Truth and history are for losers?

A year ago, I blogged a series of posts as a result of reading Jill Lepore's These Truths.  In one of those posts, I wrote:

In December 1765, George Mason wrote--an essay--to Washington "in which he argued that slavery was "the primary Cause of the Destruction of the most flourishing Government that ever existed"--the Roman republic."
Towns here and there voted in favor of abolishing slavery.  But, these were in the minority.
As the armed conflict between the colonies and the British worsened, Lord Dunmore "offered freedom to any slaves who would join His Majesty's troops in suppressing the American rebellion."  The bastards were no noble saints; it was merely their bloody divide and conquer strategy at play here too.
The symbolic Boston Tea Party didn't launch the revolution. Rather "it was this act; Dunmore's offer of freedom to slaves, that tipped the scales in favor of American independence." In doing so, Dunmore tipped the scales:

Edward Rutledge, a member of South Carolina's delegation to the Continental Congress, said that Dumore's declaration did "more effectually work an eternal separation between Great Britain and the Colonies--than any other expedient which could possibly have been thought of."

The NY Times reminds me about this in a lengthy response to a letter from five historians.  Jake Silverstein, the editor-in-chief, writes:

And yet how many contemporary Americans have ever even heard of it? Enslaved people at the time certainly knew about it. During the Revolution, thousands sought freedom by taking refuge with British forces.

Truths are often inconvenient!

The paper also offers another take--to complement yesterday's post--on why we shouldn't make saints out of our mortal leaders.  This time it is about Abraham Lincoln.  Yes, that Lincoln, about whom Silverstein writes:

for much of his career, he believed that a necessary prerequisite for freedom would be a plan to encourage the four million formerly enslaved people to leave the country. To be sure, at the end of his life, Lincoln’s racial outlook had evolved considerably in the direction of real equality. Yet the story of abolition becomes more complicated, and more instructive, when readers understand that even the Great Emancipator was ambivalent about full black citizenship.

I am not sure how many of the 63 million voters who wanted to Make America Great Again read Jill Lepore's book or the NY Times's 1619 Project.  Maybe they didn't care to even glance at these.  It is this base, more than anybody else, who need to read these.  Only then will we ever be able to have constructive conversations and move forward.