Customer Reviews

Jefferson's Pillow: The Founding Fathers and the Dilemma of Black Patriotism

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

In an age when Americans either lionize the founders and perform idolatry on them (see David McCullough) or disparage these men as hopelessly racist and dysfunctional, Wilkins performs another great service for his fellow Americans- he sees these men clearly for what they were and still are. Studying four Virginians (Jefferson, Mason, Madison and Washington), Wilkins looks at their writings and their culture and draws out their views on freedom and slavery. Comparing these views with their acts toward black Americans and the culture of 18th century slave-holding Virginia, he sees this quartet as both shaping and shaped by the world in which they live. They are Americans after all, with all the complexity and idealism that comes with being a thoughtful American. Of the four, Jefferson perhaps gets knocked around the most, but then he deserves such treatment more than his fellows. But Wilkins is not interested in scoring points against these men; rather, he seeks to understand why such educated and thoughtful men could build a nation with a great and wicked contradiction at its heart- the existence of slavery in a land devoted, on its face, to freedom. As usual, Wilkins does not remain in the 18th century but draws parallels to our own day. His subjects remain models for liberals (in the eighteenth century meaning of the word) all around the world today, fighting for basic human liberties in both awful and wealthy places. Americans cannot help but be products of these men on some level, for all that we think of as American has in part been passed down through the hands and minds of these men. To understand his four Virginians is to begin to understand our own times, in both its marvelous ideals and its unfulfilled promises.

No one doubts that the Founding Fathers, during the American Revolution, and the Constitutional Convention which followed it, produced a remarkable government to institute remarkable ideals of freedom and citizenship. They also did little to abolish the antithesis of freedom and citizenship, slavery. How can black people be patriots if this is so, and how are they to regard their portion of the American heritage? "Can I embrace the founders who may have `owned' some of my ancestors?" This is the backbone question of _Jefferson's Pillow: The Founding Fathers and the Dilemma of Black Patriotism_ (Beacon) by Roger Wilkins. Wilkins has been an Attorney General, won a Pulitzer for his Watergate coverage, and has worked for the cause of civil rights within America and within Africa over several decades. He feels himself to be deeply American and deeply patriotic, and his book provides a guide to why there is no paradox to such feelings. It represents a new and useful way of looking at the founding of the country for both blacks and whites.

The title of the book comes from Jefferson's first memory: being carried on a pillow by a slave riding on horseback. Wilkins accepts that such privileges of culture did shape the ideas of Jefferson, Madison, Mason, and Washington, but he looks at the role of slavery as something not contradictory to their efforts for freedom but as essential to those efforts. "The fact is that without black Americans, including the 40 percent of Virginians who were black, the America that General Washington led into revolution in 1775 would have been a vastly different place - a poorer and weaker place, much less capable of waging a successful revolt. And Mason, Washington, Jefferson, and Madison might themselves have been poorer, better, less conflicted, and more honest. I would argue that they might also have been less learned, less strategically astute, and less politically wise. Blacks and their works were present in the Revolution as essential elements both of its strengths and of the Virginians' greatness." Slaves at Monticello and Mount Vernon, in this view, worked in their own way as partners in the birth of the new nation, and toward eventual extension of its principles even to their descendents.

In a wise book, Wilkins is forgiving of the addiction to privilege. He has capably blended national history, family history, and personal philosophy. He realizes that the Virginia aristocrats about whom he writes are really not to blame for accepting the privilege they had as simply being the natural way of the world. He has felt the same way, for instance, not questioning his privilege of student draft deferment during the Korean War, nor his commuting to work in a "powerful European sedan." He admits he has his moral challenges and his addictions, perhaps not on the moral level of slavery, but present and accepted nonetheless. "To be human is to live with moral complexity and existential ambiguity. I don't need for this nation to be perfect in order for me to love it; I love it because it is home, and because all of the touchstones of my life are here... Whereas some people view America primarily as a place of economic opportunity, I see it as having afforded me the chance to make something of myself by exerting relentless energy in the effort to hold up my end." As a useful primer on patriotism for us all, _Jefferson's Pillow_ represents energy well spent in meditation upon our conflicted founding.

