“On this Memorial Day: A Different Story”

Americans take shelter in stories that secure our virtue and innocence, particularly in this 250th year of the nation. In the hands of Donald Trump and his supporters, this milestone anniversary offers an occasion to reaffirm the inherent goodness of the American project and to insist that the country belongs to them.

All that is required of the rest of us is gratitude and a recognition of the victory secured in the founding of the country (and with the continued sacrifice of American veterans who protect our freedoms). No need to talk about slavery, or the ugliness of the past. Even invocations of “a more perfect union” are banished. Such talk blasphemes and, as the Department of Interior’s Secretarial Order 3431 declared, “inappropriately disparages Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times.” But these are the words of a desperate and frightened people.

This approach to American history requires that we pluck out our eyes and refuse to see the past for what it is and for what it can teach us: that we can, in fact, use our history to free us from the ghosts that haunt. Instead, many Americans remain imprisoned in their myths, locked up in stories of the past that refuse to acknowledge the tragic consequences of America’s divided soul. This is, as James Baldwin noted, “the root of our unadmitted sorrow.”

In 1797, after ten years of living as a free man in Philadelphia, Moses Gordon found himself in shackles. Enslaved. Freed. Enslaved, again. Escaped. Caught. A harrowing repetition. But this time, when faced with the prospect of living as a slave without the people he loved, Moses Gordon chose death by his own hand. He chose death when he couldn’t have liberty.

His is a story that haunts our nation’s anniversary and teaches why we cannot celebrate with ease. I turned to it to make sense of the coming sesquicentennial. As history is being erased from federal sites, we must redeem its truths.

Gordon was first freed because Caleb Trueblood, a slaveholding North Carolina Quaker, had come to believe that slavery was a sin against God, and in November of 1776, just three months after the signing of the Declaration of Independence and in defiance of a North Carolina statue that forbade masters from liberating their slaves except for meritorious service, he decided to release Gordon from bondage. A confluence of faith and democratic principles.

But the colony of North Carolina remained committed to slavery. Four months after Moses Gordon was freed, the North Carolina legislature passed a law that made manumission a crime. The statue was explicit about the threat that Quakers like Trueblood presented to the institution of slavery and the danger of a growing free Black population. As such, the law required that those manumitted illegally be captured and “sold to the highest bidder.”

Moses Gordon had been free for two and half years when he was arrested by the local sheriff and sold in July 1779 to William Skinner, a brigadier general in the North Carolina militia. As the Battle of Stony Point was waged on the banks of the Hudson River, Moses found himself, once again, in shackles and the property of a white man.

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One can only imagine the heartbreak, the shattered faith in the stated promises of the American revolution, and the pressing question about the humanity of these flesh jobbers who believed, as if they were gods, that they alone could determine who could be free or not.

After six years as a slave on General Skinner’s plantation, Gordon had escaped, made his way to Philadelphia, and lived as a free man for over ten years. He married the love of his life and, together, they raised four children. But Skinner refused to give up his possession, and the law of the land supported his claim. Article IV, Section 2 Clause 3 of the Constitution of the new nation was clear:

No Person held to service or Labour 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 Labour may be due.

This came to be known as the Fugitive Slave Clause and was one of the tragic choices that paved the way for the founding of the nation. The Constitution, along with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, gave slave owners like Skinner the legal right to seek rendition of their property, and the courts consistently upheld the law even as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 threatened to rip the country apart.

In Prigg v Pennsylvania (1842), for example, the Supreme Court upheld the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 by overturning a Pennsylvania law that prevented the use of violence to remove any person from the state to return them to slavery. Justice Joseph Story wrote the opinion of the Court, and he was clear about the centrality of the Fugitive Slave Clause to the founding. The clause “was so vital…that it cannot be doubted, that it constituted a fundamental article, without the adoption of which the Union could not have been formed.”

Moses Gordon’s new life in Philadelphia was haunted by the specter of slavery. Not just by his memories or the hard reality of his escape, but by the fact that even as a free man, he was condemned to look over his shoulder for the four horsemen who, at any moment, could drag him back to hell.

No matter the life he lived, Moses remained, as the historian Andrew Delbanco describes the fugitive slave, a thief in “the contorted sense” that he had stolen himself.

