>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C. >> Edward Widner: Good
afternoon everyone. Welcome to LJ119. My name's Ted Widner. I'm the director of the
John W. Kluge Center. And if you grew up in New England
like I did, this time of year, April 19th -- specifically
the night of April 18th to 19th is the night some of
us remember as the outbreak of hostilities in 1775 and
switched to a military phase of the long conflict between
the colonies and Great Britain. It's now sort of developed into
just a marathon and a lot of parties around Boston, and not too many
people remember the political circumstances of April 1775. But I can guarantee you, one person in this room knows
them very, very well. It's such a pleasure to introduce
to you T.H. Breen of Timothy Breen, who is the John Kluge
professor of American law and governance here
at the Kluge Center. He's also the William Smith
Mason Professor Emeritus at Northwestern University. He's the James Marsh Professor at
large, at the University of Vermont, and that is -- that has to be the
greatest job anyone could ever have to be a Professor at Large and
that is what he's been for us. He's covered the waterfront. He's been inspiring presence
among us at our lunches and in the hallway,
striking up conversations. The Kluge Center has a lot of
different kinds of scholars in different disciplines and Timothy's been just a
wonderful addition to our mix. Many of you know his work already. Many of you are personal
friends of his, and it's delightful to
welcome you all here. I can't possibly list his productive
output because it would take up most of the next hour. He's the author of
more than 60 articles. Many, many books, the most recent
one of which is a favorite of mine, <i>George Washington's Journey</i>
, which came out in 2014. In 2010, <i>American Insurgence </i>. In 2005, <i>The Marketplace
of Revolution:</i> <i>How Consumers Shaped
American Independence </i>. in 2003, <i>Colonia Americans
in an Atlantic World </i>. 1985, <i>Tobacco Culture </i>. 1980, <i>Puritan's and Adventurer's </i>. 1970, <i>The Character
of a Good Rule </i>. And that's not even all of them,
and I'm already out of breath. In all this work he's
done political history, economic history, social history. He's written about
the Colonial north, he's written about
the Colonial south, he's written about everything. And it's just been a great
personal pleasure for me, as someone very interested
in this period, to spend these last
few months with him. I'm looking forward not
only to his talk today, but I'm really looking forward
to his review of the new Museum of the American Revolution that
opened in Philadelphia this week. He's covering it as a
journalist reviewing it for <i>The New York Review of Books </i>. And I think, thinking about it as
a journalist and as someone living in the present is part of the way
Timothy Breen thinks about events that we are still dealing
with on a daily basis. Its history, but it's
still effecting us and we have new institutions
springing up with new interpretations. And thank god he's here to make
sense out of it for the rest of us. So without further ado, please
welcome Timothy H. Breen. [ Applause ] >> Timothy Breen: Thank you Ted,
and all of his staff and helpers who have made the last four
months if nothing else, extraordinarily productive. I mean, to work in the Library of
Congress means I even imagine a book and it's on my desk the next day. It's an incredible resource. And so it's coming to
the end, but my wife and I have really enjoyed being here and I thank all of
you on this hot day. I might say just in passing, the new
Museum of the American Revolution that opened yesterday in
Philadelphia is very good. I'm not going to trash
it in my article. I thought I would. I went there with that goal. But progress and intelligence has
betrayed me, and I came away feeling that this is an important
contribution to our shared understanding of what the revolution
means for our country. I come 19th Century
Irish background. Not part of the American Revolution, and yet the American
Revolution is all of our realm. I mean, it created our political
system for better or worse. I think better some days. But there you are. The -- my comments today
will be woven someway -- I'm not quite clear, into a book that I'm writing, I
was researching here. And it's called <i>An Appeal to
Heaven </i>, which was the major slogan of the American revolutionaries, certainly in the first
-- 1775 and 6. So it's <i>An Appeal to Heaven:
The American Revolution </i>. And this book proposes to
address several questions. My paper today won't
address all of these, but I certainly will
entertain questions. One of the oldest questions is
still out there and that is, what was revolutionary about
the American Revolution? At the end of the day
that's still a problem. Second, how did ordinary people -- men and women living in small
communities from Georgia to New Hampshire --
experience the revolution? Not as soldiers, but as members
of small communities sustaining and mobilizing, and re-mobilizing
a revolution that succeeded -- in fact, the book will
argue that although most of our attention still is on
the great leaders of the time, and maybe on the battlefields -- like NFL plays, you follow
