Yesterday was the last of three sessions for my Osher class “Forgotten Founders: The Pinckney Family of South Carolina,” and, as usual, I learned at least as much as the members of the class.
I’m not going to attempt to summarize everything that I included in this class – you can thank me later – but I do want to share four ideas that I developed during the class. These ideas all relate to the question of the sources of information about history. We have all heard that “the winners get to tell the story,” and that’s true. But it’s also true that it’s difficult to dislodge a commonly believed historical narrative, even in the face of credible information that challenges it.
When we study the history of colonial America, we circumscribe it by looking at the 13 colonies that declared independence in 1775 and examine only the colonial history of those colonies. But Britain had 25 colonies in 1775 – the 13 that we know about plus six colonies in the Caribbean, 4 in Canada, and 2 that were ceded to Britain by Spain after the French and Indian War (East Florida and West Florida). I got hints about this when I was doing some genealogy research a few years ago and read about the founding of the colony of South Carolina. One idea stood out to me: that South Carolina might more accurately be seen as a colony of Barbados than a colony of Britain. When I began to put together this class on the Pinckney family, I revisited this idea and found a book that helped me understand this.
This book broadened my perspective of Britain’s colonies in the 18th century, and helped me develop a broader view of the historical setting in which American independence occurred.
The Southern Theater of the American Revolution was much more complicated and important than I had understood. The mainstream narrative acknowledged the Revolution in the South only after the defeat at Saratoga and the eventual siege (and fall) of Charleston in 1780. But there was more – much more – happening earlier – much earlier – in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Again, I came across a book that helped me understand this.
For the first two decades after the ratification of the Constitution in 1788, the evolution of America’s new political institutions was constantly challenged by events happening in Europe. Again, the mainstream narrative of American history focuses on what’s happening in the United States during the Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison initiatives. But the United States at this time was a bit player on an international stage dominated by three great empires – Britain, France, and Spain. The interplay among these empires dominated international economics, politics, and diplomacy. The United States, without an Army or Navy at the beginning of the 1790s, was playing in an arena it neither understood nor controlled. Britain and France had been at war off and on throughout the 18th century; they continued to be at war in the 1790s and in the early years of the 19th century. The United States was buffeted by the turmoil coming from Europe, and it’s impossible to understand what was happening in the US without insight into what was happening in Europe.
You should not be surprised by now that there’s a book on this topic.
This book documents the interaction between two of these European empires – Russia and France – and the newly hatched United States government. It is wonderfully and engagingly written.
The story of the writing of the Constitution of 1787 is more complicated than the mainstream narrative has led us to believe. Specifically, the idea that James Madison and the Virginia delegation to the Constitutional Convention were the source for the main ideas that led to the format of government laid out in the document has been credibly challenged – for more than 200 years – by a counter-narrative that Charles Pinckney of South Carolina was responsible for these ideas. And of course, there’s a book about this.
The relevant thing to know about this controversy is that the Pinckney Draft was dismissed by historians even when the contribution of this draft was acknowledged by the 1880s or so. But in the wake of the Civil War, historians (who at that point were mostly trained in the Ivy League institutions in the North) did not want to accept or promulgate any narrative that gave the South – and particularly South Carolina – credit for anything good that happened in the founding era.
And it was awesome, fun, and very eye opening in regard to my northern education of the civil war. History of the development of our constitution and institutions, as well as the impressive men and women who did so much to build the country opened my eyes to the south before the Civil War. A great class for all of us.