To assess how the Founders’ goal of creating a deliberative democracy has fared in recent years, we need to look in at least two directions: first at the massive postframing changes in both American institutions and our conceptions of rights (especially during the New Deal) and second at recent technological changes that allow information to spread instantly across large distances. In both respects, the nation that the Constitution helped create has changed quite dramatically in the last fifty years.

In some respects, the Framers’ constitution remains alive and well. Understood as an effort to create a deliberative democracy, the constitutional plan has succeeded in many ways. Perhaps above all, the system of checks and balances has ensured a measure of reflection and circumspection in government. Consider, for example, the cumbersome processes for the enactment of legislation, which provide an excellent check on the most ill considered measures. The failure to convict President Clinton, after an unconstitutional impeachment by the House of Representatives, is also a tribute to checks and balances. Or we might also look to the recent debate over measures to combat terrorism. The law eventually enacted by Congress (informally called the Patriot Act) was far more cautious and circumspect than early drafts. The system of checks and balances was the reason. Here too the Constitution’s deliberative mechanisms made things much better than they would otherwise have been. The process of deliberations between Congress and the president, leading to basically fair and even elaborate procedures in military tribunals, provides yet another illustration.

Yet in other significant ways, our Constitution is not really the Framers’ constitution. They would see huge differences between their handiwork and our institutions and our rights. I don’t mean to refer to the obvious fact that the document has been amended in major ways, beginning, of course, in 1789. The more interesting source of change has been on the interpretive side. The cornerstones of the Constitution include the system of checks and balances, federalism, and individual rights. And none of these is what it originally was. Abraham Lincoln was of course an important “framer,” in the sense that his views about the union, and about slavery, helped to produce large-scale constitutional change. But much has happened in the last hundred years. We might even see Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Martin Luther King Jr., as Framers, insofar as they contributed to significant alterations in our understanding of the founding document.

With respect to federalism, the twentieth century has witnessed a massive increase in the power of the national government, produced above all but not only by the New Deal. I would not describe this shift as unconstitutional, because the text allows for a lot of flexibility. But there is no denying the change. The same is true for checks and balances. In part because of the growing role of the United States in the world, but in part because of the need for strong domestic leadership, the president is far more powerful than he was originally supposed to be. The Framers would have a hard time recognizing the modern presidency, brought about above all by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And we have also seen the rise of administrative agencies, independent and executive, far beyond Hamilton’s wildest dreams. Our rights have changed radically as well, with, for example, much more expansive protections of speech and criminal defendants than John Adams, for one, could ever have anticipated.

In all these respects, the Constitution’s meaning has been altered through the acts not merely of the courts, but of all three branches of government. In 1944, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt contended that the Constitution’s original “political rights proved inadequate,” and he argued that we “have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all.” The second Bill of Rights was said to include (among other things) the right to education, the right to a remunerative job, the right to be free from unfair competition at home or abroad, the right to a decent home, and the right to adequate medical care. The Constitution has not, of course, been amended to include these rights, but Roosevelt did capture a large-scale shift in American government, in which “rights” of this sort have increasingly been the basis of political deliberation. The larger point is that both our institutions and our rights owe a great deal to changes introduced in the relatively recent past, and less than we usually think to the Framers’ own design.

With respect to deliberation and democracy, there is a related point. Despite the expansion of the United States across a vast amount of space throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, technological changes have, in a key sense, made the nation much “smaller” than it was at the founding. The Framers’ conception of the relationship between citizen and government had everything to do with the belief that people would know those in their own states, but have much less contact with (and understanding of) people in other states. The institution of the electoral college cannot be adequately understood unless we keep this point in mind. The Framers believed that citizens would have little knowledge of candidates from other states and would be far more likely to know electors–an odd idea today, to say the least.

Because of the rise of the mass media, including radio and television, and now because of the Internet, processes of political deliberation are radically different from what was anticipated. This has many different consequences. It’s very easy to be in contact, even in regular contact, with people in different states and even different nations. Regional rivalries have hardly disappeared, but people do not consider those far away to be strangers in any sense; and often the grounds of political competition are not regional at all. The Framers’ intense preoccupation with contests among the states is hard for us to understand. New technologies offer new and wonderful opportunities for political deliberation, in ways that the Framers could not possibly have foreseen.

At the same time, new technologies create some new risks, especially if like-minded people engage in deliberation mostly with one another. On the Internet, for example, it is easy to spend most of your time reading material by people who agree with you, and to talk only with those who share your interests and commitments. One of the most striking findings in social psychology is that when like-minded people speak mostly with one another, they tend to go to extremes–to a more extreme point in line with their original tendencies. This means that if people of one ideological stripe congregate together, they might well end up taking an extreme position. This is no truer, of course, now than in the founding era, and the Framers were aware of risks of this sort. But in some ways, new technologies have aggravated the problem, because they make it so easy for people to live in echo chambers of their own devising.

In terms of founding ideals, the resulting picture is mixed. Information is crucial to deliberation, and people are able to have a lot more information from many more places a lot more quickly. But there is fresh reason to pay attention to the Framers’ fear that factions, organized by passion or interest, can overwhelm deliberative processes and obtain ill considered legislation. With new technologies, people are increasingly able to sort themselves into groups of the like-minded, and this can undermine the Constitution’s institutions. Here again a recent example is the unconstitutional impeachment of President Clinton. Another is the use of the Internet to spread hatred, not least the kind of hatred that leads to violence and even terrorism.

In brief, many of the goals of the Constitution have indeed been realized, if we describe those goals as including the achievement of a deliberative democracy. But because of technological change, there are new challenges to both deliberation and democracy, challenges that could not possibly have been anticipated during the founding. And the Constitution’s success owes a great deal to people who did their work long after the Framers did theirs. Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King Jr., among others, are best seen as constitutional Framers. Undoubtedly many more will follow them.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 2.4 (July, 2002).

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Common-place asks Cass R. Sunstein, professor of law at the University of Chicago, occasional adviser to the executive and legislative branches of the United States government, and author of Designing Democracy: What Constitutions Do (New York, 2001) and Republic.com (Princeton, N.J., 2001), what the last two centuries have done to the Founders’ goals of creating a deliberative democracy.

Paul Soifer, Abraham Hoffman, and D. Stephen Voss, CliffsQuickReview: American Government, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2001. 180 pp., $9.99. Paul Soifer and Abraham Hoffman, CliffsAP: United States History Preparation Guide, 3d ed., New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2000. 294 pp., $16.99. George F. Willison, CliffsNotes on The Federalist, New York, John Wiley & Sons, 1971. 109 pp., $4.95.

 

If this is Wednesday, it must be the bicentennial or the tercentennial of some sacred event in our national history. Celebration of such anniversaries has become a cottage industry in our country, part of a booming economy in popular history that includes growing attendance at historical museums, mushrooming sales for popular histories, and a craze of historical novels. History has become a major item on the World Wide Web, and movie audiences have gravitated to historical films in record numbers.

Paradoxically all of this comes at a time when, as historian Kenneth Jackson put it in his 2002 Organization of American Historians presidential address, history is “flunking as a profession.” Professor Jackson offers a number of reasons for this somber judgment, all of which seem plausible to me, and recent accusations of plagiarism and fabrication of primary sources against some academic historians have not helped the reputation of the profession as a whole, but the study guides under review here offer another reason why our profession is staggering. Top research scholars have failed, despite repeated and earnest efforts, to convey to the general reader, the secondary school teacher, and students the complexity and irony of American history.

This charge is particularly appropriate for those of us who, like me, teach the U.S. history survey. We salute the achievements of the dead. We summon up the yearning and striving of those whose sacrifices made our nation possible. We analyze the thinking of those who framed the laws by which we govern ourselves. True, we recognize the too often empty rhetoric of equality, the broken promises to many left out of the polity for so long, the way that property seems to trump dignity in so much of our law, and the conflict and competition that undermine community. But our story remains one of the progressive fulfillment of an American dream.

In this task of celebration we are aided by “study guides.” When I was a student in the 1960s, I prepared my own study guides by redacting my reading and class lecture notes, but commercial study guides were already widely available. They still are. Some are free standing, like those prepared by CliffsAP (the newest version of CliffsNotes). Others, termed “student guides,” accompany commercial textbooks in American history.

The study guide, official or unofficial, is the least common denominator and the most common purchase at most of our state colleges and universities. All of our boards of regents demand that degree candidates pass courses in the U.S. Constitution and U.S. history. We historians should not complain about such boilerplate “core” curriculums. The survey course requirement forces us to abandon all pose of elitism, and accept the basic proposition that we and our survey courses are the place where college students will learn about our history. And no matter how well we lecture, how well we relate the past to the present or empower our students to learn for themselves, the study guide and its cousins are going to be there, on the students’ desks and in their book bags. How well do these three study guides introduce the federal Constitution to history students? (The editors of Common-place and the author of this review had hoped to add to it an Idiot’s Guide to the Constitution and a Constitution for Dummies, but neither exists–a striking lacuna in a list of publications that includes all manner of other guides for the uninformed. The oversight may be an accident, or it may be that the Constitution is not for dummies or idiots. Or it may be that the stakes of historicizing the Constitution are higher than the stakes of writing about computer software and foreign languages.)

How we read the historical Constitution influences how we make law. One school of interpretation of the Constitution, sometimes called the originalism or original intent school, argues that we must understand the Constitution in the light of the meaning given to its provisions by their Framers. The academic debate over originalism occurs in the shadow of appellate courthouses, and judges are wont to reach for an original meaning when it corresponds with their opinion. The foremost modern student of the historical Constitution, Jack Rakove, attempts to disarm the originalism issue by distinguishing among original meaning (which be defines as contemporary late eighteenth-century English and American usages), intention (how the Framers meant the terms to function) and understanding (how the terms were read by contemporary and later audiences). Unfortunately, in textbooks, lectures, and study guides, such precision is rarely attempted. It would go over the heads of students and lay readers.

It would not be fair, thus, to hold the authors of study guides to the high standards of historical detail and analytical breadth in a work as brilliant as Rakove’s. What standards ought apply to the study guide, then? Surely clarity, for one, and factual accuracy, for a second. But history is more than one fact after another, and we ought to be able to require the authors of study guides to analyze context. In fact, the study guides pay a good deal of attention to the internal analysis of the Constitution: explaining the division and separation of powers; following the many compromises of the Framers on representation, slavery, the executive; and making intellectual sense of the arguments. Analysis of the external context is much harder but just as necessary. Indeed, the writing of the Constitution and the writing in the Constitution cannot be understood without looking at the political and economic history of the preceding years, and those years are still the subject of serious controversy among historians.

One can date the onset of that controversy variously, for the debate over the meaning of the Constitution between its advocates and its critics in 1788 was in a fashion a debate over the history of the American Revolution. For modern scholars, the debate began anew with the publication of Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States in 1913. Beard claimed that the Constitution was the work of creditors and speculators. Although Forrest McDonald among others questioned that interpretation, historians like Merrill Jensen accepted it, and portrayed the Constitution as the capstone of a Thermidorean counterrevolution. The debate is much more sophisticated now, due in large measure to the work of Gordon Wood, and it is old hat to historians, but one can still ask if a study guide can do–or should try to do–justice to the many scholarly perspectives on the context of the Constitutional Convention and its leaders. The answer is that we cannot expect a study guide to do more than barely outline the various positions. From my own experience I can vouch that students both dislike and refuse to remember historiography. They want someone to tell them which of the positions is the soundest (and to be fair that is what the scholars are trying to do as well). It is we teachers who want to muddy the waters.

Soifer and Hoffman’s study guide to United States history is AP-test driven. Its purpose is not to review the material so much as teach the skills necessary to pass the Advanced Placement Examination in United States History. Thus the entirety of the chapter “The Constitution and the Federalists, 1787-1800” is four pages (101-05). Under the heading “things to know” are “the major compromises, representation, slavery, election of the president, the principles embodied in the Constitution . . . Federalists vs. Antifederalists; Amendments to the Constitution.” The key terms section and the “important definitions section” follow the same set of implications. There are those who object, but no one is the loser. The era of the Constitution is one of political and legal achievement, and the two are intertwined. That is, the progress in the law is the result of political empowerment of the people. There is a straight line from the Revolution to the Constitution, suggesting that the latter completes the former. There is no mention of the absence of more than two-thirds of the people from the electorate. There is no mention of the vital importance of the concept of property, indeed the emergence of the concept of private property, that the Constitution (and the Bill of Rights) enshrines. For more on the period the authors send the reader to textbooks, after explaining how they are to be read.

Soifer, Hoffman, and Voss’s American Government devotes an entire chapter to the Constitution. Its central theme is that the Constitution was “a list of Do’s and Don’ts” defining the “contract” between “rulers and ruled.” The Constitution “evolved” (here meaning came into existence rather than altered itself) “to fulfill this desire for a binding contract,” the authors implying that the Constitution was the natural conclusion to the desire for self-government expressed in the Revolution. This is “consensus history” with a vengeance. There’s no room for the dissenters, the marginal, the oppressed. They did not exist. In fact, no one is oppressed by these laws because the only people present are the Framers.

According to the authors, the Constitution differed from the constitutions of other nations “because it was a written code that the government lacked authority to change” (3, italics in original). Perhaps this was the intention of its Framers, but the Constitution has changed as a result of government action: the powers and purview of the federal government expanding into areas of everyday private life in ways unimaginable in 1787; the relationship between the federal government and the states changing dramatically even before the Fourteenth Amendment was conceived; the role of the presidency and the courts growing in proportion as both of these branches of government took upon themselves new functions. What is more, as the Framers well knew, in the years before 1787 there were a number of written codes that preceded governments and limited them. Ancient Greek city-states, ancient Rome, Swiss cantons, Poland, and the Scandinavian countries at one time or another had such codes. They differed from the federal Constitution not in being oral or open-ended, but in having the wrong balance within the branches of government, or the wrong basis for representation, or the wrong kind of executive.

