Juneteenth falls on June 19 each year. It is a holiday whose history was hidden for much of the last century. But as the nation now observes the 150th anniversary of the Civil War’s onset, it is a holiday worth recognizing.”

Read more at Smithsonian Magazine

We seem to be no better off now than we were back in 1987 when the first major survey was called “What Our 17 Year Olds Know.” (It would have been more appropriately entitled “What they don’t know.”)

So the first simple question is:

Why Are we so Bad at History?

There has been an assumption that we all hate history, probably because all the surveys keep telling us that. But the simple fact is that people really don’t hate history. They just hate the dull, watered-down version they were forced to learn in school.  And that is Reason #1 that we don’t know much about History.

Reason #2 is an old problem that has gotten worse. We don’t spend enough time teaching history. That problem has worsened over the past few years, according to history teachers I speak with, because of No Child Left Behind. History teachers often tell me that they are pulled away from their regular curriculum to assist in standardized test preparation in math and reading because judging school performance and funding for schools has been reduced to how well children do on these tests. And yes, far too many teachers have come into the system without sufficient understanding of history and its importance.

Reason #3 is the media –both news and entertainment. There is still tremendous distortion of history in the daily news –some of it deliberate by people with agendas. Then there is the problem of Hollywood History. There are millions of children who think that Pocahontas was a buxom Disney character in a tight, deerskin skirt.

What Can We Do?

The solution to this epidemic of historical ignorance is fairly simple.

•If we think history is so important, spend more time actually teaching it.

•Throw out the textbooks. Okay, maybe not actually. But I don’t know any teachers or students who enjoy textbooks. History is first and foremost STORY. Tell great stories of real people doing real things. We are in a golden age of great historical writers who know how to tell stories. Use them in the classroom. I have seen kids in elementary school who show total curiosity and enthusiasm about history. By high school, that excitement is sucked out of them by rote learning and dishwater dull textbooks.

•Field trips. I know. You shudder at the thought of brown bags and bus rides. But going to the places where history happens makes all the difference in the world. My love of history came from camping trips to places like Gettysburg, Valley Forge and Fort Ticonderoga. And you don’t have to be near Boston, Washington, D.C. or Philadelphia to see history. It is everywhere.

•Stop lying. Museums and historic sites have to tell the truth, not a sanitized, cosmetically perfect version. In Florida, a recreated Spanish village tells visitors that the French were “banished” from Florida by the Spanish in 1565. That’s just not true. They were massacred in a religious bloodbath. Now that is an interesting story. Places like Monticello and Mount Vernon, on the other hand, have come light years from the stodgy museums they once were. They are exciting but more important honest. Both openly deal with the question of slavery in realistic and vivid terms. They don’t try and hide the truth that Jefferson and Washington were slaveholders.

•Use the media. There are some great movies about history, like Glory. Use them to teach. There are many more awful movies about history. We can use them too, by watching and saying “This is not the way it happened.” The real story of Pocahontas is a lot more interesting than the Disney cartoon version. Use that –don’t run away from it.

•Cross-pollinate. By this I mean what the academics like to call “interdisciplinary approach.” Teaching American colonial history? Make sure the English teacher is having the class read The Crucible. Then you can talk about the real Salem Witch Trials –who isn’t interested in witches?– as well as the McCarthy Era which inspired Arthur Miller to write the play.

These are just a few of the lessons I’ve learned about  getting people interested in History. So the secret to this success was simple: “If you build it, they will come.” Just tell people about history in a way that is lively, meaningful, fun, relevant and most important, human, and they will listen. Work with curiosity  instead of destroying it with myths, lies and tedium. Make it fun. But mostly make it real.

In 1951, the law of the land remained “separate but equal,” the policy dictated by the Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling. “Separate but equal” kept Linda Brown out of the nearby Topeka schoolhouse and dictated that many public facilities, from maternity wards to morgues, from water fountains to swimming pools, from prisons to polling places, were either segregated or for whites only.

Exactly how these “separate” facilities were “equal” remained a mystery to blacks: If everything was so equal, why didn’t white people want to use them? Nowhere was the disparity more complete and disgraceful than in the public schools, primarily but not exclusively in the heartland of the former Confederacy. Schools for whites were spanking new, well maintained, properly staffed, and amply supplied. Black schools were usually single-room shacks with no toilets, a single teacher, and a broken chalkboard.

If black parents wanted their children to be warm in the winter, they had to buy their own coal. But a handful of courageous southern blacks—mostly common people like teachers and ministers and their families—began the struggle that turned back these laws.

Urged on by Thurgood Marshall (1908–93), the burly, barb tongued attorney from Baltimore who led the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund, small-town folks in Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware balked at the injustice of “separate but equal” educational systems. The people who carried these fights were soon confronted by threats ranging from loss of their jobs to dried-up bank credit and ultimately to threats of violence and death.

In 1951, one of these men was the Reverend Oliver Brown, the father of Linda Brown, who tried to enroll his daughter in the all-white Topeka school. Since Brown came first in the alphabet among the suits brought against four different states, it was his name that was attached to the case that Thurgood Marshall argued before the Supreme Court in 1953.

There had been a change in the makeup of the Court itself. After the arguments in Brown v. Board of Education were first heard, Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson, a Truman appointee, died of a heart attack. In 1953, with reargument of the case on the horizon, President Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren (1891–1974) chief justice of the United States.

Certainly nobody at the time suspected that Warren would go on to lead the Court for sixteen of its most turbulent years, during which the justices took the lead in transforming America’s approach to racial equality, criminal justice, and freedom of expression.

In the Brown case, Warren led the Court to a moment of needed unanimity. The decision was announced on May 17, 1954. As the New York Times banner headine proclaimed, “High Court Bans School Segregation”

“Separate but equal” was no longer the law of the land.

In Simple Justice, a monumental study of the case and the history of racism, cruelty, and discrimination that preceded it, Richard Kluger eloquently assessed the decision’s impact:

The opinion of the Court said that the United States stood for something more than material abundance, still moved to an inner spirit, however deeply it had been submerged by fear and envy and mindless hate. . . . The Court had restored to the American people a measure of the humanity that had been drained away in their climb to worldwide supremacy. The Court said, without using the words, that when you stepped on a black man, he hurt. The time had come to stop.

Of course, Brown did not cause the scales to fall from the eyes of white supremacists. The fury of the South was quick and sure. School systems around the country, South and North, had to be dragged kicking and screaming through the courts toward desegregation. The states fought the decision with endless appeals and other delaying tactics, the calling out of troops, and ultimately violence and a venomous outflow of racial hatred, targeted at schoolchildren who simply wanted to learn.

This material is adapted from  Don’t Know Much About® History which will be reissued on June 21, 2011 in a newly revised, updated and expanded 20th Anniversary Edition.

I am quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.

–John Brown at his execution (November 2, 1859)

Viewed through history as a lunatic, psychotic, fanatic, visionary, and martyr, Brown came from a New England abolitionist family, several of whom were quite insane. A failure in most of his undertakings, he had gone to Kansas –then in the midst of a mini Civil War over slavery– in 1855 with five of his twenty-two children to fight for the antislavery cause, and gained notoriety for an attack that left five pro-slavery settlers hacked to pieces.

