July 4, 2007
American Mythbuster: A July 4 Interview with Ray Raphael Posted by Allen Barra at 12:05 AM EST Paul Revere didn’t make that ride—except in Longfellow’s poem. Patrick Henry probably didn’t say “Give me liberty or give me death!” The words were likely put into his mouth by a biographer several decades after his death. Washington’s winter at Valley Forge really wasn’t that bad compared with other winters during the Revolution. Molly Pitcher probably never existed, and the colonies most definitely did not offer slaves their freedom to fight against the British. These are just a few examples of the misinformation corrected by Ray Raphael in his cult favorite book Founding Myths: Stories That Hide Our Patriotic Past (New Press, 368 pages, $15.95). Founding Myths doesn’t merely debunk popular stories in American History, it shows how they were created and why they persist, and why their persistence is blocking the path toward a true understanding of American history. Just in time for the Fourth of July, Mr. Raphael shot off some fireworks for us in this interview. One of the most enjoyable things about your book, Founding Myths, is that you skewer treasured legends of America history, or perhaps folklore would be a more appropriate term, while providing the context in which their stories grew. Paul Revere, for instance. Is the story of Paul Revere’s ride one that was popular after the revolution or was it a creation of a later era? The legend of Paul Revere’s ride was a long time in the making. Revere himself, in his official deposition shortly afterwards, devoted only one sentence to the ride that would someday make him famous. When he died, 43 years later, his obituary made no mention of it. Still, locals remembered this and other rides made by Paul Revere, and they played up his heroic deeds by word of mouth. This was not unusual. For generations after the Revolution, Americans told tales of their local heroes during the War for Independence. In the mid-nineteenth century, the historians George Bancroft and Benson Lossing collected over a thousand such stories, each featuring some local star. Paul Revere was among these, but only one of many. That’s where matters stood when the great American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published his famous poem 86 years after the fact, in January of 1861. The Civil War at that moment seemed imminent, and Longfellow wanted to wake up the nation to the threat, so he composed the lines that millions upon millions of American school children would have to learn and recite for the better part of a century: “Listen my children, and you shall hear/ Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.” Longfellow meant well, but he gave himself so much poetic license that he distorted the ride beyond recognition. Revere never waited to see the “one if by land, two if by sea” lanterns, for instance, and there were hundreds of alarms sounded that night, not just one. Subsequent generations of Americans grew up thinking that a lone rider from Boston awakened the sleepy-eyed farmers, and this effectively suppressed the amazing, patriotic story of how those very same farmers, seven months earlier, had risen up in a body to overthrow British rule, and how they had been arming themselves and training ever since, knowing full well that the Regulars would soon march out against them. Legend, with an assist from beer commercials, has granted Sam Adams a greater role. You write: “Based on the word of his Tory foes, we have granted Samuel Adams superhuman powers. This one man, we say, set Boston all ablaze—but the historical record tells a different story.” Why has Sam Adams’s role in the conflict been overinflated? The Sam Adams story imbues the tumultuous crowd actions in Boston with design and purpose. The mythic Sam Adams, our favorite rabble-rouser and the alleged mastermind of independence, writes and directs the script, keeping the Revolution on cue. The problem is, there was no mastermind of independence. Samuel Adams (he did not answer to the name of Sam) spoke out firmly against independence until late in 1775, when many others were also starting to entertain the notion. Before that, he was fighting for the rights of British subjects living in America. That’s how he and nearly all other patriots viewed themselves for the first decade of unrest. Nor were “the body of the people” (as they preferred to call themselves) a mindless rabble, incapable of acting without orders from above. That was a Tory fabrication, because Tories did not want to believe that common people could think for themselves. Unfortunately, we buy into the Tory way of thinking every time we say that “Boston was controlled by a trained mob and Sam Adams was its keeper.” That’s a direct quote from the most influential biography of Adams written in the twentieth century. This suggests a question regarding what you term “founder chic.” You write, “Founder chic authors depict political leaders as causal agents who are personally responsible for all the major events of the times. . . . Since the importance of their stories is determined in part by the importance of their protagonists, biographies have a vested interest in endowing their subjects with as much historical significance as the record will bear—and sometimes more.” You take particular exception to David McCullough’s view of John Adams: “‘It was John Adams,’ wrote McCullough in his Pulitzer prize-winning biography, John Adams, ‘who made it [the Declaration of Independence] happen.’” What’s your main point of contention with McCullough’s view? According to McCullough, John Adams acted the role of a lonely hero, willing to buck the will of the people. If Adams had been “poll-driven,” he would have “scrapped the whole idea,” McCullough claims, since there was little popular support for independence in 1776. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Twenty-one months earlier, people throughout rural Massachusetts had declared in favor of independence, but John Adams tried to talk them out of it. Later, after Lexington and Concord, Adams came around to their opinion. But he was hardly alone. In January of 1776, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense sparked a nationwide conversation of unprecedented proportions. In every tavern and meeting house across the land, people argued the merits of the case, and by spring the results were in: an overwhelming proportion supported independence. More than 90 towns, counties, and states issued formal declarations urging Congress to take action. The largest state, Virginia, declared independence on its own. It took a while for Congress to catch up with the groundswell of popular opinion. Delegates from Maryland, for instance, were opposed, but then the county conventions met and issued specific instructions: Change your vote, they said, and do it immediately. “See the glorious effects of county instructions,” a Maryland patriot wrote to John Adams. “Our people have fire if not smothered.” The sweeping, deliberate debate over independence resulted in the most productive outpouring of patriotic sentiment in our nation’s history, but McCullough takes the honor and glory away from the people and bestows it on a single individual. Ironically, John Adams knew better, and he said so at the time. On July 3, the day after Congress voted in favor of independence, he boasted to his wife Abigail that the population at large had considered the “great question of independence . . . by discussing it in newspapers and pamphlets, by debating it in assemblies, conventions, committees of safety and inspection, in town and county meetings, as well as in private conversation,” and in the end “the whole people, in every colony of the thirteen, have adopted it as their own act.” I was crushed to hear that the famous words attributed to Patrick Henry—“I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”—were not his. You write, “Nowhere in any of his speeches, as rendered by later writers, do we see even a hint of pandering to instincts less noble than the love of liberty. His speeches, quite literally, have been whitewashed.” Can you give us a brief summation of the whitewashing of Patrick Henry’s image? Patrick Henry may or may not have said, “Give me liberty or give me death.” But if he did, it was no big deal. Patriots had been using that particular refrain ever since the Stamp Act resistance ten years earlier. It is improbable, however, that Henry delivered the 1,217-word speech that William Wirt attributed to him 42 years later. Nobody had recorded the speech, and Wirt’s sole informant provided him with distant recollections for only one fifth of it. Wirt, incidentally, was quite an orator in his own right. He delivered the official commemorative address in Washington on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. So what did Patrick Henry say in his call-to-arms that aroused such emotions on March 23, 1775? Only one firsthand account has survived, but it gives some idea of the tone: Henry called the King “a tyrant, a fool, a puppet,” and he “said there was no Englishmen, no Scots, no Britons, but a set of wretches sunk in luxury, that had lost their native courage.” In other words, Henry appealed to people’s lowest instincts by calling his enemies names and labeling them cowards. Most likely, he also played the slave card. White Virginians were terrified that British officials would soon declare freedom for all slaves who fought against their masters, and eight months later Virginia’s royal governor did just that. To recruit soldiers, Patrick Henry at that point waged an intensive propaganda campaign based on the British offer to free the slaves. Henry also speculated extensively in Western lands, and to promote his interests he of course was a rabid Indian fighter. One of his main complaints against the British was that they had closed off settlement in the West. Henry’s personal perspectives—fearing slaves, hating Indians, craving expansion—were shared by most white Virginians, and it is highly unlikely that these did not figure in his thundering speeches intended to arouse anti-British sentiment. One of the American Revolution’s most cherished myths is that of the patriotic slave. I suppose we have the Mel Gibson movie The Patriot to thank for perpetuating that myth, particularly the scene when someone reads a fictional order from George Washington that “All bound slaves who give minimum one year service in the Continental Army will be granted freedom and be paid a bounty of five shillings for each month of service.” Your comment is, “The document . . . which is seen on screen and appears visually authentic, contains more historical errors in a single sentence that at first seems possible.” Could you briefly enumerate them for us? First, George Washington regarded the presence of slaves in the Continental Army as a total embarrassment, and he did everything in his power to keep them out. One week after assuming command, he ordered that no “stroller, negro, or vagabond” be allowed to enlist. The British Army was much more