How loud did “the shot heard round the world” sound when you were young?[1] I should’ve had to turn down the volume since I was a New England history boy who played war games (with toy soldiers in my room or invisible armies in the backyard). Then again, in my day, the only British Invasion that really mattered was led by the Beatles. 1775 and all that seemed less than relevant as the 60s sped up. Roots moves went out of style; the party of hope tried to keep up with the Third World’s anti-American vanguards. Hannah Arendt once lamented the American revolution tended to be seen as an “event of little more than local importance.” She did her best to resist the put-downs in On Revolution, but that 1963 text was beyond me when I was a kid.
Social Studies in school didn’t do much to amp up the resonance of our country’s primal rebellion. Revolutions, after all, aren’t made for classrooms. That was confirmed for me all over again a few years back when my son was assigned a Y.A. text, My Brother Sam Is Dead, that leeches glory—and all the juice—out of our country’s creation story. American history is nothing but comeuppance in My Brother Sam Is Dead. The teen narrator is witness to a killing family conflict between his brother, who joins the revolution, and his Tory father. Brother Sam’s adventure ends when he’s executed by the Continental army after he’s falsely accused of a breach of military conduct. Sam’s father, in turn, dies at the hands of the Brits. The book’s lesson(s) for teens: politics is limbo, war is hell, and may you never live in interesting times.
There’s more rad fun to be had on Broadway now. But Hamilton’s ticket prices are steep. Instead of ante-ing up for my kid, I’ve gone for cheaper thrills, printing out volumes from George Bancroft’s History of The United States devoted to the American revolution. It took Bancroft three books to get from the Stamp Act to Bunker Hill yet he didn’t waste too many pages.
Bancroft went for high drama when apt. But he wasn’t above memorializing mundane meetups between improvisers who made up democracy as they talked it through (…“for two hours, they reasoned together on the rights of Connecticut…”). He tried to preserve the organizing tradition invented by Sam Adams et al.
Bancroft was a man of his time. His multi-volume history, which he began publishing in the 1830s, bent toward Hegelian ideas of progress and American exceptionalism. Rhodomontade, though, wasn’t his main register. He liked plain talk too.
The first rounds of the fight against taxation without representation were full of all kinds of talk. And, as Bancroft noted, we have Brits to thank for that: “It is the glory of England, that the rightfulness of the Stamp Act was in England itself an object of dispute…It could have been nowhere else…To England exclusively belongs the honor, that between her and her colonies the question of right could arise…” Not that Bancroft overvalued English parliamentarianism (…“in Great Britain, with, at that time, eight millions of inhabitants less than ten thousand persons…elected a majority of the House of Commons and the powers of government were actually sequestered into the hands of about 200 men…”) Yet Bancroft’s tick tock of debates over the Stamp Act and later quarrels about right relations between Britain and its colonies still seems newsy. Pitt was right on time forever when he talked back to Grenville, shocking the House of Commons with his defense of upstart Americans:
“…The gentleman tells us America is obstinate; America is almost in open rebellion. I rejoice America has resisted.” At the word, the whole house started as though their hands had been joined, and an electric shock had darted through them all.
Bancroft didn’t disguise his own rooting interests. But his writing wasn’t defined by fanship. (Fifty pages after Bancroft upheld the Great Commoner’s case against the Stamp Act, he evoked the pathos of Pitt’s last days when the sickly minister—at odds with King and parliament—lost his common touch, taking lordly solace in a posh coach and four.)
While Bancroft wasn’t into hagiography, he meant to fix in the minds of his readers figures who made heavy contributions to American independence. And he was aware some of those rebels were in danger of being forgotten. The front-piece to his third volume on the revolution is a portrait of Joseph Warren—Sam Adams’ home-boy who died at the battle of Bunker Hill. James Otis (“The colonists are by the law of nature freeborn, as indeed all men are, white or black.” – 1764) got his due in Bancroft’s volume on “How Great Britain Estranged America.” Otis, whose radical imagination generated the shock Pitt transmitted to the House of Commons, lost his mind before the revolution began. He died—Bancroft didn’t make this up!—when he was struck by lightning.