After that massacre at Pottawatomie,Kansas, Brown went into hiding, but he had cultivated wealthy New England friends who believed in his violent rhetoric. A group known as the Secret Six formed to fund Brown’s audacious plan to march south, arm the slaves who would flock to his crusade, and establish a black republic in the Appalachians to wage war against the slaveholding South. Brown may have been crazy, but he was not without a sense of humor. When President Buchanan put a price of $250 on his head, Brown responded with a bounty of $20.50 on Buchanan’s.

Among the people Brown confided in was Frederick Douglass; Brown saw Douglass as the man slaves would flock to, a “hive for the bees.” But the country’s most famous abolitionist attempted to dissuade Brown, not because he disagreed with violence but because he thought Brown’s chosen target was suicidal. Few volunteers answered Brown’s call to arms, although Harriet Tubman signed on with Brown’s little band. She fell sick, however, and was unable to join the raid.

On October 16, 1859, Brown, with three of his sons and fifteen followers, white and black, attacked the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, on the Potomac River not far from Washington, D.C. Taking several hostages, including one descendant of George Washington, Brown’s brigade occupied the arsenal. But no slaves came forward to join them. The local militia was able to bottle Brown up inside the building until federal marines under Colonel Robert E. Lee and J. E. B. Stuart arrived and captured Brown and the eight men who had survived the assault.

Within six weeks Brown was indicted, tried, convicted, and hanged by the state of Virginia, with the full approval of President Buchanan. But during the period of his captivity and trial, this wild-eyed fanatic underwent a transformation of sorts, becoming a forceful and eloquent spokesman for the cause of abolition.

While disavowing violence and condemning Brown, many in the North came to the conclusion that he was a martyr in a just cause. Even peaceable abolitionists who eschewed violence, such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, overlooked Brown’s homicidal tendencies and glorified him. Thoreau likened Brown to Christ; Emerson wrote that Brown’s hanging would “make the gallows as glorious as the cross.”

The view in the South, of course, was far different. Fear of slave insurrection still ran deep. To southern minds, John Brown represented Yankee interference in their way of life taken to its extreme. Even conciliatory voices in the South turned furious in the face of the seeming beatification of Brown. When northerners began to glorify Brown while disavowing his tactics, it was one more blow forcing the wedge deeper and deeper between North and South.

This material is adapted from Don’t Know Much About History. More information about Brown and his role in the conflict that led to the Civil War can be found in Don’t Know Much About the Civil War.

Revised, updated and expanded edition scheduled for release in June 2011.

The paperback edition has been released with a new cover to mark the 150th anniversary of the Civil war.

With the publication of A NATION RISING (Smithsonian/HarperCollins) on May 11th, bestselling author Kenneth C. Davis answers some questions about his career and new book.

JUST IN: Advance Praise for A NATION RISING:

Davis is a fine writer who uses a fast-moving narrative to tell these stories well.

–Jay Freeman, Booklist (May)

Advance Praise for A NATION RISING–

“With his special gift for revealing the significance of neglected historical characters, Kenneth Davis creates a multilayered, haunting narrative. Peeling back the veneer of self-serving nineteenth-century patriotism, Davis evokes the raw and violent spirit not just of an ‘expanding nation,’ but of an emerging and aggressive empire.”

-Ray Raphael, author of Founders

Even Jefferson’s birthday is confusing. History books say he was born on April 13,1743. But the grave marker at Monticello says he was born on April 2. That one is easier to answer than some of the larger contradictions in Jefferson’s life. Jefferson was born while the old Julian calendar was still in use in Protestant England and its American colonies. So the April 2 date is called “Old Style” (O.S.). When Great Britain and America finally came around and adopted the Gregorian (named for Pope Gregory) Calendar in 1758, Jefferson’s birth date was changed to April 13.

Thomas Jefferson's Grave Marker at Monticello (Photo: Kenneth C. Davis, 2010)

Birth date aside, Thomas Jefferson is such a fascinating and confounding personality because he more than anyone embodies the “Great Contradiction” in American history. How could a nation dedicated to ideals of  freedom and liberty continue a system that enslaved human beings in the cruelest of ways?

That contradiction is nowhere more evident than in Jefferson’s original draft of Declaration of Independence.

A few years ago, at the New York Public Library, I had the thrilling experience of seeing Jefferson’s handwritten copy of his original draft of the Declaration of Independence.  We may take the words for granted now. But Jefferson gave full voice to the idea that we all possess “inalienable rights.” That we are “created equal.”  That we have basic rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” That governments exist to advance those human rights, and only with the “consent of the governed.”

This document was written on both sides of two pieces of paper. In his careful, flowing script, Jefferson included all of his original wording to show what the Congress in Philadelphia had changed, underscoring words and phrases that had been deleted. Those alterations, Jefferson, thought were “mutilations.” Distressed by the editing, he made these “fair copies” of his original some time after July 4th. (The document held by the New York Public Library is one of only two known surviving copies.)

The most startling of these changes is a paragraph about what Jefferson calls “this execrable commerce” — slavery.  Jefferson charged –rather ridiculously, of course– that King George III was responsible for the slave trade and was preventing American efforts to restrain that trade. The section was deleted completely. But it is striking to see Jefferson’s bold, block lettering when he describes:

an open market where MEN should be bought & sold

He clearly wanted to underscore his belief that slaves were MEN. The contradiction is stunning, troubling, and difficult to resolve. Jefferson knew slavery was wrong. He believed, like fellow slaveholder George Washington, that it would end. But both men were inextricably tied to the slave society and economy, even though they believed that the “peculiar institution” would gradually die out.  On that point, both men were grievously wrong and the 150th anniversary of the Civil War’s opening on April 12 is a grim reminder of that.

Of course, part of the cynicism in Jefferson’s case is due to the rumored relationship between Jefferson and slave Sally Hemings. Even Monticello now acknowledges that relationship probably existed, a contention first raised publicly in 1802 by muckraking newspaperman James Callender, a former Jefferson ally who was disgruntled when Jefferson did not offer him a post in the government. In recent years, Monticello has also gone a long way in addressing the question of slave life at the plantation.

Jefferson, who died on July 4, 1826 –the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration– and his deep contradictions are the perfect reminder that politicians are people –even the marble gods like Washington and Jefferson. Their all-too human flaws are proof of that as well as the fact that history books once tried to hide these flaws by pointing to the past with pride and patriotism.

Those flaws are explored in several of my books, including Don’t Know Much About History, Don’t Know Much About the Civil War and most recently A Nation Rising, in which I write about Jefferson’s bitter relationship with his first Vice President, Aaron Burr, a man Thomas Jefferson tried to destroy using every political tool at his disposal as President.

I have always felt that seeing a man like Jefferson as human and not a demigod does not diminish his accomplishments as a leader, philosopher, champion of religious freedom and rationality and builder of a great university. If anything, those accomplishments become all the more remarkable.

What was the difference between the Confederate and U.S. Constitutions?

One week after Lincoln’s inaugural address, on March 11, the Confederacy adopted a constitution. Given the long-held arguments that the crisis was over such issues as federal power and states’ rights, and not slavery, it might be assumed that the new Confederate nation adopted some very different form of government, perhaps more like the Articles of Confederation, under which the states operated before the Constitution was adopted.

In fact, the Constitution of the Confederate States of America was based almost verbatim on the U.S. Constitution. There were, however, several significant but relatively minor differences, as well as one big difference:

• The preamble added the words, “each State acting in its sovereign and independent character,” and instead of forming “a more perfect Union,” it was forming “a permanent federal government.” It also added an invocation to “Almighty God” absent from the original.

