Founding Myths Read online

  Ray Raphael has taught at a one-room public high school, Humboldt State University, and College of the Redwoods. His seventeen books include A People’s History of the American Revolution, The First American Revolution, Founders, and Constitutional Myths (all available from The New Press). Currently a senior research fellow at Humboldt State University, he lives in northern California.

  ALSO BY RAY RAPHAEL

  Constitutional Myths: What We Get Wrong and How to Get It Right

  Mr. President: How and Why the Founders Created a Chief Executive

  Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of the Nation (co-edited with Alfred F. Young and Gary B. Nash)

  The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Founding Fathers and the Birth of Our Nation

  Founders: The People Who Brought You a Nation

  The First American Revolution: Before Lexington and Concord

  A People’s History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

  © 2014, 2004 by Ray Raphael

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to reproduce selections from this book should be mailed to: Permissions Department, The New Press, 120 Wall Street, 31st floor, New York, NY 10005.

  Originally published in hardcover by The New Press, New York, 2004

  This revised edition published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2014

  Distributed by Perseus Distribution

  CIP data available

  ISBN 978-1-59558-974-3 (e-book)

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  Composition by dix!

  This book was set in Fournier MT

  10987654321

  In memory of Al Young and Pauline Maier

  “Who shall write the history of the American Revolution?

  Who can write it? Who will ever be able to write it?”

  —John Adams to Thomas McKean,

  July 30, 1815

  CONTENTS

  Introduction: Inventing a Past

  Heroes and Heroines

  1.Paul Revere’s Ride

  2.Sam Adams’s Mob

  3.Molly Pitcher’s Cannon

  David and Goliath

  4.The Shot Heard ’Round the World

  5.The Winter at Valley Forge

  Wise Men

  6.Jefferson’s Declaration

  7.An Assembly of Demigods

  8.American Aristocracy

  Doing Battle

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

  10.The Whites of Their Eyes

  Good v. Evil

  11.Patriotic Slaves

  12.Brutal British

  Happy Endings

  13.The Final Battle: Yorktown

  14.March of the American People

  15.Storybook Nation

  Conclusion: Why We Tell Tall Tales

  Afterword: Which Myths Persist, and Why

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Photo Credits

  Index

  FOUNDING MYTHS

  “Let the world admire our patriots and heroes.”

  Washington Crossing the Delaware.

  Engraving based on painting by Emanuel Leutze, 1851.

  INTRODUCTION: INVENTING A PAST

  When settlers from across the Atlantic arrived on the east coast of North America, they felt they were on uncharted territory. From the Old World they imported the traditions that defined them as a people, since the New World, which they treated as a blank slate, appeared in their perspective to have no history of its own.

  Slowly, over more than a century and a half, colonists developed local, homegrown histories. These remained separate and distinct until suddenly, with one cataclysmic event, they merged. The Revolutionary War provided Americans with shared stories of a common past. This past, ever since, has served the interests of nation building. For more than two centuries, the oft-repeated story of how the United States achieved its independence has bound Americans together.

  All nations like to celebrate their origins, but the birth of our nation makes a particularly compelling story. The United States has a clearly defined “founding,” the work of a single generation. Most nations are not so fortunate. The story of Britain’s founding must cover the Norman invasion (1066), the Magna Carta (1215), the Glorious Revolution (1688), and the Act of Union (1707). China’s founding includes the rise of ancient dynasties, the Nationalist Revolution in 1911, and the Communist Revolution in 1949—too much to tell in a cohesive story. Mexico has only two founding moments, independence in 1821 and revolution in the early twentieth century, but these were separated by ninety years. Canada eased into nationhood so gracefully that it hardly has a story to tell.1

  Our story, by contrast, is simple yet grand. Its plotline is easy to follow: American colonists resisted British oppression, fought a war, achieved independence, and established their own government. Within this straightforward structure we can embellish as we please, but the storyline itself is clean and efficient. It gets the job done. It establishes a separate identity for the American people.

  How we choose to tell this story helps define our nation. Daily, politicians invoke “our founders” in support of some cause totally foreign to the American experience of the late eighteenth century. They place the past—more precisely, a past they imagine—in service of a political present.