Can we believe in America? The question reverbrates through the lives of many of us. Historian and civil rights activist Roger Wilkins answers with this book. It is a powerful, passionate and eloquent summary of Colonial Era race relations. Our Founding Fathers, indeed everyone in the book, is portrayed as tragically human with all the hope and horror and truimph that we are capable of.

A keen psychological sense of motives and an empathic ear create a reading experience rarely had. Prejudiced readers, both white and black, will not be comforted by this book. The easy view of villians and victims that often corrupts our history into vulgar national mythology is not found here. In its place is a nuanced story interweaving ideology, military and political history, profiles of key players and refreshing personal reflections.

If anything, it is Wilkin's experience as African-American man that propels his prose into the past to find an answer to the troubling question of loyalty. It is a question coiled around the heart of many people of color that with every new racial crisis, squeezes tighter.

Using the telling details of a master historian, Wilkins points to the origins of racism in America through the words of the Founding Fathers. Thomas Jefferson, said his first memory was of being carried on a pillow by a slave riding horseback. At his death, the writer of the Declaration of Indepedence owned over a hundred human beings. He was not alone as many of our nation's Founding Fathers lived a life cushioned by slavery.

Unstitching that pillow is Wilkins, rousing his readers from sleep by asking difficult questions. How can an African-American be a patriot to a nation that doubted her or his humanity? How could the Founding Fathers wax eloquent of freedom as a human right when they owned slaves? Can we believe in America?

His answer is a terrifying and beautifal yes. He writes toward the end, "I have made speeches that reeked of hopelessness. People who have heard me in that mood sometimes ask how I manage to keep going. My answer is that my ancestors lift me up when I am low. Some of them never drew a free breath, and others very few of them. I try to live as if I am going to have meet them someday and answer the question "Boy, how did you use your freedom?"

He answers the question of how can we believe in America with the deeper one of what did I do with my freedom? We have the freedom to create the America we want. We have this privelege because many struggled and died for it. Wilkin's book reminds us that the blood of that sacrifice came from everyone's ancestors and it has run together. It is a book of human decency and power, have the courage to read it.

This extraordinary volume shares the virtues of the men that provide its focus. It has the steady, right-thinking leadership of Washington. It has the learning and driving intensity of Madison. It has the cantankerous insistence on truthfulness of Mason. And it surely has much of the crafty elegance of Jefferson. With charity toward all and malice toward none, Wilkins manages the nearly impossible - a fully adult reflection on race and the American project.

The issue of slavery and the founding fathers here is not the occasion for simple-minded evaluation and homiletics. It is the setting off point for a deep, careful, and powerful examination of the practical nature of political progress in the face of genuine human failing. Unflinching and realistic, mature and balanced, this book shames the shallowness of most public discourse and private apathy today, even as it honors the founding fathers with the respect of honest recognition.

In one of the many extraordinary and too little known original writings this book reveals, George Mason wrote of slavery: "By an inevitable chain of causes and effects, providence punishes national sins, by national calamities." Breaking slavery's chain of national calamity certainly requires today - as it did then - more than words. Yet through the words in this carefully crafted reflection, Wilkins opens the opportunity for us to own our own past as a nation - and that must certainly help compel and direct action.

In writing both economical and eloquent, Roger Wilkins reclaims the founders and patriotism for all Americans. Looking at the Virginia founders -- Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Mason -- Wilkins probes the the tension they lived between "earned guilt and aspiration to honor," between living privileged lives built on the horror of slavery, and calling forth a nation based on the proposition that "all men are created equal" and endowed with inalienable rights. Wilkins shows how blacks -- free and unfree -- played a major role in the revolution. With the perspective of a life devoted to making America better, he praises the founders for "their greatest legacy": a government "wrapped in the aura of freedom and limited by a devotion to rights" that created the field that allows each generation to work to extend freedom and equality. Wilkins probes the founders, neither airbrushing their flaws nor ignoring their genius. This is the testament of an honest and wise patriot. I recommend it highly.

