceeding should be seen centrally as a communication between the Bench and the accused. That courtroom certainly seemed to embody that approach. Unlike, for example, the courtroom at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which I visited recently, where the accused is shunted off well to one side of the set-up.)
And so, on to Monticello. Here, the main thing that has always interested me has been how the interpreters deal with the whole issue of the slave-based foundations of the whole Monticello venture, and in particular Thomas Jefferson’s extremely contradictory/hypocritical attitudes towards slavery. (“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal… ” etc., etc — words drafted by TJ to go into the “Declaration of Independence”; but despite them, he only freed a miserly total of four of the 600 or so slaves whom he owned for longer or shorter periods during the course of his life.)
I shall probably have to wait until a lot later to get much satisfaction at all from the hearing of the story of the “discovery” of the American West that was undertaken under Jefferson’s auspices; or indeed, to hear any description of how it was that the jeffersons and the rest of the Anglo colonists somehow came to be “given” all that land in this continent by a British monarch in the first place… As I’ve noted here previously, the words “colonial”, “colonist”, “settler”, and the like still have a basically laudable, mythologized ring to them here in the US, while the story of the displaced and essentially genocided indigenes has gotten far shorter shrift.
But on the way I heard the story of slavery told here this week, the news is moderately good. There has been progress. I guess I’ve done the Monticello tour four or five times over the years. The first time was on my honyemoon with Bill, back in 1984– and I don’t recall that the word was much mentioned then at all.
The last time I took the tour, maybe five or six years ago, there was some overt recognition that the whole Moniticello venture had been based on slave labor. On that occasion, as this week, I took both the main “big house” tour and the special tour of the “slave row” down to one side of the house. But that last time, neither of the interpreters voluntarily brought up the “Sally Hemings” affair, despite the fact that it was quite in the news then, already.
(Sally H was the enslaved young woman who had six children, most or all of them almost certainly fathered by TJ. Sally herself was the half-sister of TJ’s wife Martha, being the offspring of Martha’s white, slave-owning father and a slave in his “possession” Betsy Hemings, who was bequeathed along with all of her children to TJ and Martha, on the death of the old man. That’s how it was in them days, I guess.)
And that last time, when someone–maybe me?–had the nerve to ask the interpreters about Sally H, they both hemmed and hawed and tried to downplay the evidence and say there was still a lot of uncertainty, etc., etc.
This time, the whole issue was much more forthrightly out front. Both the interpreters we listened to mentioned it, and both admitted that the claims of at least some of Sally Hemings’ descendants that TJ was one of their ancestors were “probably” correct. (These days, the DNA evidence could probably nail the issue down more accurately than that, even.)
In addition, the young man who intepreted the “slave row” tour for us gave a fairly full and balanced account of such important issues as why American slavery was different from, and worse than, indenturehood or even many other forms of slavery found around the world; the fact that TJ had ordered the flogging of at least one of “his” slaves; the fact that despite all his platitudes in the Declaration of Independence, he took few or no serious steps either to free the vast majority of his slaves or to prepare these people for their eventual freedom.
The interpreter was also appropriately respectful in referring generally to “enslaved people”, rather than slaves…
Last year, as part of my project on Violence and its Legacies, I had a research assistant do some interviews in Germany for the project on the effectiveness of the Nuremberg Trials especially in the realm of helping to re-educate the german people into members of democratic, tolerant society. One of the people she interviewed was a German historian of the period, Konrad Jarausch, who made the observation that the Nuremberg Trials had established a historical record that over time a new generation of Germans turned to as they tried to reach their own evaluation of the actions of their parents and grandparents in the Nazi era.
“Public memory in Germany now is the memory of the victims, rather than the memory of the perpetrators,” Jarausch said. ” That is breathtaking. I know of no other international example where that has happened… If you ask the young people now who they associate with, it is people in the camps. It is people who are survivors. It is not their grandparents or their great-grandparents who did these things.”
Well, maybe public memory here in the US is not quite yet “that of the victims” of the institution of slavery– and it is certainly not that of the victims of colonial ethnically cleansing. But on slavery, at least, there has been some clear progress.
Did I mention that the Monticello Foundation is actually controlled by the (white) biological descendants of Thomas Jefferson? For even those people to have come as far as they have come in recognizing the immoral hypocrisy of their exalted forebear is no small matter. Now, the next logical step would be for them to invite Sally Hemings’s descendants to join their association on a completely equal footing.
And hey, how about some reparations to those people, too??