the little marches around. It's all important. I'm not denigrating that. But if it hadn't been for small
towns that never saw the face of war -- that sustained the
revolution -- we would not have won. I mean it was the people
who got behind the cause and keep the cause alive. And third, is a question
that developed in the course of my research here, and that is how
did a war that generated such hate, such bitterness, a sense of
revenge, anger, domestic enemies -- your neighbors could have killed
your family or destroyed your farm. There was hostility in the
land, and yet at the end of the American Revolution it ended. Unlike almost every other
revolution we can think of, our revolution stopped and
there was not killing fields or massive sense of
revenge in the land. I think that's something
needs to be explained. Not in order to praise us as
an exceptional revolution, but as a problematic in
comparing our revolution with other revolutions
throughout the war. Like a good undergraduate teacher
I have a crude handout some of you have I hope. I always praise the crudity
of my handouts because I claim that it's more authentic --
its like more revolutionary. It was neat, you see, you
wouldn't -- it wouldn't be proper. So, at the start -- and let me just
read my comments as best I can, and welcome your questions. Let me warn you in advance that
this is a very radical presentation, and if you want to leave now
or you're going to be offend -- it's a triggering moment. Right? You're going to
hear some radical things. Rest assured, I'm not proposing
anything wildly conspiratorial such as that George Washington
was really a secret agent for the British Parliament or
that the founding fathers wanted to redistribute land and
property to the peasants in the name of worker equality. Rather drawing on the research
that I've been pursuing here at the center, thanks
to Ted and his friends, I want to interrogate closely
a revolutionary narrative that Americans -- all
of us I think -- have been telling ourselves about
the nature of the nations origins. The process of reconsidering the
relationship between chronology and narrative, between
the assumptions about time and its effect on causality
raises for me at least, exciting, even radical new questions
about the fundamental character of the American Revolution. Now even to pose the question -- as I have in the title
of the lecture -- what time was the American
Revolution -- may strike you as slightly perverse since in fact the temporal
boundaries of revolution from the initial colonial
grievances to the achievement of political stability under the
federal constitution have been well established in the historical memory of the United States
for several centuries. But however persuasive
this narrative may be, recent and ongoing research
invites a thorough rethinking of the familiar account. Although some scholars
once traced the origins of the American Revolution
back to the dark forrest of ancient Germany --
they really did that. And others have insisted that the
American Revolution did not realize its full revolutionary potential
until the age of Jackson. The story of our national origins -- think of third grade
again in your life -- most often begins with the
1760 coronation of George III and then step by step it traces
the growth of colonial unrest from resistance to the Stamp
Act, through the Boston Massacre, the Tea Party, the Battle of
Bunker Hill, and then the drafting of the Declaration of Independence. After this defining moment
in 1776, the standard litany of events loses some of its clarity
and many historians have leapt with interpretive grace
from the Declaration of Independence all the
way to the Constitution. I call this the lily pad or
the frog pond theory of leaping from one event to another event. Of course this traditional approach
of time and narrative works best with intellectual history
or the story of history of political thought, since the
development of abstract concepts such as virtue and liberty
often does not concern itself with the changes social
and political context of the events on the ground. To be sure, a revolutionary
narrative framed by the accession of George III and the ratification of the Constitution does possess
a kind of compelling logic. It allows us to navigate
a smooth interpretive path from national liberation
to political stability. This traditional periodization
however, raises a troublesome
interpretive challenge. The standard narratives
suggest be it implicitly a kind of inevitability of
celebratory chronicle of the American people marching
forward under the banner of liberty and rights to their
well deserved destiny as citizens of the New Republic. Not surprisingly, this complacent
story lends itself to organic, even providential metaphors. You know them. Children growing up and demanding that the mother country
treat them with respect. Or colonies growing to maturity like
political plants until they flower in the form of political
independence. From these perspectives,
the temporal flow of crucial events acquires
a kind of causal aspect, becoming in the telling a
coherent teleological tale in which one thing leads necessarily to another thing from
beginning to end. The description of the nations
origins therefore often takes a kind of self-congratulatory tone. One grounded on the assumption
