Deconstructing history

LITTLE ROCK — Now I discover that much of what I’ve been taught about the history of our nation has been incomplete, inadequate and just flat wrong.

Wish you could have been with me at the gathering of the Arkansas African American GOP Caucus the other night in Little Rock to hear David Barton, the Texas academician, researcher and lecturer, who’s often referred to as “America’s historian.”

Barton, a Christian conservative, talks about hundreds of “incontrovertible facts” that he says are supported by reams of documents that he’s discovered. Verify it all at the website wallbuilders.com and in his book, “American History in Black and White.”

Our nation, Barton said, has been victimized by a calculated process of historical “deconstruction.” He defines that as using only partial facts, usually negative, about a person, place or event, then amplifying the misimpressions to appear as if that is how history truly unfolded. In other words, he maintains that to a large degree we’ve pretty much been fed a line of agenda-soaked U.S. historical baloney for well over a century.

For example, Barton cited the way our Founders have been wrongly painted academically over time, through a pervasive “liberal and secular bias,” as atheists, agnostics and deists. Authentic history shows that’s hogwash, he said. He said that 29 of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence held what we might call Bible school or seminary degrees.

Other of Barton’s historical truths (all with original documents offered as proof) that I was never taught: A significant number of genuine black heroes in the Revolutionary War were pivotal in its outcome. Some were slaves. Many were free men who fought alongside white comrades. Some appear in illustrations of the era, including paintings of the Battle of Bunker Hill and George Washington crossing the Delaware. Those men included Prince Estabrook at Lexington Green, James Armistead at Yorktown, Peter Salem at Bunker Hill and Wentworth Cheswell who, with Paul Revere, rode to warn the Colonists that the British were coming.

Congress was actively fighting slave trade in the nation by actually abolishing the practice in 1808. That abolition was celebrated in a famous sermon by black bishop Absalom Jones.

By 1820, most Founders were dead and the Democrats were the congressional majority that passed the Missouri Compromise, which reversed earlier abolition and allowed slavery in much of the federal territory. Several states later were admitted as slave states. For the first time since the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, slavery was now being officially promoted as a matter of congressional policy. Democrats also passed the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, which required Northerners to return to their supposed owners any blacks who a white person even accused of being slaves. There was no due process for the accused.

In 1854, the Democratic-controlled Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which expanded the reach of slavery into western territories. Some antislavery Democrats, Whigs, Free Soilers and Emancipationists then formed the Republican Party primarily to oppose slavery. Members said they sought to return to the principles of freedom and equality “first set forth in the governing documents before pro-slavery members of Congress had perverted those original principles.” The initial Republican Party platform in 1856 consisted of nine planks, six of which involved declarations of equality and civil rights for blacks based on the Declaration of Independence. The Democratic platform that same year strongly defended slavery, warning: “All efforts of the abolitionists . . . are calculated to lead to the most alarming and dangerous consequences and all such efforts have an inevitable tendency to diminish the happiness of the people.” Oh really? A year later, the Democratic-controlled Supreme Court issued its infamous Dred Scott decision, which held that blacks weren’t persons but property without rights.

President Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860 along with a Republican majority in the House and Senate. Again, the GOP platform had called for the abolition of slavery. It also blasted the Dred Scott decision and the Fugitive Slave Law. Democrats endorsed both of those laws and affirmed their belief that it was proper to hold black people in bondage.

The 1860 election caused a split between Northern and Southern slaveholding Democrats. While both factions supported slavery, the Southern Democrats were willing to leave the nation to form their own slave holding confederacy, while Northern Democrats remained in the Union. In other words, their primary difference wasn’t over slavery but over whether to secede. Only 19 percent of Southerners at that time lived in slave owner households.

As the Civil War drew to a close, 137 congressional members voted to pass the 13th Amendment that would abolish slavery. All118 Republicans voted to end slavery; 19 of 82 Northern Democrats voted that way.

By 1867, the largest church in Washington, D.C., was located inside the U.S. Capitol, where 2,000 regularly gathered each Sunday. The sermon celebrating the 13th Amendment was preached there on Feb. 12, 1865, by a black minister and former slave, Rev. Henry Garnet, who called for states to ratify the congressional vote.

An 1872 print depicts the first seven black Americans elected to the U.S. Congress, all members of the Republican Party.

Mike Masterson is opinion editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s Northwest edition.