The authors next summarize the historical context of Revolutionary constitutionalism. The Continental Congress “assumed governmental functions . . . without legal authority to do so.” Jefferson based the Declaration of Independence largely on John Locke’s Two Treatises. He needed little help and no other sources of his ideas are mentioned. The state constitutions reflected the idea that “the people were the source of power.” In them, “individual liberties were usually safeguarded” (4). By this time in my course I’ve lectured on slavery, anti-Catholicism, and the legal debilities of women in the early republic. Most of the state constitutions in various ways supported these positions, even when they prefaced themselves with portions from the Declaration of Independence. Even the author of that document did not support laws freeing the slaves, giving full citizenship to Roman Catholics, or enfranchising women. Mentioning all of this may be presentist on my part (although Thomas Paine, Ethan Allen, Benjamin Franklin, Elbridge Gerry, Benjamin Rush, and other revolutionaries spoke of one or more of these reforms at the time), but surely the study guide ought to warn the students that not all the people were “people” under the law. And please, please, spell Shays’s Rebellion correctly; his name was Daniel Shays, not Shay (5).

Slavery finally makes its appearance in a section entitled “Decisions on slavery” near the end of the discussion of the compromises at the Philadelphia convention. “Slaves were a significant percentage of the population of the southern states” is the only demographic or economic depiction of early slavery in the entire book. There is no mention of the many slaves in New York City or Philadelphia at the time of the convention; of the importance of slavery as a system of labor; of the investment that owners had in slave property; or of the threat of South Carolina, whose slave trade was a major industry, and Georgia, whose need for slaves made it the major consumer of the trade, to bolt the convention if some provision were not made for their “peculiar institution.” There is also no mention of the Rendition Clause of the Constitution that “No person, held to service or labor in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due” (U.S. Const. Art. IV, Sec. 2). This provision was the explicit sanction for the Fugitive Slave Laws of 1793 and 1850, and was understood at the time and subsequently to be a major concession to the slave-holding states and the slave owners therein. The controversy over the legality of slave catching in the North was one, if not the principal, cause of the Civil War. Leaving out this provision in particular, and the discussion of slavery and the Constitution as a whole, is a serious charge against the value of this study guide. The students, sadly, will not know how much they have missed.

The next portion of the chapter is devoted to “Key Concepts.” Two of these, “checks and balances” and “federalism,” are not mentioned in the Constitution itself, which raises a number of questions. The word slavery, for example, never appears. The Constitution has in it a number of provisions, like the Three-fifths Clause, the reference to the “migration or immigration of such persons” in Art I, Sec. 9 (the overseas slave-trade provision), and the Rendition Clause, that never mention slavery but clearly reference it. To what extent are other key legal institutions actually extraconstitutional? There is no mention of administration or bureaucracy in the Constitution. How could the new government run without these? Consider political parties. Within a decade of the ratification of the Constitution the two party system had become a hallmark of national politics. Without them, the federal government could not organize itself, but there is no provision for them in the written contract of rulers and ruled drafted in 1787. What about the idea of rights? In the original of the Constitution the word is not used. It first appears in the amendments proposed by James Madison at the first session of the U.S. Congress. If notions of liberty, equality, and freedom were basic to the Revolution, why were they invisible in the language of the Framers at Philadelphia? What might this mean and why would it be important to students?

What it means is that any adequate summary of the Constitution must concern itself with silences and gaps as well as text. The authors had the chance to ask students about these silences in the “critical thinking” section that ends the chapter. Instead, they ask students to make up a new amendment to the Constitution that “establishes a critical ‘right’ not currently protected.” I like this exercise, and will borrow it when I next teach legal history, but wonder if it could have been used to promote historical critical thinking. Perhaps the authors might have asked why the Framers did not voice some of the silences or fill some of the gaps in the letter of the Constitution at the time it was written. One thus comes away from these two study guides with the conclusion that the course of our early constitutionalism was smooth and consensual, a conclusion that fits the celebratory mode of contemporary popular histories.

Willison’s The Federalist is an able exposition of the essays, prefaced by three short biographies, and divided into expository and analytical sections on each of the numbers. Although it is now thirty years old, and its laudatory tone may be read as early 1970s consensus political science in a time when riotous divisiveness seemed everywhere, Willison’s study guide is a model of careful prose and sound judgment. The review questions are thoughtful and probing. Would that all study guides be this literate, balanced, and informative.

But even Willison’s work teeters at the edge of the trap that celebratory history has laid for students and teachers. Such celebrations of events are not intended to offer varying perspectives or controversial interpretations. Instead, the celebrations take the form of rituals to which we all are expected to consent. Despite (or perhaps because of) the controversy over the fashioning of a national curriculum for American history in secondary schools, much of history that we cover in the classroom remains celebratory. There is much to celebrate but the study of American history should be more than mere celebration and our study guides should foster inquiry rather than obeisance.

Further Reading: See Merrill Jensen, The New Nation: A History of the United States During the Confederation, 1781-1789 (New York, 1961); Kenneth Jackson, “The Power of History: The Weakness of a Profession” Journal of American History 88 (March 2002), 1299-1314; Leonard W. Levy, Original Intent and the Framers’ Constitution (New York, 1988); Forrest McDonald, We the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution (New York, 1958); Gary Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn, History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York, 1997); Jack Rakove, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (New York, 1996), chaps. 7-8; Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill, 1969) and The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1991).

 

This article originally appeared in issue 2.4 (July, 2002).

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Peter Charles Hoffer is Distinguished Research Professor of History at the University of Georgia and specializes in early American legal history. He is working on a study guide for American History I for the College Network.

It was a frigid cold afternoon in February 1988 when I first took students to participate in the district level competition at Syosset High School, Long Island, New York, of the “We the People” program on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. “Be confident in yourselves,” I told my high schoolers during the long bus ride, as they anticipated stepping on stage to join a simulated congressional hearing. “You can speak eloquently about how the founding of our nation has been an adventure in ideas.” One student, in his youthful enthusiasm, laughed, “This is America, baby. We want to win.” His remark was a reflection of the healthy competitiveness that the program’s course of study promotes. Yet the competitive spirit is grounded in cooperation, for the students have to work together in teams to develop their ideas in depth on a specific topic. “We the People” (formerly known as the Bicentennial Competition on the Constitution) was founded in 1987, chaired by former Chief Justice Warren Burger, and is conducted by the Center for Civic Education. Its premise is that what defines us as a nation is the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights; we are held together by our shared beliefs in the values of liberty, equality, and justice. Students begin a six-month program by studying the text We the People: The Citizen and the Constitution, whose topics include:

• What were the philosophical and historical foundations of the American political system?
• How did the Framers create the Constitution?
• How did the principles and values embodied in the Constitution shape American institutions and practices?
• How have the protections of the Bill of Rights been developed and expanded?
• What rights does the Bill of Rights protect?
• What are the roles of the citizen in American democracy?

The classroom lessons are supplemented by in-depth study of each of the units. Students are divided into six groups of three or four each (depending on the size of the class). Each of the groups prepares a four-minute opening speech on each of three questions. The opening speeches are presented at a district/regional competition in January; the opening remarks are followed by a six-minute questioning period on the specific topic and the overall knowledge of the course. The students must work cooperatively on developing the opening speeches and answering the follow-up questions. Each unit is judged on the following criteria:

• Understanding
• Constitutional application
• Reasoning
• Supporting evidence
• Responsiveness
• Participation

The class that wins the most points will be eligible to compete at the state level. It sounds complicated but it works extremely well. Let’s follow Unit One from the classroom lesson to the simulated hearing at both the district and state levels. The three questions for preparation in Unit One are:

• How were the Founder’s views about government influenced by both classical republicans and natural rights philosophers?
• What are the fundamental characteristics of a constitutional government?
• What effect did colonial experiences have on the Founder’s views about rights and government?

Classical republicanism is a difficult topic for students to understand and so the classroom lesson focused on the story of Cincinnatus and civic virtue. John Barralet’s engraving, General Washington’s Resignation, was distributed to students and analyzed in connection with the Cincinnatus story.

 

In class discussion, I asked my students what “the plow awaits the plowman,” meant. Where is George Washington’s hand pointing and why? What is Lady Liberty offering him? How does he respond? How do his actions illustrate the story of Cincinnatus? How are his actions a major tenet of classical republicanism? How does classical republicanism shape contemporary political culture? Many students feel that it is an outdated idea. “It’s positively frightening,” one student remarked, “because one has to sacrifice his rights for the common good. Who can determine the common good? How do we know what it is?” “Perhaps,” said another student, “George Washington was fulfilling his own power struggle and not really sacrificing power for the common good.” Another student disagreed, pointing out that Washington gave up the presidency after two terms. “Who gives up power? He must have been acting on the principles of classical republicanism.” A slightly different debate went on at the congressional hearing where this question was called. The students were asked why classical republicanism held that military service was important and whether they thought military service should be mandatory. Students understood the concept of citizen-soldier because of the classroom discussions and their in-depth study of the situation. However, the unit members disagreed among themselves as to whether military service should be mandatory. One student asserted, “Classical republicanism is not relevant today. Citizen-soldiers preparing to defend their country is an outdated idea. We are at the hands of the politicians who get us into war without our consent and this would encourage them. We have a professional army and that is all that is needed. Besides, technology reduces the need for a required draft as most fighting will not be person-to-person combat.” Another replied, “I think our country is stronger if each person is prepared to defend it and gives up time in their life to answer the call of good citizenship. We have been too focused on our individual rights and we are becoming selfish.” After winning the regional competition, the students confronted still different questions at the state level:

• According to the natural rights philosophers, under what circumstances are people justified in exercising their right of revolution?
• What is the importance of the rule of law in a constitutional government?
• How were governments in colonial America similar to or different from the government in England at the time?

In discussion, students were asked a question following up on the first above: Did southerners misuse the Declaration of Independence when they seceded from the Union? The first student to speak spoke forcefully: “They used it correctly. They felt that their liberty was taken away when a president was elected without their consent. Abraham Lincoln did not get one vote from the South.” A second respondent agreed, “We may not like it, but they used it correctly. They established conventions and asked the people to vote for secession. They felt that their property was going to be taken away. After all, the Republican Party platform was illegal in that it went against a Supreme Court decision.” Finally, a third student countered, “They used it incorrectly. It just goes to show you how a leader can manipulate the mob. Madison wanted a Constitution just to avoid mob manipulation at the local level. These people were not defending equality or liberty but slavery.” I’m proud to report that my class won the New York State championship that year, in 1988. (Indeed, I’m delighted to report that my classes have won the state championship in nine of the thirteen years that I’ve participated in the competition.) The national competition, at which there is a team from every state, follows much the same format. At this competition, held in Washington, D.C., two questions are called in the first two days. The totals of the two-day competition will determine the ten classes nationwide that will compete on the third day for the top three spots nationwide. The judges at the national competition, held in the Senate hearing rooms, are usually very prominent officials–constitutional scholars, law professors, justices, and government officials. Take a look at how the Unit One questions and answers changed during the national competition:

• Rights and republican self-government may be said to be the twin pillars of the American political tradition. These pillars are planted in the soil of our history so firmly and seem to reinforce each other so strongly, that it is hard for us at first to credit any suggestion that there may be some tension or problem in their coexistence. Should these two Rs be considered the twin pillars of our political tradition? Why or why not?
• In his classic study of the influence of the frontier on American history, Frederick Jackson Turner observed that “American democracy was born of no theorist’s dream; it was not carried in the Susan Constant to Virginia, nor in the Mayflower to Plymouth . . . free land and an abundance of natural resources open to a fit people, made the democratic type of society in America.” Do you agree or disagree with Turner’s statement? Explain your position.
• The experience of the American Revolution influenced the constitution making that followed Independence. Which lessons learned from the colonists’ break with Great Britain were positive? Which lessons turned out to have been wrong? Which lessons proved to be temporary? Which have survived to the present day?

The Washington experience is one that my students never forget. They remember the discussions, the opening speeches, the dialogues and the camaraderie as the best experience in high school. They make friends with students from all over the country and they keep in touch. They even meet some of them at their respective colleges. There were other discussions to remember besides the ones surrounding natural rights and classical republicanism. Students debated the constitutionality of Bush v. Gore, the power of the Supreme Court, and whether the Bill of Rights is as Madison said, “merely a parchment barrier.” On that frigid February day in 1988, my elated students won the regional competition. They went on to win the New York State championship and came in third in the United States. However, they achieved more than that. They forged a cooperative spirit in working together to plan ideas, they practiced public speaking, and they became critical thinkers, highly knowledgeable about the foundation of the “idea” that is American democracy. They practiced civic responsibility and they learned the values of good citizenship. They are still friends today and the student who once said, “This is America, baby. We want to win,” will be clerking for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg next year.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 2.4 (July, 2002).

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Gloria Sesso is district director of social studies for the Patchogue Medford School District and was the teacher and coach of the “We the People” class and team at Half Hollow Hills East for thirteen years. Patchogue Medford is currently instituting the “We the People” program in its high school.

It was the financial profiles, of course, that accounted both for the remarkable popularity of Charles Beard’s Economic Interpretation of the Constitution and for the bitterest attacks on it. At the center of the book is a seventy-eight-page chapter in which Beard calls the roll of the Constitutional Convention, not simply reporting the delegates’ political views, as other historians had done–and as many still do–but investigating their economic interests.

