Remembering the Revolution

Memory, History, and Nation Making from Independence to the Civil War

Michael A. McDonnell, Clare Corbould, Frances M. Clarke, W. Brundage, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Michael A. McDonnell, Clare Corbould, Frances M. Clarke, W. Brundage, W. Fitzhugh Brundage

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781625340337, 9781625340320
• eBook ISBN: 9781613763315
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In today's United States, the legacy of the American Revolution looms large. From presidential speeches to bestselling biographies, from conservative politics to school pageants, everybody knows something about the Revolution. Yet what was a messy, protracted, divisive, and destructive war has calcified into a glorified founding moment of the American nation. Disparate events with equally diverse participants have been reduced to a few key scenes and characters, presided over by well-meaning and wise old men.

Recollections of the Revolution did not always take today's form. In this lively collection of essays, historians and literary scholars consider how the first three generations of American citizens interpreted their nation's origins. The volume introduces readers to a host of individuals and groups both well known and obscure, from Molly Pitcher and "forgotten father" John Dickinson to African American Baptists in Georgia and antebellum pacifists. They show how the memory of the Revolution became politicized early in the nation's history, as different interests sought to harness its meaning for their own ends. No single faction succeeded, and at the outbreak of the Civil War the American people remained divided over how to remember the Revolution.

Part I

The Revolutionary Generation Remembers

War and Nationhood

Founding Myths and Historical Realities

Michael A. McDonnell

In his much-anticipated inaugural address in January 2009, President Barack H. Obama invoked the country’s founding moment—the American Revolution—no fewer than four separate times in charting a proposed path through the difficult years to come. Concluding with a call to action, Obama recalled a nation-defining moment during the Revolutionary War: “In the year of America’s birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river,” he began. “The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people: ‘Let it be told to the future world . . . that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive . . . that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet . . . it.’ ” “America,” Obama concluded, “in the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words.”¹

In conjuring a memory of the Revolution as a nation-building event, Obama was following a well-worn path. Only four years previously, George W. Bush invoked the Revolution in his inaugural address to shore up support for the so-called War on Terror.² Obama and Bush knew what buttons to push. Presidents, of course, try to manipulate the emotions of their listeners by appealing to what they imagine their audiences find compelling. And surveys consistently reveal that if Americans remember anything about their past, it is usually something about the American Revolution. The era of the American Revolution has come to provide a rich seam of memorable events that can be mined to invoke, impart, and inspire. Whether it be iconic images or memorable stories of Valley Forge, the Boston Tea Party, the Founding Fathers, Washington’s tearful Farewell Address, or knowledge of the “sacred” texts that lie enshrined under bombproof glass in a vault at the National Archives—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights—most Americans do indeed seem to remember something about their Revolution.³

Central to these memories is an idea of the Revolutionary War as a nation-building event—perhaps the nation-building event. Obama was not the first to link the War for Independence with the creation of a new nation. The most memorable images and tales of the war—including stories, engravings, paintings, legends, myths, and now Hollywood movies—all connect the long and arduous conflict between the thirteen original colonies and Britain with the founding, or birth, of a new nation. And Americans today most often recall tales of a Revolutionary War that privilege unity over division, simple stories of the triumph of good over evil, and memories of a hard-fought victory that ended with the overthrow of a tyrannical monarchy and its replacement with a republican government. As the Valley Forge National Historic Park website notes, sites such as theirs “are tangible links to one of the most defining events in our nation’s history.” Few places “evoke the spirit of patriotism and independence, represent individual and collective sacrifice, or demonstrate the resolve, tenacity and determination of the people of the United States to be free as does Valley Forge.”⁴

This powerful collective memory of the Revolutionary War as a nation-building event has been reinforced by historical accounts. Most American history textbooks, for example, make this link clear. George Brown Tindall and David Emory Shi in America: A Narrative History begin the second part of their textbook, titled “Building a Nation,” with the Revolutionary War. The conflict, they argue, “not only secured American independence” but “generated a new sense of nationalism.”⁵ For Paul Boyer and his colleagues in The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People, the war was the seminal event in the birth of the nation. They begin their section on “The Forge of Nationhood, 1776–1788” with a chapter on the conflict, asserting that well-documented friendships like the one that developed between Virginian George Washington and Henry Knox from Massachusetts became equally commonplace among ordinary men and women during the war. Localism, which was “well entrenched at the start of the war,” was overcome as “the Revolution gave northerners and southerners their first real chance to learn what they had in common, and they soon developed mutual admiration.” The Enduring Vision is most sanguine about the national legacy of the War for Independence: “In July 1776 the thirteen colonies had out of desperation declared independence and established a new nation. But only as a result of the collective hardships experienced during eight years of terrible fighting did the inhabitants of the thirteen states cease to see themselves simply as military allies and begin to accept each other as fellow citizens.”⁶

