The Whites of their Eyes (15 page)

Nowhere has the tyranny of the past proven more despotic than on the matters having to do with race. In the decades
between the Revolution and the Civil War, every story about the Revolution was a story about slavery, and the Constitution’s failure to end it. “The page of impartial history bears testimony to the fact that the first martyr in the American Revolution was a colored man by the name of Attucks, who fell in King street, Boston,” a Boston-born African American abolitionist named William Cooper Nell pointed out in 1848, launching a campaign to erect a statue to Attucks on the Common. (Nell is the historian who found that runaway slave ad, from 1750, identifying Crispus Attucks as a fugitive from Fr
amingham.) The next year, in
Mardi
, Herman Melville’s narrator travels to a fictionalized republic, where hieroglyphics chiseled in an arch at the entrance read: “In-this-republican-land-all-men-are-born-free-and-equal” but then, in smaller letters, “Except-the-tribe-of-Hamo.”
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That same year, Boston’s blacks petitioned the school committee to integrate the city’s public schools, insisting on racial equality.
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In 1850, in
Roberts v. City of Boston
, Lemuel Shaw, chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (and Melville’s father-in-law), upheld segregation, countering Charl
es Sumner’s claim that segregation was based on nothing more than prejudice by declaring, “This prejudice is not created by law, and probably cannot be changed by law.” (Shaw’s ruling was later cited in
Plessy v. Ferguson
.) In Massachusetts, the first test of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act came the next year, when Shaw heard the case of Thomas Sims. Shaw ruled that the fugitive Sims must be returned to slavery. “What a moment was lost,” Emerson wrote, “when Judge Shaw declined to affirm the unconstitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Law!” Meanwhile, Nell petitioned the Massachusetts legislatur
e for funding for his Attucks statue. After the legislature said no, in 1851, Nell led black Bostonians
in celebrating Crispus Attucks Day, every fifth of March, in Faneuil Hall.
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When Theodore Parker gave an address in Boston in 1852, on the first anniversary of Sims’s being taken back into slavery, he insisted that Bostonians had no right to celebrate the Revolution so long as slavery endured. “Some of you, I think, keep trophies from that day, won at Concord or at Lexington,” Parker said. “I have seen such things,—powderhorns, shoe-buckles, and other things from the nineteenth of April 1775. Here is a Boston trophy from April 19, 1851. This is the coat of Thomas Sims.” He held up a garment, ripped to tatters. “Go Massachusetts! keep thy trophies
from Lexington! I will keep this coat to remind me of Boston, and her dark places, which are full of cruelty.”
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On July 4, 1854, William Lloyd Garrison spoke at an antislavery rally in Framingham. Standing in front of an American flag hung upside down and bordered in black, Garrison burned a copy of the Constitution, calling it a “covenant with death, an agreement with hell.” As the crowd cried, “Amen,” Garrison ground the ashes of the Constitution beneath the heel of his shoe.
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That same year, Anthony Burns, who was born into slavery in Virginia, stowed away aboard a ship heading for Boston, explaining
, “I heard of a North where men of my color could live without any man daring to say to them, ‘You are my property.’ ”
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In Boston, Burns was arrested under the terms of the Fugitive Slave Act. Boston’s Vigilance Committee protested his arrest at Faneuil Hall on May 26. Thomas Wentworth Higginson left the meeting and, with a crowd of like-minded men, went to the Court House, to try to rescue Burns. In the melee, a federal marshal was killed. Later, when marshals marched Burns to the docks, there to board a boat to Virginia, fifty thousand Bostonians marched alongside, crying out, “Kidnappers!”
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In 1855, when William Cooper
Nell published
Colored Patriots of the American Revolution
, Harriet Beecher Stowe supplied an introduction, noting that black patriots had rendered magnanimous service, fighting for “a nation which did not acknowledge them as citizens and equals.” The book’s frontispiece is an engraving of the Boston Massacre, based on Paul Revere’s, in which Attucks has collapsed into the arms of white patriots. In the foreground, fallen from his head, lies his tricornered hat.
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In antebellum America, every story about the Revolution was a story about slavery.