Beard found what he had expected to find. Almost all of the delegates owned lots of what he called “personalty”–trading stock, money-at-interest, western land held for speculation, and, most importantly, war bonds. He then went on to argue that the state legislatures of the Confederation era (1781-89) posed a threat to personalty. Thus one of the Framers’ chief motives in writing the Constitution was to protect their personalty–to create a national army strong enough to take the Indians’ land away from them, to prevent the states from screening debtors from their creditors’ lawsuits, and to wrest from the state governments the business of collecting–or not collecting–the “Continental” taxes that were needed to pay off the bond speculators.

Beard’s critics asserted that he had failed to demonstrate a correlation between support for the Constitution, on the one hand, and possession of bonds, accounts receivable, western land claims, and other personalty on the other. If such a correlation existed, they asked, why did the opponents of the Constitution also own so much personalty? Indeed, why was it that one of the Philadelphia Convention’s largest creditors, George Mason, and one of its biggest bondholders, Elbridge Gerry, became Anti-Federalists? (Beard anticipated these objections, but his responses to them are not very convincing.)

On the other side, as Beard acknowledges, Madison and Hamilton, two of the Constitution’s most enthusiastic champions, owned almost no personalty. And similar criticisms were lodged against the other correlations Beard attempted in his Economic Interpretation.

So what is left of the Beard thesis? Plenty. As I re-read the book, I was struck by the ironic impression that its most persuasive evidence was the one sort that both its fans and its critics virtually ignored: Beard’s quotations, especially from the Framers. In their speeches in Philadelphia, their private letters (most of which had been published by the time Economic Interpretation was written), and their newspaper essays, the Framers made it abundantly clear that they expected the Constitution to benefit creditors and Americans who had speculated, whether in Indian land or war bonds. To cite only one of Beard’s numerous quotations establishing the Constitution’s popularity among bondholders: even as the Federal Convention sat, a Connecticut writer predicted that its handiwork would win the support of “[t]he public creditor, who, from the deranged state of finances in every state . . . now places all his hopes of justice in an enlightened and stable national government” (53).

From reading either Beard’s critics or his admirers, you might get the impression that the bondholders were the only interest group that appeared in Economic Interpretation. Perhaps Beard’s pioneering work in the Treasury Office’s bond records–he did not visit any archives outside Washington, D.C.–made that inevitable. But Beard’s work in printed primary sources also draws attention to other groups that benefited from the Constitution, especially private creditors.

For instance, early in the Convention’s deliberations, Madison reminded his fellow delegates that the state legislatures’ mistreatment (in his view) of private creditors as well as bondholders had “contributed more to that uneasiness which produced the Convention, and prepared the public mind for a general reform, than those which accrued to our national character and interest from the inadequacy of the Confederation to its immediate objects” (178). After ratification, Hamilton told Washington that Article I, Section 10, which prohibits the states from relieving debtors, “was not one of the least recommendations of that Constitution. The too frequent intermeddlings of the state legislatures in relation to private contracts were extensively felt and seriously lamented” (180). For me, the most impressive quotation in the book is the passage (too long for use here) in which John Marshall says the Constitution was opposed by those who had advocated state laws easing the distress of debtors and taxpayers–and supported by relief’s enemies.

Just in terms of the allocation of real estate, it is quotations, not evidence of property holding, that dominate Beard’s book. Indeed, with the crucial exceptions of chapter 5 and 10 (where Beard examines the economic interests of delegates to both the Constitutional Convention and the state ratifying conventions) and chapter 9 (where Beard makes state-by-state estimates that allow him to say, “[I]t may very well be that a majority of those who voted were against the adoption of the Constitution”), nearly half the book is enclosed in quotation marks. Some quoted passages consume an entire page (251).

Everyone who has ever tried to finish a dissertation will suspect that what caused Beard to fill so many of his pages with long passages from the Framers’ speeches, letters, and essays was simple haste. This suspicion is fostered by the fact that so many of his long quotations return for encores. For instance, Beard used the same six-line statement from James Wilson on both page 183 and page 185. But I think the real reason Beard quoted so heavily is that he hoped to take himself out of the line of fire by letting the Framers speak for themselves. Am I being paranoid when I suspect that it was the very persuasiveness of Beard’s quotations that caused his critics virtually to ignore them and concentrate their fire on his highly vulnerable economic data?

All those quotations convince me that the Framers thought bondholders, land speculators, and private creditors believed they were suffering under the Articles of Confederation–and that a principal aim of the Constitution was to rescue them. Indeed, as Beard points out, John Fiske (who has always been placed at the opposite pole of Constitutional interpretation from Beard) had made essentially the same claim in The Critical Period of American History a quarter century earlier. Similarly, Orin Libby had shown in his 1894 book, A Geographical Distribution of the Vote of the Thirteen States on the Federal Constitution, that the strongholds of Anti-Federalism were the very regions that had backed the sort of debtor and taxpayer relief legislation (such as paper money) that the Constitution banned.

Which, for me, leaves only one question: When the Framers handed this windfall to the owners of personalty, to what extent were they motivated by the fact that they themselves owned so much of it? Beard does say (though not everyone believes him) that his point is not that the fifty-five Federal Convention delegates were only lining their own pockets. Rather, they were looking out for the interests of the personalty-owning class as a whole. (That is an even more damning indictment, if you ask me, just as President Bush’s titillating ties to Enron are actually less troubling than his bias in favor of the entire oil industry.) But that still leaves the problem of the leading Framers (like Hamilton and Madison) who owned little personalty. Were they simply exceptions to the rule?

Beard might have found an answer to that question if he had recalled that bondholders and private creditors were not the only ones who thought the state legislatures had given debtors and taxpayers too easy a time. People with no immediate stake in the contest worried that debt and tax relief had caused “moneyed men” to refuse to lend anything more–either to the government or to individuals. (Yet another group of Americans–arguably the majority–believed the assemblies were too harsh on debtors and taxpayers, but that is another story.)

Beard was certainly correct that bondholders, including those who sat in the Convention, liked the Constitution because it would, for the first time, give the general government the tax revenue it needed to redeem their bonds. But he forgot that this provision was equally popular among nonbondholders who simply wanted to restore the government’s credit rating. And many Americans, especially in states that imposed heavy direct taxes because they lacked ports at which to levy tariffs, correctly predicted that allowing the federal government to collect an impost would reduce its annual demands on farmers and other payers of direct levies. Beard’s insinuation that most middle-income taxpayers opposed the Constitution is simply incorrect. Many of them loved it.

Likewise, Article I, Section 10 won the enthusiastic support of creditors, as Beard showed. Yet it was also popular among people–among them James Madison–who wanted to be able to obtain loans. As Jefferson had told Madison in explaining why he was unable to borrow any money for him in Paris, would-be creditors knew that if they and Madison ever landed in a Virginia court, the judges’ “habitual protection of the debtor would be against” the investors. It was not worth the risk. Thus the fundamental right for which Madison and others were contending as they traveled to Philadelphia was the right to be sued.

Nor was the would-be debtors’ interest in providing encouragement to creditors entirely selfish. Thousands of Americans were convinced that the way to rescue the United States from the postwar recession was to make it a more attractive place in which to invest.

It is remarkable to me that when Beard compiled his list of interest groups pushing for the Constitution, he left out taxpayers in portless states and would-be borrowers like Madison. Is it possible that he omitted them because they did not seem to belong in the sordid company of the holders of personalty?

The biographers tell us Beard, like Marx, rooted for the personalty-holders, who represented the next stage of economic development. But I wonder. If, as historians say, Economic Interpretation reflects a progressive view of history, I think it also breathes the spirit of the Progressive Party that had formed the year before it was published. This was the spirit of the muckrakers and the trust-busters, the men and women who were determined to expose the acts of plunder that had brought the era’s political and industrial leaders to power. And here I am not just reviving the old claim that Beard hoped to undermine popular support for the Supreme Court, which had been overturning progressive legislation. “Science,” that muse Beard constantly invoked, may have taught him to favor economic progress at all cost. Yet I think the tone of the book points in another direction. In a footnote defending Elbridge Gerry, whose enemies attributed his opposition to the Constitution to “bare-faced selfishness,” Beard dryly remarks that greed “was not monopolized by Gerry in the Convention” (98n.).

Beard’s heart, at least, was not with the holder of personalty but with a group that almost never appears in these pages. It was with the farmer, the man who had squatted on land claimed by some Brattle Street speculator . . . or was being sued for debt . . . or had to sell half his livestock to pay taxes earmarked for bond speculators (who nonetheless complained of receiving too little). In short, with the underdog.

Further Reading: See R. Terry Bouton, “‘Tying Up the Revolution’: Money, Power, and the Regulation in Pennsylvania, 1765-1800” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1996) and “A Road Closed: Rural Insurgency in Post-Independence Pennsylvania,” Journal of American History, 87 (December 2000), 855-87; John Fiske, The Critical Period of American History, 1783-1789 (Boston, 1888); Orin Grant Libby, The Geographical Distribution of the Vote of the Thirteen States on the Federal Constitution, 1787-8 (New York, 1894); Gordon S. Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill, 1969).

 

This article originally appeared in issue 2.4 (July, 2002).

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Woody Holton is an assistant professor at the University of Richmond. His book, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1999), won the Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award (New York Sons of the Revolution) and the Merle Curti Social History Award (Organization of American Historians).

 

From the time the first English colonists settled in the New World, they discussed what kinds of government they would establish and how these governments fit into the complex matrix that was the British Empire. Wary of the violations of rights in Europe, Americans enunciated their rights as Englishmen in scores of documents during the colonial era. Between 1761 and 1776 American colonists took part in an intensive public debate over government. Americans finally decided that their rights, as protected over the years by the British Constitution, could best be preserved outside of the empire.

As Americans declared their independence they simultaneously wrote new state constitutions and drafted and adopted a federal constitution–the Articles of Confederation. Relatively little is known about what took place in Congress and in provincial popular assemblies that wrote these new constitutions. But Americans were proud of their new constitutions, so much so that in 1781 and again in 1786 Congress ordered the publication of an anthology of the state constitutions that also included the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Peace of 1783, and the Articles of Confederation. Copies of this little book circulated throughout the United States and abroad. Americans and Europeans looked upon the United States as a laboratory of constitutional experimentation.

A decade after declaring their independence, a growing number of Americans became dissatisfied with their governments, both state and federal. After repeatedly failing to amend the Articles of Confederation or strengthen Congress with additional powers, a Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia in 1787 to amend the Articles. Led by a small group of nationalists, the Convention drafted an entirely new constitution that fundamentally altered the federal-state relationship by drastically increasing the power of the central government, reserving significant local powers for the states, and, at the same time, preserving and maybe even expanding the rights of individuals.

Thirty-six-year-old James Madison felt the need for Virginia–his home state, the Old Dominion–to take the lead in proposing a new constitution; and, for some inexplicable reason, Madison believed that he should be the agent to lead the Virginia delegation. More than any other delegate, Madison prepared himself for the intellectual and political rigors of the convention. He studied the history of ancient confederacies to see why they failed and he examined the vices of the American political system. The lack of information available about the origins of the ancient confederacies convinced Madison to “preserve as far as I could an exact account of what might pass in the Convention” (17). If the convention succeeded in drafting a new constitution and if that proposal were adopted by the American people, Madison felt that his record of what happened in the convention would allow future generations to understand “the objects, the opinions & the reasonings” that gave rise to the new Constitution (17). Madison, like many others of his generation, believed that Americans had the responsibility of constitution making not merely for themselves and their posterity but for all of mankind. His record of the Constitutional Convention would help future historians from all countries understand the philosophical and practical motivations of the delegates.

The Convention chose William Jackson as its secretary. Madison correctly sensed that Jackson would preserve only a skeletal record of the proceedings. Thus, with the tacit approval of the delegates, Madison separated himself from the Virginia delegation and sat instead in “a seat in front of the presiding member, with the other members on my right & left hands. In this favorable position for hearing all that passed, I noted . . . what was read from the Chair or spoken by the members” (17).

Madison was already an accomplished note taker of debates, having practiced and refined his skill in Congress. The scholarly Virginian had a knack for isolating the essentials of the argument while listing the supporting evidence given by each speaker. He explained that he “was not a little aided by practice & by a familiarity with the style and the train of observation & reasoning which characterized the principal speakers” (17-18). He never missed a day of the convention, nor at most “a cassual fraction of an hour in any day, so that I could not have lost a single speech, unless a very short one” (18). He wrote his notes in full words, abbreviations, and symbols known only to him. Later each evening he expanded these rough notes. On occasion speakers gave him written copies of their speeches and, naturally, he had whatever written text he prepared for the more than two hundred times he spoke in the convention. The labor of taking notes, expanding them, and preparing himself as one of the most important participants in the debates, Madison said, nearly killed him.

Madison kept his notes with his papers until he died. He allowed only a handful of individuals to see the manuscript. Sporadically he worked on the notes, especially after 1789 when he copied William Jackson’s manuscript proceedings of the convention, which contained the exact wording of motions and resolutions as well as the votes on these measures. After examining all of the changes, the editors of the modern edition of Madison’s papers maintain that the later additions made by Madison “were motivated by an earnest desire for completeness and accuracy” (Madison Papers, X, 9).

Madison always intended that his notes should be published, but he steadfastly felt that a posthumous publication would best serve the American public. Other accounts of the convention were published for partisan purposes–Luther Martin of Maryland published a lengthy account of the convention during the debate over ratifying the Constitution in 1788. During the presidential campaign of 1808, Edmund Genet (the former Citizen Genet of 1793) aided the candidacy of his father-in-law (Vice President George Clinton) by publishing an adulterated excerpt of Robert Yates’s notes as a short pamphlet. Genet altered Yates’s notes in an attempt to discredit Madison’s presidential candidacy by showing that he had been an ardent nationalist during the convention. Although he publicly criticized the inaccuracy of Yates’s notes, Madison refused to draw upon his own notes in his defense. In 1819, at the order of Congress, the convention’s proceedings were published, followed two years later by the full set of Yates’s altered notes.