Bancroft was alive to the role of personality in theaters of power and resistance. His books were filled with crisp summaries of the characters of his key players. But his history wasn’t too personal. Bancroft commended Rousseau for speaking “hidden truth” to power: “‘if there is life still on earth, it is the masses alone that live.’” That truth informed Bancroft shout-out to a little Massachusetts town:
The first official utterance of revolution did not spring from a congress of the colonies, or the future chiefs of the republic; from the rich who falter, or the learned who weigh and debate. The people of the little interior town of Pembroke, in Plymouth county, unpretending husbandman, full of glory in their descent from the pilgrims, concluded a clear statement of their grievances with the prediction that: “…if the measures so justly complained of were persisted in and enforced by fleets and armies, they must, they will lead to the total dissolution of the union between the mother country and the colonies.”
A few years later, as British functionaries holed up in Boston waiting for “fleets and armies” that would bring on revolution, numberless Massachusetts towns enacted anarchy in New England.
The condition of Massachusetts was anomalous; three hundred thousand people continued their usual avocations, and enjoyed life and property in undisturbed tranquility without a legislature or executive officers, without sheriffs, judge, or justices of the peace. As the supervisors of government disappeared, each man seemed more and more a law to himself; and as if to show that the world had been governed too much, order prevailed in a province where in fact there existed no regular government; no administration but by committees; no military officers but those chosen by the militia.
Bancroft twigged to (what Gordon Wood has termed) “the radicalism of the American revolution.” A radicalism that’s likely to become harder to grasp going forward. To feel it, you must lock back into the 18th Century’s great chain of hierarchy and presumption. A line of Hume’s comes to mind: “The consequences of living in a monarchy tended to heighten in everyone an inclination to please his superior.”
May Bancroft’s vision of direct democracy—New England’s alternative to the society of suck-ups, of bows and obsequies—never grow old. It’s one of the peaks in Bancroft’s “third epoch” of the American revolution. After two volumes focused chiefly on argufying and politicking—a reader is ready for action. But this innocent wasn’t prepped for Bancroft’s account of what happened at Lexington. He brought me near the massacre on the common. Given the disparity between the British force and the small group of townies, the event on that April morning amounted to mass murder. In Bancroft’s telling, it was punctuated by a bully move: “The British troops drew up on the village green, huzzaed thrice by way of triumph…” Those killer cheers sound louder to me now than Emerson’s shot.
The Brits had to eat their huzzas, of course. They ended up on a march that turned into a scarifying twenty-mile run, as they tried to avoid being picked off by Minute Men who’d become the first guerrillas—“Scarce ten of the Americans were at any time seen together.” Bancroft’s narrative of the big payback was never simply triumphal: “James Hayward, son of the deacon of Acton church, encountered a regular, and both at the same April moment fired; the regular was instantly killed, James Hayward, 19 years old, was mortally wounded.” The Brits got meaner as they ducked and ran:
In one house they found two aged, helpless, unarmed men, and butchered them both without mercy, stabbing them, breaking their skulls, and dashing out their brains. Hannah Adams, wife of Deacon Joseph Adams of Cambridge, lay in child-bed with a babe of a week old, but was forced to crawl with her infant in her arms and almost naked to a corn shed, while the soldiers set her house on fire. At Cambridge, an idiot, perched on a fence to gaze at the regular army, was wantonly shot at and killed.
British officers stayed ugly in the prelude to the next great battle. They fired the town of Charleston before sending their troops up Breed’s Hill. Bancroft detailed the carnage of that battle, the courage on both sides as well as a shared lucidity about what was at stake. “’The whole,’ wrote Burgoyne, ‘was a complication of horror and importance beyond any thing it ever came to my lot to be witness to.’”
One passage in Bancroft’s chapter on the battle seems to look ahead to the irrepressible conflict looming when he published his third volume on the revolution in 1858.
Nor should history forget to record that, as in the army at Cambridge, so also in this gallant band, the free negroes of the colony had their representatives. For the right of free negroes to bear arms in the public defence was, at that day, as little disputed in New England as their other rights. They took their place not in a separate corps, but in the ranks with the white man, and their names may be read on the pension rolls of the country, side by side with those of other soldiers of the revolution.
