by Ray Raphael
The signing of the Declaration of Independence was a manufactured event, consciously designed to produce a sort of “overnight antiquity,†in the words of historian Garry Wills.7 The sleight of hand worked. By 1786, the tenth anniversary of independence, Fourth of July rituals in the major cities had assumed an air of tradition. Early in the morning, bells or cannons announced the beginning of commemorative festivities. Militia or volunteer units marched in parade; then, in ritualistic procession, citizens joined the march toward the site of the official oration. There, a prominent citizen preached a secular gospel; often these speeches were placed in print, and some became bestsellers. After the oration, people would join in song, much like parishioners responding with hymns. The Fourth of July was celebrated as a holy day—“the Sabbath of our Freedom,†according to one contemporary participant.8
Following the formal commemoration, people adjourned to various inns and taverns to break bread and drink. Each group offered thirteen toasts in honor of the body assembled, the state, the nation, and the republican ideal of popular sovereignty. After dinner, with their patriotism revived and their spirits lubricated, Americans caroused in the streets, where they gathered around bonfires and set off fireworks.
Toward the end of the eighteenth century, this “holy day†turned into a “holiday.†For the first time, unencumbered by any religious obligations, workers were given a day off. To celebrate the birth of their nation, Americans neither labored nor went to church. The Fourth of July became the liveliest day of the year.
Early Fourth of July rituals helped define the evolving American character. While orators highlighted the “superior advantages†of republican government and “public virtue,†the parades and festivities showcased the military aspects of the “American†experience.9 In 1786 a writer for the Independent Gazetteer commented on the proper celebratory mores:
Let the youth, the hope of his country, grow up amidst annual festivities, commemorative of the events of the war. . . . Let this young hero, at frequent intervals, quit the toils of husbandry, to kindle his public spirit amidst war like exercises; let him learn the use of arms and accustom himself to discipline in the sight of the most respectable citizens. Let him, in their presence, pledge himself to defend his country and its laws.10
While the Revolutionary War receded into the past, military men marched in Fourth of July parades, cannons fired, and all paid homage to the Revolutionary dead, creating national martyrs. As Boston poet Barnabas Binney wrote: “With Blood they seal their Cause, / Died to save their Country’s Laws.â€11
By paying tribute to the past, Americans affirmed their commitment to the nation that was emerging in the present. The Fourth of July conferred upon the nation a “history,†even if it was recent and brief. That was a start. In time, that history would be embellished, set to paper, and codified into a narrative that every American would be expected to learn.
Not coincidentally, two of the orators at early Fourth of July celebrations—William Gordon and David Ramsay—were the first Americans to pen narratives of the Revolution. Gordon led the way with his four-volume tome entitled The History of the Rise, Progress, and Establishment of the Independence of the United States of America, published in 1788.12 The following year, David Ramsay published his two-volume History of the American Revolution.13 Both Gordon and Ramsay wrote with political purpose. By chronicling the struggle for independence, Gordon hoped to promote his republican ideals. Ramsay, an active Federalist, tried to unify the nation by developing an “American†sense of identity through a shared history. “Joining foot to foot, and hand to hand, . . . with one mind,†Ramsay wrote, the American people presented “a solid phalanx opposing their energies and resources to the introduction of arbitrary power.â€14
Other contemporary historians wrote with acknowledged agendas. John Marshall (The Life of George Washington, 1804–1807) was a leading political figure in Virginia in the 1790s and chief justice of the United States Supreme Court for more than three decades, starting in 1801.15 As a staunch Federalist, Marshall wished to minimize regional differences and promote a stronger sense of national pride; to do this, he focused on Washington as a symbol of unity. Mercy Otis Warren (History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, 1805) was an ardent anti-Federalist, and she too wrote with purpose. Warren’s brother, James Otis, and husband, James Warren, had been prominent Massachusetts patriots, and she herself had been an active and communicative Revolutionary. Warren, who still viewed herself as a patriot, tried to revive a sense of public virtue in the post-Revolutionary generation.16
The prominent early historians of the Revolution were similar in three respects. First, while professing to seek only the “truth,†they consciously promulgated civic values. Although Warren and Gordon focused on public virtue and Ramsay and Marshall on strengthening the nation, their goals certainly intermeshed. All four promoted “America†as the embodiment of republican ideals. Together, they laid the foundations for a coherent narrative of the Revolutionary War, although this rough draft of an American Genesis did not yet include most of the tales featured in these pages. (Gordon’s rendition of Samuel Adams, and Warren’s celebration of Jefferson’s genius and the “patient suffering†at Valley Forge, were notable exceptions.)
