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David's Mental Meanderings
14th September 2002

I recently watched Steven Spielberg's 1998 movie Amistad. The film dramatizes the events surrounding the 1839 mutiny aboard a Spanish slave ship by its cargo and subsequent capture and impounding by the United States. The true story is quite interesting and left to itself would be quite entertaining. Various parties argued that they were the rightful owners of the slaves, including the Queen of Spain. The federal district court ruled that the slaves were free and should be returned to Africa at the expense of the US government. The Government appealed and former President John Quincy Adams successfully argued the case for the Africans before the US Supreme Court in 1841.

As the self-appointed conscience of the planet, Spielberg wasn't happy to let it go at that. Having stolen some ideas from a novel by Barbara Chase-Riboud, he introduces a rich black abolitionist, of course played by Morgan Freeman and a friendship between JQ Adams and Cinque, the first named defendant/appellee African. He also brings in John C. Calhoun, threatening the then-President Martin Van Buren and the nation with Civil War if the case isn't decided in favour of maintaining the slave status of the Africans. (In the closing of the film, he throws in a battle scene from the War Between the States just to make his point. The scene is a charge by Southern infantry being mowed down by Yankee bullets.)

The Amistad case did energize Unitarian abolitionists such as Lewis Tappan, but in 1840, the fracturing of the Union was not really the front-burner issue it would later become. There was no need to create a moving monologue of humanistic drivel in the climatic scene of Adams' oral argument before the Supremes. (The actual text of Adams speech is freely available on the Internet. It is a masterpiece of legal and moral argument.)

Amistad is not the first historical film to rankle me (and probably not the last). For example, I have long been irritated with Braveheart, particularly the portrayal of Robert the Bruce as a wussy, two-faced traitor. It is one thing to denigrate the character of the true liberator of the Scots. It is another to do it by placing him in events in which he did not even appear. I'm not even sure why Mel Gibson and his writers felt compelled to do this. At least in Spielberg's case he was pushing his political and ideological agenda. And don't even get me started on that whole storyline of a liaison between William Wallace and Isabella of France, the wife of the future Edward II. Besides the complete impossibility of it ever happening, the real Isabella resembles the soft demure character portrayed by Sophie Moreau about as much as Edward the II resembles Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry or Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator.

But historical revisionism is not confined to Hollywood. It isn't even confined to the halls of academia. Perhaps we tolerate it because we tolerate it in our own histories. I have spent a lot of time working in the area of family history and genealogy, as have a number of my readers. The greatest challenge facing the true historian or genealogist is separating the facts from the fiction that seems to creep into stories passed down from generation to generation.

I grew up hearing how my great-great-grandfather Holford served as a Captain in the Confederate Army and was shot off his horse in the Caney Fork River in Tennessee whilst carrying a bag of gold (apparently the soldiers' payroll). What a tremendous story. And unfortunately completely bogus. As best I can now tell, the story probably came down to us from my great-grandfather Holford, who was seven years old when his father died. It was probably told to him by his mother or another well-meaning relative to comfort him and give him a positive impression of his father.

Amongst the things to which seven-year-old boys don't generally have access are military records. My great-great-grandfather did indeed serve in the Confederate Army, in the 25th Tennessee Infantry. He was a private. The Confederate Army was not in the habit of issuing horses to infantry privates. He served as a musician. Privates who are musicians are not generally entrusted with delivering the payroll. And even if he had the payroll, it wouldn't have been in gold, or any other hard currency for that matter. This was another thing the Confederate Army had in short supply, especially by 1864, the earliest year in which he could have died. On top of all of this, is it extremely unlikely that he had the regimental payroll when he hadn't actually shown up for duty since 1862. The military records clearly show that he permanently excused himself from roll call and didn't bother to mention his plans to anyone before he left.

I don't judge my great-great-grandfather's actions harshly. I know that the facts don't speak for themselves. Why would he volunteer one year and leave the next? I don't know the social or family pressures he was under as a young man in Middle Tennessee in the autumn of 1861. Perhaps by late 1862, the horrors of war were just too much. The 25th Tennessee was not the luckiest of regiments. It had a tendency to be decimated in battles. As a student of the War for Southern Independence, I am aware of the particular horrors of that conflict. Take a bunch of generals using 1840s tactics and give them 1860s technology - the results were not pretty. As I said, I am aware, academically, of the horrors of the war, but I didn't experience them. I am very glad I didn't.

And if you think I should be ashamed of the actions of my great-great-grandfather Holford, there are worse family secrets. I even had ancestors who fought in the same War, but on the side of Mr. Lincoln. Yes, it is difficult for a Southerner to admit this, but I'm getting over it. Slowly.

I know of family historians who have gone to great lengths to contrive explanations which put ancestors or collateral relatives in a better light. This is especially true when birth dates and relevant marriage dates show a difference of less than nine months. We are ashamed of the shortcomings of others as though it somehow reflects upon ourselves. We end up just like Steven Spielberg, adjusting the facts to promote our own agenda.

This is very different is this from the genealogy of Jesus. If anyone should have had a perfect ancestry, it should have been the Son of God. Admittedly, on His Father's side it was okay. But on His mother's side, he was descended from a hooker, an adulteress, an incestuous daughter-in-law, and (a significant consideration for a first-century Jew or Pat Buchanan) a foreigner. And that was just the women who are mentioned. The men? There's the trickster and liar, the one who sold his brother into slavery before sleeping with the aforementioned daughter-in-law, but only because he thought she was a prostitute, the adulterer, and at least three evil kings of Judah. Of course there is also the father of the Faith, Abraham, who was married to his half-sister - not something we would be proud of today, at least in most States - but apparently this was okay at the time.

How will we ever learn from history if we constantly re-write and sanitize it? We cannot change the past to suit the concerns of the present. However, if we honestly look at the past, perhaps it will change our perspective on the present.

My own shortcomings and mistakes far outweigh those of my great-great-grandfather Holford. I only hope they will serve as a lesson to my son to live a more righteous life than I have. Moreover, I hope that viewed from a biblical perspective, they will encourage him that whilst he can be instructed from lives of those who have gone before, they do not negatively impact upon his relationship with God. As St Paul told the Philippians, his salvation is for him to work out with fear and trembling.

Returning to the story of the Amistad, Steven Spielberg changed the ending of John Quincy Adams' oral argument, perhaps because it did not reflect the values and priorities of the present age. When all the legal points were made, and he took his final leave of the Supreme Court, he got to the heart of the matter and expressed the hope "...that you may, every one, after the close of a long and virtuous career in this world, be received at the portals of the next with the approving sentence-'Well done, good and faithful servant; enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.'"

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