Founding Myths

Founding Myths Page 20

by Ray Raphael

  Cold, hard numbers confirmed the patriots’ discipline; a figure-of-speech command by American officers would have proved nothing. None of the Revolutionary Era historians—William Gordon, David Ramsay, John Marshall, or Mercy Otis Warren—mentioned anything about “the whites of their eyes.” In 1788 David Humphreys published a biography of Israel Putnam, the officer from Connecticut who was later said to have issued the order. Humphreys said not a word about the command at Bunker Hill that would later be tied to Putnam’s name, but he did tell another story that would become enshrined in Revolutionary lore: “Putnam, who was ploughing when he heard the news [about Lexington and Concord], left his plough in the middle of the field, unyoked his team, and without waiting to change his clothes, set off for the theatre of action.”21 (In later versions of the tale, still with us today, “Old Put” jumped immediately on his horse without even bothering to unyoke his team.) Here was a tale worth telling—this single incident exemplified the eagerness of New England farmers to answer the call to arms. “The whites of their eyes,” by contrast, was hardly a story at all in the minds of contemporaries.

  The story first found its way into print in Mason Weems’s popular biography of George Washington, a quarter century afterward:

  “Don’t throw away a single shot, my brave fellows,” said old Putnam, “don’t throw away a single shot, but take good aim; nor touch a trigger, till you can see the white of their eyes.”

  This steady reserve of fire, even after the British had come up within pistol-shot, led them [the British] to hope that the Americans did not mean to resist! . . . But soon as the enemy were advanced within the fatal distance marked, all at once a thousand triggers were drawn, and a sheet of fire, wide as the whole front of the breast-work, bursted upon them with most ruinous effect.22

  Over the next half century, although a few writers echoed Weems’s tale, most preferred to state specified distances at which the patriots fired: Paul Allen in 1819 followed Marshall’s estimate of one hundred yards; Charles Goodrich in 1823 wrote “within twelve rods”; Salma Hale in 1822 shortened it to “within ten rods”; Noah Webster in 1833 used the official Committee of Safety numbers, ten to twelve rods. Richard Hildreth, a conscientious scholar writing in 1849, set the distance at “within a hundred yards.” Even George Bancroft, a popular historian fond of direct quotations and folksy dialogue, said nothing about “the whites of their eyes.” Instead, he offered two contemporaneous estimates: “within eight rods, as [William] Prescott afterwards thought,” and “within ten or twelve rods as the committee of safety of Massachusetts wrote.” Setting a prescribed distance was deemed critical to the moral of the story, but the precise words of the commanding officer were of little account in most renditions.23

  Richard Frothingham, in an exhaustive study of Bunker Hill written in 1849, presented a thesis that would set Weems’s story back even further: Israel Putnam was not even in charge at the time. That honor, he wrote, went to William Prescott, a colonel from Massachusetts.24 In the middle of the nineteenth century, a furious debate raged through academic circles: who was the commander at the Battle of Bunker Hill? Both Putnam and Prescott had their defenders.25

  One would think that uncertainty over the identity of the commander would have interfered with any story about what this mystery man actually said. Not so. Following Frothingham’s passing reference to the “whites of their eyes” in 1849, the story picked up steam—and it has never lost its momentum. In the first half of the twentieth century, specific distances began to disappear from school texts; instead, students were told that “untrained militia . . . coolly stood their ground until they saw the whites of the enemy’s eyes.”26 A figure of speech had been taken literally and enshrined in the official lexicon of the Revolutionary War. Students had little trouble drawing the obvious conclusion: American patriots, like knights of the Middle Ages, fought their foes eye to eye and hand to hand.

  The “whites of their eyes” tale has shown remarkable endurance. In the most recent American National Biography, a twenty-four-volume compilation that represents state-of-the-art history, the entry for Israel Putnam states definitively: “As field commander of the troops at Bunker Hill, Putnam gave one of the most famous orders in American military history: ‘Men, you are marksmen—don’t one of you fire until you see the white[s] of their eyes.’ ” But what does the American National Biography say about William Prescott? “Tradition has him [Prescott] calling, ‘Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes.’ ” Although this statement is guarded in tone and not incorrect (“tradition” does say this), the story is passed on nonetheless. Putnam said it, Prescott said it, they both said it—one way or the other, or both ways at once, the legend continues.27

  Significantly, most modern renditions leave out the actual distance between the armies at the time the Americans opened fire.28 In the absence of concrete numbers, which the early accounts had scrupulously included, we are left only with the evidence of our senses to interpret the now-famous command. Advancing British soldiers must have been at extremely close range, we assume, if the patriots could see into their eyes. Since the distances mentioned in contemporaneous accounts would contradict this assumption, they are conveniently omitted.