In 1857, in
Dred Scott v. Sandford
, the Supreme Court, enslaved to the tyranny of the past, ruled that the framers had considered blacks “as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they have no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
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That’s what Illinois senator Stephen Douglas and his Republican challenger, Abraham Lincoln, debated, the next year. “I believe that this government was made on the white basis,” Douglas said. “It was made by white men for the benefit o
f white men and their posterity forever.” Lincoln disagreed: “I believe the entire records of the world, from the date of the Declaration of Independence up to within three years ago, may be searched in vain for one single affirmation, from one single man, that the negro was not included in the Declaration of Independence,” he said. “I think I may defy Douglas to show that any President ever said so—that any member of Congress ever said so—or that any man ever said so, until the necessities of the Democratic party had to invent that.”
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The question debated by Lincoln and Douglas was historical, but the founding documents couldn’t settle it because the founders hadn’t settled it. Even the Civil War didn’t settle it.
“Have You Ever Seen the Words Forced Busing in the Constitution?” That was a sign carried in Boston, on March 5, 1975, at a reenactment of the Boston Massacre on its 205th anniversary. In 1974, Judge W. Arthur Garrity, a federal district court judge, mandated the integration of Boston’s public schools—requiring the forced busing of children, from one neighborhood to another. White antibusing activists turned up at Bicentennial events in force. As J. Anthony Lukas reported in
Common Ground
, “Opponents of busing saw themselves as victims of the same oppression which had beset eighteenth-century Bostonians and said they were fighting for the same right to control their own lives. State Representative Ray Flynn warned, ‘The sacred principles on which this nation was founded are threatened by a new tyranny, a tyranny dressed in judicial robes.’ ” On the day of the 1975 Boston Massacre reenactment, four hundred antibusing protesters in colonial garb marched to the Old State House carrying a coffin marked “R.I.P. Liberty, Born 1770—Died 1974.” When the reen
actors portraying Preston’s grenadiers fired, all four hundred protesters fell to the ground.
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Just weeks later, on April 18, 1975, the two hundredth anniversary of Paul Revere’s ride, Gerald Ford came to Boston. Nixon had abolished the American Bicentennial Commission in 1973, replacing it with the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration. In August of that year, Nixon had resigned; Ford pardoned him in September. Now, in a speech at the Old North Church, Ford called on Americans to learn, by examining their history, that “the American experience has been more of reason than revolution.” Acr
oss town, at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, Arthur Schleslinger Jr. spoke about his new book,
The Imperial Presidency
.
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In Concord, thirty thousand protesters,
under the banner of the Peoples Bicentennial Commission, were camping out, while Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie played through the night. Rifkin said, “The theme of the demonstration is ‘Send a Message to Wall Street,’ and we want the corporations to know, by our mass presence at Concord, that people are fed up with them running the country.”
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By morning, over a hundred thousand people had gathered in Concord, awaiting the president.

Meanwhile, the evacuation of Saigon was beginning. Ford had already authorized early airlifts. At ten o’clock on the morning of April 19, 1975, Ford arrived in Concord, by helicopter. In the two centuries since the shot heard round the world, the president said, “The United States has become a world power.” He boasted of American military might, decried isolationism, acknowledged the past, and argued for change, quoting Jefferson: “Nothing then is unchangeable but the inherent and inalienable rights of man.” He said he hoped that, at the Tricentennial, in a hundred years, people woul
d look back at this day and see it as the first in a century of American unity. After Ford flew away and the protesters went home, one
Globe
reporter wrote, all that was left was trash, and a sign reading “The Revolution is Not Over.”
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Saigon fell eleven days later.

