What Historians Make of America’s 250th Anniversary

The American Revolution at 250: Twenty-Four Historians Reflect on the Founding, edited by Francis D. Cogliano (University of Virginia Press, 277 pp., $35)

In these contentious times, America’s 250th birthday is bound to get a varied reception around the country. Whatever their political views, however, the historically minded may want to know how contemporary scholars regard the occasion. For this purpose, The American Revolution at 250, edited by Francis D. Cogliano, professor of American history at the University of Edinburgh, is revelatory.

In his introduction, Cogliano insists on seeing the current history of the Founding largely in terms of politics and the “culture wars”—with the New York Times’s 1619 Project on one side and President Trump’s 1776 Commission on the other. If all that our history were able to show for itself were a scholarly refashioning of the talking points of our political parties, we would be well advised to look elsewhere for an understanding of our past and present, let alone our future. Fortunately, while it’s true that some partisan historians might march under one or the other of these standards, they are not representative of the semi-quincentennial’s true reception. Some of the best historians now writing on the Founding—David Hackett Fischer, Andrew O’Shaughnessy, Richard Brookhiser, Wilfred McClay, and Joseph Ellis, to name a few—do not fall neatly into “right” or “left.” They are too nuanced, too attentive to historical evidence, too critical-minded to allow partisanship to warp their historical judgment.

Of course, celebrating the Revolution is not a strictly right-wing position, just as deploring the slave-owning of the Founders is not strictly left-wing. What McClay has to say of David Hackett Fischer’s book, African Founders, is a useful case in point. Fischer, he says, “sets aside the moralism and virtue-signaling that so often beset writing on the subject of race in America. He does not preach at us, he merely states the facts, which are powerful enough without amplification.” For McClay, Fischer merits particular praise because:

He insists on two guiding assumptions. The first is that “slavery, racism, and racial oppression in many forms have long been great and persistent evils in America and the world.” In fact, he could have added that the existence of slavery has been more the rule than the exception throughout human history, and that there are more enslaved people in the world today than ever before—50 million, according to the United Nations’ International Labor Organization—though slavery is illegal throughout the world. Fischer’s second guiding assumption is another equally true statement: “that vibrant traditions of freedom and liberty and the rule of law have long continued to be sources of enduring strength, especially in the United States.” In a sense, American history is a record of the struggle between these two facts, the struggle to overcome the worst aspects of our human nature for the sake of the best. And as Fischer’s detailed research shows, those “vibrant traditions” are fed by African sources in America.

Fischer’s avoidance of partisanship here echoes that of several of Cogliano’s contributors. Yes, some of the contributors resort to virtue signaling. Marlene L. Daut, for instance, shares what seem the rather ungrateful thoughts she had while passing Thomas Jefferson’s statue on the University of Virginia campus after being made full professor there: “I marveled at how it is that so many of us live in countries where the cruel and inhumane see their rise to power in stone while those they irreparably harmed to get there are relegated to the status of collateral damage.” Such moral vanity, however, is rare in Cogliano’s collection.

Indeed, the book kicks off with a splendid essay by Brendan McConville, who makes a vital point when he says: “Making everything about now is at the core of the humanities . . . in the twenty-first-century academy . . . We have been emptying the vault of time for most of my career to make the ever-changing ‘now’ more smugly comfortable with itself than perhaps it should be.” Most of Cogliano’s contributors do not fall into that trap. Still, I was surprised that McConville did not quote a marvelous bit from Samuel Johnson’s Tour of the Hebrides (1775), where he says of his visit to Iona:

Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses, whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future, predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings. Far from me, and from my friends, be such frigid philosophy as may conduct us indifferent and unmoved over any ground which has been dignified by wisdom, bravery or virtue. That man is little to be envied . . . whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona!

In a fascinating essay on The Crisis, T. H. Breen shows how the incendiary London weekly went from being frowned upon to being fully embraced by colonial editors. Beginning publication in London in January 1775 and ending in October 1776, The Crisis doubled as both a pamphlet and a newspaper and always included at least one essay on a political topic. Because of its low price and highly controversial point of view, it reached an unusually wide audience in both England and America. As Breen says, the paper might have been “shrill” and “crude,” but its value for historians and readers today lies in explaining “why a comfortable imperial world suddenly came unraveled.” One colonial editor, Charles Crouch of the South Carolina Gazette, confessed that he might once have regarded the publication’s calls for independence as “gross and licentious.” After Lexington and Concord, however, and the British Crown’s “adoption of the late iniquitous ministerial measures,” Crouch became convinced “that this is not a season to lisp, and whisper, to cog, and frown, and flatter; when plain truths are to be argued, plain direct language is absolutely necessary.” That the paper was reviled by Westminster after its third number enumerated the putative sins of George III’s “shameful and inglorious reign” gave it added appeal in the colonies. (Readers can access the full contents of the paper at the Liberty Fund’s online library.) Yet when The Crisis went still further, insisting on “blood for blood,” the colonists had the good sense to reject the incitement, which leads Breen to marvel at how, under circumstances otherwise so combustible, “a raw appeal to violence—blood for blood—did not lead to a subsequent breakdown of civil society.”

Here, we can see compelling vindication of Jefferson’s staunch belief in the American people’s good sense. They did not succumb to the anarchy that made Napoleon so necessary for the French: they were too busy establishing a new order. After all, as McConville writes in his essay, the Americans committed themselves to “a transformation in the human condition when they unleashed the idea of the rule of the people on a hierarchical, monarchical world.”

The book boasts other strong contributions. Rosemarie Zagarri shows why the Americans “did not experience a complete collapse of their governmental institutions during the War of Independence”—the orderly transfer of power was upheld. Joanne B. Freeman looks back at the bicentennial celebrations in 1976 and describes the once-widespread patriotism that inspired her, as it did many others, to devote her life to teaching American history. Eliga H. Gould offers a well-researched essay on the Founders and their alleged hypocrisy, especially on slavery, which reminded me of another wise observation of Johnson’s: “Nothing is more unjust, however common, than to charge with hypocrisy him that expresses zeal for those virtues which he neglects to practice; since he may be sincerely convinced of the advantages of conquering his passions, without having yet obtained the victory.” Anyone reflecting on these words might regard the slave-owning Jefferson with more forbearance than he is commonly accorded these days.

 Woody Holton’s exceptional essay delves into how infectious disease affected the War of Independence. Such disease, he tells us, tended to afflict the colonists more than their British opponents. Why? “Most British soldiers had grown up in the more densely populated mother country where they had obtained lifetime immunity to smallpox by surviving it in childhood.” Northern American soldiers were notoriously reluctant to travel south because of the risks of illness. Washington managed to persuade his troops to march from the Hudson River to Yorktown only after urging from the French and his pledging them “a month’s pay in gold and silver coin.” Had the French not put pressure on Washington and the pecuniary incentive not been applied—this was the only time the colonists were paid in hard money—“the soldiers’ anxiety about tropical disease might have prevented Washington from trapping Cornwallis at Yorktown.” Here, then, is a subject replete with historical consequence.

Lastly, the book includes a piece on how religion figures into the idea of national unity for which so many hanker. “It’s an arguable question whether Americans today would be drawn closer together or pushed further apart by the kind of religious rhetoric that Paine and Lincoln used to conjure national unity,” Katherine Carté writes, though she also quotes John Adams, who would have been the first to concede the divisiveness of religion without ever forgetting that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other”—an arresting observation.

The American semi-quincentennial will not knit up our myriad divisions, but it should inspire some salutary stock-taking. For that good purpose, The American Revolution at 250 makes for a most welcome, insightful companion.