Founding Myths

by Ray Raphael

  11.William Tudor to John Adams, June 26, 1775, in Frothingham, Siege of Boston, 396.

  12.Issachar Bates, The Revolutionary War (Old Chatham, NY: Shaker Museum Foundation, 1960; originally published in 1833), np.

  13.Ray Raphael, A People’s History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence (New York: The New Press, 2001), 161.

  14.Bates, The Revolutionary War, np.

  15.“Lieut. Dana tells me he was the first man that fired, and that he did it singly, and with a view to draw the enemy’s fire, and he obtained his end fully, without any damage to our party.” (John Chester to Joseph Fish, July 22, 1775, in Frothingham, Siege of Boston, 390.)

  16.Peter Brown to his mother, June 25, 1775, ibid., 393.

  17.These figures are from the official British returns. Ibid., 389.

  18.Ibid., 382–384.

  19.Ibid., 140–143.

  20.John Marshall, The Life of George Washington (New York: AMS Press, 196; first published 1804–1807), 2: 239.

  21.David Humphreys, An Essay on the Life of the Honorable Major Israel Putnam (Hartford, CT: Hudson and Goodwin, 1788), 103. Putnam, at the time, was almost as renowned as Washington. This was the first biography of an American written by an American.

  22.Mason L. Weems, The Life of George Washington (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1962; reprint of ninth edition, published in 1809), 74–75. Emphasis in original. Weems did not have to invent this story; very likely, it was already part of folkloric tradition. Major General Israel Putnam, the protagonist of this tale, was a legendary hero, one of the most famous men in America. Not only had “Old Put” served with distinction in the French and Indian War, people said, but he had also been shipwrecked near Havana, held prisoner by the French, and nearly burned at the stake by Indians.

  23.Paul Allen, A History of the American Revolution, Comprising all the Principal Events both in the Field and the Cabinet (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1819), I: 259; Charles A. Goodrich, History of the United States of America (Hartford, CT: Barber and Robinson, 1823), 158; Salma Hale, History of the United States, from their First Settlement as Colonies, to the Close of the War with Great Britain in 1815 (New York: Collins and Hannay, 1822), 151; Noah Webster, History of the United States (New Haven, CT: Durric & Peck, 1833); Richard Hildreth, The History of the United States of America (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1880, first published 1849), 3: 83; George Bancroft, History of the United States of America, from the Discovery of the Continent (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1879; first published 1834–1874), 4: 615.

  24.Frothingham, Siege of Boston, 154–164.

  25.Those not wishing to show a preference as to the identity of the commander attributed these words to both the leading candidates. In his 1858 biography of Israel Putnam, George Canning Hill wrote: “Putnam told the men, as he passed hastily along the lines, dusty and perspiring, not to waste their fire, for powder was very scarce. ‘Wait,’ said he, ‘till you see the whites of their eyes.’ ” Not wishing to offend the Prescott fans, he then added: “Prescott gave the same orders to those within the redoubt.” (George Canning Hill, American Biography: General Israel Putnam [Boston: E O. Libby and Co., 1858], 148.)

  26.David Saville Muzzey, The United States of America (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1933), 1:111. Muzzey was the most widely read textbook writer of his, or perhaps any, generation.

  27.John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, American National Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 18: 11–12 and 17: 564–564. The Putnam entry was written by Bruce Daniels, the Prescott entry by William Fowler. In popular histories the confusion continues, but so does the story. Louis Birnbaum, in Red Dawn at Lexington, goes with Prescott: “Men, you are all marksmen; do not any of you fire until you can see the whites of their eyes.” Robert Leckie, in George Washington’s War, writes with equal certainty: “Burly Israel Putnam rode up and down the lines roaring the immortal words, ‘Don’t fire until you see the white of their eyes! Then, fire low.’ ” A.J. Langguth in Patriots and Thomas Fleming in Liberty! also weigh in with Putnam. Benson Bobrick, in Angel in the Whirlwind, hedges. By using the generic term “officers” and writing in the passive voice, he manages to tell the story without favoritism: “Those on the front line were now exhorted by their officers ‘to be cool’ and to reserve their fire until the enemy ‘were near enough for us to see the white of their eyes.’ ” (Contrary to appearances, this is not a direct quotation from a participant, but only a literary device.) Even so, since Bobrick wants to place Putnam at the heart of the action, he has him uttering further commands: “Fire low—take aim at the waistbands—pick off the commanders—aim at the handsome coats.” (Louis Birnbaum, Red Dawn at Lexington [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986], 241; Robert Lieke, George Washington’s War: The Saga of the American Revolution [New York: HarperCollins, 1992], 159; A.J. Langguth, Patriots: The Men Who Started the American Revolution [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988], 281; Fleming, Liberty!, 140; Benson Bobrick, Angel in the Whirlwind: The Triumph of the American Revolution [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997], 141.) Both Langguth and Fleming note that the command had been used in the past.

