The University of South Carolina’s Athletic Department announced that the rooster serving as their mascot, formerly known as “Fighting Gamecock”, will now be named “The General” in honor of Brigadier General Thomas Sumter. This is just one story in the hundreds that could catch our attention on any given day. But this one has lesson potential. It certainly provokes some thinking about what some Americans choose to remember and what to forget.
“In keeping with how University of South Carolina Athletics became known as the Gamecocks, the department’s live mascot will now be known as The General in homage to Revolutionary War General Thomas Sumter, whose nickname “Fighting Gamecock” created the created the original moniker for Athletics.” (Source)
You may recognize the name “Sumter” – yes, the fort is named after him. If you spend just a few minutes searching and reading about him, you might find the American Battlefield’s Trust quick summary which highlights his military accomplishments (not surprising), but also his fighting with the Virginia militia in the French and Indian War, his trip to London with Cherokee leader Ostenaco to have an audience with King George III, and the way the burning of his plantation by the British inspired him to lead a “band of partisans” against the British in the Revolutionary War. You’ll also learn how he represented South Carolina in the House and Senate for over 20 years and lived to the age of 97. (Source) You might learn more about his life, including some time he spent in jail in Virginia for not paying debts, at Wikipedia. (Source) The National Park Service will give you the back-up to know that what you’ve read at Battlefield.org and Wikipedia is roughly accurate (Source). But not much more.
What you won’t learn at Battlefields.org, Wikipedia or the National Park Service is that Thomas Sumter advocated seizing enslaved people from loyalists and awarding them to men who enlisted in the Continental Army. You’d have to come across a source like the South Carolina Encyclopedia to learn about that. You’ll also learn that some Patriot leaders like Andrew Pickens endorsed this policy while others, like Francis Marion, opposed it. (Source). This difference of opinion is supported by a quick blurb in the Journal of the American Revolution (Source). It is also mentioned in Alan Taylor’s “American Revolutions“.
Thomas Sumter played a role in the Revolutionary War which resulted in the independence of the United States. He also stole human beings that were enslaved by British loyalists, and kept them enslaved, awarding them to other South Carolinians to fight against the British Army. How can we understand that? What sense can we make of that?
Anyone attempting to wrestle with answers to those questions can spend 15 minutes and find the information listed in this essay – and much more.
The University of South Carolina’s choice to honor Sumter may catch attention and become contentious. It has all the necessary ingredients of America’s celebrated and tortured past to provoke heated discussions and thousands of tweets barbs of invective. Yet, it’s more likely to sink below the overheated news cycle of serious challenges facing Americans today, submerged into our collective past.
History teachers can invest ten minutes of their available instructional time to share the news story and set their students loose to see what they can learn. After the students have shared what they searched and what they found, the teacher should model what they found and how they found it – what they searched, what they read, and what they saved. Doing this will be teaching a more important lesson to their students about history than the timeline of the British Parliamentary Acts and the colonists’ reactions we’ve chosen to include in our table of “reactions”. There is a wide variety of information available to those who know how to find it and how to “read” it and most of the talking heads and tweets we see arguing about the past come from people who have chosen to do neither.
What we understand of the past is not only shaped by the past itself, but by what we choose to look at while trying to understand it.