On various occasions friends and correspondents encouraged Madison to publish his notes. In opposing Federalist policies in 1799, Vice President Thomas Jefferson urged the publication so “that the constitution will then receive a different explanation. Could those debates be ready to appear critically, their effect would be decisive. I beg of you to turn this subject in your mind. The arguments against it will be personal; those in favor of it moral” (Madison Papers, XVII, 210). Madison responded that the “idea of publishing the Debates of the Convention ought to be well weighed before the expediency of it, in a public as well as personal view be decided on” (Madison Papers, XVII, 219). Federalists, Madison worried, might be able to use some of his notes to their political advantage. To another correspondent, Madison disputed the value of his notes “[a]s a guide in expounding and applying the provisions of the Constitution . . . the legitimate meaning of the Instrument must be derived from the text itself; or if a key is to be sought elsewhere, it must be not in the opinions or intentions of the Body which planned & proposed the Constitution, but in the sense attached to it by the people in their respective State Conventions where it received all the authority which it possesses” (Farrand, IV, 447-48). To another correspondent, Madison warned that in an environment of compromise, some convention delegates suggested exaggerated proposals hoping, by give and take, to achieve more moderate ends (Farrand, IV, 449). A publication after the death of all the Framers “may be most delicate and most useful also . . . As no personal or party views can then be imputed, they will be read with less of personal or party feelings, and consequently, with whatever profit, may be promised by them” (Farrand, IV, 475).

James Madison died on June 26, 1836. In his will leaving his papers to his widow, Madison wrote that “it was not an unreasonable inference that a report of the proceedings and discussions . . . [of the convention] will be particularly gratifying to the people of the United States, and to all who take an interest in the progress of political science and the course of true liberty.” In 1837 Dolley Madison sold her husband’s papers to the Library of Congress and three years later a three-volume edition of his papers was published, more than half of which was made up of his notes of the Constitutional Convention. Since that original publication, numerous editions of his notes have been published. Max Farrand’s 1913 three-volume edition of the Records of the Federal Convention, which included Jackson’s proceedings and the notes of half a dozen of Madison’s colleagues, became the standard source. In 1937, the sesquicentennial of the convention, Yale University Press reprinted Farrand’s three volumes with a fourth volume that included various documents referring to the Constitutional Convention.

By 1965 all of the editions of Madison’s notes were out of print. My predecessor, Leonard Rapport, the first associate editor of the Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, suggested to the director of the Ohio University Press that a new edition of Madison’s notes needed to be published. Adrienne Koch was selected as the editor and in 1966 Ohio University Press published this one-volume edition. W. W. Norton published a one-volume paperback edition of Koch’s work in 1987, the bicentennial of the convention. In the same year, Yale published a new fourth-volume supplement to Farrand edited by James H. Hutson with new documents located since the 1937 edition.

Farrand’s four-volume edition (with the 1987 supplement) is the definitive source for all of the records of the convention, but Koch’s edition has remained the standard one-volume edition of Madison’s notes of the convention. The text and footnotes in the Koch edition are taken from C. C. Tansill’s edition, which was published as a U.S. House of Representatives document in 1927. Koch includes in her edition Madison’s preface written after 1830. Koch also includes two indexes–a serviceable general index and a thorough index of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention.

Given the importance of the Constitution in our lives today, Madison’s notes have become invaluable for an understanding of the original meaning of the Founders. It is remarkable to think that throughout the first fifty years of the republic under the Constitution, no one–not even Chief Justice John Marshall–had access to Madison’s notes.

It would be hard to imagine any other historical work that has been so important as Madison’s notes of the convention. It was a gift–a legacy left by Madison to his country. He could have used it to his or his party’s advantage, but he didn’t. He waited for a posthumous publication to avoid the charge of partisanship that would denigrate the importance of his notes as an impartial record of the convention. In 1823 Madison wrote,

It has been the misfortune of history that a personal knowledge and an impartial judgment of things, can rarely meet in the historian. The best history of our country therefore must be the fruit of contributions bequeathed by co-temporary actors and witnesses, to successors who will make an unbiased use of them. And if the abundance and authenticity of the materials which still exist in the private as well as in public repositories among us should descend to hands capable of doing justice to them, then American History may be expected to contain more truth, and lessons certainly not less valuable, than that of any Country or age whatever” (xxii).

Madison’s notes have given us the raw material from “co-temporary actors and witnesses.” More than any other source, Madison’s notes of the debates have remained for over 160 years the standard authority for what happened in the Constitutional Convention. It has allowed historians to look back at the founding and see the genesis of our Constitution. It was an incredible gift.

Further Reading: See Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (New Haven, 1911-); William T. Hutchinson and William M.E. Rachal, eds., The Papers of James Madison, 17 vols. (Chicago, c1962-91); John P. Kaminski, Merrill Jensen, and Gaspare J. Saladino, eds., The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution (Madison, 1976-).

 

This article originally appeared in issue 2.4 (July, 2002).

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John P. Kaminski is the director of the Center for the Study of the American Constitution at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he edits the multivolume Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution.

 

 Historians have long neglected the Thirteenth Amendment, often rendering it as a postscript to the Emancipation Proclamation and a forerunner to the Fourteenth Amendment. Michael Vorenberg’s Final Freedom will force them to reexamine their assumptions concerning American slavery’s final demise and require them to integrate the Thirteenth Amendment more fully into the broad Civil War narrative. Most importantly, the Thirteenth Amendment marked a turning point regarding Americans’ understanding of their Constitution. It additionally caused them to reconsider freedom’s meaning and played a crucial role in transforming the era’s politics. Emphasizing human contingency, Vorenberg deftly illustrates how unexpected developments marked the incremental steps whereby Abraham Lincoln, Republicans, and War Democrats came to support constitutional emancipation.

Scholars have long recognized that few Northerners went to war in 1861 intending to abolish slavery. Even this minority did not anticipate emancipation by means of a constitutional amendment. Most antebellum Americans–abolitionists included–saw amending the Constitution as an inappropriate avenue for launching social change. They generally envisioned a static Constitution and would have judged any amending efforts as tantamount to admitting “that the American national experiment had failed” (17). This attitude helps explain the lapse between the Twelfth Amendment’s (1804) and the Thirteenth Amendment’s (1865) ratifications, the longest in the nation’s history.

Several forces–the Civil War’s escalating casualties, the growing Northern hostility towards Southern whites, slaves’ fleeing to Union lines, the successes of African American soldiers, and the expected military benefits of emancipation–exacerbated white Northerners’ hostility towards slavery. The burgeoning ranks of antislavery Northerners applauded Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863. Inasmuch as the proclamation abolished slavery only in areas under Confederate control, many expected that congressional action would somehow end slavery by resorting to a constitutional loophole.

Realizing that courts could nullify both antislavery legislation and the Emancipation Proclamation, some War Democrats and Republicans began promoting an antislavery constitutional amendment in late 1863. That Democrats were an impetus behind the amendment is one of the surprises of Vorenberg’s narrative, as their party’s Northern wing had, for decades, been a more probable defender of slavery than their Northern political competitors. Indeed, during the secession winter of 1860-61 Northern Democrats had played a leading role in proposing amendments that constitutionally protected slavery, and that they hoped would undermine secession. Peace Democrats continued to propose similar amendments during the war in hopes of ending the fighting. By late 1863, however, a number of War Democrats recognized that their party’s defense of slavery was becoming politically unwise. An antislavery amendment, on the other hand, made good political sense, as it held the promise of forging a new political coalition. It could appeal to War Democrats who condemned Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation as unconstitutional and whose party had long preferred constitutional change over the broad use of executive or legislative power. Although no radical would resist a measure promoting emancipation, War Democrats and conservative Republicans hoped that an amendment merely abolishing slavery could also undermine radical Republicans’ gestures towards racial equality.

Representative James Ashley’s introduction of an antislavery amendment into the House in December 1863 initially gathered little notice. Lincoln did not publicly support it, and newspapers said little about it then or the following month, when Senator John Henderson, a Missouri Democrat, introduced a similar amendment. The Senate Judiciary Committee, which wrote the version later incorporated into the Constitution, generated no recorded debate on the measure. It was only during the April Senate debate, when Maryland Democrat Reverdy Johnson announced his support, that the national press began to follow the amendment more closely. Public scrutiny increased in June 1864, when the Republican Convention’s platform embraced the amendment, followed by the House of Representatives’ debate and vote on the proposal. When passage failed by only thirteen votes, many political observers expected that the amendment would be the fall campaign’s defining issue.

Unforeseen events dictated another course. The lack of military victories during the summer of 1864 reminded everyone that the Confederacy’s survival diminished the antislavery amendment’s importance. Meanwhile Peace Democrats charged that Lincoln was unnecessarily prolonging the war in order to end slavery. Fearful that emancipation could harm them politically and concerned that they might lose the election, the president and Republicans ceased promoting the amendment. Republican prospects improved only following the September Union victory in Atlanta. Nevertheless, politicians of both parties scarcely broached emancipation during the fall campaign. Democrats emphasized civil liberties violations, conscription, federal interference with states’ rights, and miscegenation, whereas Republicans questioned Peace Democrats’ loyalty.

Despite the fall campaign’s emphasis on other issues, Lincoln informed Congress a month after his reelection that the returns showed a popular mandate for the antislavery amendment. Fresh from electoral victory, Lincoln lobbied to have the amendment pass the House of Representatives. The mood in Congress, however, had changed since the preceding June. Several years of fighting, in particular the blood spilled in 1864, forced Americans to confront the Constitution’s failure to resolve slavery. Consequently, the originalist argument that Congress should not tamper with the Constitution had grown feeble. Lincoln and Congressional Republicans persuaded eight Democrats–some of whom had formerly defended slavery–to switch their votes from the previous June, and convinced Representatives formerly absent to vote yea. The House finally passed the Thirteenth Amendment on January 31, 1865, and transmitted it to the states for their ratification.

Once the Thirteenth Amendment was in the hands of state legislatures, several questions surfaced that Congress had deliberately avoided. Most immediate was the indeterminate number of states needed to ratify the amendment. Because conservative Republicans and War Democrats differed from Radical Republicans over whether seceded states were still technically within the Union, Congress never stated the precise guidelines for ratification before submitting the amendment to the states. Lincoln favored including the Southern states in the ratification process, and Andrew Johnson, who insisted that former Confederate states abolish slavery in their state constitutions as a term of their readmission to the Union, implored them also to ratify the amendment. Georgia’s ratification in December 6, 1865, followed twelve days later by Secretary of State William Seward’s proclamation declaring the amendment adopted, formally ended slavery in the United States and, for practical purposes, terminated the ratification dispute.

More important was the amendment’s second section, which gave to Congress the “power to enforce [the amendment] by appropriate legislation.” Congressional debaters favoring the amendment skirted this section, as they recognized a public discussion of it could expose supporters’ differences regarding the meaning of freedom, racial equality, and citizenship, and might threaten its passage altogether. Expectedly, Democrats and slave-state legislators lambasted this enforcement clause–even more than they did the ending of slavery–claiming that it would expand federal authority and give Congress the power to promote racial equality. Several former Confederate states conditionally ratified the amendment, declaring that the enforcement clause was ineffectual.

Some of the Amendment’s early supporters “believed that ex-slaves should have no positive rights beyond the right not to be owned” (86). Many of these individuals changed their minds, however, when former Confederate states passed the Black Codes in 1865. These codes, which circumscribed African Americans’ rights, caused many Republicans to concede that freedom consisted of more than the absence of bondage. Accordingly they reinterpreted the enforcement clause and now envisioned the Thirteenth Amendment as the foundation for African Americans’ civil rights. When passing the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and renewing the Freedmen’s Bureau Act, Congress claimed as its authority the Thirteenth Amendment’s enforcement clause.

The Thirteenth Amendment’s importance lies not only in its striking the final blow to slavery. It also marked the beginning of Americans using constitutional amendments as instruments of social reform–including reforms not imagined by the Framers. The amendment debate further weakened originalist thinking and forced Americans to confront the Constitution’s imperfections. By illustrating how contingency affected the process of passing and ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment and demonstrating that it “never had a single, fixed meaning” (237), Vorenberg offers a convincing counterpoint to contemporary originalists.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 2.4 (July, 2002).

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John W. Quist is an associate professor of history at Shippensburg University and the author of Restless Visionaries: The Social Roots of Antebellum Reform in Alabama and Michigan (Baton Rouge, 1998).

Thanks to the University of Chicago Press and the Liberty Fund, the five stout volumes of Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner’s collection of constitutional source material, The Founders’ Constitution, first published in 1987, are now available in a searchable electronic format, both online and on a CD-ROM. Users will thus be able to decide which of three versions they prefer–the original hard copy (available from the University Press of Chicago or as an inexpensive paperback from the Liberty Fund), the online version, or the disk.

Briefly put, The Founders’ Constitution resembles one of those eighteenth-century compilations that went by the title of The Flowers of [fill in favorite author]. These forerunners of Reader’s Digest condensed books did the work for you by collecting the good bits and leaving out the extraneous or distracting or even unsuitable parts. So, too, The Founders’ Constitution. Kurland and Lerner went through what they saw as the relevant texts (starting with Magna Carta and ending with the decisions of the Marshall Court), found the telling material, and arranged their excerpts according to the constitutional provision on which they threw light. The result was arbitrary but hardly accidental; these were scholars who knew what they thought, and they thought the materials they gathered for their readers would help them learn a good deal about what the Constitution meant to those who framed it. Kurland and Lerner liked the idea of a recoverable original intent; even more, they seem to have liked the idea that the Founders’ intent, once conveniently presented, could be made use of today. Aware that some of their readers might have difficulty swallowing these propositions, they tried in their introduction to overcome potential objections. But in the end, and like many of us, they knew what they liked, and they assumed that what worked for them would work for the rest of us, too.