of American exceptionalism. A belief that our revolution, this revolution was
somehow different, special. Even unique. Unlike other revolutions that
have shaped the modern world. In this rendering there's
not much incentive to engage in a comparative analysis. In other words, to examine
whether the American revolutionary experience over time
paralleled in interesting ways that of other nations
throughout the world. The French Revolution. The Haitian Revolution. The Russian Revolution. What is at stake in
posing a question about revolutionary time therefore,
is the possibility, the invitation, the excitement of developing
a less teleological, more coherent understanding of the
relationship between interpretation, periodization, and narrative. The alternative conceptualization
of revolutionary time that I want to advance here is that what
we now think of generally as the single essentially
monolithic block of time -- a block of time roughly
from 1760 to 1788 -- should in fact be three
discrete segments. Each demanding its own interpretive
standing in the flow of time. I bring to bear evidence number one. You can look, you can follow. You see the block of
time and now through it. It'll be on the final exam. So pay attention. This revised perspective does
not start with the assumption that history is moving
towards a predestined goal such as greater democracy,
or more personal freedom, or a powerful American empire. Rather my argument
begins with the assertion that the period most often
associated with the run up to the revolution and the
Declaration of Independence -- in other words, the period 1760 to
1773 -- was nothing of the sort. These years are more accurately
defined as a general crisis of imperial rule throughout
the Atlantic world. The relatively minor provincial
risings in the American colony -- the Stamp Act crisis, the Boston
Massacre, the destruction of the tea in Boston harbor, lets face
it, were really minor tremors in an ongoing effort by an ambitious
imperial power to make sense of the unprecedented
challenge of governing peoples, of different races, and of different
backgrounds, and of different places over a vast world in which
communication remained slow and unreliable. The second stage -- the second
new stage of this revised version of revolutionary time begins in
1774 with the military occupation of Boston and ends with
the Peace Treaty of 1783. A period during which a colonial
rebellion -- colonial rebellion -- transformed itself into a genuine
political and social revolution. It involved the experience of
armed resistance, of large numbers of ordinary people suddenly
assuming meaningful authority for the first time in
communities throughout American, and of social relations that were
no longer defined by monarchy or aristocratic relationships. These developments
promoted a strong sense of republic equality among
white males that turned itself into initial armed response against
monarchical authority and eventually into a revolution few people
wanted or anticipated in 1776. The third period -- again,
look at your chart -- in this revised narrative is the
years following the end of the war. Did not lead inevitably
to the Constitution, the federal constitution. Divorce from the traditional
triumph discourse -- of which we all know we should
see the period after 1770 -- 1783 as a post-revolutionary moment
in which ordinary people came to terms with life under an
experimental federal regime and as they did so,
they sought to reabsorb into an uncertain civil society
a large number of Americans who had recently sided
with Great Britain. To depict this decade of the
1780's as "the critical period" -- that's what it's called
in most books -- it focuses unwarranted attention on
elite fears of disorder and anarchy and by so doing, turns an explosion of entrepreneurial energy
among ordinary men and women into an alarming account of a
revolution betrayed at the moment of it's greatest success. So let me explain a little bit the
rationale for this new narrative. And Ted, do you have
a whip or something? A prod if I go. A radical recasting of
revolutionary chronology begins with a thorough reassessment
of the period before 1775. These years seem especially
vulnerable to teleological interpretation. One can easily understand
the temptation to anticipate in the years, the coming of
revolution and independence. Because we know -- we know what's
coming and it appear only fair from this perspective to depict
every event as a harbinger to the final break with
Great Britain, but even armed with the clarity of hindsight
there's no reason to conclude that local complaints about
imperial rule, even urban riots, even threats of organized
resistance amounted to any more than what they were, highly limited
protests that lost the potential for a large scale mobilization
within days or months of their initial occurrence. Such episodes hardly
represented a serious break with imperial authority. Throughout the 18th Century the
British showed remarkable ability to maintain order in
England, Scotland, Ireland. The negotiations in this empire
usually involved a pragmatic mixture or carrots and sticks, and
at the end of the day even when lethal violence was employed, the narrative process successfully
re-channeled local anger. For example, the bloody conclusion