• It permitted a tariff for revenue but not for protection of domestic industries, though the distinction between the two was unclear.

• It altered the executive branch by creating a presidency with a single six-year term, instead of (then) unlimited four-year terms. However, the presidency was strengthened with a line item veto with which certain parts of a budget can be removed by the president. (Many U.S. presidents of both parties have argued for the line item veto as a means to control congressional spending. A line item veto was finally passed in 1996 and used first by President Bill Clinton. However, in 1998 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the line item veto was unconstitutional.

• The major differences between the two constitutions regarded slavery. First, the Confederate version didn’t bother with neat euphemisms (“persons held in service”) but simply and honestly called it slavery. While it upheld the ban on the importation of slaves from abroad, the Confederate constitution removed any restrictions on slavery. Slavery was going to be protected and extended into any new territory the Confederacy might acquire.

•There were also changes in citizenship requirements that were designed to prevent abolition-minded people from moving into the Confederate states and influencing slavery laws.

In other words, while “states’ rights” is a powerful abstraction, and the back-and-forth between federal power and the power of the states has been a theme throughout American history, there were few explicit changes to the federal powers under the Constitution. There  was really only one right that the southern states cared about. Examining the speeches by southern leaders and the Confederate constitution itself underscores the fact that the only right in question was the right to continue slavery without restriction, both where it already existed and in the new territories being opened up in the West.

(adapted from Don’t Know Much About History. For more about the Civil War, read Don’t Know Much About the Civil War.

The complete text of the Confederate Constitution can be found in the documents at the Avalon Project, Yale Law School.

An excellent source to follow the progress of the Civil War can be found at Vermont Public Radio’s Civil War Book of Days.

But this year, as the 150th anniversary of the Civil War approaches, the maple sugar season has a different meaning. Some 70 years before the war began on April 12, 1861, people had looked to maple sugar  –both as a political and economic weapon against slavery. The idea was simple –replace cane sugar, produced by slave labor, with maple sugar and it would be a blow to the slave system.

One of the first to advocate the idea was Benjamin Rush, a physician and signer of the Declaration and an early voice of abolition in America.  With the Quakers of Philadelphia, Rush proposed using maple sugar as a means of hastening the end of slavery by replacing one of the key products manufactured by slave labor.  (Rush also opposed the death penalty, was a proponent of public education, and advocated for the humane treatment of the mentally ill.)

In 1788 Rush had published an essay on the “Advantages of the Culture of the Sugar Maple Tree” in a Philadelphia monthly. In 1789 he had founded, with a group of Philadelphia Quakers, the Society for Promoting the Manufacture of Sugar from the Sugar Maple Tree. He had even staged a scientific tea party to prove the potency of maple sugar. The guests – Alexander Hamilton, Quaker merchant Henry Drinker, and “several Ladies” – sipped cups of hyson tea, sweetened with equal amounts of cane and maple sugar. All agreed the sugar from the maple was as sweet as cane sugar. (Source: The Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia)

Their aim was simple, as Rush’s 1788 essay put it: “to lessen or destroy the consumption of West Indian sugar, and thus indirectly to destroy negro slavery.”

Dr. Rush found an enthusiastic disciple in Thomas Jefferson, who explored the concept of an American maple sugar industry during a journey to Vermont and even attempted–unsuccessfully it would turn out– to import sugar maple trees to Monticello.

Jefferson and other conscientious consumers could now … “put sugar in (their) coffee without being saddened by the thought of all the toil, sweat, tears, suffering and crimes that have hitherto been necessary to procure this product.” (Source: The Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia)

Jefferson, Dr. Rush and other Abolitionists were ultimately disappointed as the maple sugar idea failed to gain a foothold and speculation in maple forests actually created a “maple bubble” which burst before this “sugar substitute” could prove itself an economic weapon against slavery.

But well into the 19th century, Abolitionists continued to  pursue the cause of maple sugar. The American artist Eastman Johnson attempted to make maple syrup a political statement through a collection of works showing the sugaring process was not only a part of New England’s social fabric, but a way to strike a blow for freedom.

This failed effort to make what we buy and eat a political act may have been a quixotic disappointment. But the thought of putting maple syrup and sugar to use in a noble cause only makes them taste a little sweeter. And the fundamental idea that taking care in what what we purchase and consume can make a difference is still a valuable principle.

“That there are persons in one section or another who seek to destroy the Union at all events and are glad of any pretext to do it I will neither affirm nor deny; but if there be such, I need address no word to them. To those, however, who really love the Union may I not speak?”

It is more than a little ironic to me that today, as we mark the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s first inauguration on March 4, 1861 – and the events leading to the first shots in the Civil War on April 12, 1861—that “destroying the Union” has a very different context. In Wisconsin and other parts of the country, there is an assault on unionized workers –private and public. That attack on one group of Americans by another is, in fact, another kind of civil war.

When Lincoln delivered his first inaugural address, before a crowd said to number 30,000, on what was a balmy fifty-degree March day, in front of the unfinished Capitol Building, the nation was on the brink of the deadliest and most dangerous chapter in our history.

It is hard to imagine the weight of responsibility on Lincoln’s shoulders as he rose to speak. Never was the nation more divided. The division extended well past North and South.

In his speech, Lincoln was measured, even conciliatory. No glove was thrown down, no threats issued. He sought to reassure the slaveholding states that he had no plan to abolish slavery. That was never the issue for him –although he was morally and philosophically opposed to slavery, Lincoln recognized that it was the law of the land. He and most other Republicans sought merely to limit its extension.

Lincoln was at first lawyerly, arguing for the permanence of the Constitution and the inherent political flaws and dangers of secession. But he also spoke compellingly and from the heart about the history of the Union, going back before 1776.  And in the end, he sought to connect Americans together, to find common ground –even as the  issues drove them further apart.

In rereading and reflecting on Lincoln’s first inaugural –one of the greatest speeches in American history— I can only wonder in the present division: What would Lincoln say if he was in Wisconsin?

Maybe it would be as simple and as eloquent as this:

“We are not enemies but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

************

In this clip, the late political columnist and one-time presidential speechwriter William Safire discusses Lincoln’s First Inaugural and the composition of that memorable closing passage in particular.

(Corrected: An earlier version of this post used the date February 4, 1865.)

One week after Lincoln’s first inaugural address, on March 11, the Confederacy adopted a constitution. Given the long-held arguments that the crisis was over such issues as federal power and states’ rights, and not slavery, it might be assumed that the new Confederate nation adopted some very different form of government, perhaps more like the Articles of Confederation, under which the states operated before the Constitution was adopted.

In fact, the Constitution of the Confederate States of America was based almost verbatim on the U.S. Constitution. There were, however, several significant but relatively minor differences, as well as one big difference:

• The preamble added the words, “each State acting in its sovereign and independent character,” and instead of forming “a more perfect Union,” it was forming “a permanent federal government.” It also added an invocation to “Almighty God” absent from the original.

• It permitted a tariff for revenue but not for protection of domestic industries, though the distinction between the two was unclear.

• It altered the executive branch by creating a presidency with a single six-year term, instead of the (then) unlimited four-year terms. However, the presidency was strengthened with a line item veto with which certain parts of a budget can be removed by the president. (Many U.S. presidents of both parties have argued for the line item veto as a means to control congressional spending. A line item veto was finally passed in 1996 and used first by President Bill Clinton. However, in 1998 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the line item veto was unconstitutional.)

