Narrative Management in the American Revolution
For generations, American history was taught with a laser-like focus on the “great men” who launched the republic, emphasizing the wisdom, foresight and morality of the Founding Fathers, and extolling the inexorable goodness of the American cause.
They built a democratic republic that was ingenious in its self-correcting capacity, one that stood head and shoulders above other governing systems and would surely stand the test of time. Textbooks highlighted the indisputably positive side of the American story and tended to de-emphasize — or even erase — the experiences of Native Americans, the enslaved, the poor, women, and immigrants.
Recent decades, however, have been marked by a seismic shift in how American history is presented to America’s youth. History lessons have sought to be more inclusive and place more focus on the underbelly of the American experience.
Insofar as this provides a broader perspective on the national experience, this is generally a welcome development, but at times, it seems that this approach to history could go too far — to the point of misrepresenting reality. Rather than highlighting their virtues, much contemporary history portrays the founders as hypocrites and thieves who stole the land from its native inhabitants and murderers who committed mass slaughter on a level approaching genocide.
The founders are increasingly condemned for failing to properly address the issue of slavery at the nation’s founding, and since so many of them, including slaveowners such as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, clearly recognized the evils of slavery at the time, they are harshly judged for allowing it to continue instead of nipping it in the bud.
It is of course entirely legitimate to point out the founders’ flaws as well as their double standards — the fact that some of them acknowledged the wrongs of slavery while personally participating in the practice — but in some ways, it should be said, this is the easy approach to history. Looking for cases of hypocrisy and holding the founders in contempt for failing to live up to their professed ideals is not difficult, and in fact the historical record is rife with examples.
Jefferson, in particular, is an easy target since he was one of the most eloquent opponents of slavery’s evils while owning hundreds of fellow human beings. “There is nothing I would not sacrifice to a practicable plan of abolishing every vestige of this moral and political depravity,” he wrote in 1814.[1]
This has led many to wonder why he didn’t do more to end it, and in fact helped expand it through the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Instead of proposing that Louisiana be excluded from the domestic slave trade, Jefferson kept the new territories and states open to slavery, calling into question his commitment to his professed desire to remove the “hideous blot”[2] of slavery from the United States.
While these inconsistencies could be seen as evidence of hypocrisy and opportunism, a kinder interpretation would be that they reflect the thoughts of a troubled and conflicted mind — one that understood all too well the fundamental dilemma posed by slavery. On many occasions, Jefferson compared American slavery to holding a wolf by its ears.
“We can neither hold him, nor safely let him go,” Jefferson explained. “Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”[3]
Beyond questions of self-preservation, it is also possible, his defenders point out, that although Jefferson helped perpetuate the injustices of slavery, on some level he felt guilt and remorse about the crimes against blacks that he and his contemporaries committed and expressed these feelings in his writings, while stopping short of taking the necessary actions to actually remedy the situation.
Modern historians, however, tend to reject this nuanced approach and go in the opposite direction of ascribing the worst possible motives to the founders and the revolution that they launched in the 1770s. According to Nikole Hannah-Jones and her widely read essay introducing the New York Times’ controversial 1619 Project, the American Revolution was fought not to secure the blessings of liberty, but to preserve human bondage. She argues that maintaining “the institution of slavery” was the “primary” reason the Founding Fathers launched the Revolutionary War — a provocative take, to say the least, but one that quickly became widely influential.
Within six months of its publication by the New York Times in August 2019, the 1619 Project was adopted as part of the curriculum in thousands of classrooms in all 50 states.[4] Buffalo Public Schools made the 1619 Project a required component of their middle schools’ and high schools’ curriculum, noting that the supplemental material will assist in “render[ing] a true history of the institution of slavery for all students, a history which is often silenced in mainstream curriculum and textbooks.”[5]
Revolutionary War scholars, however, pushed back on this usurpation of the American narrative and denounced the 1619 Project as falsified pseudo-history.
Critics taking issue with Hannah-Jones’s argument include prominent historians James McPherson, Gordon Wood, Victoria Bynum, James Oakes, and Sean Wilentz. This group issued an open letter in December 2019 expressing “strong reservations about important aspects of the 1619 Project” and underlined their dismay “at some of the factual errors in the project and the closed process behind it.”
McPherson, Wood, Bynum, Oakes, and Wilentz emphasized that the errors in the 1619 Project’s publications “cannot be described as interpretation or ‘framing,’” but instead constitute “matters of verifiable fact, which are the foundation of both honest scholarship and honest journalism.” The Project’s claims that the founders’ primary motivation in launching the revolution was to maintain slavery “suggest a displacement of historical understanding by ideology,” the critics contended. They requested that the New York Times issue prominent corrections of all the errors and distortions presented in the 1619 Project, a demand to which the Times responded to with a full-throated defense.[6]
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What this controversy underscores is that shaping the discourse of American history is seen as essential by people from across the political spectrum who hope to influence how Americans view their country. While mainstream historians were motivated to push back against the deeply flawed historical analysis presented by the 1619 Project — and more broadly against the perceived anti-Americanism in the revisionist approach to history — the motivation is similar on the other side.
