New perspectives on the American Revolution

Eric Herschthal with Slate raises some good points about the failure of many “popular” histories on the American Revolution to outline the complexities of the time, most notably by focusing almost exclusively on the Northern patriots — with Virginia’s George Washington being one exception — while ignoring the South and the general public’s anxieties about the war. Some of the indemnifying works he lists include Joseph Ellis’ “Revolutionary Summer” and Nathanial Philbrick’s “Bunker Hill.”

As Herschthal points out, these works commonly play on the ethos of the era, but then don’t do the Revolution any justice by glaring over other factors that were at play.

Rightly, I think, he makes the case that the Revolution, like every other war in human history, does not exist in a bubble neatly stored away in a dusty volume or in our nation’s collective conscious, but was lived by flawed and complex individuals amid a set of global tensions:

These new pop histories of the Revolution are oblivious to the war’s global dimensions, as well as the quotidian reality of ordinary colonists, despite their claims to the contrary. They naively indulge the Revolution’s idealistic rhetoric, even if they dutifully note how those words failed to be put into practice. It makes sense; after all, there’s nothing’s less romantic than the complicated, disheartening truths of war-torn societies. The irony is that these new histories all try, rightly, to make the Revolution seem relevant again. Yet paying more attention to the new scholarship would show how much more similar the Revolution was to our own wars now.

Perhaps there’s a lesson we could learn from the Revolution’s losers, the British, for instance. They took on what looked like an easy war abroad to patch over partisan divisions at home, yet nonetheless lost the war because of imperial overreach. Or perhaps we could learn something from the vast majority of ambivalent colonists, the ones unsure whether the war was even worth it. The Revolution scared them, or held false promises. Their experience provides a sobering lesson about the hubris of war, but one we can still thank them for today.

Many ordinary colonists, I dare say, would have just as much preferred peace under British rule than engage in a fierce battle against the most powerful military force in the world at that time. They did, after all, have kids to raise and families to support. And what about the elite planter class in the South? How many of them were really on board with disrupting a life of relative stability to support what must have seemed to them the radical cause of American patriotism?

While some of the might have supported liberty in theory, few were willing to do so in practice, especially if it meant giving up their livelihood or risking their lives:

Wealthy planters were happy to champion liberty so long as their lives weren’t put on the line, as an article in a forthcoming collection of scholarly articles shows. They paid poorer men to fight for them, and when they tried to institute a draft, less affluent Virginians rebelled, knowing they’d be forced to carry the burden.