The first is the story of William Trent Junior, who was the commander at Fort Pitt during Pontiac’s Rebellion. Like George Washington, he was a land speculator, amassing vast tracts of land west of the Alleghenies at a time when white people weren’t allowed to do that—it was land that was supposed to be only for the Shawnee and the Lenape and the Huron and various other Indian nations. And when the Shawnee and the Lenape and the Huron and the others had had enough of their lands being illegally taken from them, they fought back—that was Pontiac’s Rebellion. Trent's attempt to destroy them using deadly disease is one of the most notorious episodes in American history:
William Trent grew up in a wealthy slaveholding family in New Jersey. When he grew up, he started to acquire land west of the Alleghenies, paying as little as he could get away with to the Indians who had occupied the land—all this when settlers or would-be settlers were not allowed to occupy or to buy land west of the Alleghenies. The British colonial authorities had spelled that out in the Treaty of Easton in 1758 (and it would be spelled out again in the Proclamation of 1763). But the settlers and the land speculators had other ideas. George Washington put his view of the situation bluntly in a letter to a friend: he said he looked on the Proclamation as nothing more than “a temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians.” Eventually, in Washington's view, the Indians would have to consent to the settlers occupying those lands. Of course Washington asked his friend to keep those views secret—this was still years before the American Revolution, and it wouldn’t do to be seen or heard to openly defy the colonial authorities.The other account has to it a very different tone:
William Trent Jr. had been a colleague of Washington’s in the British army, and like Washington he had become a land speculator as well as a soldier. The plan was simple: buy or acquire through whatever means you could as much land west of the Alleghenies as you could. Join the growing chorus of American colonists insisting that the westward march of colonial settlement must not be held back. Be prepared to fight the Indians as necessary.
And of course it was necessary. Pontiac and the others did not give up land that was rightfully theirs without a fight. In 1763 they laid siege to Fort Pitt, where Willam Trent Junior was commanding the militia. During a truce, Trent made an infamous gift to a Lenape [Delaware] group who had promised to remain friendly with the militia. “Out of our regard for them,” he wrote afterwards, “we gave them two blankets and a handkerchief out of the smallpox hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect.” Trent and the settlers would have quashed Pontiac's Rebellion even without resorting to atrocity. But clearly he had no qualms at having done so.
Look at an 1880s map of the first ward in Pittsburgh—the ward that included what’s now the Point Park. None of what's now parkland was open land back then; Fort Duquesne and Fort Pitt were long gone, but there were houses and factories all the way west to the point. The Pennsylvania Railway had a big freight terminal, running between Liberty and Penn. All through the blocks between the Allegheny and the railway—First Street, Second Street, Third Street—there were sawmills, planing mills, foundries, lumber yards, boiler works. There were houses too—cramped little working-class houses, with privies out the back. Some of them fronted on the streets, and some of them fronted on little alleys—like Greentree Alley, that ran between Duquesne Way and Penn St. just east of third Street. The McQuywan and Douglass planing mill and boiler works ran for the whole block on one side of the alley, and on the other side there was another planing mill at Duquesne Way. But there were a handful of houses tucked in there too; David Leo Lawrence was born in one of those houses. He was the last of the four children born to Charles and Kate Lawrence—Kate Conwell, she had been. Both parents came from Belfast families (the whole neighborhood was overwhelmingly Irish—Point Irish, it was called); his father worked in a warehouse and later became a road supervisor; his mother eventually became prominent in a maternity hospital for unwed mothers. When the children were young, though, the family was very poor. It’s an interesting detail that Greentree Alley was originally called Green Alley; the name was changed a few years before Lawrence was born, in order to prevent any confusion with Green Street in the Hill District. “Born on Green Street” would have been the perfect beginning for the greenest mayor that Pittsburgh—and maybe America—has ever seen.So, in Dave Lawrence, some of the best of Pittsburgh and some of the best of America. And in William Trent Jr., some of the worst.
