Part 4:
Anderson’s work clears an opening for a more cyclical, longer view of revolutions and backlashes in the writing of history.
The American Revolution, then, wasn’t about natural rights, much less about abolition. It didn’t inspire “all our current egalitarian thinking” (as Wood insisted in Radicalism), but more of the opposite: a backlash. Anderson finds plenty of evidence in the early republic that makes gradual emancipation in the North look like surface, feel-good reform, not the world-historical event presaging equality that Wood and many other historians see. The Naturalization Act of 1790 granted citizen status explicitly and solely to white immigrants. The 1790s Uniform Militia Act made every white able-bodied man subject to militia duty and required them to possess arms, in effect nationalizing the whiteness of guns. Anderson sees an early-emerging pattern of light punishments for white rebels in the cases of Shays’ Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion but overwhelming force used against enslaved freedom fighters. The comparison may not be quite right, because white protesters—calling themselves regulators, not rebels—didn’t have to exert as much violence as enslaved rebels, who fought for their lives. Still, the trend is telling. Even when Black people took up arms for the republic, as with the freemen of color militia in New Orleans who fought with General Andrew Jackson in the War of 1812, or with the approval of local communities, as in important instances of violent resistance against slave catchers, the result merely “gave the illusion of a right of self-defense for Black people.” The key variable, again, wasn’t any individual or collective right to bear arms, or a conflict between two meanings of the Second Amendment: it was anti-Black racism.
Even the Civil War didn’t undo this enduring core of racism. Anderson cites Kellie Carter Jackson, whose Force and Freedom (2019) offers the most systematic study to date of how Black abolitionists dealt with the question of violent means. “The core of white supremacy was not chattel slavery,” Jackson writes, “but anti-blackness.” This claim can sound like a tautology—racism derived from racism—until we realize the limits of the counterargument, on which much of the antislavery political tradition rested, was that slavery, inherently immoral, was the problem and its end, gradual or immediate, the complete solution. Where historians like Du Bois and Eric Foner have stressed a glass half full during Reconstruction—when Black individuals and communities successfully defended themselves to the point (and necessity) of parading regularly with rifles—Anderson asks us to reflect on the extreme backlash, justified by President Andrew Johnson and epitomized by occasions in South Carolina and Louisiana when Blacks shooting guns at white Klansmen and rioters led to full out massacre—of Blacks. To Anderson, there is a straight line from the Klan-led Colfax Massacre of 1873 to the dishonorable discharging (and thus disarming) of Black U.S. soldiers in Brownsville, Texas, in 1906 to the controversies around policing today, where the double standard of Second Amendment enforcement, more than the police power itself, becomes fatal. She doesn’t have to invoke lynching as a reality or a metaphor because the gun double standard has been more pervasive and continuous. The Second becomes just as central to the anti-Black political order today as the Three-Fifths Compromise was during the age of slavery.
Anderson doesn’t tell the whole story of the Second Amendment: her account of its origins and uses is a polemical corrective, not the last word or the balanced account that Noah Shusterman provided in Armed Citizens: The Road from Ancient Rome to the Second Amendment (2020). Once we see the militia as shock troops of slavery and Jim Crow, though, it is hard to take as much inspiration from fears of the kinds of standing armies which in Black American history have on more than one occasion been a liberating force.
This story will be tough to swallow for those who reject what James Oakes callsthe new “racial consensus history,” according to which racism not only runs deep in the American grain but is its actual DNA—a metaphor Nikole Hannah-Jones used in her lead essay to the Times’s 1619 Project and which Anderson employs once in an aside. The critics of racial consensus history insist that this isn’t history at all: it ignores any change, and is sure to be politically debilitating. As Matthew Karp recently lamented in Harper’s, “Progress is dead; the future cannot be believed; all we have left is the past, which must therefore be held responsible for the atrocities of the present.” (Never mind that Hannah-Jones herself insists on change: “black Americans have made astounding progress,” she wrote in her 1619 Project contribution, “not only for ourselves but also for all Americans.”)
