Founding Myths (29 page)

The conclusion to Occam's tale is even more incredible. As the soldiers prepare to fight and perhaps die at Cowpens, a fellow who has formerly been a bigot observes that Occam has already served his time. (Even by the film's own terms, this does not hold: the alleged emancipation notice applies only to Continental soldiers, while Occam is a militiaman.) Although Occam, unlike white soldiers, is free to go, he refuses to leave, for he has become a true patriot: “I'm
here now on my own accord,” he announces. The reformed bigot replies: “I'm honored to have you with us. Honored.” Then, in the concluding scene, Occam and his new white friend set out to “build a whole new world,” starting with a house for Benjamin Martin.

Although the story is made up,
The Patriot
purports to historical authenticity. Viewers are encouraged to treat the movie as a reasonable simulation of actual events, and most do. “We felt that while we were telling the fictional story,” says producer Mark Gordon, on the DVD, “the backdrop was serious history.” That's why Gordon and his team decided to consult the Smithsonian Institution, whom they credit in the closing titles. “When you hear the words ‘Smithsonian Institution,' ” Gordon explains, “you think serious, you think important.”

The mystique of “history” is marshaled in support of fiction, and
The Patriot
tells a story we wish to believe: the American Revolution was the first step along the long road to the termination of slavery. The War for Independence, with its promise of freedom and its suggestion of equality, supposedly served as a blueprint for black independence as well as white.

In truth, the contradiction between slavery and the American Revolution was not so easily resolved as it was in
The Patriot.
During the war, Southern white patriots united in opposition to the seemingly diabolical designs of the British, who threatened the very roots of their society by offering freedom to people enslaved to rebel masters. After the war, the institution of slavery solidified throughout the South, even as it gradually disappeared in the North. During the Revolutionary War, many thousands of enslaved people had managed to escape from their masters, seriously threatening the very existence of slavery in regions dependent on slave labor, and in response, white owners clamped down. The rigid slave codes we associate with the period before the Civil War were a direct outcome of the Revolutionary War.
This
is “serious history.” The notion that blacks and whites in South Carolina pulled together in the wake of the Revolution to “build a whole new world” is a self-serving fantasy.

HISTORY IN BLACK AND WHITE

The celebration of black patriotism is itself a historical phenomenon. At the time of the Revolution and for decades after, little was said about the black presence in the Revolutionary War. Early historians assigned no special role to black patriots, while they either ignored or downplayed the flight of enslaved people to the British. When they did happen to mention this, they emphasized the loss inflicted on white masters. “It has been estimated that between the years 1775 and 1783 the state of South Carolina was robbed of twenty-five thousand negroes, valued at about twelve million five hundred thousand dollars,” wrote Benson Lossing in his
Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution
, citing the early historian David Ramsay.
¹⁰

In the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the notion of “colored” patriotism assumed great political significance. Abolitionists pointed to the participation of blacks in the American Revolution to make a strong argument: if these people helped white Americans win freedom, how could they be denied their own?

In 1855 a black abolitionist from Boston, William Nell, authored a book called
The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution.
Nell's work, according to an introduction written by fellow abolitionist Wendell Phillips, was intended “to stem the tide of prejudice against the colored race” and “to prove colored men patriotic.”
¹¹
Harriet Beecher Stowe, in a second introduction, claimed that black patriots should be honored even more than whites: “It was not for their own land they fought, not even for a land which had adopted them, but for a land which had enslaved them, and whose laws, even in freedom, oftener oppressed than protected. Bravery, under such circumstances, has a peculiar beauty and merit.”
¹²

As his title suggested, Nell focused exclusively on the five thousand blacks who fought on the side of the Americans. He made no mention of enslaved African Americans who fled to the British; this would scarcely have won converts to the abolitionist cause. Since he
could not point to any black patriot soldiers when discussing South Carolina, he cited the celebrated revolutionary Charles Pinckney: “In the course of the Revolution, the Southern States were continually overrun by the British, and every negro in them had an opportunity of running away, yet few did.”
¹³
Instead of running, Pinckney said, South Carolina's slaves worked side by side with their masters to fortify against British attacks. Ironically, abolitionists at that time were in no position to dispute this idyllic picture of happy slaves during the American Revolution.
¹⁴

Following the Civil War and Reconstruction, during the Jim Crow era, blacks in the Revolution once again took a backseat. In 1891 one of the country's foremost historians, John Fiske, spoke for his age when he ignored the historical record and stated bluntly that happy slaves had declined Lord Dunmore's offer of freedom:

The relations between master and slave in Virginia were so pleasant that the offer of freedom fell upon dull, uninterested ears. With light work and generous fare, the condition of the Virginia negro was a happy one. . . . He was proud of his connection with his master's estate and family, and had nothing to gain by rebellion.
¹⁵

One writer during this time, Edward Eggleston, made an intriguing use of the “happy slaves” myth in his argument for Negro inferiority. Negroes were so lacking in mental capacities, he claimed, that they would die out from natural evolutionary processes; this was the “ultimate solution” to the “Negro problem.” As proof of their inability to fend for themselves, Eggleston offered the example of early emancipation efforts around the time of the Revolution: these resulted from “the improved moral standards” of whites, not the efforts of a “black race” too feeble to “assert its rights.” By failing to acknowledge the many and varied efforts that blacks had made to gain their freedom during the Revolution, Eggleston perpetuated one of the greatest of
all historical lies: “The Negro possessed no ability whatsoever to help free himself. So long as he had plenty of food, and outlets for his ordinary animal passions, he remained happy and content.”
¹⁶

Edward Eggleston also wrote textbooks for children, and these texts included no mention of these allegedly passive blacks when discussing the American Revolution.
¹⁷
Neither did any of twenty-two other school texts I surveyed that were written from the end of Reconstruction to the beginning of the civil rights movement.
¹⁸
From the time of Ulysses S. Grant to Dwight D. Eisenhower, textbook writers totally excluded one-sixth of Revolutionary-Era Americans.
¹⁹

So did most professional historians. With only a few exceptions (most notably Herbert Aptheker, a Communist writing in the 1940s and 1950s), white authors ignored the black presence in the Revolution for a full century, from the Civil War to the 1960s. It fell upon black historians to tell the story.