How good is The Founders’ Constitution at what it claims to do? The answer depends in part on what you choose to look at. In the case of the Second Amendment, to take a subject of more interest today than it was for Kurland and Lerner in the 1980s, the job it does is pretty poor. On this notorious provision of the Bill of Rights we get ten snippets, occupying some six pages and ranging from the 1328 Statute of Northampton to an 1833 Indiana decision. Admittedly, this is two pages more than are devoted to the Third Amendment, but it’s an awful lot less than the twenty-six pages on the Fourth Amendment, or the 166 pages for the First Amendment. And yet in recent months few constitutional topics have been of more interest to early American historians than the Second Amendment. This suggests that there may be something inherently unworkable about Kurland and Lerner’s effort to locate an unchanging constitutional essence that can be tied to carefully chosen texts, the whole packaged as a reliable if not infallible guide to what the Constitution means.

Even Michael Bellesiles’s badly flawed Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture (New York, 2000) does a much better job with the Second Amendment than Kurland and Lerner. In fact, as Jack Rakove notes in the January 2002 William and Mary Quarterly, it’s a redeeming feature of Bellesiles’s book that it forces us to think about the sorts of contextualizing material that can help us to understand the Framers. Nothing, I think, could be further from the mental world of The Founders’ Constitution than the notion that social history has a role to play in this process. But perhaps the probate inventories Bellesiles studies really are more helpful than the Statute of Northampton, and maybe, to move closer to the sort of material Kurland and Lerner privilege, all those letters from Washington complaining about the militia he quotes do have something to say about what was in the Founders’ minds. You won’t find this sort of stuff in Kurland and Lerner, though, in part because their principles of selection are conventional, if not downright unimaginative, in part because what they really go in for is proof texts.

When The Founders’ Constitution appeared in 1987, it was possible to overlook some of its more dubious aspects. It was convenient, it was handy, it had a wonderful index that allowed you to look things up very quickly. Of course you might have been advised to check the originals from which Kurland and Lerner drew, just to make sure they hadn’t wrenched their excerpts out of context or because you never know what will happen when you read the complete text instead of a snippet. No question, though, in the age of paper The Founders’ Constitution was a great quick fix.

Things have changed since 1987, and the fact that this review is appearing in an e-journal is indicative of that change. Thus many–not all, but a healthy percentage–of the texts included in The Founders’ Constitution are available in unabridged form on the Yale Law School’s Avalon Project site and that’s only the tip of the cyber iceberg when it comes to materials of constitutional relevance. So unless you find Kurland and Lerner’s choice of what to excerpt particularly appealing and don’t want to be distracted by other possibilities, there’s no real reason to prefer The Founders’ Website to the Avalon Project’s. Moreover, there’s been enormous progress since 1987 with the documentary editions–in particular The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution (Madison, Wi., 1976) and The Documentary History of the First Federal Congress (Baltimore, 1972-)–so that scholars today have at their fingertips far more sources than Kurland and Lerner had in the 1980s. The result, then, is that the issues of access that once made a work like The Founders’ Constitution an attractive proposition even to those who don’t share Kurland and Lerner’s presumptions have largely disappeared, and with them a not inappreciable part of its raison d’être.

Lest I appear ungrateful to the Liberty Fund and the University of Chicago Press, I’ll end by saying that The Founders’ Constitution is not without its uses and that, given the choice of having the compilation or not having it at all, I’d certainly choose to have it. But it’s a work that needs to be used with a fairly robust sense of its limitations, and it should never, ever be a final stopping point in research.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 2.4 (July, 2002).

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Herbert Sloan is professor of history at Barnard College. He is the author of Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt (New York and London, 1995), recently republished in paperback by the University Press of Virginia.

“If you knew what you were getting into, would you do it again?” That question was recently posed to me by one of the producers of the PBS series Colonial House, after I had just completed more than a year as a lead consultant for the show. A follow-up to such popular shows as Frontier House and Manor House, the series is an effort to blend reality television with history. A group of modern day “colonists” spent four months of 2003 experiencing the life of settlers in 1628 Maine. The colonists undertook a crash course in seventeenth-century living, were provided with historically accurate food, clothing, shelter, and other necessities, and had to carve out a colony on the harsh and unforgiving shores of a new land. They were filmed regularly, and the result was an eight-hour series that premiered May 17.

Some historians might view the muck of a recreated 1628 village as a long way from the ivory tower—and a still longer way from the real 1628—and thus steer well clear of such a project. I must admit I had a few doubts when PBS first approached me. After all, Frontier House had occasionally threatened to turn into Survivor meets Little House on the Prairie. Still, I was struck by the incredible power of this popular series. I was amazed by my young daughters’ fascination with the show—and their willingness to watch it again and again. Despite its flaws, people talked about Frontier House—including many folks who never showed much interest in history before.

So, it seemed worth the risk, as Colonial House was a rare opportunity to present early American history to a large audience. Most history on television focuses on the recent past, where photographs, film clips, and other visual materials are readily available. All too often, the History Channel becomes the World War II Channel. Finally, early America was getting the attention it deserved and I could be a part of it. The alternative was to stay on the sidelines, and my family was already heartily sick of hearing my complaints about bad history on television. 

Occasionally I did question my decision to get involved. My responsibilities on the show were wide ranging and often time consuming. Drawing on court records, legal codes, letters, account books, and many other primary sources from England and America, I put together the historical background for the colony including its charter, the governor’s commission, even the historical backgrounds for individual colonists. The production team studied these materials and also placed the documents in the hands of our colonists to help order their society. I helped train the “settlers,” and was one of the on-camera experts who assessed their relative success in establishing a community and making a profit for their sponsoring company in England. I weighed in on numerous historical questions ranging from, What was a beaver pelt worth in 1628? to Would the colonists have exported blueberries? 

I quickly realized that much more so than my other public-history projects, Colonial House had to weave historical accuracy with modern-day reality. Unlike a museum exhibit, talking-head documentaries, or even Plimoth Plantation where the staff goes home at night, these twenty-first-century colonists were really living living history, and bringing their modern worldviews and expectations with them. The series also had to pay close attention to what the production team called “the televisual moment”: a compelling, brief, and visually interesting scene that told a story. And not least, we had to work within the confines of close deadlines and tight budgets. Thus Colonial House was a constant balancing act between the ideal and the practical, between the televisual story, the sound bite, and the historical record. Clearly, this leads to some unique problems and opportunities for the historian.

 

Thanks to the talented staff of Plimoth Plantation, most aspects of the material world of 1628 could be reproduced. However, there were practical limits to the project. For example, a real colony in 1628 would most likely have been an armed camp, complete with a night watch, a hastily constructed palisade, and a military leader such as John Smith or Miles Standish. Unfortunately, safety precautions and modern-day laws preempted any efforts to arm our colonists with clumsy matchlock muskets, leading to the wholesale elimination of an important aspect of a colony’s first months. It is probably just as well, or we might have accidentally lost a colonist or two. Still, a little martial drill with some unloaded firearms and the construction of a section of palisade might have at least given the flavor of this experience. 

Furs, fish, and lumber were even more plentiful than weapons in 1628 Maine, so planters had lots of goods to export. Our settlers faced a different reality—a twenty-first century world of scarcity. Their colony was a blueberry barren, with no hardwood, and little in the way of game or fur bearers. The Maine fishing banks are now so depleted that many fishermen are going bankrupt, so how could our colonists succeed? 

Despite these material constraints, it was much more difficult to recreate the mental world of 1628. The long history of mistreatment of Native peoples made it tough for our colonists and their modern-day Native American visitors to portray first encounters and the subsequent fur trade. Likewise, how do you deal with the complexities of slavery and race relations in 1628 with the hindsight of 2003? How can you enforce seventeenth-century religion and morality on people with a diverse, and often secular modern worldview? Especially when there is no available means of punishment other than public humiliation—something that only works if the offender and the public agree that the transgression merits shame. Such issues meant that the twenty-first century kept rearing its ugly head into the series.

So, was Colonial House perfect? Reality never is, and reality television is no different. I had an excellent relationship with the production team, professionals who were genuinely concerned with historical accuracy. However, if I had been the producer rather than a consultant, I would have changed a number of things. First, the show needed far more historical explanation right up front to set the stage and explain the limitations of the series. For example, I would have more clearly laid out how the show portrayed race in 1628. Some viewers who knew that Africans had not migrated to northern New England this early were puzzled to see apparent free blacks in our colony. No, there were no Africans or Chinese (or Italians for that matter) in 1628 New England, but Americans with these and other proud heritages are an important part of the 2003 effort to recreate a founding moment of our American nation. 

It is difficult to explain complex ideas like joint stock companies and seventeenth-century Protestantism in televised sound bites, but a stronger effort was needed. The differences between Puritanism and Anglicanism—differences for which people in the era Colonial House portrayed fought and died—were never really discussed on screen. I fear many viewers will equate the governor’s enforcement of the Sabbath with Puritanism, without realizing that this was the norm in the Protestant world of 1628, and that our colony was actually loyal to the Church of England.

 

would have avoided the twenty-first century as much as possible. The narrator acknowledges that people in 1628 did not celebrate birthdays, so why include the birthday party and other clearly modern moments? When I did enter 2003, it would have been to discuss the historical research that shaped the colony. Plimoth Planation deserves far more credit than it got for the hundreds of hours its staff put in, making sure the architecture and material culture were as accurate as possible. Perhaps it is the deluded historian in me, but I think people would have been fascinated by how the colony was put together. I even suggested to PBS that an episode of Novacould be dedicated to Colonial House as experimental archaeology. PBS passed on the idea, though it may still occur informally. Plimoth Plantation staff have already begun asking the former colonists why they chose to carry out activities in certain ways. Thankfully, the show frequently cites its companion Website, where viewers can learn the details of some of these unexplored issues, and get behind-the-scenes information and curriculum materials from consultants and the production team. 

Despite the limitations, I remain convinced that “reality history” is a potentially powerful way to introduce the past to a wide audience comprised largely of people who have no desire to read lengthy academic books on early America. I would like to think that Colonial House at least gave us a different view of the remote past than the stereotypical textbook treatment we remember from high school. Some K-12 teachers and college professors have already told me they plan to use the show in the classroom. With any luck, it may also stimulate people to go to Plimoth and other living-history museums, where they can get a more detailed and nuanced view of early American life. I also hope Colonial House showed how important and relevant our past can be when we try to sort out complex modern-day issues like race, gender, and religion. 

So would I do it again? Absolutely. I have spent my career as a historian and archaeologist trying to understand what life was like for the inhabitants of early New England. Last fall I had the opportunity to walk into a version of that past, and to share that experience with a few million students of history. Flaws and all, it was the opportunity of a lifetime.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 4.4 (July, 2004).

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Emerson “Tad” Baker is chair of the history department at Salem State College. His current book project is Lithobolia, or the Stone-Throwing Devil of New England. Details on his archaeological excavations on early Maine sites can be found here.

There is little doubt that “race” is the American issue, the one that saturates the nation’s past and continues to bedevil its present. It is this fact, of course, that has helped to give studies of slavery their edge, that has contributed to making the historiography of slavery so conflicted but also so impressive. Part of the reason why courses about slavery and African American culture are so popular in institutions outside the United States, and why so many non-American scholars specialize in black history, is that “race” provides a quick way into America’s soft moral underbelly, laying bare in the starkest of fashions American sanctimony. 

Writing about slavery presents special problems–how can a writer deal with something so all-encompassingly evil ?–and the usual difficulties associated with attempting to recover the past of people who, in the main, did not leave written records. For the most part, historians–perhaps still sheltering under lingering tatters of “scientific objectivity”–have dealt with the latter problem rather better than with the former. Generally, scholars have ignored or glancingly touched on issues such as the immorality of slavery or the ethics of slave life; indeed, probably the best recent treatment of slavery in these terms is Toni Morrison’s Beloved (New York, 1987).

“Writing about slavery presents special problems–how can a writer deal with something so all-encompassingly evil?”

The writers contributing to this roundtable were asked to use their particular expertise to ponder the dilemmas of how slavery may be represented. Hardly surprisingly, given the variety of backgrounds and interests of those involved, the resulting brief essays are quite disparate in their focus. A. J. Verdelle, a novelist, explores the contested terrain that authors mine to build tales of American slavery–the narrow discursive ground between what she calls “stories overdone” and “tragedies understated.” Karen Sutton, a historical interpreter at Colonial Williamsburg, meditates on the challenge of remaining “truthful but tasteful” when presenting the uncomfortable history of slavery to tourists. Historian David Blight, too, is concerned with the issue of how slavery is represented to the public, discussing both feature films and, from his experience as an adviser, historical documentaries. The last pair of essays take a different tack, pointing to facets that are mostly absent from our understanding of the slave past. Alex Bontemps considers the very few visual representations of American slavery and, in an attempt to correct history’s deafness, Graham White and I suggest ways in which we might access slavery’s hitherto largely soundless world. For all their eclecticism, however, the essays demonstrate the continuing ability of the history of slavery to engage and deeply challenge those scholars and writers who feel impelled to take it up.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 1.4 (July, 2001).

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In the summer of 1953, Richard Wright left Paris for West Africa’s Gold Coast, where Kwame Nkrumah, that country’s first black prime minister, was about to make a historic bid for independence from British colonial rule. The purpose of Wright’s trip–his first to Africa–was to document Nkrumah’s political moment and to dispel stereotypical myths about the continent in the process. Yet as Wright’s reflections in the now-classic Black Power make clear, his six-month sojourn became, as well, a personal pilgrimage to an ancestral homeland. “I wanted to see the crumbling slave castles where my ancestors had lain panting in hot despair,” he wrote (6). He chose to travel to the Gold Coast by ship, then a twelve-day voyage, re-charting the course taken previously by slave ship captains and colonial officials from Liverpool in England to Takoradi in the Gold Coast.

