editor: Talk To Action contributor Chris Rodda is the author of Liars for Jesus: The Religious Right's Alternate Version of American History.
Chris Rodda is Senior Researcher for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which fights improper evangelizing in the U.S. military and works to protect the right of armed forces members to hold whatever religious or philosophical beliefs they choose.
Why does falsified history matter ? - see Talk To Action Co-Founder Frederick Clarkson's Political Research Associates / Public Eye article, History is Powerful: Why the Christian Right Distorts History and Why it Matters]
For the third installment of my little series debunking the American history lies being told on Glenn Beck, I'm going to take on another of pseudo-historian David Barton's favorite lies: that Thomas Jefferson dated his presidential documents not just "In the Year of Our Lord," but that he went even further than any of our other early presidents, dating his documents "In the Year of Our Lord Christ." Barton told this lie twice on Glenn Beck, first when he was on in March with the other speakers who were going to be appearing with Beck on his American Revival Tour, and then again when Beck had him back on for a whole show.
Barton has been using this lie for a very long time. In an ten year old article on his WallBuilders website, he wrote: "While President, Jefferson closed his presidential documents with the phrase, `In the year of our Lord Christ; by the President; Thomas Jefferson.'" In that article, Barton's footnote for this claim is: "For example, his presidential act of October 18, 1804, from an original document in our possession." A typical revisionist tactic, which Barton used in this footnote, is to take their claim, which isn't even true in the first place, and word it in a way that makes it sound like something happened multiple times or was the regular practice of whoever they're lying about. In his footnote, Barton does this by beginning with the words "for example." On Beck's show, he kept referring to Jefferson's documents (plural), as if the document he was showing was just one example of many.
A few years later after Barton started using this lie about Jefferson, the late D. James Kennedy, in his 2003 book What If America Were a Christian Nation Again?, repeated the lie, writing: "I have a photocopy of the conclusion of one of the many documents that he signed as president, and it says, `In the year of our Lord Christ 1804.' He was the first president, and to my knowledge, the only president who did that. Jefferson, the anti-Christian, the irreligious infidel, said that it is Christ who is our Lord, and no one else."
At the time that I was working on my book, which I started writing around the same time that D. James Kennedy's book came out, I had no idea what this mystery document that Barton claimed to possess might be. I knew it had to be some kind of document that already had the date on it, and was simply signed by Jefferson, because the claim that Jefferson personally dated any of his documents "In the year of our Lord," let alone "In the year of our Lord Christ," was just too ridiculous. In fact, Jefferson sometimes went out of his way to make it clear to everybody that he wasn't just overlooking using the phrase "In the year of our Lord," but was deliberately omitting it, particularly in documents that he was writing to abolish something religious, using phrases like "in the Christian computation," and "of the Christian epoch." Anyway, my best guess at the time as to what Barton's mystery document might be was a pardon, since there was, in fact, a pardon signed by Jefferson that would have coincided with the date cited by Barton in his footnote. It didn't occur to me at the time that it might just be a routine preprinted form, which, as I'll explain in a minute, is exactly what this document is. So, I might have been off when I took a stab at guessing what Barton's mystery document might be, but, as I had suspected, it is not a document that Jefferson personally wrote and dated, but an already written document that he merely signed.
When I made my first YouTube videos in March of last year, (in response to Barton bashing me on his radio show), I still didn't know what the document was, even though he had showed a corner of it on the video screen during his presentation that I had attended a few months earlier. But, about a week after I put my videos up on YouTube, Barton suddenly posted the document on his website -- well, sort of. The document that Barton posted was not dated October 18, 1804, as the footnote in his earlier website article stated, but September 24, 1807. But, this doesn't really matter. Both documents, the 1804 one that Barton shows a corner of in his presentation, and the 1807 one now posted on his website are the same thing. They're ship's papers. These documents, carried by all American ships leaving the United States, were a fill-in-the-blanks form with columns translated into several languages. Each president signed hundreds of these forms, leaving all the other information blank, and then the blank signed forms were sent in bulk to the customs officials at all the ports, where they were filled out as needed for departing ships.
Not to digress from the story too much, but I did wonder why Barton didn't just post an image of the 1804 ship's papers that he had been claiming for a decade to have in his possession. The only reason I could think of is that he never did actually have the original 1804 document that he claimed to have. The image of it that he showed video screen could be a photocopy and nobody would know the difference since he never pulls out and waves around the original document like he does with other documents he's showing on the screen. He probably just looked for an original after the fact, and bought the 1807 one. If this is the case, Mr. Barton should know that there is currently one up for auction that's only one day off from the date of that 1804 one he claims to own. He could buy that one and easily get away with claiming that he just had a typo in the date in his old article. But, like I said, it really doesn't matter whether it was an 1804 or 1807 ship's papers. They're exactly the same because they were a preprinted form. So, let's get back to the story.
The primary purpose of a ship's papers, sometimes called sea letters or passports, was to provide proof of the nationality of the ship's owner if the ship was stopped by a foreign power. This became enormously important in 1793 when George Washington proclaimed the neutrality of the United States in the war between France and England, as I'll explain in a minute when I get to who really chose the language of this form.
Now, Barton claims in his description of the form on his website that "this is the explicitly Christian language that President Thomas Jefferson chose to use in official public presidential documents," and said on Glenn Beck that "Jefferson added in the year of our lord Christ." This is a flat out lie. Actually, it's two lies. Jefferson absolutely did not choose the language on this form, and he was not the only president who signed these forms that were dated that way. So did Washington and Adams before him, and Madison and Monroe after him. While the ship's papers form remained virtually the same from 1793 until well into the late 1800s, the name Christ was eventually dropped from the date on it, but that didn't happen until somewhere in the 1820s or 1830s.
The reason Barton lies about Jefferson being the only president to sign these documents is pretty obvious. As he claims in his presentations, other early presidents only dated things "in the year of our Lord," but Jefferson -- the least religious of them all -- the man who coined the phrase "separation between church and state" -- well, he went even further and added the name Christ! And his audience, of course, believes him.
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2010/6/23/74018/0628
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
