Rick Green: 0:07

Welcome to WallBuilders. A lot of you have seen the American Heritage Series with David Barton. Well, the sequel has now come out. Building on the American Heritage Series has been released. You can actually order it at our website right now at wallbuilders. com. Here we go to Building on the American Heritage Series with David Barton. David, our topic today is Black History in America. We know February is Black History Month, but it seems like we often only look at the last 40 or 50 years of Black History. What were some of the great Black Americans earlier in our history?

David Barton: 0:35

Well, you're right. So much of Black history today focuses from the time of Martin Luther King coming forward. And that's important guys, really important stuff. But we used to know a whole lot more about our history. We knew of Black Patriots way back in the beginning. Matter of fact, here's a really special book. This is one that came out in 1852, the Services of Colored Americans in the War of 1776 and 1812. Now there's a book done by William Nell and, by the way, William Nell is the first Black American to have any position in the Federal Government and this is his kind of introduction to look at all the Black Patriots we had in the Revolution of Wars of 1812. And then he came back three years later with a really big book, and this is the book from three years later the Colored Patriots of the American Revolution with the stories of service of these distinguished Colored Patriots. You go through here and there are scores of names out of the American Revolution that we've really never heard about.

Rick Green: 1:24

And so that's already a paradigm shift, because most of the time you think about the Revolution, you think it's a bunch of rich white guys that started a revolution.

David Barton: 1:30

We're just to know the names of the heroes Black heroes from Bucker Hill or from York Town, or from Lexington or from Washington Crossing and Delaware, we don't know. The battle of Groton Heights, the battle of Newport, all these battles were Black heroes were the heroes. We don't hear a thing about that. We don't hear a thing about Blacks being elected office. Back in the founding era, I mean 1768, Wentworth Cheswell church leader elected the office of New Hampshire. He becomes the historian of New Hampshire, the Great History of New Hampshire by Jeremy Belknap. It was the work of Wentworth Cheswell, black historian who fed so much of that to him. He was re-elected for 49 years to eight different political offices. I mean that's fairly significant.

David Barton: 2:06

We've never heard of Wentworth Cheswell. We don't hear a thing about Thomas Hercules. He's a Black official elected in Pennsylvania in 1793. He was elected in a white area of Pennsylvania by a huge majority of votes. I mean we never hear even about the voting that happened at the states like Massachusetts, or it was never a time when Blacks couldn't vote in Massachusetts. And if you look even at the Constitution of the United States, you look at what happened in ratifying the Constitution. You have to go through all the states, never hear about all the Blacks who voted in ratification of the Constitution. I mean, you go into Maryland, you know in Baltimore more Blacks than whites voted to ratify the Constitution in the United States. No idea. We hear nothing about that. That's not part of what we teach in Black history. We'll start in the 1960s and move forward, but how about all the stuff that happened back in the 1600s and 1700s and 1800s?

Rick Green: 2:54

Well, if you leave all of that out, then you tend to teach both Black and White Americans that Blacks didn't contribute until the 1960s, instead of recognizing they made great contributions from the very beginning.

David Barton: 3:04

Oh man, black inventors, black scientists, you have Black mathematicians, you have Black soldiers, you have Black sailors. I mean Robert Smalls in the Civil War. He's the first Black captain of military ship. Became a general in the Civil War. We never heard of Robert Smalls. Became a member of Congress, a Black member of Congress, right after the Civil War. Made a great story. We've never heard of him.

Rick Green: 3:27

Even what you just said. Members of Congress. Black members of Congress right after the Civil War. Black members of Congress.

David Barton: 3:31

There's a great lithograph done by Curran Ice and it shows the first Blacks elected to Congress. On the far left side sitting, there is the first Black US Senator, hiram Rhodes Rebels. Oh, by the way, he is the Reverend Hiram Rhodes Rebels. He's a preacher of the gospel, he was a missionary. He raised three full regiments of Black soldiers in the Civil War. I mean just a great guy. Oh, over on the other side you see folks like Joseph Hayne Rainey. Joseph Hayne Rainey is the first Black elected to the House of Representatives and, by the way, he's the he's the first black to preside over the House of Representatives.

