After reading that the Tennessee Tea Party would like to revise history taught to children to downplay slavery and the struggle of minorities (so as not to detract from the revolutionary if imperfect progress of our founders), I was reminded of a 2007 visit our family made to the Magnolia Plantation outside Charleston, where a descendant of the original owner came to give a "slave talk" at one of the restored slave cabins. He went on to deliver a series of platitudes, half-truths, and some fabrications created during the Lost Cause era when revisionists wanted us to remember that the South fought for states rights but to forget that the right in question was the right to own slaves.
He said that no one was ever beaten to death. He was confident of this because there are no records indicating any slave was ever beaten to death on the plantation. Slavery was not the great "atrocity" some people might want you to believe it was, he reassured the all-white crowd who had come for a Magnolia Plantation Gone With the Wind experience devoid of any nagging reminders of who drained the swamps and tilled the grounds and created the wealth that allowed the plantation they could never enter to be erected. Why, did we know that slaves were allowed to leave the plantation and go into Charleston to buy things for their masters and they all returned? Now if slavery was such a hell on earth, why did they all come back to it?
I had heard enough at that point. Trying to sound polite, probably without success, I asked, "Where exactly could they have gone?"
He looked at me a little puzzled by the question.
"I mean," I continued. "They were deep in slave territory. A slave owner had every legal right to beat a runaway slave to death as an example to other slaves. Not only that, by law anyone who caught a runaway slave had a duty to return that slave to his owner. After the Dred Scott Decision, this was true even if the slave managed to make it all the way to the North. The Fugitive Slave Act made it a felony not to return a slave to its rightful owner, even if the slave escaped to a free state."
About this time, there was a whole lot of uncomfortable shifting going on. The guy talking repeated that there were no records of anyone being beaten or whipped to death on the plantation.
"Yes," I countered. "There were no records that Thomas Jefferson had sex with his slaves - and he gave his word of honor that he had not when allegations came up in the campaign of 1800 - but we now know from DNA evidence that he was lying. The absence of proof is not the same as proof of absence."
He puzzled over this a bit, then took a different tack, claiming that the South probably would have given up slavery if the North had just left them alone and let them do it on their own time. To which I countered that there was a fire-breathing South Carolinian named John C. Calhoun - he might have heard of him since he has a huge statue and several streets and a square in Charleston named after him - said just the opposite, stating that slavery was a "positive good" the South should not just defend but should never apologize for.
About this time, my family was mad enough at me for spoiling everyone's fun that I decided I had had enough of this slave talk, so decided to leave, but it reminded me that there is a huge chunk of our population that simply wants to pretend this horror never happened. There is something disturbing (or should be) about the fact that one out of five Americans were in bondage at the time of the founding of the Land of the Free. If we don't know our history, we are doomed to repeat it, and if we really think that slavery wasn't a great trans-generational crime, as Sarah Palin and Glenn Bleck seem to think, then what followed, including a century of slave-cropping, Jim Crow, and use of the southern penal system as a de facto source of compulsory, uncompensated labor (read Douglas Blackmon's Pulitzer Prize winner Slavery by Another Name for details), makes no sense. It's just "dwelling on scars" to talk about slavery according to these folks. Which is why these folks scare me so much.
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