I stood looking at the empty
plinth in the baking Baltimore sun. 'There is nothing in the world so invisible
as a monument', Morgan and I had quoted Robert Musil's words to our students
only a few weeks before in London as we looked at which slave owners, overseers
of massacres and sworn enemies of democracy get away with being commemorated
there.
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The empty plinth, Baltimore, 2017 (all photos my own).
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But there's nothing so visible as the vandalised statue or empty
plinth. It reminds us that history is contested - quite literally from below.
The Black Lives Matter movement protested at the presence of Confederate
statues. Some were pulled down, vandalised. In Baltimore, however, the decision
had been taken to remove them in the middle of the night. History would not be
contested here - it would be swiftly rewritten.
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Baltimore, 2017
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History is written, we are told, by the victors. So how come there
are statues to the Confederacy, the losing side in the American Civil
War?
The statues, though, don't date from the Civil War - they date
from the era of Jim Crow and the KKK. These monuments weren't about the Civil
War, they proclaimed the victory of white supremacy and terror.
This year, Black Lives Matter has
proved as urgent a movement as ever and one that resonates across the globe.
And in Britain the hated statue of Edward Colston, who made enormous profits
from slavery in the eighteenth century, was torn down by a huge crowd and
thrown in Bristol’s dock.
In light of these events, I offer
these thoughts on my visit to The Hermitage as a historian undertaking research
in the summer of 2018, following in the thoughts and footsteps of lifelong
anti-racist Sylvia Pankhurst, as a small contribution to the discussion about
the politics of historical monuments and present day injustice.
When I say ‘footsteps’, that’s
not strictly true. On 14 February 1912, the day she arrived in Nashville,
Tennessee, Sylvia Pankhurst was driven to The Hermitage – the former home of
Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States. It is now, as in
1912, a tourist attraction.
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The Hermitage, tourist attraction.
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Morgan and I are not drivers
(discussed in my Railroads post) and we naively thought we’d get to this
tourist attraction by public transport. The bus was an underused service, there
was only one other passenger and they didn’t appear to know where they were.
The Hermitage stop was nowhere
near The Hermitage to which, it was now clear, there was no pedestrian access. We
trudged alongside dirt tracks up a six lane motorway under the blaring sun.
Finally, seeing the signs to The
Hermitage, we ran across that motorway. It was a ridiculous thing to do, but
the whole situation was ridiculous.
We found ourselves at the
beginning of a long, meandering road, the house nowhere in sight. And that’s
because The Hermitage is a one thousand acre plantation. The picking of cotton
by enslaved people on this huge piece of land was the source of Andrew Jackson’s
wealth.
It would take you a very long
time to get away from here on foot.
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A railroad crossing on the plantation, which provides a sense of scale.
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Sylvia Pankhurst was probably
taken here by local suffragists; the Jackson home was first maintained as an
attraction by women supporters. They were perhaps the same women who told
Sylvia not to speak at Nashville’s Fisk University to an audience of black
students, perhaps those that Sylvia remembered ‘talk glibly of the “slavery
days” as they site behind the Negro coachman, or are waited on at table by the
Negro women servants’ (p.156).
I had read Sylvia’s description
of The Hermitage before I saw it for myself. It seemed little had changed.
There was the ‘row of massive fluted columns of white stone along the front’(p.157).
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The Hermitage, just as Pankhurst described it in 1912.
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In the entrance hall our first
guide, a white man in nineteenth century costume, painfully, offensively
imitated the black woman housekeeper he imagined would have welcomed us during
the ‘slavery days’.
He showed off the wallpaper
depicting mythological scenes, especially ordered by the Jacksons from Paris. I
could hear Sylvia whispering in my ear:
“The
walls of the entrance hall are covered with a hideous hand-painted paper,
specially procured from Paris in General Jackson’s time, which shows
innumerable little six inch gods and goddesses passing through a series of
meaningless adventures. It seems impossible that nineteenth century Paris could
ever have produced anything more ugly.” (p.157)
It was all just as she had
described, including the four post beds so far raised above the floor that
beside them are ‘the steps by which the family were obliged to climb up to them
at night’ (p.157).
These people even slept on
pedestals. The house slaves, we were told, slept on the floor.
We followed Sylvia through the
stuffy rooms to the back porch where, like her, we saw ‘still standing in a
row, are the cabins in which the slaves were housed’ (p.158).
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The slave huts at The Hermitage, also just as Pankhurst described in 1912.
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This is in the home of the man
The Hermitage unashamedly celebrates today as ‘The People’s President’.
The museum attached to the house
insists that Jackson did ‘good’ and ‘bad’ – the overriding message being that
we cannot allow the ‘bad’ to discount the ‘good’. It is a message that the
President and CEO of The Hermitage reiterated in response to the Black Lives
Matter movement this year: “Andrew Jackson was a complex man who, like many
U.S. presidents, was far from perfect” (15 July 2020).
Or, as one commentator on a
Hermitage museum film told us, we have all done good and bad things.
It’s easy to see how this
argument is persuasive – because we have all done good and bad things. We can
all relate to that. And who among us would agree that it’s fair that our worst misdemeanours
should cancel out everything decent we’ve ever done?
But there’s a cunning sleight of
hand going on here. This is not the same as finding out that a good president
was a bit of a bully at school.
Jackson was a militarist and a
populist, presenting himself as on the side of ‘the people’ against the elites –
something uncritically repeated by The Hermitage today: “The People’s President”.
But which people? Not black
people. Not those enlisted soldiers who mutinied against his leadership in the
Creek War. And not Native American people.
Howard Zinn described Jackson as ‘the
most aggressive enemy of the Indians in early American history’ (Zinn, A People’s History of the United States,
New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2015, p.127). As president, he was
responsible for the devastating forced removal of Native Americans.
Earlier in his career, in the war
for territory occupied by the Creek Indians, Jackson expanded the American
nation into parts of Alabama, Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi,
Kentucky and North Carolina.
His policy of selling off the
land he seized expanded capitalist ownership and undermined the unity of Native
American resistance. Huge tracts of seized land made way for new plantations
tilled by enslaved black people to make huge profits for white plantation
owners – like himself.
And this is why it is so clumsy to
say that criticisms of the monuments to slave owners seek to erase history. Millions
of people’s histories were forcibly erased and these monuments perpetuate the
myths propagated by those who erased them.
The Hermitage now purports to
tell the stories of both the president and his slaves. But how can this claim
upon balance be anything but one-sided when the president is the celebrated
subject? It denies the fundamental antagonism in the relationship. Shouldn’t
The Hermitage be a site of mourning, not celebration?
The Hermitage’s self-serving and
simplistic ‘good’ and ‘bad’ dichotomy is misleading because it insists that
they were separate. The ‘bad’ was not an aberration; it was integral to the
creation of modern America. As the Black Lives Matter movement revealed, it’s
not the past we are seeking to change, but the present.
