SHOULD MONUMENTS TO THE FOUNDING FATHERS BE TORN DOWN?
- Peter Radan
- Mar 22, 2019
- 7 min read
Updated: Oct 24, 2019
Peter Radan (23 March 2019)
In June 2017 a white supremacy rally was held in Charlottesville, Virginia, sparked by moves to remove the statue in Charlottesville of Robert E Lee, the slaveholding commander of the Confederacy's army.[1] Although coverage of the ugly rally received enormous media coverage, the issue that sparked it did not. This can be partly explained by the fact that the issue of tearing down Confederate monuments has been an on-going issue for many years.[2]
Of the coverage on the campaign to remove Lee's statue, the most significant item was the reaction to President Donald Trump's comments on that campaign when he said:
“Well now, George Washington was a slave owner. ... So will George Washington now lose his status? ... Are we going to take down statues of George Washington? ... How about Thomas Jefferson? ... Are we going to take down his statue because he was a major slave owner?"
In a scathing op-ed piece on Trump's rhetorical questions in The Washington Post on 16 August 2017, Kristine Phillips included the following responses from two historians:
"To make an equivalency between two of the Founding Fathers and Confederacy leaders is not only 'absurd,' but also 'unacceptable for the president of the United States,' said Jim Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association. 'They accomplished something very important. Washington and Jefferson were central to the creation of a nation … Lee and Stonewall [Jackson] were not being honored for those types of accomplishment,' Grossman said. 'They were being honored for creating and defending the Confederacy, which existed for one reason, and that was to protect the right of people to own other people.' ...
Douglas Blackmon, an author and senior fellow at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, said Trump either does not understand the history of the Confederacy or he’s sympathetic to white nationalist views. 'It’s the difference between a monument to the founder of our nation, and a monument to a key figure in an effort to break apart the nation,' Blackmon said.
To suggest that association with slavery is the only criteria on whether a historical figure should be honored is an equally faulty argument, Blackmon said, because one would be hard-pressed to find any 18th- and 19th-century leader of great consequence to American life who never owned slaves. 'It would be impossible to remember them if an association with slavery is the only criteria,' Blackmon said."
In essence, Grossman and Blackmon make the argument that Confederate monuments should be torn down because they honor men, who also happened to be slaveholders, because they sought to dismember the American Union. The fact that slaveholding Founding Fathers such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had an 'association' with slavery is not a good enough reason to tear down monuments honoring them.
In a previous blog I discussed the views of key founding Fathers on slavery (Slavery and America's Founding Fathers, 7 December 2018). Washington, for example, was a lifelong slaveholder and trader in slaves. He built his fortune on the back of slavery. During his presidency he took measures to avoid state laws that would have resulted in freedom to his slaves, and went to extreme lengths to recapture runaway slaves, the most famous example of that concerned Oney 'Ona' Judge who escaped in 1796 and who Washington was still actively seeking to recapture, albeit without success, until his death in 1799.[3] To simply say that Washington merely had an 'association' with slavery is a gross distortion of his attitude towards slavery and its perpetuation within the Union.
In another previous blog I discussed the centrality of slavery to the Constitution that the slaveholding Founding Fathers of 'great consequence' produced (America's Founding Fathers: Saints or Sinners?, 11 October 2018). As James Madison, another slaveholding Founding Father said, the entrenchment of slavery in the Constitution that the Founding Fathers created was America's 'original sin'.[4]
According to Madison, committing this 'original sin' was a matter of necessity, which he was honest enough to concede was grounded in a perceived reality that 'the two races cannot co-exist, being free & equal’.[5] Although Madison and his slaveholding colleagues were, as the legal historian Noah Feldman has concluded, 'ashamed of their association with slavery', Feldman goes on to say:
"They just did not feel sufficiently ashamed to do anything about it, at least not while their livelihoods and those of their families depended upon the labor of enslaved persons. They could compromise on slavery in the constitution – because they always compromised on slavery in their own lives. … [Their] position reflected the contorted moral logic of slaveholders enacting a slavery-protection constitution while claiming to oppose that very institution".[6]
It is implicit in Grossman's and Blackmon's responses to Trump's rhetorical questions about the Founding Fathers that they too accept that the Constitution's accommodations with slavery by those who had an 'association' with that institution, was a necessity.