Second, they all borrowed liberally from an even earlier work, a narrative set in print years before by an Englishman. Throughout the Revolutionary Era, an official publication of the British Parliament, the Annual Register, chronicled events in the rebellious colonies as part of its annual news-of-the-world report. As luck would have it, during this period the Register was under the editorship of Edmund Burke, who wrote many of the entries himself. An outspoken Whig member of Parliament, Burke embraced a perspective that was easy for American patriots to accept: actions adopted by the British government to keep the colonists under tight reins were ill-advised and self-defeating.
Few Americans bothered to read the Annual Register, but those who took the trouble perused it carefully—they must have, for they copied it word for word. Sentences, paragraphs, and entire pages reappeared verbatim in the works of Gordon, Ramsay, Marshall, and, to a lesser extent, Warren. In 1789 the Columbian, a staunchly patriotic journal, published a “concise history of the late war in America†that lifted large sections from Burke’s Register, admittedly copied “without change†because of “the superior eloquence of its composition.â€17 In 1899 a scholar named Orin Libby exposed this so-called “plagiarism,†although during Revolutionary times, intellectual property was not so jealously guarded, and all the alleged culprits had freely acknowledged their sources.18
Third, none of the early historians was as successful as he or she had hoped.19 Only cultured literati, who already knew the basic story, actually purchased their multivolume tomes; the masses of people whom the authors had wanted to inspire never took much notice. For every person who read their ponderous works, scores of others heard about the glorious deeds of the original patriots only by word of mouth. While Fourth of July rituals celebrated the past in a style accessible to all, written history needed to come down a notch if it was ever to be embraced by common Americans.
ROMANCING THE REVOLUTION
Like his more learned and renowned contemporaries, an itinerant preacher and traveling book salesman named Mason Locke Weems wanted to promote patriotism, but he took the pulse of the American people more accurately. Weems could deliver a sermon, fashion a speech, or play the fiddle—whatever would draw an audience. For thirty years he peddled his “Flying Library†up and down the eastern seaboard. From New York to Georgia, he worked the crowd at court days and revival meetings. At first he sold books for Matthew Carey, a Philadelphia publisher; later, he pushed his own wares as well—biographies of George Washington, Benjamin
Franklin, William Penn, and Francis Marion.20
Mason Weems gave the reading public what it wanted: virtuous heroes, lively prose, and cheap books. In 1797 he outlined to Carey the basic strategy that would catapult him to fame:
Experience has taught me that small, i.e., quarter of dollar books, on subjects calculated to strike the Popular Curiosity, printed in very large numbers and properly distributed, would prove an immense revenue to the prudent and industrious Undertakers. If you could get the life of General Wayne, Putnam, Green &c., Men whose courage and Abilities, whose patriotism and Exploits have won the love and admiration of the American people, printed in small volumes and with very interesting frontispieces, you would, without doubt, sell an immense number of them.21
Following his own formula, Weems embarked on his personal writing career. In the spring of 1799, as George Washington’s health began to fade, Weems propositioned Carey:
I have nearly ready for press, a piece to be christened “The Beauties of Washington.†. . . The whole will make but four sheets and will sell like flax seed at quarter of a dollar. I could make you a world of pence and popularity by it.22
Washington died six months later, and Weems wrote immediately to Carey: “Millions are gaping to read something about him. I am nearly primed and cocked for ’em.†And so he was: by February 1800 Weems had published his first edition of George Washington’s biography, an eighty-page pamphlet which did indeed sell like flaxseed at planting time.23
Over the next few years Weems peddled his own pamphlet from his “Flying Library.†He also took subscriptions for John Marshall’s forthcoming Life of George Washington. When Marshall’s laborious volumes appeared, subscribers complained that there was too much history and too little Washington. Weems listened. He wanted to deliver God and country at an affordable price, but he also knew that his little pamphlet would not serve as a substitute for a full-scale biography, so he started gathering and inventing more material. In 1806, for his fifth edition, he added the fictive “I cannot tell a lie†story about cutting down the cherry tree, and in 1808, the sixth edition, he expanded his product into the full-length book that would introduce the Father of our Country and the Revolutionary War to generations of Americans (The Life of George Washington; With Curious Anecdotes, Equally Honorable to Himself and Exemplary to His Young Countrymen.)
