Founding Myths (40 page)

As those documenting the Revolution searched for heroes, they eyed the fifty-six delegates to the Continental Congress who had signed the Declaration of Independence. In fact, the Declaration of
Independence had been approved by thirteen state delegations, and most delegations were responding to specific instructions from their constituents. In the popular mind, however, the courageous patriots assembled in Philadelphia had taken the fate of the nation upon themselves. Although countless patriots operating on the state and local levels had also pledged their lives and their fortunes (see
chapter 6
), these people, along with the collective bodies through which they operated, were eclipsed by “the Signers.”

Responding to similar impulses, academic as well as popular writers rendered versions of the past intended to unify the nation. Between 1833 and 1849 Jared Sparks, soon to become president of Harvard, edited a monumental twenty-five-volume series entitled
The Library of American Biography.
He also published a twelve-volume collection of Washington's writings, introduced by a scholarly biography. Here at last were serious works that appealed to the public: altogether, Sparks sold more than half a million volumes. Although Sparks toned down the language and stepped up the documentation, he still dressed up the Revolutionary pantheon for public inspection. Sparks routinely doctored the documents to eliminate offensive material or undignified language. A man of Washington's stature, he reasoned, should not be remembered for such folksy expressions as “not amount to a flea bite.”
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If the marketplace made its mark on the telling of history, so did the advent of public education. Back in 1790 Noah Webster had argued persuasively that “in our American republics, where government is in the hands of the people, knowledge should be universally diffused by means of public schools.”
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The logic was irrefutable, and by the early decades of the nineteenth century, public education was becoming the norm rather than the exception. Since the need for an informed citizenry necessitated the study of history as well as the “three Rs,” early children's texts included elementary renderings of the American Revolution. One book,
The American Revolution Written in the Style of Ancient History
, imitated biblical language and assigned each of the central characters a biblical name.
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In 1820 the American Academy of Language and Belles Lettres offered a prize of $400 plus a medal of solid gold for the best history of the United States designed for schools.
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Salma Hale, who produced the winning entry, outlined the objectives for his book:

[T]o exhibit in a strong light, the principles of political and religious freedom which our forefathers professed, and for which they fought and conquered; to record the numerous examples of fortitude, courage, and patriotism, which have rendered them illustrious; and to produce, not so much by moral reflections, as by the tenor of the narrative, virtuous and patriotic impressions on the mind of the reader.
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Hale's book and many others like it were produced in tiny formats, four inches by six inches or even less, small enough to fit in a mechanic's apron or a frock pocket. Reprinted in mass quantities and sold for a pittance, they presented a child's version of history to a population that was minimally literate. Addressing two audiences—young students and adult citizens of a young nation—they performed double duty: character building and nation building.

In their treatments of the American Revolution, books such as Hale's tread a thin line: they needed to celebrate the break from Britain, but they could not preach the virtues of rebellion to children who ought to obey their elders. Coincidentally, this was the same thin line followed by many Americans of the times. In the decades after the Revolutionary War, upheavals in France and Haiti, with their infamous massacres, had given revolution a bad name. The earlier meaning of “revolution,” prevalent during the War for Independence, connoted a “revolving turn of events,” not an overthrow of the established order; specifically, it referred to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England. This is why members of the colonial elite could consider themselves “revolutionaries.”
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In the early nineteenth century, once the meaning of the word had changed, conservatives faced the task of de-revolutionizing the American Revolution. Paul Allen, writing in 1819, argued that the
patriots should not even be called “rebels.” Since they were fighting for no more than “the rights secured by Magna Charta,” they were simply upholding ancient law and tradition.
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Drawing on folkloric material and the letters of famous leaders collected by Sparks and others, popular writers presented a sanitized version of the Revolution, an amalgamation of simple morality tales depicting courageous displays of valor and great individual achievements. It was at this point that the critical 1774 revolution in Massachusetts, a popular uprising that established a dangerous precedent, began to disappear from the saga.