This is often a critique from the left, very different from Wood’s selective evacuation of the present and all politics from his account of an ancient founding that ironically leads to an implicitly white middle-class modernity. It suggests, however, that progressive history, not to mention progressive politics, may be as much in thrall to narratives built around revolutions as is founders history à laWood. Karp rightly complains that origins stories—whether about 1619 or 1776—are being asked to carry too much political weight, but pointing to the Civil War or the civil rights movement as the real American revolution does not solve the problem. In a Public Books essay criticizing Walter Johnson’s emphasis on continuities in his recent history of St. Louis, The Broken Heart of America, Steven Hahn tries to find a middle ground by arguing that “history can be about continuities but it is also about change, and analytical concepts are useful to the extent that they can account for and incorporate change.” What this misses is that some concepts, like race itself, are precisely about how some people have made history by denying to others the possibility of change. Accounts of history that stress continuity aren’t necessarily bad history. They’re just unsettling, especially if the past is full of bad stuff that can’t be recycled as the noble source of our political system, national identity, or reform agendas.
Saying that good history has to reveal change or progress in the nation is just as risky as saying the past has no relation to the present.
Where does this debate leave us? Saying that good history has to reveal change or progress in the nation is just as risky as saying the past has no relation to the present. Much can be explained by an American history that instead stresses revolutions and reactions. Indeed, the fact that backlashes happen repeatedly suggests that American revolutions aren’t all they’re sometimes cracked up to be. It may be time to admit that our tendency to think of revolutions as epochal transformations, rather than as circular turns, has not been conducive to understanding the power of racism’s repeated reinventions, which not a few have echoed Amiri Baraka in calling the “changing same.” We can recognize these cyclical processes without succumbing to them; doing so might even help us see how persistent injustice works differently today.
Anderson’s work clears an opening for a more cyclical, longer view of struggles and backlashes than is possible in histories that see the Civil War as the more revolutionary American Revolution or, in Foner’s words, our “Second Founding” (a view that Beard pioneered). In the United States as elsewhere, revolutions and civil wars have enslaved as well as liberated. For all their radicalism, they have consistently led to backlashes, sometimes in the form of new constitutions. At the same time, saying that racism is the fundamental fact of U.S. history will not supply a political strategy for the present any more than stressing capitalism, conflating racism and capitalism, or ignoring both. Its virtue is to correct the errors of fact and focus that, in Wood’s histories, leave us strikingly unable to see how we got where we are.
David Waldstreicher is Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. A historian of early and nineteenth-century America, he is author of Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (2009), Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery and the American Revolution (2004), and In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (1997).
Anderson’s work clears an opening for a more cyclical, longer view of revolutions and backlashes in the writing of history.
The American Revolution, then, wasn’t about natural rights, much less about abolition. It didn’t inspire “all our current egalitarian thinking” (as Wood insisted in Radicalism), but more of the opposite: a backlash. Anderson finds plenty of evidence in the early republic that makes gradual emancipation in the North look like surface, feel-good reform, not the world-historical event presaging equality that Wood and many other historians see. The Naturalization Act of 1790 granted citizen status explicitly and solely to white immigrants. The 1790s Uniform Militia Act made every white able-bodied man subject to militia duty and required them to possess arms, in effect nationalizing the whiteness of guns. Anderson sees an early-emerging pattern of light punishments for white rebels in the cases of Shays’ Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion but overwhelming force used against enslaved freedom fighters. The comparison may not be quite right, because white protesters—calling themselves regulators, not rebels—didn’t have to exert as much violence as enslaved rebels, who fought for their lives. Still, the trend is telling. Even when Black people took up arms for the republic, as with the freemen of color militia in New Orleans who fought with General Andrew Jackson in the War of 1812, or with the approval of local communities, as in important instances of violent resistance against slave catchers, the result merely “gave the illusion of a right of self-defense for Black people.” The key variable, again, wasn’t any individual or collective right to bear arms, or a conflict between two meanings of the Second Amendment: it was anti-Black racism.
Even the Civil War didn’t undo this enduring core of racism. Anderson cites Kellie Carter Jackson, whose Force and Freedom (2019) offers the most systematic study to date of how Black abolitionists dealt with the question of violent means. “The core of white supremacy was not chattel slavery,” Jackson writes, “but anti-blackness.” This claim can sound like a tautology—racism derived from racism—until we realize the limits of the counterargument, on which much of the antislavery political tradition rested, was that slavery, inherently immoral, was the problem and its end, gradual or immediate, the complete solution. Where historians like Du Bois and Eric Foner have stressed a glass half full during Reconstruction—when Black individuals and communities successfully defended themselves to the point (and necessity) of parading regularly with rifles—Anderson asks us to reflect on the extreme backlash, justified by President Andrew Johnson and epitomized by occasions in South Carolina and Louisiana when Blacks shooting guns at white Klansmen and rioters led to full out massacre—of Blacks. To Anderson, there is a straight line from the Klan-led Colfax Massacre of 1873 to the dishonorable discharging (and thus disarming) of Black U.S. soldiers in Brownsville, Texas, in 1906 to the controversies around policing today, where the double standard of Second Amendment enforcement, more than the police power itself, becomes fatal. She doesn’t have to invoke lynching as a reality or a metaphor because the gun double standard has been more pervasive and continuous. The Second becomes just as central to the anti-Black political order today as the Three-Fifths Compromise was during the age of slavery.