It was right after the war that Dave Lawrence became mayor—1946. Pittsburgh was the dirtiest city in America; it might have been the dirtiest anywhere in the world. There were ordinances on the books that should have been improving things, but they’d never been enforced. Lawrence made sure they were enforced, and he added new ones. He didn’t eliminate the smoke in his twelve years as mayor—“smoke” was still a regular part of Pittsburgh weather reports into the 1960s. But with help from the state and federal governments, he reduced it by 90 percent. He started to address pollution in the waterways as well. He worked to increase the amount of available low-cost housing—and he often acted as a mediator when there were strikes, trying to arrange settlements that would provide decent wages for workers, and help them afford the new housing that was being built. And Point Irish, where he’d grown up? It had been devastated by a fire as well as by industrial blight and decades of neglect of the housing stock. Lawrence was responsible for turning it into a park — what is now Point State Park. He fought with the steel industry, but he would often work with other businesses, and (as Governor as well as when he was mayor) he would work with Republicans as well as Democrats. He wouldn’t have been able to get done all that he did if he hadn’t tried to find common ground with a lot of people he didn’t have much in common with.
It’s a sad commentary on America today that many on both sides of the great ideological divide would be comfortable in hearing only one of these stories. On the political left, many are uncomfortable with any sort of story that seems to celebrate American achievements—particularly if they are achievements by a mainstream figure who tried to build bipartisan consensus.
On the political right, many are far less tolerant than that. Numerous state governments have been revising educational curricula, making every effort to banish topics that show America in anything other than a positive light. Those efforts have gathered steam recently, but they are not new. In 2008, for example, the Arizona Legislature declared that the state's public schools would not be allowed to "include within the program of instruction any courses, classes, or school-sponsored activities that promote [or] assert as truth ... any political, religious, ideological or cultural beliefs or values that denigrate, disparage, or overtly encourage dissent from the values of American democracy and Western civilization."
The sad fact is, of course, that while "the values of Western civilization" have often been expressive of admirable ideals, they have often also been expressive of conquest and oppression; such was clearly the case during Pontiac's Rebellion.
In much of America, there has never been much appetite for telling the truth about the land speculations of the likes of George Washington and William Trent Jr. or the atrocities committed by the likes of Trent. And a great many textbooks, encyclopedias, and institutional websites, in discussing the causes of Pontiac's Rebellion, tend even today to omit any mention of the fundamental underlying dynamic - Indigenous peoples rising in protest against settler colonialists taking their land. Here is how the Battlefield Trust website presents things:
Influenced by the unwillingness of the British to establish alliances, the preaching of a Delaware holy man, Neolin, ignited the struggle between the various Native American tribes and the new power in North America...Here is how Wikipedia summarizes the causes of the war:
Pontiac's War (also known as Pontiac's Conspiracy or Pontiac's Rebellion) was launched in 1763 by a loose confederation of Native Americans who were dissatisfied with British rule in the Great Lakes region following the French and Indian War (1754–1763). Warriors from numerous nations joined in an effort to drive British soldiers and settlers out of the region. ... The war began in May 1763 when Native Americans, alarmed by policies imposed by British General Jeffrey Amherst, attacked a number of British forts and settlements.No mention there of white settlers having taken over large tracts of land that the colonial authorities had agreed would remain Indian land. Eric Foner, arguably America's most distinguished living historian, tells a different story, making clear that the Indians took up arms with the aim of driving the settlers from the Indian lands that the settlers had intruded onto:
[Neolin's message was] that his people must reject European technology, free themselves from commercial ties with whites and dependence on alcohol,... and drive the British from their territory.... In the spring and summer of 1763, Ottawas, Hurons and other Indians ...seized forts and killed hundreds of white settlers who had intruded onto Indian lands.Now, in not a few jurisdictions, it’s becoming illegal to try to teach the sorts of truths that Foner recounts in his Give Me Liberty: An American History (which has become the most widely used university survey textbook on American history).
We can only hope that one fine day all of America will be willing to learn about all of its history.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments welcome!