What the resistance historian describes as "hating" on the Founders is more in this one an attack on what I have long called the Jefferson Cult. The irony is the resistance historian has to talk about heroic Timothy Pickering, a military guy in the Revolution and a major booster to ratify the Constitution, and Rufus King, who signed the Constitution at the end of the 1787 convention, and was perhaps too young to sign, but definitely was active in the Revolution that began more in earnest after the Declaration of Independence was announced. I would call those men "Founders," too, and the resistance historian really can't deny that. He wonders why they are not known, and I would say it is because they did not become president and were not as consequential overall as a Franklin or Hamilton. I wish it was different as I, the history buff, sure know those guys.
But what fried me is how he cherry picks a paragraph from Gordon Wood's really outstanding "Empire of Liberty" and ignores how Wood provides over the next thirty pages a history of slavery as a central issue. He makes it sound like Wood's book was trying to sweep slavery under the rug. Do I like Wood's ironic phrase of antislavery advocates "inadvertently" pushing white southerner enslavers toward overt racism to justify slavery? No. But his point is better stated not at the beginning of the chapter where Wood is quoted, but by the end of the chapter, where Wood shows how race became an obsession in white-dominated US politics by the late 1790s. Wood is certainly not sweeping enslavement under a rug. In fact, the word "slavery" and "slave(s)" etc. are mentioned about 300 times in a 738 book, about once every two or three pages. It is central to his story. Wood never discusses the 1784 proposed ordinance EXCEPT for its actually PRIMARY purpose, which shows how our Founders were foursquare wanting to conquer Native American lands. This understanding of US officials wanting to conquer Native nations wouldn't help the intrepid resistance historian in painting these historians as soft racists, I guess.
But what about Joseph Ellis, another modern historian he attacks? Here I can only say this resistance historian does a three quarter-slander of Joseph Ellis. Here is Ellis in his main, major biography of Jefferson at page 68:
"(Jefferson) wrote the Ordinance of 1784, which established the principles on which all new states would be admitted to the Union on an equal basis with existing states. The final provision required the end of slavery in all newly created states by 1800. But it lost by one vote, prompting Jefferson to remark later that “the fate of millions unborn [was] hanging on the tongue of one man, and Heaven was silent in that awful moment!” It was the most far-reaching proposal to end slavery that Jefferson ever wrote but also the high-water mark of his antislavery efforts, which receded afterward to lower levels of caution and procrastination."
Wait. I thought this resistance historian said people like Ellis never mention the 1784 ordinance would not end slavery until 1800? Ellis sure did. And note what Ellis also says, it was a "high water" mark for Jefferson--not forever, and not compared to other founders. But give the resistance historian one thing: Ellis never mentions Rufus King and Timothy Pickering reintroducing a ban that was immediate--but note the resistance historian says it passed unanimously. I wonder how that happens if "the" "Founders" are ALL to be so hated?
I can agree with the resistance historian about the excesses of the Jefferson Cult. Still, the Cult is far less powerful than it was two generations ago. Sometimes I think the resistance historian is making arguments against professional historians (Jon Meacham, please sit down) that would have far more salience a generation or two ago. I think there has been far more understanding of the centrality of enslavement as an institution than at any time since the rise of professional academic historians in the late 19th Century.
I can also agree we should have a resistance form of history to help people see alternatives, hopes, and the contradictions that make history a politics of the past that keeps seeping into our present and likely our future. But I really don't like his overstatements and certainly not the type of attacks he makes against someone such as Gordon Wood or even Joseph Ellis. One can be critical of their work over decades to be sure. But Wood above so many has been an amazing scholar who has written so many important and insightful works. Ellis has been an academic who has straddled the Meacham-McCullough worlds, but I think his histories are really good. And Meacham-McCullough can be fun to read and still fairly informative.
To me, the focus on slavery as central is important as far as it goes. But we must never obscure what I call Project 1492, which is genocide and replacement of most Native nations in our nation. One goes from 3-4 million Native Americans in 1770 to 250,000 (!!) in 1900. That's a genocide, and our Founders were sadly united in moving Native peoples further and further across the continent, with lies nearly every step of the way, and extermination whenever Native Americans became too frustrated with those lies. It is as central as the institution of enslavement.
See an older blog post on Gordon Wood.