  When the story is repeated in school texts, it is often accompanied by reproductions of Romantic paintings, such as John Trumbull’s famous The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill, which show British and American forces within arm’s length of each other. If only we could believe that our nation was born in this manner, with no man firing his Brown Bess musket before establishing a kind of personal (albeit adversarial) relationship with the enemy. That’s the way they did it in the old days. That’s how wars are supposed to be. People do not state this directly, but unthinkingly, and by including the “whites of their eyes” tale within the popular narrative of our nation’s founding, Americans find it easier to justify and even celebrate the purposive killing that occurred in the Revolutionary War, and by informal proxy, in wars generally.

  GOOD V. EVIL

  “The relations between master and slave in Virginia were so pleasant that the offer of freedom fell upon dull, uninterested ears.”

  Life of George Washington the Farmer. Lithograph by Claude Regnier, 1853, based on painting by Junius Brutus Stearns, Washington as a Farmer at Mount Vernon, 1851.

  11

  PATRIOTIC SLAVES

  In the popular movie The Patriot, which remains to this day the most viewed dramatic presentation of the Revolutionary War, a British officer rides up to Benjamin Martin’s South Carolina plantation and offers freedom to any slaves who will fight in His Majesty’s army. This is rooted in historical fact. Early in the war Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, pronounced: “I do hereby declare all indented Servants, Negroes, or others (appertaining to Rebels) free, that are able and willing to bear Arms, they joining His Majesty’s Troops as soon as may be.”1 Later on, British general Henry Clinton made a related offer, although stopping short of promising freedom: “Every Negro who shall desert the Rebel Standard” would enjoy the “full security to follow within these Lines, any Occupation which he shall think proper.”2

  In fact, several thousand bondsmen from South Carolina took these offers seriously and fled to the British in search of their freedom.3 Not so in The Patriot. In the Hollywood version of history, the officer who offered freedom to slaves at Martin’s plantation received a most unexpected response from the black field hands he addressed: “Sir, we’re not slaves. We work this land as freed men.” Here begins a serious stretch of poetic license: we see happy blacks working plantations as freed men in Revolutionary South Carolina, the very h
eart of the Deep South.

  A bit later in the film, an enslaved man named Occam enlists in the militia, serving in place of his master. Although this never happened in South Carolina, Occam proceeds to bear arms on behalf of the patriots in an integrated militia unit. Not until the Korean War, says Dean Devlin, one of the film’s producers, would black and white Americans again serve side by side.

  Midway through the story, Occam sees a notice posted on a bulletin board in camp. Since Occam, like most of his peers, can’t read, someone else reads it aloud:

  By order of GENERAL GEORGE WASHINGTON and the CONTINENTAL CONGRESS, all bound SLAVES who give minimum ONE YEAR SERVICE in the CONTINENTAL ARMY will be GRANTED FREEDOM and be paid a bounty of FIVE SHILLINGS for each month of service.

  Occam then looks wistfully into the air as he whispers to himself: “Only another six months.”

  The document read to Occam, which is seen onscreen and appears visually authentic, contains more historical errors in a single sentence than at first seems possible. A complete concoction, it seriously misrepresents the participation of African Americans in the Revolutionary War. Neither George Washington nor the Continental Congress issued anything like this emancipation proclamation, which allegedly preceded Lincoln’s famous decree by more than fourscore years.

  When Washington first assumed command of the Continental forces, he banned the enlistment of all Negroes, both slave and free. Because of serious manpower shortages, however, he soon had to rescind a portion of his order: free blacks who had previously served were permitted to reenlist, but those held in bondage were still banned. Enslaved soldiers were viewed as an embarrassment to a republican army fighting in the name of freedom.4

  Soldiers were recruited by individual states, not by the Continental Congress, as implied in the notice read to Occam. Later in the war some states permitted blacks to serve as substitutes for whites who had been drafted, but in South Carolina, not a single black is known to have enlisted in the Continental Army during the entire course of the Revolutionary War. Upon the urging of John Laurens, Congress had indeed suggested that the state recruit enslaved men, but the notion of arming those held in bondage was preposterous to most white South Carolinians, who rejected the proposal out of hand. “We are much disgusted here at Congress recommending us to arm our Slaves,” wrote Christopher Gadsden. “It was received with great resentment, as a very dangerous and impolitic Step.”5

  Unwilling to militarize the enslaved population, white Southerners confronted their manpower shortages by offering special bounties. Bondsmen did figure in the bounty policy, although not by receiving a bounty, as suggested in Washington’s alleged emancipation proclamation; instead, they were the bounties. In April 1781 the “Carolina Gamecock,” Brigadier General Thomas Sumter of the South Carolina militia, offered to each private “one grown negro”; officers received more according to their rank, up to “three large and one small negro” to a lieutenant colonel.6 Late in 1780, with British forces threatening Virginia from the south, the legislature tried to attract three thousand new recruits by offering each one a “healthy sound negro” between the ages of ten and thirty.7

  Had Washington and the Continental Congress truly offered freedom for a single year of service, when the standard term for everyone else was “three years or the duration of the war,” enslaved men by the tens of thousands would have rushed to sign up.8 This would have seriously disrupted Southern society, already reeling from the mass exodus fleeing to the British. George Washington lost at least seventeen (and likely more) of the people he claimed as slaves when they escaped to the British; he was not likely to weaken his command over the remaining 200+ bondsmen claimed by him or his wife during the war years by offering freedom to those enlisting in the Continental Army.9

  Further, if Washington and the Continental Congress had truly offered freedom to enslaved people, who would compensate the masters? Already broke, Congress would not be able to afford the expense—but to liberate the workforce without paying off masters would surely have provoked an outright rebellion among Southern whites. The Union would have collapsed at the very beginning had Washington and the Continental Congress followed the plotline of The Patriot.