  Stories of the American Revolution were first communicated by word of mouth, and these folkloric renditions, infinitely malleable, provided fertile grounds for the invention of history. Before the Revolution, angry and animated colonists gathered in taverns and meetinghouses to rail against acts of Parliament; after the fighting was done, this same crew downed pint after pint of hard cider while exchanging old war stories. For decades, men and women of the early republic told and retold what had happened, augmenting and enriching their skeletal memories of actual events, removing what was too painful to recall (no shortage there) while embellishing what could be seen as heroic (no shortage there either). At funerals or Fourth of July celebrations, orators used tales of the Revolution as grist for their rhetoric. While audiences applauded and critics ranked their performances, these civic preachers competed in the art and sport of patriotic expression. This vibrant oral tradition helped produce a history that was detailed but unfettered. Divested of any need for documentation, it went freely wherever it wanted.

  The visual arts, like the oral tradition, gave the past a place in the present. During and after the Revolution, engravings and lithographs depicted the major events to popular audiences. More pliable than photography, these artistic forms allowed for leeway in interpretation. In the early nineteenth century, grandiose Romantic paintings offered indelible images of battles and key political proceedings. Subsequent generations, viewing reproductions in popular histories and textbooks, used these images to help shape a collective “memory” of the Revolution. Set to canvas long after the war had ended, they became national icons. Today, the two most dominant visual reflections of the American Revolution are John Trumbull’s 1818 painting Declaration of Independence and Emanue
l Leutze’s 1851 masterpiece Washington Crossing the Delaware—even though there was no ceremonial signing of the Declaration on July 4, 1776, the date mistakenly applied to Trumbull’s painting when it was hung in the Capitol Rotunda, and the flag displayed prominently in Washington’s boat had not yet been created.2

  Oral tradition and artistic imagination filled in the blanks left by incomplete and selective documentation. Although a handful of exceptionally literate men bequeathed volume after volume of letters, diaries, and memoirs, these writings emanated from a very small segment of the population, unrepresentative of the whole. Many of these first-person accounts were set to paper decades after the fact. Because of skewed sampling, personal bias, and the effects of time on memory, they cannot always be accepted at face value.

  Selective written sources, rich but loose oral and visual traditions, and the intrusion of politics and ideology—these have presented open invitations to the historical imagination. Creatively, if not accurately, we have fashioned a past we would like to have had.

  Fiction parted from fact at the very beginning. Shortly after the Revolutionary War, Charles Thomson, secretary of the Continental Congress, embarked on writing a history of the conflict. Privy to insider information, Thomson had much to reveal—but then, surprisingly, he gave the history up. “I shall not undeceive future generations,” he later explained. “I could not tell the truth without giving great offense. Let the world admire our patriots and heroes.”3

  Since people like Mr. Thomson chose not to tell the truth, what might they tell instead? In 1790 Noah Webster provided an answer: “Every child in America,” said the dean of the Anglo-American language, “as soon as he opens his lips . . . should rehearse the history of his country; he should lisp the praise of Liberty and of those illustrious heroes and statesmen who have wrought a revolution in his favor.”4

  So the romance began. Starting in the decades following the Revolution and continuing through much of the nineteenth century, writers and orators transformed a bloody and protracted war into glamorous tales conjured from mere shreds of evidence. We still tell these classics today—Paul Revere’s ride, “Give me liberty or give me death,” the shot heard ’round the world—and we assume they are true representations of actual occurrences. Mere frequency of repetition appears to confirm their authenticity.

  Our confidence is misplaced. In fact, most of the stories were created up to one hundred years after the events they supposedly depict. Paul Revere was known only in local circles until 1861, when Henry Wadsworth Longfellow made him immortal by distorting every detail of his now-famous ride. Patrick Henry’s “liberty or death” speech first appeared in print, under mysterious circumstances, in 1817, forty-two years after he supposedly uttered those words. The “shot heard ’round the world” did not become known by that name until 1836, sixty-one years after it was fired.

  The list goes on. Samuel Adams, our most beloved rabble-rouser, lay low through the first half of the nineteenth century, only to be revived as the mastermind of the Revolution three-quarters of a century after the fact. Thomas Jefferson was not widely seen as the architect of American “equality” until Abraham Lincoln assigned him that role, four score and seven years later. The winter at Valley Forge remained uncelebrated for thirty years. Molly Pitcher, the Revolutionary heroine whose picture adorns many elementary and middle-school textbooks today, is a complete fabrication. Her legend did not settle firmly on a specific, historic individual until the nation’s centennial celebration in 1876.

  These stories, invented long ago, persist in our textbooks and popular histories despite advances in recent scholarship that disprove their authenticity. One popular schoolbook includes all but two of the tales exposed in this book, and several of the stories, still taken as gospel, are featured in all modern texts.5

  Why do we cling to these yarns? There are three reasons, thoroughly intertwined: they give us a collective identity, they make good stories, and we think they are patriotic.

