All sides in the history wars
The Washington Post unintentionally highlighted the need to remember Civil War slavery escapees forcing freedom—then printed a letter
August 9, 2023. Newcomers to this free Substack newsletter might want to read the brief introductory post on the archive page, “Why ‘The Self-Emancipator’?” The posts can be seen as a serialized book or read independently.
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“Nation’s racial past drives fight for future” declared a headline atop the Sunday, July 30, Washington Post front page. The article lamented polarization-caused loss of a shared national sense of history. But that regret inadvertently shows the importance of elevating long-overlooked memory of Black self-agency in the Civil War. It was a central element—some historians, framing it as self-emancipation, call it THE central element—in the war’s transformation into a struggle not only for union, but for freedom.
That beautiful but puzzlingly scanted Black history story—that American story of overwhelming numbers of enterprising slavery escapees—would appeal to all sides in the history wars.
So I submitted a letter to the editor. The Post printed it. Its text appears below.
The Post article that inspired the letter begins:
The 2024 presidential race, nominally a battle to shape the country’s future, is increasingly being consumed by a roiling debate over reexamining, redefining and reimagining its past.
Over the past 10 days, candidates from across the political spectrum have discussed the intricacies of slavery, Reconstruction, military desegregation and lynching — a rare moment in modern presidential politics when Black history has become a more dominant subject than more traditional topics like taxes or crime.
The reporters say that “a growing number of scholars and politicians seek to draw a more direct link between the past and the present.” To me, in one sense, that seems fine. I’m always ready to lob yet again that old William Faulkner quotation: “The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
But there’s another sense. The reporters see “dueling American histories.” They lament that the “political and pedagogical firefight . . . underscores how the nation’s metastasizing culture wars . . . have broadened to strip Americans of a shared sense of history.”
Strip Americans of a shared sense of history? I believe it, but I also know a sense of history that all sides in the history wars could share. That’s why I advocated a national emancipation memorial last year in a History News Network essay. It’s why I’ve started this Substack.
And it’s why I submitted this letter that the Post printed on August 4 under the headline “The U.S. does have a shared national story”:
We do have a shared national story, at least potentially. It's the long arc of the moral universe that bent toward emancipation. It would appeal to any side in the history wars.
Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley — a Black man, it’s necessary to point out — wrote in Hillsdale College’s ultraconservative Imprimis, “What makes America unique is not slavery. It’s emancipation.”
In 2020, David W. Blight, who directs Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, published a New York Times op-ed headlined “There’s a Chance to Tell a New American Story. Biden Should Seize It.” In a 2020 Post op-ed, he urged an “epic process” of memorializing emancipation.
This national story of our second founding comes directly from slavery’s crimes against humanity and the Declaration of Independence. It shows Ukrainian, Chinese and other freedom strivers that Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo was right in his Nobel Prize lecture that “no force . . . can put an end to the human quest for freedom.”
It centrally involves what Princeton’s Sean Wilentz describes as “hundreds of thousands” of Civil War slavery escapees “forcing the issue of freedom, which helped change a war to crush southern secession into a war to destroy slavery.”
Ira Berlin of the University of Maryland’s Freedmen and Southern Society Project explained in a 1992 Post op-ed “how the slaves freed themselves.” James M. McPherson, with others, calls that the “self-emancipation thesis.”
It's hiding in plain sight as a shared national story affirming founding principles, but the country has not yet adopted it. I think the country will.