My hope is that some who read the interviews in this book will be inspired to help lead the way to our continued progress and thereby avoid the historical fate of other countries that also at times were once the envy of the world.
David M. Rubenstein, June 2021
1
Promise and Principle
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
—Preamble to the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776
JILL LEPORE on 400 Years of American History
David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History and Affiliate Professor of Law, Harvard University; author of These Truths: A History of the United States and 13 other books; Staff Writer for the New Yorker
“It is our obligation as historians and as citizens to think about the relationship between the past and the present and to reckon with whether the nation has lived up to the promise of the Declaration of Independence.”
From the beginning, America was an ideal—a new land, with fresh opportunities for those adventuresome enough to pursue them, in the belief that in so doing they could create a new, better life for themselves and their families.
As America grew from outposts and thriving colonies into the United States of America, those responsible for creating a new country and government idealized their invention: their government would provide liberties, freedoms, equality with a benevolence that other governments had never explicitly provided.
These would be guaranteed (albeit only for white males) in founding documents that would take on the character of religious icons—i.e., the Constitution was deserving of faith and allegiance, rather than any leader or group of leaders.
Over the centuries, this experiment in democratic self-governance evolved, as social mores, legal principles, economic realities, foreign challenges, and cultural perspectives changed, though not always for the country’s betterment.
Capturing in an understandable way how this governing experiment occurred over the centuries has always been a challenge for observers of America. Doing so in a way that really captures the perspectives of those who were not the powerful and traditional leaders of American society has truly eluded a great many historians. But not Jill Lepore.
Her epic history of the United States, These Truths, provides a look at the country from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries, in a novel-like writing style that focuses on those whose voices have not always been reflected in comprehensive books about the nation.
That should probably not be a surprise, for Jill Lepore is not only an endowed professor of American history at Harvard University but the author of more than a dozen critically acclaimed books and a regular and much-read contributor to the New Yorker on the subjects of history, law, and public policy.
With These Truths, Jill Lepore also essentially became the first woman to write a comprehensive history of the U.S.—hard to believe, but that is the case. Not surprisingly, she was able to bring a different perspective on some of the most important issues faced by women in our country’s history, such as the right to own property, to vote, to hold office, to be paid fairly, to overcome career challenges, to confront sexual harassment and violence, and, in general, to have equal protection and opportunities.
In recounting the entire history of the United States, Jill Lepore has taken the American experiment—with all of its ideals, challenges, successes, and failures—and provided an overview of so many of the American genes that have given us America in 2021.
I interviewed Jill Lepore at the New-York Historical Society on October 7, 2019. On reflection, my only regret about the interview was that Professor Lepore had not written the U.S. history textbooks I read in high school or college. I know that her doing so would have assured I actually wanted to finish the whole book.
* * *
DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): For most people, writing a nine-hundred-page book on American history would take a lifetime. Did you ever regret doing it while you were working through it?
JILL LEPORE (JL): It was really fun to write, actually. That’s embarrassing to say. I feel bad when people have writer’s block, because I have a problem—I write too much.
I decided to write the book because I’ve been teaching this material for decades now—for maybe thirty years—and over the years I’ve been asked, here and there, would I write a single volume on the American Revolution? I’ve always thought textbook writing would be depressing. It doesn’t really come alive on the page.
I was asked, one more time, to write a single-volume, single-narrator history of the United States as a textbook. As an American political historian, I thought, “I should take up this invitation to do this work of public service.” I thought the nation needed an accessible, new history that took into account the incredible revolution in scholarship over the last half century.
DR: You begin your book with a discussion about the “discovery” of this country by early settlers, and you talk about Christopher Columbus. He has been vilified by some people in recent years. Do you think vilifying him was appropriate?
JL: I think we should spend some time collectively rejecting the either/or there. I understand we’re inclined to ask, “Is he a villain or is he a hero?”
Teachers and textbook writers understand that the story of the United States begins tens of thousands of years ago, with migrations of people we would now call Indigenous Americans, and that this story is vitally important to who we are today. The story of European conquest is a story of tremendous violence, of religious violence, of a legal regime that is in many ways with us and still bears a lot of scrutiny.
That said, it was an interesting and puzzling question for me: Where to start a history of the United States? The easiest, straightforward way is “I’m going to start with the Declaration of Independence.” That’s when the United States begins.
But that doesn’t really offer an explanation for a country wrestling with these problems. How is it that we are descended both from European colonizers and from Indigenous peoples and from Africans kidnapped from their homes and brought as forced laborers? To be a nation, we have to all accept that we’re descended from all these people.