welcoming. Four months after Washington’s decree, the royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, offered freedom to all slaves who left their masters and fought against the patriots. Over the course of the war, tens of thousands of slaves fled to the British in search of their freedom, including at least 20 men and women enslaved to George Washington. Next, even if Washington had wanted to enlist slaves, he never would have offered them freedom for only one year of service. He insisted on longer enlistments, three years or the duration of the war. Had he promised freedom in return for such a short term, his recruiting officers would have been instantly overwhelmed, and the Continental Army would have become predominantly black. Further, who would have compensated the masters? To seize “property” from patriotic slave owners without compensation was unthinkable—but how could Congress afford to pay for slaves when it couldn’t even afford enough food to sustain the soldiers it had? Plus, Washington was simply not the one to do the recruiting. That was left to the individual states. Later in the war some states did permit slaves to serve as substitutes for whites who had been drafted, but even so, not all of these were granted freedom in the end. In South Carolina, the setting for The Patriot, John Laurens, the son of the president of Congress, proposed arming some slaves to fight alongside the patriots, but Washington opposed the idea, and the South Carolina government rejected it outright. This is not to say South Carolina did not make use of slaves to bolster the army. To induce whites to enlist, Southern states offered special bounties—not to slaves, but of slaves. Near the end of the war, when manpower was scarce, any white who signed on would receive a special bonus of one slave. The worst myth propagated in The Patriot is that slaves were so devoted to their masters that they would risk their lives on the battlefield. The truth is, slaves tried to use the Revolutionary War in whatever way they could to gain their own freedom. A few enslaved African-Americans in the North managed to bargain for their freedom by fighting for the patriots; a vastly greater number in the South thought their prospects were better with the British. In either case, slaves struggled to achieve freedom from a tyranny far more acute than “taxation without representation.” In your chapter “March of the American People,” you write, “The Revolutionary War looks very different if we stand on Indian lands and look back east.” This is a particularly interesting point since most Americans seem to feel that the Indian Wars really took place on the Western plains. You remind us that “the American Revolution was by far the largest Indian war in our nation’s history.” Why do you feel this very important point has been all but forgotten by writers of American history textbooks? While other conflicts between Native Americans and Euro-Americans involved only one or two Indian nations at a time, all Native peoples east of the Mississippi became directly involved in the Revolutionary War, most fighting with the British, a few with the Americans. For a decade after the Revolution, various pan-Indian confederations continued to pursue their own wars of independence. Finally, after two decades of fighting, Euro-Americans managed to expand their effective domain from east of the Appalachian Divide clear to the Mississippi. Previously, it had taken a century and a half to conquer an equivalent amount of territory along the Eastern seaboard. The American Revolution, in short, was at least in part a war of conquest, but we don’t like to view it that way. In our texts we learn about white-Indian conflict during the early settlements in the seventeenth century, and we pick up the story again with the struggles for the West in the nineteenth century, but we ignore the critical moment at the time of our nation’s founding, when the groundwork for westward expansion was established. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, for instance, is always portrayed as the crowning achievement of the Articles of Confederation, because it paved the way to the West. Rarely during our discussions of the founding era do we treat the impact on Native populations, because it’s simply too embarrassing. If we view the American Revolution as a simple conflict between the United States and its former rulers from across the seas, it’s easy to see who stands on the moral high ground. If, on the other hand, we acknowledge the persistence of white-Indian struggles, that moral high ground is quickly surrendered. We—the American nation that was created in the late eighteenth century—lose our definition, our purity. Our core national narrative can admit that “we” were not always the good guys, but please, not at the time of our birth. That remains sacred, and so we continue to push the agonizing aspects of the American saga forward or backward in time. This is a shame. Americans, from the beginning, were both democrats and bullies. Despite the hesitancy of elites, most patriots at the time of our nation’s birth believed people should govern themselves, and that is why they threw off British rule. They also believed they had the right, even the obligation, to impose their will on people they deemed inferior. These two core beliefs are key to understanding American history and the American character, and we do an injustice to ourselves and to our nation when we pretend otherwise.
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