American History Revised (57 page)

How significant was the contribution of Butler’s recruits to the Northern victory? Simple numbers tell the story. In his defense of the Militia Act of July 1862 authorizing Afro-American troops, Lincoln said:

Some 110,000 Afro-Americans served as troops at the war’s end, and no fewer than twenty-one were awarded the nation’s highest award, the Medal of Honor. Another 90,000 served in a support capacity as laborers, cooks, carpenters, fortifications
builders, spies, scouts, and guides.

Black regiment in New York, getting ready for war

Even the Confederacy recognized their impact. In early 1865 it did the unthinkable: it passed a law calling for the enlistment of its slaves as soldiers. Out went the slave-owning society; in came a last-ditch attempt to woo slaves to fight to save their masters. Obviously it didn’t work, and a month later the South surrendered.

Now let us look at what might have been, a story told to us not by American historians, but by two British historians who obviously have a quite different take on American history.

The first to recognize the military value of liberated slaves was not Benjamin Butler in 1861, but John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, in 1775. In most Southern states, blacks outnumbered whites. Forced to flee when the Revolution started, this loyalist governor of Virginia knew how to hit the plantation owners below the belt: emancipate the slaves. He knew full well, in the historian Simon Schama’s words, that “the majority of slaves wanted nothing to do with the new American republic of bondage.”

The reaction of the Southern slaveholders was vicious and swift. “A most diabolical scheme!” fumed the Virginia House of Burgesses. “Hell itself could not have invented anything more black than this design of emancipating our slaves,” added a
Pennsylvania planter. “If that man [Dunmore] is not crushed before spring,” wrote General George Washington, “he will become the most formidable enemy America has; his strength will increase as a snowball is rolling; and faster, if some expedition cannot be hit upon to convince the slaves and servants of the impotency of his designs.”

The so-called expedition to convince the slaves was a reign of terror. The Virginia planters quickly issued strong warnings to their slaves, and, to make sure they got the message, executed any runaway slaves who got caught. Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware all passed acts prohibiting the enlistment of blacks, to keep their Virginia colleagues happy. Unable to recruit more than six hundred runaways before the Southern planters retaliated, the Dunmore movement never caught on, and so one fifth of the population never had the opportunity to declare their preference. Given that the Loyalists had been guaranteed continued possession of their Negroes, the number of blacks deserting to the British side came solely from the patriots and would have been lower, say one-third of the population, or 200,000. Considering the closeness of the fight and the fact that it was only won by the Americans at the very last minute, 200,000 Afro-Americans would have made all the difference.

Imagine: hauled away in chains while Afro-Americans celebrated, Washington, Jefferson, and Madison became footnotes in history, while Benjamin Franklin, president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, finally got a full hearing and advocated that even the Loyalists not continue their slaveholding. When Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery in 1833, the few remaining slaves in the South finally became free. There was no Civil War, and Abraham Lincoln continued his practice as a small-time lawyer in Springfield, Illinois.

1866
Anyone looking at the history of the federal debt would be impressed by the twenty-eight-year performance from 1866 to 1893. In an effort to pay off the massive Civil War debt, seven consecutive administrations from Andrew Johnson to Benjamin Harrison all ran budget surpluses without fail.

However, statistics can lie—especially when government budgeting is involved. During this time the U.S. government embarked on the most profligate “giveaway” program in its history: land grants from the public domain. Between 1866 and 1933, the government gave away 500 million acres to individuals, railroads, and states, and sold another 70 million acres at below-market prices. Observes the economist Gary Anderson, “Over the same period that the federal government was acting with supposed excess zeal in balancing the budget by running huge apparent surpluses, it was ‘spending’ and therefore liquidating a major portion of its fixed capital assets.”

If the capital value of the land given away during the budget surplus years of 1866–93 is subtracted from the recorded surpluses, the surpluses would vanish and the result would be a substantial net deficit. But because the federal government made no distinction between operating budgets and capital budgets, it could pretend to be balancing the budget while at the same time it was looting the store.

Today, as the United States faces a severe government deficit problem, much is often made of the fact that the United States for 143 of its first two hundred years managed to keep its house in order and balance the budget. To be sure, “balancing the budget” was always an important political objective, treated with far more reverence than it is today. But also part of the equation was shoddy accounting practices.

1907
Our largest migration is not the 140-year immigration of 47 million Europeans and Asians to our shores from 1820 to 1960, but rather the forty-year migration of more than 30 million Americans from the farmlands to the cities and suburbs from the mid-1920s to the mid-1960s.
But how could this be? Forty-seven is greater than thirty, right? Yes, but forty-seven is a “gross” number, not a “net” number. Plus, it covers 140 years, not 40.

In reality, less than two-thirds of immigrants stayed in America, whereas the number of migrants was entirely “net.” Of the 47 million immigrants, some 18 million went back home, leaving a net immigration of 29 million. The return rates varied widely among ethnic groups, from 3 percent for Russian Jews and 10 percent for the Irish, to 55 percent for Japanese (in Hawaii) and 60 percent for Italians. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, for every one hundred immigrants there were thirty-seven emigrants.

There were two kinds of immigrants: permanent immigrants, and migrant workers known as “birds of passage” (after migratory birds who move from place to place frequently). These were immigrants who intended to work in America for a short time, then return home to their families and villages. The introduction of the steamship in 1880 reduced the length of a transatlantic crossing to ten days, making it possible for workers to return home in the winter when unskilled labor was in short demand in the United States. Many of these workers, after saving enough money to buy substantial land back home, did not return to America.