Parker Potter is a former archaeologist and historian, and a retired lawyer. He is currently a semi-professional dogwalker who lives and works in Contoocook.
On my daily morning walk, I saw what I took to be a tulip poplar tree. Whatever kind of tree it actually was, it made me think of a rather famous tulip poplar, Maryland’s Liberty Tree.
That tree stood on the campus of St. John’s College, in Annapolis, Maryland, until Hurricane Hugo took it down in the late 1990s, and I walked by it almost every day when I worked as a historical archaeologist in Annapolis in the mid-1980s.
As the story goes, patriots gathered under the Liberty Tree to discuss revolutionary politics and plan their roles in the American Revolution.
Thinking about Maryland’s Liberty Tree made me think about our country’s founders and the amazing things they did in the 1770s and 1780s. They invented a brand new country. How many times in history has that happened?
Our founders declared independence from England, fought for it, wrote a Constitution, and adopted it. Seeing all the dysfunction in Washington today makes the work of our founders seem all the more impressive. Can you imagine what would happen if today’s Congress were faced with such a monumental task?
But our founders were not writing on a blank continent; there were people and nations here long before Europeans first arrived. And some of the land that Europeans took from Native people was worked by people who Europeans took from their native lands in Africa.
Not only did our founders create a new country, but those who came before them created and passed along to the generation of our founders a system of slavery unlike anything they ever knew or saw in their European homelands.
While expressing lofty principles concerning the rights of man, our founders did so in documents that extended the definition of humanity only so far, and not far enough to embrace Black Africans, the Native people of North America, or women of any color.
Our founders, as brilliant as some of them were, were incapable of seeing themselves as hypocritical when they proclaimed that “all men are created equal” while calling America’s first people “merciless Indian Savages” in the Declaration of Independence, or when they counted enslaved Africans as three-fifths of a person in the Constitution.
They simply did not recognize Native people or Black Africans as men. We now know that they were wrong about that. Let me say it again: We now know that they were wrong.
The idea that our founders were wrong on this point should not be a divisive concept. If it is, our country is in a world of hurt.
In recognition that our founders were wrong, and in an attempt to right their wrongs, we have amended the Constitution that they gave us. Whether our attempts at correction have been successful is a question for another day.
Here is my point for today. The 1619 Project seeks to illuminate the role of slavery in the establishment of our country. And remember, slavery on this continent had a five or six-generation head start on the birth of our nation.
Opponents of the 1619 Project see it as a cancel-culture threat to 1776 and the glory of our founders. However, it is not either/or, me or you, or a zero-sum game.
Our founders did an amazing thing. But they did so while standing on, and perpetuating, a fundamental error about the humanity of people who were not white like them.
It seems to me that America would be a better place if we all could try to build the country our founders would have built if they had not made the mistake of failing to see the humanity that they shared with Africans and Native people.