Historical Image of the Day

William Denning, leading New York City politician and revolutionary in the 1770s

Grading America's Sacred Cow

I'm grading AP US History exams this week. What was I thinking? Anyway, the question I am grading is on the American Revolution. It's a standard question about major events between 1763 and 1776.

I've talked about my annoyance at how we think about the Revolution before. We still see this event in black and white, with the British as actual bad guys and the Founding Fathers as saints. Even progressives, people who are usually open to thinking in new ways about the past, ar e loathe to touch this question. In fact, many times, I've seen people get real touchy when you suggest the Revolution was a lot more complicated than it is usually made out to be.

Obviously, high school teachers are still teaching this subject in a black and white manner. With very few exceptions, students buy whole hog into the myths of the Revolution. According to them, the British were completely wrong, the Founders were heroes, the Tories don't even exist, and in the end, the greatest country the world has ever seen began.

I don't want to again revisit my arguments that maybe winning the Revolution wasn't as black and white as it seems. You can read about it here.

But I am very interested in how you can feel the anti-tax sentiment pour out of the students. Has our revolutionary mythology helped foster some of our greatest problems today? I wonder if those familiar with the revenue problems of California would think so.

Things They Don't Teach in Ohio History Classes

My father is originally from the Ohio River Valley, not too far from Wheeling (WV) on the Ohio side of the River, and some of his family has never left that area. When visiting, we often had to pass through Steubenville, Ohio (the birthplace of Dean Martin of all people, and the city doesn't fail to announce this with signs; strangely, there are no signs boasting Steubenville's status as also being "home to Wu-Tang Clan affiliates 4th Disciple, Beretta 9, and ShoGun Assason"). As you go through Steubenville, along the river, you see the remains/recreation of Fort Steuben, which was built in 1786 as a major outpost for surveying the Northwest Territory, and which was named after Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, a Prussian officer who came to the rebellious American colonies in 1777 and trained the Americans in warfare. Steuben was central to the war efforts, as his training left the ill-equipped American colonists much less ill-equipped. Steuben even ended up writing the Revolutionary War Drill Manual, which was the major training guide for the military until the War of 1812, thereby occupying a fairly important piece of American history. All of this is common knowledge to anybody who has to spend more than 10 minutes in Steubenville.

However, what I never knew until watching the final few seconds of the interview with Nathaniel Frank on the Daily Show last night, was that Steuben very well may have been gay (this also appears in American National Biography Online, but you need university access to log in). Yes - in spite of the don't ask/don't tell policy being in place, and the anti-gay policies of the military for decades, the author of America's first military training manual, which would be essential to early military training in America, the man without whose training the colonists very well may have never beaten the British, was gay, a fact that, as Stewart alludes at the end of the above interview, renders current policy even more surreal.

Colony to Superpower: Proclamation of 1763 and Western Settlement

In our discussion of From Colony to Superpower, Rob asks this:

I wish Erik would expand on this point:

Also, I think westward expansion as a real reason for Revolution has probably been overhyped since 1776.

It's not that I disagree; I'm just curious about the nature of the argument. Is Erik suggesting that the British would (eventually) have been just as comfortable with expansion as the colonists? This would seem plausible, although it's fair to say that the gains from expansion (territory and property) would have been distributed much differently under a different relationship between the colonies and the metropol. That difference in distribution might well have produced a civil war or revolution by itself.

The basic answer to Rob's question is I think, yes. The British were not uncomfortable with their colonists expanding their territory. Again, we are getting into counterfactuals here and so we can't know. But the British were never opposed to their colonists expanding their territory until they couldn't pay for the wars anymore. Now the question for the future was this--would the increasingly centralizing British empire continued trying to limit colonial expansion in order to push a more imperialist economic agenda?

I don't think so.

The settlement of Australia and New Zealand lends to me to believe that the British were happy to continue the expansion of settlement in North America. My sense is that the distribution of land would not have been wildly different either, also based upon the history of Australia and New Zealand. While I am certainly not an expert on the histories of these two nations, although of course I am aware of the prison colony aspect of Australia. But even if, let's say, Britain decides to use Alabama as a prison colony, this doesn't significantly alter the long-term settlement patterns of immigrants.

Now of course things would have been different. Would the British cracked down on German immigrants settling the interior of Pennsylvania? Would the American colonies become a dumping ground for Irish criminals? Who knows.

But I do want to reiterate that I think the role of westward expansion is overrated in the leadup to the Revolution. We have this jolt of anger in 1763. And there is no question that Americans moved across the mountains as soon as they could, starting conflicts with the Native Americans and forcing the British to fight in the West as well. But after 1763, none of the major areas of conflict revolve around westward migration. I just don't see strong enough evidence to argue that western issues were really central to the Revolution.

