The Land That Never Has Been Yet, Ep 1

A rich man's revolt

The award-winning author Isabel Wilkerson wrote the following this past week, in reference to Memorial Day, but it sums up why I am doing this series, which is a group listen of Scene on Radio Season Four: The Land That Never Has Been Yet.

“A tragedy that so much of our country’s history has been withheld from us — we don’t know who we are as a nation, don’t know what we’re celebrating, don’t know how we got to where we are, and thus we don’t know how to fix what ails and divides us. It’s time that we learn our history and act upon it for the salvation of our democracy.”

—Isabel Wilkerson

It’s time to take a clear-eyed look at history, so we can have a better idea of what ails and divides us and how to take action. Let’s dive in.

I highly recommend listening to the entire episode yourself, as the summary below is only a brief overview. The work of John Biewen, with the perspective and scholarship of Chenjerai Kumanyika, is not to be missed.

EPISODE ONE: A RICH MAN’S REVOLT

Scene One:

The series starts at Oconaluftee Indian Village, in the Great Smokey Mountains of western North Carolina, run by the Cherokee Historical Association. This region is home to what is called the Eastern Band of Cherokee and the village recreates what life looked like in the 1750s.

In the 1830s, the US government forced removal of the Cherokee, among other tribes, to Oklahoma—a brutal march now referred to as the Trail of Tears. An estimated 4,000 people lost their lives to hunger, cold, and disease. The Eastern Band of Cherokee—now some 16,000 members—are descended from those who returned home, or hid in the hills to avoid removal.

In Cherokee culture, the Council of Seven Women—consisting of one female elder from each of the clans—carried the most influence. Decisions were made by community consensus and even children had input. It could take a month for a tribe to reach a decision about whether or not they wanted to do business with a particular trader, which drove Europeans nuts.

If the community decided to go to war, a male war chief would be appointed by the council (as mothers and grandmothers, they would be losing husbands and sons in any fighting). In times of peace there was a different male chief appointed, but he was not a decider—his role was to execute the decisions the community had reached by consensus.

Women had equal say in decision making. For any Cherokee agreement to be binding, the women had to participate. They kept asking the colonial settlers, when only men showed up to do business, “Where are your women?”

Oconaluftee Indian Village : the Cherokee were not nomadic hunters/gatherers and did not live in teepees

There was also concern for the common good built into the community. Every community had a storehouse of supplies for use by the community. Everyone got fed, without question. Untold thousands of white settlers, especially those struggling to get by, defected and joined Native communities and were welcomed.

As Barbara Duncan, retired folklorist who worked for the Museum of the Cherokee Indian says, “European culture is based on acquiring things—we see it in our fairy tales. Characters go out to seek their fortunes and a happy ending is gaining a pot of gold and elevating your social status. But in American Indian stories, a happy ending is someone learns a lesson that helps him get along with other people.”

John Biewen asks: There are phrases that we love to use in describing what we think of as our form of democracy, like “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” Which of those two systems would you say better fits that description?

Duncan: “The Cherokee one...”

***
Scene Two:

Mount Vernon, George Washington’s estate and slave labor camp in northern Virginia. Originally 7,500 acres, it encompassed five different farms and was run on the forced labor of several hundred enslaved people.

George Washington had tremendous wealth. He was fourth-generation American gentry, one of the very richest men in the colonies at the time of the Revolution—thanks in part to his wife’s inherited wealth, which was even greater than his own. As a young man, he acquired land in Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and New York.

Woody Holton, professor of American History at University of South Carolina, asks the pertinent question: Why would the people at the top of the hierarchy, why would they be the ones starting a revolution?

Throughout history, revolutions have been primarily class-based—poor and working people overthrowing the rich elite. That is not the case here. But most of the founding fathers did not originally want to split from Britain.

As Holton says: They are protesting the British but they do not want independence. Really, they want to turn back the clock to how things had been in 1763.

In the 1750s, the Seven Years War is being fought between the British and the French, both eager to claim chunks of North America. Because the British do not have much money, they promise land to their soldiers instead—granting them tracks of what would become Ohio.

Once they win over the French, the British are faced with debts, and a frontier border they must defend. Trying to avoid ongoing violence with the Indigenous tribes, King George issues a royal proclamation in 1763 that instructs colonial settlers not to travel or settle west of the Appalachians—making the Ohio land virtually worthless.

