To paraphrase James Joyce, current events are a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. Escapist entertainment is one dodge, and I’m all for it, but I’ve also been reading American history to understand how we got to this place. Ironically, what we learn is plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
I have recommended to readers Jill Lepore’s “These Truths,” and now commend for your perusal Alan Taylor’s “American Revolutions.” The plural points to the fact that our revolution was a complex, messy, many faceted, world-spanning upheaval, not the neat story purveyed in our school days.
One thing is clear, however, certain indelible American traits have been present from before the creation. Americans dislike entrenched power, taxes, politicians, hierarchy, unless they benefit from them. They exalt self-interest and individualism and are divided against themselves. At the time of the revolution, elites and commoners, various sections of the country, rural and urban people saw things differently. And hypocrisy was endemic.
New York Patriots tore down a huge equestrian statue of George III and melted it down to produce 40,000 bullets to shoot at his troops, except these liberty-loving men didn’t do the hard work themselves. Slaves provided the manual labor.
As the war dragged on, manpower became an issue for both sides. The British at one point promised slaves freedom if they’d fight on the side of the king. Washington’s farm manager wrote to warn the general that every one of his slaves “would leave us if they believed they could make their escape — liberty is sweet.”
Slaveholders briefly considered freeing their own men if they would fight in their stead, but armed slaves might easily turn the guns on their masters. Instead, they decided to offer poor whites a free slave if they would take up arms.
Sunshine soldiers and summer patriots was not just a phrase but a reality. Many upper crust colonials had no interest in risking their pampered skins in a dicey cause. Yeoman farmers turned militiamen had an infuriating way of melting away when it was time to get the crops planted each spring or harvested each fall.
The arrogant British called Washington’s army “undisciplined people, the scum and refuse of all nations.” But part of the lack of discipline came from a lack of pay and equipment. In a revolution sparked by taxation, the colonial government lacked the ability to tax and were forced to beg the states for funds. They often refused to kick in their fair share. The result was ill-fed, ill-housed soldiers in tatters who balked at prolonged service and described even a brief enlistment as “temporary slavery.”
The British might have had more success if they had treated the colonials as fellow subjects of the king, but instead treated them with contempt, as inferiors. One disgusted British officer complained cluelessly that as soon as New Jersey Loyalists were “freed” by his troops, which behaved like jack booted occupiers, they were all suddenly “liberty mad again.”
When rural farmers, who had lived for a century far freer than their European counterparts, suddenly found their land invaded by a hostile army, they often embraced the Patriot cause for fear victorious Brits would “subject them to peonage as they did the Irish.”
Class figured in the revolution in various ways. Upper class Loyalists opposed independence because they feared what the common people might do if “freed of the traditional order.”
No less a figure than Gouverneur Morris, heir to a vast New York estate, signer of the Constitution and author of its elegant Preamble, shared the worry of his class. During the war, he said “the mob begins to think and to reason…I see it with fear and trembling.”
Patriot propagandists said the “colonial order was artificial and corrupt.” After the victory there would be “an equal and and open competition for property and office. Merit rather than connections would reap wealth and leadership.” But those promising this utopia were the ones who designed the new government, served in it, and rose to the top. The rabble did not.
To be fair, worries about disorder and lawlessness were not entirely misplaced. Patriot zealots, including the often celebrated Sons of Liberty, were capable of behavior we now associate with Hitler’s Brown Shirts or Mao’s Red Guards.
Insufficiently zealous neighbors or merchants unwilling to join boycotts against Britain, for example, could find their property vandalized, or themselves shamed, isolated, and ruined financially by being branded enemies of the people. Printers who offered news favorable to the King could find their presses destroyed or shops burned.
Some suspected loyalists were tarred and feathered, others forced to stand below a gallows with a rope around the neck while they confessed their crimes, apologized, and promised to reform. Their property could also be searched and their mail read for evidence of apostasy.
There are few civil rights in a revolution, and the memory of these outrages, and similar behavior on the part of the occupying British troops undoubtedly lay behind a Bill of Rights adopted a decade later to guarantee due process, fair trials, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, free speech and press.
Fear and self-interest often competed for the minds of the colonists. For good and ill, it isn’t difficult to see similar divisions, prejudices, and competing perspectives to those of 250 years ago expressed in today’s political and philosophical to and fro. Not always a pretty sight then, or now.