Through the Lens of Slavery: A Look at Early America

Abstract

Through the Lens of SlaveryA Look at Early America Marie Jenkins Schwartz (bio) The Antebellum Origins of the Modern Constitution: Slavery and the Spirit of the American Founding simon j. gilhooley Cambridge University Press, 2022 350 pp. Thirteen Clocks: How Race United the Colonies and Made the Declaration of Independence robert g. parkinson Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture and University of North Carolina Press, 2021 256 pp. Washington at the Plow: The Founding Farmer and the Question of Slavery bruce a. ragsdale Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021 368 pp. Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States samantha seeley Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture and University of North Carolina Press, 2021 368 pp. Slavery is a lens through which academics, journalists, and members of the general public are increasingly looking to learn about the founding of the United States. Some people might prefer a more positive approach to understanding the nation's origins. After all, Americans threw off British imperial rule and established the world's first modern republic. They united under a written Constitution that together with its first [End Page 219] ten amendments protected individual civil rights and limited the power of the federal government to do such things as restrict speech, establish a state religion, or control the press. War hero George Washington refused to be made president for life and stepped down of his own accord after two terms. The problem with limiting discussion of early America to such celebratory events is that slavery was a blight that left a legacy of racism. Incomplete or distorted versions of history will not help a nation that continues to struggle with issues of inequality and exclusion. Four recent books answer important questions about slavery in early America. How and why did thirteen disparate colonies unite to fight and defeat the British? Who, exactly, was included in the definition of "American"? Who were the nation's founders, really? And when the founders wrote the US Constitution, what was their original intent? One scholar considers the efforts of the nation's founders to incite fears among white colonists of Black and Native peoples as a means of uniting against British rule. Another engages and carries this narrative forward by looking at how, in the aftermath of the Revolution, federal and state officials, with the backing of eager white settlers, attempted to exclude from America these same peoples, and how and why Black and Native Americans struggled to remain in the places they called home. A third author examines George Washington, not as war hero or first president, but as slaveholding agriculturalist. The fourth makes the case that the concept of originalism as applied to judicial interpretation of the US Constitution was established in the antebellum era by men intent on preserving slavery. Although all four books focus on the distant past, each in its own way has something to say about modern America. _______ The subtitle of Robert G. Parkinson's Thirteen Clocks makes clear its central theme: "how race united the colonies and made the Declaration of Independence." Focusing on the fifteen months that separated the start of the Revolutionary War and the Declaration of Independence (April 19, 1775, to July 4, 1776), Parkinson takes issue with John Adams's oft-quoted observation that "the Revolution was effected before the war commenced." It had occurred, Adams said, "in the minds and hearts of the people," who had undergone a radical change in thinking before the first shots were fired. Adams's words, Parkinson says, make a violent event seem like an intellectual disagreement. In truth, to keep up momentum for war and [End Page 220] independence after the skirmishes in Lexington and Concord, Patriot leaders deliberately set out to instill fear. The British, they insisted, were planning to employ enslaved people and Native Americans to slaughter settlers and upend the domestic order. When later certain British officials called for arming or aligning with Black or Native Americans to put down the rebellion, the situation played into Patriot leaders' hands. Rather than talk of liberty, rights, and republicanism, Parkinson says, "weaponized prejudice" caused thirteen...