Two summers ago, I traveled to Ghana to conduct research in the historic castles and dungeons of Cape Coast and Elmina. Since Wright’s trip forty years ago, these sites have become hugely popular with tourists. I went there to study how the curators of these sites reconstructed the history of the slave trade, and how visitors interacted with the history exhibitions and the physical environment. Specifically, I wanted to understand how visitors formulated ideas about remembrance, cultural identity, and heritage in the space of the monuments.

Like Wright’s, my trip to Ghana marked my first time in Africa and combined research with a spiritual homecoming. Prior to going, I had traveled from New York to England, where I spent several weeks examining archives and exhibitions in London, Bristol, and Liverpool, ports notorious for their connection to the slave trade. Consequently, not unlike Wright’s, my trip to Ghana originated on the shores of its former colonial ruler. Instead of traveling by ship, however, I flew from London to Accra. From there, I took a State Transportation Corporation bus, crowded with Ghanaian travelers and tourists from around the world, along the rugged, hilly coast, and saw for the first time the crumbling forts and the angry waters that still churn around them. It was a view that I imagined to be not too dissimilar to the one that my ancestors in the coffle might have witnessed centuries ago on their defiant and painful march to the coast (fig. 1).

 

 

Such journeys, unusual in Wright’s day, are quite common in ours. In recent years, increasing numbers of people of African descent, particularly African Americans, have engaged in what I call cultural heritage tourism, a type of travel-related identity seeking, where they visit monuments, historic sites, and other places of interest in an effort to get a glimpse of where they came from and an understanding of how they define themselves. The cultural heritage tourist in this case is typically middle or working class and travels as part of a group, usually a church group or an organized tour, with “roots seeking” in mind. Indeed, this type of leisure travel is also called roots tourism, in part after Alex Haley’s popular novel and later television miniseries, Roots, which spurred the first big wave of African American heritage tourism in the late 1970s, together with the designation of both Cape Coast and Elmina as World Heritage Monuments by UNESCO in 1972 (fig. 2). But while cultural heritage tourism seems to be booming, it is not for everyone. When my sister, Lisa, asked about joining me in Ghana, I mentioned my research plans at Cape Coast and Elmina. Her response was, “Cheryl, that’s depressing! Why would I want to go there and revisit that horror? That’s not my idea of a vacation.” I suggested that she could also check out a local village, the nearby nature reserve, rainforest, or beach, but being familiar with the history of coastal Ghana, she could not begin to imagine treading in waters that at one time had been so bloodied. Clearly, for some, the pain of visiting sites of such human devastation is simply too unbearable.

 

 

The attention directed towards Cape Coast and Elmina by tourists from around the globe, then, is not part of an isolated trend. Nor are members of the African Diaspora the only ones going to visit. Rather, Cape Coast and Elmina are frequented by Ghanaians, different groups of people from the African continent, and others still from around the world. This makes for an interesting mix of descendants of slave traders, both African and white European, and descendants of slaves at these popular yet controversial sites. Converging in the space of the monuments then are the contested memories of the significance of the place, different perspectives on which histories should be most emphasized, and which cultural group lays claim to them.

In other words, such sites become important battlegrounds for what I call symbolic possession of the past, that is, claiming the memory of a historic event by one social group or another. Symbolic possession of the past concerns a group’s willingness to take responsibility for its past, to (re)claim a particular slice of history that defines who they are. As victims of traumatic histories struggle to possess the sites and symbols of the past, they begin to acquire the sense of agency to shape dominant narratives and to police their history, making sure that its significance is never forgotten. Because exercising symbolic possession of the past repeatedly affirms the existence of the group, this action constantly validates the identity of the members of the group. Understanding contests for symbolic possession of the past, then, can help us understand our attachment to (or disavowal of) lost or painful histories.

At the historic castle/dungeons of Cape Coast and Elmina, the struggle for symbolic possession of the past unfolds among visitors, who draw battle lines along ethnic, racial, national, gender, and class divides. Furthermore, the battle for symbolic possession of the past involves government officials and museum professionals, for it is at the center of the controversy over how these sites are treated as memorials (or not) and whose and what memories are represented there for tourist consumption. As I learned on my journey, no one group controls the symbolic possession of these monuments. Rather there exists an often contentious joint partnership, one that is fluid, shifting between many different interests, different features of the sites, different pasts. Wright’s questions to himself before embarking on his trip to the Gold Coast laid out the complexity of the dilemma at hand: “Perhaps some Englishman, Scotsman, Frenchman, Swede, or Dutchman had chained my great-great-great-great-grandfather in the hold of a slave ship; and perhaps that remote grandfather had been sold on an auction block in New Orleans, Richmond, or Atlanta . . . My emotions seemed to be touching a dark and dank wall . . . But, am I African? Had some of my ancestors sold their relatives to white men? What would my feelings be when I looked into the black face of an African, feeling that maybe his great-great-great-great grandfather had sold my great-great great grandfather into slavery?” (4). Such questions still haunt today’s African Diaspora tourists, nearly four decades later.

The Price of the Ticket
Upon entering the monuments of Cape Coast or Elmina, visitors first become aware of themselves as a particular type of tourist–Ghanaian national or non-Ghanaian national–based on the price of the admission ticket. Non-Ghanaian nationals pay ten times more than Ghanaian nationals: ten thousand cedis (approximately four dollars) instead of one thousand cedis (approximately forty cents). Officials of the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board (GMMB) defend this pricing structure, which discriminates based on class and national belonging, as necessary to support the maintenance and upkeep of the monuments, a strategy not uncommon to nascent tourist economies in other developing countries. At one thousand cedis, a visit to Cape Coast or Elmina is within reach of many Ghanaians, enabling them to participate in the development of the tourist economy, while lending support to the monuments’national importance. The GMMB spokesmen assert that tourists coming from as far away as New York City or Auckland can afford to pay ten times more than the admission price paid by Ghanaians.

Many non-Ghanaian nationals, especially those from the African Diaspora, expressed great dissatisfaction with the admissions fees at Cape Coast and Elmina. Simply put, they felt that it was unfair that they should have to pay more. Indeed, many African Americans and blacks from the diaspora assert that their historical relationship to the monuments in Ghana is the overriding difference. For them, the monuments are distinctive sites that they journey to in search of some aspect of their identity, a clue that will unlock the mystery of their past, something that will connect them to their ancestors. Many African Americans claim that it is hard enough for them make the pilgrimage to redeem this part of their history, to “come home” and to pay homage to their ancestors, without feeling doubly wounded by the unequal admission prices. During her visit to Cape Coast Castle in 1998, Farah Jasmine Griffin, who teaches English at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States, asked, “Why do Africans in the diaspora have to pay so much more when our ancestors were held captive here?” As descendants of enslaved Africans then, coming (home) to reconnect with their lost ancestors, many members of the African Diaspora claim a privileged status. Moreover, some reason that if they are making such a homecoming, why should they have to pay anything whatsoever to enter? Why aren’t they welcomed home with open arms and regarded, as Richard Wright wondered, as “lost brother[s] who had returned?” (4).

This question illuminates the very problem. African Americans have certain expectations when they go “back” to visit a place that has come to stand for the homeland of their ancestors. In Ghana, they feel a definite connection not only to the people and the land, but to the dungeons, those bold, physical markers of the past. Ghanaians, on the other hand, do not necessarily appreciate African Americans’ symbolic relationship to the castle/dungeons, their need to cling to something there that may explain their African heritage and anchor their sense of belonging in the world. Some Ghanaians point to a certain lack of specificity when blacks from the diaspora claim Ghana as their ancestral home. They wonder, why Ghana, and not another West African country? Why not Nigeria, Gambia, Angola, or Senegal, for example?

As such questions remind us, Ghanaians and African Americans have understood the histories of slavery and the slave trade in very distinct ways, from opposite sides of the Atlantic. And, perhaps, from opposite sides of the coin of memory. If African Americans long to remember, many Ghanians need to forget. Perhaps one of the few ways that the people who remained in present-day Ghana managed to survive the trauma of the slave trade was to suppress the memory of how it forever transformed their culture, society, land, and people. They had to forget in order to survive, to move on, and to build a new identity. They had to forget the wrongs that were perpetrated against them by white Europeans and Americans, as well as their own forefathers. Many Ghanaians I asked about this responded, “Four hundred years is enough”–enough talking about it, enough shame, enough painful memories. In contrast, most African American visitors to Ghana believe that the very act of visiting the castle/dungeons demonstrates a certain responsibility for their history, a reclaiming of the past. While many remain perplexed by the cost of admission at Cape Coast and Elmina, others see this relatively nominal fee as the small price they have to pay in order to help preserve the monuments for generations to come. Seen as a charitable donation, their contributions play the double role of honoring the memory of their ancestors while supporting the livelihood of their Ghanaian brothers and sisters. This ongoing debate is an example of how symbolic possession of the past shapes the present with such a seemingly petty thing as the price of a ticket, even when the top price is only four dollars.

What’s in a Name, I
African Americans and black people from the diaspora often have great expectations for their first visit to Africa. Whether the destination is Ghana, Kenya, or Nigeria, visitors’ hopes are connected to their desire to answer questions about their ancestry. Wright, when reflecting upon the prospect of going to Africa for the first time, gave the question of homecoming serious thought: “Africa! Being of African descent, would I be able to feel and know something about Africa on the basis of a common ‘racial’ heritage? . . . Or had three hundred years imposed a psychological distance between me and the ‘racial stock’ from which I had sprung? . . . Was there something in Africa that my feelings could latch onto to make all of this dark past clear and meaningful? Would the Africans regard me as a lost brother who had returned?” (4). Unfortunately for Wright, the answer to his last question would be no. Dressed neatly in a khaki safari outfit, sun hat, sunglasses, and camera, Wright was regarded as Western and wholly foreign by most of the people that he met in the Gold Coast.

Today, the same holds true for many African Americans and black people from the diaspora who travel to Ghana in search of their roots. What these twenty-first century pilgrims believe to be a return “home” is exposed as a mere tourist excursion upon their arrival. Regardless of skin color or manner of dress, black people from the diaspora are considered just as foreign as the average tourist from Asia, Europe, or the Americas. To Ghanaians, the tourists–black and white alike–are obruni, a term that carries the double-edged meaning of both “white man” and “foreigner.” Whether they hear the term when they go to purchase a bottle of water from a street vendor, or as they are confronted by the sea of small children who huddle outside of the monuments at Cape Coast and Elmina asking for American money and addresses, diaspora blacks can’t help being unnerved by the irony of this innocent name.

What’s in a Name, II
The original name for Elmina, Saõ Jorge da Mina, pays tribute to the patron saint of Portugal, St. George, and harks back to its initial function as a fortified trading post within close proximity of the gold mines near the Prah River in present-day Ghana. Built in 1482 by Portuguese soldiers, masons, and carpenters, it remains the oldest and largest colonial structure in sub-Saharan Africa, and one of the world’s important medieval castles. Even Richard Wright was seduced by its mere presence: “I reached Elmina just as the sun was setting and its long red rays lit the awe-inspiring battlements of the castle with a somber but resplendent majesty. It is by far the most impressive castle or fort on the Atlantic shore of the Gold Coast” (383). Elmina had to be both immense and imposing. Impenetrable even (fig. 3).

 

 

With the reluctant permission of the local village chief, Elmina was built into the rocky coastline on a narrow peninsula where the Benya River meets the Gulf of Guinea. Underground storerooms and dungeons were carved out of the stone. These were used for Portuguese trade goods, such as linen, brass manilas, and earthenware, and for the local resources received in exchange: first gold, salt, and ivory, and then human beings.

Elmina’s strategic location was a reminder for rival European nations, who were vying to break the Portuguese monopoly over the vast new supplies of gold, and for the local inhabitants, who weren’t altogether happy with the presence of a foreign stronghold in their midst. The site long since had been the center of commerce for a small fishing village, split geographically by the Benya Lagoon and politically between the Eguafo and Efutu States. By sea, Elmina was sheltered by the treacherous, rocky coastline. By land, approximately three hundred feet away as the crow flies, a steep hill, perfect for keeping watch, provided additional protection. On top of this hill, the Portuguese built a church in 1503, from which missionaries converted and baptized the local villagers, including the paramount chief (fig. 4).

 

 

Destroyed in battles with the Dutch by the end of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese church was later rebuilt in a courtyard within the fortified walls of Elmina Castle, where it was surrounded on three sides by cavernous dungeons that held African men bound for slave ships (fig. 5).

 

 

After the Dutch finally seized Elmina in 1637, it was expanded to include a Dutch chapel. The Portuguese church became an auction gallery and later, an officer’s mess hall. After nearly 150 years of maintaining colonial headquarters at Elmina, the Dutch relinquished the castle to the British in 1872, who turned it over to the newly independent Ghanaian government of Kwame Nkrumah in 1957.

On a clear day, it is possible to see Elmina from Cape Coast Castle, located just a few miles to the east. Cape Coast began as a Portuguese trading lodge in 1555. Strategically situated on a rocky promontory with an adjacent natural harbor, it was called Cabo Corso, or short cape, by the Portuguese. For nearly one hundred years, rival European nations fought for control of Cape Coast until 1653, when the Swedish signed a treaty with the Efutu paramount chief to build a permanent structure named after King Charles X of Sweden. Over the next decade, more skirmishes ensued between the Dutch, the Efutu chief, and the Danish. But the final European power to take the fort would be the British, who captured it in 1665 and named it Cape Coast (fig. 6).