As the historian Adam Rothman has argued, this necessity meant that the 'more perfect Union' that the Constitution's Preamble referred to ‘entered into history as a slave country’.[7] The significance of this slave country that the Founding Fathers bequeathed to future generations of Americans was that slave labor, especially in the production of cotton, was central to the emergence of America as an economic powerhouse during the nineteenth century. As Caitlin Rosenthal has exhaustively documented, the then practice of slavery shows that slaveholding planters 'developed complex management structures ... akin to what would later be called scientific management ... [in which] slave labor and modern business practices strengthen[ed] each other ...[and] were deployed in search of new markets, new crops, new production processes, and new information systems to coordinate production'. The effect of this slave-based economy was that 'slaveholders ... built an innovative, global, profit-hungry labor regime that contributed to the emergence of the [America's] modern [capitalist] economy'.[8]
Many of the Founding Fathers' contemporaries predicted that a great national tragedy would be the consequence of the 'original sin' committed in 1787. George Mason, a delegate to the Philadelphia Convention, astutely observed at the end of the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention held during the summer of 1787, that ‘by an inevitable chain of causes & effects providence punishes national sins, by national calamities’.[9] The national calamity presciently foreseen by Mason was more directly articulated by Samuel Hopkins, a prominent abolitionist and theologian, who, in January 1788, wrote that he feared that ‘civil war will not be avoided’.10]
Thus, America's 'original sin' led directly to what Grossman and Blackmon clearly regard as an even greater 'sin', that is, the Confederacy's attempt to dismember the American Union. If so, their assertion that the Founding Fathers' mere 'association' with slavery is not grounds alone for calling into question the existence of monuments erected in their honor, becomes problematic. This is all the more so since the Confederacy sought to dismember the American Union in defence of the 'original sin' that the Founding Fathers bequeathed to them. If men who sought to dismember the Union in defence of the 'original sin' of slavery should not have monuments erected in their honor, why should the same approach not be taken for those who committed that 'original sin'?
The Charlottesville rally evidenced that the issue of Confederate monuments and symbols is still very much alive. Indeed, it has entered the jockeying that is currently underway in relation to the Democratic Party's choice to contest the 2020 presidential election. Thus, on 18 March 2019, in an interview on CNN, Senator Elizabeth Warren voiced her support for the removal of the Confederate battle emblem from Mississippi's state flag.
However, the issue of monuments has also expanded beyond just Confederate monuments. There have been calls for getting rid of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC as well as Mount Rushmore, which honors four American presidents, two of whom are Washington and Jefferson.
And it is not only monuments to slaveholding Founding Fathers that are being called into question. For example, on 11 March 2019, The Washington Postreported that there was a strong campaign underway to rename the prestigious Woodrow Wilson High in Washington DC, on account of that president's racism which had him impeding the progress of DC's significant African-American population by re-segregating the federal workforce and making it extremely difficult for African-Americans to obtain employment in the federal public service.
What the fate of these, and other, claims for the removal of monuments and symbols reveal, is that America has still to come to terms with the consequences of decisions made by its Founding Fathers in the summer of 1787. Although race-based slavery was abolished following the Civil War in what many have referred to as the 'Second American Revolution', what followed was a long period of racial segregation. This stain on the American past was progressively dismantled over a period of time commencing in the 1950s. De-segregation, when combined with the passage of federal civil rights legislation in the 1960s, contributed significantly to the election of Barack Obama as America's first African-American President in 2008, a year in which one may have thought that America had finally come to terms with its racist past.
The result of the 2016 presidential election proved otherwise, and there is little reason to doubt that its victor will, in due course, have monuments erected in his honour.
Footnotes
[1] On 11 December 2018, James A Fields Jr, who rammed a car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one person, was sentenced to life in prison for first-degree murder.
[2] Sanford Levinson, Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies, Duke University Press, 2018.
[3] Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Never Caught, The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge, Atria Books, 2017.
[4] James Madison, ‘To Marquis De La Fayette’, 25 November 1820, in Gaillard Hunt (ed),The Writings of James Madison, Vol IX, 1819-1836, G P Putnam’s Sons, 1910, 37.
[5] James Madison, ‘To Marquis de Lafayette’, November 1826, in Hunt (ed),The Writings of James Madison, Vol IX, note 2 above, 265.
[6] Noah Feldman, The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President, Random House, 2017, 164.
[7] Adam Rothman, Slave Country, American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South, Harvard University Press, 2005, 8-9.
[8] Caitlin Rosenthal, Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management, Harvard University Press, 2018, 3, 189-191.
[9] Max Farrand (ed), The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, Revised Edition in Four Volumes, Volume 2, Yale University Press, 1966, 370.
[10] Quoted in James T Kloppenberg, Toward Democracy, The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought, Oxford University Press, 2016, 574.