Song Lyric of the Day (Francis Hopkinson, Sending Up Redcoat Readiness in the Revolution)

“A soldier stood on a log of wood,
               And saw a thing surprising.
 
              As in amaze he stood to gaze,
               The truth can't be denied, sir,
              He spied a score of kegs or more
               Come floating down the tide, sir.
 
              A sailor too in jerkin blue,
               This strange appearance viewing,
              First damned his eyes, in great surprise,
               Then said, ‘Some mischief's brewing.
 
              "These kegs, I'm told, the rebels hold,
               Packed up like pickled herring;
              And they're come down to attack the town,
               In this new way of ferrying.’ 
 
              The soldier flew, the sailor too,
               And scared almost to death, sir,
              Wore out their shoes, to spread the news,
               And ran till out of breath, sir.”— American polymath and signer of the Declaration of Independence Francis Hopkinson (1737-1791), “The Battle of the Kegs,” originally published in 1778, reprinted in American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, edited by David S. Shields (2007)
 
Faithful reader, if you’ve been reading this blog long enough and frequently enough, you’ll notice that I open and close the workweek with a humorous quote, on the reasonable supposition that everybody needs a laugh as they start their jobs on Monday and once they make it to Friday. I find no reason to change that pattern as we begin celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
 
If you read anything at all about that document and the American Revolution in general (which I hope you will), nearly all of it will be very sober. And I’ll provide a bit of that over the weekend myself.
 
But human nature doesn’t change that much over the centuries, and the men and women who created this country liked to drink and laugh as much as we do. I think they would have nodded in agreement with a bibulous fellow writer on my college newspaper, when hearing a recent article described as “very sober,” remarked, “Gee, I hate anything sober!”
 
So did Francis Hopkinson, a signer of the Declaration of Independence whom I think you and I would have liked to hang with. A blog post of mine from 18 years ago described the general arc of the career of this witty Renaissance Man of the Revolution, but his part in depicting one incident in the war deserves a fuller explanation.
 
If the rhythm of his verses above sounds familiar, it should: they’re written to the tune of “Yankee Doodle.” Modern Americans associate that tune with patriots playing it on fife and drum on the way into battle, but it began a few decades before the war, with British doctor Richard Schuckburg creating a straw man with a colonist who was both a provincial hick and a pretentious fop.
 
By the outbreak of hostilities at Lexington and Concord, according to this account of the song on the Website of The Kennedy Center, the colonists were throwing the insult back, singing the tune derisively at the fleeing redcoats.
 
Nearly three years later, Hopkinson decided to make further use of the tune’s melody. You can see from the verses I’ve quoted that the lyrics are in ballad form, as capable of being sung as read.
 
What he was doing was rather audacious: taking a failed patriot military operation and, instead of being defensive about it, using it to mock vaunted British heroics.
 
In my high school, if you mentioned “The Battle of the Kegs,” some rowdy classmates might have seen it as a dare to finish off libations at a party. 

But in the American Revolution, it referred to a real patriot tactic in January 1778: to float explosive barrels at British ships. The colonists needed to try something: the British had captured and made themselves comfortable in Philadelphia, the capital of the young republic.
 
The whole thing was a big dud: no British ships blew up. But Hopkinson used the opportunity to satirize the redcoats’ panic and overreaction to the unknown objects coming their way.
 
Ultimately, the American Revolution would have to be settled by other means. But then as now, satire directed at an enemy possessing overwhelming power was necessary to sustain the spirit for the larger contest.

Quote of the Day (Thomas Paine, on ‘The Irresistible Nature of Truth’)

“But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks—and all it wants—is the liberty of appearing.”—English-born American pamphleteer and patriot Thomas Paine (1737-1809), The Rights of Man (1791)

TV Quote of the Day (‘All in the Family,’ With ‘Archie Bunker's Bicentennial Minute’)

Archie Bunker [played by Carroll O’Connor] [to liberal son-in-law Mike Stivic]: “That ain't the American way, buddy. No, siree. Listen here, professor. You're the one who needs an American History lesson. You don't know nothin' about Lady Liberty standin' there in the harbor, with her torch on high, screamin' out to all the nations in the world: ‘Send me your poor, your deadbeats, your filthy.’ And all the nations send 'em in here, they come swarming in like ants. Your Spanish P.R.'s from the Caribboin, your Japs, your Chinamen, your Krauts, and your Hebes, and your English fags. All of 'em come in here and they're all free to live in their own separate sections where they feel safe. And they'll bust your head if you go in there. That's what makes America great, buddy.” [exits the Stivic house]

Mike Stivic [played by Rob Reiner] [to Gloria]: “I think we just heard ‘Archie Bunker's Bicentennial Minute.’"—All in the Family, Season 6, Episode 7, “Mike Faces Life,” original air date Oct. 27, 1975, teleplay by Mel Tolkin, Larry Rhine, and Johnny Speight, directed by Paul Bogart

I felt a shock of recognition when I heard about these lines a few weeks ago. For starters, it was Archie’s benighted view of immigration—one, with its nonstop onslaught of slurs and utter disregard for any notion of a "melting pot," that might have seemed ready to fade into the margins a half-century ago, but resurgent now, with the issue even central to the 2024 Presidential election.