David Barton: 4:01

But we've never talked about these guys. So the other guys there you've got Benjamin Turner, you've got Josiah Wall, you've got Robert Large, you've got Robert Brown Elliot. We don't talk about them in any way, shape, fashion or form. We just didn't even know that this happened in our history. There's just so many things that have gotten away from our history. And Benjamin Beniker I love the story of Benjamin Beniker. Got to tell the story because it's so cool, because Benjamin Beniker, in the founding era, he became a self-taught mathematician and scientist, a really incredible guy. But what Benjamin did was he one time asked his friend to see his pocket watch. Of course you know it's a windup pocket watch back then. So Benjamin took that pocket watch, turned it over, unscrewed the back off the pocket watch, looked inside, studied it for a while, put the back on it, gave it back to his friend. He went home. He carved a clock out of wood that kept accurate time to within one minute a year.

Rick Green: 4:55

Just from looking at it.

David Barton: 4:59

He looked at it and he said I can do that. Goes home, carves it out of wood. It's incredible. Well, he goes on to teach himself math and science. Thomas Jefferson chose him as one of the seven guys to lay out DC.

Rick Green: 5:11

He taught himself, he does this kind of scientific thing.

David Barton: 5:17

He goes to his friend, Andrew Ellicott and said do you have any books on math? I want to read some math books and he would teach himself math. He'd teach himself science. He came up with an almanac that was printed. Now his almanac came out in the 1790s very famous almanac of Benjamin Bannaker. And, by the way, the guy who helped fund it was James McHenry, signer of the US Constitution, a white guy that wanted to make sure this almanac got out. So he helped raise the funding and get this almanac printed and Bannaker's almanac.

David Barton: 5:42

Now Bannaker taught himself science, benjamin Bannaker, and that almanac would predict the exact minute of sunrise and sunset, even 10 years in advance. His calculations were incredible and he sent a copy of his almanac to Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson gets that and says ah, this is the proof, look how brilliant this guy is. He sends it off to the anti-slavery forces in France. He said look, here's a perfect example of a black man. Look at the computations. I think he's the greatest scientist in American history. We've never heard of Benjamin Bannaker to any degree. I mean what a great model he was. And again, black and white, side by side, cooperating. It wasn't racism, I mean, he and Andrew Ellicott and what they did and Jefferson . It's good stuff.

Rick Green: 6:22

But you're giving great examples. If we do go all the way back Revolutionary war examples this kid right after the Revolutionary War, you go all the way through the Civil War, these first members of Congress If we hold up these examples, we can say to young black Americans look, you've had a piece of the American dream from the beginning. So how do we get it back into the history books and how do we get people to go back and read these stories?

David Barton: 6:40

Well, guess what? Black history is part of my history, because I'm an American and this is part of American history. We're living the benefit of what they did Exactly right, and so we have to get this back ourselves and once we get it, we have to pass it on, because this will change the paradigm of everyone, black or white. When you say that, you know what? Yeah, there was some racism back there, but there's a ton of stuff that was such good cooperation between blacks and whites and others, and there's so many positive, uplifting examples. You don't have to choose between Michael Jordan and Dr King, although both of those are great examples. You have hundreds of uplifting, edifying choices from across American history, and if we don't get back to knowing our own history, we'll never be able to recover the wholesomeness that made America so good.

Rick Green: 7:24

All right, David. A lot of great questions today on black history in America. Let's get the first one. Why should I be proud of the founding fathers and the revolution when none of them wanted to end slavery? This is a question not just from black Americans, but white Americans as well.

David Barton: 7:37

Really, it's an element that deconstruction the stuff, where we always present the negative about America and we present the exception rather than the rule. Great example I spoke recently at Southern University Law School really sharp kids. This is one of the traditional black colleges and universities in America and so when I was there I made the comments, said well, you know, as we know, unfortunately all of our founding fathers, senators, declaration all bunch of racists and bigots and slave owners. That's just one of the bad downsides of America.

Rick Green: 8:03

Hey that's what they literally taught me in law school. Why should I listen to you?

David Barton: 8:04

That's right, and that's why I put that out there. And everybody said, yeah, that's right, that's you know, it's too bad. And I said, oh, by the way. I said who up there owned slaves? And everybody said, well, Thomas Jefferson did. I said, yeah, who else on slaves? They couldn't name anybody else and I said so, wait a minute, 56 guys there, one on slaves, so that means they're all slave owners, all racists, all bigots. See, I said what do you do over here with this man, Benjamin Rush, and this man right here, Ben Franklin?

