David Barton is a Dolt (Unfounded Fathers Edition)

Right Wing Watch highlights two bits of historic revisionism by pseudo-historian preacher David Barton, in which he informs us (a) the Founding Fathers were all anti-evolution, and (b) the Founding Fathers were so anti-slavery that was the reason they declared independence.

Let’s start with that first claim:

Barton vaguely hand-waves the point that the Founders, pre-Darwin, had already had “the entire debate on creation / evolution” (it’s hard to tell whether he’s referring to the two as alternatives, as some sort of hyphenated mixture, or what), but only provides in this snippet reference to Thomas Paine, “the least religious Founding Father” saying “you’ve got to teach Creation Science in the public classroom; scientific method demands that.”

Of course, that’s quite a paraphrase, but Barton seems to be referring to Paine’s 1797 Discourse to the Society of Theophilanthropists in Paris, in which he said, in part:

It has been the error of the schools to teach astronomy, and all the other sciences and subjects of natural philosophy, as accomplishments only; whereas they should be taught theologically, or with reference to the Being who is the author of them: for all the principles of science are of Divine origin. Man cannot make, or invent, or contrive principles. He can only discover them; and he ought to look through the discovery to the Author.

(The full essay, with more information about its origins, can be found here.)

There is, of course, a certain irony in Barton invoking Paine.  Theophilanthropy was a Deist sect, arising during the French Revolution as a combination of Deism and ideas of Civic Virtue. It was eventually suppressed by Napoleon at the behest of the Catholic Church.

Paine’s hallmark work on religion, The Age of Reason (1792ff), opposed the atheism of the French revolution, but just as vehemently opposed the “mythology” of Christianity and the Bible. As he noted in his “creed” at the beginning of that work:

I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.
I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow-creatures happy.
But, lest it should be supposed that I believe many other things in addition to these, I shall, in the progress of this work, declare the things I do not believe, and my reasons for not believing them.
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.
All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

While “Creation Science” proponents claim to be asserting purely that there was a Creator to Creation, they are never so Deist as Paine and the Theophilanthropists, and are nearly always evangelical Christians whose Creator is clearly their understanding of the Biblical God.

Barton’s willingness to embrace Paine for his theistic support of a Creator, while rejecting his inextricably linked beliefs about organized religion (including Christianity) is difficult to credit for any sort of intellectual consistency.  And even if it were, it’s meaningless — a belief that a Creation implies a Creator is not a scientific question but a philosophical / theological one.  It’s a personal opinion, not science, and even if it is to be taught, it ought to be taught as a separate part of the curriculum.

While Paine’s Deism — and position that theistic belief was societally useful (less for personal salvation than for for social control and morality) — was, indeed, echoed by many of the Founders (Franklin and Jefferson, certainly; Adams and Madison and some others to varying degrees), Barton’s interpretation of this as the Founders being Christians through and through and explicitly founding a Christian nation that condemned evolution in favor of creationism is, frankly, absurd.

Equally absurd is Barton’s idea that the United States was founded as an anti-slavery nation:

Barton starts by playing a game of false dichotomy. It’s not true that the only positions one can have on the Founders is either they are nasty scoundrels, racists, immoral, “atheists” (yikes!) — or that they are instead shining figures cloaked in purest samite, perfect and all-wise devout Christians. Either position ignores many of the facts — and neither is “what we teach” (though in fact Barton’s position and orthodox children’s history up until the 70s was much closer to the last extreme than Barton is willing to admit).

Barton allows that maybe some of the Founders owned slaves, but that 70% were “abolitionists.” Without arguing that percentage, it’s worth noting that there were many varying degrees of abolitionism. While Franklin, Hamilton, and Adams were all vehemently against the institution, and “walked the talk,” Jefferson and Washington, for example, both professed an opposition to slavery and held hundreds of slaves all their lives.

Barton is correct that the original draft, by Jefferson, of the Declaration of Independence included a condemnation of slavery:

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

Barton suggests that one of the key reasons for separating from Great Britain was “so that we could end slavery.” While Jefferson clearly spoke out against slavery, it was hardly the key or even one of the more important reasons behind the declaration (any more than one could argue that we broke away from Great Britain to stop the King from using private homes for the quartering of troops — it was “a” reason, not “the” reason).

Barton also plays the game of claiming that it was only taken out because three colonies — Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina — didn’t want to end slavery. That was “only three states” of the thirteen, so, hurrah, the US was founded on a majority spirit of anti-slavery, right?

Well, not quite. Jefferson himself spread the blame a bit:

the clause too, reprobating the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina & Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it. our Northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under those censures; for tho’ their people have very few slaves themselves yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.

While the other delegates from the South — including Virgina and Maryland — might have accepted the removed clause, the debates over slavery regarding the Constitution (its crafting then ratification) show that majorities in the colonies/states themselves of the South (if not the North) were much more opposed to abolition than Barton credits. The growing intransigence over slavery as it spread westward demonstrates that anti-slavery was not nearly so wide-spread a movement as Barton likes to exceptionally pretend it was.

For that matter, Barton’s claims about the overall abolitionist mood of the North is more than a bit exaggerated. He suggests that in the early 1770s Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts were all “anti-slavery,” but that their anti-slavery laws were vetoed by George III, “so that’s why we said we wanted to separate from Britain, so we could end slavery.”

It’s true that there were efforts to outlaw the slave trade that were suppressed by the British crown, even in states like Virginia (though efforts to block the importation of slaves must be considered separate from eliminating slavery itself).   But whatever happened pre-Independence, if that was “why we said we wanted to separate from Britain,” it’s odd that. even after the Declaration of Independence, and even the Constitution, the end of slavery was not an immediate and absolute priority for the states. Vermont (not yet a state) banned slavery in 1777 — but only required that slaves be removed from the state, not freed. Pennsylvania banned the import of slaves in 1780, but didn’t immediately free any; only children born of slaves would be free, and pre-existing slaves in Pennsylvania weren’t emancipated until 1847. While Massachusetts did have a much more radical freeing of the slaves, most other northern states followed Pennsylvania’s model. And, of course, the Constitution itself codified allowing continued import of slaves to the US for twenty years after its signing (and after that said nothing about freeing slaves).

Public sentiment in the North may have been more against slavery than in the South, but it was hardly the major motivator of either the move toward Independence nor of how slaves were actually treated by the North once Independence was declared.

In summary, while I realize that Barton wants to bang the American Exceptionalism drum loud and long, if he’s going to do so he might want to do a bit more research first. Thomas Paine is hardly a poster child for teaching Biblical creation stories in school, and while there was certainly anti-slavery sentiment in the colonies prior to the American Revolution, it was hardly the grand banner under which they marched toward Independency.