Confederate "Heritage" Month 2023, April 27: Again on the American Revolution and abolishing slavery
William Hoagland grumps a bit about the issue of the American Revolution and slavery1:
Yet again I’ve been exposed to the happy notion that the American Revolution, far from being fought, for one thing, to preserve the institution of African slavery—as the 1619 Project claims—was instead closely associated with early efforts to abolish the vile institution. I heard this Revolution-abolitionism connection advanced, most recently, during a roundtable discussion among some scholars and journalists held by the National Constitution Center earlier this year and released as a podcast the other day.
The discussion he cites is from a panel discussion at the National Constitution Center called “Should We Break Up With the Founders?”2 It’s an interesting snapshot of varying reviews of the Founding generation and their relation to slavery, in particular.
Hoagland disagrees with the argument that the Revolution had preserving slavery as a central goal. But he also seems to think that the claimed slavery-abolition effect of the Revolutionary ideals is sometimes overblown in more apologetic views of American history. In an earlier article, he sketches out some of the rebellious history over decades that among other things led to the end of slavery.3
[T]he most important insurrection in our history—it began with riots, shutdowns, and crowd attacks on officials and law-compliant citizens and then became a full-on insurrectionary war of secession—was the American Revolution, as it became known after it succeeded. During that war, the British naturally called it both an insurrection and a rebellion. Our other insurrectionary war of secession was the Confederacy’s effort in the Civil War, ultimately unsuccessful. We sometimes call that war both an insurrection and a rebellion. …
There’s another category of American insurrections that’s even easier to sympathize with: slave revolts, as they’re commonly known. They went on in the colonial period and continued through the antebellum years. …
Probably the most famous insurrection on behalf of the enslaved was led by the ever-fascinating John Brown, a white man, in 1859. His goal was to seize weaponry and ammunition from the federal armory and arsenal in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia; widely distribute it to enslaved populations; and trigger a rebellion to take down the whole evil institution. That didn’t happen, of course. Brown’s attempt to hold the arsenal against U.S. Marines, led by Robert E. Lee, collapsed quickly.
But the insurrectionary nature of the dream at Harper’s Ferry survived in an unusual form. During the Civil War, one of Brown’s Boston-abolitionist supporters, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, raised a U.S. Army regiment of escaped black fighters in South Carolina and Georgia and led them against their oppressors. The regiment included the army’s first black nurse, Susie King Taylor. The Union thus not only defeated the Confederacy’s insurrection but also, by arming former slaves, supported a kind of insurrection against the Confederacy. That was John Brown’s dream. [my emphasis]
Hoagland gives a helpful picture of his approach to looking at the history of the Founders in a 2017 forum dealing with Alexander Hamilton.4 He refers to the limitations of the Progressive historical tradition associated with Charles Beard. Beard focused broadly on economic issues in his analysis of the Constitution’s creations. But he took a rather cynical, everybody’s-in-it-for-a-buck approach that oversimplified to actual class and political issues involved.
Hoagland sees the dominant liberal historical trends in the 1950s and 1960s that rejected the narrow Beard view as having embraced a kind of throwing-out-the-baby-with-the-bathwater approach that ended up ignoring class and economic issues in favor of an excessjve focus on formal ideology and political philosophy.
The founders themselves thus became so abstracted from day-to-day politics [under that approach] that the grittiness and intensity necessary to create a nation seemed mere objective correlatives to philosophical themes and trends. The approach may now seem quaint, superseded in the academy by social history, feminist history, African American history, “history from the bottom up,” and other modes. But [Douglass] Adair’s influence continues to shape the work of well-regarded historians and thinkers to this day, scholars as different from one another as Gordon Wood, Garry Wills, Pauline Maier, and Akhil Reed Amar. Those thinkers have, in turn, been influential well beyond the academy. Our public history, in particular, remains steeped in barely-examined notions that identify the founders’ motivations—if not solely, then most significantly—with ideas. [my emphasis]
Hoagland provides an important warning about the hazards of substituting intellectual history for examining the actual trends in the struggles of people in real history. Both are important. Neither can be completely isolated from the other. But in the end, the actions and results matter more.
Elsewhere, Hoagland notes that historians using the more intellectual-history-based view and taking a more academic approach than popular historians "depend less on narrative." So it's therefore "easier for them to get away with making the most revealing action disappear just at the crucial moment. They tend to de-center action anyway, in favor of ideas. When it’s time to fuzz things out, there’s a lot of fuzz to work with."5
Hoagland, William (2023): Was the American Revolution Abolitionist? No. But some people still can't stop trying to make it so. Hogeland’s Bad History (Substack) 04/24/2023. (Accessed: 2023-24-04). Part of the Hoagland article is behind subscription.
Should We Break Up With the Founders? National Constitutional Center. <https://constitutioncenter.org/news-debate/podcasts/should-we-break-up-with-the-founders> (Accessed: 2023-24-04).
Hoagland, William (2021): American Rebellion, American Democracy, American Tyranny-How Insurrection Works Here. Hogeland’s Bad History (Substack) 04/02/2021. (Accessed: 2023-24-04).
Hoagland, William (2021): William Hogeland responds to Martha Nussbaum. Boston Review 01/27/2017. <https://www.bostonreview.net/forum_response/william-hogeland-william-hoagland-responds-martha-nussbaum/> (Accessed: 2023-24-04).
Hogeland, William (2022): Dominant Narratives and Their Overturnings: the History Genre That Can Never Die. Hogeland's Bad History (Substack) 11/23/2022. <https://williamhogeland.substack.com/p/dominant-narratives-andtheir-overturnings> (Accessed: 2023-25-04).