David Barton: 8:32

In 1774, as an act of civil disobedience to King George III, they formed the first abolition society in America. The king said you can't do that. And they said watch this. We thank God wants blacks to be free. We think all men are equal. So you have two really what you would call radical abolitionists in these two guys. That is an act of civil disobedience. Start the first abolition society.

David Barton: 8:53

Now, significantly with that, they had to go back into American history where that in 1773, you had a number of the northern colonies, especially the, started passing anti-slavery laws. You had Rhode Island 1773, that's it passed an anti-slavery law 1774, you have Connecticut, you have Pennsylvania. How all these states started to pass anti-slavery laws. 1774 is when King George III stepped in and vetoed every American anti-slavery law. At that point he said hold it guys. He said you're part of the British Empire, we have slavery in the British Empire. As long as you're part of the British Empire, you're going to have slavery. And that's when several founding fathers said great, let's not be part of the British Empire. And specifically that's where Benjamin Rush and Ben Franklin said we're not going to do this. Now, significantly, in the Declaration of Independence it lists the desire to end slavery twice as often as it lists taxation, without representation. We always hear about taxation, we don't hear about the others. That's the kind of attitude that you have throughout the revolution with so many of the founding fathers.

David Barton: 9:53

Now again, not all of them owned slaves, and whole lot of them. I mean John Adams said he would have no slave allowed in his house because slavery was so abominable. Samuel Adams actually freed slaves. People would want to give him a gift and what can you give more of the slave? And people would give him slaves. No. Soon, as he was given a slave, he freed the slave on the spot. He fought against slavery. He had a lot of founding fathers, who never owned slaves, would not own slaves, fought against slavery. There were hardcore abolitionists but there were others that did have slavery and, by the way, Ben Franklin here.

David Barton: 10:22

Ben Franklin also joined with this man right here. This guy sitting right there on the edge is Francis Hopkinson. And Ben Franklin and Francis Hopkinson, back in 1768, started a whole chain of schools for black Americans to teach black Americans academics and Christianity and the Bible. Now, under British policy, you didn't teach black Americans that kind of stuff illegal. That'll get you in trouble. Here's two founding fathers out of the declaration. They said we don't care what the British law is. This is wrong. We're all created equal and we're going to teach black Americans the same things we teach white Americans, and that is the Bible, Christianity and academics. You also have folks like this man here with the hat. That's Stephen Hopkins. Stephen Hopkins became the first founding father to sign an anti-slavery law after we separated from Great Britain.

Rick Green: 11:06

It sounds like a lot of these guys not only were not slave owners, they were actively trying to get rid of slavery.

David Barton: 11:11

You bet they were.

Rick Green: 11:12

And even used it as one of the reasons why we wanted to become an independent nation.

David Barton: 11:16

You bet they were. Now the founding fathers point out that the three southern states of Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina were so stridently pro-slavery that during the Revolution Congress, the way they fought the Revolution was they asked every state to meet kind of a quota. Hey, you've got 5% of the population, can you provide 5% of the troops in the Continental Army? You've got 25% of the population. So they would try to spread it out where everybody can participate. But what happened was the founding fathers who represented the deep south states, those deep south states never even met their quotas for soldiers because the plantation owners were so scared to go fight for freedom.

David Barton: 11:49

They're afraid that if they left plantation slaves might escape and they would stay home and guard those slaves rather than go out and fight for freedom for their state and their country. So it was northern anti-slavery states, particularly like Connecticut and Massachusetts, that oversupplied soldiers from these anti-slavery states to have enough troops to be able to fight the British. So what you find is among the founding fathers, yeah, there were some pro-slavery guys, there were some slave owners. About 30% of the founding fathers were pro-slavery, but they were the exception, not the rule, and you have lots of guys who did a lot of work to make sure that equal rights and the Declaration of Independence were extended to all Americans Black, white, red, whatever.

Rick Green: 12:26

Okay, David. How about another question from the audience? Did black Americans fight on both sides of the Revolutionary War? Well, so the country was somewhat split, right? I mean, it was white Americans. The same way, some were for somewhere against. What about black Americans?