The decree frustrates the plans of Washington and some of his fellow elite Virginians, like Jefferson and Madison. They wanted to profit from their western property, but now they can’t.

Two years later the Stamp Act of 1765, and the tax on tea that led to the Boston Tea Party, would take place, but many historians argue the Proclamation of 1763 was an early break in the relationship.

“it was their single largest source of income,” says Holton, “and the British cut it off. And so we know that was one of the things that drove them into the revolution.”

Wealthy men wanting to profit is quite a theme in US history.
The other theme: race and racial grievance.

***
Scene Three:

In 1774, the governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, was approached by a group of enslaved Black men—who offered to fight for the British against the American rebels in exchange for their freedom. Dunmore turned them down, but they kept coming. Finally, in late 1775, Dunmore formed the Ethiopian Regiment—a troop of about 200 men who had escaped slave camps.

The regiment defeated a colonial militia and captured two rebel colonels—one of whom was the former owner of a regiment soldier. Dunmore offered freedom to any slaves who could escape their masters and join the British. This alliance infuriated the white colonists and became the thing that turned people.

As Holton says: “…if you really forced me… to put the motives of the American Revolution into a single phrase, it would be resistance to British meddling… not just general meddling, but meddling in those relationships, especially relationships between the gentry and the slaves, and earlier than that the gentry relationship with Native Americans.”

John Biewen: “And how much of it was about, ‘We want to create a democracy. We want to be free so we can create a democracy on these shores.’”

Holton: “None. None on the part of most elites.”

***
Conclusion (paraphrased):

John Biewen: So you take something like the phrase, “All men are created equal” from the Declaration of Independence. And people have attached tremendous meaning to that phrase…

But if you look at what Thomas Jefferson meant when he wrote those words—Woody Holton and I talked about this, and he thinks that it was kind of, in part, a rhetorical flourish of a sort.

These Enlightenment ideas were out there, in the air. And he grabbed this idea because it's going to make this whole thing sound really noble and lofty.

But then in another way… Jefferson is saying, hey, King of England, guys like me and Washington and Ben Franklin who are just kind of rich white guys but we're not actual nobility or royalty, you know what? We're as good as you are. And we have the right to govern ourselves.

So really, in a way, what the founders of the United States were saying is, we don't want to be part of this club anymore, the British Empire. Because you're imposing rules on us that we don't like, rules that impinge on our ability to do the stuff we've been doing, which, well, is to exploit and subjugate these people that we're holding captive.

And of course, underlying that is the message: you're eating into our business opportunities and our profits.

…the most important thing that got destroyed, of course, was many, many actual lives. By some estimates, tens of millions of indigenous people died from disease and genocide in the several centuries’ process that led to the creation and the founding of the United States.

…there were five hundred, more than five hundred native tribes in what is now the United States. Not all were matrilineal or consensus-based like the Cherokee were, although many were. But the point is to say that indigenous folk had working systems for governing themselves that they’d developed over millennia. And they had at least as much to teach us colonizers, and maybe more, about how to live together, than the other way around.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Of course, oppression and class struggle exists in every society, but in some ways, you know, the indigenous societies on this land were more democratic and more free than we are to this day.

This is such a paraphrased summary of the podcast—there is so much more, and I hope you listen to it. Again, this comes out of documentary studies work, created in consultation with historians and folklorists and interpretive guides, this isn’t a quick take. When you dive into the depths of US history and remove the overlay of patriotism, racism, and jingoism, what is left?

We all need this sort of clear-eyed look at the past.

Some things I think about:

Scene One: Biewen refers to Barbara Duncan and himself as “European Americans.” This is a term that attempts to decenter white Americans of European descent as the default version, and everyone else a hyphen (Asian-American, Mexican-American, etc). Is this something you’ve heard used before?

Scene Two: When this podcast was released, in January of 2020, it was the first time I had heard anyone refer to George Washington’s home and estate as a “slave labor camp.” I found it startling at first, but undoubtedly the most accurate description of Mount Vernon. How does it shift things when we start being honest about historical wrongs?

Conclusion: Chenjerai Kumanyika talks about his love for Star Wars as a kid—and how he wasn’t so much watching the film as revering it. He compares this to the founding of the country: “We've held it up in such a light that although we're looking at it, sometimes we can't really see it.”

What do we learn when we stop revering and start really looking?

Up next: Writing the Constitution. What were the real motives behind that founding document? I’ll be back with a summary and thoughts next week.

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