There Were Giants in the Earth in Those Days
Time for some legend-tweaking, some myth-interrogating, some eye-poking in the.
But while millions of colonists were accepting of slavery if not relaxed about it, millions of Britons back in the old country really were disgusted by it. And when slaves could choose whom to trust, they trusted Britannia.
So in the end it’s a poke in the eye for America?
“Yup. In the interests of truth,” he says.
Simon Schama, this is. He’s written a new book on – well, what it sounds like.
He’s grateful, he says, for Americans thirst for popular history – a thirst that can make “doorstoppers such as Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton beach reading for the summer”. But there’s a but, and it’s a big one. All these blockbusters (one thinks also of Stephen Ambrose’s boomingly titled The Victors, Band of Brothers and Undaunted Courage) are “very coloured, in my view, by the wish for a pre-lapsarian past; (by the notion that) however much trouble we’ve been in since the civil war, there was once a place where America’s founding fathers were good, wise, strong, heroic, devoted to liberty and all of that”.
And by the wish for ‘the good war’ and for ‘the greatest generation’ and other cuddly items. Wishes of that kind do get in the way of truth. That happens.
Wrong sort of history for his esteemed colleagues to be writing, Schama reckons. Go back to Thucydides and the great cock-up theory of how we got to where we are. “It may have been low-key and Macaulay, not Carlisle, but that’s the greatness of the Western historical tradition. It’s not purely celebratory — in fact it began with unflinching self-criticism — so there is some sense of the virtue of party-pooping.”
There is indeed. Unflinching self-criticism is a good deal more likely to get at the truth than wishful thinking about pre-lapsarian pasts is. (Why? Because there is always something to criticise, whereas pre-lapsarian pasts don’t exist. And because wishful thinking distorts perception. That’s why.)
Schama was on Start the Week last week, talking about this book and being amusingly rude about Mel Gibson’s terrible mythic movie ‘The Patriot’ and about the decisiveness of Bush – ‘He’s decisive,’ Schama said acidly, ‘about doing whatever the last person he spoke to recommended.’
I wonder how far the unflinching self-criticism – a critical and rational exploration of U.S. history with no ideological axe to grind – will fly with some of those advocating the Academic Bill of Rights (“don’t dismiss my dissenting viewpoint in class”) and “teach the controversy” in biology. I don’t think very far. Dissenting viewpoints about U.S. history (and the Iraq war,the environment,etc.) are, of course, unpatriotic.
Well, naturally. Unflinching self-criticism=why do you hate America so much? Furthermore, unflinching criticism also = treading on some students’ beliefs. Naughty.
Ophelia, you are RUDE! I happen to have extremely sensitive and deeply-held, yet very fuzzy, notions about the sun-dappled Norman Rockwell land I live in, and you have just defecated all over them with your snide sarcastic remarks. Now, to heal the trauma you’ve inflicted on me, I’m enrolling in a special camp to help me learn to combat your unpleasant worldview.
Oh yeah, that Patriot flick by Mel “Spank Me” Gibson. Ten minutes of that treacly mendacious ad for honey-coated stool softener made my gorge rise so violently that I was forced to change the channel back to the goat porn I’d been watching earlier.
“the sun-dappled Norman Rockwell land I live in”
“that treacly mendacious ad for honey-coated stool softener”
Phrasemaker!
“Phrasemaker!”
Guinness is the key.
Ah – Guiness is good for you.
snerk
I think that one has to be careful that the self-criticism doesn’t become self-flagellation. It is true that many British politicians noted the irony of the slaveowners fighting under a banner of liberty, but slavery was still perfectly legal in British colonies, and a lot of money was made until the final abolition of slavery in the British dominions in 1833. The slaveowners were, of course, compensated for their loss of property.
In fact, checking Wikipedia tells me that no major country abolished slavery before the beginning of the 19th century.
The Schama article of course gives similar caveats.
And the Patriot is terrible history. I agree wholeheartedly with that assessment.
True. The self-criticism—>self-flagellation thing can (for instance) end up with the much-noted perversity of thinking, say, Bush (whom I myself loathe with a passion, I have to say) is actually worse than various prominent mass-murderers. In short it can lead to really terrible thinking and really indefensible moral views. And really tragic witholding of solidarity and help from people who desperately need it.
But, Schama’s not a likely candidate for that, I think. The chat on Start the Week was full of stipulations of that kind – the British had cynical reasons, etc.
(I haven’t seen ‘The Patriot’ meself. I won’t darken Gibson’s door; I refuse. I loathe him and all his works, ever since that damn Jesus movie.)
I agree that Schama doesn’t suffer from that, but the article (IMHO) does; the caveats get one paragraph of a fairly long article.
I fear that many people may fall into a version of the Donatist heresy; just because a spokesman is fallible, this doesn’t invalidate what they say. A Founding Father may have kept slaves, but this doesn’t mean that their ideas of liberty, as seen in the Constitution, are wrong.
A random thought: given that there was a popular revulsion towards slavery in much of Europe at the time of the American Revolution, why did it take another 60 years to finally outlaw it in the British colonies?
“given that there was a popular revulsion towards slavery in much of Europe at the time of the American Revolution, why did it take another 60 years to finally outlaw it in the British colonies?”
