Ask the Scholars

First of all, a comment about the question. The question seems to indicate that revisionist interpretations of history are one, somehow new, and two, somehow negative. The fact is that every generation provides a revisionist interpretation of history. And largely that generation revises history from its own standpoint, its own vantage point. The job of the historian is to interpret and revise history based upon new evidence and new interpretations of that evidence. That's what historians...

I think the questioner is suggesting, how can you call the Founding Fathers racist when many of them were against slavery? But you can have a racist ideology and also be against slavery. Jefferson, for example, developed a concept of difference, radical difference, which led him to think that blacks and whites couldn't live together in freedom. He wanted to get rid of slavery eventually, but the only way that he thought that could be done is if the races totally separated. In other words...

We know a lot about how slavery began in North America, and we know that there were a lot of people who were theoretically opposed to slavery, even Jefferson himself was, as George said, opposed to slavery. But this didn't stop them from owning and exploiting slaves. I mean the reality, the economic reality was that they needed the slaves, and this points to the fundamental hypocrisy of the Founding Fathers, because so many of them did own slaves, and people ought to know that.

I think the economic necessity of slavery in a free society created a profound dilemma. It created a situation where, if you say that all men are created equal, but then you say that some men, or human beings, are to be enslaved, that creates a real contradiction. One way out of that contradiction - which is the basis for the more articulate, overt racism that comes about in the 19th century - is to say, "Well, these people aren't quite human. These people are not capable of exercising t...