 

 

The British were quick to make significant reinforcements to Cape Coast, increasing both its size and strength to compete with the headquarters of the Dutch West India Company just a few miles away at Elmina Castle. The architectural improvements greatly enhanced the total surface area of the castle to include additional officers’ barracks, trading rooms, underground cisterns, more cannon, and taller battlements. Not only did the British hope to remain in control of this strategically positioned fort, they also aimed to establish a dominant presence on the West African coast. By enclosing virtually all the necessities of a small city within the walls of the expanded Cape Coast Castle, the British protected themselves against attacks from local and European enemies, and efficiently refined the business of the slave trade through what an economist might call vertical integration. Cape Coast remained a central conduit for the extremely high volume of British slave trafficking until the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. Beginning in the mid-1820s, Cape Coast served primarily as an administrative headquarters, first over British forts in West Africa and then as the initial seat of government for the British Gold Coast Colony in 1872. Cape Coast Castle remained under British colonial rule until Ghanaian independence in 1957.

According to the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board, there are only three structures designated as castles among the sixty colonial forts that remain on Ghana’s coast: Elmina, Cape Coast, and Christianborg. Of the three, Cape Coast and Elmina are the most popular with present-day tourists. By default, Christianborg is virtually off limits to tourists and photography because it houses the Ghanaian head of state. Of Danish origin, Christianborg was built in 1661 at Osu in the capital city of Accra. As a fortified structure that once held African captives in a complex matrix of dungeons, it might seem a bit odd that Christianborg Castle is now home to the president of Ghana. But equally perplexing for today’s roots tourist is the very term “castle.”

The word castle dates from before the twelfth century. From the Latin castellum or fortress, a diminutive of castrum, meaning fortified place, the word castle signifies “a large fortified building or set of buildings.” Over the past three hundred years, Christianborg, Elmina, and Cape Coast have been classified as castles for their style of architecture, their sheer size, and their function. Distinguished from the more numerous but smaller forts, the castles have a larger surface area, a more intricate complex of connecting structures, and the ability to house a large number of people. Yet the word rings oddly in many visitors’ ears. African Americans and many blacks from the diaspora feel that calling Cape Coast and Elmina by the name “castle” elides the history of the dungeons beneath these places and with it, their ancestors’ experiences. With such a name, they say the stories of their forebears get lost. In their place, fairytale notions of European architectural grandeur associated with a popular understanding of the term “castle,” sugarcoat the fact that enslaved Africans, possibly their ancestors, were held captive there.

Just as they reject the label “castle” to describe sites like Elmina and Cape Coast, some members of the African Diaspora also disagree with the renovation efforts being made in the name of historic preservation. They feel that the renovations privilege high architecture and transform the castles into “make believe” places. One visitor plainly stated, “It is horrible to watch this dungeon being turned into a Walt Disney castle!” referring to coats of fresh white paint on the bastions, the addition of potted plants and flowers at the entrance, and the effort to clean and paint the inside of the dungeons. The double-edged phrase, “Stop white washing our history!” appears frequently in the visitor comment books at Cape Coast and Elmina. Instead of the regular program of painting, upkeep, and renovation, some feel that these monuments should be left alone to crumble and fall into the sea (fig. 7).

 

 

Other African Americans have recommended that the word “dungeons” be added to the official name of Cape Coast Castle and Elmina Castle. Their suggestion seeks to recognize the memory of the millions who were held captive there. But considering the GMMB’s marketing efforts aimed at international tourism, a name like Cape Coast Castle and Dungeons might not be so good for business.

Performing Memory, Performing Race, Performing Identity
Upon entering Cape Coast or Elmina, visitors are invited to see and participate in layered and nuanced performances of remembrance. First, they become aware of themselves as a particular type of tourist–as Ghanaian nationals or non-Ghanaian nationals–based on the price of the admission ticket. Then, as if to prepare visitors for the horror of the dungeons, to soften the emotional blow that they are about to experience, they are directed to visit a museum before going on a guided tour of the castle.

In order to reach the museum at Cape Coast Castle, visitors must walk across an expansive, cobblestone courtyard that opens out to the sea. The museum is located on the second floor in cool, darkened rooms that formerly engaged the business of the slave trade and the administration of the British Gold Coast Colony. Upon entering the museum, most visitors experience momentary blindness as their eyes become accustomed to the sharp transition from brightness to darkness. Outside, pure, equatorial sunlight reflects off the whitewashed exterior of the castle and the crashing sea, providing a high contrast with the simulated museum environment lit in deliberately low lumens in order to protect the artifacts on display. Other contrasts of light and dark are found throughout the tour of the castle, most obviously between the gloom of the dungeons and the intensity of the sun in exterior spaces–or metaphorically, between blacks and whites (fig. 8).

 

 

According to the curators, the museum’s exhibition, Crossroads of a People, Crossroads of Trade, “examines more than 500 years of Ghana’s history, placing the castle within its broad economic, political, and historical contexts, including the legacy of the slave trade. It also offers a glimpse into the life today and the rich cultural heritage of the Central Region.” The exhibition was developed in 1994 in close consultation with North American advisors, designers, curators, and historians, as well as local and national scholars, chiefs, and archeologists. Crossroads begins with the pre-colonial history of the Central Region of Ghana, using artifacts, such as gold weights and measuring scales, stone implements for hunting, and terracotta figurines. The coming of the Europeans is represented by large blowups of European engravings that depict West African scenes or West African/European contact. The development of the slave trade is told through maps of the trade routes, engravings of the coffle marching through the hinterlands, and examples of the artifacts of barter and exchange–glass beads, pottery, whiskey bottles, and firearms. Midway through the exhibition, visitors pass through a dark, wood-paneled space meant to represent the hold of the slave ships in which captive Africans were forcibly transported to the New World. Walking through this cramped, minimally designed space, visitors are confronted with a heap of heavy rope from a ship, a pair of shackles connected to chains, and other iron restraint devices, which are fastened to the raw hewn wooden walls. One section of the wall has rough, wooden planks meant to resemble the narrow decks on which enslaved men, women, and children were closely confined. There is also a large black-and-white print of the slave ship icon and two popular nineteenth-century engravings of captives onboard a slave ship. Overhead, a wooden grate simulates the hatch that would have brought in fresh air from the ship’s upper deck (fig. 9).

 

 

Equipped with artifacts, illustrations, and a faint musty smell, this fabricated, transitional space is obviously meant to impress upon the visitor’s imagination the horror of the Middle Passage. Similar installations replicating the hold of a slave ship have been utilized by museum professionals in England and the United States, often to great effect. But here, ironically, such an installation fails to have the same impact because the main attractions–the physical edifice of the castle and slave dungeons–are themselves so real and tangible that they need no theatrical accompaniments. They provide the “authentic” experience.

Upon exiting the “hold,” the visitor is thrust immediately upon a simulated auction block in the Southern United States. The transition is abrupt, and not without impact. The next room summarizes the trials and achievements of New World blacks, using black-and-white photographs or engravings of notable people. These images visualize moments of African Diaspora history in the Caribbean and North America, from the Haitian Revolution to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. There are familiar portraits of people like Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Duke Ellington, Billie Holliday, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson, Angela Davis, and Bob Marley. Although many of these people are well known in Ghana and around the world today, this part of the exhibition has a distinctly American and mostly masculine feeling. The last part of the exhibit describes the contemporary cultural history of Ghana and the Central Region using examples of local crafts, including brightly colored cloths and carved wooden utensils and musical instruments. With a mood that is upbeat and exuding vitality, this closing section ends with explanations of local and national traditions, economy, politics, and agriculture.

The museum at Elmina is much smaller and less sophisticated, and its focus on local history instead of larger history of the slave trade gives it special charm for many tourists. It is located on the first floor of the former Portuguese church, a squat red-brick building that dominates the central courtyard. The exhibit, Images of Elmina across the Centuries, charts the history of the village of Elmina from pre-colonial times to the present. Opened in 1996, the exhibition was organized by the GMMB in conjunction with the same group of American consultants that advised the Cape Coast design team. Using little in the way of complex design or theatrical installations, the Elmina exhibit effectively employs two-dimensional illustrative materials–mostly prints, photographs, and text–on large folding panels to relate an intimate local history. At the museums at Cape Coast and Elmina, the influence of Western consultants is notable in the design, layout, and type of art and artifacts selected to relate the histories.

After visitors take in the exhibitions at either Cape Coast or Elmina, they go to meet a tour guide in the courtyard. Each tour guide leads a group of about twenty people, which usually ends up being racially and ethnically diverse as well as international in character. Diversity doesn’t mean harmony, however. Indeed, some members of such mixed tour groups complain of being singled out by other visitors in their groups for derogatory comments. An American tourist from Connecticut briefly described his experience during an Elmina Castle tour in the site’s logbook: “Very impressive castle. Tour was very good. Great views toward the city, beach and ocean. One concern–a man during the tour was distracting an[d] I felt offended by his anti-white sentiments, as he kept saying, ‘white people this . . .’ I couldn’t understand exactly, but he should respect other people more who are trying to follow the tour guide. Overall, I enjoyed my visit here.” A Ghanaian member of the same tour group added, “[I]t should be strictly forbidden for visitors in the group to keep making offensive comments which directly or indirectly concern individuals in the group.”

Organized tour groups often request to have their own guide. These groups are usually more homogeneous, either racially, or by their affiliation with schools, churches, or missionary organizations. Often, organized groups of African American tourists ask that no white people accompany their tour. One African American visitor to Cape Coast suggested, “White visitors should come on different days than the black visitors.” In addition, some African American groups request that no white people be present when they go to the dungeons for the first time, explaining that they don’t want to experience the pain of their ancestors with a descendant of the oppressor present. One African American visitor to Cape Coast expressed his feelings of “rage and hostility towards the Dutch and Portuguese”–past and present–after going on the tour.

The guided tours at both Cape Coast and Elmina focus on the points of pain and suffering, and of strength and resistance, to lend a sense of authenticity to the historical and contemporary significance of the sites. Indeed, the notion of authenticity is central to the allure of cultural heritage tourism as an industry. In their efforts to show “how it really was,” the principal highlights of the castle tours dramatize key features that offer up a notion of life as it was once experienced there. Thus, visitors learn about how enslaved women were raped by European traders, governors, and officers and about the types of torture inflicted upon defiant captives. They also sense the ironic presence of the church inside the castle, and the dramatic contrast between the spacious governors’ and officers’ quarters on the upper levels and the stench and horror of the underground dungeons. Perhaps most disturbing, and in this sense most authentic, is the visitor’s final glimpse of the “Door of No Return,” from which enslaved Africans were led to awaiting ships, never to come back.

Most, if not all of the rooms that tourists pass through are empty. The churches have no pews. Nor are the governors’ or officers’ quarters decorated with period furniture. This means that visitors have to imagine what it might have been like to live in these spaces. One visitor at Cape Coast demanded: “Please authenticate the Governor’s residence to look exactly the way it was then. I think that will make the necessary contrast with the dungeons.” When I visited Cape Coast Castle, restorations to the governor’s quarters, which were scheduled to include arrangements of furniture and decorations from the colonial period, had begun. At Elmina, there was talk of restoring the two tower prisons on top of the seaward bastions in which the Asantehene or king of Ashanti, Prempeh I, and his royal family were held by the British for four years at the end of the nineteenth century. These restorations would likely aim to give a sense of Ashanti culture, in particular of the way in which a turn-of-the-century royal Asantehene lived. Such a restoration, focusing on the history of a known national figure, would provide a powerful contrast to the better-known stories of the colonial officials who occupied the second-story living quarters. It’s relatively easy to imagine how to restore the quarters of the colonial and local elites.

But how might the dungeons be “authenticated”? A visitor to Elmina had one possible solution: “Renovate with models of slaves, sound effects, [and] smells to give authenticity and real feel for what it was like for our ancestors.” But might such a renovation go too far? How would the curators and designers choose the models to represent the slaves? Would they opt for wax figures of the type seen at natural history museums or at the popular international tourist attraction, Madame Tussaud’s? Or might they use actual people to make the body casts? This was the case at the Museum of African American History in Detroit, where city residents were used as models for the life-sized figures of fifty shackled youths, cast in bronze. Until recently, these figures were part of a central exhibit about the Middle Passage, now being demolished due to its lack of popularity with visitors. Some of the restorative changes to the female dungeons at Elmina aim at the kind of authentication the visitors’ logbooks call for, especially the new metal bars that were placed in the arched window openings (fig. 10).

 

 

But the fresh coats of white paint inside of some of the male dungeons have left many visitors in a state of outrage. As one person commented, “The Jews would not paint the ovens in Germany!” What is more, when one of the male dungeons at Elmina was remodeled into a gift shop, so many visitors complained about it that it was eventually dismantled and moved to an outer service area across from the castle restaurant. They felt that the presence of a gift shop in a former dungeon not only trivialized, but also erased the memory of those who were once held prisoner there. Moreover the bitter irony of a dungeon-cum-gift shop drew attention to the consumer side of the monuments as tourist attractions.

But the deepest sense of irony becomes clear when we consider the way in which the monuments are packaged and marketed for global tourism, especially for cultural heritage tourism. Here, the thing that is being sold (back) to the tourist is the memory of their ancestors: the now-absent black bodies that become part of the allure of these monuments. It is an irony some visitors to the castles have complained about. As one person put it, “Don’t turn our memories into a tourist attraction.” In the current age of global tourism, memory itself becomes a commodity–a thing to be bought, sold, and traded.