The French outlawed slavery in their colonies soon after the Revolution. The Brits didn’t have a political revolution during the Enlightenment: they were still a rather conservative monarchy + parliament. Sure, the Brits hypocritically railed against slavery during the American Revolution, because it was a stick you could use to beat the colonist rebels with. After the AR, it served no useful purpose anymore, so most of them forgot about it. Besides, slavery is extremely profitable (don’t believe those modern-day Confederate apologists who tell you that slavery in America was dying out anyway because it was too unprofitable), so the Brits weren’t in any hurry to get rid of it. But some ideas are too powerful to resist, and the Enlightenment idea that slavery is absolutely, fundamentally wrong finally proved irresistible, even to the Brits and Americans.
“A Founding Father may have kept slaves, but this doesn’t mean that their ideas of liberty, as seen in the Constitution, are wrong.”
I’m not sure that’s true. Or I suppose I could agree with it if there were a ‘necessarily’ added – this doesn’t necessarily mean that their ideas of liberty, as seen in the Constitution, are wrong. They could have kept the two entirely separate – but in fact they didn’t, so I think the one does taint the other.
1. The French outlawed slavery during the Terror, in 1793. Napoleon reinstituted it by decree in [I think] 1802 — making him the only modern leader [pre-fascism] to formally enslave an entire social category. Another reason to find him loathsome…
2. Much as it pains me to admit it, I think evangelical religion and plain old-fashioned sentimental humanitarianism had more to do with abolitionism than Enlightenment thought…
3. As for the US Constitution, the mealy-mouthed way in which it incorporates both the power of slaveownership [in the infamous rule for allotting representation], and the matter-of-fact provision for the cross-border return of runaway slaves, need to be read to be believed, under all the universalist rhetoric.
Yeah, I know. Napoleon was quite the reactionary little shit, wasn’t he?
I tend to think that the abolitionist evangelicals by and large were trailing the great Enlightenment figures like Tom Paine, but yeah okay hats off to the Quakers, Methodists, and Congregationalists who formed the bulk of the abolitionist movement in the 19C U.S. But the Southern Baptists, among many other evangelicals, were just as fierce in defending slavery on religious grounds.(Hell, in the last decade of the 19C they were still passing resolutions justifying black slavery as approved by God!)
Random thought: The French and American Revolutions seem to have had opposite effects on British abolitionism. If there hadn’t been an AmRev, Britain would’ve had much stronger economic reasons to keep the filthy institution of slavery going. And if there hadn’t been a French Rev, and consequently if Enlightenment ideals–such as abolitionism–hadn’t become associated in the British mind with Jacobinism, maybe they would have caught on earlier.
Curiously enough, major antislavery campaigns were started in GB, France and USA about the same time, 1787-90. Whether it took the Americans longest to ‘follow through’ simply because slavery was part of their core domestic, as opposed to colonial, economy, is a pointed question.
BTW, I wasn’t saying there was anything special about the religious inclinations of the abolitionists, just that they had them…
I’d also love to agree that Tom Paine was a great enlightenment figure, but it just ain’t so — an outstanding polemicist, yes, but notable for his failures when attempting to do anything other than agitate…
It seems that it was easiest to outlaw slavery where it wasn’t going on; most of the Northern States abolished slavery at about the same time as Britain (1790s-1830s), and Britain abolished slavery outside the West Indies (as G Tingey points out above) but it remained there for another 25 years because it was actually practised there. This ties in with Karl’s economic arguments, of course.
Random thought: if there hadn’t been an American Revolution, might it have been easier to abolish slavery in the Southern Colonies? The North probably didn’t like slavery much, but their only chance of successfully rebelling was to make common cause with the South. Would there have been a similar anti-slavery movement in the colonies in the 1800s and 1830s, only this time with the backing of the colonial government?
Of course this is of complete irrelevancy to actual world history, but I thought it was interesting :)
Re Slavary.
Probably the greatest driver to the abolition of slavery was that it was about this time that technology was allowing alternative sources of energy to be tapped (coal, oil etc).
In the modern world, about 5kw is consumed by every person, either directly, or indirectly on our behalf. The average human generates about 75w. That means each of us has about 70 “slaves” at our beck and call, day and night. This suggests that any non-industrialised society would resort to salvary, and history would seem to back this up.
Yeah. I did a comment to a similar effect on Friday but it got eaten by the hacker (or the rebuild, but that’s the hacker at bottom). Slavery was all about the fact that huge money could be made in the fertile South, but only by doing backbreaking labour in a horrible climate. Well, guess what: that presented a standing temptation to dragoon cheap unfree labour. Now the same kind of thing is done by for instance introducing cash taxation that forces farmers to become miners to get the cash to pay the taxes. Hey presto: you got your miners!
If the doomsayers are correct (peak oil and all that stuff), could we perhaps see a return to slavery post-cheap oil?
The furthest reaches of the theocratic Religious Reich in the United States (Chalcedon Institute, for example) already have the ideological/
theological arguments in place (see also The Handmaiden’s Tale mentioned in another thread)
Much more likely is what we have now only more so – just highly systematized exploitation of nominally free labour.