Last year, during the height of agitation over whether or not to tear down statues, the Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C.’s Lincoln Park came under scrutiny. The statue, dedicated in 1876, shows Abraham Lincoln freeing a slave who is crouched below him.
The statue’s subordination of the slave to a white man has spurred calls for its removal. And those calls led to the discovery of a previously unknown letter from famed orator Frederick Douglass.
The debate over the statue continues, but my purpose here is to discuss the discovery of Douglass’s letter and how it reflects, if I may say so, a bias of historians.
The discovery of this “vital American artifact” is grippingly told by Ted Mann in the Wall Street Journal. Last summer two historians were debating the question of whether the statue should be taken down, and one commented that even Frederick Douglass, who had spoken at the 1876 dedication, had expressed unhappiness with it.
But the only known source of that information was from a 1916 book by a person who had attended the dedication.
So, one of the professors did a Google search to find more information. It took 20 minutes or so, using Newspapers.com, to find an 1876 letter, signed by Douglass and published in the National Republican under the title “A Suggestion.” In part, it said:
“The negro here, though rising, is still on his knees and nude. What I want to see before I die is a monument representing the negro, not couchant on his knees like a four-footed animal, but erect on his feet like a man.”
Frederick Douglass is probably one of the most studied persons in American history. Yet no historian had come across this letter. When David Bight, a biographer of Douglass, heard about it, he was “practically giddy,” Scott Sandage, the discoverer of the letter, told the Journal..
Now how can this upbeat story reflect bias? Historians love primary sources—defined as “immediate, first-hand accounts of a topic, from people who had a direct connection with it”—as they should. But some legitimate primary sources, such as newspaper articles, seem to be beneath their dignity. Rather, the Holy Grail is archival sources, especially those that no one has seen or explored before.
Thus if it is not archival, it may not be worth investigating.
I have experienced this bias personally. I sought to publish an article about correspondence schools in the United States from 1890 to the 1920s. The article was rejected by a history journal and the editor’s note included this:
“Chiefly, insufficient critical engagement with primary source material makes the manuscript a problematic match for [this publication]. The article makes little if any use of archival sources, instead apparently relying on quotations from secondary sources and rhetorical evidence . . . .”
I had used contemporary newspaper and magazine articles, contemporary speeches, contemporary documents, and contemporary publications by the schools themselves (and one archival source from a University of Wisconsin collection of letters). Technically, these are all primary sources.
I had also quoted one of the few experts on correspondence schools as saying, “the dearth of manuscript sources helps explain the paucity of articles and books on this important segment of American education.”[1] My goal was to erase that paucity in order to inform historians and others about a rarely discussed topic, American correspondence schools. But without archival or manuscript sources, it seemed impossible, even prohibited. (Fortunately, another journal has accepted my article.)
Of course, I’m not opposed to archival research. In my study of the Industrial Revolution I came across impressive archival research based on the business records of such figures as iron magnate Ambrose Crowley, cotton mill owner Samuel Oldnow, and ceramicist Josiah Wedgwood . These caches of material shed light on how bosses viewed their workers at the time. In my study of primogeniture in medieval Europe, I found research on archival charters authorizing gifts to the Catholic Church; when analyzed, they debunked some of the assumptions about the rigidity of heirship rules. Yet sometimes the obligation to cover all the details can deaden the excitement of the findings and perhaps even fail to encourage insightful analyses.
All in all, I am not surprised that Douglass’s letter went unnoticed for nearly a century and a half—simply because it had appeared in a newspaper
[1] Robert L. Hampel, “The National Home Study Council, 1926–1942,” American Journal of Distance Education 23, no. 1 (2009): 4-19, at 5.
Image of Emancipation Statue in Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C., by David King is licensed by CC under 2.0.
Very interesting. And amusing.
Re the “bias of historians,” I’m less charitable. There’s a good deal of scientism among today’s historians. The idea that newspaper reports from the time aren’t original sources is not supported by any epistemological criteria; it’s just pretending to be “data-driven” instead of opinion driven. The same historians will blather on endlessly about “lived-experience” (including their own).
The real criteria for things selected as “evidence” seem to reflect first the political biases of the contemporary historian, and secondly whether the historian can concoct a “narrative” that the stuff qualifies as original and archival – neither of which is an epistemological criterion.
But OK, I’ll be charitable: the editorial response you received is not thoughtful. (That’s much more charitable than the first thing that came to mind. Heh!)