of the Massacre at St. George Fields in London in a tense 1768. There were at least seven people
brought down by government troops. About the same as the
Boston Massacre. But this was not a sign that the
British people were conspiring to launch a revolution? Conditions in North American
colonies were not that . The Boston Massacre certainly did
not lead inevitably to Bunker Hill or the Declaration of Independence. Instead, the event introduced
three years of extraordinary peace. 1770 to 1773 were the most
peaceful, consumer oriented years of the whole colonial period. And poor Sam Adams was in
utter despair in his ability to persuade the people that
they had legitimate grievances against the empire. No doubt, Parliament's
attempts during the 1760's to raise revenue -- stamps, sugar,
tea -- irritated the Americans, especially those that
lived in the port cities. But, the fact of the matter is
that those Boston agitators even at the height of the Stamp Act
crisis did not receive much support from the ordinary people
living in other parts of the British American colonies. Leaders of the colonial
assemblies wrote to other leaders of
colonial assemblies. They talked about possible coercion, about making stamp collectors
resign, but that was about it. Even in Massachusetts town meetings in the countryside
showed little enthusiasm for an agenda of the
Boston radicals. And I can say I've gone through all
the town records and they're still in print of these towns
of Massachusetts, and outside of Boston there was a
big yawn about what those wackos in Boston were up to in 1765. So the ability to limit and control
occasional controversy is precisely what one would have
expected at the time. Even if there had been
no revolution. After all, the American colonists
viewed the victory over the French in the Seven Years War as
incontrovertible evidence of their American loyalty
to the empire. And by their own lives,
they were not full partners in a powerful expanding
imperial regime. In so much, as the Americans
experienced a growing sense of nationalism after the
war, the expressed it in almost a reflective emotional
attachment to Great Britain. Indeed, many historians call
this phenomena I think rightly, the sense of colonial nationalism. What then, you might say -- should
there be any critics out there -- of the much quoted pamphlets
that drive the standard account of the American -- the
coming of the revolution? Surely like the prophets
of the Old Testament, they were preparing the way. But in fact, celebrated
writers such as John Adams and John Dickinson were not
harolds of an independent republic. The colonists who analyzed the
American grievances were members of a creole elite. In other words, a group of wealthy,
privileged, well-educated men who felt themselves marginalized
within the imperial structure. That was their problem. Not enough patronage
is going our way. What these ambitious
Americans wanted was -- lets put it bluntly -- respect. To be accepted by the leading
British political figures as fully British and
not as lesser beings who inhabited the marshlands
of empire. George Washington sulked when he
was not given a proper commission in the British Army. John Adams looking to
make a political -- or legal career in
Massachusetts complained bitterly that Hutchison's clan
got all the business, and he had not received
any imperial patronage. Protesting his imagined inferiority
in British eyes, Adams announced, I say we are as handsome
as English folks here and therefore should be free. James Otis agreed. Benjamin Franklin held out
in the hope of acceptance to the very eve of revolution. It was only when he was humiliated
during a public hearing in London that he finally decided that
Philadelphia was his home. Creole leaders were not
plotting revolution. They only wanted to be
accepted in the imperial club. Frances Bernard -- a royal governor of Massachusetts during
the 1760's -- a very smart and misunderstood
man -- understood how to accommodate
these upity colonials. And he advised the Earl
of Hillsborough in 1769 that if Parliament would only
create a kind of upper house in each colony, a kind of
American House of Lords filled with wealthy Americans appointed
by the King, it would -- and I quote Bernard -- go a
long way to remedy the disorders to which the government
of America is subject to. And he predicted --
I think correctly -- that eager Americans would fall
all over themselves to have -- and I quote again -- Barron
prefixed to their name. The beauty of the change
would be that in the addition of so many royal honors from the
new form of govern, it will assist in the establishment of it by
engaging men who are ripe for honors to reconciling the
people to the system that introduces the new honors. Nothing came with the plan. Since in fact parliamentary leaders
did look at the Americans as well as the Irish, as well as the
Scots, as inferior subjects. That's true. But bias here threatened what
could have been a brilliant reform to save the empire. What once appeared as
simply the inevitable run up to the American
Revolution therefore takes on a very different
character when we view it as a crisis within the empire. Great Britain was not
alone in having troubles with demanding creole leaders. Throughout the new world
they demanded more authority. They demanded a meaningful
