A tale of two American revolutions

This post is a simplistic exercise in historiography -- the study of how history describes the past. That there should be such a discipline eludes our right wing nincompoops who think history is one fixed, true story (and often one inerrant Bible) and should be taught as such. That's baloney.

For the purpose of thinking about the varieties of how historical narratives can be told, I'm looking at two huge, relatively recent, tomes about the American revolution.

Historian Gordon Wood's The Radicalism of the American Revolution came out in 1993 and received a Pulitzer prize. Wood's central insight is that the uprising of the colonists amounted to escape from an ancient monarchical hierarchy whose order was as natural as breathing to men of the time.

... mid-eighteenth-century colonial society was in many ways still traditional. ... The household, the society, and the state -- public and private spheres -- scarcely seemed separable. Authority and liberty flowed, not as today from the political organization of society, but from the structure of its personal relationships. ... Powerful social and economic developments were stretching, fraying, and forcing apart older personal bonds holding people together, and people everywhere were hard pressed to explain what was happening. New ideas, new values, were emerging in the English-speaking world, but the past was tenacious. 

... The hierarchy of a monarchical society was part of the natural order of things, part of the great chain of existence that ordered the entire universe ... Ideally, people were expected to find and attend to "the proper Business" of their particular place with the social order... "God hath in great wisdom," said the Reverend Thomas Craddock of Maryland at mid-century, "given varieties of ability to men, suitable to the several stations in life, for which he hath design'd them, that everyone keeping his station, and applying his respective abilities to his own work, all might receive advantage."

Wood's contention is that for various reasons which he describes at length, this was the social order that the American rebellion overturned. The book is the working out of just what drove many colonists to try to change the order of their own known universe and some of the implications for the new polity.

That's what you get if you read Woods and in my opinion he does the job magnificently with both nuance and depth. It's hard for us to imagine that the colonists' project -- to delegitimize a historic hierarchy to which we have trouble giving even momentary mental deference -- might have been a real revolution. But he's got a case.

What you don't get from Woods is what any of this meant to the despoiled Native population; to enslaved laborers, mostly African; to women; or even much to enterprising colonists who took off to settle the far side of the Appalachian mountains, leaving the staid, almost-British, thirteen original colonies behind. That's what you get from Pulitzer prize winning historian Alan Taylor.

American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804 was published in 2016. I think it's fair to say that his project is to blast away the aura of romance and whiff of hagiography which has accreted around the U.S. founding.

... the struggle was our first civil war, rife with divisions, violence and destruction. The fiends of fire and darkness were busy during the revolution. 

... Only by the exceptionally destructive standards of other revolutions was the American more restrained. During the Revolutionary War, Americans killed one another over politics and massacred Indians, who returned the bloody favors. Patriots also kept one-fifth of Americans enslaved, and thousands of those slave escaped to help the British oppose the Revolution. After the war, 60,000 dispossessed Loyalists became refugees. The dislocated proportion of the American population exceeded that of the French in their revolution. The American revolutionary turmoil also inflicted an economic decline that lasted for fifteen years in a crisis unmatched until the Great Depression of the 1930s. During the revolution, Americans suffered more upheaval than any other American generation save that which experienced the Civil War of 1861 to 1865.

This awful parade of truths shape Taylor's narrative. It's full of land grabs, violence, greed, false promises, and cupidity -- all of which shaped the polity of the nation we became. There are lots of villains and very few heroes. This too is a convincing, magnificent narrative.

And there we are. Can both these stories be "true"? Sure they can be. How to teach both in a respectful, honest way is the terrible burden of responsible teachers of United States history.

• • •

Just for fun, I thought I'd share the two historians' contrasting treatment of my distant collateral forebear Samuel Adams (and no, there's no evidence he was ever a brewer, FWIW). This Adams, a cousin of the better known future president John Adams (also strictly collateral), was a Boston rabble-rouser who, from 1760 onward, incited the working masses to contest the power of the English king to tax colonists.

For Wood, the periodic eruptions of mob violence that Adams had a hand in were just a colonial enactment of British "Pope's Day" (Guy Fawkes) bacchanalia. Sure, some property might be destroyed but ...

... they indicated, said Samuel Adams, that the 'wheels of government' were 'somewhere clogged' ...

In Woods' view, Samuel Adams, for all his rabble rousing, was a figure of "classical republican virtue" on the pre-empire Roman model.

Adams was a Harvard-educated gentleman who literally devoted himself to the public. He was without interests or even private passions. "It would be the glory of this Age," he said, "to find Men having no ruling Passion but the Love of their Country." He had neither personal ambition nor the desire for wealth. In fact, he prided himself on being a "poor Man," and he lived in conspicuous poverty. So unconcerned was he with his personal appearance that his colleagues had to outfit him properly for his mission in 1774 to the Continental Congress. He did not even care about fame. He thought his letters were trifles and refused to keep copies of them. He despised everything that had to do with genealogy, and refused to have anything to do with patronage in any form, even among his own family. He left his son to make his own way in the world, saying that no one could expect any "advantage in point of Promotion from his Connections with men." No one took republican values as seriously as Adams did.

Sounds like a stand up guy, of a sort.

Taylor is not so sure. His Adams is a recognizable type of political figure.

... Adams possessed only moderate means but a fierce focus on his political goals. ... Adams was stocky and shabbily dressed. "I glory in being what the world calls a poor Man," Adams wrote. Secretive, patient, and cautious, he cultivated popularity as the basis for power. Instead of putting on airs, Adams carefully learned the names and views of shipwrights and other artisans. A leader in Boston's town meeting, Adams secured appointment as a local tax collector, where he became more popular by neglecting to collect from his neediest supporters. A political rival characterized Adams as "by no means remarkable for brilliant abilities," but "equal to most men in popular intrigue, and the management of a faction. He eats little, drinks little, sleeps little, thinks much, and is most decisive and indefatigable in pursuit of his objectives." Adams aptly described his political strategy as to "keep the attention of his fellow citizens awake to their grievances; and not to suffer them to be at rest, till the causes of their complaints are removed."

Taylor's Adams seems to have been a slightly disreputable political consultant. Wood's is more like a self-effacing patriot. In our time, it's easier to imagine the former than the latter. But how much of that is simply our jaded contemporary political cynicism overwhelming the hopeful imagination of  another time?

That's a puzzle presented by comparative historiography.