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New Testament Reading—Revelation 21: 1-5
This morning I would like for you to pretend that you are looking at a slideshow of a recent trip Eunita and I made to Williamsburg, Virginia with my oldest sister and her six year old daughter. Some of the pictures might seem self-indulgent, but I think by the end of the slideshow you will understand why I have included them. The first group of pictures are all from the central part of colonial Williamsburg. This is the old capitol building. For those of you unfamiliar with Williamsburg, it was the capital city of Virginia during the colonial era, so here is where the likes of Patrick Henry, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson were part of the growing revolutionary fervor of the era.
Up next you will see here a picture of the Governor’s Palace with its fine gardens and its pond. Here’s a picture of the Palace ballroom with its glass chandelier, its ornate decorations, and its finely patterned carpet. In the next picture, you will see a reenactment of a public debate involving the infamous traitor Benedict Arnold. Everywhere we went in Williamsburg we found people speaking, acting, and dressing as they would have done back in the 1700s. They call these people “interpreters,” and if you ask them any questions, you will find they are quite knowledgeable about what life was like back then. Notably, the Williamsburg population was evenly split between blacks and whites, so in these pictures you will see interpreters of both races.
Now, in these next pictures you will see different crafts people at work. Here’s a silversmith hammering a spoon into shape. Here’s an apothecary with a local bark used for curing fevers. Here’s me trying on a powdered wig. Alright, in these next pictures, you will see a part of the colonial town that has been modernized and commercialized. It’s called the Merchant Square, and it has a series of shops and restaurants. It’s like a Disney Land version of colonial times. In this picture of the street, you can see that it is packed with tourists. In this next picture, my niece is in a toy store with an American Girl doll. My niece is a big fan of American Girl dolls, and one of the dolls happens to be a girl named Felicity who grew up in colonial Williamsburg. Oh, here’s a picture of me in a store full of chocolates and fudge. As you can see, I didn’t waste anytime getting down to business. Next, this is Eunita and I standing in front of Trellis, a world-class restaurant in which they gave me a funny look. I didn’t realize it was one of those fancy, reservation only kind of places, and I came in wearing basketball shorts and a t-shirt. After my embarrassed exit, we headed across the street to this high-end cheese, wine, and deli store. You can see us having lunch in this picture. We had an imported cheese with a layer of mango that was absolutely delicious.
After we had explored this area, Eunita and I went to a part of the colonial Williamsburg attraction that is just outside the main part of the town. This is a place called the Great Hopes Plantation. Here’s a white farmer working a tobacco field with his hoe. We arrived there in the late afternoon, and he explained to us that he had been out there all day. By changing his grip on the hoe every now and then, he was able to keep working. Here’s a white woman who lived in a ramshackle wooden hut near the field. She was keen on using language and phrases from the colonial era, so she explained to Eunita that she was “in an increasing way.” Another way of saying, she was in “the family way.” This interpreter was very knowledgeable about how hard it was to deliver a baby back in the colonial era. From records, they know about half of the infants born in town died, so one can imagine that even more died on plantations such as this. Now, here is the final picture in my slideshow. It’s one of the older black slave interpreters on the plantation. He was probably in his 60s. Slaves generally didn’t live that long. This man had a real passion for sharing with us about life on the plantation. He also had a great sense of humor. We were starting to get bit by bugs, and he explained that they were noseeums. How many of you are familiar with noseeums? I am a little slow, so it took me awhile to realize that all of us are actually familiar with noseeums. They’re mosquitoes that bite you but you never see. Get it? Noseeums?
This interpreter also shared with us a fair amount of more serious information and history. He talked about how the family and community life of the slaves enabled them to survive. He additionally talked about how the people who lived in the town of Williamsburg were only 2% of the population and how this plantation represented how most of the rest lived. The town was where the elites lived with the slaves and artisans who served them, but in the rural areas, one commonly found mid-size plantations like this one. They were owned by white farmers who were relatively poor compared to their urban counterparts. These farmers had little wealth outside of the slaves they owned. We learned a lot from this interpreter, and as he spoke, I looked around the plantation and was struck by how there were virtually no tourists in this part of the Williamsburg. The sad irony is that most of the tourists who come to Williamsburg to learn about colonial times never go to the one part of Williamsburg where they can learn about how most of the population lived.
