Guess that now that Charles Pierce has said what I got slammed for saying three years earlier that it's OK to say that the Broadway smash hit "Hamilton" is a lie from pretty much start to finish. Only Ishmael Reed and a number of Black scholars said it before I got to it.
In the paper, titled “‘As Odious and Immoral a Thing’: Alexander Hamilton’s Hidden History as an Enslaver,” Jessie Serfilippi, a historical interpreter at the mansion, examines letters, account books and other documents. Her conclusion — about Hamilton, and what she suggests is wishful thinking on the part of many of his modern-day admirers — is blunt. “Not only did Alexander Hamilton enslave people, but his involvement in the institution of slavery was essential to his identity, both personally and professionally,” she writes. “It is vital,” she adds, “that the myth of Hamilton as ‘the Abolitionist Founding Father’ end.”
Annette Gordon-Reed and Joanne Freeman, both respected scholars of the founding era—Gordon-Reed won a Pulitzer for her work on Thomas Jefferson and the Hemings family, and Freeman is the editor of the Hamilton papers for the Library of America—are quoted as supporting Serfilippi's work as yet another step in the country's overdue reckoning with how thoroughly saturated by the slave economy the first years of the republic were. In fact, as long as we're talking Broadway musicals, the showstopper "Molasses to Rum" from 1776, in which Edward Rutledge of South Carolina arraigns his northern colleagues for their "high-pocrisy" on the subject, may be closer to the truth of things than the more recent sensation was.
Travis Bowman, the senior curator for the New York State Bureau of Historic Sites, who supervised the internal review of Ms. Serfilippi’s paper, said the relative lack of research on enslaved people in Hamilton’s household partly reflects the overall paucity of scholarship on Northern slavery. And the complexities of gradual abolition (New York’s gradual abolition law of 1799 phased slavery out over decades) makes tracking enslaved people, and clearly determining their status, particularly difficult. “It’s a very odd period,” Mr. Bowman said. “Many people were granting half-freedom. If enslaved people walked away, they didn’t go after them.”
Which proves a number of things, one is that you cannot trust a NYT Bestseller biography such as the one Lin Manuel Miranda pretty much entirely based is big lie on to be anything like good history or biography. Another is that even the college-credentialed will buy bogus history if you put it in a costume and put it on stage or, even worse, on the screen. Worse still if you do it with music and dancing and being an extended and far less rigorously researched Constitution Rock show.
Another is that the NYT is hardly in the business of rigorous fact checking in much of what it promotes. As Ishamael Reed pointed out, it was one of the foremost forces pushing that piece of garbage into the show biz stratosphere. Lastly, I was right, the dolts who trolled me over it were wrong. You'd have thought that they, college credentialed, all of them, would have noticed the citations and quotations, but, no, that doesn't count for anything.
And if you think this is me saying "tolt ya so" twice in two days, about that you'd be right. Now, who's going to break the news to Rosie O'Donnell?
Never, ever, EVER rely on show biz to give you biography or history. The percentage that gets it right is nugatory.
“First years of the republic” were “saturated “ by “the slave economy”?
ReplyDeleteI didn’t know the saturation ever stopped.