History 117: US History To 1877

Tom Paine

Who declared American Independence?  The answer is not quite as simple as it appears.  Gordon Wood relates how some observers remarked later that Sam Adams of Boston had at least decided on independence as early as 1768, following enactment of the Townshend Duties.  One thing is clear in Wood’s account of the movement from resistance to rebellion –there was a real sense of American Independence readily apparent by 1774.  That was the year of the Coercive Acts and what Wood characterizes as “open rebellion in America.”  Students in History 117 should be able to identify a variety of ways that the authority of the British imperial system quite literally fell apart in the American colonies during the period from 1774 to 1775.  Yet still, there was no “declared” independence until the summer of 1776.  Nonetheless, it is not enough to simply reward the credit for American Independence to the decision-making of the Second Continental Congress and  the prose of Thomas Jefferson.  According to Wood, it was Tom Paine, more than any other figure, who most fully expressed “the accumulated American rage against George III.”  Students might benefit from studying this rage in Paine’s sensational pamphlet, Common Sense (1776) or by analyzing its influence on the “long train of abuses” which dominate the second half of the Declaration of Independence.  Yet regardless of how exactly independence got declared, or how to explain the ideology which lay behind it, one Founder who was noticeably reluctant about embracing this revolutionary step was John Dickinson, the famous pamphleteer.  Dickinson warned his colleagues on July 1, 1776 that with their declaration that they would be attempting to “brave the storm in a skiff made of paper.”  Dickinson soon came around to the cause, but his fears remained a recurring concern for many.  Securing independence proved even far more challenging than declaring it.

Franklin’s “retirement” portrait (Feke, c. 1746)

In his short book on The American Revolution, historian Gordon Wood offers a series of powerful insights about the nature of the British Empire in the eighteenth century.  First, it was about much more than the so-called thirteen colonies along the Atlantic coast of North America.  To begin, Wood points out that there were 22 British colonies in the Western Hemisphere by 1760, and the eighteenth-century empire, which he terms “the greatest and richest empire since the fall of Rome,” quite literally “straddled the world” (4).   Yet by the middle of the eighteenth century, it was also a wildly troubled empire.  If there was one colonist in British North America who seemed to embody both the perils and promises of the British imperial system, it might have been Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790).  Today, we consider Ben Franklin as the ultimate symbol for the American spirit and yet during his own lifetime, Franklin was often regarded as more British than American, and even after the War for Independence began, the diplomat and renowned scientist Franklin was a uniquely cosmopolitan figure.

Students should consider how Wood describes the state of the British Empire in North America by the mid-eighteenth century.  Then they might consult Franklin’s famous Autobiography which was written in several stages between the early 1770s and late 1780s.  How does Franklin’s story, from his boyhood in Boston to his rise to prominence in Philadelphia and London, help illustrate key aspects of the sprawling British imperial system?  Franklin’s autobiography was ostensibly written for his adult son (then royal governor of New Jersey) but was not completed and published until after father and son had a irreparable break over their differing views on the American Revolution.  Franklin’s autobiography was first published as a book in French, rather than English, after his death in 1790.  Only later, during the nineteenth century, did Franklin’s memorable life story come to be considered an American treasure.  You can read more about the complicated history of the Autobiography from a helpful online exhibit at the Library of Congress.

Maps like the representation to the left, or the one above right, offer shorthand ways to contextualize Franklin’s life in that eighteenth imperial system.  He was a by-product of the forces outlined here, even as he worked at first to reform, and then ultimately to revolutionize them.  Gordon Wood explains how to visualize Franklin at the center of this story in the one-hour lecture embedded below.

Gordon Wood: The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin from The Gilder Lehrman Institute on Vimeo.

Thanksgiving myths?  Say it ain’t so!  Yet in History 117, students are reading a handful of short, insightful essays by Edward O’Donnell and Charles Mann that help situate the traditional story of Thanksgiving into a more complicated narrative borne in the shadows of the Columbian Exchange.  Those with a particular interest in the Pilgrims might also appreciate this longer article by John Humins (available via JSTOR) on the  complicated political and diplomatic intrigue behind the scenes of the first Thanksgiving in 1621.  When Pilgrim separatists arrived in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620, they thought they were settling in Northern Virginia.  In some ways, they found a similar dynamic with Wampanoag Indians as John Smith and the Jamestown settlers had discovered several years earlier with the Powhatan Indians.  In other words, as foreigners they were originally sized up as pawns in the political and imperial battles of the indigenous populations.  Humins focuses his attention on the tensions between two Indians:  Squanto and Massasoit.

In class, we also discussed ways to use the Thanksgiving story as an illustration of the evolving Puritan worldview.  At first, Puritans held many days of prayer, fasting and thanksgiving, but they avoided celebrations of Christmas and Easter.  Puritan settlements in New England expanded rapidly throughout much of the seventeenth century, offering the world a “city upon a hill,” as John Winthrop famously called it, but also soon demonstrated the tensions in applying the dictates of covenant theology to the realities of everyday life.  The civil wars in England, as well as pressures from the Indians and mercantile trade, eventually conspired to shift the strict Calvinist dogma of the Puritan faithful into a more secular “Yankee” culture.  Religious faith still mattered in Puritan (now Congregational) New England, but so did other values.

1772 Washington portrait by Charles W. Peale

George Washington famously appeared at the Second Continental Congress in his old Virginia militia uniform from the French & Indian War.  His appearance sent a radical message –Washington was ready for a fight by the spring of 1775.  Washington’s feisty sentiments and his Virginia birth explain a great deal about why he was selected to lead the new Continental Army and why he became such a revered figure during the Revolutionary War.  Washington was not, as Gordon Wood observes, a distinguished battlefield tactician.  However, he was an extraordinary organizer and leader of men.   Students in History 117 should be able to explain how Washington transformed the Continental Army and why his strategy for victory proved to be so prescient.  In class, we will discussion Washington’s 1778 letter to the committee of Congress, which another historian, Jack Rakove describes as a “virtual state paper,” and try to assess its significance.  We will also review the experiences of the Continental Army in the field, during the various campaigns of the Revolutionary War.