To conclude, I think that the West could have played a major role in future colonist-empire conflicts, although I think both sides might have worked something out. But I remain unconvinced that the West is really what we need to be looking at when we talk about the beginnings of the Revolution.

Historical Image of the Day

Bernard Romans engraving of the Battle of Charlestown, MA, June 17, 1775.

Historical Image of the Day

The "Philadelphia," a gunboat from the American Revolution. Recovered from Lake Champlain, now in the Smithsonian Museum of American History. I've always thought this is the coolest single item in that museum

Historical Image of the Day

Based on a couple requests for more context for these photos, I am at least occasionally going to write an explanatory sentence or two.

George Mason (1725-92). Writer of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, advocate for the Bill of Rights, general important figure of the American Revolution.

Also, at least according to Wikipedia, Mason is Paris Hilton's great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather. He'd probably regret pushing for such a democratic government if he knew this.

Historical Image of the Day

Benedict Arnold

Historical Image of the Day

Advertisement for runaway slave, New York City, 1778

Was the American Revolution Bad for America?

I have been thinking about some of the implications of Michael Moore's Sicko. Specifically, why is the United States the only nation in the developed world without some sort of equitable, government-funded health care?

I am just wondering if we can look back to the American Revolution for some answers. To be exact, did the American Revolution undermine the modern United States' willingness to engage in the sort of social democracies we see throughout Europe, Canada, and increasingly other nations as well?

I don't have a solid answer for this. But I'm going to play a little counterfactual game to help think about these issues.

Let's say the American Revolution fails. What happens?

We are Canada.

Is that so bad? I don't think so.

Sure, Britain would have executed Jefferson, Washington, and the gang. That would have been terrible. But what happens after that?

First, the Declaration of Independence is still around. That wasn't going away. If those words have inspired movements around the world, they probably still would have.

Second, Britain would have solved the U.S.' slavery problem. Great Britain abolished slavery in 1833. Slavery was never as profitable in the US as it was in the Caribbean. So the US experience likely would not have affected British opinion. In addition, if we assume that the US becomes a free nation in 1867, the same year as Canada, that gives us 34 years to figure out our race relations. Do we still have racial problems? Of course. But they would be different, at the very least.

Third is the issue of westward expansion. Frontier issues played a major role in the Revolution, one that is underplayed in traditional narratives. The Proclamation of 1763, not allowing settlers access to lands west of the Appalachian Mountains, really made colonists angry. We wanted to kill Indians and steal their lands. That may sound too blunt, but it is most certainly true. As Richard White has shown in The Middle Ground, the worst thing that happened to the Indians of the Ohio Valley was the American victory in the Revolution. The British didn't care about native rights of course. But they didn't want to pay for frontier wars. With the British still in charge, perhaps you see a situation between Native Americans and whites similar to that in Canada. It's still bad. But it's not as bad. It's probably not genocide.

Plus, we probably would not have Texas today. The American Southwest would quite possibly still be part of Mexico. Maybe when the Latin American nations throw off Spain, the British go in and take a bunch of Mexico. Quite a reasonable hypothesis. But in any case, you don't see a bunch of pro-slavery expansionists go into Texas to bring slavery there. You don't see a war started to protect that slavery. And most certainly, Texas is not TEXAS, in the way it is today. It's hard to argue that Texas is good for the nation.

I think more generally, what you would have seen with a US that remains part of Britain until the 1860s is a maturing of society. A growing industrial base, slowly evolving set of political rights, increased education and wealth--all of this would have made for a more stable nation than what we saw in the 1780s. As Gordon Wood has shown in Revolutionary Characters, among other writings, the Revolution got away from the Founding Fathers. We might think of this as good, as those men were elitists who felt uncomfortable with many of the pioneering aspects of American democracy as it developed in the early 19th century. But with that democracy also came a lot of bad things--the overwhelming power of money over politics, unbridled westward expansion, anti-intellectualism, the popular killing of Indians, the increasing entrenchment of slavery, seemingly endless waves of evangelicalism, etc., etc.

It's at least possible that the pushing up of the average money-grubbing white male to the top of the political process at a very early age has helped create a society focused on the individual over the group, on personal wealth over social wealth, on money over education, on white over black.

Finally, we wouldn't be basing our whole political system in the present on trying to interpret (or misinterpret) what a bunch of rich white men thought over 200 years ago. We wouldn't be trying to fit everything we do into the Constitution. We would be focusing on governing for the present, not the past.

No doubt, you can poke holes in my argument. But I think it's at least worth considering whether the American Revolution was really a good thing for the United States. It's a counterfactual, presentist argument, but one that is at least worth mulling over for awhile. And if you don't like my argument, what better answers are there for why the United States is so different from the rest of the western world when it comes to creating a decent society for all citizens?