This July 4th Let’s Begin to Change the Way We Think about America’s Past

Thomas Fleming is the author of more than fifty books on America’s past. His latest work is The Great Divide, about the conflict between George Washington and Thomas Jefferson that played a powerful role in defining the nation.


The nation’s birthday would seem to be a good time to consider the possibility of changing the way we have begun to think about America’s history. In our colleges and universities, too many people, from professors to students, are taking a moral approach to the past. They are judging previous generations whose attitudes and customs were often quite different from ours by the standards of today. The result has been a growing sense of guilt for the supposed failures of theseAmericans to live up to our contemporary ideals.

The prime example is slavery. Most people see it as a totally reprehensible social system for which it is impossible to forgive the white masters. Contemporary critics regularly fail to understand slavery’s deep roots in the world’s history. Does anyone know that in the eighth and ninth centuries tens of thousands of white European men, women and children were dragged into slavery by triumphant Muslim raiders who ruled the Mediterranean world? If we go back another thousand years we find slavery an essential part of the economy and social life of Greece and Rome.

When British, French and Spanish merchants began importing black slaves from Africa to the New World, no one took a moral view of it. They saw only another phase of an ancient system. The English city of Liverpool was so proud of the riches they accumulated from the slave trade, they included a chained humbled black man in their official city emblem. In Africa most of the slaves were captured by fellow blacks who marched them to the coast for sale to white traders. Morality had nothing to do with any part of this system. It was a simple business transaction. Is it surprising that for the better part of two centuries after the 1619 arrival of the first slaves, no one in the 13 British colonies except a handful of Quakers saw anything wrong with the custom?

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