Books |
Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence
Joseph Ellis
By
Published: Jul 30, 2013
Category:
Non Fiction
I don’t know how I managed it, but I never studied the American Revolution. So when Bill Bodkin, a New York attorney and writer, offered to write about the origins of our republic, a large hole in this site’s coverage just… disappeared. Many thanks to our newest Guest Butler.
It seems a truism of American public life that if you want to be taken seriously as a public figure or movement you identify with the Founders. We have endowed them over two centuries with an almost mystical power for creating this nation. And now, from afar, they seem to be able to confer credibility today.
A few summers ago, when Tea Party mania first burst on the scene, I decided to look past our Founding myths to discover the humans. Who were the Founders? Could they tell us anything about today’s political debates?
For the answer, I looked to Joseph Ellis, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and one of our better historians on the Revolution.
The answers are far from simple, as Ellis shows in his latest work, “Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence.” Here, in 240 brisk pages, Ellis presents a fairly straightforward narrative of May through October of 1776, portraying the Founders as political actors who knew their goals but had no idea where their actions would ultimately lead. [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition. click here.]
Because David McCullough and a miniseries have recently put the spotlight on John Adams, let’s first consider this lawyer and the leader of the “Radical” faction in the Continental Congress. As the book begins, Adams sees himself as a “responsible,” “conservative revolutionary” who would defy the history of world revolutions by “establishing a new political framework” for the American colonies before independence was officially declared.
Ellis describes George Washington as a model general, possessing the highest standards of honor and right conduct. The great general had stationed himself on Manhattan, hoping to defend New York City. But Washington found himself leading the Continental Army, the military equivalent of the Sweathogs. His army drove him to the “edge of exasperation” — they were a “motley crew of marginal men and misfits, most wearing hunting shirts instead of uniforms, spitting tobacco every ten paces, all defiantly confident they had just humiliated the flower of the British Army at Boston, and would soon do the same in New York.”
Over the course of the narrative, we learn the key to the Founders’ success: their adaptability. Adams soon gave up any pretense of imposing order on the unfolding chaos, concerning himself, as Chairman of the Committee on War and Ordnance, with the task of securing additional men and materials for Washington’s Continental Army and trying not to second-guess his strategy. Washington gradually suppressed his natural instinct for military aggression and heeded his Council of Generals’ repeated admonition to retreat from Brooklyn Heights and Lower Manhattan to Harlem Heights and eventually to White Plains, so that the Continental Army could live to fight another day.
Thomas Jefferson, the final Founder in the traditional triumvirate, appears briefly in Ellis’s book. Shortly after Jefferson’s arrival in Philadelphia, he had become the primary draftsman for the Continental Congress. During this time, though, he was greatly preoccupied by matters at home in Monticello, following the March 1776 death of his mother and the difficult pregnancy of his wife.
In the absence of the man himself, Ellis focuses on Jefferson’s masterpiece, the Declaration of Independence. Here Ellis challenges our mythological conception of the document by asking us to view it not as the hallowed statement of our Founding ideals, but as a conversation between factions in the Continental Congress. On one side were the Radicals seeking independence. On the other were moderates who tended to agree with the British position: the controversy was merely a “family dispute” that could end happily with the “American cousins” back under the “protection” of King George III. The Radicals, Adams included, sensed that reconciliation would only end with their being hanged for treason.
Jefferson responded to the “family dispute” argument by reminding the moderates that King George was “transporting large armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny.” Why was it necessary in a “family dispute” to call in the Hessians, then the finest fighting army in the world, to defeat and subjugate the colonies?
Jefferson’s argument carried the day.
The vote to adopt the Declaration was unanimous. The process, though, was not without pain. First, the Continental Congress put itself into “committee as a whole format” to debate Jefferson’s draft. Jefferson sat “silently and sullenly” throughout the debate. He regarded each revision, which eventually totaled over a third of the Declaration, as a defacement of his perfect document.
Ellis also discusses the famous tensions between Adams and Jefferson. In the spring of 1776, Adams wrote his “Thoughts on Government,” wherein he set forth, for the new states, his vision for a “republicanized version” of England’s “mixed constitution.” Each state government would have three parts: an elected executive, a bicameral legislature, and a judiciary. Congress voted to adopt Adams’s recommendations as a framework for the states to replace the colonial constitutions sanctioned by the Crown.
Ellis notes that “Adams liked to claim that this was the real declaration of Independence, and that Jefferson’s more famous declaration six weeks later was a ceremonial afterthought.” We know this not to be true. The Declaration came to define the “Spirit of ’76,” “the Cause” that Washington’s men were fighting for, and ultimately, the spirit of independence with which we conceive of ourselves as Americans. Jefferson won this debate — “Author of the Declaration of Independence” is, correctly, chiseled on the top of his gravestone.
If we listen closely, we can hear the echoes of these tensions today. Our politicians may campaign for office in the language of Jeffersonian freedom and independence, but our nation is governed by the language of Adams, the man who provided the structural framework within which each individual’s freedom could co-exist.