  28.The entry for Putnam says nothing about it, while that for Prescott states only that the British were “within close range.” Writers during the second half of the twentieth century who stated the distance generally shortened it greatly. Richard Ketchum and Francis Russell, for instance, listed it at fifty feet, or three rods—down considerably from the ten to twelve rods of the Committee of Safety. (Ketchum and Russell, Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill [New York: Harper and Row, 1963], 108.) Even at fifty feet, however, patriots could not have seen the whites of the eyes of the advancing Redcoats.

  11: Patriotic Slaves

  1.For a discussion of Dunmore proclamation, see Ray Raphael, A People’s History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence (New York: The New Press, 2001), 254–261.

  2.For a discussion of Clinton’s offer and the response it triggered, see Raphael, People’s History of the American Revolution, 261–270.

  3.Contemporary estimates placed the “loss” of slaves in South Carolina at 20,000–25,000. See Abbott Hall, Custom House Report, December 31, 1784, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Julian P. Boyd, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), 8: 199; David Ramsay, History of the Revolution in South Carolina (Trenton: Isaac Collins, 1785), 2: 382. These figures were probably exaggerated. According to estimates by patriots after the war, 60,000 slaves fled to the British from three states (Ray Raphael, A People’s History of the American Revolution [New York: The New Pess, 2001], 261–62), but these figures were likely exaggerated to highlight the losses of their masters, who were trying to avoid payment of debts to British merchants by claiming that the British had “stolen” their property. The estimates were also very rough: Jefferson, for instance, recalled that thirty slaves fled from his own plantation, and twenty-seven of these had died of smallpox; by adding a seemingly arbitrary number of zeroes, this led him to conjecture that in Virginia as a whole, 30,000 had fled and 27,000 had died. (Cassandra Pybus, “Thomas Jefferson’s Faulty Math: The Question of Slave Defections in the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 62 [2005], 243–47.) Despite these exaggerations, even the most conservative estimates by modern scholars suggest that around 20,000 slaves fled to the British in search of freedom, while the total number of blacks who served in the Continental army was only about 5,000—and many of these, perhaps most, were freeman, not slaves. (Pybus, “Jefferson’s Faulty Math,” 261; Allan Kulikoff, “Uprooted Peoples: Black Migrants in the Age of the American Revolution, 1790–1820,” in Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, eds., Slavery
and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution [Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983], 143–145.)

  4.W.W. Abbot and Dorothy Twohig, eds., Papers of George Washington (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983), Revolutionary War Series, 2: 125, 354.

  5.George D. Massay, “The Limits of Antislavery Thought in the Revolutionary Lower South: John Laurens and Henry Laurens,” Journal of Southern History 63 (1997): 517.

  6.Rachel N. Klein, Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760–1808 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 107.

  7.Michael A. McDonnell, The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 393.

  8.The average term for blacks who served was actually four and a half years, not the single year implied by this notice. (Robert Ewell Greene, Black Courage, 1775–1783: Documentation of Black Participation in the American Revolution [Washington, DC: Daughters of the American Revolution, 1984], 2, cited in Charles Patrick Neimeyer, America Goes to War: A Social History of the Continental Army [New York: New York University Press, 1996], 82.)

  9.For the names and ages of seventeen people enslaved to Washington who fled in 1781, see Raphael, People’s History of the American Revolution, 262, 361. For additional information and sources concerning these and other enslaved people who left Washington’s plantations, see Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 45–47, 230–231; and Charles Lincoln, ed., Naval Documents of the American Revolution (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1906), 5: 1250–1251. For the number of slaves Washington owned, see Jackson T. Main, “The One Hundred,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 11 (1954). For in-depth investigations into Washington and slavery, see Fritz Hirschfield, George Washington and Slavery: A Documentary Portrayal (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), and Henry Wiencek, An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003).

  10.Benson Lossing, Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution (New York: Harper Brothers, 1851), 2: 779. See also Ramsay, History of the Revolution in South Carolina, 2: 382.

  11.William C. Nell, Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (Boston: Robert F. Wallcut, 1855; Arno Press and New York Times reprint edition, 1968), 7–8. Phillips’s remarks were written as an introduction to an earlier draft of Nell’s work, published as a pamphlet in 1852.

  12.Nell, Colored Patriots, 5–6.

  13.Ibid., 236–237.

  14.The views of committed abolitionists were echoed by George Bancroft, who always gave a Northern slant to his history of the Revolution. Bancroft reported that “more than seven hundred black Americans fought side by side with the white” at Monmouth, and he made a special point of including blacks in his treatment of Bunker Hill: “Nor should history forget to record that, as in the army at Cambridge, so also in this gallant band, the free negroes of the colony had their representatives; for the right of free negroes to bear arms in the public defence was, at that day, as little disputed in New England as their other rights. They took their place not in a separate corps, but in the ranks with the white men; and their names may be read on the pension roles of the country, side by side with those of other soldiers of the revolution.” (George Bancroft, History of the United States of America, from the Discovery of the Continent [Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1879; first published 1834–1874], 6: 142, and 4: 614.) Bancroft probably based his Monmouth numbers on the returns of Alexander Scammell, adjutant general of the Continental Army, for August 24, 1778, which identified 755 black soldiers. (Neimeyer, America Goes to War, 83].) Bancroft’s regional pride was unabashed: while slavery prevailed in the South, the rights of “free negroes” were never questioned in his native New England. But Bancroft failed to mention the next chapter in this saga: within a month of the heroic performance of African American soldiers at Bunker Hill, Horatio Gates, the adjutant general for the rebel forces, prohibited the recruitment of “any stroller, Negro, or vagabond.” (Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press], 15.)