• The major difference between the two constitutions regarded slavery. First, the Confederate version didn’t bother with neat euphemisms (“persons held in service”) but simply and honestly called it slavery. While it upheld the ban on the importation of slaves from abroad, the Confederate constitution removed any restrictions on slavery. Slavery was going to be protected and extended into any new territory the Confederacy might acquire.

In other words, while “states’ rights” is a powerful abstraction, and the back-and-forth between federal power and the power of the states has been a theme throughout American history, there was really only one right that the southern states cared about. Examining the speeches by southern leaders and the Confederate constitution itself underscores the fact that the only right in question was the right to continue slavery without restriction, both where it already existed and in the new territories being opened up in the West.

Adapted from Don’t Know Much About History

My complete history of the Civil War can be found in  Don’t Know Much About the Civil War

He is the first person in the Western world to have shown us that a struggle can be waged without violence. He is the first to make the message of brotherly love a reality in the course of his struggle, and he has brought this message to all men, to all nations and races.

Today we pay tribute to Martin Luther King, the man who has never abandoned his faith in the unarmed struggle he is waging, who has suffered for his faith, who has been imprisoned on many occasions, whose home has been subject to bomb attacks, whose life and the lives of his family have been threatened, and who nevertheless has never faltered.

On Monday January 17, 2011, Dr. King’s life will be marked by a federal holiday (3d Monday in January) celebrating his life and achievements. It is now a day that many try and set aside as a Day of Service in honor of Dr. King’s memory. The “Dream Speech” will be televised and talked about.

But Martin Luther King’s Dream seems very far away after Tucson. (It is perhaps worth noting that Arizona was a state in which the newly-elected Governor Evan Mecham revoked the state’s King holiday in 1987 and it was only reinstated after a national outcry and the NFL pulled the Super Bowl from its Arizona site in 1993.)

According to a recent poll, as reported on National Public Radio, ”

Despite having their first black president, Americans are no more certain than before that the country is closer to the racial equality preached by Martin Luther King Jr.

The killings in Tucson and the ugly wash of words that have unfortunately followed in their wake seem to have left little room for thoughts of Martin Luther King –also gunned down by an assassin. But his fundamental ideas are always worth remembering, particularly in the face of this deadly violence.

These words come from his Nobel lecture:

Nonviolence has also meant that my people in the agonizing struggles of recent years have taken suffering upon themselves instead of inflicting it on others. It has meant, as I said, that we are no longer afraid and cowed. But in some substantial degree it has meant that we do not want to instill fear in others or into the society of which we are a part. The movement does not seek to liberate Negroes at the expense of the humiliation and enslavement of whites. It seeks no victory over anyone. It seeks to liberate American society and to share in the self-liberation of all the people.

A work that aspires, however, humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

The great novelist Joseph Conrad wrote those words in a literary manifesto called “A Preface to the Nigger of the ‘Narcissus.’ ”

Oops, I mean “Slave of the Narcissus.” Or should it be “The Children of the Sea,” the title used by Conrad’s first American publisher in 1897? Or perhaps I should call it the nearly unspeakable “N-word of the Narcissus,” the title chosen by WordBridge, publisher of a 2009 bowdlerized version of Conrad’s novel?

This question arises over the decision to publish a “sanitized” version of the great American classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in an edition which purges the use of the word “nigger” (as well as “injun”). The edition, forthcoming from NewSouth Books, replaces more than 200 uses of the word “nigger” with “slave”  in Mark Twain’s original text and substitutes “Indian” for “injun.”.

This, I believe, is the real N-word: Nonsense.

NewSouth Books asserts that these epithets are “hurtful” and prevent some teachers from assigning the book.

It’s true –some readers, along with educators and parents, have been offended by the use of a word that makes people uncomfortable — with good reason.

News flash: Art is supposed to make us uncomfortable.

The controversy behind the decision to –in my opinion– deface  a signature piece of American culture has been well-covered in the media and addressed by many, including New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani as well as the Times editorial page.

As someone who cares deeply about American History and Literature, I would like to add my voice to all those who find this expurgated version of Huck Finn an act of cultural destruction in the guise of political correctness. While it falls far short of the Taliban blowing up ancient Buddhas, it is a lot worse than draping the bare breasts of two female “Liberty” statues at the Justice Dept. during John Ashcroft’s days as Attorney General.

We are not talking about painting lawn jockeys white, but altering the intent and meaning of one of America’s cultural touchstones. And in so doing, missing Mark Twain’s central point. It’s a bit like complaining that Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” is cruel to Irish babies.

This should be what I and others like to call a “teachable moment.”

Teachers should assign Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, read it together with their students, and talk about what the book means. And most important, what Mark Twain meant. Acknowledge that this word is hateful and hurtful. But get students to Think For Themselves. That, after all, is a teacher’s most important job.

And maybe, while they are at it, teachers might get them to read Randall Kennedy’s excellent book, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word. (Pantheon, 2002). In it, Kennedy writes of Huck Finn:

Twain is not willfully buttressing racism here; he is seeking ruthlessly to unveil and ridicule it. By putting nigger in white characters’ mouths, the author is not branding blacks, but rather branding the whites. . . . Huckleberry Finn is the best fictive example  of Twain’s triumph over his upbringing. In it, he creates a loving relationship between Huck and Jim, the runaway slave, all the while sardonically impugning the pretensions of white racial superiority.

Joseph Conrad, whose work was also sanitized for an American audience, also wrote in that memorable essay (a must read for writers, by the way):

And art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect. . .  If I succeed, you shall find there according to your desserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm-all you demand-and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.”

Providing that glimpse of truth is what Huck, Jim and Mark Twain were able to do. The justification is found not only in every line, but in every word. Even the “hurtful” ones.

The answer: 435.

Here’s  another question  that wasn’t included in that survey: How many Electors are there? Add 100 Senators to the number of Representatives and then three more votes for the District of Columbia (which has no Senators and a non-voting member of the House) and you get the answer: 538. Each state gets electors equal to their representation in Congress. To become President, you must win enough states and their Electors to reach the Magic Number of 270 (half of 538 plus one). By the way, the “Electoral College” is not mentioned in the Constitution –only “Electors.” And no, the Electoral College is definitely not a party school.

In the first post of this series, I summarized the First Amendment and its five essential guarantees –always a source of controversy. If anything, the Second Amendment has often proven just as contentious. But most of us don’t know what it actually says or means.

Americans have always liked their guns. And some Americans REALLY like their guns. Whether to hunt, protect their homes or defend themselves from a tyrannical government, many Americans believe that the government has no right to restrict their access to firearms. But those who want to minimize gun violence, Congress, and the Courts have thought otherwise. Which brings us to the Second Amendment. There is little doubt that the Founders and Framers, in a time when there was no standing army, expected men to  have a gun at the ready to defend the country. But does that 18th century logic still hold in a country with a standing army, state militias and local police forces? And does the high level of American gun violence (more than 31,000 firearms fatalities in 2006, according to the CDC) mean it is time to reassess an idea that made sense more than 200 years ago?

Amendment Two: Guarantees the limited right to keep and bear arms.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Among today’s most passionately argued of the amendments in the Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment was intended to provide for the effectiveness of the militia, which would presumably protect the citizen against Indians, foreign powers, or the power of the federal government, at a time when there was little or no standing army.  Militias also served another unique role in the slave holding states: one of their primary duties was to suppress slave revolts, of which there were hundreds throughout American History.

