History is Not a Search for Saints

 Tell Both: History Is Not a Search for Saints

Humans are a funny bunch.

We have an extraordinary ability to take a complicated human life, select one part of it, and decide that the part explains the whole. We do it with people. We do it with history. We even do it with the Bible.

Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson lived only 39 years. Today we overwhelmingly remember approximately the final two years of his life—the years in which he became one of the Confederacy’s most famous generals. Those years matter. They cannot and should not be erased. Jackson fought for the Confederacy. Slavery was deeply intertwined with the creation of that Confederacy. Jackson himself owned enslaved people.

Tell that.

But don’t stop there. Before Stonewall Jackson became “Stonewall,” there was Thomas Jackson: an orphaned boy, a West Point graduate, a veteran of the Mexican-American War, a professor, husband, Presbyterian deacon, and a man who organized religious instruction for Black people in Lexington, including enslaved people. Those facts do not absolve Jackson of anything. They complete him. Therein lies the problem with much of our modern historical debate: we seem increasingly unable to hold two truths about the same human being simultaneously.

 

The James Blair Test

I live in Williamsburg, Virginia, where we recently had our own argument over historical memory. James Blair Middle School bears the name of the Reverend James Blair, founder and first president of the College of William & Mary. Blair served as William & Mary’s president for an extraordinary 50 years, from 1693 until his death in 1743. He was a minister and an enormously important figure in establishing education, religion and civic institutions in colonial Virginia. He also enslaved human beings and participated in building institutions intertwined with slavery.

Tell that.

But again, don’t stop there. A campaign arose to remove Blair’s name from the school. Mary Lassiter became one of the prominent advocates for changing it. Members and supporters of the NAACP were also present in the public debate. I watched the meetings myself as a Williamsburg-area resident. They spoke, participated and supported the effort to remove Blair’s name. The former James Blair campaign and the current NAACP litigation involving Stonewall Jackson and Turner Ashby school names in Shenandoah County should not simply be declared organizationally connected without evidence.

There is plainly an intellectual connection worth examining. Mary Lassiter has publicly expressed support for the Shenandoah County NAACP’s position on social media. More importantly, both controversies present essentially the same philosophical question:

When does historical accountability become historical reductionism?

James Blair provides an especially useful test because nobody can dismiss the question by saying, “But he fought for the Confederacy.” Blair died in 1743. The Confederacy would not exist for another 118 years. Yet the historical judgment eventually reaches him too.

Why?

Because participation in slavery becomes the controlling fact. The fact considered sufficiently grave that the rest of the man’s accomplishments can no longer justify putting his name on a public school.

I understand that argument. I simply question its limiting principle. If slaveholding alone disqualifies James Blair from public commemoration, what do we do with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe?

If unacceptable racial views are enough, the list grows considerably longer. If serious personal moral failures are enough, longer still. Eventually we must answer a question.

How much wrongdoing is necessary before everything else a human being accomplished ceases to count?

Benjamin Franklin Wasn’t a Saint Either

Consider Benjamin Franklin. I greatly admire Franklin. Yet the deeper I have read about his life, the more complicated the polished portrait on the hundred-dollar bill becomes. His relationship with his wife Deborah troubles me. He spent years away from her in England. His relationship with his Loyalist son William became bitter and never truly recovered. Franklin had an illegitimate son. He possessed weaknesses, vanities, and contradictions just like other human beings. Imagine teaching Franklin this way:

Benjamin Franklin failed people who loved him. End of lesson.

Everything in that sentence might have some basis in history, and the lesson would still be historically absurd. We would have erased the scientist, printer, writer, inventor, diplomat, statesman and revolutionary because we decided one portion of his life was sufficient to explain the whole. We could do this forever. Thomas Jefferson wrote words about human equality that changed civilization while owning human beings. Ulysses S. Grant became the general who defeated the Confederacy and later defended the rights of freedmen, yet had his own connection to slavery before the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln preserved the Union and issued the Emancipation Proclamation while expressing racial views at various times that Americans today would reject. Martin Luther King Jr. transformed the moral landscape of America while being an imperfect husband and imperfect man.

None were saints. Neither was Stonewall Jackson. Neither was James Blair. Neither is Mary Lassiter, and neither am I, and neither are the people demanding that these names come down.

Tell Both About Our Opponents, Too

That last sentence matters. It would be easy for someone on my side of this argument to look at Mary Lassiter or members of the NAACP and conclude that their motivation must be anger, resentment, hatred, ignorance or revenge.

Upon reflection, however, I don’t know that. I cannot see inside another person’s heart and Christianity tells me to be exceedingly careful when I pretend that I can. Mary Lassiter herself lived through an important piece of the history we are discussing. She graduated from James Blair High School in 1969 as schools were being integrated in 1973. Her family participated in the civil-rights struggle in Williamsburg. That history does not automatically make her position correct, but it deserves to be told.

