Trump’s Crusade to Rewrite History

And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

– St. John 8:32

Mr. Marc H. Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League, writes that “The history of enslavement, segregation and discrimination in the United States traditionally has been seen as a Southern story.” This has been true ever since Reconstruction, for, as the French philosopher Voltaire so accurately observed, “History is the propaganda of the victorious.” As long as this traditional interpretation was extant, one heard no protest from the “powers that be.” Now, however, with the Urban Civil Rights Museum in Harlem and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture prepared to expose the truth, there is wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Let us hope that these institutions expose the fact that the African slave-trade in America originated in New England within twenty years of the Pilgrim’s landing at Plymouth Rock, that the wealth of New England was built on the African slave-trade, and that its monies endowed the Ivy League institutions. John Brown (not that John Brown), one of the founders of Brown University and a notorious slave trader, said he saw no more problem carrying off a cargo of Africans than in carrying off a cargo of jackasses. Dr. W. E. B. DuBois, in his Suppression of the African Slave-trade, quotes the January 1862 New York Continental Monthly (available on-line) as saying that New York, Boston, and Portland were the largest African Slave-trading ports in the world at the time of Lincoln’s election.

Let us hope that these institutions expose the fact that Alexis de Tocqueville, in his famous Democracy in America, said that racism in America was strongest in the States where slavery had not existed. He said in the North, where slavery had been proven uneconomical (owning a slave does not give one “free labor” any more than owning a horse gives one a free ride – try it and see for yourself), it was abolished, but the slaves were not set free – they were “sold down the river,” and Northern “Jim Crow” laws were instituted to keep them from coming back. This explains why the “Underground Railroad” in later years terminated in Canada, not the Northern States.

Let us hope that these institutions expose the fact that The Greatest Lynching in American History occurred during the New York draft riots in the summer of 1863, revealed in his book by that name by Dr. Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. And let us hope that Lerone Bennett, Jr., past editor for both Jet and Ebony magazines, gets his due. He definitively exposes Abraham Lincoln, “The Great Emancipator,” as a White supremacist (in his book Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream) who worked until the day he died to deport the Black race to Latin America or back to Africa. It is long past time to know the truth: Lincoln and the North did not go to war for the slave, but against his master. So much for The Myth of the Righteous Cause.

The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily the views of the Abbeville Institute.

H.V. Traywick, Jr.

A native of Lynchburg, Virginia, the author graduated from the Virginia Military Institute in 1967 with a degree in Civil Engineering and a Regular Commission in the US Army. His service included qualification as an Airborne Ranger, and command of an Engineer company in Vietnam, where he received the Bronze Star. After his return, he resigned his Commission and ended by making a career as a tugboat captain. During this time he was able to earn a Master of Liberal Arts from the University of Richmond, with an international focus on war and cultural revolution. He is a member of the Jamestowne Society, the Society of the Cincinnati in the State of Virginia, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and the Society of Independent Southern Historians. He currently lives in Richmond, where he writes, studies history, literature and cultural revolution, and occasionally commutes to Norfolk to serve as a tugboat pilot.

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