voice in the Atlantic economy. This was the moment when
the British, the French, and the Spanish discovered for the
first time that they were not fully in control of the lands and
the peoples of the new world that they claimed to rule. The new world remained
uncharted territory for these imperial administrators. And awareness of this demanding,
fluent, fluid experimental aspect of 18th Century expansion I think
erodes our standard revolutionary narrative and indeed it brings us into an unprecedented
imperial crisis. And reminds us that the
pre-revolutionary period was not pre-revolutionary at all. It was rather a period of sorting
out complex relations, races, distances, peoples
throughout a territory that amounted to half the globe. The second, even more
significant break in the standard revolutionary
time in 1774. This was a crucial year. This was the major year that
witnessed the rendering of time, rendering of the old narrative
we all learned in third grade. For although memories of an
earlier period shaped the political consensus of consciousness
of Americans the landscape of power underwent a
sudden and profound shift. And the trigger for massive change
was not the traditional story of the coming of the American
Revolution, the Boston Tea Party. It was not the Boston Tea Party. Many Americans saw the destruction
of the private property in Boston as an extreme and unpleasant
form of protest. As an unwarranted provocation. An attack on property. And there was in fact almost no
outpouring of popular support for the people of Boston who organized throwing
the tea into the water. What fundamentally and irrevocably
transformed the character of colonial politics was not
the destruction of the tea, but the reaction in Parliament
to the destruction of the tea. The story of protest by creole
leaders suddenly became a tale of massive popular mobilization. And so in 1774 we enter an entirely
new, unprecedented political world. Lord North and his
allies passed a series of harsh retaliatory acts
known as the Coercive Acts, which not only closed the Port
of Boston to all commerce, but more important -- and
I think we overlook -- authorized armed military occupation of the second largest
city in colonial America. I might say that the Brits had
never used armed occupation in their own cities under -- this was a provocation of
great, great magnitude. And for the colonists
living is distant places such as South Carolina and Virginia, the British punishments seemed
totally out of proportion with the seriousness of the crime. Over night, British -- over night
Boston became a city occupied by a standing army and it's
subjects subject to marshal law. And suddenly in that year, you find
Americans -- ordinary Americans, men and women -- talking about
something called the American cause. A new phrase in the
lexicon of protest. The revisionary view
of revolutionary time that I'm proposing takes our
attention away from the writings of celebrated leaders, the ones -- the pamphlets, the arguments
of lawyers and planters. My time restores the people who
actually showed up at Bunker Hill and figured out what revolution
meant in their lives without having to read the learned pamphlets
that figure so centrally in our intellectual history. One detail -- and I know there's
an Irishman way back there -- one detail I just want to give you
that shall we say, puts on the alert about the standard
teleological account, my research and the research of other scholars
have shown there was a massive flood of Irish immigrants -- massive -- in 1774, 75, into the
American colonies. They were driven out of Ireland
-- mostly in the North -- by British restrictions on the linen
industry that were very similar to the restrictions on
American stamps and so on. My point was, these Irishmen came
to America and had no experience or memory of the American
protest of the 1760's. They were irritated -- they
knew to hate Brits on their own. They didn't need the
American experience. So what does it matter? Research has found that in
some of the continental lines in Pennsylvania especially, over 60% of all the fighting men
were new Irish immigrants. Hm-mm, so much for the teleological
argument about growing protests. It's the new men, angry
at the empire. Now 1775, these protests or this resistance did not signal
the start of a genuine revolution. That came later. At first, most American's
hoped that Lord North and his supporters would simply
come to their senses and find a way to negotiate a way
to save the empire. They wanted reform,
not independence. And there was little
-- almost no enthusiasm for Republican government. From this perspective almost
all Americans in 1776 -- 75 I would say -- were loyalists. All of them. They simply wanted the
British to back down and restore an imperial system
that would bring them security and respect within the empire. Thomas Jefferson noted in
something that you all should read, because its kind of
a weird document, and that is the first draft of
the Declaration of Independence. It's a testimony to good teaching. I mean, we all think
it's so well written, but it's took his colleagues
to cut the adverbs and the adjectives out
and make it pretty. What did he write at this moment
of the second period of time? We might have been a free and great
people together, but a communication of grandeur and of freedom it
