Founding Myths

by Ray Raphael

  9.Before accepting the position of superintendent of finance, Morris insisted that he have the absolute power to dismiss, on his own authority alone, any officer at all involved in federal expenditures. After his appointment, Congress placed all money borrowed from foreign governments directly in his hands. It permitted him to import or export goods on the nation’s tab, with no oversight. It allowed him to issue private contracts to supply the army, and it placed the entire Marine Department under his control. It granted him the authority to deal with foreign ministers, thereby allowing him to operate his own department of foreign affairs. Meanwhile, the state of Pennsylvania, the nation’s most prominent commercial center, granted Morris the authority to run its official business more or less by himself.

  10.For Morris’s central roles in the founding of the nation, see Ray Raphael, Founders: The People Who Brought You a Nation (New York: The New Press, 2009), and Charles Rappleye, Robert Morris: Financier of the American Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011).

  11.McCullough, “Argonauts of 1776,” July 4, 2002.

  12.Ibid.

  13.David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 78, 90. McCullough also notes that delegates for six states in the Continental Congress “were under specific instructions not to vote for independence.” This was true in the early spring of 1776, but over the course of the next few months, all states except New York either instructed their delegates to vote for independence or permitted them to do so. These changed instructions were not due to debates within Congress, but to pressure from without.

  14.John Adams to Benjamin Rush, March 19, 1812, in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Department, ms no. 229 (44), Boston Public Library. The words deleted are: “Mr Gerry, Mr Lovel was not there. Gerry not till 1776. Lovel not till 1777.”

  15.Adams to Jefferson, November 12, 1813, John Adams, Works of John Adams, Charles Francis Adams, ed. (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1850–1856), 10: 78–79.

  16.John Adams, with his handy breakdown of one-third, one-third, and one-third, is often cited as the definitive source on the strength of Tories, patriots, and neutrals during the American Revolution. In 1815, writing to James Lloyd, he stated that a “full one third were averse to the Revolution. . . . An opposite third conceived a hatred of the English. . . . The middle third . . . were rather lukewarm.” (Charles Francis Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams [Boston: Charles Little and James Brown, 1850], 10: 110.) Here, however, Adams was speaking not about the American Revolution but about the political split in 1797 between Americans who supported the French Revolution and those who supported Britain, France’s enemy at that time. Words usually deleted would make this clear: “rather lukewarm to both England and France.” In 1908 historian Sydney George Fisher misinterpreted Adams’s reminiscence, thinking it applied to the numbers of patriots and loyalists in the American Revolution, and that mistaken notion has been passed along. Adams showed a penchant for breaking down the population into thirds; writers of history texts, in turn, have shown a penchant for accepting as fact these quick and easy assessments, set to paper several decades later by an aging man and taken totally out of context.

  17.McCullough, John Adams, jacket copy (written by McCullough).

  18.John Adams to Abigail Adams, July 3, 1776, in Charles Francis Adams, ed., Familiar Letters of John Adams and his Wife Abigail Adams, during the Revolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1875), 193.

  19.Chase to Adams, June 28, 1776, Papers of John Adams, Robert J. Taylor, ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1977), 4: 351

  20.McCullough, John Adams, 129.

  21.Overpromoting the individual agency of their subjects is an occupational hazard of biographers. Since the importance of their stories is determined in part by the importance of their protagonists, they have a vested interest in endowing their subjects with as much historical significance as the record will bear—and sometimes more. The very nature of their enterprise entices them to portray their chosen heroes as prime movers of history.

  22.John Ferling, Setting the World Ablaze: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 306. Here is the entire quotation, the closing paragraph of Ferling’s book: “Washington and Adams achieved historical greatness in the American Revolution. In some ways, Adams’s achievement was the more impressive. His was the more lonely struggle. Before 1778 he battled for unpopular, but necessary, ends against a recalcitrant Congress. Later, when faced with a menacing isolation in Europe, he struggled against America’s most popular diplomat and citizen and refused to quail before an imperious ally in whose clutches the very survival of the American Revolution seemed to rest. He was a ‘bold spirit,’ as Daniel Webster stated in an address at Faneuil Hall in Boston shortly after Adams’s death, a ‘manly and energetic’ leader who possessed the qualities of ‘natural talent and natural temperament’ which the Revolutionary crisis demanded. The Revolutionary generation was indeed fortunate to have had Washington and Adams as its greatest stewards and shepherds.”

  23.Ellis, Founding Brothers, 16.

  9: “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!”

  1.William Wirt, Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry (Philadelphia: James Webster, 1818), 121–123. Paragraph delineations added, and Wirt’s descriptive interludes omitted. Emphasis in original.

  2.Richard R. Beeman, Patrick Henry: A Biography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), xi; Andrew Burstein, America’s Jubilee (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), 35, 39. Wirt continued: “[T]he style of the narrative, fettered by a scrupulous regard to real facts, is to me the most difficult in the world. It is like attempting to run, tied up in a bag. My pen wants perpetually to career and frolic it away.”

  3.Wirt to Adams, January 12, 1818, in Burstein, America’s Jubilee, 46.