In 1883 George W. Williams included in his comprehensive
History of the Negro Race in America, from 1619 to 1880
an extensive discussion of the Revolutionary Era. He started by exposing the hypocrisy of white Revolutionaries:

The sentiment that adorned the speeches of orators . . . was “the equality of the rights of all men.” And yet the slaves who bore their chains under their eyes, who were denied the commonest rights of humanity, who were rated as chattels and real property, were living witnesses to the insincerity and inconsistency of this declaration.
²⁰

Then, rather than limiting his attention to the contributions of black patriots, Williams undertook a serious investigation of the racial politics involved in military recruitment. He showed step by step how Washington and his War Council came to prohibit the enlistment of blacks during the siege of Boston, and he then explained how Dunmore's proclamation of freedom forced them to reverse themselves. He chronicled the flight of enslaved people to the British and the
feeble attempts to quell this exodus by white patriots who claimed to be “true friends” of the people they held in bondage. Suddenly, however, Williams interjected into his forthright analysis a pat display of traditional patriotism: “The struggle went on between Tory and Whig, between traitor and patriot, between selfishness and the spirit of noble consecration to the righteous cause of the Americans,” he wrote.
²¹
Williams tried to negotiate a difficult course: he wanted to tell the story from the black perspective, but he could not evidence anti-American or pro-British sentiments.

Despite his hesitations, Williams arrived at a truly radical con clusion:

Enlistment in the army did not work a practical emancipation of the slave, as some have thought. Negroes were rated as chattel property by both armies and both governments during the entire war. This is the cold fact of history, and it is not pleasing to contemplate. The Negro occupied the anomalous position of an American Slave and an American soldier. He was a soldier in the hour of danger, but a chattel in time of peace.
²²

This sobering assessment would not be echoed by white writers for three-quarters of a century.

Although Williams's work was ignored by white scholars, two black scholars writing in the 1920s, Carter G. Woodson and W.E.B. Du Bois, took up where Williams had left off. Woodson, often labeled “the father of Negro history,” organized the
Journal of Negro History
in 1916, and in 1922 he published a comprehensive survey that became the standard text for a quarter of a century,
The Negro in Our History.
Woodson treated the flight of enslaved people to the British in a straightforward manner, without apologies; he also added that “a corps of fugitive slaves calling themselves the King of England's Soldiers harassed for several years the people living on the Savannah River, and there was much fear that the rebuffed free Negroes of New England would do the same for the colonists in their section.”
²³
At the
close of the war in the South, Woodson concluded, “There followed such a reaction against the elevation of the race to citizenship that much of the work proposed to promote their welfare and to provide for manumission was undone.”
²⁴
Gone was the fairy tale with a happy ending. The American Revolution had done as much harm as good.

In 1924 Du Bois, a socialist and founder of the NAACP, followed Woodson's basic line in his informal history
The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America.
Du Bois discussed openly the idiosyncratic “patriotism” of black soldiers:

His problem as a soldier was always peculiar: no matter for what her enemies fought and no matter for what America fought, the American Negro always fought for his own freedom and for the self-respect of his race. Whatever the cause of war, therefore, his cause was peculiarly just. He appears . . . always with a double motive,—the desire to oppose the so-called enemy of his country along with his fellow white citizens, and before that, the motive of deserving well of those citizens and securing justice for his folk.
²⁵

In 1947 John Hope Franklin discussed black flight to the British in his popular college text
From Slavery to Freedom
—but the story remained ghettoized, told only as “Negro history.” Despite the work of Williams, Woodson, Du Bois, and Franklin, blacks were still not included in the standard telling of the American Revolution.
²⁶

Not until the 1960s were blacks once again counted as “present” at our nation's founding. In 1961 another black scholar, Benjamin Quarles, published an account that was both penetrating and thorough,
The Negro in the American Revolution
.
²⁷
The broad lines of argument had been made before, but Quarles added significant detail, and his timing was perfect. Within the history profession, Quarles's masterpiece was considered “a bombshell of a book.”
²⁸
Young white historians, influenced by the civil rights movement, embraced and built on Quarles's work. In the decades that followed, black and white
scholars have produced a wealth of monographs and in-depth studies chronicling how African Americans experienced the Revolution and the impact of their actions on the politics of war. Some but not all of this new information has made its way to popular audiences. Today, as in the 1850s, Northern blacks who found freedom by fighting with the patriots are celebrated, while their Southern counterparts who fled to the British are not.

A TALE OF TWO STORIES

       
(1)
   
In Northern states during the American Revolution, some enslaved people earned their freedom by fighting side by side with white patriots. Further, a war fought in the name of freedom triggered a gradual end to the nefarious institution of slaves from Pennsylvania northward.