New at Reason

March 12, 2007

Amy Sturgis uses a bold new Internet project to rediscover the history of a forgotten American rebel.

Comments

PintofStout|3.12.07 @ 12:58PM|#

Quite enjoyed the article and when time permits, I will likely enjoy the site.

JIMMYDAGEEK|3.12.07 @ 12:59PM|#

Recently the Seminole Tribe decided to exclude the descendants of slaves from their tribes. Hopefully, this documentary will serve to illustrate what an integral part the slaves played in the history of the Seminoles. IMO, the recent exclusion of slave descendants only serves to fill the pockets of these greedy Seminole fucks.

jimmydageek|3.12.07 @ 1:00PM|#

I don't have a link to the story of the Seminole exclusion of slave descendants, but I'm sure Google can come up with something.

tomWright|3.12.07 @ 1:13PM|#

History is written by the winners, and the powerful.

No wonder we do not read of this in US textbooks, just as you will not read about 'comfort women' in Japanese text books.

|3.12.07 @ 1:43PM|#

"Bird believes there is also an ideological reason most schoolchildren do not know the name John Horse...Bird notes how the distinguished scholar concluded "broadly, that after Nat Turner's uprising in 1831, southern Americans effectively co-opted their slave-proletariat by improving living conditions and offering them the feeble hope of emancipation through peaceful means, a naive dream that was easier for slaves to accept than the brutal consequences of leading a failed rebellion."

In fairness, official sources and the contemporary elites had every reason to paint the conflict solely as an "Indian war." At this time there were several Southern states where the whites were heavily outnumbered by their black slaves. Public knowledge of a slave rebellion that had gone on for seven years (or of the favorable terms given the enemy) might cause the rebellion to spread.

In 1831, one in ten Virginians was a member of a militia. Since blacks and women were forbidden to join, nearly every white male must have been a member of an armed unit at a time when the foreign threat to the US was negligible, to say the least. The militia existed to answer the threat of slave rebellions, a neat example of how slavery could not exist without the active support of the State, rather than the passive acceptance often presumed.

At no time in the debate in Congress over funding the war did Jackson's legislative allies argue they were fighting a slave rebellion, even when they ended up making terms with the slaves themselves. All along they stoutly maintained the fiction that this was purely an Indian affair, keeping the lie alive as long as slavery existed, which is to say until the end of the Civil War, when all the participants had since passed away.

In 1822, Denmark Vesey organized a large conspiracy in and around Charleston, SC, for the purpose of burning the city and liberating all the slaves in the area in the chaos. The plan was betrayed and Vesey and 35 others were hanged. The trial record itself was destroyed, considered too dangerous a document to keep.

In fact, the use of Nat Turner as a stand-in for rebellious blacks may have its own sinister explanation: other slave rebellions had focused on freeing slaves, forming armies, and forcing the government to treat with them as equals. Those killed were usually abusive masters. But Nat Turner was slightly mad. He claimed religious visions and his followers tended to kill every white person they came across, man, woman, and child. Small wonder that high school history textbooks, whose form and content were generally set in the early part of the 20th century, should focus on his rampage as an example of what slave rebellions were really like.

History, as Napolean said, is shaped by the communiques of victorious generals. Reconstructing a forgotten episode is entirely laudable and likely very difficult, given the deliberate obfuscation of primary sources. But blaming "Marxist historians" for controlling history and deliberately contorting the narrative of Seminole War is high paranoia and a cheap shot against academia, given that deliberate deceit in explaining, financing, and prosecuting the war was the policy of all concerned long before Marxism existed.

|3.12.07 @ 3:02PM|#

I don't have time to Google it but I read about the Seminoles' exclusion of slave descendants in Wired Magazine... I think the article dealt at least in part with genetic testing to say, yes, these guys have Seminole blood, or something. The article would have to be over a year old.

LarryA|3.12.07 @ 3:13PM|#

Calling Mel Gibson.

tros|3.12.07 @ 3:28PM|#

http://www.floridagathering.info/

http://home.earthlink.net/~kzirk/scroll/Arizona/0709rainbow.html

Rainbow Family nabs suspect

Florida police alert group via Web site.

Printed in the The Arizona Republic on July 9, 1998.

By Hannah Miller

Peace, love, happiness and a suspected murderer.

Those elements combined unexpectedly Friday at the Rainbow Family Gathering in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest, when the Rainbows' unarmed peacekeepers captured a suspect wanted in a brutal Florida murder case.

"In my long law-enforcement career, this is something I have never seen happen," said Sgt. Jim Morse of the Apache County Sheriff's Department.

"With 25,000 people, and being so unstructured, he must've figured it was a good place to hide out. He was wrong."

biologist|3.12.07 @ 4:19PM|#

jimmydageek:

that was the Cherokee Nation, not the Seminole Nation, that refused to recognize the descendants of slaves as tribe members

jimmydageek|3.12.07 @ 5:52PM|#

My apologies to the Seminoles, then, for being misinformed. Greedy Cherokee fucks! :)

jimmydageek|3.12.07 @ 5:56PM|#

Althought, it's possible that the remainder of the 5 "civilized" tribes could follow suit. In preparation for that, I say: those future greedy Indian fucks!

|3.12.07 @ 7:48PM|#

What, exactly, is a 'professional, credentialed historian'? I graduated college with a degree in history, and let me tell you, the only things I learned that were specific to being a historian were 'how to footnote' and 'watch out for historians; they lie a lot.'

Einstein wasn't a 'professional, credentialed' physicist until 1905, but he was publishing in Annalen der Physik in 1900. Should we be careful to include in any discussion of his work that he didn't have official recognition from the Halls of Great Learning? Why would we hold historians to higher standards than physicists?

If you can do the research, and you can document that research, and you can make a compelling argument, then why would your work receive any different treatment than that of Bubba McDoctorate, PhD? It's not like 'professional, credentialed' historians aren't plenty guilty of distortions, misrepresentation of evidence, and selective choice of sources (c.f. 'Black Athena').

Historians are far too convinced they're engaged in social science. They're not; they're engaged in nonfiction writing, and no amount of codification of Marxist, postmodernist, or feminist approaches to history can change that.

In the sense that historians are just writers, the only legitimate 'certification' process should be critical review by other interested scholars, professional or otherwise, and the willingness of the public to buy the books produced.