At midcentury, writer-artist Benson Lossing gave this idolatrous, anecdotal history a concrete physical expression. Embarking on an eight-thousand-mile pilgrimage through the “Old Thirteen States and Canada,” Lossing visited “every important place made memorable by the events of the war” in a quest to discover “the history, biography, scenery, relics, and traditions of the War for Independence.” His aim was to rescue the “tangible vestiges of the Revolution” from oblivion, before they were swept away by “the invisible fingers of decay, the plow or agriculture, and the behests of Mammon.”
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While researching his historical travelogue, Lossing listened to the tales of countless old-timers, people who had been raised on stories of the Revolution told by firsthand participants. He tapped into an oral tradition strongly linked to a sense of place. Everywhere he went, locals would usher him through battlefields that had turned back to meadows, calling forth the ghosts who still prowled about.

In 1851 and 1852 Lossing published his folkloric compilation,
A Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution
, accompanied by more than one thousand illustrations. In two large and impressive volumes, Lossing turned his readers into historical tourists. He provided no organizing principle other than plain geography; the narrative simply followed his journey from one place to the next. This conformed to the “antiquarian” approach to history prevalent at the time: the past survived in the present through physical relics and the stories of individual lives.

Such was the state of historical writing when George Bancroft, a
prodigy who had graduated from Harvard at the age of sixteen, commenced his serious and comprehensive history of the British colonies in North America and their War for Independence. Bancroft combined the talents of scholar, writer, and political advocate. He drew on all traditions, written and oral, and geared his history to scholars and laypeople alike. Gifted with a marvelous eye for detail, he could spin a yarn or eulogize a hero as well as any writer of his times—but he also believed in primary source documentation. Like Jared Sparks, with his biographical collections, and Peter Force, with his monumental compilation of newspaper accounts and official records,
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Bancroft gathered a wealth of material from the colonial and Revolutionary eras; unlike Sparks and Force, he synthesized what he read into a coherent story with a definite perspective. Through some 1,700,000 words, Bancroft held fast a single perspective: that from the very beginning of colonial settlement, the colonists had moved toward independence. America was the promised land, and this was her age. European monarchies and aristocracies were old and corrupt; America, young and vital, represented humanity's best hope. Whatever Americans did to foster freedom and democratic values was commendable, while anyone who opposed America must be considered malevolent.
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Bancroft defined the American experience for the American people. His history, published serially between 1834 and 1875, told the story of our nation's founding from a passionately patriotic perspective. Later, learned professors would take him to task for his excesses, but the vibrant nationalism he espoused still permeates our popular culture today. Bancroft wove images of a perfect America into a rich mosaic with a strong narrative thread.

But there was some dissent. Richard Hildreth, a contemporary of Bancroft, took a different tack:

Of centennial sermons and Fourth-of-July orations, whether professedly such or in the guise of history, there are more than enough. It is due to our fathers and ourselves, it is due to truth and philosophy, to present for once, on the historic stage, the
founders of our American nation unbedaubed with patriotic rouge, wrapped up in no fine-spun cloaks of excuses and apology. . . . The result of their labors is eulogy enough; their best apology is to tell their story exactly as it was.
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Hildreth was not a commercial success. Precise but dry, his prose failed to excite. The public seemed to prefer history wrapped in “fine-spun cloaks.” In scholarly circles, on the other hand, Hildreth received a warm response. Historians of the late nineteenth century's “scientific school” preferred Hildreth's tempered tone to Bancroft's hyperbole. The American Historical Association, founded in 1884, saw no need for “Fourth-of-July orations . . . in the guise of history.” The history profession tried to remove itself from the peddling of patriotism. According to John Fiske, labeled the “Bancroft of his generation,” the job of history, like that of science, was only “to emphasize relations of cause and effect that are often buried in the mass of details.”
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Most common citizens, however, could not have cared less about cause and effect. They looked to history for different and more personal reasons: to connect with the past, often through tangible legacies, and to buttress the present with a sense of tradition. In 1876, triggered by the centennial celebrations, communities throughout the eastern states returned to Benson Lossing's physical, on-site approach. By consecrating particular locations, they claimed the Revolution as their own. During and after the centennial, almost every town with some stake in the Revolution formed its own historical society, dedicated to preserving the relics and traditions of the past. “George Washington slept here” had a more immediate ring than scholarly debates over abstract causes. The lay alternative to “scientific history” was clearly expressed in the first “objective” of the Daughters of the American Revolution, as stated in its bylaws of 1890:

To perpetuate the memory and spirit of the men and women who achieved American Independence; by the acquisition and
protection of historic spots and the erection of monuments; . . . by the preservation of documents and relics, and of the records of individual services of Revolutionary soldiers and patriots; and by the promotion of celebrations of all patriotic anniversaries.
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Popular history and academic history were parting ways. Scholars dismissed popular history as “nostalgia”; laypeople regarded academic works as irrelevant at best, irreverent at worst. The central scholarly debate during this time—whether the Revolution had been caused by the wrongdoing of select individuals or by a fundamental flaw in the concept of empire—played to deaf ears outside academia. Recently divided by the Civil War and Reconstruction, Americans now reminded themselves that South and North had fought side by side at our nation's inception. It was time to gather inspiration from the “Heroic Age” of the founders, “one equaling in interest and grandeur any similar period in the annals of Greece and Rome.” The Revolution, according to a magazine editorial, was characterized by “a strange elevation of feeling and dignity of action” which furnished “a treasury of glorious reminiscences wherewith to reinvigorate . . . the national virtue.” The editor continued:

What political utility can there be in discovering, even if it were so, that Washington was not so wise, or Warren so brave, or Putnam so adventurous, or Bunker Hill not so heroically contested, as has been believed? Away with such skepticism, we say; and the mousing criticism by which it is sometimes attempted to be supported. Such beliefs have at all events become real for us by entering into the very soul of our history and forming the style of our national thought. To take them away would now be a baneful disorganizing of the national mind.
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By the end of the nineteenth century, romantic stories of the nation's founding had been fine-tuned and firmly implanted in the
mainstream of American culture. Revolutionary mythologies, including but not limited to those featured in this book, helped create and support jingoistic attitudes. These stories portrayed war as a noble experience, and they praised Revolutionary soldiers as particularly valorous. Patrick Henry's “Liberty or Death” speech, conjured long after his death, made young Americans feel good about fighting for their country. Patriots had looked into the whites of the eyes of their foreign foe. They had suffered patiently at Valley Forge, remaining true to their cause and their leader. Tales of the Revolutionary War, fashioned to reflect military values, taught Americans the logic and language of expansive nationalism: you fight a war, win it, and thereby become more powerful.

While these stories touted militarism, they failed to acknowledge the revolutionary nature of the American Revolution. In fact, revolutions are the work of groups, not individuals, and ours was no exception. The dominant mode of the original patriots was collaborative action, and the ultimate end was to place government in the hands of a collectivity, the “body of the people.” Yet the tales that emerged, with the notable exception of the Boston Tea Party, ignored that. Instead, they romanticized deeds of individual achievement. The story of the Massachusetts Revolution of 1774, in which ordinary farmers overthrew British rule, was replaced by the tale of Paul Revere, the lone rider who rousted farmers from their slumber. Rather than revealing the intricate web of patriotic resistance organizations in Boston, the tales showcased a charismatic mastermind, Sam Adams. Instead of unveiling the rash of state and local declarations of independence, which demonstrated a revolutionary groundswell, they bestowed all attention on Thomas Jefferson, the creative genius who allegedly conjured the ideas for the nation's sacred scripture “from deep within himself.”