Shared national story?

Barack Obama says it's lost

(Recent Self-Emancipator posts discussed self-emancipators among the Civil War’s very earliest: Tidewater Virginia freedom strivers, often then and now called contrabands. Some readers are expecting a post about a planned PBS film on those enterprising slavery escapees and their Virginia descendants. That post is coming.)

Historian and political commentator Heather Cox Richardson, with an enormous Substack following, wrote recently that former president Barack Obama had said that Americans had lost the sense of “a common national story.” In 2023, I had something to say about that in the Washington Post after Post reporters offered the same surmise then that the former president has offered now.

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Last week on December 5 in Chicago, the former president made his lost-national-story statement in the third in his annual series of lectures for his foundation’s Democracy Forum. Professor Richardson calls those lectures “a historical and philosophical exploration of the weaknesses of twenty-first century democracy as well as a road map of directions, some new and some old, for democracy’s defense.”

Last year on July 30, a headline atop the Sunday Washington Post front page declared “Nation’s racial past drives fight for future.” The three-author article lamented that “the nation’s metastasizing culture wars . . . have broadened to strip Americans of a shared sense of history.”

It’s the same surmise. So I’ll exclaim again what I exclaimed in the August 9, 2023 Self-Emancipator post “All sides in the history wars”: “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 post continued: “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.”

Then I quoted my letter to the editor 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, Blight 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.

When I wrote that final paragraph 16 months ago, I had not yet begun saying what I say regularly now, borrowing phrasing from Thomas Jefferson:

Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that Americans will eventually esteem the Civil War’s multitudes of freedom-striving, emancipation-forcing slavery escapees. Just not yet.

By the way: The Post itself unintentionally illustrated that just-not-yetness. With the online copy of my letter, the paper included a picture of the Emancipation Memorial in Washington’s Lincoln Park—a statue depicting a shirtless Black American kneeling before Abraham Lincoln, who’s holding a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation and looking downward. It presumes Black inferiority and omits any sense of those “hundreds of thousands” of enterprising Civil War slavery escapees “forcing the issue of freedom.”

It was well intended when dedicated in 1876. In 2024, it’s a reminder of the just-not-yetness.