At least since the cultural revolution of the 1960s, there has been a concerted effort by progressive historians to call into question the fundamental assumptions about the nation’s origins, as well as its foundational values, and to promote a more critical analysis of America’s past. On one hand, of course, this is a healthy approach to history and perhaps a needed corrective to centuries of downplaying the plight of the oppressed and downtrodden. But by ascribing motives to the founders that they didn’t actually have, a distorted view of history could prevail. These cynical and ahistorical narratives, in turn, promote a warped national identity and could serve as the basis for opportunistic and nefarious political agendas.
For the record, it should be acknowledged that the American Revolution was not prompted by a desire to maintain slavery. In the voluminous writings of the revolutionary generation, certain recurrent themes are dominant — including complaints about taxation without representation and the unresponsiveness of the Crown to colonists’ concerns — but what is not seen are widespread complaints about anti-slavery measures being imposed on the colonies.
This, however, is not to say that the narrative of a glorious revolution that united liberty-loving Americans in common cause against tyranny is true either. In fact, the colonists were deeply divided among supporters of the revolutionary cause, supporters of the Crown, and a broad mass of ambivalent laborers and farmers who wanted nothing to do with the zealots of either side.
The reality is that the nation’s founding was forged in the rejection of London’s taxes and general exercise of legal authority over the colonies, which translated into violent and sometimes fanatical mob actions on the ground, culminating in a growing escalation of hostilities in 1760s and 1770s.
From the beginning of the conflict, controlling the narrative was seen as essential, and at times, this required embellishing and exaggerating incidents to accentuate the virtues of the patriots’ side and the irredeemable wickedness of the other side. The famous Boston Massacre, for example, was portrayed by patriots writing in newspapers as a one-sided slaughter of peaceable Bostonians, but the reality was probably closer to the description that the British soldiers’ defense attorney John Adams gave in his closing argument:
[The soldiers] could not defend themselves with their bayonets against so many people; it was in the power of the sailors to kill one half or the whole of the party, if they had been so disposed; what had the soldiers to expect, when twelve persons armed with clubs, (sailors too, between whom and soldiers, there is such an antipathy, that they fight as naturally when they meet, as the elephant and Rhinoceros) were daring enough, even at the time when they were loading their guns, to come up with their clubs, and smite on their guns; what had eight soldiers to expect from such a set of people?[7]
In representing the British defendants, Adams emphasized the importance of the case as a demonstration of the colonists’ commitment to the rule of law and principles of liberty. He raised the very real prospect of the British soldiers being tarred and feathered by the mob, asserting that anyone facing that threat “would have a good right to have stood upon his defense, the defense of his liberty, and if he could not preserve that without hazard to his own life, he would be warranted, in depriving those of life, who were endeavouring to deprive him of his.”[8]
His arguments were convincing enough to bring an acquittal on most of the charges, with the jurors agreeing that the British soldiers had no choice but to open fire on the mob.[9]
Ultimately, just two of the soldiers were found guilty of manslaughter, and got off with a branding rather than execution. This, however, didn’t stop the patriots from continuing to denounce the “Boston massacre,” and holding yearly demonstrations on the anniversary of the incident. Framing the discourse about the “massacre” — and leveraging it to mobilize popular support — was ultimately more important than the not-guilty verdicts in the case.
The story of Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride is another example of early American attempts at narrative management, with initial versions of the event painting a picture of a spontaneous reaction to British overreaching and minimizing the elaborate preparations that the patriots had made in anticipation of the British moves to seize the patriots’ supplies of gunpowder, ammunition, and cannon.
While the Midnight Ride was portrayed as an impromptu reaction to British aggression, in reality, the patriots had established a network of spies, informants and fighters who were actively preparing for battle. Worried that this would cast them in a negative light, the Whigs suppressed information that contradicted the story of a spontaneous event, including the written account prepared at the time by Paul Revere himself. His account offered details about the preparations that had preceded the event and so it remained unpublished until 1891.[10]
In the wartime fever of the revolutionary period, not only truth but also civil liberties and due process were considered secondary to absolute loyalty, a reality that expressed itself in show trials, lynchings (a term that has its roots in the American Revolution) and even torture, including the brutal practice known as tar-and-feathering.
In the 1770s, the American colonies passed laws demanding oaths of allegiance to the revolutionary cause, and instituted the death penalty for those who expressed loyalty to King George III.[11] Although many of these measures might today be considered extreme, they were perhaps necessary to ensure victory in a country divided between patriots, loyalists and opportunists.