David Barton: 12:38

There were, and sometimes the situation was not good. A great example is a black man named John Morant. John Morant was from New York. When he was about 11, 12 years old they moved to South Carolina and he wanted to study music and at 12 years old he was really kind of a child prodigy. He was called on to give concerts all over South Carolina and he said that one day, as he was going to give a concert, he said he passed by an open pasture and in the middle of that field he said there was a crazy man hallowing at the crowd.

David Barton: 13:10

Turned out, the guy in the middle was George Whitfield and it was one of the meetings in the Great Awakening and one of the friends with John who was going to this concert with him, dared him to break up the meeting. Pull out his French horn, call up and break up the meeting. So John said yeah, I'll do that. So John pulls out his French horn and this young black American goes and he's going to play it and break up the meeting. And just before he did, Whitfield spins and turns and points at him and says pair to meet thy God, That'll get you attention. 12 year old, about to blow his French horn break up the meeting thinks this is really funny.

David Barton: 13:42

What happened was John fell over and just hit the ground, and it turns out that that was kind of a common phenomenon in the Great Awakening. And so Whitfield finished a sermon and then went over and got young John by the hand and picked him up and said we need to talk. And so Whitfield took him home with him for the next three days, shared with him about God having something for him to do and having planned for him. And you need to find out what God wants you to do. And so after three days, John Morant says I want to be a Christian, I want to be a preacher. And so he tells his family here's what's happened I'm going to become a Christian, I'm going to be a preacher. His family says do not ever set foot in this house again. We don't want somebody like you a preacher. There's no way you're going to be part of this family.

David Barton: 14:22

So now here's a 12 year old black boy out on his own, and what do you do? And as the American Revolution broke out, the British found him and they impressed him into the British Navy. Remember, impressment was one of the causes for the separation from Great Britain. Great Britain would send their sailors in and just say you, you're now a British sailor, You're off, Leave your family. And that's what they did with John. Here's a country he loved, here's a country where he was preaching, and the British have now forced him to fight against the Americans. So he's not volunteering, he's forced into British service. And so, yeah, there were blacks fighting on both sides of the revolution, and sometimes not voluntarily.

Rick Green: 15:04

Great question. Typically, you only see, when we talk about heroes of the American Revolution, it's white Americans that we see in those paintings.

David Barton: 15:09

Well, we think it is. This painting over my shoulders is a great example. Washington and Crossing the Delaware. If you ask people today who's in the boat other than George Washington, they wouldn't have a clue.

Rick Green: 15:18

Yeah that's it.

David Barton: 15:19

And yet sitting right up in the front of the boat are two black Americans. You have Oliver Cromwell and you have Prince Whipple, two black Americans who served in the American Revolution. They were with the general staff throughout the American Revolution, served in the General Staff and, by the way, that is significant, they served throughout the revolution. Your term of enlistment back then was one year. Well, if you served the whole revolution, you re-upped seven times. That's a lot of wanting to serve your country. And even the story of Prince Whipple, who's there in the front of the boat, really cool guy. It's a neat story because his master, if you would, he had been a slave. His master was William Whipple, sider of the Declaration of the Independence.

Rick Green: 16:01

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David Barton: 17:05

When the war started, Washington contacted Whipple and said hey, I need your help in the military, I need you to come be an officer. And so William Whipple took Prince Whipple and he didn't consider him a slave. He really was a slave, but he was just part of the family. And so he took Prince and they're heading off to get with Washington and do the fighting. And William Whipple turns to Prince and says Prince, you said I hope you'd be really courageous, fighting for the liberties of the country. And Prince looked back at William and said I could fight a whole lot more if I was fighting for my own freedom. And William looked at him and said you're right, didn't cross my mind, you're free right now. Freedom only spot. Oh, wow. And that's the way it was for a lot of the founding fathers. They had slaves as British citizens. They freed them as Americans.

David Barton: 17:48

John Jay, who's a huge anti-slavery leader in New York, at the time he wrote the Federalist paper seats of Chief Justice on the US Supreme Court on a point by George Washington. He said that prior to the American Revolution, for so many Americans it never crossed their mind to think of slavery, particularly slavery in New England. There weren't all that many slaves up there, but slaves are more like a part of the family. Now it was a different view for slaves. I'm not excusing that at all, but when Prince Whipple turned to William and said I'd fight a lot more if I'm fighting for my freedom, it's like epiphany.

