Cross posted from the Dank History Stash on Facebook:
As Juneteenth approaches, I’d like to make a lengthy post about myth, history, and when the distinction doesn’t matter. Juneteenth was not, as I have discussed before, the day the last slaves were freed. Juneteenth is the day the last slaves in the Confederacy were freed, but there were still ~400,000 slaves in the border states who would not be freed until Dec 9, when the Thirteenth Amendment completed the ratification process by the States (how long it took for anyone to tell the black people who were affected by ratification, I don’t know). However, there is a symbolism in the liberation of the last people held in chains by a government whose “corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man” (Alexander Stevens, 3/21/1861). The power of this symbol that should have overthrown the very concepts the Confederate States were founded on is far greater than the power of the liberation of the last slaves in States that did not send men to die to preserve that peculiar institution.
Myth is a tool we use in our battle to understand the past, and it’s not always a bad one. Sometimes myth preserves an emotional truth that is not strictly factually true, but represents a moment more accurately than the facts do. When I saw Eric Foner talk in Cambridge last year, he discussed how historians are subject to “the tyranny of the fact,” which he used to demonstrate how speculation on alternate courses of history, even by historians, should be taken with a grain of salt because they only know what did happen, not what might have happened. But another element of factual tyranny is frequently history buffs will “well, actually” their way out of an emotional truth. An example from my own life is when I was younger I would point out the difference in magnitude of political prisoners made by McCarthy-era anti-communism and 1920s-era anti-communism. However, the Red Scare began by Wilson was ultimately a far more culturally contained phenomenon due to low levels of publicity, whereas by the 1950s McCarthy’s anti-communism was broadcast by television and radio to nearly every house in America, making it a far more culturally powerful moment.
The most famous of American myths are all regarding the Founding Generation, a group of people so integral to the American myth and creed that even mentioning them has already conjured up strong emotions in you, the reader. The greatest myth of this generation is that they fought and died to prove that “self evident truth” that “all men are created equal.” This myth is, by itself, a positive one. It gives Americans a sense that they should strive to continue and perhaps someday finish that fight. However, the myriad of myths that spiral out of that one have given the public amnesia and sometimes false memory. That statement that we have so thoroughly internalized is not even completely consistent with the document it is in, as that same Declaration refers to “domestic insurrections” which presumably means slave revolts inspired by Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation and “merciless Indian Savages” who were, according to that document, instigated to kill settlers by King George III himself. It is ultimately good that as history unfolded we settled on the “self evident truths” to found our national creed on instead of any of the more destructive elements of the document, but our battle to find consistency where there is none has led us into confusion around our own origins.
It is also interesting to look at what we do not mythologize. On February 21, 1848, John Quincy Adams died on the floor of Congress. The former President, who had watched the Revolutionary War begin at Bunker Hill from the porch of his home in Braintree, went to Ghent to negotiate peace with Britain after the War of 1812, drafted the Monroe Doctrine, and the only President to date who continued to serve in public life after leaving the White House, would hold as much mythical status in a logical world as Andrew Jackson or Henry Clay. However, it did not suit the America of 1848, nor any America since, to lionize this legendary human, and his death, rivaled only in poetic power by the effectively simultaneous deaths of his father and Jefferson, was not baked into the stories we tell our children about what happened in this nation before.
Myth is a powerful tool we should be using to reforge and refine the American Creed. We should be searching not only for the factual truth but also the emotional truth that is embodied in myths, and work to mythologize events that hold true the best parts of the past.
Fucking poetry.
Just learned a good one today.
Worth a read this Fourth of July. John Quincy Adams, in 1846, about why he loathes the celebrations of The Battle of Bunker Hill.
Could’ve put this in Random Comments but it’s also on topic here.
Wow, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to devote the 45 minutes but so glad I did. Great video! I love the weak-ass retort by right-wingers along the lines of “oh yeah? Then let’s take down the other people too!” (whether founding fathers, Clintons, liberal celebrities, etc…) and the response is “sure, if they are bad people give them what they deserve.”
Literally just started watching this 5 minutes ago!
I have takes on this but given that the bulk of the video is paraphrased from books I already read (based on his bibliography and the first seven minutes of the Washington section) I’m just gonna leave it at “this guy’s mostly right but leaves out important information both in terms of things in favor and against the Founding Fathers.” I’m not trying to say he’s being one sided, because yeah, that’s how agit prop works, but also he’s not really giving the full one side.
EDIT: ok very quickly, the most prominent instance of this is when he’s talking about slavery and the British Empire and he really glosses over how the Brits stokes the fears of slave insurrection in the hearts of the colonists. By starting to talk about Britain’s anti-slavery actions in the 1800s he’s glossing over things like The Somerset Case in 1772 which abolished slavery in Great Britain (which is to say England, Scotland, and Wales) and Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation which promised freedom to any slave who joined the British Army – a promise that was honored despite American attempts to neuter it at the Treaty of Paris.
This isn’t (just?) to try to justify the colonists’ fear that their human property would be no longer property, it’s also to illustrate how he’s leaving out vital information that makes his arguments more convincing. Further damning is that he has to have read these things based on his bibliography. Admittedly Chernow and Meacham aren’t terribly great at anything but the facts behind the myth, but Kendi’s book Stamped from the Beginning (cited in the video) goes into great depth about these things, and yet the YouTuber excluded it.
EDIT 2: yes, I started by saying very quickly and then trippled the length of my post.
No YouTube video is ever 100% accurate, I thought to share since there were good points being made with some things glossed over for the overall story of it.
Yeah I get it it’s just that he’s also not very good at demonstrating the point he’s trying to make, which is a feat for a 45 minute video.
EDIT: I’ll write more about this later when I’ve thought about it for more than a day but I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between historical accuracy and historical precision, to borrow a term from the sciences. Most of the time when people talk about historical accuracy, they’re talking about the number of facts that actually happened, but in science (or at least, my high school science classes, which are obviously not Real Science) that’s precision. Historical accuracy would be more like how accurate it is to how those events felt and what they led to, which is why Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson is the most accuracte depiction of Jackson despite being the least precise of the last 40 years.
I ran into this unrelated to the recent release of Hamilton on Disney+. The one good thing I had to say about Burr was that he did found an anti-slavery society with Hamilton and John Jay, but this negates that pretty heavily.
There’s a lot of history I could be talking about right now that’s relevant, but let’s just enjoy this shitpost of a YouTube video instead.
New Twitter historical roleplay account, please give it a follow.