Founding Myths

by Ray Raphael

  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.”37 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,38 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.39

  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.40

  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.”41

  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.42

  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.43

  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 lan
guage 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.”

  We owe our very existence, the stories said, to the wisdom and courage of a small cadre of leaders who worked closely together, as a separate and distinct group, to determine the fate of the nation. In fact, these men did not act in a vacuum. Outside official chambers, a host of local activists, working in committees, tended unrelentingly to the business of the new nation. Meanwhile, poor men and boys of the Continental Army, together with countless local militiamen, repulsed British advances. The so-called founders reflected the fervor of the people—they did not create it. By ignoring or downplaying the widespread participation of ordinary people in Revolutionary affairs, stories that claimed to be patriotic subverted the very essence of popular sovereignty, the explicit reason for the nation’s existence. Four score and seven years after the United States declared its independence, Abraham Lincoln gave poetic voice to this central theme by boasting that our original patriots had established a nation “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” When we say our nation was created by a mere handful of Founding Fathers, we lose a key component of this democratic trinity.

  CONCLUSION: WHY WE TELL TALL TALES

  Despite advances in historical scholarship that show them to be mistaken or misleading, the fanciful tales featured in this book continue to anchor the telling of the American Revolution. They endure because they engage and excite and please, and a story, if it pleases, will generally trump hard evidence.

  History, of course, can never adequately re-create the past. Back then, people didn’t know how things would turn out; now, we do. Try as we might, we will always be reading history backward. This in itself places an impenetrable barrier between past and present. There are other barriers as well, differences in culture and circumstance. Added to all this, the sheer multiplicity of events, always chaotic, belies our attempts at neat packaging.

  Inevitably befuddled, we unravel the tangle of the past by substituting a series of comprehensible stories that draw on important elements of traditional Western storytelling. The past has no beginning, middle, and end, but our stories must. The past has multifarious players, more than we can possibly meet, so we make the acquaintance of just a few, giving preference to heroes and heroines who embody virtue and represent our collective ideals. Documents abound, but these atomic elements tell us little until we organize them and assign meanings. As one philosopher of history put it, the past is “immense, sublime, and gone.”1 The stories we tell of the past, on the other hand, are contained, manifest, and present. People in all cultures tell such tales. The problem lies not in the act of conjuring them, but in failing to acknowledge their purpose and limitations. In practice, they are subject to several common fallacies.

  Individual agency. Assuming undue agency for one’s subject is the biographer’s great temptation, and the historian’s as well. Samuel Adams, it is said, single-handedly steered the United States toward independence—as did John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine. Each of these allegedly indispensable protagonists, in the hands of admiring authors, not only drives the story but becomes the story. The committees of correspondence, by definition collective endeavors, become “Sam Adams’s committees,” and the Declaration of Independence “Jefferson’s Declaration.” The fallacy of protagonist-as-primary-agent sustains historical mythologies while relegating great numbers of people and groups to the sidelines, or simply discarding them.

  Presumed consistency. In most textbooks and popular historical narratives, protagonists shape events more than events shape protagonists. For this to happen, a protagonist functions as an engine chugging through time, the track always straight. The inner Samuel Adams, hell-bent from the outset on separation from Britain, eventually achieves his goal. Any notion that his position evolved as he reacted to circumstances beyond his control would appear to negate the power of that engine. James Madison, so-called Father of the Constitution, envisioned that document and then made it happen; never mind that at the Constitutional Convention, the very model of a collective deliberation, Madison lost out on forty of seventy-one issues on which he took a stand, or that the Constitution he envisioned at the start—including an absolute federal veto over all state legislation—was very, very different from the one that emerged, or that by 1798 his view on federal versus state authority had turned upside down. To this day, scholars as well as laymen make free use of the term “Madisonian,” as if it that denoted a consistent, unwavering philosophy that placed its indelible stamp on how things turned out.2

  Faulty representation. Heroes and heroines, selected for their uncommon features, are marshaled forth to represent all the people, including those who are common, not special. History is supposedly revealed through stories of protagonists who are “giants” or “larger than life.” Their exploits are “amazing” or “unbelievable.” “Never before or since,” we like to say, “has there been such a man or woman”—and yet, strangely, we present these exceptional people as “representative” of historical movements. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson—we speak of these illustrious individuals as the Revolutionaries, and we use them as stand-ins for all the other Revolutionaries, although we have just proclaimed they are not like the rest.

  Iconic events as protagonist-agents. Special events subsume other events, in the same way that heroes and heroines subsume other characters. Three such events drive and define the traditional story of the American Revolution, but each in fact hides critical features:

  •The British never would have marched on Lexington and Concord unless the people of Massachusetts had shed British rule the previous year, yet the iconic tale of “the shot heard ’round the world,” which allegedly initiated the American Revolution, effectively conceals the revolution that happened before it.3

  •Congress voted for independence on July 2, 1776, only because a groundswell of public pressure, including instructions by state and local bodies to declare independence, had made that move viable—yet the later event has subsumed the others, reversing cause and effect. “The Declaration launched a period of energetic political innovation, as one colony after another reconstituted itself as a ‘state,’ ” one recent college text states emphatically. In fact, Congress had requested the emerging states to form new governments back on May 10, almost two months earlier, and by July 2 several states were in the process of doing so. These were key steps in making the congressional declaration possible, not consequences of it.4

  •The Battle of Yorktown proved to be pivotal, but only because other world powers, acting in various theaters across the globe, circumscribed Britain’s options in response to this particular military defeat. When we isolate the Ba
ttle of Yorktown and treat it as the definitive end of the war, we lose the global context, critical to all international events. We do not see the elephant but only the tip of his tail.

  All events, iconic and otherwise, exist in webs, not in isolation. Stories that ignore such webs not only misrepresent history but blind us to the fluid and interconnected dynamics of how human societies function.

  LANGUAGE THAT DECEIVES

  The construction of our sentences, like the structure of our stories, leads to individualistic misinterpretations of history. Sentences written in the active voice require subjects, just as stories require protagonists. The problem is, we don’t always know the exact identities of the subjects of our sentences. Composites suffice only for a while. So when we tire of saying “Republicans opposed” or “rebels demanded,” we turn to a slightly more personalized alternative: “Republican spokesmen opposed” or “rebel leaders demanded.” These subjects are still generic, but at least they refer to individual people rather than to abstract groups. We like that, and we revert to it unconsciously. It’s a default mode in the writing of history. “Rebels” and “rebel leaders” are used interchangeably, as if there were no difference between them.