Bancroft would get on the Union train, becoming a celebrant of Lincoln etc., but he was slow to board. No abolitionist, his story of the revolution is too solicitous to preening apologies for slavery offered by the Virginia hypocrites—Patrick Henry, Jefferson and George Mason. (I’ll admit, though, Mason almost broke me down:
Every gentleman here is born a petty tyrant. Practiced in the arts of despotism and cruelty, we become callous to the dictates of humanity, and all the finer feelings of the soul. Taught to regard a part of our own species in this most abject and contemptible degree below us, we lose that idea of the dignity of a man which the hand of nature planted in us for great and useful purposes. Habituated from our infancy to trample upon the rights of human nature, every generous, every liberal sentiment, if not extinguished, is enfeebled in our minds; and in such an infernal school are to be educated our future legislators and rulers. The laws of impartial Providence may, even by such means of these, avenge upon our posterity the injury done to a set of wretches whom our injustice has debased to a level with the brute creation.
But Mason’s shame was overmastered by animal spirits and Southern rich man’s pride:
These remarks were extorted by a kind of irresistible, perhaps an enthusiastic, impulse; and the author of them, conscious of his own good intentions cares not whom they please or offend.
Those intentions came to nothing since he ended up arguing for slavery at the Constitutional Convention.)
Bancroft swallowed cant of slave-masters who presented themselves as freedom-fighters.[2] His unstinting praise for South Carolina’s Christopher Gadsden—admittedly, a stalwart in the struggle for independence—is especially hard to take. (Famous for his “Don’t Tread on Me” flag and his duel with a fellow officer in the Continental army, Gadsden’s honor-mongering fits Orlando Patterson’s neat formulation about “the southerner’s highly developed sense of honor and freedom”: “Those who most dishonor and constrain others are in the best position to appreciate what joy it is to possess what they deny.”)
Bancroft’s books on the revolution need corrective supplements. Young Americans out to gnaw through the crust of faux-patriotic lies might start with Henry Wiencek’s devastating books on Washington (An Imperfect God) and Jefferson (Master of the Mountain). While Washington beat the hell out of Jefferson when it came to slavery, George’s tight mouth in all those portraits of rectitude looks different when you know it was filled with teeth he bought from his “servants,” who weren’t vending their molars in a sellers’ market.[3]
Washington’s teeth got noticed by one of the contributors to 1619—the New York Times’ recent effort to focus attention on the foundational role of slavery in America’s constitution. I’m down with 1619’s mission. I hope First of the Month will always be alive to the centrality of race in the American experience. I have no quarrel with anyone who argues the Stono Rebellion of 1737—when slaves in South Carolina revolted against their masters—is more connected to this country’s primal scene/sin than Lexington and Concord. But I doubt we have to choose between Rebellion and Revolution. Which, I guess, is another way of saying I believe old-timey American patriotism has a future. I don’t want to cede the shot heard round the world to Proud Boys.
xxx
Addendum: Bancroft’s corpus may have its uses in the struggle against white nationalism since he was a sort of proto-multiculturalist. Versions of the following passage from a lecture titled, ahem, “The Necessity, the Reality, and the Promise of the Progress of the Human Race,” have been cited lately in The New Yorker and The Tablet by critics writing on patriotism in the Age of Trump.
Our land is not more the recipient of the men of all countries than their ideas. Annihilate the past of any one leading nation of the world, and our destiny would have been changed. Italy and Spain, in the persons of COLUMBUS and ISABELLA, joined together for the great discovery that opened America for emigration and commerce; France contributed to its independence; the search for the origin of the language we speak carries us to India; our religion is from Palestine; of the hymns sung in our churches, some were first heard in Italy, some in the deserts of Arabia, some on the banks of the Euphrates; our arts come from Greece, our jurisprudence from Rome; our maritime code from Russia; England taught us the system of representative government; the noble Republic of the United Provinces bequeathed to us, in the world of thought, the great idea of the toleration of all opinions; in the world of action, the prolific principle of the federal union. Our country stands, therefore, more than any other, as the realisation of the unity of the race—
Per Paul Berman’s gloss in The Tablet—“with ‘the race’ meaning the human race, and its unity leading, as he insisted, to ꜰʀᴇᴇᴅᴏᴍ.”