DR: You point out in your book that when Columbus arrived, he didn’t actually hit North America, he hit some islands in the Caribbean, and that there were ten or twenty million people living on the continent. Is that right?
JL: Yes. There were many more tens of millions than that. The European invasion of the Americas was a genocide. A lot of those deaths were caused by disease. The acts of violence, the forced enslavement of Indigenous peoples, the attempt to erase the sophistication and diversity of Native cultures: all this is a legacy whose agony we bear with us still.
The reason I begin with Columbus and 1492 and then move backward to Indigenous life earlier was that I decided to tell the story in large part about how our political arrangements are the product of our technologies of communication as much as our ideas.
It was extremely significant that Columbus could write in his diary and tell the queen and king of Spain he took possession of these lands, and decided that these people have no language, because he didn’t understand it. The technology of writing is hugely important in that historical moment, and we can see the power dynamics differently if we pay attention to technology.
DR: When I was in grade school, I remember people saying that Columbus went to discover a new route to the East, but it wasn’t clear that the world was round and he was maybe risking falling off the globe.
That wasn’t the case. He was just looking for a cheaper way to get to Asia?
JL: Yes. But he was also a former slave trader and, in effect, a crusader. He wasn’t only a seeker of knowledge.
> DR: I like to cite him as the first private equity investor, because he had a deal with Queen Isabella. He got 5 percent of the gold and 10 percent of the profits, but there was no gold and no profits, so in the end he didn’t really make any money out of it. But it’s called the United States of America. Why didn’t Columbus get billing rights?
JL: Let me just take seriously your private equity argument. There is a really important interpretation to offer with regard to the European conquest of the Americas, which is that it makes possible the emergence of capitalism, because of the vast wealth that Europeans extract from the natural resources and from the forced labor of Native peoples and Africans and bring to Europe. That consolidates wealth in a way that makes possible the emergence of capitalism. Setting aside how we want to think about Columbus, on a much larger scale of economic history, it is a really important development.
The naming largely has to do with Amerigo Vespucci, who wrote a book called Mundus Novus (The New World), after his voyage to what came to be called Brazil. When a German mapmaker named Martin Waldseemüller went to make a map in 1507, he didn’t know anything really about Columbus, but he had read Vespucci’s book, which had been widely translated. On the map, as an honor to Vespucci, he called this blob of land “America.”
DR: The original sin of this country was slavery. The English people who came over to colonize weren’t slave owners at the time. How did slavery get started in this country?
JL: Many of the English, in fact, were slave owners. They didn’t bring enslaved people with them to New England, but many of them had already made voyages to or had family that had made voyages to the Caribbean and had slave plantations in places like Barbados and Jamaica.
The Atlantic trade in slaves dates to the middle of the fifteenth century and had its origins in Portugal and Spain engaging in raids of people along the West African coast. That happened before Columbus made his voyage. It’s one of these terrible accidents of history that this new trade in people from West Africa was just beginning to churn when Portugal and Spain began founding colonies in the New World.
DR: I thought originally it was indentured servants who were the precursors of slaves here and who could, after a couple of years, become free.
JL: The first Portuguese slave-trading voyages begin in the 1440s, buying people and selling people as chattel. That is the case throughout South America, throughout the Caribbean, it’s the case in early Virginia, and it is also the case in New England.
Well into the eighteenth century, a lot of white people are indentured servants. They’re not free either. The conflation of “if you’re black, you’re enslaved, and if you’re white, you’re free” begins to emerge by the end of the seventeenth century.
DR: We ultimately had thirteen colonies. After the French and Indian War, the British said, “You need to pay for some of the protection we’ve given you,” and they began to impose taxes. That didn’t work out to the satisfaction of colonial leaders. Do you think that the British could have prevented a revolution from occurring?
JL: A, they did prevent one, and B, there were two. A complicated answer. We now think about how there were thirteen colonies, but really there were twenty-six, because there were the thirteen colonies in the Caribbean, which nobody really distinguished in any meaningful way. From the vantage of London, those are the colonies—all of them.
The Caribbean colonies are the ones England really wanted to keep. Those colonies, which were just brutal death camps for Africans, were the sugar plantations. That was where England was making the most money off its colonies.
The English colonists in the thirteen mainland colonies, when they were protesting first the sugar tax and the stamp tax and then later the taxes in the 1770s, kept trying to recruit the colonial assemblies in Barbados and Jamaica. They’re like, “We’re sending a petition to Parliament complaining about this tax. Are you with us?”