seems is below the British dignity. In so, so they will have
it so, the road to glory and happiness is open to us. We will climb it as a separate
state and acquiesce in the necessity which pronounces us to say to
Britain, an everlasting ado. That got cut out. At the start of the war, therefore
the American insurgence clashed over strategies of
reconciliation and not over fundamental political ideas. Even colonial leaders who later
opposed independence [inaudible] at the beginning of resistance
values such as virtue and liberty. By 1776, our protest against the
British oppression had begun -- that had begun as a colonial
rebellion comparative to India or Nigeria, or other
former colonial states. It had become a real revolution. The transformation did
not involve the shift in fundamental political principles. Ideology did not turn
rebellion into revolution. After all, the idea that the people
are the only legitimate source of political power has a very
long history reaching back into the Middle Ages. The new element in the time equation
was experienced quite simply by living through a time of
violent political change. It was one -- it's one thing
to discuss with your friends in the pub rights and equality in
the abstract, but quite another to experience newly formed groups,
army groups, committees of safety and inspection that recruited
people that had never served in any political movement at all. Participation in political
resistance created fresh and new and exciting emotional bonds
that carried radical potential. White American males came to believe
in a crude sense their equality. Aristocratic claims to special
privilege no longer counted for much. Achievement through works
suddenly transcended the old order. That's revolutionary in
the late-18th Century. To be sure, the language of rights
inspired American revolutionaries. The traditional story of
revolution stresses the centrality of these enabling principles they
did yesterday in Philadelphia. But that approach discounts
other binding elements, some of which make
modern commentators on our revolution uncomfortable. The actual experience of war
included not only Republican ideas, but also a forgotten lexicon of
unsettled words such as fear, vengeance, retaliation,
denunciation, betrayal, revenge, and violence. That's part of our revolution too. It is this emotionally
charged political environment that has gone missing from
the historical literature, securing the revolution -- securing
our revolution was difficult and dangerous for all people. Suspicion of neighbors, enforcing
the revolutionary agenda, taking property from domestic
enemies, is often thought as a part of the story of other revolutions. Less nice, less good
revolutions than ours. But I can assure you it was a
nasty business those eight years. After the victory of Yorktown,
Americans entered the third and final, and blessedly
for you, short period. Which is best described I think
as our post-revolutionary period. This different terminology
post-revolutionary, deflects our attention away from the
absolute obsession with the coming and the drafting of
the Constitution. George Washington, Andrew
Hamilton, James Madison, the dominant characters
in the campaign to establish a strong
central government -- certainly they did worry about the
dangers of political fragmentation. They became so anxious about the
threat of stability that in fact that they greatly exaggerated the
danger posed by small agrarian riots such as Daniel Shays -- a
group of impoverished veterans in Massachusetts that presents
absolutely no military threat to anybody, but it
became a national incident of great historical power
in our story of stealth. But however we may
admire [inaudible], we do not have to accept
this analysis. If one concentrates chiefly on
elite fears, on looming anarchy as most American historians
have done, one discounts the buoyant optimism that characterized the
American people as whole. There's not much evidence that
they were paralyzed by anxiety over the country's future. The revolution in itself
unleashed an extraordinary burst of energy and optimism. Suddenly after years of
British economic regulation, ordinary Americans devised schemes
everywhere to better their lives. Build a canal, speculate
on land, a new mill, new people were participating
in fresh and exciting, and free ways in a growing economy. And they moved west in huge numbers. Probably the worst
thing that ever happened to the Native American
people's on this continent. But they did. Like locusts they moved west and started new lives
and took up new farms. And they had lots and
lots of children. The greatest percentage of
population growth in the history of the United States
occurred in the 1780's and it is almost not traceable to
migration from foreign country. Men and women are having kids
because they're optimistic about the future of their country. They are not sitting around saying, oh we need a strong
federal government. Where's the -- where should we go? To Philadelphia? The rejection of the
standard narrative, a smooth almost predestined tale of
gifted leaders guiding the people from colonial protest to political
stability, therefore brings into fresh focus and new
challenging concerns. And to me, the payoff seems obvious. First, the years before