Gordon’s is a decidedly American story, a story of freedom and unfreedom, of cycles of sentiment and rage rooted in the duality that resides at the heart of the nation. America was a country defined by the principle of the equality of men and, yet, held others as chattel or resigned them to second-class status. The nation imagined itself as a beacon of freedom and as a white Republic. This is America’s double consciousness, its divided soul. And it is our inheritance as we commemorate the nation’s founding.

From the beginning of this fragile experiment in democracy, America has been split between its commitment to liberty and equality and to the idea of white superiority. In one moment, the country could embrace the idea of liberty and freedom for all (e.g., the freeing of slaves, the radical experiment of Reconstruction, the promise of the Civil Rights movement, the reckoning of Black Lives Matter), and then as quickly as storm clouds can hide the sun, the mood darkens and freedom can be snatched away.

The repetition, the back and forth, rests in the heresy that freedom is the possession of white Americans to give and to take away. A repetition of the evil and hubris at the heart of slavery. Living in this contradiction, Black people were swept up in the whirlwind as profit and prejudice collided with justice and virtue, as America imagined itself as a New Israel and lived as if pharaoh resided in Washington, D.C. People like Moses Gordon knew intimately of the hypocrisy and the cruelty of American freedom snatchers.

We do, too. Ours is a moment characterized by the whip of the whirlwind as MAGA claims the country as its own. We have witnessed an assault on the basic values of diversity and an attack on any attempt to remedy historic harms that resulted from the tragic choices of the founders. The Trump administration, for example, has set out to destroy the basic governmental infrastructure of civil rights. They have attacked DEI in the public and private sectors; instructed federal agencies to stop enforcing key civil rights protections; engaged in an all-out assault on American education, using diversity initiatives and so-called “woke” histories as examples of reverse discrimination; gutted the civil rights division of the Justice Department, ended consent decrees with police departments around the country; attempted to upend a hundred years of jurisprudence with an effort to end birthright citizenship; and, finally, put the last nail in the coffin of the Voting Rights Act.

Hatred and grievance saturate our politics, and it happened in the blink of an eye. Just a few years ago, as we were locked up in our homes because of Covid, Americans witnessed the murder of George Floyd. People flooded the streets. They risked death as the virus raged, and they demanded the country reckon with its racist past and present. But some cried out that we were going too far: that the sentimental liberals, with their wet eyes, had overreached and threatened the very character of the nation.

Whenever the tensions between our stated commitments to freedom and to the idea of the white Republic become unbearable, it leads to a kind of delirium that erupts in draconian policies and in a manic search for scapegoats that can wash away our sins.

Today, it feels as if some white Americans pine for what they believe were the halcyon days before the civil rights movement as they attack voting rights and immigration. They also yearn for an understanding of the nation’s past in which Black people were on the margins, playing minor bit parts and white people were at the center of everything, innocently inhabiting a nation of unblemished virtue and seamless progress. This is the history that redacts and evades the past, a storybook version of America required by Donald Trump’s executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” An America where all are grateful for living in the greatest country on earth.

We have had to struggle with the madness that comes with the split in our national consciousness: that who we say we are as Americans runs smack up against the reality of our daily lives.

We are not who we say we are.

There were no halcyon days. Fears and terrors shadow our lofty ideals and color how we deal with each other in this country, especially when it comes to matters of race. James Baldwin got it right when he wrote in “Nothing Personal” (1964),

We are afraid to reveal ourselves, because we trust ourselves so little…[I]n this labyrinth the person is desperately trying not to find out what he really feels. Therefore, the truth cannot be told, even about one’s attitudes: we live by lies.

And those lies have become the source of our suffering.

In the 250^th year since the founding, America finds itself battling its ghosts once again. I cannot say with any degree of certainty that the country will survive the madness of these dark days. Time will tell.

What I do know for sure is that we must tap the source of our unadmitted sorrow. It is clear, and it has been since the founding, that we cannot be a white Republic and a beacon of freedom. A choice must finally be made. Trump and his supporters have made their choice. Now we, those of us who truly believe in justice and freedom, must make ours and finally allow the ghosts of all those who have sacrificed for this nation – the ghost of Moses Gordon – to rest and set this nation free.

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