Quick Take
In his provocative new book, “Founding Daughter,” novelist and longtime Santa Cruz journalist Wallace Baine imagines a different Founders story for America — one shaped by a brilliant Black teenage girl in Revolution-era Philadelphia. The book came out in April and is, Baine writes, his way of coming to terms with the soaring prose Jefferson penned about equality and the bitter reality that he owned slaves. Here, Baine discusses who gets remembered, who gets erased and whether America’s 250-year-old ideals can survive their flawed origins.
Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.
Like millions of other Americans, I was first exposed to the soaring poetry of the Declaration of Independence’s most famous line somewhere in the third grade, maybe the fourth. I seem to remember that our teacher made us commit it to memory — “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
It probably didn’t mean much at the time; words like “unalienable” and “endowed” weren’t often heard in the banana-seat-bicycle crowd I ran with. But eventually, the line took hold in my psyche and I internalized the ideal that, at least in America, the circumstances of one’s birth do not have to define the shape of one’s life, that anybody can be anything. What a blessing to grow up in a nation based on such a simple and aspirational idea.
At some point, however, I learned — again, like millions of other Americans — that the same person who wrote that noble sentiment, Thomas Jefferson, also “owned” people, that he kept generations of men, women and children in involuntary bondage, denying them the very same unalienable rights he claimed for himself so grandiloquently in the Declaration.
It is, of course, perhaps the most breathtaking and brazen act of hypocrisy in modern history (though, I suspect, there are plenty of strong contenders for the title). The attempt to square that circle, intellectually and morally, is at the heart of the American experience. Confronting that daunting ethical contradiction is the duty of all Americans, though, let’s be honest, many don’t bother.
For those of us who have grappled with that central cognitive dissonance of the country’s founding, the fact that Jefferson was a slaveowner diminishes the power of what he wrote. How could it not? Hypocrisy of this order can render even great and commanding truths into merely pretty words hiding ugly realities, a spritz of perfume on a skunk.
But — humor me with a fantasy here — what if it didn’t happen that way? What if the person who wrote those famous lines actually was not a well-born white man but instead someone with a real flesh-and-blood stake in those words and the outcome of their release into the world? What if that person were born on the wrong side of privilege and truly believed that those words would be the silver bullet to bring down slavery and that this new thing called “America” would be the miracle cure for centuries of systematic oppression?
What if “We hold these truths …” were the product of a genuinely pure heart yearning for freedom?
That’s the guiding idea behind my new novel, “Founding Daughter” (Paper Angel Press, published in April). The novel is largely set in Philadelphia in the monumental summer of 1776. It heaps upon that most morally suspect of Founders, Thomas Jefferson, yet another sin, plagiarism. In the story, the Declaration of Independence and the entire moral framework of American exceptionalism was in fact the work of an especially precocious firebrand philosopher named Charlotte “Lottie” Berbich, who also happened to be a teenage Black girl working as a kitchen maid in Philadelphia’s most exclusive brothel. And there’s more: Thomas Paine’s incendiary pamphlet “Common Sense,” that blistering critique of monarchy that inflamed locals that same summer and is credited with sparking the American Revolution? Yep, Lottie wrote that too.
Like many teens of future generations, Lottie is possessed of a consuming passion, fueled by the potent enthusiasms of adolescence. But instead of pop stars or sports teams, her passion is for the then-radical ideas of the luminaries of the Enlightenment. Her icons are Voltaire, Kant, Locke and Rousseau.
The famous names of that era — Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Paine — all encounter our young revolutionist with stunned disbelief. Among those initially shocked, then beguiled by Lottie is our story’s narrator, a young man named Temple Franklin. Unlike Lottie, Temple is an actual figure from history. He was Benjamin Franklin’s grandson, a fact that even he didn’t know until he was well into adolescence. History records that Temple, newly informed of his famous lineage, accompanies his grandfather from England to Philadelphia in 1775, and departs with him some 18 months later for Paris, to be Ben Franklin’s personal secretary at the court of King Louis XVII.
Little is known about Temple’s life in that short period in Philadelphia. He was only 15 when he arrived, having never left the shores of his native England. So, what happens when a bewildered 15-year-old boy meets a vibrant and brilliant 15-year-old girl against the backdrop of brewing adolescence and political revolution? In that sense, “Founding Daughter” works also as a love story, albeit a chaste one.
Lottie herself is based loosely on another historical figure, a colonial-era woman born in Africa and sold into slavery named Phillis Wheatley. She ended up in Massachusetts where, despite her circumstances, she emerged as a poet of considerable talent and vision.
To the degree that American history is essentially about memorializing a handful of wealthy white men, my novel is really a kind of cock-eyed tribute to the many American women and people of color whose contributions in pushing the rock forward toward liberty and equality have been overlooked by the selective memory of a country that never viewed such Americans as fully human to begin with.
Obviously, Americans who revere the Founders as the visionary inventors of American-style democracy are likely going to take a dim view of my fantasy. And, spoiler alert, knowing what we know about how American history has unfolded, this story cannot have a happy ending. But I do hope that readers will come away with the feeling that Lottie is less a theoretical invention of a contemporary mind and more of a new way to think about American women and people of color in history, not that she didn’t exist, but that she could have.
As for the author, this novel is my attempt to do that American thing, to square that impossible circle when it comes to the Declaration of Independence and come to some kind of peace with the ick factor surrounding its author. There’s still a part of me that swoons at that simple and elegant language and the ideals it represents, especially now in this period of American squalor.
Despite the preamble’s notoriously discordant words, at least to contemporary ears — namely “men” and “Creator” — it still, in 250 years, has not been topped in its eloquence and simplicity in arguing for the fundamental political dignity of all humans. The seeds it has planted in the hearts of people all over the world since the summer of ’76 have profoundly changed history, for the better.
Can the words of the Declaration regain a bit of luster decoupled from Jefferson? The stain of slavery is not so easily lifted, but I hope, in some small way, this what-if dream scenario of the country’s founding might convince a few Americans that our famous self-evident truths can still sparkle like gold.
Wallace Baine reads from his new novel, “Founding Daughter,” on June 24 at Bookshop Santa Cruz. The event is free.