Berman lauded Bancroft’s “fine expression of our modern liberal idea”: “It is not an ethnic swagger, it is a multi-ethnic swagger.” He was aware, though, historian Jill Lepore isn’t “convinced.”
Bancroft, she says, “wrote the history of the United States as the history of the providential founding of the world’s first modern democracy by the ‘white man,’ after his conquest over ‘savages.’ Bancroft believed that slavery was a national sin and warned that it would doom the Republic; he blamed Africans: ‘negro slavery is not an invention of the white man.’ Bancroft’s universalism was no univeralism at all.”
Berman defended Bancroft;
Actually, he blamed the British, too…He was catholic in his aspersions. He also had a flair for saying things like this:
“The good time is coming, when humanity will recognize all members of its family as alike entitled to its care; when the heartless jargon of overproduction in the midst of want will end in a better system of distribution; when man will dwell with man as with his brother; when political institutions will rest on a basis of equality and freedom.”
To be a champion of multiculturalism and, at the same time, a friend of the working class was not at all impossible. In my reading of him, nothing in his fundamental standpoint should have prevented him from adding that Africa, too, contributed to the United States, as more than obviously it did, and likewise the Indians of America, and not just of India.
Berman, though, didn’t let the “the Michelet of America” get away clean. His final words, which remind me of Bancroft’s own summary judgments of major characters, were pretty cutting:
Why did he shrink from adding those points, then? What quality was missing in George Bancroft? It was the political courage to stand up to the Southern reactionaries. Northern cowardice was his failing. By the time he delivered his oration on The Necessity, the Reality, etc., he was a Franklin Pierce man, who gazed boldly outward and offered revolutionary solidarity to the embattled European democrats; and, in other respects, lowered his eyes in shame, lest the African Americans or their friends might be watching. Bancroft’s universalism was a universalism, in my opinion. But it was a deformed thing, as if some deranged Southerner had hacked off part of his nose.
Notes
1 Emerson’s poem didn’t signify when I was a kid. He came to matter to me later as a thinker about thinking (who gave me more on that score than phenomenologists), but I didn’t tumble to his rad side until I caught up with him and Thoreau conspiring to save Frank Merrian, one of John Brown’s escaped liberators. Per Sam Abrams’ poem “American Renaissance Criminals”:
super-sage Emerson
loaned horse and shay
eccentric Henry
drove Frank to the station
quickly, efficiently, criminally
no hesitating, no doubt
literary gods
help one of the most wanted men in the USA
to get safe away to Canada
Emerson and Thoreau acted after one of the Secret Six who funded John Brown’s provocation shut the door on Merriam.
2 Bancroft held his own, though, when he addressed Samuel Johnson’s famous dis of those slave-drivers:
[Johnson] had broken his bread with poverty and even knew what it was it is from sheer want to go without a dinner. When better days came, he loved the poor as few else love them, the blind, the sick, and the sorrowful. A man who had thus sturdily battled with social evils, and was so keenly touched by the wretchedness of the down-trodden, deserved to have been able to feel for an injured people; but he refused to do so. Having defined the word pension as “pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country,” he was himself become a pensioner; and at the age of three score and six, with small hire, like a bravo who loves his trade, he set about the task of his work-masters. In a tract, which he called “Taxation no Tyranny,” he echoed to the crowd the haughty rancor, which passed down from the king and his court, to his council, to the ministers, to the aristocracy, their parasites and followers, with nothing remarkable in his party zeal, but the intensity of its bitterness; or in his manner, but its unparalleled insolence; or in his argument, but its grotesque extravagance.
3 David Waldstreicher’s Runaway America zeroes in on vagaries of Ben Franklin—founder of America’s first anti-slavery society and publisher of profitable notices identifying indentured servants who’d run out on their would-be masters.