“Barbados has a fascinating past,” says a brightly-colored brochure from Hilton Grand Vacations featuring the island’s blue-green waters and beautiful sand beaches. “Wherever you go, you’ll be pacing through history.” The brochure advises visitors to take the “rum tour” and visit the St. Nicholas Abbey Plantation, built during the height of Barbodos’ wealth in the seventeenth century.
The brochure does mention the “painful history” of slave labor, which, it explains, can be reviewed at the Museum & Historical Society. Then it lists where to eat and the best beaches.
How lightly the past sometimes weighs on the present!
I have just written a paper about Barbados for a history class. Barbados’s history was grim. Barbados was the first English colony to take advantage of the rising English demand for sugar. By 1680 Barbardos was the richest of England’s colonies. It was the best of times and the worst of times, depending on who you were.
It does not surprise me that Paul Finkelman (cited in Allen Guelzo’s article in National Review) argues as he does—he’s long twisted history to promote hostility toward the Aerican Founders. What is more surprising is that most of the Constitution’s defenders, including Prof. Guelzo, have overlooked the actual reasons for the three-fifths clause, which, of course, is Exhibit A in the case against the Constitution.
In the course of researching my 2015 article on the use of financial phrases in the Constitution, I uncovered those actual reasons. They should not be so obscure: the apportionment formula flowed from the framers theories about representation and wealth rather than from any desire to accommodate slavery per se. Here is the relevant excerpt from my article. What the Constitution Means by “Duties, Imposts, and Excises”—and Taxes (Direct or Otherwise), 66 Case Western Res. L. Rev. 297 (2015). The many footnote citations are omitted:
Agreeing on the general principle of apportionment was less difficult than settling on a formula applying it. The Confederation system of allocating requisitions by state land values had proved impractical. Apportionment by actual taxes paid seemed to be likewise unworkable. A new formula was needed.
The starting point in the search was collective agreement that each state’s contribution in federal taxes would be a function of (1) the state’s population (2) and its wealth. Fortunately, experience strongly suggested that, for the most part, wealth followed population. In other words, population usually was a good proxy for wealth. Madison reported Connecticut’s William Samuel Johnson as telling the Constitutional Convention that “wealth and population were the true, equitable rule of representation; but … these two principles resolved themselves into one; population being the best measure of wealth.”
What was true in general, however, was not true always. Slavery created a valuation problem. Although few of the framers thought slavery was a good thing, slavery was a fact and they had to address the conundrum it created. The conundrum was this:
These days, the judgment of history saturates our public discourse. We battle over the meaning of Confederate statues; we discuss reparations for slavery; even the “#MeToo” movement brings the transgressions of the past into the present. Unfortunately, all this division is breaking the nation apart.
In North Carolina, there is a way to address the past in a positive way. It is by pardoning a governor who, during Reconstruction, put down an uprising of the Ku Klux Klan—and was impeached for it. Strangely enough, in spite of all the chatter these days about atoning for the sins of the past, obtaining a posthumous pardon for the governor has been impossible so far.
Governor William Woods Holden, impeached in 1871.
I know this because Arch T. Allen, a retired attorney in Raleigh, conducted an extensive study of Holden in 2010 and petitioned the North Carolina state legislature to pardon him. Allen’s paper was reviewed by several prominent historians in the state, so it is accurate.[1] Here is the story.
In 1868, William W. Holden was elected governor of North Carolina. “There had been little Klan activity in the state prior to the 1868 elections,” writes Allen, “but after the Republican victories violence erupted in several parts of the state. . . . The Klan committed arson, lynching, and political assassination, including one of a white Republic sheriff by ambush.” A black Republican, Wyatt Outlaw, was dragged from his home and hanged; four Klan members killed Republican senator John W. Stephens by cutting his throat and stabbing him in the heart. Several children were killed.
Robert H. Nelson died suddenly last December, while he was in Helsinki, Finland, to give a talk. Nelson was a respected—and unconventional—economist. In preparing a memorial essay about him, I read through many of his writings and saw how an economist can use history to gain insight. In this short space I’d like to concentrate on just one topic—federal land management in the United States.
In the early 1980s Nelson worked for the Interior Department’s Office of Policy Analysis (otherwise known as the “Office of Smart Guys,” according to my husband, who directed the office at the time). Part of his research involved reviewing the history of federal land ownership.
He made two important discoveries.
First, he discovered the utter failure of federal “scientific management” of land.[1] The federal government owns large swaths of land in the West because the Progressive movement of the late nineteenth century halted its dispersal to the private sector. Suspicious of big companies (the trust-busting Theodore Roosevelt was a hero), Progressives thought that big projects like managing land should be in the hands of the federal government, which would hire experts and leave them free to manage “scientifically” without political interference.
The Chronicle of Higher Education recently featured Steven Pinker, a well-known philosopher and author of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. What interested the Chronicle most was Pinker’s optimism. As interviewer Tom Bartlett said, ”Pinker writes that intellectuals hate ‘the idea of progress’ while happily enjoying its multitudinous comforts (‘they prefer to have their surgery with anesthesia’).”[1] Pinker, in contrast, believes that “today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species’ time on earth,” as he wrote in the New Republic in 2007.
It does seem that many intellectuals are pessimistic about the future and also pessimistic about the past. That is, they devalue the progress that has taken place. For example, the status of women has changed enormously since the 1960s. (When I started working, prominent magazines like Time didn’t hire women reporters, just researchers who worked with male reporters). But Laurie Penny, a London writer, recently disparaged the positive story of “empowerment” she was taught to believe in. She can’t get beyond the fact that “behind every one of the brave and brilliant women I sketched in my schoolbooks were a great many men who tried to destroy her.”[2]
Robert J. Norell wrote a devastating book about the experience of Jim Crow (the racial segregation following Reconstruction and continuing until the civil rights movement). The book, The House I Live In, was written partly to show how much race relations have improved in the United States. But (unlike his more recent Up from Slavery, about Booker T. Washington) it received a cold shoulder, especially from academics. The story of progress is not all that attractive, it seems.
