History Matters: Re-examining our racist past

A reader asked me this week if I know about Joshua Lane Foster, the founder of Foster's Daily Democrat. I do. Isn’t it curious, she noted, that a newspaper named after a pro-South, pro-slavery, anti-Lincoln publisher is still in circulation today? Curious, I agree, even fascinating. Which is why I’ve written about Joshua Foster in this column half a dozen times.

Still, I get the reader’s implied point. Since the murder of George Floyd and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, a lot of institutions have been rethinking their “brand” and erasing any whisper of white supremacist history. NASCAR, for example, has boldly banned the display of the Confederate flag at all races. In a widely repeated scene, protestors in Richmond, Virginia, toppled a statue of Jefferson Davis, the Civil War president of the Confederate States of America. Princeton University plans to remove Woodrow Wilson's name from its public policy school because of the former president’s racist views and policies. And the Dixie Chicks, a country pop band, have renamed themselves “The Chicks” because they want to separate themselves from “people who wave the Dixie flag.”

Even New Hampshire’s only native-born president has come under fire. Franklin Pierce, who cut his teeth as a young lawyer in Portsmouth, is about to be scrubbed from the Franklin Pierce School of Law at UNH after students raised concerns about Pierce’s ties to slavery. Worse yet, after the Civil War in 1865, Pierce purchased 80 acres in North Hampton and built a cottage. From there, in his declining years, the ex-president offered to act as attorney for his old friend Jefferson Davis, should he be tried for war crimes. The offer was rejected. When Davis was released from prison two years later and given amnesty, Pierce offered his Seacoast home to Davis and his wife. Wisely, the former president of the Confederacy declined the offer. For now, Pierce’s statue still stands outside the Statehouse in Concord –but people are talking.

The American paradox

Whether removing monuments and changing names will have an impact or become simply an exercise in political correctness remains to be seen. But the message, for those willing to listen, is clear – the United States began as a slave society. For the next two-and-a-half centuries our expanding nation and rising economy relied on a workforce of millions of unpaid enslaved Africans. And it was during that period, knowing full well that slavery was fundamentally wrong, that white Americans crafted a complex web of excuses for why Blacks were inferior. Those racist stereotypes and false rationalizations, absorbed deep into the bloodstream of American culture – North and South – are still with us today.

As slave owners, our forefathers were so horrified by the thought of being enslaved themselves, they created a new nation and a new government. Their revolutionary writings frequently describe British taxes on tea, sugar, paper and other luxuries as acts of “bondage” and “slavery.” Thomas Jefferson, who had a hand in writing “all men are created equal” enslaved more than 600 Africans in his lifetime. Born white, rich and entitled, Jefferson wrote that the inferiority of Blacks was “fixed in nature” and he was convinced that even Negroes believed the white race was superior. Jefferson, we now know, fathered children with an enslaved African, Sally Hemings, then denied the affair, and tried to bribe reporters to look the other way.

The problem with Jefferson, like so many white American males, is that we turned him into a hero when, in reality, he was a complex, accomplished and flawed human being. We preserved his historic home, put his face on our money, built him a marble memorial shrine, and carved his head 60 feet tall into the side of a mountain. Undeniably a Founding Father, Jefferson might also be described as a liberal-minded racist who had a way with words. He wrote “all men are created equal” but didn’t believe it. So Jefferson is an enigma and the Declaration of Independence is a paradox.

Then came the trauma of our bloody Civil War that tore the nation apart and left half a million soldiers dead for the cause of emancipation. Four million enslaved people of color were suddenly released into a predominantly white culture that had for two centuries imagined itself as a superior race. For these new citizens, marked by the color of their skin, to be considered equal, required the rest of the population to admit: (1) that slavery was wrong, evil and immoral; (2) that the United States had begun as a slave society; (3) that no race was superior to any other race; and (4) that two-and-a-half centuries of African enslavement had created a pervasive culture of institutional racism and white privilege that must be acknowledged, identified and removed. We’re still waiting.

What about Joshua?

Which brings us back to the problem of Joshua Foster’s racism. Do we expunge his name from the masthead of one of New Hampshire’s longest surviving newspapers? We need to know more about the story before we decide.

Foster was a Copperhead, although he preferred the term “states rights” advocate or “Peace Democrat.” Copperheads were members of the Union who opposed the Civil War. Many local merchants held ties to the Southern cotton trade. They feared the end of slavery would lead to an economic catastrophe in the North. Others were simply attracted to Foster's commentary in an era when racial prejudice against blacks was common in New England, in New Hampshire, and in Portsmouth.

It is still unclear what lay at the heart of Foster's strongly held political and racist views. He was born in Canterbury in 1824 and grew up in Chichester. He became a successful architect and designed a number of local buildings. He was also a farmer, carpenter and builder.

Foster bought an interest in his first newspaper, The Dover Gazette, in 1858 and moved to Portsmouth a few years later. He launched The States and Union the day after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation at the height of the war in 1863. Portsmouth already had four newspapers, all generally favoring the Union cause. Foster offered the only radical alternative view in town. The editor routinely attacked Republicans, abolitionists, Blacks, the church, the military, the president and the war.