1774 become part of a genuinely imperative
world story about imperial rivalries
throughout the Atlantic world. The competition for military and commercial dominance shaped
the lives of ordinary Europeans and African slaves, as well
as indigenous people's. Second, an account of the
actual experience of living through a revolution
restores ordinary people to a tale previously dominated
by a group of leaders. It liberates us from the
obsession on the founding fathers and gives genuine agency to
the people in the creation of their own new republic. And third, by rejecting
the teleological account of the Constitution as
almost providential, restores our appreciation of a surge
of popular entrepreneurial energy that generated excitement in
a post-revolutionary society. The new periodization of
revolution -- here I pause it -- is dynamic, its open to the people
who did not pen founding documents or serve as generals or statesmen. And so, in a surge for a
more textured, more complex, more inclusive, more
comparative revolution it is time that we all ask ourselves, what
time was the American Revolution? [ Applause ] >> Thank you. Thank you very much. That was a wonderful talk. I've learned a great deal from it. I've asked a number
of people as a test, what gave rise to the
Boston Tea Party? Almost invariably say, well the
British increased the taxes. But I gather in fact, it
was almost the opposite, that people like Sam Adams were
smuggling tea from Holland, undercutting the British and the British dropped the
export tax to be more competitive. Now it may be more
complicated than that, but I'd like to know
what your views are. >> Timothy Breen: No,
you're absolutely right. Even though I was fearful that your
accent would lead to an attack, in point of fact, the tea act
would have lowered the price for the consumer. What the Americans said
is lower price or not, it's still a tax that
we didn't vote on. And so it's on principle
not acceptable. But I don't -- but again,
my point was all that aside, it was the British reaction
sending General Gage and thousands of soldiers to Boston and closing
Massachusetts to all commerce, and closing all town meetings that by then had a 200 year
history of self-government. It's exactly the same thing -- I'm looking at my Irish
friend back there. It's exactly the same thing the
Brits after the Eastern rising. The Easter rising, most Irish
people felt were a bunch of nutters, you know. And they probably were. But it was the execution day after
day after day, and the humiliation of the Irish people that turned
a weak protest into a rebellion. Same thing happened here. Nut cases were made
martyrs to the people. Yes? He's going to give
you a speaker dinger. >> At the beginning of your lecture
you raised the intriguing question of how Americans coped
with reabsorbing those who had been the enemies within
in the wake of the revolution. >> Timothy Breen: Yeah. >> And I wonder if you could
say a little about that and your conclusions on that. >> Timothy Breen: Okay. Thank you very much for -- because that's what I spent the
last four months studying here at the library and now Ted will
think he got his money's worth. It is cited probably
impressionistically that about 60,000 Americans left
at the end of the war and went to Nova Scotia or other places,
sometimes to the Caribbean. And of that group, a huge
number were not eager to go, because they were the slaves
owned by these people. So whatever the number is. But the research that I've done
shows that the great majority of people that had participated
as enemies of the revolution in some demonstrable way either
giving aid and comfort to the enemy or perhaps even serving in
one of their loyalist legions, far exceeded, far, far
exceeded that 60,000 number. And this set off a very forgotten -- thankfully it's forgotten
because now I can write my book -- but the first rate
refugee crisis in America. Because these people that had
been enemies of the revolution -- and some of them had done
some very bad things -- they wanted to come home. They wanted to live with their
neighbors they had violated, and humiliated, and hurt. And the ordinary people
of American said, no way. No way. It was the leaders and the people
that signed the peace treaty in Paris that said -- as all
political documents like this, the language is very wishy washy -- but that Congress of the
United States would recommend to the separate state governments
that they would not pursue loyalists or any other people who had
acted against the interests of the United States
before the peace treaty. The people were not happy to
hear this and there were many, many incidents of local violence. The Sons of Liberty, which
we associate with the lead up to the revolution
reformed in Boston in 1783 to keep the refugees out. But in time -- by 1786 remarkably --
I think people -- they wanted farms, they wanted to go west,
they wanted to say hello to all these kids they're having. Whatever they did, the hatred
dissipated, and so it's true that for instance,
some of the leaders in the Washington cabinet
were Tories. They had, you know, come back. Trench Cocks is one
economic analysis. The point is for a concatenation
of elements in our country -- and I think probably
it was its size. Because what happened to the Tories? My answer is usually -- and
