On the Right Side of American History
You visit the “Farmington Historic Plantation” at the outskirts of Louisville, Kentucky, to learn about history. At least that is the idea. It is here that President Abraham Lincoln had his first personal encounter with slavery when he visited his slave-owning friend Joshua Speed in 1841 to overcome the depression and despair he had fallen into as a young politician at the time. Today David Green leads the visitors around the 550-acre plantation grounds. And he often wonders how he can best explain the experience of slavery and its role in Southern history to his often- unsuspecting tourists; when he as a history teacher himself “does not get” what has happened to his country over the last generation.
What concept of history, I ask him, do his visitors bring with them to Farmington with its antebellum villa and the grounds where the Speed family had 57 slaves working? What kind of knowledge do they have and what historical baggage do they carry around with them? Well, he says, they are arriving with what they have been taught at school. “Slavery was wrong, but the South fought for a noble cause which was tragic and suicidal”. David can provide some real background to this myth of the so-called “lost cause”: In 1840 more than a quarter of people in Kentucky owned slaves, most had only 2 or 3, so Farmington was unusual for the “Bluegrass state” in having so many slaves working in the hemp fields and the orchards behind the main house. And later in the Civil War Kentucky joined the Union merely for tactical, not for moral reasons. So “noble” might not be exactly the fitting adjective for the cause the Confederacy fought for in the Civil War.
School knowledge also states that after the war, explains David, “we all got back together again, yet with blacks staying behind in their place throughout the Jim Crow era”. But then came the Civil Rights legislation and Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream speech”, David paraphrases what the visitors know, “and we are all equal now”.
Sometimes David Green wonders what impact his tours can have on the people visiting “Farmington Plantation” when it becomes clear that they just want to know how the white planters lived. But the retired history teacher does continue to tell “history as it is, even if that sounds quite harsh to some people”.
American history has always been more of a celebration than an interrogation, but you understand what he means when later that day the visitors can hardly answer my questions why they came here. “Because I wanted to take my friend from England somewhere” or because we just wanted to have a look”.
David Green grew up in a fundamentalist church but later changed to the Presbyterian denomination. When he was young and rebellious in the then staunchly Democratic state of Kentucky he had to vote for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. But “seeing the light teaching history” he has since become a staunch Democrat, now living in a still liberal city yet in a state that has turned conservative after Bill Clinton left office in the year 2000. And on April 5th David was one in the crowd of about 2.000 Louisville citizens in front of the Metro Hall protesting the attacks against state institutions and social services by the Trump-Administration. He is now hoping that the court cases against deportations and the standing-up of Harvard University against Trump’s orders will rekindle more public resistance.
David is just reading the memoirs of the well-known historian Doris Kearns Goodwin in which she describes the enthusiasm and idealism of her husband Dick who worked as a speechwriter and advisor for Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy. And he wonders “how we lost that concept of the Great Society, that there is room for immigrants of all kinds.”
When you ask the history teacher, the Christian and Democrat David Green when things did go wrong with America, he first answers: “I don’t know”. When you ask how the patriotic American public once so proud of its soldiers during the Gulf Wars would now tolerate a President ridiculing the late war hero and Senator John McCain and cutting funds for the veterans, he is only shaking his head. “People’s grandparents fought in the World War II, and now? I don’t get it.”
And then David starts musing about when and where his country lost its way: In the 60s people were talking about opportunities and human rights. But then, through the 70s to the 90s we became self-congratulating and self-consumed. “After more than 40 years of that”, he thinks, “we must seriously ask ourselves if we answered the call”. David does not blame the kids of today. “We didn’t educate them properly”. And maybe, he wonders, “things are not bad enough that it hurts”.
And the Democrats? In his view they are too technical in their approach. They would need the passion Franklin D. Roosevelt, Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Martin Luther King showed, David says. Not MAGA he says, but “Make Americans Remember who they are”. They would need to commit themselves to the ideal of democracy with religious fervour. Then people would respond. “Obama could do that, and people did respond”.
But is today’s success of right-wing politics not also a late revenge of those people who think that the country was not ready for a black President? “Yes, he says, racism has much to do with it.”
In any case, David Green is a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist. He will continue doing his part to make people understand their own history by guiding them through the grounds of “Farmington Plantation”, the place where Abraham Lincoln first encountered slavery. And he will go on demonstrating if more immigrants are going to be deported from his country to be on the right side of history.
(The photograph shows David Green standing in the formal dining room of the Main House at Farmington Plantation, where Abraham Lincoln dined with members of the Speed family in 1841.)