  4.Citations here are based on the third edition, published in 1818 by James Webster in Philadelphia.

  5.A list of several of these editions appears in Judy Hample, “The Textual and Cultural Authenticity of Patrick Henry’s ‘Liberty or Death’ Speech,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 63 (1977): 299. The speech itself was actually excerpted a few months prior to publication of the book in Port Folio, December 1816.

  6.Wirt to Tucker, August 16, 1815, William and Mary Quarterly, First Series, 22 (1914), 252. Cited in Hample, “Textual Authenticity,” 300. Unfortunately, the term “verbatim” in this sentence is unclear: does it refer to the speech itself, or merely to the effect it had on Tucker, which Wirt did in fact include in a footnote to his biography? (Wirt, Patrick Henry, 122.)

  7.Hample, “Textual Authenticity,” 298–310; Stephen T. Olsen, “A Study in Disputed Authorship: the ‘Liberty or Death’ Speech,” PhD dissertation, Pennsylvania State University, 1976; Charles I. Cohen, “The ‘Liberty or Death’ Speech: A Note on Religion and Revolutionary Rhetoric,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 38 (1981), 702–717; David A. McCants, “The Authenticity of William Wirt’s Version of Patrick Henry’s ‘Liberty or Death’ Speech,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 87 (1979), 387–402.

  8.Moses Coit Tyler, Patrick Henry (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1887), 126; Hample, “Textual Authenticity,” 301.

  9.Thanks to the written record (and in this case, the audio and visual record as well), we do know the exact words of Kennedy’s exciting conclusion: “My fellow citizens: let no one doubt that this is a difficult and dangerous effort on which we have set out. No one can foresee precisely what course it will take or what costs or casualties will be incurred. Many months of sacrifice and self-discipline lie ahead—months in which both our patience and our will will be tested—months in which many threats and denunciations will keep us aware of our dange
rs. But the greatest danger of all would be to do nothing. The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are—but it is the one most consistent with our character and courage as a nation and our commitments around the world. The cost of freedom is always high—but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that’s the path of surrender or submission. Our goal is not the victory of might, but the vindication of right—not peace at the expense of freedom, but both peace and freedom, here in this hemisphere, and we hope, around the world. God willing, that goal will be achieved. Thank you and good night.”

  10.Hample, “Textual Authenticity,” 308. The letter was originally published in Magazine of History, March 1906, 158.

  11.From the South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal, June 6, 1775, cited in Woody Holton, “Rebel Against Rebel: Enslaved Virginians and the Coming of the American Revolution,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 105 (1997): 171, 176; Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 149–151; Peter Wood, “ ‘Taking Care of Business’ in Revolutionary South Carolina: Republicanism and the Slave Society,” in Jeffrey J. Crow and Larry E. Tise, eds., Southern Experience in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 282; Ray Raphael, People’s History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence (New York: The New Press, 2001), 246.

  12.William J. Van Schreeven, Robert L. Scribner, and Brent Tarter, eds., Revolutionary Virginia: The Road to Independence, a Documentary Record (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1973–1983), 3: 6.

  13.Holton, “Rebel Against Rebel,” 174.

  14.According to the 1787 and 1788 tax records, Patrick Henry owned sixty-six slaves in the years following the Revolution. (Jackson T. Main, “The One Hundred,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 11 [1954], 376, 383.)

  15.Holton, “Rebel Against Rebel,” 174; Beeman, Patrick Henry, 70.

  16.A photocopy of Henry’s warning is reprinted in Beeman, Patrick Henry, insert between pp. 57 and 59. Some historians portray Henry as being soft on slavery, based on a single letter he wrote in 1773: “Is it not amazing, that at a time, when ye Rights of Humanity are defined & understood with precision, in a Country above all others fond of Liberty, that in such an Age, & such a Country we find Men, professing a Religion ye most humane, mild, meek, gentle & generous; adopting a Principle as repugnant to humanity as it is inconsistent with the Bible and destructive to Liberty? . . . Would any one believe that I am Master of Slaves of my own purchase! I am drawn by ye general inconvenience of living without them, I will not, I cannot justify it. However culpable my Conduct, I will so far pay my devoir to Virtue, as to own the excellence & rectitude of her Precepts, & to lament my want of conforming to them.” (Robert D. Meade, Patrick Henry: Patriot in the Making [Philadelphia and New York: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1957], 299–300.) Clearly, Henry understood the inherent evils of slavery, but over the course of three decades of public service—as a state legislator, governor, and representative to the Continental Congress—he made no moves to further the sentiments he voiced in 1773, while he did take actions to defend the institution of slavery. In May 1776, Henry served on the committee that drafted the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which stated in its first article that “all men are born equally free and independent.” Some of the more astute delegates were distressed by these dangerous words, which they feared could be used in the future to justify the abolition of slavery. The bill was sent back to committee “to vary the language, as not to involve the necessity of emancipating the slaves.” The committee soon reported back: although all men are born free and independent, they can claim their rights only “when they enter into a state of society”—and slaves, of course, were not “part of the society to which the declaration applied.” Apparently, this bit of sophistry quieted the dissent. (Henry Mayer, Son of Thunder [New York: Franklin Watts, 1986], 300–301; Beeman, Patrick Henry, 101–102.)