Anderson doesn’t tell the whole story of the Second Amendment: her account of its origins and uses is a polemical corrective, not the last word or the balanced account that Noah Shusterman provided in Armed Citizens: The Road from Ancient Rome to the Second Amendment (2020). Once we see the militia as shock troops of slavery and Jim Crow, though, it is hard to take as much inspiration from fears of the kinds of standing armies which in Black American history have on more than one occasion been a liberating force.
This story will be tough to swallow for those who reject what James Oakes callsthe new “racial consensus history,” according to which racism not only runs deep in the American grain but is its actual DNA—a metaphor Nikole Hannah-Jones used in her lead essay to the Times’s 1619 Project and which Anderson employs once in an aside. The critics of racial consensus history insist that this isn’t history at all: it ignores any change, and is sure to be politically debilitating. As Matthew Karp recently lamented in Harper’s, “Progress is dead; the future cannot be believed; all we have left is the past, which must therefore be held responsible for the atrocities of the present.” (Never mind that Hannah-Jones herself insists on change: “black Americans have made astounding progress,” she wrote in her 1619 Project contribution, “not only for ourselves but also for all Americans.”)
This is often a critique from the left, very different from Wood’s selective evacuation of the present and all politics from his account of an ancient founding that ironically leads to an implicitly white middle-class modernity. It suggests, however, that progressive history, not to mention progressive politics, may be as much in thrall to narratives built around revolutions as is founders history à laWood. Karp rightly complains that origins stories—whether about 1619 or 1776—are being asked to carry too much political weight, but pointing to the Civil War or the civil rights movement as the real American revolution does not solve the problem. In a Public Books essay criticizing Walter Johnson’s emphasis on continuities in his recent history of St. Louis, The Broken Heart of America, Steven Hahn tries to find a middle ground by arguing that “history can be about continuities but it is also about change, and analytical concepts are useful to the extent that they can account for and incorporate change.” What this misses is that some concepts, like race itself, are precisely about how some people have made history by denying to others the possibility of change. Accounts of history that stress continuity aren’t necessarily bad history. They’re just unsettling, especially if the past is full of bad stuff that can’t be recycled as the noble source of our political system, national identity, or reform agendas.
Saying that good history has to reveal change or progress in the nation is just as risky as saying the past has no relation to the present.
Where does this debate leave us? Saying that good history has to reveal change or progress in the nation is just as risky as saying the past has no relation to the present. Much can be explained by an American history that instead stresses revolutions and reactions. Indeed, the fact that backlashes happen repeatedly suggests that American revolutions aren’t all they’re sometimes cracked up to be. It may be time to admit that our tendency to think of revolutions as epochal transformations, rather than as circular turns, has not been conducive to understanding the power of racism’s repeated reinventions, which not a few have echoed Amiri Baraka in calling the “changing same.” We can recognize these cyclical processes without succumbing to them; doing so might even help us see how persistent injustice works differently today.
Anderson’s work clears an opening for a more cyclical, longer view of struggles and backlashes than is possible in histories that see the Civil War as the more revolutionary American Revolution or, in Foner’s words, our “Second Founding” (a view that Beard pioneered). In the United States as elsewhere, revolutions and civil wars have enslaved as well as liberated. For all their radicalism, they have consistently led to backlashes, sometimes in the form of new constitutions. At the same time, saying that racism is the fundamental fact of U.S. history will not supply a political strategy for the present any more than stressing capitalism, conflating racism and capitalism, or ignoring both. Its virtue is to correct the errors of fact and focus that, in Wood’s histories, leave us strikingly unable to see how we got where we are.
David Waldstreicher is Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. A historian of early and nineteenth-century America, he is author of Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (2009), Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery and the American Revolution (2004), and In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (1997).
