Are Our Historians Deceiving Us With Half-Truths?

Is American history sanitized, sanctified by truths mixed with half-truths, myths and distortions?  Have our violent revolutions been as successful as often portrayed in our history courses?  Have we avoided asking hard questions such as:

1.  Do violent revolutions leave a tragic heritage of violence in society?
2.  Do violent revolutions achieve political freedom for all citizens or only for an elite in society?
3.  Does the common citizen fight and die in a revolution that ends up benefiting the elite, few of whom die in the revolution?
4.  Is political freedom without economic justice worth the enormous death and destruction of a violent revolution?

In my reading of both U.S. and Haitian history, I have concluded that each extremely violent revolution, including the American Civil War, left a heritage of continuing violence and oppression that has been normalized in each society.  In the U.S., it has been violence in numerous unjust wars and against other ethnic groups.  In Haiti, an endless stream of dictators from Dessalines (1804) to Baby Doc (1986) have legitimated, normalized violence.

Both Haiti and the U.S. have statues of liberty proudly proclaiming their hard fought political freedom.  But in America, it was primarily the case of an American founding father elite replacing a British elite.  The poor and women were second class citizens at our founding and in some ways still are today.  America, despite eloquent myths to the contrary, never has really been a government of the people, by the people and for the people.

In Haiti, Haitian tyrants/dictators and urban elite replaced the French colonial elite.  Poor peasants continued to be exploited, often treated as semi-slaves.  Political freedom was seldom accompanied by economic justice.  Political freedom without economic justice is shallow, superficial.

In neither the Haitian nor the American revolutions was political freedom followed by economic justice?  Is the mix of political freedom and economic oppression/death worth a violent revolution?  An expert on Black History told me that never in American history have blacks ever had economic justice.  Even after black American slaves were freed, they were immediately homeless, foodless and landless.  Free, but one historian estimates that up to a million freed slaves died of disease and starvation, not war.  Freedom and death, but not freedom and economic justice.

The French colonists created an export oriented economic system built upon plantations, slaves and sugar to benefit the French.  In 1804, the victorious Haitian slaves took the existing French economic system and tried to make it work again because Haiti desperately needed cash to buy guns to keep the French from reinvading.  They needed cheap and plentiful labor to make the plantation system work. So General/Dictator Dessalines turned to 'militarized agriculture'; in other words, the reinstatement of slavery.  Can Christians devise a better way built around the biblical kingdom of God?