This collective memory of the Revolutionary War as a nation-building event stands in marked contrast to the historical realities of the War for Independence. Lasting eight years, the war was one of the longest and bloodiest wars in America’s history. The per capita equivalent of the number of casualties in the Revolution would today mean the death of perhaps as many as three million Americans. Yet it was not such an extended and bloody war simply because the might of the British armed forces was brought to bear on the hapless colonists. As historians have been rediscovering of late, the Revolution went on so long because of the many divisions among colonists themselves over whether to fight, what to fight for, and who would do the fighting. The War for Independence was by any measure the first American Civil War.⁷

Though historians have searched hard for signs of unity, the origins of a common identity, and the roots of American nationalism amid the chaos of this conflict, they have met with little success.⁸ Indeed, everywhere they have looked closely they have instead found divisions, conflicts, and sentiments that would militate against the creation of a new national identity during the war. Such tensions often lay along older colonial fault lines between and within the diverse colonies; others emerged under the pressure of war.⁹ Leaving aside the most obvious internal conflicts between slave owners and their workers, and between Native Americans and the colonists, these tensions can be roughly grouped into four categories: a persistent localism, animosity between the colonies and new states, antipathy toward new Continental officials, and a lack of attachment more generally to the patriot cause. Though a full examination of these conflicts is beyond the scope of this chapter, a brief review of each should be sufficient to raise questions about the link between the War for Independence and the creation of a nation. In turn, the chapter concludes by raising a new question: if the roots of a new national identity cannot be found in the War for Independence, where should we start looking?¹⁰

In July 1776 thirteen colonies came together to declare independence. But it was largely a union of self-defense. There was, of course, no nation in 1775 when the conflict began, and older colonial attachments remained preeminent. New citizens who supported independence fought for “country”—and most people’s sense of their country extended no farther than the boundaries of their own local communities, or at best their own state. While many could see a necessity for common defense and unity of purpose, most ordinary Americans were unwilling to sacrifice their own, more local, common defense for some vague idea of a greater good or larger nation. Even in the heat of the most critical moment, in May 1775, volunteers in Williamsburg, Virginia, pledged themselves to “march, on the smallest warning, to any part of the continent, where the general cause of American liberty may demand their attendance,” but only if, they added, “they do not by such step leave their own country in a defenseless state.”¹¹ Their counterparts in Botetourt County in western Virginia were not even that sure, for it was rumored at the same time that the Independent Company of Volunteers in that county had registered their protest “about going out of the Colony” at all.¹²

Such local feelings grew rather than diminished through the war. Thousands of white Virginians refused to take a loyalty oath when it became mandatory in the spring of 1777, because they believed they would then “be compelled to go to the northward whenever the Governor pleased to order them.” The following year, an entire county secretly circulated a “Subscripsion” binding themselves “to stand by each other and oppose any attempt that may be made to march them out of this State.”¹³ Militia in Delaware disrupted elections in 1777 because they believed if the Whigs got into the Assembly, they would be “drafted and obliged to go to camp” northward. Later in the war, and in the face of military reverses in the South, militia rarely rallied to the Continental cause. When the British threatened Charleston, South Carolina, in the spring of 1780, the governor of Virginia ordered the militia there to go southward. Yet many rebelled at the thought of leaving home for so long (three months) to risk their lives in another state. The orders to march gave “very great & general discontent” and many who were ordered to march “staid behind.” In several counties there were violent mutinies.¹⁴

There were important reasons why militia wanted to stay local. Pennsylvania farmers who had joined the army, for example, were incensed to find themselves attached to Washington’s army in the east after they had been ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction The Revolution in American Life from 1776 to the Civil War
• Part I The Revolutionary Generation Remembers
• Part II Transmitting Memories
• Part III Dividing Memories
• Notes on Contributors
• Index