The Pendulum of American History
Will Patriotism Swing Back Our Way Again? A Historian's Thoughts on July 4th
I’ve been spending this summer researching the Bill of Rights, trying to learn how it came to be, as it seems now so fragile a bridge for our liberties. Which is another way of saying I’ve been hanging out with the Founding Fathers, yes those white men, some of them slave owners, who crafted our nation’s great foundational documents.
Recently I took a deep dive into the biography of Samuel Adams — not the beer maker, but the revolutionary. Born in Boston in 1722, to a Puritan family (his father malted barley for local breweries and was a religious deacon), Adams attended Boston Latin School and Harvard College. It was there that he studied British philosopher John Locke, above all his writings about how all humans were born with inalienable rights, and how governments should only rule with the consent of the governed. In fact Adams wrote his Harvard masters thesis on the righteousness of opposing British authority. No wonder he became a passionate pamphleteer, cheering on rebellion.
No man could be said to have done more than Samuel Adams to secure the First Amendment and other liberties for this country — unless of course it was James Madison, their author. But what also drew my attention to Sam Adams was the way in which his reputation in the eyes of history has whipsawed over the years, as if scholars were more like fashion writers than historians, reflecting the trends of their own times rather than the spirit of the person or cause under study.
Sam Adams — who led the boycott of British goods in protest of oppressive taxes, signed the Declaration of Independence, helped draft the Articles of Confederation and the Massachusetts Constitution and insisted that no state should ratify the US Constitution unless a Bill of Rights was appended — has been characterized by historians as a troublemaker who used mob violence to win public support. As historian Pauline Maier pointed out in a brilliant essay, “Coming to Terms with Samuel Adams,” he instead was an enlightened person who fought Britain because he believed the Mother Country was violating its own principles in its dealings with the colonies. Once America became a republic, founded on the model of the Massachusetts Town Hall, he no longer believed in revolution, holding that “even the most severe threats” to freedom should be fought through the channels of democracy.
I was thinking about all this recently when I read that the rare books library at Cornell University removed a bust of Abraham Lincoln, along with a copy of his Emancipation Proclamation. One of the most important documents in U.S. history, and the president who had the courage to issue it, somehow triggered a student, who complained, and the whole display was cancelled. Librarians and administrators never explained why the EP was banished — has the academe decided to scrub history of any evils, like slavery, that once reigned? A chilling thought.
The huge sea changes in America’s “settled history” — scholars call them a subject’s historiography — are as infamous as they are numerous. The most grievous to my mind was the myth of “the Lost Cause.” This idea, which came up from the ashes of the South’s utter destruction in the Civil War, held that the war was never about slavery, just sovereignty. It took nearly 100 years for this deliberately torquing of the real history to be righted in history books. Much has been written since about how slaves were abused, inadequately fed, clothed and housed, robbed of family and freedom, because they were cogs in a system designed to exploit their labor.
These days, we face similar challenges in the deliberate slander of our history. Nikole Hannah-Jones, a journalist, preaches that our nation was actually founded in 1619, when the first slave touched down on American shores, and not in 1776 when the Declaration of Independence asserted, “All men are created equal.” A nation is not founded on its first residents but on its foundational documents. Ours — the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights — are rich.
I sometimes wonder if Hannah-Jones is aware of the story of Elizabeth, a slave in Sheffield, MA who listened to the Massachusetts Constitution as it was read aloud on the steps of the Congregational Church one fall day in October 1780. When she heard the words, “All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential and unalienable rights,” the slave called Mum Bett heard her own name. She asked a white lawyer to take her case to court, where she won her freedom, based on that sentence in the state Constitution, and changed her name to Elizabeth Freeman.
As we mark the Fourth of July that in 1776 announced the most important right of all, the right to be free, I note the wild swings history has taken, and hope the pendulum will yet swing back in an appreciation of what the Revolutionaries bequeathed to us. Surely the excesses of the Woke Left — sexualizing children instead of protecting their innocence, substituting racist filters for a melting pot ethos, shielding young minds from critical thinking in favor of safe spaces — surely this too will end.
The Constitution, crafted in 1787, was sent to the 13 states, needing nine to be approved. Its fate hung by a thread in the Massachusetts ratifying convention. No state had more active opponents, dubbed Anti-Federalists by the ruling elite. These men and one unheralded woman (who wrote under a pseudonym) were terrified that the proposed Constitution — with its three branches of government, a standing army and a capital city — would create a centralized government so powerful it would crush the very liberties they had fought for in the Revolution.
In the end, the Constitution was ratified in Massachusetts by a slim margin of 19 votes out of 355, but only after Federalists promised their opponents — who they called insurgents — that the new Congress would, as its first act, enact a Bill of Rights.
What strikes me, reading through the debates and the robust exchanges in the newspapers of the day, is how often participants spoke of happiness. Like Thomas Jefferson’s call for “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” they wanted a government that allowed people to live their best lives. Massachusetts Governor John Hancock, on the fence at first, said afterward that he thought the Constitution would lead to the “promotion of tranquility and happiness amongst the states.”
Let’s channel that, embracing our heritage, and make our Fourth of July a happy one.
And thank you, as always, for reading Make Orwell Fiction Again.