To establish his credibility, Mason Weems identified himself on the title page as “Formerly Rector of Mount-Vernon Parish.†Although there never was a “Mount-Vernon Parish,†the preacher had occasionally delivered sermons at Pohick Church, which Washington might have attended many years before. This supposedly gave the writer an inside connection, and he undoubtedly picked up on some local folklore, but “Parson Weems†(as he was now called) did not hesitate to invent a story from scratch if it could produce the desired result.
Weems’s challenge was to present Washington as picture-book-perfect, and to do it in grandiose style. William Gordon had complained that extravagant writing made the reader feel he was “in company with a painted harlotâ€; if so, Weems was among the most promiscuous of writers.24 By magically conjuring fantastic and even outrageous images, he entertained as he preached. “He is a most delightful mixture of the Scriptures, Homer, Virgil, and the back woods,†wrote Sydney Fisher over a century later. “Everything rages and storms, slashes and tears.â€25 For example:
Then sudden and terrible the charge was made! Like men fighting, life in hand, all at once they rose high on their stirrups! while in streams of lightening their swords came down, and heads and arms, and caps, and carcasses, distained with spouting gore, rolled fearfully all around.26
Weems set the standard, and others followed suit. Biography was the name of the game, and the rules were clear: choose a military hero or prominent Revolutionary statesman, build up his virtues while suppressing his vices, and above all, entertain. So it was, in the early 1800s, that fading memories of the Revolution came back to life for the American people. Biographies of Patrick Henry, Thomas Sumter (the Gamecock), and Francis Marion (the Swamp Fox) delighted and inspired. Even David Ramsay jumped onboard, penning a biography of Washington that outsold his original history.27 During the 1820s John Sanderson came out with a nine-volume series of eulogies entitled Biography of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence. All these bestsellers were buttressed by lofty sentiments. Heroic biographies, which provided moral instruction for the young, also promoted a sense of national identity at a time when the United States, still in its adolescence, needed to counter the centrifugal forces of regionalism and rapid westward expansion.
The War of 1812 both reflected and furthered an increased militarism in American culture. Revolutionary War veterans, once scorned, were suddenly celebrated, and the myth of “patient suffering,†focused on Valley Forge, now flourished. In 1817 William Wirt promoted military values with his re-creation of Patrick Henry’s speech. Since the United States had been created through acts of war, military virtues became synonymous with patriotism.
The emphasis on military struggles, along with the rage for popular biographies, reduced history to a series of isolated stories with individual protagonists and straightforward plotlines. Battles had definite beginnings and endings, and nobody could mistake a hero for a villain. Events were shaped by personal acts of courage and valor, not by collective action. Separate scenes—“anecdotes,†in the parlance of the times—were connected only by the sense of morality they instilled. One book was titled Anecdotes of the American revolution: illustrative of the talents and virtues of the heroes and patriots, who acted the most conspicuous parts therein;28 another presumptuously labeled itself “a complete anecdotal history†of the Revolution.29 Leading characters assumed godlike proportions in order to serve as appropriate role models for young Americans. The Revolution, in a word, lost all of its dimensions but one.
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.â€
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.â€30
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.â€31 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 â�
��œthree 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.32
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.33 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.34
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.â€35 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.36 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.