It is easy, because of Foster's unpopular politics, to shrug him off altogether. Yet this lone wolf sometimes howled the truth. He gave gleeful attention to reports of corruption at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and he corrected the locally held myth that early New Englanders had never practiced slavery.

Foster gets his due

Joshua Foster railed at the re-election of Abraham Lincoln. Then on a rainy April 10, 1865, four days before Lincoln’s assassination, a Portsmouth mob trashed Foster’s office of The States and Union newspaper on Daniel Street. A drunken crowd of up to 2,000 citizens, sailors and shipyard workers taunted Foster and threatened to lynch him. The editor escaped out the back door clutching his ledgers and subscription list. Portsmouth police took no action as the "mobocracy" did its work.

Popular legend says the mob threw Foster’s printing press into the Piscataqua River, putting an end to the Copperhead views of The States and Union. Not true. Rioters smashed the press and threw pieces from the window and some of the metal type letters may have found their way to the river, but the paper lived on for decades. Nine days later, on April 19, Foster published a two-page special edition of The States and Union. On one side of the broadsheet Foster described in detail his version of the Daniel Street riot. The front side bears the headline: TERRIBLE TRAGEDY! PRESIDENT LINCOLN ASSASSINATED!

According to Foster family history, Joshua successfully sued the Navy yard, whose drunken off-duty workers had raided his shop. Winning $2,000 in the lawsuit, Foster rebuilt his newspaper. In March 1868, Joshua Foster started the Portsmouth Evening Times. Foster sold his Portsmouth papers in 1870 and introduced the Daily Democrat three years later.

Joshua Foster died in 1900, well before our two political parties seemingly swapped roles. Except for its masthead, the Daily Democrat operated by the George J. Foster Company of Dover was wholly unlike The States and Union that set off a riot in 1865. After 141 years as an independent family-owned newspaper “Fosters” was acquired in 2014 by Seacoast Media Group, which also publishes the Portsmouth Herald.

Envisioning the past

What I write is often called “revisionist history.” My job is to tell readable stories about the past based on the latest evidence and interpretations. Modern historians are not changing the past when we tell you that Jefferson enslaved 600 Africans or slept with Sally Heming. If anything, revisionist history is filling in the missing details and fleshing out the reality of life as it actually was. We are interested in viewing our forebears, not as devils or angels, but as real people like us. Thomas Jefferson didn’t put himself on our money, or build himself a shrine or carve himself into a mountain. America did that. America invented the perfect Thomas Jefferson. Revisionist historians are simply searching for the man behind the statue.

It’s also the search for missing people – for the “invisible” African Americans who were written out of the historical record, for women, and for marginalized people. The history of famous white men who made lots of money, or wielded power, or fought battles is only part of our story.

Revisioning the past is not easy. It often requires us to see the past from different, even opposing angles at the same time. We can love Portsmouth history, for example, while admitting to our racist culture in which wealthy merchants and local ministers enslaved Africans. Portsmouth somehow “lost” its only African cemetery, cut into the graves with buildings, and paved it over. As recently as the 1960s, the local NAACP uncovered Portsmouth restaurants that refused Black diners, barbers who refused Black customers, grocery stores unwilling to hire Black youths, and separate housing lists given to Black and white families at Pease Air Force Base.

The problem with seeing the past through new eyes and with fresh detail is that it makes some people uncomfortable, even angry. Donald J. Trump, for example, recently described what I do as “a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children.”

“Make no mistake,” Trump recently told a crowd gathered below the massive carved heads of four former presidents at Mount Rushmore, “this left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution... This attack on our liberty, our magnificent liberty, must be stopped, and it will be stopped very quickly.”

In my defense, I offer this quote from Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a U.S. Army veteran whose patriotism was also questioned last week by Fox News and the president. "What some on the other side don't seem to understand,” Duckworth wrote in the New York Times, “is that we can honor our founders while acknowledging their serious faults, including the undeniable fact that many of them enslaved Black Americans."

American history, all human history, is full of enigmas and paradoxes. Unlike the silent, rigid, brass statues that Mr. Trump is hell-bent on preserving, the past is a dynamic, lively and inspiring place – if you have an open mind and the guts to go there.

But I digress. As to the case of Joshua Lane Foster, I admit, I’m not yet ready to topple his monument. We remove the statues of Confederate leaders, because they glorify men who fought to preserve the institution of human slavery – and most were erected long after the Civil War to send a message of white supremacy. Nothing in the masthead of Foster’s Daily Democrat glorifies its founder, or whispers a word about his politics. And there were a lot of Fosters running that newspaper over its first 141 years. It's thanks to Joshua Foster that we've had this little revisionist peek into the past. His story, warts and all, is one we need to tell ourselves again and again.

Copyright 2020 by J. Dennis Robinson, all rights reserved. Dennis is the author of a dozen books on topics including Strawbery Banke Museum, Wentworth by the Sea Hotel, and the 1873 Smuttynose Murders. His new book, “Music Hall,” was named best 2020 history book by the Independent Book Publishers Association. look for it at a bookstore near you or visit Amazon.com. He can be reached at dennis@mySeacoastNH.com or visit www.jdennisrobinson.com.