At Cape Coast Castle, a different type of authentication takes place inside the male dungeons. A large altar to the local god, Nana Tabir, has been erected in front of the blocked entranceway to an old tunnel leading to the Door of No Return. One of the oldest gods of Cape Coast, Nana Tabir was known to protect the local fishermen as well as the traders who met in Cape Coast Castle. The god took the form of a sacred rock, the very rock from which the dungeons were carved during the late seventeenth century. The present shrine to Nana Tabir was erected by the chief of Cape Coast, Nana Kwesi Atta, to replace the one that was there prior to the construction of the dungeons and castle. The altar is decorated with candles, flowers, fruits, notes, and monetary offerings from visitors. It is attended by a local priest, who will say a prayer to Nana Tabir in exchange for a donation.

There have been mixed reactions to the presence of the altar deep within the cavernous male dungeon. Some feel that the monetary donations, often urged by the tour guide, have made the dungeon commercial. Others, including local Christians, dismiss it as simple idolatry, while local believers in the panoply of household and state gods feel their beliefs are given notice at Cape Coast Castle. Yet many black people from the diaspora find the presence of the altar comforting. It is a place where they can bring offerings to their lost ancestors. For them, it takes on a different, double meaning, serving as an altar to Nan Tabir as well as a shrine to the people once enslaved there.

Elsewhere, the dungeons are left hauntingly bare, with the exception of the wreaths, flowers, notes, and burning candles left on a daily basis by visitors. And most people seem to prefer the dungeons that way. They feel that the emptiness best signifies the absence of the many millions gone. For them, empty is the only authentic way for the dungeons to be represented. Visitors regularly choose the emptiness of the dungeons to perform rituals of tribute and commemoration. Some burn incense there. Others weep, almost incessantly. Some groups recite poetry, sing songs, or pray together. What sound effects could compete with the cries, shrieks, chants, prayers, and songs of today’s visitors? What could be more “authentic”?

Photographic Memories
At the castles, visitors are permitted to take photographs free of charge. Throughout the tour, guests are constantly seen taking pictures of the historical points of interest, members of their group, or details of architectural or aesthetic import. Often, they choose the most picturesque vistas to make their photographs. At Elmina, the most popular places for taking pictures include the courtyard with the view of the Portuguese church, the northeast bastion with views of Fort St. Jago and the fishing village of Elmina, and the front entrance with the medieval drawbridge (fig. 11).

 

 

At Cape Coast, the most photographed spot is the balustrade walkway lined with cannon, which boasts a dramatic view of the ocean. The irony of the visitors’ fascination with taking photographs at these monuments is echoed in the sentiment of one tourist who noted, “The disparity between the horrific history of the castle and the natural and physical beauty of the seashore is a difficult mix for the present day visitor.” Seemingly attracted by the “physical beauty” alone, some visitors come with sophisticated view cameras, tripods, and black-and-white film to make “art” photographs of the castles and the surrounding environment. In fact, many fashion photographers have chosen the castles as stylish backdrops for their glossy magazine work (fig. 12).

 

 

In a strange way, then, the horror of these monuments becomes aestheticized in the act of making photographs. Even Richard Wright was taken by the hypnotizing beauty of Elmina: “Towers rise two hundred feet in the air. What spacious dreams! What august faith! How elegantly laid-out the castle is! What bold plunging lines! What, yes, taste” (384). Wright’s own photographs of Elmina emphasized the symmetry of the walls. It is significant that most people do not return to the dungeons to make photographs, nor do they take many pictures there at all. Perhaps this is in reverence to “the ancestors,” or for more practical reasons, such as the lack of sufficient light. The bright flashes needed to get a decent photograph in the darkness of the dungeons would not only disturb the somber mood for other visitors, but would surely ruin the “authentic” gloom cast by the deep shadows (fig. 13).

 

 

Without a doubt, snapping photographs has become a required part of the tourist experience. But, in the case of roots tourism, it has a special commemorative function, a different familial appeal. As roots tourists gather in front of the cannon at Cape Coast Castle or the Portuguese Church at Elmina, they are consciously participating in an act of remembrance–symbolically taking possession of the past. Their photographs are evidence of a return to the ancestral homeland, of the buildings that still stand as a reminder of the birth of the African Diaspora in the transatlantic slave trade. Back home, they share their snapshots with family and friends as proof of having been there, of having walked through the Door of No Return. Of having “returned home,” and then returned home.

In fact, the Door of No Return is one of the popular–almost required–sites that roots tourists choose to record on film (fig. 14).

 

 

At Cape Coast Castle, the Door of No Return is located at the base of the central courtyard, just beyond the female dungeons. The enormous arched doorway encloses two impressive black doors. At the top of the doorframe, a standard GMMB sign labels the door in neat white letters, “DOOR OF NO RETURN,” marking it as a site of special interest. At Cape Coast Castle, the Door of No Return is often the last stop on the guided tour, a climactic moment where visitors watch in quiet anticipation as the guide opens the door to reveal the expanse of angry sea where enslaved Africans would have been led to awaiting ships. After the group walks across the threshold to the beach, the guide points out other places of interest that lie outside the castle walls. Meanwhile, local children, who know to wait for the opening of the door, try to engage tourists in conversation or ask for money. Some groups of cultural heritage tourists choose this spot for pouring libations to ancestors.

Finally, as the guide motions to the group that it is time to go back inside, he points out a relatively new sign above the door, visible from the outside upon reentry. In the now-recognizable neat white lettering, it reads, “DOOR OF RETURN” (fig. 15).

 

 

Placed there as a gesture of reconciliation, the guide explains that is meant to welcome back the thousands of African Diaspora tourists who flock to the monuments each year.

But is such a return really possible? Think about it. What does it mean to rename the infamous DOOR OF NO RETURN, the DOOR OF RETURN? Is the sign simply a marketing tool aimed at the African Diaspora segment of the tourist industry? Does such an act signify an attempt to erase the brutal history of the castles and the dungeons beneath them? Does it mean that time–four hundred years–has healed the wounds? Is it asking us to forget and move on?

Choosing the Perfect Souvenir
Before leaving, most visitors stop by the gift shop to purchase post cards, tourist art, textiles, jewelry, carved wooden sculpture and T-shirts. Some of the T-shirts bear slogans echoing pressing issues of debate for black Americans, such as reparations for slavery. One T-shirt for sale read: front, “Back to our heritage, Elmina Castle, 1482,” with an illustration of the castle; and back, “Damn right! Our people worked for 400 years without a paycheck. Reparations are due!” One of the popular books sold in the gift shop is Castles & Forts of Ghana, written by prominent Ghanaian archeologist, Kwesi J. Anquandah and illustrated with seductive color photographs by Thierry Secretan. Published by the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board, the book has the strange feeling of being part colonial/architectural history, part travel brochure. With photographs of whitewashed forts drenched in the pink light of sunset, it succeeds in glamorizing the forts, making them a desirable tourist destination. Moreover, like the renamed Door of Return at Cape Coast Castle, this book seems to be targeted towards the returning African Diaspora. Even the souvenirs that visitors choose to purchase are telling indicators of their own need to symbolically possess the past.

Upon leaving, visitors are invited to list their nationalities, names, and addresses and to write their impressions of the tour and the castle in comment books placed on the podium just by the entrance. The comment books serve as a census of visitors and their impressions. They help site administrators, curators, and the GMMB gauge visitors’ approval of the job they are doing. At the same time, the comment books often satisfy visitors’ needs to express their feelings after cathartic experiences in the dungeons. Writing about their experiences helps them to begin the process of making sense of their visit. The comments left in these books form a continuing dialogue, one that is often played out over days, weeks, and months as successive visitors respond to the comments of those that came before them. While seemingly an innocent gesture on the part of the GMMB to document its visitors, the comment books are the place of many discussions about race, history, politics, and commemoration. It is here that the visitors’ final performances of remembrance, race, and identity are recorded.

No Place Like Home
The castles and forts of Ghana always have been sites of African/European contact and centers of cultural exchange. While their fundamental role in facilitating the slave trade is undeniable, it is important to bear in mind that they also served many different purposes, often simultaneously. During the period of the slave trade, Cape Coast Castle served as defense against rival competitors, a prison for the enslaved, a residence for foreign workers and visitors, a trading hall, a warehouse, a court of mediation, a dining hall, a place of worship, a missionary school, and a meeting place for local and foreign dignitaries. Thus, in one way or another, priests, slaves, doctors, carpenters, servants, traders, cooks, kings, and schoolchildren might have interacted with each other and occupied the same space.

The castles and forts developed a symbiotic relationship with the towns that grew around them, relying upon them for their work forces, housing stock, food production, and natural resources. Moreover, in response to the needs of local, national, or international interests, these buildings were continually adapted and converted to different uses. Likewise, the local economy shifted and changed. Today, the castles and the cities that surround them remain almost inseparable–spiritually, economically, and intrinsically. In the case of Cape Coast and Elmina, they share the same name; they thrive off of one another and it has long been that way. For nearly thirty years, the castles have been steadily renovated to prepare for their latest incarnation, as World Heritage Monuments. Following suit, the towns around them have shifted their economies towards tourism, with the construction of world class hotels and resorts, the preservation and restoration of historic architecture, the opening of new restaurants, the development of walking tours, a new international performing arts festival–Panafest–in 1992, and the improvement of roads and infrastructure. The castles indeed forge a sense of community, albeit one filled with contradictions.

Until recently, local inhabitants understood the historical function of these buildings to be fluid and constantly changing. But since the forts and castles were designated as World Heritage Monuments–a term that requires that they be preserved and conserved for the understanding of future generations of the international community–the multiplicity of meanings and uses that they once shared has dwindled. Designated as World Heritage Monuments, the forts and castles are marketed to tourists as memorials to the victims of the slave trade.

Many African American visitors to the Cape Coast and Elmina see these sites as tangible and necessary memorials, some of the very few places where physical evidence of their heritage can be seen, touched, walked through, and experienced with all of their physical senses. For them, having a physical place to link to their bodies–to the way they imagine the past–is the primary reason for their visit. There is something about the significance of a place for people who cannot trace their ancestry specifically, but know that their people at one time came from that place, passed through its doors, suffocated in the stench of its dungeons, were raped in the governors’ quarters, and carried across the still-turbulent sea just outside the Door of (No) Return. These pilgrims, by “returning” to, or making recuperative homages to the dungeons, are staking a claim for their history, symbolically taking possession of their past. Their individual acts of performing memory–walking through the dungeons, leaving memorials, lighting candles, saying prayers, taking photographs, and writing about their experiences in the visitor comment books–leave physical evidence of their visits to these monumental memorials (fig. 16).

 

 

Their individual acts of remembrance and interaction with others like or unlike them speak to the power that physical places have for the articulation of memory and identity.

Further Reading:

The remarks by Richard Wright can be found in his Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (1954; reprint, New York, 1995); the comment by my sister, Lisa Lennon, was made in a personal communication, May 1999; opinions of the GMMB regarding the development of tourism at the forts and castles, the attitudes of Ghanaian and non-Ghanaian visitors, and the various restoration and renovation projects were obtained in interviews with Nana Ocran, director of education, Cape Coast Castle; Stephen Korsah, tour guide, Elmina Castle; and Gina Haney, US/ICOMOS, August 1999. Opinions of tourists were obtained in interviews conducted in August 1999 or from the visitor comment books. The viewpoints of people living in Cape Coast, Elmina, and other neighboring villages regarding the castles, forts, and tourism were obtained in interviews in August 1999. The comment by Farah Jasmine Griffin was obtained from the visitor comment book and in a personal communication, April 21, 2001. For aspects of architectural and cultural history of the forts and castles see, for example, Kwesi J. Anquandah, Castles & Forts of Ghana (Accra, 1999); Albert van Dantzig, Forts and Castles of Ghana (1980; reprint, Accra, 1998); and J. Erskine Graham Jr., Cape Coast In History (Cape Coast, 1994). For a general history of Ghana, see for example, F. Buah, A History of Ghana (New York, 1980) and F. Agbodeka, An Economic History of Ghana (Accra, 1992). For a general history of the slave trade see, for example, James A. Rawley, The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History (New York, 1981); Philip D. Curtin Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, Wisc., 1969); Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition 1760-1810. For Dolores Hayden’s comment regarding place memory, see her Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge, Mass., 1995). For more on cultural heritage tourism, see James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1997); Edward M. Bruner and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Maasi on the Lawn: Tourist Realism in East Africa,” Cultural Anthropology 9:435-70; Chris Rojek and John Urry, Touring Cultures: Transformation of Travel and Theory (London, 1997); and Edward M. Bruner, “Tourism in Ghana: The Representation of Slavery and the Return of the Black Diaspora,” American Anthropologist 98, no. 2 (1996): 290-304.

Acknowledgements:

For generously funding the field research for this project, I would like to acknowledge the following entities at Yale University: the History of Art Department (Lehman Traveling Fellowship), the John F. Enders Research Fellowship, the Pew Program in Religion and American History, and the Center for the Study of Race, Inequality and Politics. For contributing their hospitality, wisdom, and helpful comments, I would like to thank the following individuals: Professor Kellie Jones, Professor Laura Wexler, Kofi Blankson, Paa Kwesi Ocancey, Rosamund H. Arkorful, Grace Amonoo, Sara Asafu Adjaye, Zelda Cheatle, Michael Birt, Nana Ocran, Stephen Korsah, Gina Haney, and Mwenda, Japhiyah and Menefese Kudumu-Clavell. Finally, I would like to offer my deepest appreciation to Robert Forbes, executive coordinator of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, for recommending me to Common-place.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 1.4 (July, 2001).

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Cheryl Finley writes about photography and African American Art. She is completing her dissertation, entitled “Committed to Memory: The Slave Ship Icon in the Black Atlantic Imagination,” in the departments of African American studies and history of art at Yale University. She is co-author of From Swing to Soul: An Illustrated History of African American Popular Music from 1930 to 1960 (Washington, D.C., 1994) and author of Berenice Abbott (East Rutherford, N.J. 1988). In January 2002, she will join the faculty of Wellesley College.