it's very glib -- is Ohio. But people found other things
to do than pursue revenge. If I may -- I don't think -- I'll maybe end with a story
I found in my research here. Some of the hottest, my physical
violent, horrible crimes of neighbor against neighbor took place
in the American south. Georgia, South Carolina,
especially up country Carolina. There's a town there that some of you may have gone
to called Ninety-six. People think I'm making it up,
but it is a town and it's 96 miles from Charleston on the
old Indian trade road. Ninety-six had some bad
times during the war. And there was a man that
had created real havoc who had the interesting
name of Matthew Love. That was the last thing
I'd associate with Matthew, because
he was a killer. But the war ended and the
peace treaty was announced and he showed back up in Ninety-six. Said, I'm here guys. Back home. The locals said, oh boy. They locked him up in jail and they
waited for the judge to come up -- because there was -- judge's
rode circuit in South Carolina -- came up and it was Judge Grimke. You may recognize the name because
he had two interesting daughters who protested slavery on
the coming of the Civil War. Judge Grimke read to
the jury a statement. He said, look we hate this guy. This guy did some really bad
things, but they were war crimes and this war and this people are not
authorized to deal with war crimes. That's another world. We're a new world. We're new South, we
have our own laws and there's nothing we
can do with Matthew Love. And he wrote in his little diary,
he said, the people listened. They were so attentive. It was like a civics
lesson, you see. They said, oh yeah, right. We have war times and now times. And they all took the Judge
Grimke back to the local hotel. Probably had a drink or
two, and he went to bed. And the people of 96 marched back to
the jail and executed Matthew Love. And that moment resolved
the tension. That was -- for these people
that was the end of the -- that was the end of the war. It wasn't a mass killing,
but there were limits. And then they found -- yes? >> Well thank you for the
wonderful revisionist account. But I was hoping you would
answer your own question. Namely, most revolutions
have similar beginnings. But the American Revolution had, as you pointed out, a
rather unique ending. A very successful ending. And so this [inaudible]
revolutionary optimism, how do we explain it and why
every other revolution ends in terror, in [inaudible] regimes. And so what made it possible then? This positive revolutionary success. Even before the Constitution,
before Philadelphia. >> Timothy Breen: I mean, if
you do the standard count its like I know you study
religious history, whatnot. You know, its like the standard
New Testament account, you know, what books are written about. And we tell ourselves the story
of these wonderful leaders who were worried about anarchy
and lead us to stability. That's the answer. You know, we have a Constitution. The fact that it's one of the most
undemocratic documents you can possibly read is beside the point. My -- I just think that
there were elements, mostly the [inaudible] come to
think that a much maligned historian of the late-19th Century --
Turner -- the Turner Thesis. You know, he said that
basically [inaudible]. Boy, it makes a lot
of sense to me now. People rushing to Kentucky,
and Ohio, and Indiana, and reinventing themselves and
finding new ways to make money. They're not pretty. You know, this is capitalism
without control. I understand all that. But they were following a different
tangent of their lives and because of the distances out
there it made it very hard to have these post-revolutionaries
[inaudible] with France or Haiti never had a
good day [inaudible]. >> [Inaudible]. The very experience of [inaudible]. What ended the revolution
is [inaudible]. So it is unique. [Inaudible]. >> Timothy Breen: I know,
and I said I didn't want to have an exceptionalism
view and I don't. But I've kind of fallen
into it beside myself. Almost anybody who
witnessed American society in the 1790's, the
Jeffersonian period. [Inaudible] was right. He was a good observer. I don't like him, but
he was a good observer. He said, you know, these
Americans they have a problem, what do they do? They form a committee. They have a group. You know, they don't turn to the
government to solve their problems. And since they came
out of the revolution that was genuine heritage
of the revolution. A mind experiment that's
very interesting, you know, is that much of what is
seen in the literature of the revolution today --
and I won't name historians. They're all wonderful and good. And that is that America
became more democratic, more open, more inclusive. And so, what everyone thinks
of those rolly polly world -- Andrew Jackson -- that's the
American Revolution working itself out. Right? But lets say the
revolution hadn't occurred. How much of what we see as revolutionary would
have happened anyway? I mean is Canada a [inaudible]
that we had to avoid? No. I mean these -- England
is giving the Irish the vote for god sake. I mean these things are in the air. So what a lot of elements
that we say are part of our revolutionary heritage
would have happened anyway. All right, I'm finished. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.