But it also underscores the fact that the passionate commitment the founders had to concepts of liberty and justice led to a conflict that was fraught with contradictions — including their approach to freedom of thought.
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The Revolutionary War was a gruesome conflict characterized both by ethical uncertainties and staggering casualties, and the clearly drawn sides of good vs. evil might not actually be so clear when examined more closely. There were numerous sides to the conflict, with nuanced views among the conflicting parties, competing loyalties among the colonists and myriad motivations for deciding which side to support — and indeed, sometimes, people had changes of heart and switched sides.
Determining the total numbers of those who actively supported the revolution has long been a topic of inquiry among historians, with many pointing out that popular support for the revolution was not as universal as is commonly believed.
In this context of varied allegiances and lukewarm support, the patriots would resort to coercion to ensure loyalty to the cause. Mobs throughout the colonies routinely utilized tar-and-featherings, expanding the punishment’s earlier use against customs officials and other trade war villains, and increasingly applied it to Tories and alleged sympathizers.
From the northern colonies to the southern colonies, townspeople were quick to tar and feather anyone deemed an “enemy to the rights of America.” In Charleston, South Carolina, for example, two men were tarred and feathered for showing disrespect towards the local revolutionary committee.[13]
Throughout the revolutionary era, patriots used draconian methods of punishment and street justice to enforce allegiance to the revolutionary cause. Stationed in New York, on June 12, 1776, Lieutenant Isaac Bangs wrote in his journal about how rebels dealt with those who declined to support the struggle:
There are very many in the City of York who have behaved in an inimical Manner to America, a large Mob this Day visited many of them, & treated them very inhumanly by carrying them on a Rail through the Streets, striping them, &c. Many of the Officers endeavoured to suppress them, but were unable only to disperse them for a little time. Towards Night they came nigh our Guard, & I desired the Captain to turn out the Guard & disperse them, but he was unwilling ; however, they did no Violence to the two Tories whom they were in pursuit of, but brought them to us & desired us to keep them, which we did out of compassion to the poor Men, but as no Crime was sent in against them, we dismissed them at relieving of the Guard.[14]
Patriots had little compunction over targeting those deemed insufficiently supportive of the cause, with fence-sitters’ nuanced approaches becoming largely untenable after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, when persecution was made official with the adoption of confiscation and banishment acts by many states.[15] Sometimes, though, the hard line taken by the patriots turned people off and pushed them into the loyalist camp.
It was also clear that even among those who fought on the patriot side, their commitment was not always as strong as it could be. As a sign of the often tepid support that many patriots held for the revolution, Congress curbed the practice of exchanging prisoners of war with the enemy, due to the Continentals’ calculation that prisoner exchanges heavily favored the British. While exchanged British soldiers would typically end up back on the frontlines, the freed American POWs would often just go home.
By 1780, Washington came to firmly oppose prisoner exchanges because they so clearly favored the enemy.[16] In other words, he would rather allow Americans to remain in British custody (typically in horrendous conditions) because he knew that most of them would likely not return to the fight if they were set free — a rather poor reflection of American commitment to the cause.
Ultimately, to meet their needs for fighters, the patriots would come to rely on conscription, with Continental regiments sometimes augmented with state militia drafts. Connecticut passed a statute in 1777 that would set recruiting quotas for selected towns that would be met by drafting men from the local militia to serve ten months as Continental soldiers. In October 1777, Virginia adopted a requirement for counties to provide an allotment of one-year militia levies to supplement Continental regiments and in February 1778, Congress authorized the first comprehensive Continental Army draft recruiting act, which called for the enactment of a nine-month levy to fill recruiting quotas.[17]
Conscription efforts met widespread opposition among the populace, with entire counties refusing to respond to militia callouts in Virginia, for example, culminating at times in violence. Every time the state tried to compel men into service, resistance was the result.
Violent riots broke out across Virginia in 1781, with one county seeing as many as 700 men standing in opposition to conscription, and in another town, hundreds of armed men gathered at the courthouse to prevent the draft from taking place. Sometimes the anti-draft efforts were assisted by the very militia officers in charge of implementing the laws.
In Connecticut, one captain refused to comply with draft orders because he felt that the Assembly had set an unfair quota for his town.[18] In another incident in Connecticut, a sergeant, after being instructed to draft a man in 1780, told his captain that his “orders are not worthy of my notice.” In Braintree, Massachusetts, civilian officials voted to compensate its militia officers who were fined for failing to meet conscription quotas.[19]
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For Americans who continue to celebrate “the Spirit of ’76” and hold up the American Revolution as evidence of the country’s exceptionalism and unique greatness, these details about the difficulties in maintaining a fighting force are inconvenient facts.