David Barton: 18:17

Of course you would. What was I thinking? And gave him his freedom on the spot. So here you have Prince Whipple, freed by one of the signers of the declaration who said, yeah, slavery is a bad deal. What was I thinking? And that's the kind of attitude that you have throughout the Revolution with so many of the founding fathers. By and large, most were not pro-slavery. But the thing about we see white Americans, not black, always see George Washington, but we've never been pointed out that two guys in front of the vote are black Americans.

Rick Green: 18:42

Yeah, I think that will surprise a lot of people. That's right, Because they've seen the painting but they've never been told that they were black Americans.

David Barton: 18:47

Well, consider the painting of the Battle of Bunker Hill. That's painted by John Trumbull, founding father, who fought in the Revolution. He saw so much of what went on he painted. Actually, he's the guy who painted the sign of the declaration. John Trumbull painted this. Well, he painted the Battle of Bunker Hill. He paints the hero of Bunker Hill right there in the painting and nobody ever noticed it because it's a black guy. It's a black patriot named Peter Salem. Peter Salem was the hero of the Battle of Bunker Hill and you see in the painting he's standing right there beside Thomas Groder and I love that image, black and white, standing side by side, fighting for the freedom of their country. Peter Salem received more than a dozen military commendations for what he did at the Battle of Bunker Hill. He was presented to the commander-in-chief as the hero of Bunker Hill. They built monuments to Peter Salem, black patriot. We've never even heard his name.

Rick Green: 19:33

I don't think we teach that at all.

David Barton: 19:34

No, it's who Peter Salem is. As a matter of fact, in the last 20 years, all these academics have said no, no, no, stop. Peter Salem, that is the slave of Thomas Groder. I don't even know if he's a slave or not. I mean the thing is oh, it can't be a free black, it can't be a patriot black. There was oppression all over America. No, there was oppression in some colonies. In other colonies it was a radically different era, a civil rights kind of attitude. And you have that in Connecticut. Connecticut's one of the anti-slavery states. Once they got free from Great Britain, no slavery. You have the same thing with Massachusetts. You have the same thing with New Hampshire and Vermont All these states in this slavery once they got out from under British control.

Rick Green: 20:10

Well, certainly if you had guys like you pointed out earlier, that's re-up seven times. If they only had to fight a year to be free, clearly they were fighting for more than just their individual free.

David Barton: 20:18

Well, talking about re-upping several times, another black soldier that was that way was a guy named Lemuel Haynes. Now I have here a very rare sermon. This is by Lemuel Haynes. You see here the Lemuel Haynes at the bottom.

David Barton: 20:32

Lemuel Haynes is a very special black American. Lemuel Haynes is actually the first black American to receive any higher degree of education, got a master's degree up in Middlebury College. But he also was a pastor. He pioneered churches all over New England and quite frequently he was the black pastor of a white church. He sometimes was a black pastor of a black church but often black pastor of a white church.

David Barton: 20:56

But he had been one of the minute men down at the early part of the revolution with Lexington and Concord and all the things that happened there, and he re-upped in the revolution several times.

David Barton: 21:06

And so he serves in the early stages of the revolution and such was his love for his country and for his commander-in-chief, George Washington, and for the Revolution that in his pulpits in New England on George Washington's birthday every year he would preach a special sermon on his commander-in-chief, George Washington, whom he had served in the American Revolution. So there is a black who is a great leader, a great educated man, a pioneer of churches all over New England, is not a slave. Another really fun painting deals with James Armistead. Now we would never recognize James Armistead, matter of fact, the painting you see is of Lafayette, the young French general, at the Battle of Yorktown. Yorktown's the final battle in the American Revolution and you got young general Marquis de Lafayette really good patriot. He loved America. He used his own wealth and resources to bring the French Navy and French soldiers come help and be our allies, and we teach about him.

Rick Green: 21:59

And we teach about him.

David Barton: 22:00

He's definitely covered in the textbooks. But standing right there beside him with the horse, you see the black guy standing there. Who's that black guy? That's a slave. That's who that is. No, no, no, that is James Armistead, a really good friend of Marquis de Lafayette. And James Armistead, that black patriot standing right there, is the hero of the battle of Yorktown.