  We like to hear stories of our nation’s beginnings because they help define us as a people. Americans have always used the word “we,” highlighting a shared sense of the past. Likewise, this book uses the first person plural when referring to commonly held beliefs. This usage is more than just a linguistic convenience—it pinpoints actual cognitive habits. We are history’s protagonists. Few Americans read about the Revolutionary War or World War II without identifying with our side. George Washington, we are told in myriad ways, is the father of our country, whether our forebears came from England, Poland, or Vietnam.6

  Like rumors, the tales are too good not to be told. They are carefully crafted to fit a time-tested mold. Successful stories feature heroes or heroines, clear plotlines, and happy endings. Good does battle against evil, David beats Goliath, and wise men prevail over fools. Stories of our nation’s founding mesh well with these narrative forms. American revolutionaries, they say, were better and wiser than decadent Europeans. Outnumbered colonists overcame a Goliath, the mightiest empire on earth. Good prevailed over evil, and the war ended happily with the birth of the United States. Even if they don’t tell true history, these imaginings work as stories. Much of what we think of as “history” is driven not by facts but by these narrative preferences.

  This imagined past, anointed as “patriotic,” paints a flattering self-portrait of our nation. We pose before the mirror in our finest attire. By gazing upon the Revolution’s gallant heroes, we celebrate what we think it means to be an American. We make our country perfect—if not now, at least in the mythic past—and through the comforting thought of an ideal America, we fix our bearings. We feel more secure in our confused and changing world if we can draw upon an honored tradition.

  But is this really “patriotism”? Only from a narrow and outdated perspective can we see it that way. Our nation was a collaborative creation, the work of hundreds of thousands of dedicated patriots—yet we exclude most of these people from history by repeating the traditional tales. Worse yet, we distort the very nature of their monumental project. The United States was founded not by isolated acts of individual heroism but by the concerted revolutionary activities of people who had learned the power of working together. This rich and very democratic heritage remains untapped precisely because its story is too big, not too small. It transcends the artificial constraints of traditional storytelling. Its protagonists are too many, and too real, to be contained within simple morality tales. This sprawling saga needs to be told—but our founding myths, neat and tidy, have concealed it from view.7

  Traditional stories of national creation reflect the romantic individualism of the nineteenth century, and they sell our country short. They are strangely out of sync with both the communitarian ideals of Revolutionary America and the democratic values of today. “Government has now devolved upon the people,” wrote one disgruntled Tory in 1774, even before war broke out, “and they seem to be for using it.” Yes, indeed. That’s a story we do not have to conjure, and what an epic it is.8

  HEROES AND HEROINES

  “The fate of a nation was riding that night.”

  Paul Revere’s Ride. Drawing by Charles G. Bush,

  Harper’s Weekly, June 29, 1867.

  1

  PAUL REVERE’S RIDE

  On April 5, 1860, while walking past Boston’s Old North Church, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow heard a folkloric rendition of Paul Revere’s midnight ride from a friend, George Sumner. The story stirred him, and the next day he began setting thoughts to paper.1 With the United States on the verge of splitting apart, Longfellow, a unionist, was inspired by the dramatic opening to the American Revolution, when “the fate of the nation” (as he would soon write) seemed to hinge on a single courageous act. For the noted poet,
Revere was a timely hero: a lonely rider who issued a wake-up call. If Revere had roused the nation once, perhaps he could do it again, this time riding the rhythmic beat of Longfellow’s verse:

  So through the night rode Paul Revere;

  And so through the night went his cry of alarm

  To every Middlesex village and farm,

  A cry of defiance, and not of fear,

  A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,

  And a word that shall echo forevermore!

  For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,

  Through all our history, to the last,

  In the hour of darkness and peril and need,

  The people will waken and listen to hear

  The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,

  And the midnight message of Paul Revere.2

  In close replication of Revere’s own effort, Longfellow passed word of the ride to every household on America’s highways and byways, issuing his alarm, line by line, as he distorted every detail of the actual deed. In the process, he transformed a local favorite into a national legend.

  Longfellow himself made history in two ways: he conjured events that never happened, and he established a new patriotic ritual. For a century to follow, nearly every schoolchild in the United States would hear or recite “Paul Revere’s Ride.” In their history texts, students read pared-down prose renditions of Longfellow’s tale, the meter gone but distortions still intact. Even today, one line remains in our popular lexicon, known to those who have never read or heard the entire piece: “One, if by land, and two, if by sea.” These words, all by themselves, call forth the entire story, and Paul Revere’s ride remains the best-known heroic exploit of the American Revolution.