Overall, Wilkins provides outstanding insight into the schism between the equality espoused in the Declaration of Independence and the reality of the world in the late 18th Century. He, I believe, seems to clearly understand the extraordinary tension between the idealism of men like Adams (and even Jefferson), economic survival (as seen by the proponents of slavery) of Washington, Mason, Jefferson and Madison and the arrogance of 18th, 19th and 20th Century Christian superiority. Wilkins is proud to be an American, and accepts all the profound ideals and warts that go into making as all Americans today. We have certainly come a long way, but we still have a way to go. Wilkins deals only briefly with his view (in favor of) of reparations for slavery. His monograph certainly supports his view. An excellent read.

Once again, Dr. Wilkins has demonstrated his immense talents for mature, patriotic, deep thinking and eloquent writing. As he did in his autobiographical memoir he has again confronted the "mother" of all American problems; the beast that remains coiled in the nation's bosom: the history and practice of racism, and its companion and handmaiden, racist hypocrisy.

By unraveling the moral and existential ambiguity and complexity these issues set up in the personal lives of our four most revered forefathers (what he refers to as the Virginia quartet), he has peered through the dense jungle of patriotic myths and stared this beast squarely in the eyes.

By bringing more clearly into focus what they were thinking and how they acted on issues of race and slavery, Wilkins has demythologized Washington, Madison, Mason, and Jefferson, and in the process has forever elevated them above the plane of mere racist adulation and rationalization. He has done more. He has in the process "re-humanized" them, and has given us, not less, but more, reasons to revere them. For this feat alone he must be lauded. It is no mean trick to be able to accomplish this.

However, had he stopped there, I would have no qualms with this manuscript. But he tried to do more -- perhaps too much more.

Professor Wilkins' ultimate goal seemed to have been to square the circle between the immense theoretical contributions made by these men in the political sphere on the one hand, and the utter destructive legacy bequeathed to us as a result of their personal weaknesses in the social sphere, on the other.

Just as we still live under the political freedoms provided by the former, we also continue to live under the social destructiveness and scourges of the latter. Just as the Constitution is a direct legagy of these patriots, so to is the racism that we have come to know in everyday practice a direct result of their hypocrisy.

Despite failing at his goal, we must all be grateful to the author for the clarity with which he demonstrated through historical juxtaposition the contradictory (if not fatal) qualities in each of these founding patriots. He did it with grace, without even a hint of malice or bitterness and with great skill and honesty.

My concern is with the calculus he has used to try to revolve these human contradictions, the calculus with which he tried to square the circle: by adding them together. How reasonable it must have seemed to the author that the good in these men should, in the end "be made" to cancel out the bad.

But may I ask: of what good is it to raise the skeleton of slavery from the historical closet if it is only to be re-clothed in a different colored garment of the same old pedigree of exaggerated mythmaking? How easy it is to make such a mistake in a country where we desperately need more genuine heroes worthy of our adulation.

But, if history has taught us anything, it is that moral complexity and existential ambiguity cannot be reduced to a simple additive calculus: The good, even in our most revered heroes, will never quite completely cancel out the bad.

Unless, and until, theory is put into practice the good and the bad forever remain in different orbits. They remain in two different but parallel universes. Greatness is not to be found in the mere careful juxtaposition of good and evil, but in eliminating the latter, the evil.

Although each of these theoretical giants saw the handwriting on the wall: That is, conceptually they each knew that slavery, racism and freedom could not long coexist, and could even possibly serve to destroy this country.

