Put Schuyler in context but do not cancel him
Instead, opportunity to seek falsity, ignorance the real history lessons
The statue of slave-owning Philip Schuyler still stands across from Albany City Hall. What does it commemorate? Whose history does it embody? Is it destined to become a divisive bronze problem, unnoticed by most people, despised by some, and “lost to history” no matter what happens to it?
Context is everything and can turn a problem into an opportunity. Not too long ago, I received a newsletter from the National Museum of African American History and Culture in which was highlighted a brilliant use of context to reveal and teach a truer American history.
On loan and temporary display in the museum is a stained-glass window of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee that was removed from the National Cathedral in 2017. With its sacred endorsement of Lee, this window, (installed around 1950 with another panel featuring Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson), is a face-slapping history lesson on just how hard, far and long the false history of “The Lost Cause” has been pushed in America. Having the window on display at the African American Museum as a teaching instrument is sheer genius.
Status quo statue preservationists often cry that removal of a statue or monument is equal to “losing part of our history.” They are ironically correct, but, as the stained-glass apotheosis of Lee makes instantly clear, the history being memorialized is totally false, as with Lee, or, at best incomplete, as with Schuyler. It is removal of the falsity, the incompleteness, the ignorance in these memorials that should be sought. That can be done through removal, relocation, or establishing a new context.
We are now in a golden age of academic research and discussion of early American slavery, abolition and race in general, including Native American interaction with white Europeans. Books, articles, symposia are disgorging a flood of new information and thinking on race before the American Revolution.
Philip Schuyler was indeed an enslaver. He was also a patriot general. You might think the two roles can be segregated, but they can’t or shouldn’t be. In John A. Ruddiman’s eye-opening article, “‘Is This the Land of Liberty?’: Continental Soldiers and Slavery in the Revolutionary South” in the April 2022 issue of William and Mary Quarterly, you see a quote from a Schuyler letter on the issue of whether Blacks should be allowed in the Continental Army (an issue George Washington wrestled with and flip-flopped yes-noyes on) in which he concludes that Black men as soldiers “disgrace our arms,” and “Sons of Freedom” should not “trust their all to be defended by slaves.”
In the exceptionaly readable new book by historian Robert G. Parkinson, “Thirteen Clocks: How Race United The Colonies And Made The Declaration of Independence,” a section of a December 1775 Philip Schuyler letter to Congress was ordered published in the Pennsylvania Evening Post as revolutionary propaganda: “The Indians delivered to us in a speech on the 12th, in which they related the substances of all the conferences Col. (Guy) Johnson had with them the last summer, concluding with that at Montreal, where he delivered to each of the Canadian tribes a war belt and a hatchet, who accepted it. After which they were invited to FEAST ON A BOSTONIAN AND DRINK HIS BLOOD ... proof the ministerial servants have attempted to engage the savages against us.”
We have begun to use the statue of Philip Schuyler as a teaching opportunity. First, we are publicly discussing it and its ramifications. The listing of the Schuyler Mansion in the State and National Registers of Historic Places is being amended to acknowledge that enslaved people lived and worked there. Another good small step. Perhaps there may be a “contextualizing ” sign placed next to the statue.
All this is good, but why not try and recover a fuller, truer history of all the issues Philip
Schuyler seems to be wrapped up in? Why not a public-invited symposium on “Race and the American Revolution” involving the McCormick Center for the Study of the American Revolution at Siena College, The Schuyler
Mansion Historic Site, the State Museum, the Underground Railroad Education Project, the City of Albany? The history department of the University at Albany, the Albany Institute of History and Art, and perhaps local school districts might also want to play some role. We could even teach by naming it the “Philip Schuyler Symposium on Race and the American Revolution.”
I can readily imagine some of the possible topics: “Blacks in the Continental Army”; “British use of Natives and slaves as threats and allies”; “The use of fear of hostile Natives and freedom-seeking slaves in unifying Patriot propaganda”; “Manumission, abolition, and slave revolts in pre-Revolution America”; “the Continental soldier’s view of slavery”; “The Founding Fathers and slavery — did they recognize the irony and hypocrisy?”; and “Why did so many Blacks fight for America?”
The man behind creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture and now the 14th secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Lonnie G. Bunch III will be in Albany on Nov. 1 to receive the 2022 Empire State Archives History Award. Maybe we can’t match his ability to place historic monuments in new contexts, but with Philip Schuyler let’s see how close we can come.