  Henry did oppose the African slave trade, but this position, supported by most Virginia slaveholders, served their economic interests: since Virginia was the primary supplier of slaves to the rest of the states, they naturally opposed foreign competition. In 1785 Patrick Henry supported a bill prohibiting slave importation; this bill, passed by and for the Virginia gentry, included one provision which prevented slaves from testifying in court and another which allowed them to be punished “with stripes” for gathering in groups or leaving home without a pass. The net effect was to tighten control over the slaves that were already there.

  In 1788, during the ratification debates, Henry complained that the proposed Constitution did not provide adequate safeguards against emancipation. Slavery, he insisted, was strictly a local issue, yet the Constitution failed to guarantee that it would be treated that way. Under the “necessary and proper” clause, he feared, Congress could tax slavery so heavily that masters would be forced to free their slaves.

  In his will, Henry allowed his wife Dolly, “if she chooses,” to “set free one or two of my slaves”—cautious words indeed from such a flamboyant defender of freedom (Henry Mayer, Son of Thunder, 473). By contrast, Patrick’s sister Elizabeth stated as her last wishes: “Whereas by the wrongdoing of man it hath been the unfortunate lot of the following negroes to be Slaves for life, to wit, Nina, Adam, Nancy senr, Nancy, Kitty and Selah. And whereas believing the same have come unto my possession by the direction of providence, and conceiving from the clearest conviction of my conscience aided by the power of a good and just God, that it is both sinful and unjust, as they are by nature equally free with myself, to continue them in Slavery I do therefore by these presents, under the influence of a duty I not only owe my own conscience, but the just God who made us all, make free the said Negroes, hoping while they are free of man they will faithfully serve their MAKER through the merits of CHRIST.” (Meade, Patrick Henry, 312–313.) Here was some fire, the sort of passion that her brother managed to muster only for the “liberty” of free whites.

  17.Holton, “Rebel Against Rebel,” 173.

  18.William Wirt Henry, Patrick Henry: Life, Correspondence and Speeches (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1891), 1: 121; Holton, Forced Founders, 10, 32, 37–38.

  19.Randolph C. Downes, Council Fires on the Upper Ohio: A Narrative of Indian Affairs in the Upper Ohio Valley until 1795 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1968), 209; Louise P. Kellogg, ed., Frontier Advance on the Upper Ohio, 1778–1779 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1916), 100.

  20.Colin C. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 202.

  21.Beeman, Patrick Henry, 123.

  22.Wirt, Patrick Henry, 65.

  23.McCants, Patrick Henry, 121–122.

  24.Joy Hakim, A History of US (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 3: 62. Hakim’s dramatic rendering is based on a secondhand account, a conversation with a man over ninety years of age, who allegedly recalled the event fifty-nine years after the fact. Hakim and many others have accepted this account, at face value, as trustworthy and accurate. By 1834, when the conversation was reported, Wirt had successfully established an official “memory” of the speech, which clearly influenced the informant, John Roane. (Tyler, Patrick Henry, 129–133; Hample, “Textual Authenticity,” 301–302.)

  10: The Whites of Their Eyes

  1.Richard Frothingham, History of the Siege of Boston, and of the Battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1903; reprint edition, Da Capo Press, 1970; first published in 1849), 140. Nineteenth-century sources often us
ed “white of their eyes” instead of “whites of their eyes.”

  2.Paul F. Boller Jr. and John George, They Never Said It (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 106; Tom Burnham, Dictionary of Misinformation (New York: Crowell, 1975), 69–70; Lyman C. Draper, King’s Mountain and Its Heroes (Cincinnati: Peter G. Thomson, 1881), 107.

  3.David K. Wilson, The Southern Strategy: Britain’s Conquest of South Carolina and Georgia, 1775–1780 (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2005), 254; James Piecuch, “Massacre or Myth: Banastre Tarleton at the Waxhaws, May 29, 1780,” Southern Campaigns of the American Revolution 1: 2 (October, 2004): http://www.southerncampaign.org/newsletter/v1n2.pdf.

  4.Howard H. Peckham, Toll of Independence: Engagements & Battle Casualties of the American Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 130–134.

  5.Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775–1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 225.

  6.William Moultrie, Memoirs of the American Revolution (New York: David Longworth, 1802), 2: 96–97; quoted in John Buchanan, The Road to Guillford Courthouse: The American Revolution in the Carolinas (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1997), 69.

  7.Joseph Plumb Martin, A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier (New York: Signet, 2001; originally published in 1830), 79–80.

  8.John Chester to Joseph Fish, July 22, 1775, in Frothingham, Siege of Boston, 391.

  9.Peter Brown to his mother, June 25, 1775, in Frothingham, Siege of Boston, 392.

  10.William Prescott to John Adams, August 25, 1775, in Frothingham, Siege of Boston, 395.