David Barton: 22:20

Really cool story, the way it happened. James Armistead, black patriot, comes to Marquis de Lafayette, friends of Marquis de Lafayette, general Lafayette, and says I wanted to do something to serve my country. And Marquis de Lafayette says well, the problem we've got right now is we don't have good intelligence of what's going on inside the British camp and we just don't know what they're doing until after they've done it. And if we could get some kind of information from inside the camp fed back to us, it would really help us. It's a really dangerous assignment. And so what happened was James Armistead went straggling over to the British camp there at Yorktown and when straggling, it says oh, these terrible, mean Americans. I hate the Americans. They so abused me, they so mistreated me. Would you, kind of British, take me in and take care of me? And so what they did was they took James Armistead and assigned him to be the servant to general British general Benedict Arnold.

David Barton: 23:08

Benedict Arnold wait, he's the traitor. Yeah, he's the traitor in America that switched over to the British side. So he switches over to the British side. Now he's the British general and James Armistead has been assigned to be a servant to him. So James serves him faithfully, takes his meals whatever he needs. Well, general Benedict Arnold's all the time meeting with the other British generals and with Lord Cornwallis, the head of all the British forces, and so that means that James is all the time going with the other general. He's hearing everything going on. Let's move 5,000 troops over here, let's set up artillery. And every night he feeds this information back to Lafayette. He said they're about to move 5,000 troops, they're sending them over to it. Every night. Got good information back so Washington and all the troops know what's happening with the British.

David Barton: 23:48

Well, after faithfully serving the British for a while, Lord Cornwallis came to James, really impressed with James, came to him and said James, would you consider being a spy for us against the Americans? He said I know you hate the Americans. They really mistreated you, but would you be a spy for us? And James is like I don't know. Those Americans. Well, if you want me to, I'll be a spy. So what you have is Lafayette has a relationship with them and Cornwallis thinks he has a relationship. What happens is Armistead feeds all this bad information to Cornwallis, all the good information to Washington and Lafayette. We end up trapping the British out on the peninsula, get them cut off. Armistead, the hero of the first double-spot in American history, cut months off of The American Revolution saved scores of American lives. A really cool story about the guy in the painting, James Armistead, and we've never heard of this guy.

Rick Green: 24:36

When you say he's the hero of Yorktown, I mean that's where we win, that's where we win.

David Barton: 24:40

That is it. Otherwise the thing would have kept going for a long time. So after the Revolution, when it's all over in one and Armistead's really been the hero, Lafayette goes back to France because the reason he came it's now settled and done so in France, by the way. He fights for liberty in France but he ends up being thrown in the prison. He's in the Bastille, so they imprison him because he wants liberty for France and doesn't get it, and so all sorts of stuff going on which really tick the Americans off. Because here's this guy who came to fight for their liberty and now he gets back home and gets in prison, spent years in prison. When he finally got out of Bastille, by the way, he took a key to the door of the Bastille, mailed it to George Washington, said I want you to have the symbol of our freedom here in France. We've done the, got rid of the torture in the dungeon of the Bastille. Nonetheless, as Lafayette starts growing old, he recognizes I will die before too long. I need to make a farewell tour of America. I need to go back. All the friends I had and he was a hero in America.

David Barton: 25:32

If you look inside the US Capitol, there are two paintings inside the House of Representatives of Capitol. One is George Washington and the other is Marquis de Lafayette. As you look at the painting it's a really old guy. It's not the same Marquis de Lafayette we had in Yorktown. It's a very old guy and he came back in 1824. So essentially we're talking nearly 50 years after the Revolution. He's come back and he was still such a hero that as he toured all the way across America, every one went crowds, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands would show up to cheer him. They made ribbons with Lafayette on it, et cetera. Well, as he's in this massive crowd in Richmond, Virginia, having been gone now from America for well over 40 years. He looks across the crowd and he sees James Armistead recognize him instantly, runs across. They embrace each other. You know great picture, again black and white. But for him to pick out somebody he hadn't seen in 40 years, a black hero and a black friend and a black patriot. It's a really cool story with James Armistead.

Rick Green: 26:30

Thanks for listening today. Folks, many of you have the DVD set of the American Heritage Series. You can now get the sequel, which is Building on the American Heritage Series some fantastic programs you want to have in your library. You can get it at our website today at wallbuilders. com.