Before we left Williamsburg, we spent some time in the bookstore. There I looked at some of the books recommended by the interpreter who told us what it meant to be “in an increasing way.” As I was reading, I learned about how it’s a distorted view of U.S. history to think of the American Revolution as the achievement of a few heroes like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. In fact, the best selling author in the U.S. around the time of the 1840s was a man named George Lippard who began to challenge this view of history early on. Lippard portrayed the Revolution as a poor man’s war and said, “The General who received all the glory of the battles said to have been fought under his eye, who is worshiped in poetry and history, received in every city which he may enter by hundreds of thousands, who makes the heavens ring with his name, this General then is not the hero. No; the hero is the private soldier, who stands upon the battle field; …the poor soldier…whose skull bleaches in the sands, while the general whose glory the volunteer helped to win is warm and comfortable upon his mimic throne.”[i] A similar yet different point was made by John Greenleaf Whittier, who has been described as the poet laureate of the abolitionist movement. In 1847, after attending a fourth of July celebration in Washington D.C., he asked why “a whole nation” honors “the memories of one class of its defenders, to the neglect of another class, who had the misfortune to be of darker complexion.” He asserted that for fifty years “certain historical facts…[had] been quietly elbowed aside.” He continued by saying that these facts pertain to “the services and sufferings of the colored soldiers of the Revolution.”[ii]
There are now a number of history books that present a different picture of the Revolution than has been traditionally given, a picture that shows the diverse array of democratic dreams that people had and a picture that shows how many of these dreams were cut down by the very men we celebrate today. These were dreams of freedom and equality by blacks, Indians, white women, and poor white farmers. One of the dreamers was a white farmer and preacher named Herman Husband. Husband had a vision of a participatory government with voting districts “so small each voter would [personally] know the character of every candidate” and legislatures would be filled with “workers, farmers, and craftsmen.”[iii] He also wanted to see economic equality brought to farms and factories. This egalitarian utopia Husband called New Jerusalem. He was initially a supporter of the Revolution and was elected to Pennsylvania’s General Assembly in 1777. He soon became disillusioned, however, with how men of wealth dominated the legislature. He would later see the Constitutional Convention as the imposition of tyranny by elites who had betrayed the principles of the Revolution. As historian Howard Zinn has noted, “Merchants, slave-holders, and land speculators” used the constitution to protect their own interests and prevent rebellions such as the Shays’ rebellion, a revolt of farmers in Massachusetts.[iv] Notably, the constitution allowed states to continue their practice of restricting the right to vote not only to white males but to those who owned property.
For some, it may seem like this is not the kind of history one would want to remember on the 4th of July. For some, it might seem to present a tarnished picture of how our nation was founded, but I think it is all a matter of how one frames the picture. I like to think of it this way: If I were to have a 4th of July party to which I could invite anyone from the colonial period, I would want to invite all of those people who agitated for freedom and equality back before it was popular and long before their cause was winnable. I would want it to be a party with heroes and heroines of all races and classes. It would be a party that represents the diversity of our nation. I would call it the New Jerusalem Party because in the Book of Revelation New Jerusalem represented the world for which the oppressed and persecuted Christians of the Roman Empire longed. It represented an egalitarian state of existence. It represented a renewed and transformed humanity.
In the scrapbook for this New Jerusalem party, you’d see that we held it at the Great Hope Plantation. You’d see that we partied like they did in the olden times. You’d see a picture of the string section playing on the fiddle, guitar, and banjo. You’d see the percussion section drumming away on buckets and pans. You’d see the wind section blowing on rows of whistles made of reeds and bark. You’d see a buffet full of food and drink for everyone. And, then, there would be a picture of us all dancing the night away slapping the ground with our bare feet. As much as I like the cheese and chocolate served in town, I am imagine is where I’d want to be. At this party, you wouldn’t have to worry about being given a seat at the table. You wouldn’t have to worry about being looked down upon or given a funny look. At this party, you can come as you are. You can even wear your basketball shorts. Amen.
[i] Gary B. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America, (New York: Penguin, 2005), xxiv.
[ii] Ibid., xxvi-xxvii.
[iii] Wythe Holt, “The New Jerusalem: Herman Husband’s Egalitarian Alternative to the United States Constitution” in Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of the Nation, ed. by Alfred F. Young, Ray Raphael, and Gary B. Nash, (New York: Random House, 2011), 253.
[iv] Howard Zinn, “Big Government for Whom?,” (April 1999), Progressive Magazine,
<http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Zinn/BigGovernWhom_Zinn.html>.