In a long string of decisions, the Supreme Court had consistently ruled that the Second Amendment does not bind the states, so that state and local governments are free to enact gun control laws if they desire. In the case of federal laws, since a 1939 case involving sawed-off shotguns, United States v. Miller, the courts have held that the Second Amendment only confers a collective right to keep and bear arms, which must have a “reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia.” Since then, Congress has placed many restrictions on the manufacture, sale, transfer, and possession of weapons, and these statutes have all been upheld as constitutional.

Not everyone agrees with that interpretation, even though it stood for more than sixty years. As constitutional scholar Leonard W. Levy writes,

The Second Amendment is as vague as it is ambiguous. Some think it upholds the collective right of state militias to bear arms, while others, probably more accurate in so far as original intent is concerned, argue that it protects the right of individuals to keep arms. (Original Intent and the Framers’ Constitution)

Until 2002, no administration had challenged the so-called “collective right” established by Miller in 1939. But in 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that the Justice Department would seek to challenge the collective view in favor of the individual rights view, a stance vigorously supported by the National Rifle Association. In footnotes in two filings with the Supreme Court in 2002, the government said that the Second Amendment protected the rights of individuals “to possess and bear their own firearms, subject to reasonable restrictions designed to prevent possession by unfit persons or to restrict the possession of types of firearms that are particularly suited to criminal misuse.”

More recently, in June 2008, the Supreme Court, led by George W. Bush appointee Chief Justice John Roberts (appointed in 2005 following the death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist), went beyond the Bush Administration’s arguments. In District of Columbia v. Heller, the Court struck down a 32-year-old Washington, D.C. ban on handguns as incompatible with the Second Amendment.

The majority opinion in the 5-4 decision ruled that an individual right to bear arms is supported by “the historical narrative” both before and after the Second Amendment was adopted, wrote Justice Antonin Scalia.  The Constitution does not permit “the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home.”

In a vigorous dissent expressing what had been the predominant view since the 1939 Miller ruling, Justice Stevens wrote that the Second Amendment:

was adopted to protect the right of the people of each of the several States to maintain a well-regulated militia. It was a response to concerns raised during the ratification of the Constitution that the power of Congress to disarm the state militias and create a national standing army posed an intolerable threat to the sovereignty of the several States. Neither the text of the Amendment nor the arguments advanced by its proponents evidenced the slightest interest in limiting any legislature’s authority to regulate private civilian uses of firearms. Specifically, there is no indication that the Framers of the Amendment intended to enshrine the common-law right of self-defense in the Constitution.

And that is where the Second Amendment stands today.

Here is a link to the District of Columbia v. Heller case, including the majority and dissenting opinions.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/07-290.ZS.html

WHEN: On September 9, 1739 –Early Sunday morning

WHERE: The Stono River, 20 miles south of Charleston, South Carolina

WHAT: The largest slave insurrection in colonial America, before the Revolution

WHO: About twenty blacks set off this day, took guns and powder from a store and killed its two owners. As they marched through the countryside, they gathered more recruits from plantations along the way. By the end of the day, more than one hundred slaves had joined the rebellion.

WHY: These rebels hoped to reach St. Augustine, Florida where they thought they would be free under Spanish rule. By the end of the day, they were caught by a small army of mounted planters who attacked the runaways and broke the Stono Rebellion. During this insurrection, approximately 20 whites and twice that number of blacks were killed.

Few things were more frightening in early America than the thought of armed slave rebellions. Contrary to the image of meek slaves and well-meaning slave owners, there were hundreds of slave uprisings in America, dating to the earliest colonial times. Just the fear of a slave insurrection threw New York City into a massive panic in 1743.

When the slaves of the future Republic of Haiti rebelled in the 1790s in a bloody war against white owners, the fears increased dramatically. Every insurrection was usually met with tougher laws and harsh punishments, including executions or beheadings, after which the heads of the rebels were set on pikes as warnings to other slaves.

You can read more about the history of slave insurrections in A NATION RISING

The Spanish in Florida encouraged American slaves to run away and even created a haven for them in Florida known as Fort Mose, now a historic landmark.
http://www.floridastateparks.org/fortmose/default.cfm
There are excellent resources on slavery at the Library of Congress:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/today/today.html

Observing a Choctaw tribe—the old, the sick, the wounded, and newborns among them—forced to cross an ice-choked Mississippi River during the harsh winter, Alexis de Tocqueville once wrote,

“In the whole scene, there was an air of destruction, something which betrayed a final and irrevocable adieu; one couldn’t watch without feeling one’s heart wrung.” The Indians, he added, “have no longer a country, and soon will not be a people.”

Who was Tocqueville and why did he write all those interesting things about America?

The author of those words was an aristocratic, young French magistrate studying America’s penal system, named Alexis Charles Henri Clerel de Tocqueville, who arrived in America in May 1831 with his friend Gustave de Beaumont. As young men who had grown up in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic empire, they came to examine American democracy with an eye to understanding how the American experience could help form the developing democratic spirit in France and the rest of Europe. The two spent nine months traveling the nation, gathering facts and opinions, interviewing Americans from President Jackson to frontiersmen and Indians. On their return to France, Tocqueville reported on the U.S. prison system, and Beaumont wrote a novel exploring the race problem in America.

But it is for an inspired work combining reportage, personal observation, and philosophical explorations, and titled Democracy in America, that Tocqueville’s name became a permanent part of the American vocabulary. The book appeared in two volumes, the first of which appeared in 1835, the second in 1840. More than 150 years after its appearance, Democracy in America remains a basic text in American history and political theory.
Although many of his commentaries and observations were remarkably astute, and seem to apply as neatly to modern America as they did to the United States he found in 1831, Tocqueville did not always bat a thousand. Perhaps one of his greatest oversights was his assessment of the presidency as a weak office. In fact, he wrote at a time when Andrew Jackson was shaping the office as preeminent among the three branches, establishing the mold of a strong presidency that would be repeated in such chief executives as Lincoln and the two Roosevelts.

In many more matters, he was right on target. Critical of slavery –as well as the treatment of Native Americas– the Frenchman could see civil strife ahead. And he remains astonishingly correct about the American addiction to practical rather than philosophical matters and the relentless and practically single-minded pursuit of wealth. As he observed,

“I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken a stronger hold on the affections of men….”

You can read more about de Tocqueville and this period in Don’t Know Much About History. and A Nation Rising

In 1997, CSPAN retraced the Frenchman’s route through America. Here’s a link to the CSPAN site: http://www.tocqueville.org/

On July 9, 1868, the state of South Carolina ratified the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, providing the necessary three-fourths of the states to adopt this very significant Amendment as part of the law of the land. One of the “Reconstruction Amendments” ratified in the wake of the Civil War, it had far-reaching consequences in American history, touching on every aspect of public and private life in America — from the schoolroom to the bedroom. And it still does.

Think of a controversial court decision and chances are the 14th Amendment is involved. It has been invoked in such major decisions as Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which ended segregation of public schools; Roe v. Wade (1973), which disallowed most existing restrictions on abortion; and Loving v. Virginia (1967), which ended race-based restrictions on marriage in America. It also provided the Constitutional authority for many of the most important pieces of civil rights legislation passed in the 1960s.

Today, the 14th Amendment is front and center in several current controversies, including the same-sex marriage debate.

Here are the first two sections of the Amendment. The full text of the 14th Amendment can be found at the links to the National Archives and Library of Congress at the bottom of this post.