  Why did the creators of The Patriot manufacture this specious document, with all the lies it embodied? “The great and painful irony of the American Revolution is the fact that this was a war fought for freedom,” explains the screenwriter, Robert Rodat, in an interview featured on the DVD. White Americans, while pursuing their own freedom, denied freedom to the men, women, and children they enslaved. The only way to resolve this inherent contradiction is to make the freedom struggle for blacks coincide with that of their white masters—but to achieve such an unlikely wedding of interests required the makers of The Patriot to break, not merely bend, historical truths.

  The desire to reconcile the inherent contradiction of the Revolution tempted Rodat to create a highly implausible story. Toward the end of the film, Benjamin Martin’s family is sheltered by a black Maroon (escaped slaves) community, composed of his slaves-who-were-not-really-slaves. These joyous people even host a wedding party, to the beat of African drums, for Martin’s son Gabriel. This is how we would like to imagine our Revolutionary past: a happy union between former black field hands and a white plantation family.

  The conclusion to Occam’s tale is even more incredible. As the soldiers prepare to fight and perhaps die at Cowpens, a fellow who has formerly been a bigot observes that Occam has already served his time. (Even by the film’s own terms, this does not hold: the alleged emancipation notice applies only to Continental soldiers, while Occam is a militiaman.) Although Occam, unlike white soldiers, is free to go, he refuses to leave, for he has become a true patriot: “I’m here now on my own accord,” he announces. The reformed bigot replies: “I’m honored to have you with us. Honored.” Then, in the concluding scene, Occam and his new white friend set out to “build a whole new world,” starting with a house for Benjamin Martin.

  Although the story is made up, The Patriot purports to historical authenticity. Viewers are encouraged to treat the movie as a reasonable simulation of actual events, and most do. “We felt that while we were telling the fictional story,” says producer Mark Gordon, on the DVD, “the backdrop was serious history.” That’s why Gordon and his team decided to consult the Smithsonian Institution, whom they credit in the closing titles. “When you hear the words ‘Smithsonian Institution,’ ” Gordon explains, “you think serious, you think important.”

  The mystique of “history” is marshaled in support of fiction, and The Patriot tells a story we wish to believe: the American Revolution was the first step along the long road to the termination of slavery. The War for Independence, with its promise of freedom and its suggestion of equality, supposedly served as a blueprint for black independence as well as white.

  In truth, the contradiction between slavery and the American Revolution was not so easily resolved as it was in The Patriot. During the war, Southern white patriots united in opposition to the seemingly diabolical designs of the British, who threatened the very roots of their society by offering freedom to people enslaved to rebel masters. After the war, the institution of slavery solidified throughout the South, even as it gradually disappeared in the North. During the Revolutionary War, many thousands of enslaved people had managed to escape from their masters, seriously threatening the very existence of slavery in regions dependent on slave labor, and in response, white owners clamped down. The rigid slave codes we associate with the period before the Civil War were a direct outcome of the Revolutionary War. This is “serious history.” The notion that blacks and whites in South Carolina pulled together in the wake of the Revolution to “build a whole new world” is a self-serving fantasy.

  HIST
ORY IN BLACK AND WHITE

  The celebration of black patriotism is itself a historical phenomenon. At the time of the Revolution and for decades after, little was said about the black presence in the Revolutionary War. Early historians assigned no special role to black patriots, while they either ignored or downplayed the flight of enslaved people to the British. When they did happen to mention this, they emphasized the loss inflicted on white masters. “It has been estimated that between the years 1775 and 1783 the state of South Carolina was robbed of twenty-five thousand negroes, valued at about twelve million five hundred thousand dollars,” wrote Benson Lossing in his Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution, citing the early historian David Ramsay.10

  In the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the notion of “colored” patriotism assumed great political significance. Abolitionists pointed to the participation of blacks in the American Revolution to make a strong argument: if these people helped white Americans win freedom, how could they be denied their own?

  In 1855 a black abolitionist from Boston, William Nell, authored a book called The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution. Nell’s work, according to an introduction written by fellow abolitionist Wendell Phillips, was intended “to stem the tide of prejudice against the colored race” and “to prove colored men patriotic.”11 Harriet Beecher Stowe, in a second introduction, claimed that black patriots should be honored even more than whites: “It was not for their own land they fought, not even for a land which had adopted them, but for a land which had enslaved them, and whose laws, even in freedom, oftener oppressed than protected. Bravery, under such circumstances, has a peculiar beauty and merit.”12

 

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