Yet despite this, none among them had the moral courage to face this reality -- if only to possibly head it off. As a result, despite the lovely embroidery that Professor Wilkins has fashioned here, the Virginia quartet will forever remain theoretical giants and moral pigmies. Every American, and especially every Native and Black America must read this book. Five stars.

Roger Wilkins attempts to do two things in this book and both within a short, confined space. First, he meditates on the nature of black patriotism. Can a black man truly call himself an American and feel comfortable laying claim to the full American heritage even though the very founding of this country is so inextricably intertwined with the enslavement and commodification of his ancestors? To this question, Wilkins answers a textured and nuanced (but a very definite "yes"). Through the prism of family history and a recounting of blacks (some well-known some not) who even in slavery acted like free men, he shows that the black contribution was integral to the foundation of this country and that without that contribution, America would have been far weaker and poorer in every way.
Second, Wilkins talks about the moral ambiguity of founders like George Washington, who personified freedom and yet owned slaves right through his presidency, Thomas Jefferson, who invented a new language of liberty and yet lived a life of self-indulgent dissipation on slave labor, and George Mason, doughty champion of the Bill of Rights, who also lived off his slaves. And yet Wilkins writes no mere screed. He can appreciate the founders' greatness even as he deplores their base imperfections and corruptions. The prose is measured, crisp, and heartfelt all at once. I subtract 1 star because I think he could have expounded some of these subjects even further in a more developed book. I recommend it.

`Jefferson's Pillow' is a brief but powerful work which examines the uncomfortable juxtaposition of America's founding ideals of liberty with the reality that many of the founders were slave owners. It examines four of those founders - Jefferson, Washington, Madison, and Mason, along with their rhetoric on liberty and slavery, their own words about the evils of slavery, and their failure to separate themselves from this noxious institution. It also delves into how slavery worked as an institution of power and privilege, and how the repercussions of that system still affect us today.
Wilkins' book stands out because while it tackles a most controversial and difficult subject it never stoops to being merely iconoclastic. Wilkins is not attempting to tear down the founders - indeed he spends a great deal of time establishing their very real brilliance, strengths and virtues. He never looks at them from outside of their own generation and culture, but judges them by the standards of their time and their own words. He recognizes how terribly difficult it would have been for any of these men born to power and privilege to divest themselves of the slaves that were both the source and symbol of that power. Yet he does not absolve them, as he proves through their own words and actions that they were aware of the system's evil, as well as their own inconsistency.
Wilkins attempts to humanize these four founders - to divest them of the marble image of secular saints that has petrified them in myth. He shows them to us as brilliant and principled, but human; able to create a great and enduring country, yet unable to rid themselves of a system they knew to be evil from which they profitted and gained power and privilege. He sums up this failing in the words of yet another founder, Patrick Henry - "Every thinking honest man rejects it [slavery] in speculation, how few in practice? Would any one believe that I am master of slaves of my own purchase? I am drawn along by ye general inconvenience of living without them; I will not, I cannot justify it." Nothing illustrates Wilkins point better than these damning words from the man who is better known for proclaiming, "Give me liberty, or give me death!"
Wilkins writes with elegant and powerful prose, and great passion and intellect. He writes as a proud American who believes that we must honestly face the uncomfortable truth of the blemish slavery gave to our ideals of liberty so as to be better able to deal with its repercussions that still affect us today. His book is balanced, thoughtful, and respectful of its subject, and I believe essential reading for any American patriot. I give it my highest of recommendations.

Theo Logos

Wilkins does a good job at demonstating the founding generation from a unique perspective, African Americans. It is funny how the perspective of the story teller impacts the story. The greatness of the key Founding Fathers, along with their faults, are carefully displayed. I often wondered whether the Founders actively decided to continue slavery or was ending slavery never a serious consideration. Sadly the option of ending slavery was considered and rejected. This book shows the poor decision of the Founders with regards to slavery but still maintains that in other areas they made correct decisions. Please read this text to obtain a different perspective about the issue of slavery in this country.