AMENDMENT XIV

Passed by Congress June 13, 1866. Ratified July 9, 1868.

Section 1.
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section 2.
Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age,* and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

*Changed by section 1 of the 26th amendment.

Proposed after the Civil War in 1866, the 14th Amendment is one of three Constitutional Amendments referred to as the “Reconstruction Amendments.” Its immediate impact was to give citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States,” which included former slaves. Creating national citizenship that was independent of state citizenship, the 14th Amendment reversed the 1857 Dred Scott decision which denied citizenship to most slaves.

In addition, the 14th Amendment forbids states from denying any person “life, liberty or property, without due process of law” or to “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of its laws.”  These clauses, usually referred to as “due process” and “equal protection,” have been involved in some of the most significant decisions in American history.

You don’t need to be a Constitutional scholar to understand this Amendment and the profound impact it has had –and continues to have–  on every American’s life.

Here is a link to the National Archives US Constitution site: http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_amendments_11-27.html#14

Here is a link to more information on the 14th Amendment from the Library of Congress: http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/14thamendment.html

Since poverty has been our crime,
We bow to the decree.
We are the poor who have no wealth
To purchase liberty.

If your picture of draft dodgers is one of 60s-era hippies shouting “Hell No, We won’t go,” the ditty above offers another vision.
It comes from the Civil War era, when the United States passed its first federal draft, the Enrollment Act, in March 1863. (A Confederate Draft had actually preceded the federal draft by two years.)
Under the rules of the law, there were certain exemptions –telegraph operators and railroad engineers were excused, as were certain government employees.
Then there were the rich. They were different. Under the terms of the Civil War draft, a man could avoid the draft by paying $300 or hiring a substitute. J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and future President Grover Cleveland all did it. So did the wealthy father of Teddy Roosevelt.
The practice led to the complaint that the Civil War was “A rich man’s war, but a poor man’s fight.”

Coming on the heels of the Emancipation Proclamation announced in January 1863, the draft law was bitterly resented. By the summer of 1863 angry protests had taken place in nearly every union state. The headline of one Pennsylvania newspaper read: “WILLING TO FIGHT FOR UNCLE SAM BUT NOT FOR UNCLE SAMBO.”

And resistance to the draft soon turned ugly. Nowhere was the opposition greater or more violent than in New York City where Lincoln was despised by the powerful Democratic party which was openly critical of his administration. The working class Irish were particularly resentful of policies that allowed the wealthy to buy their way out of the draft, and they were hostile toward blacks, many of whom had been used to replace striking Irish longshoreman at New York’s docks.

The anger spilled over into violence in July 1863. On Saturday morning, July 11, the first draftees’ names were pulled in a lottery and announced. They were published alongside the casualty lists from the recent battle of Gettysburg, fought from July 1-3, 1863.

The following Monday, July 13, the draft office at Third Avenue and Forty-sixth Street was attacked by a mob of men armed with clubs who set the building afire. The fire brigade, angry that their jobs were not entitled to an official exemption, joined the mob instead of putting out the fire.

This was the beginning of a four-day spree of looting and arson that ended with murderous rioting.

Singled out for deadly attacks was the city’s black population. The rioters, many of them too young for the draft got caught up in the frenzy. Hundreds of mostly Irish rioters burned and pillaged their way down Third Avenue, en route to an armory where they seized hundreds of rifles. Another mob attacked an orphanage where black children lived. The anger boiled over into grotesquely savage atrocities. A crippled black coachman was lynched and his body burned. After his genitals were cut off, the mob dragged the body through the streets

One newspaper account published by the African Methodist Episcopal church, read:

“Many men were killed and thrown into the rivers, a great number were hung to trees and lamp-posts, numbers shot down; no black person could show their heads but that they were hunted like wolves. These scenes continued for four days.”

The riots left at least hundreds dead –some estimates range to two thousand—of course, most of them black. Order was eventually restored when troops arrived, some of them from West Point, others returning to New York from the Gettysburg battlefield.

The New-York Historical Society has an excellent overview of the riots and the Civil War period in New York:
http://www.nydivided.org/popup/Documents/DraftRiotsViolence.php

You can read more about the Civil War and the Draft Riots in

Once again the New York Public Library is displaying a handwritten version of the Declaration, written by Jefferson. Here is a post I wrote last year after visiting the Library:

Last evening, I had a thrilling experience. In a small, darkened room with the feel of a chapel inside the magnificent New York Public Library, I saw Thomas Jefferson’s handwritten copy of his original draft of the Declaration of Independence. For me this was a “Grail Moment.” Setting aside all of Jefferson’s contradictions and human flaws, I found the experience of seeing these words in his own hand exhilarating.

We take them for granted, of course. But Jefferson gave full voice to the idea that we all possess “inalienable rights” –That we are “created equal.” That we have basic rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” That governments exist to advance those human rights, and only with the “consent of the governed.”

The document is written on both sides of two pieces of paper. In his careful, flowing script, Jefferson included all of his original wording to show what the Congress in Philadelphia had changed, underscoring words and phrases that had been deleted. Those alterations, Jefferson, thought were “mutilations.” Distressed by the editing, he made these “fair copies” of his original some time after July 4th. (The document on display at the New York Public Library is one of only two known surviving copies.)

The most startling of these changes is a paragraph about what Jefferson calls “this execrable commerce” — slavery. Jefferson charged –rather ridiculously, of course– that King George III was responsible for the slave trade and was preventing American efforts to restrain that trade. The section was deleted completely. But it is striking to see Jefferson’s bold, block lettering when he describes:

an open market where MEN should be bought & sold

Yes, he was going home to a plantation completely dependent upon slave labor. But he clearly wanted to underscore his belief that slaves were MEN. The contradiction is stunning, troubling, and difficult to resolve.

As the nation approaches its celebration of Independence and the ideals of “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness,” it is always crucial –and challenging– to remember that with those rights comes responsibility. We have traveled a remarkable road in 233 years. There is no more powerful symbol of that distance than the fact that an African American is President.

But we still have far to go until we all have secured all of those rights –equality, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness– for all of the people. Jefferson and his 55 fellow signers pledged their lives, fortunes and “sacred honor” in support of those fundamental human rights. Would we all be willing to say the same?

Here is a link to the New York Public Library Exhibit:
http://www.nypl.org/events/exhibitions/declaration-independence-7

That spontaneous celebration—commonly called Juneteenth— became prominent in many African-American communities, but never gained any official recognition. Recently it has been recognized by several states as a day celebrating emancipation. There is a movement to gain national recognition of “Juneteenth” as a way of marking the end of slavery in America.

Here is a link to the National Archives site about the Emancipation Proclamation, formally announced by President Lincoln on January 1, 1863.

http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured_documents/emancipation_proclamation/index.html

After four years of Civil War, with his Army of Northern Virginia practically starving and reeling under the onslaught of Union pressure from Grant’s superior forces, Robert E. Lee had to contemplate the inevitable –surrender. On the evening of April 8, after a last-ditch attempt at breaking through Union lines failed, Lee was told that his army could not move forward.

“There is nothing left for me to do but to go see General Grant, and I had rather die a thousand deaths. “

By coincidence, Lee’s meeting with Grant took place in a farmhouse owned by Wilmer McLean, the same man who in 1861 had given his house to Confederate General Beauregard during the Battle of Bull Run, the first major engagement of the war. McLean moved from Manassas, Virginia with the hope of finding a quieter place. His home at Appomattox Court House would again witness history.
The New York Times headlines read:
Hang Out Your Banners; Union Victory! Peace!