  15.John Fiske, The American Revolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1891), 1: 178.

  16.Edward Eggleston, The Ultimate Solution of the American Negro Problem (Boston: Gorham Press, 1913), 127–128.

  17.Edward Eggleston, A History of the United States and Its People (New York: D. Appleton, 1888) and The New Century History of the United States (New York: American Book Company, 1904).

  18.These are the texts available at the University of California’s Northern Regional Library Facility in Richmond: D.H. Montgomery, The Leading Fact of American History (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1891); D.H. Montgomery, The Student’s American History (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1897); D H. Montgomery, The Beginner’s American History (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1899); Roscoe Lewis Ashley, American History, for Use in Secondary Schools (New York: Macmillan, 1907); David Saville Muzzey, An American History (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1911); Willis Mason West, American History and Government (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1913); Henry Eldridge Bourne and Elbert Jay Benton, A History of the United States (Boston: D C. Heath and Co., 1913); William Backus Guitteau, Our United States: A History (New York: Silver, Burdett and Co., 1919); Reuben Post Halleck, History of Our Country for Higher Grades (New York: American Book Company, 1923); Rolla Tryon and Charles R. Lingley, The American People and Nation (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1927); William A. Hamm, Henry Eldridge Bourne, and Elbert Jay Benton, A Unit History of the United States (Boston: D.C. Heath and Co., 1932); David Saville Muzzey, The United States of America (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1933); David Saville Muzzey, An American History (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1933); David Saville Muzzey, History of the American People (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1934); Harold Underwood Faulkner and Tyler Kepner, America: Its History and People (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1934); Ruth West and Willis Mason West, The Story of Our Country (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1935); James Truslow Adams and Charles Garrett Vannest, The Record of America (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935); Harold Rugg and Louise Krueger, The Building of America (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1936); William A. Hamm, The American People (Boston: D.C. Heath and Co., 1942); George Earl Freeland and James Truslow Adams, America’s Progress in Civilization (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1942); Gertrude Hartman, America: Land of Freedom (Boston: D.C. Heath and Co., 1946); Robert E. Riegel and Helen Haugh, United States of America: A History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953).

  19.The lack of attention given to blacks during the early years of Jim Crow comes as no surprise, but it is astonishing that the silence continued in the subsequent writings of the Progressives. Despite their interest in the social “revolution” fought on the home front, historians such as Carl Becker, Charles and Mary Beard, and John Franklin Jameson paid little attention to the most fundamental class conflict of all: that between enslaved people and their masters. The Beards chronicled the “desperate struggle” in Virginia “between planters on the seaboard and small farmers of the interior, a struggle which involved nothing less than a revolution in the social order of the Old Dominion”—but enslaved people must have sat that revolution out, for they are not included in the tale. The fact that the institution of slavery rigidified in the South ran counter to the Beardses’ thesis that the American Revolution had brought about “the opening of a new humane epoch.” (Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization [New York: Macmillan, 1927] 1: 267, 296.) In a similar vein, Jameson stated that “very substantial progress was made” during the Revolution toward “the removal or amelioration of slavery.” (J. Franklin Jameson, The Ameri
can Revolution Considered as a Social Movement [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940; first published in 1926], 26.) The flight of enslaved people to the British was not included as part of the “amelioration” of slavery or the “new human epoch.” Although the Northern version of the black Revolutionary tale made occasional cameo appearances, the Southern version was entirely left out.

  20.George W. Williams, History of the Negro Race in America, from 1619 to 1880 (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1883; reprint edition, Arno Press, 1968), 326. Between the work of Nell and Williams, one other black historian gained some readership. In 1867 William Wells Brown recapitulated Nell’s work in a book titled The Negro in the American Rebellion: His Heroism and His Fidelity (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1867). Like Nell, Brown ingratiated himself to a white audience by pointing to the patriotic service of blacks; his only major change was to use the term “Negro” instead of “colored.”

  21.Williams, History of Negro Race, 1: 355–359. Although he did include David Ramsay’s claim that 25,000 slaves had fled to the British in South Carolina and Thomas Jefferson’s exaggerated estimate that 30,000 had escaped in Virginia, Williams accepted at face value Jefferson’s version of the story: those who escaped were cruelly mistreated by the British.

  22.Ibid., 1: 384.

  23.Carter G. Woodson, The Negro in Our History (Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1922), 60–61.

  24.Ibid., 71.

  25.W.E.B. Du Bois, The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America (Boston: Stratford Co., 1924; reprint edition, 1975), 82.

  26.John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of American Negroes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947), 132–134.

  27.Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961).

  28.Gary Nash, personal communication, November 2003. For the importance of Quarles’s book, see Nash’s introduction to the 1996 reprint, published by University of North Carolina Press.