Two months later, on June 17, 1975, during a two hundredth anniversary reenactment of the Battle of Bunker Hill conducted by the Charlestown Militia, someone hung an antibusing banner from a window of a house alongside Monument Square. It read, “We’re right back where we began 200 years ago.”
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Originalism as a school of constitutional interpretation has waxed and waned and has always competed with other
schools of interpretation. Madison’s invaluable notes on the Constitutional Convention weren’t published until 1840, and nineteenth-century constitutional theory differed, dramatically, from the debates that have taken place in the twentieth century. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Supreme Court rejected originalist arguments put forward by southern segregationists, stating, in
Brown v. Board of Education
in 1954, that “we cannot turn back the clock” but “must consider public education in the light of its full development and its present place in American life throughout the Nation.” Constitutional scholars generally date the rise of originalism to the 1970s and consider it a response to controversial decisions of both the Warren and Burger Courts, especially
Roe v. Wade
, in 1973. Originalism received a great deal of attention in 1987, with the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork.
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Bork’s nomination also happened to coincide with the bicentennial of the Cons
titutional Convention. “Nineteen eighty-seven marks the 200th anniversary of the United States Constitution,” Thurgood Marshall said in a speech that year. Marshall (who went to Frederick Douglass High School) had argued
Brown v. Board of Education
in 1954 and, in 1967, after being nominated by Lyndon Johnson, became the first African American on the Supreme Court. In 1987, contemplating the bicentennial of the Constitution, Marshall took a skeptical view.

The focus of this celebration invites a complacent belief that the vision of those who debated and compromised in Philadelphia yielded the “m
ore perfect Union” it is said we now enjoy. I cannot accept this invitation, for I do not believe that the meaning of the Constitution was forever “fixed” at the Philadelphia Convention. Nor do I find the wisdom, foresight, and sense of justice exhibited by the Framers
particularly profound. To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and major social transformations to attain the system of constitutional government and its respect for the freedoms and individual rights, we hold as fundamental today.

Marshall was worried about what anniversaries do. “The odds are that for many Americans the bicentennial celebration will be little more than a blind pilgrimage to the shrine of the original document now stored in a vault in the National Archives,” rather than the occasion for “a sensitive understanding of the Constitution’s inherent defects, and its promising evolution through 200 years of history.” Expressing doubts about unthinking reverence, Marshall called for something different:

In this bicentennial year, we may not all participate in the festivities with flagwaving fervor. Some may more quietly commemorate the suffering, struggle, and sacrifice that has triumphed over much of what was wrong with the original document, and observe the anniversary with hopes not realized and promises not fulfilled. I plan to celebrate the bicentennial of the Constitution as a living document.
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Even as Marshall was making that speech, the banner of originalism was being taken up by evangelicals, who, since joining the Reagan Revolution in 1980, had been playing an increasingly prominent role in American politics. “Any diligent student of American history finds that our great nation was founded by godly men upon godly principles to be a Christian nation,” Jerry Falwell insisted. In 1987, Tim LaHaye, an evangelical minister who went on to write a series
of best-selling apocalyptic novels, published a book called
The Faith of Our Founding Fathers
, in which he attempted to chronicle the “Rape of History” by “history revisionists” who had systemically erased from American textbooks the “evangelical Protestants who founded this nation.” Documenting this claim was no mean feat. Jefferson posed a particular problem, not least because he crafted a custom copy of the Bible by cutting out all the miracles and pasting together what was left. LaHaye, to support his argument, took out his own pair of scissors, deciding, for instance, that Jefferson didn’t count as a Founding Father because he “
had nothing to do with the founding of our nation,” and basing his claims about Benjamin Franklin not on evidence (because, as he admitted, “There is no evidence that Franklin ever became a Christian”), but on sheer bald, raising-the-founders-from-the-dead assertion. LaHaye wrote, “Many modern secularizers try to claim Franklin as one of their own. I am confident, however, that Franklin would not identify with them were he alive today.”
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(Alas, Franklin, who once said he wished he could preserve himself in a vat of Madeira wine, to see what the world would look like in a century or two, is not, in fact
, alive today.
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And, while I confess that I’m quite excessively fond of him, the man is not coming back.)