This noteworthy anniversary would be most likely overlooked by all but Civil War buffs if it were not for the current dust-up over Virginia Governor Bob McMullen’s pronouncement that April is “Confederate History Month” in the state. Unfortunately the Governor neglected to mention the word “slavery” is his press release marking this part of Virginia’s past. While the Governor quickly corrected his omission, it attracted even more attention. President Obama termed the oversight “unacceptable” a few days later in response to a reporter’s question about the controversy.

For a moment, we shall set aside the question of the wisdom of choosing April as the appropriate month in which to celebrate the tradition of violent rebellion against the government in 1861. It is after all, the month in which the Civil War began with the bombardment of Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, the surrender of the Confederacy on April 9, 1865 and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln on April 14 by John Wilkes Booth. These are not exactly the high water marks of the Confederacy.

The controversy generated by the celebration of Confederate History Month and the hastily-corrected omission of any mention of slavery served as a pointed reminder that the Civil War still haunts the nation.

Discussing Civil War History still raises two problems –Many people know nothing about the central event in our history. It has fallen into that “black hole” of dates, battles and speeches that is usually flushed down the memory hole when the final exams are done.

Then there are those who profess who cling to a history that says that slavery had nothing to do with the Civil War. That it was a glorious second “revolution,” fought to protect “states rights” from a tyrannical federal government. That is nonsense. Slavery was at the heart of the political, economic and social struggle that led to the Civil War. That does not mean that the Civil War was a “moral crusade” fought by Abolitionists. But the right to own slaves and take them further west into the territories being opened up was the only “right” that the Confederate states were fighting for.

I hope that the Governor’s proclamation of Confederate History Month becomes a “teachable moment” in which we really discuss what this devastating war, which cost the lives of some TWO PERCENT of the American population at the time, meant to America, then and now.

Read more in Don’t Know Much About the Civil War

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Today is Dedication Day, the date on which Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address at a ceremony to dedicate the opening of the cemetery at the Gettysburg Battlefield in 1863. On that day, Lincoln was not the featured speaker. The “few appropriate remarks” he was asked to make took about two minutes. Edward Everett, the most famed orator in America, was featured speaker and spoke for two hours. But which Gettysburg Address do we remember?
And no, it wasn’t written in haste on the back of an envelope. Lincoln carefully drafted the speech on official stationery.

Here is a link to the National Park Service’s Gettysburg pages on the cemetery
http://www.nps.gov/archive/gett/getttour/tstops/tstd4-23.htm

This is a link to the Library of Congress online Exhibition about the Gettysburg Address:
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/gadd/

Lincoln made five copies of the speech. Two are at the Library of Congress. One is kept at the White House: This is the complete text of the Address, as recorded by Lincoln, in what is called the “Bliss Copy,” generally accepted as the standard version and the one which is inscribed at the Lincoln Memorial.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate…we can not consecrate…we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government: of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

When: On September 18, 1890, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which allowed slave owners to reclaim slaves who had escaped to other states.

Why: The Fugitive Slave Act was part of a larger “Compromise of 1850,” intended to settle the question of extending slavery into new territories and avoid breaking apart the Union. (Guess what? It didn’t work.)

What: Under the law, aid to escaping slaves became a federal offense. A bounty system was created that opened the way for “slave catchers” who had free rein to swoop down on entire black families and accuse them of being runaways. The law also created an office of commissioners who decided if a black person was a runaway slave or not. They were paid $10 for every person they returned to slavery but only $5 for every one they determined was a freedman. Guess what they usually decided?

The law immediately hardened the resistance to slavery among the growing number of American abolitionists. Ralph Waldo Emerson called it, “a filthy enactment” and said he would not obey it. In Boston, a fugitive named Shadrach was captured and was going to be returned to the South. But an angry crowd of blacks rescued him and sent him to freedom in Canada. President Millard Fillmore threatened to send in federal troops to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act in Boston.

Frederick Douglass, a former slave turned fiery abolitionist speaker and publisher, said:

The only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter is to make a half a dozen or more dead kidnappers. A half dozen more dead kidnappers carried down South would cool the ardor of Southern gentlemen, and keep their rapacity in check….

But the greatest impact of the Act may have been the inspiration it provided to a writer. Outraged by the law, Harriet Beecher Stowe began to write the serialized story that would be published in 1852 as Uncle Tom’s Cabin. A literary sensation, it sold more than a million copies and changed the terms of the debate over slavery in America. During the Civil War, Lincoln met Stowe and said,

So you’re the little lady that made this great war.

You can read more about the Compromise of 1850, The Fugitive Slave Act, Frederick Douglass and Stowe in Don’t Know Much About the Civil War.

Here is the New York Times account of the march and speech:
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0828.html#article

King’s most memorable speech was the culmination of the mass march on Washington, D.C., that drew a huge crowd of blacks and whites to the nation’s capital. In his biography of King, Bearing the Cross, author David J. Garrow calls the speech,

“The clarion call that conveyed the moral power of the movement’s cause to the millions who had watched the live national network coverage. Now, more than ever before…white America was confronted with the undeniable justice of blacks’ demands.”

The march was followed nearly one year later by passage of the Civil Rights Act, signed into law by Lyndon Johnson in June 1964, and the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Dr. King in October 1964.

Not everyone liked the march. Or the speech. Malcolm X responded to the historic occasion this way:

Not long ago, the black man in America was fed a dose of another form of the weakening, lulling, and deluding effects of so-called “integration.”
It was that “Farce on Washington,” I call it. . . . .
. . . Yes, I was there. I observed that circus. Who ever heard of angry revolutionists all harmonizing “We Shall Overcome . . . Someday . . .” while tripping and swaying along arm-in-arm with the very people they were supposed to be angrily revolting against? Who ever heard of angry revolutionists swinging their bare feet together with their oppressor in lily-pad park pools, with gospels and guitars and “I Have A Dream” speeches?

What many people have also forgotten about the March was that it was about more than civil rights. Billed as the March for Jobs and Freedom, the March was also dedicated to economic justice. Martin Luther King increasingly voiced his opposition to the war in Vietnam as well.

In the current landscape of high unemployment and two foreign wars, it is difficult to imagine that Dr. King would be satisfied that his work was done. So the Dream goes on.

This is a link to the King Center Photo and video archive:
http://www.thekingcenter.org/PhotoVideo/Default.aspx

You can read more about King, the march and the civil rights movement in Don’t Know Much About History

“White men were 100% of the people that wrote the Constitution, 100% of the people that signed the Declaration of Independence, 100% of the people who died at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, probably close to 100% of the people who died at Normandy. This has been a country built basically by white folks, who were 90% of the nation in 1960 when I was growing up and the other 10% were African-Americans who had been discriminated against.”

The video of the exchange: http://www.wikio.co.uk/video/1410248

The Huffington Post story: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/16/rachel-maddow-duels-with_n_237036.html

I can’t begin to dismiss all of the inaccuracies and flawed logic contained in this statement. But it is an appropriate day to tell you that on JULY 18, 1863, nearly 100% of the Union soldiers who died while storming Fort Wagner in South Carolina were black. These were the men of the famed  54th Massachusetts Regiment who fought and died in the tragic battle that was made famous in the film Glory.

