As the July 4 holiday came and went, Americans stumbled out of their lockdowns and quarantines fueled by the Covid-19 pandemic and the drudgery of talks and debates over what actually happened on January 6 and an election cycle that never ends, because a former president refuses to let the embers die, we celebrated freedom like never before. Our fireworks displays felt even more celebratory than ever and freedom felt like what it truly is - something to be grasped by all Americans.
But, in the midst of all that, there has been a lot of tumult over our history as a nation and the place of many Americans who view injustices in all sectors of society and in the very foundations of our national conscious.
I have always been connected to a sense of place, regardless of where I have lived, and every place I have lived has left an indelible impression on my psyche that leaves me somehow homesick for those places I have lived as I feel a certain nostalgia from time to time, sometimes on a fairly regular basis. I have rarely left a place with bad sentiments, so the memories of place always linger and the history of those places always leaves an imprint on my brain. I am sure the same thing will be true when the times comes for me to leave the small town I now live in and move on to another. Because, I believe, we do not settle a place as much as we experiment with it and move on to something better.
Nostalgia comes into play as I remember July 4 and what it should mean to all of us as Americans.
At the intersection of his expertise and our need for coherence about our national founding arrives historian Joseph Ellis with his soon-to-be-released book, The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773-1783.
The Pulitzer Prize winner has spent a lifetime in the materials of late 18th-century America. His National Book Award for American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson and his Pulitzer for Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation should credential him as a scholar even among those skeptical of the Founding Fathers for their participation in (or at least tolerance of) slavery and their uncomprehending approach to women and native tribes. Ellis dives into these evils and attendant blindness to what we see easily now. He is no apologist for the hypocrisy of Jefferson and interrogates every significant Framer’s culpability for the failures of the epoch. He does so, however, with awareness that they did not see or reason with the same powers we possess. Not even the era’s “American Prometheus” - Benjamin Franklin - could escape the stains of that time.
What Ellis does, though, is remind us specifically of those times and the ideas they unleashed. In The Cause, Ellis reacquaints us with the enormous sacrifices made by the first citizens to secure independence and with it the implicit promise of the Declaration of Independence - that all humans are created equal - and reminds us of the collective genius and courage of the day. He also renders judgments, many of them surprising, of the events of 1773 through 1783.
The “most perilous” moment in the early days of the country? It was when George Washington’s officers gathered to perhaps launch a coup at Newburgh, New York, only to have Washington surprise them with a personal appearance and a speech full of dramatic measure. At one moment, Washington hesitated, drew out his reading glasses that only his closest aides had seen him use, and said to the 550 military men, some close to mutiny, “Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in service to my country.”
“Several officers wept openly,” Ellis writes, a glimpsing for the first time of some tiny sign of human frailty in their leader.
The “most lopsided triumph in the history of American statecraft?” Treaty of Paris of 1783, the first mover of which was the often forgotten John Jay and the co-conspirators Franklin and John Adams, the trio that Congress thought first to accuse of treason for disobeying their explicit instructions, but which later came to understand that genius can put aside orders when confronted with an opportunity that could not be missed. Jay proposed - and Franklin and Adams agreed - to ignore their explicit orders, and then bypassed the French and went directly to the British to win a western boundary of the Mississippi River for the new nation, a vast expansion of many patriots’ dreams back home.
The “most consequential battle in American history” is Yorktown, for there could be no Gettysburg or Normandy without it first having been won; and it would have been lost without a string of lucky and unlikely breaks that fell on the American and French side of the ledger.
The title “America’s most legendary warrior” is a harder call, but - in Ellis's view - belongs to Daniel Morgan, who led the Virginia Rifles, while Nathanael Greene is described as Washington’s “most trusted lieutenant and most battle-tested general.” Both feature prominently in the closing campaign of the long war. “We fight,” Greene declared, “get beat and rise to fight again.”
Most timely of all, though, is Ellis's thorough treatment of both Washington and Jefferson’s views of - and shame for - the enslavement of people. That both men profited from this evil institution is well known; less well understood is their steady evolution, brought about by the war itself, toward the view that the institution was incompatible with “The Cause.” Ellis is no apologist, but he is a chronicler of the entire revolution, its best aspirations, its worst contradictions and its ongoing dilemmas.
As we celebrate our freedoms, in any form, it is important to recall it all.
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