They show that many Americans at the time could not be bothered with the cause and were more concerned with just getting by than they were with lofty ideals about liberty. Correspondingly, revisionist historians have pointed to these sorts of inconvenient details as proof that the revolution was a top-down affair and perhaps should not be considered a revolution at all. The claims in recent years that the conflict was really about preserving slavery take this cynicism a step further, providing a counter-narrative that not only undermines America’s claims of exceptionalism but accentuates and perhaps exaggerates its injustices.
But both attempts at narrative management — from the patriotic perspective on America’s founding and from those skeptical view of American values — largely miss the mark. For those who actually took up arms against the British and kicked off the war for independence, the issues at hand were simpler than modern historical revisionists would like everyone to believe.
As Captain Levi Preston, who faced down the redcoats on Lexington Green on April 19, 1775, explained his decision to muster that day, “What we meant in going for those redcoats was this: we always had governed ourselves and we always meant to. They didn’t mean we should.”[20]
Capt. Preston’s plain words are a reminder that while we continue to debate underlying causes for the revolution and wring our hands over hypocrisies and historical injustices, to the participants themselves, the motivations were often rather straightforward.
As people who had long exercised the prerogative of self-government, they were not prepared to surrender their rights without a fight. The motives of all the founders might not have been pure, but purity, it turns out, might not actually exist in this or any other historical context.
Nat Parry is the author of Samuel Adams and the Vagabond Henry Tufts: Virtue Meets Vice in the Revolutionary Era and How Christmas Became Christmas. He is the editor of American Dispatches: A Robert Parry Reader. Follow him on X.
[1] “Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, 10 September 1814,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-07-02-0471. [Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, vol. 7, 28 November 1813 to 30 September 1814, ed. J. Jefferson Looney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010, pp. 649–655.]
[2] “From Thomas Jefferson to William Short, 8 September 1823,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-3750.
[3] From Thomas Jefferson to John Holmes, April 22, 1820. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/159.html Accessed February 19, 2024
[4] Lucille Crelli, Emily Rauh and Jon Sawyer. 2019 Pulitzer Center Annual Report. December 31, 2019 https://pulitzercenter.org/blog/2019-pulitzer-center-annual-report accessed January 25, 2024
[5] John Murawski. “Disputed NY Times ‘1619 Project’ Already Shaping Schoolkids’ Minds on Race”. RealClearInvestigations, January 31, 2020. https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2020/01/31/disputed_ny_times_1619_project_is_already_shaping_kids_minds_on_race_bias_122192.html Accessed January 25, 2024
[6] Silverstein, Jake. “We Respond to the Historians Who Critiqued The 1619 Project”. December 20, 2019. The New York Times.
[7] Summation of John Adams in Rex v Wemms (The Soldiers Trial) from The Legal Papers of John Adams, №64, Rex v Wemms. http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/bostonmassacre/adamssummation.html Accessed September 2, 2022
[8] John Adams’s Argument for the Defense. 3–4 December 1770. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/05-03-02-0001-0004-0016 Accessed March 9, 2023
[9] Zavala, Cesar. “The Incident on King Street: the Boston Massacre of 1770”, March 24, 2017. StMU Research Scholars https://stmuscholars.org/the-incident-on-king-street/ Accessed September 2, 2022
[10] Fischer, David Hackett. Paul Revere’s Ride. Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 327–328
[11] Raphael, Ray. A People’s History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence (New York: Perennial, 2002), pp. 214–215
[12] Letter From John Adams to James Lloyd, 28 January 1815. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-6401 Accessed March 9, 2023
[13] Fraser, Walter J. Charleston! Charleston! The History of a Southern City (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989), p. 143
[14] Journal of Lieutenant Isaac Bangs, April 1 to July 29, 1776, pp. 43–44 https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/public/gdcmassbookdig/journaloflieuten00bang/journaloflieuten00bang.pdf Accessed January 19, 2023
[15] Smith, Wendy. “Dark violence and atrocities of the Revolutionary War” May 18, 2017. Boston Globe. https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2017/05/18/dark-violence-and-atrocities-revolutionary-war/X4Kr4EzUUrNeVmnrNeSh2N/story.html Accessed September 25, 2022
[16] Witt, John Fabian. Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History. Free Press (2013). pp. 22–23
[17] Rees, John U. Continental Army draft, vol. 1, 250, Mark M. Boatner, Encyclopedia of the American
Revolution: Library of Military History, Harold E. Selesky, ed. (2nd Edition, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2006)
[18] McDonnell, Michael A. “Resistance to the American Revolution,” in Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole, eds., A Companion to the American Revolution. Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishers, 2000, p. 344
[19] McDonnell, Michael A. “Resistance to the American Revolution,” in Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole, eds., A Companion to the American Revolution. Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishers, 2000, p. 345
[20] Fischer, David Hackett. Paul Revere’s Ride. Oxford University Press (1995), p. 164