Pat Buchanan’s words are an offense to their honor and sacrifice. (Yes, Mr. Buchanan, there have been other movies about the Civil War besides Gone With the Wind.)

If you haven’t seen Glory, it recounts the true story of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, one of the first officially organized and recognized all-black fighting units in the Civil War. The regiment was organized in March 1863 after the Emancipation Proclamation was officially announced by President Lincoln. The men were commanded by white officers, including Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, whose parents were abolitionists.

At first consigned to work details, the 54th eventually saw combat. In its most famous engagement, the 54th led the assault on Fort (Battery) Wagner, near Charleston, South Carolina. The battle came fifteen days after the Battle of Gettysburg concluded.

In the fierce combat, Colonel Shaw was killed leading his men –116 of whom died in the fighting. Colonel Shaw’s body was thrown  into a mass grave with his men, which the Confederates thought was an indignity. However, Shaw’s family considered it a badge of honor. One of the Regiment’s men, Sergeant William Harvey Carney, was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, one of the first black soldiers so honored.

Of course, the 54th Massachusetts was only one small group of more than 250,000 African American soldiers who served in the Union armies during the Civil War. So, yes, it was not just white men fighting in the Civil War. Black soldiers served, fought and died in every American conflict since the Revolution. There were freedmen at Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill. George Washington tried to prevent black enlistments, but eventually needed these men to fight. These facts are part of “America’s Hidden History,” but were ignored in 100% 0f my textbooks, which were definitely 100% written by white men.

Yes, no black men signed the Declaration. They were consigned to the plantations of many of the men who did the signing, putting food on their tables and money in their purses. They did not sign the Constitution. They were held in “Involuntary servitude,” recognized by that document and the Framers only as “three-fifths of a man.” Thomas Jefferson was elected President in part because slaves inflated the number of Electors in the slave-holding states. After his election in 1800, Jefferson was derided as the “Negro President.”

And of course, those black men built the nation’s capital–not as free laborers but as slaves. They, along with the black women and millions of other immigrant laborers of all colors, also built this nation –its rails, canals, factories, bridges and dams.

Yes, Mr. Buchanan even a few Irishmen helped too. Although they had to face plenty of discrimination as well. On that note, it was not until 1836 that a Catholic –Roger Taney who delivered the dreadful Dred Scott decision which said slaves were property and had no more rights than farm animals– sat on the Supreme Court. It would be 1894 before a second Catholic was appointed. The Supreme Court was not only a white, male bastion, but a Protestant one as well.

On a night when we honor the memory of Walter Cronkite, one of America’s greatest television journalists and a man who was dedicated to the truth, it seems particularly sad to have to correct the shameful errors of a man whose swagger and clever phrase-making keep him on the television screen, in spite of his tainted views.

I don’t know if Pat Buchanan is a racist. I can’t say what is in his heart. But I do know when he spouts words like these, he is just an ignorant old man –”Full of the sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

His column, entitled “In Search of Dignity,” topped the Times list of most emailed articles and drew hundreds on online comments, many of them laudatory. Brooks used the column to celebrate the good manners, civility and dignity possessed by George Washington. These attributes, Brooks believed, could be traced back to Washington’s boyhood, when he scrupulously copied out maxims from the “Miss Manners” of his day, a book called Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation. Among its 110 rules:

When in Company, put not your Hands to any Part of the Body not usually Discovered.

Brooks then contrasted Washington’s demeanor in public with that of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford –he of the secret rendezvous in Argentina that didn’t stay secret– and Governor Sarah Palin, who chose Friday afternoon on the July 4th Weekend to inform the world that she was resigning as Governor of Alaska for reasons that many found mystifying.  Brooks bemoaned the fact that these modern Republicans just couldn’t hold a candle to Washington when it came to dignified behavior.

Brooks finally made the leap to Barack Obama, surprising many readers with an admiring nod that placed the current President on equal footing alongside the First President in terms of his public demeanor.

Set against the backdrop of the day’s Michael Jackson memorial frenzy, the piece clearly tapped into a great American yearning for civility and a gentler time when wise men with Washington’s virtues held court.

But his argument has a fatal flaw. As I read Brooks’ words, the obvious jumped off the page. In his catalog of Washington’s public virtues and civility, David Brooks neglected to mention that George Washington owned, bought and sold his fellow human beings. When they ran away, he took out advertisements offering a reward for their return. He ran such an advertisement in 1761 when three of his “Negroes” took flight.

Whoever apprehends the said Negroes, so that the Subscriber may readily get them, shall have, if taken  up in this County, forty shillings reward. . .

Brooks neglected this uncomfortable fact of Washington’s life. It is a truth all the more evident in light of the recent celebration of  the Declaration of Independence. With its clarion call that “All Men are created equal,” the Declaration was written by Thomas Jefferson, another Virginian who also relied completely upon slave labor to put food on his table. Both men would have been completely at home owning Barack Obama, his wife and their children and perhaps selling some or all of them if necessary.

It was for this fact that Samuel Johnson once railed in Parliament:

How is that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?

The great contradiction between Washington’s dignity and idealism and the fact he was a slave owner is at the heart of so much of what was rotten in this country for centuries. It strikes me as outlandish to attempt to laud Washington’s courtly demeanor without reflecting on this great stain on his character. And the “everybody did it back then” defense doesn’t cut it either. Washington knew slavery was wrong and completely at odds with what he was fighting for. It is shameful to give him –and the rest of the “Revolutionary Generation”– a pass when it comes to America’s “original sin.”

As the events of the day have shown, we live in a world that is quick to lavish praise on the departed –to cover up a multitude of sins in an orgy of adulation that allows the country to feel some pride in a sanitized past. But when we overlook the “evil that men do” in singing those praises, the music starts to sound very tinny.

True dignity demands far more than decent manners.

On June 19, 1865, Union General Gordon Granger informed former slaves in the area from the Gulf of Mexico to Galveston, Texas that they were free. Abraham Lincoln had officially issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, but it had taken two more years of Union victories to end the war and for this news to reach slaves in remote sections of the country. The words “June” and “Nineteenth” were merged too create “Juneteenth.”

This is from General Granger’s Order No. 3:

The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.

Many of the newly freed slaves in the territory, the last area to receive news of the war’s end and Emancipation, celebrated the news with ecstasy, and according to the Texas State Library,

In many parts of Texas, ex-slaves purchased land, or “emancipation grounds,” for the Juneteenth gathering. Examples include: Emancipation Park in Houston, purchased in 1872; what is now Booker T. Washington Park in Mexia; and Emancipation park in East Austin.

http://www.tsl.state.tx.us/ref/abouttx/juneteenth.html

Other freed slaves began to travel to other states in search of family members who had been separated from them by slave sales.
Starting in 1866, that spontaneous celebration –commonly called “Juneteenth”– spread to become  a holiday celebrating emancipation in many parts of the United States, although it still lacks national recognition.

On June 18th, 2009. the U.S.. Senate issued a resolution, apologizing for slavery. (The resolution also carried a disclaimer stating, “nothing in the resolution authorizes or supports reparations for slavery.”) The resolution moved to the House, where a similar resolution has passed, although without mention of reparations. I’ll be following this story to report on a final Congressional resolution on the slavery apology.

I would like to add my name to the list of people who want to make June 19 a new national holiday in honor of “Juneteenth,” a holiday or “state observance” already recognized in 31 states. We could all use another holiday. The gap between Memorial Day and July 4th is too long. This celebration of freedom is a perfect reason!