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Patrick Rael is a professor of history at Bowdoin College in Brunswick. He specializes in African-American history, the Civil War era, and the history of slavery and emancipation.
Recently speaking of the renowned set of museums that adorn the National Mall in Washington, D.C., President Donald Trump once again exposed his ignorance of American history.
He wrote in a social media post, “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.”
He is of course factually incorrect, as anyone who’s had the pleasure of experiencing the Smithsonian Institution can tell you. More to the point, think of the astounding ignorance it takes to ask why only the “bad” parts of slavery might be covered.
Let’s be clear: there were no “good” parts to slavery. None.
At our country’s founding, every state in the Union protected the rights of enslavers to own humans as property, subject them to their petty and often sadistic will, sexually exploit them, compel them to produce new generations born into bondage, invest and barter in them, and work them until death. This system of unchecked power taught Americans to demonize the most vulnerable among us, making them pariahs and scapegoats for all the nation’s ills, even to the point of denying them a place in the human family.
Slavery stands literally at this nation’s core. Seven of the first eight U.S. presidents held slaves. Slaves served the man who penned the words: “All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Slaves helped build the U.S. Capitol during the Civil War, and freed slaves helped win the Civil War and end slavery.
Slaveholders claimed that perpetual hereditary servitude benefitted those it dehumanized. In 1861 Texas joined the Confederacy to protect the “beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery.” As Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens declared of his short-lived new nation, “its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”
The daily practice of slavery exposes this paternalistic lie. Consider the diaries of just one typical planter, Bennet H. Barrow of Louisiana: “Gave every cotton picker a whipping last night,” reads one note. On another occasion he recorded: “Gave my driver a few licks this evening, not knowing who had done bad work.” Days after: “Gave my Negroes about my lot the worst whipping they ever had.” “Had a general whipping frolic,” runs a short entry.
When one of his pieces of human property attempted to flee from such dehumanizing treatment, Barrow shot him in the thigh so he could not run. Of one who successfully escaped, Barrow wrote: “Will shoot to kill him should I be fortunate enough to meet him.” And woe be to the captured fugitive. “Gave him the worst whipping he ever had,” he reported of one such unfortunate. He gleefully set hounds on another: “The dogs soon tore him naked. I took him home & made the dogs give him another overhauling.”
No, there was nothing good about slavery, except its abolition.
Trump’s assault on the Smithsonian is just one piece of the MAGA assault on history. From efforts to suppress the teaching of African American history in grade schools, to the censorship of history books at West Point, to the purging of National Archivist Colleen Shogan, war is being waged on truthfully remembering the past. This is the playbook of authoritarians throughout time. George Orwell captured it in 1984: “‘Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’”
Another great writer, Mark Twain, wrote that “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” I think he meant that only by thoughtfully listening to the past can we learn from it. But if there is no sound history, there are no rhymes. No lessons can be gleaned from a past that exists only in the ever-shifting words of a lying, capricious leader.
What lessons might the history of slavery teach?
It might teach us that slavery was not a benign institution but an exploitative practice of anti-democratic oligarchs.
It might teach us how the founders of this country sacrificed the nation’s principles by committing its constitution to the protection of men as property.
It might teach us how the law can be perverted to the service of oligarchs, making it illegal to protect the human rights of the fugitives from slavery they might harbor.
It might teach us how effectively oligarchs use race to set those who served them against each other, rather than direct their wrath at their real foe.
It might teach us about those black and white activists who found the courage to resist a government that protected slavery, even in the face of enormous threat and violence.
It might teach us about the commitment and service of the oppressed, who took up arms against the power that oppressed them, in the process saving the Union.
It might teach us how that service helped destroy slavery, and write that abolition into the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution.
And it might teach us why making freedom meaningful required the Fourteenth Amendment, which makes every person born on American soil a citizen, and guarantees the civil rights of every person regardless of whether or not they are citizens.
Presumptive dictators do not want such things remembered, because they know that talking to the past is a good practice for democracy. It keeps us out of information silos, challenging a tendency to believe whatever we want to believe just because we want to believe it. It reminds us that we are accountable to those who fought for the liberties we do enjoy, who would not let us devolve into the worst versions of ourselves. It reminds us of the dangers of demagoguery and it shows us how previous generations have resisted the forces that would reduce the best of this troubled country to the plaything of corrupt oligarchs.
Twain was right: History never clearly repeats itself. But it sure can offer us insight into where we’ve been, and how we might cope with where we’re headed.