In the Caribbean, these slave-owning plantation owners would say, “We are outnumbered by our enslaved property thirty to one here. So you guys go off and rebel, but we actually need the British army.” During the war, Britain essentially made a choice to give up on the northern colonies, because why keep these sad colonies when all the riches are in the Caribbean?
DR: George Washington was seen as the general who won the war for us. Even if he hadn’t been such a good general, would the British eventually have said, “Good-bye, we really don’t get that much out of the North American colonies”?
JL: Counterfactuals are hard to give a compelling answer to. But I do want to say something about the other revolution, the one the northern colonies lost, which was the revolution of enslaved people who fought on the side of the British during the American Revolution because the British promised them their freedom.
The American victory was an incredible tragedy for enslaved people who were seeking their freedom. Britain had abolished slavery, and they had every reason to expect that the colonies would abolish slavery if they had not become independent.
DR: By the time of the Revolutionary War, there were about 450,000 enslaved Blacks in the United States, and about two million white Americans.
At the beginning of the Revolution, during the Second Continental Congress, a committee was formed to write an explanation of why they would break away from England if they voted to do so. The Declaration of Independence was written largely by Thomas Jefferson. The title of your book relates to the Declaration. Can you explain the title and the inconsistency between “these truths” and the reality?
JL: We all know that Jefferson is famous for “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, and among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
I take the Declaration of Independence very, very seriously as a founding document for this nation. I take very seriously the idea that a nation is the only creation of human civilization that has been able to guarantee rights.
I chose These Truths as the title for my book because of something I don’t think we reckon with fully as citizens—certainly not as often or as deeply as we need to: that an obligation of being a citizen in a democracy is the act of inquiry. Jefferson also says in the Declaration of Independence, “Let [these] facts be submitted to a candid world.”
The document is essentially a product of the Enlightenment and its passion for empirical observation and research and experiment. The nation is an experiment, and this is the statement of our obligation to participate in the experiment and to be keen observers of the results.
But it is also an experiment that has been fraught from the start, from long before the start. Even where Jefferson got those ideas is quite fraught. And it is our obligation as historians and as citizens to think about the relationship between the past and the present and to reckon with whether the nation has lived up to the promise of the Declaration of Independence.
DR: When Jefferson wrote the Declaration, the most important part was not the preamble, it was the sins of King George and so forth. Why is the preamble now perhaps the most famous sentence in the English language? It became the creed of our country, though the country didn’t live up to the creed.
JL: There’s a piece of the story that is really important to remember, which is that when Jefferson talked about equality, that all men are created equal, he was talking in a very narrow political sense about the political equality of propertied, educated men. Why that preamble has become ubiquitous and why it is cherished is not because of what Jefferson meant when he wrote it, but because of the work that Black abolitionists did in the 1820s and 1830s to reinterpret those words.
Go from 1776 to the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. A lot of things happen as part of that celebration. Among other things that happen to be going on in the 1820s is an evangelical religious revival. Many Americans are born again, including many free Blacks in the North. The attraction of evangelical Christianity for them
is the spiritual call of equality. Male or female, Black or white, we are all equal before God.
A lot of preaching Black abolitionists in the North reinterpret the equality of the Declaration of Independence as a universal equality of all people. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”—well, then, we can’t have slavery. And it becomes the manifesto for the abolitionist movement. That’s the Declaration of Independence we cherish.
DR: When Abraham Lincoln gave his Gettysburg Address, he was referring to the preamble, and he was in effect saying that all white and all Black people should be equal. Is that right?
JL: Right. That’s what people know about the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858, when they’re both running for a Senate seat in Illinois. Stephen Douglas says, “The Declaration of Independence was never meant to include Black people.” Lincoln says, “No, show me where in these documents it says this is a white man’s government.”
Lincoln has largely gotten that argument from Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist who had been born into slavery and escaped. Douglass had been part of that movement to reinterpret the Declaration of Independence.
And Lincoln constitutionalizes that. That’s what the struggle of the Civil War is over. But it becomes the new constitutional truth of the nation.
DR: Reconstruction, which was largely a disaster in the 1870s and ’80s, led to Jim Crow laws, the Ku Klux Klan, and so forth. Do you think any of that could have been prevented if Lincoln had survived?
JL: The Compromise of 1877 [which resolved the 1876 presidential election by having federal soldiers leave the southern states] is what people generally refer to when they say Reconstruction failed. Well before that, during Andrew Johnson’s besmirched presidency, the Confederacy is allowed to win the peace. That appeasement of the Confederate South is the single worst thing that happened in American history, in my view.
The American Experiment Page 3