I follow Larry Sabato on Twitter. (Doesn't everyone?!) That's where I learned that while he was lecturing in Kansas, he was repeatedly questioned about Virginia's Confederate History Month. "This incident," the professor tweeted, "has done VA's image no good at all."
Hard to argue with that.
But maybe some good can come from Gov. Bob McDonnell's ill chosen words.
Reading The Cavalier Daily last week, I saw some discussion of the proclamation, reaction to it, and the history it allegedly meant to celebrate. The University community, it seems, is making some attempt to understand slavery's place in the University's history even if the governor thought slavery's part in causing the war that nearly destroyed the United States wasn't significant enough to mention.
The Student Council's Diversity Initiatives Committee hosted a forum called, "The Slave Experience at U.Va: Uncovering the Truth."
Slaves built the University's first buildings. More recent construction may have covered slaves' gravesites.
As Ervin Jordan, Research Archivist and Agency Records Manager, declared, "African-American history is not for the squeamish."
The same could be said of history in general.
Since human history involves humans, it is complicated. And it is never as clear and neat as what we learned in our fourth grade history classes.
Thomas Jefferson wrote that people are endowed by their creator with inalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. He owned people. One of the people he owned was his wife's half sister. You probably know the rest of that story.
Jefferson was also the president who signed legislation that outlawed the importation of slaves into the United States.
But Jefferson and his fellow Southerners weren't the only Americans with a complicated - some would say hypocritical - relationship with slavery. The popular version of history has the slave dependent South pitted against the emancipating North. But it was 1862 when the Delaware legislature considered a bill that would outlaw slavery - by 1872. Maryland abolished slavery in 1864.
The Emancipation Proclamation was issued the year before that, but it didn't apply to states not in rebellion. It didn't apply to some states and portions of states that had been in rebellion but were then under Union control.
Columnist Sam Allis wrote in the Boston Globe in 2004 about a conference on slavery in New England. There were African slaves in New England in the 1620s, a few years later than Virginia and more than a century before Georgia legalized slavery. New Englanders were also enslaving Native Americans, by the way.
But that's ancient history. By the time John Brown raided Harper's Ferry, slavery was long gone from New England.
Right?
Well, not long gone. According to Allis, "The last slave recorded alive in Rhode Island was in 1859."
With emancipation, Allis wrote, New Englanders developed "an immediate amnesia among whites about their immediate past."
But that wasn't New England's only involvement in slavery. Allis again: Yankees were less slave owners than slave traders. They owned ships that carried men and women from Africa to the killing fields of the sugar islands and beyond. Boston names like Boylston and Faneuil and Rhode Island clans like the Browns, founding benefactors of what is now Brown University, all grew rich from the trafficking of human beings. Most of the leading families of Boston, Providence and Newport, R.I., had house slaves, and prosperous farmers often had one or two to work their fields ... Many Yankees participated passively, buying shares of a slave voyage much as we buy mutual funds today.
As I say, history is rarely a clear and uncomplicated thing.
In his tweets, Sabato wondered why no one in the media has asked McDonnell about succession. The governor's revised proclamation declares slavery "an evil and inhumane practice that deprived people of their God-given inalienable rights." But it doesn't say secession is a bad thing.
When Newt Gingrich is comparing the country's condition to the crisis of the 1850s and the governor of Texas has suggested that if federal heavy handedness doesn't ease up his state may leave the Union and the language of nullification and interposition is being tossed around concerning the new federal health care reform law - well, in times such as these, denouncing secession might be a good thing.
"It was a sin twinned w/slavery," Sabato tweeted about secession. "It's a good opportunity to get Gov. McDonnell on record disassociating himself with TX Gov. Rick Perry's secession talk."
All of which leads us to that old clich
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