Tell both about her, too.

Otherwise I would be committing precisely the offense I am accusing others of committing against Jackson and Blair: taking one position held by a complicated human being and allowing it to define the whole person. If I want grace for the historical figures I defend, intellectual honesty requires that I extend grace to the living people with whom I disagree. That doesn’t mean surrendering the argument. Quite the opposite. It means attacking the principle instead of the person, and the principle I question is this:

Should one grave moral failing become the controlling fact by which an entire human life is judged?

The Bible Doesn’t Hide the Bad Parts

This question is particularly interesting to me as a Christian.

I sometimes quote Matthew 7:1: “Judge not, that ye be not judged.”

Upon reflection, even there I must be careful. I cannot pull a single verse from the New Testament and claim to have captured the whole of Christianity. Someone else can turn a few pages and find passages concerning judgment, righteousness, accountability and recognizing people by their fruits. Scripture has to be read as a whole.

Maybe human lives deserve something similar. Look at the people Scripture gives us. Moses killed a man. David committed adultery and arranged for another man’s death. Peter denied Christ three times. Paul persecuted Christians. The Bible does something remarkable with those uncomfortable facts.

It leaves them in.

Scripture doesn’t sanitize its heroes, but neither does it reduce Moses to the killing, David to the adultery, Peter to the denial or Paul to the persecution. It tells both.

There is sin.

There is accomplishment.

There is repentance.

There is failure.

There is redemption.

There is grace.

There is the whole human being.

Perhaps historians, and the rest of us, could learn something from that. I certainly think Mary Lassiter could. 

Remembering Is Not Worshiping

Keeping someone’s name on a building does not necessarily mean endorsing everything that person ever believed or did. Remembering is not worshiping. We should teach children that Jackson fought for the Confederacy, but we continue the story.  Tell them slavery was central to the secession crisis. Tell them Jackson owned enslaved people. Then keep talking.Tell them about the professor. Tell them about his faith. Tell them about the Sunday school he established for Black people. Tell them about the contradictions. Tell them historians disagree about how those facts should be understood.

Tell them James Blair enslaved people. Then tell them he spent half a century building William & Mary.

Tell them Jefferson owned slaves. Then hand them the Declaration of Independence.

Tell them about Franklin’s failures. Then explain what he did in Philadelphia, Paris and London to help create the United States.

Tell them about King’s human failures, including his adultery. Then play the speeches and teach the children what his movement accomplished.

Because history shouldn’t be a competition between people trying to manufacture spotless heroes and people searching for sufficient evidence to manufacture irredeemable villains. History should be an attempt to understand human beings.

Where Does It End?

Virginia is covered with the names of morally complicated people.

Washington.

Jefferson.

Madison.

Monroe.

Blair.

Fairfax.

Jackson.

The names of kings, revolutionaries, slaveholders, soldiers, politicians and imperfect human beings cover our counties, rivers, universities, schools and towns. If moral perfection becomes the standard for historical recognition, eventually we will run out of names, and if we establish a principle under which one sufficiently objectionable fact can invalidate an entire lifetime, we should at least have the courage to apply that principle consistently. That means not merely Jackson. It means Blair. Then Jefferson. Then Washington.

Then wherever the principle logically leads. Perhaps instead of continuously renaming America, we should continuously teach America. Put another paragraph in the history book. Put another exhibit in the museum. Put historical context beside the name if necessary. Explain what the person did wrong. Explain what the person did right. Allow young people to encounter the uncomfortable truth that someone can accomplish extraordinary good while participating in something terribly wrong. That isn’t weakness. That is history.

Grace

And perhaps somewhere in this argument there is room for something increasingly uncommon in American public life.

Grace.

Grace doesn’t mean pretending slavery didn’t happen. Grace doesn’t require Mary Lassiter to change her mind. Grace doesn’t require the NAACP to abandon its argument, and grace doesn’t require me to surrender mine.

Grace permits us to say:

I believe you are wrong without believing you are evil.

Imagine what would happen to American politics if we relearned that sentence. Changing a school name cannot change what happened in 1861. Restoring one cannot change it either. Removing James Blair’s name cannot undo colonial slavery. Keeping it cannot justify slavery. No School Board, judge, activist or columnist possesses the power to rewrite what happened. We possess only the power to decide how honestly we remember it.

Christianity has spent two thousand years reminding us of something we continually forget. Human beings fall and sometimes terribly. Yet Christianity also teaches that failure need not constitute the entirety of a human existence. Maybe history doesn’t need more saints. Maybe it doesn’t need more villains either.

Maybe it needs something much simpler.

Tell the accomplishment.

Tell the failure.

Tell the virtue.

Tell the sin.

Tell the disagreement.

Tell the contradiction.

Tell the whole human being.

Tell both.