But that phrase “Bicentennial Minute” also struck a chord with me. These short educational segments commemorating the American Revolution aired on CBS—the same network that ran All in the Family—from July 4, 1974, until December 31, 1976.

During that two-year period, one of my high school’s history teachers thought of including similar segments during morning announcements. I was selected to write them. 

Though I enjoyed learning about such bits of history, I came to groan each time as I watched members of my homeroom roll their eyes when the pieces were read into a microphone in the principal’s office and heard all over the school.

It’s funny how the world turns. Public television viewers were lucky to take in Ken Burns’ documentary series on the Revolutionary War, rolling out with greater depth and complexity than those “Bicentennial Minutes.”

On the other hand, the White House has announced the Salute to America 250 Task Force (“Task Force 250”). One of its early initiatives, “The Patriot Games,” doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence, with a name sounding all too much like “The Hunger Games.” How much will its participants learn about the groups that heeded the call of Lady Liberty?

Quote of the Day (Anne Applebaum, on American Culture, ‘No Longer Synonymous With the Aspiration to Freedom’)

“American culture is no longer synonymous with the aspiration to freedom, but with transactionalism and secrecy: the algorithms that mysteriously determine what you see, the money collected by anonymous billionaires, the deals that the American president is making with world leaders that benefit himself and maybe others whose names we don’t know. America was always associated with capitalism, business, and markets, but nowadays there’s no pretense that anyone else will be invited to share the wealth. USAID is gone; American humanitarianism is depleted; America’s international medical infrastructure was dismantled so quickly that people died in the process. The image of the ugly American always competed with the image of the generous American. Now that the latter has disappeared, the only Americans anyone can see are the ones trying to rip you off.”— Pulitzer-prize winning American historian Anne Applebaum, “The Beacon of Democracy Goes Dark,” The Atlantic, November 2025

By all means, as you’re watching Ken Burns’ multi-part documentary on the American Revolution this week, please read as many articles as you can from The Atlantic’s November issue, which is entirely devoted to “The Unfinished Revolution.”

In this year of PBS budget cuts, Burns has been enormously careful in interviews not to sound like he’s taking an ideological, let alone party, side. That won’t stop those inclined from thinking he is indeed “woke.”

For those like me who fear that he might pull his punches, The Atlantic will provide some much-needed perspective, especially the pieces by Applebaum, Fintan O’Toole (“What the Founders Would Say Now”), and David Brooks (“The Rising”). They remind us that the commitment to equality and against despotism was a near-run thing 250 years ago, and perhaps even more so today.

This Day in Revolutionary War History (Moderates, Radicals Unite to Present Case for Fighting)

July 6, 1775—Nearly one year before the Second Continental Congress issued the Declaration of Independence, it took the first step at airing the grievances of the 13 colonies over British depredations.

Two delegates who locked horns in the debate leading to independence, Thomas Jefferson and John Dickinson, took turns in creating Declaration of the Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms, which sought to assure the public—and, in far-off Great Britain, King George III—that their problems were not with the monarch but with his ministers imposing coercive measures on the colonies.

Years later, John Adams recalled that during the American Revolution, one-third of the colonists supported the cause, one-third were opposed, and one-third were neutral. If anything, non-supporters of independence were still in the ascendant one year earlier, but events were assuming a momentum that many feared could not be controlled.

This latter group is not as celebrated as the radicals, who won the vote for independence in the Second Continental Congress and, in the end, the war itself. They come off especially badly in the musical 1776.

But the moderates’ stance was not without merit, and they marshaled compelling arguments for the colonists’ rights before the Declaration of Independence and contributed to the republic afterward.

The most prominent moderate delegates from two large middle colonies, including New York’s John Jay, who became the first Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court; Pennsylvania’s James Wilson, among the keenest legal minds of the revolutionary and Federalist periods; and Robert Morris, a wealthy Philadelphia merchant who earned the nickname “Financier of the Revolution” through his crucial infusion of money when the Continental Army was at its most desperate.

But the leader of the group in the debates already convulsing the Second Continental Congress was Dickinson, a wealthy lawyer who, by refusing to sign the Declaration of Independence—even though he promptly joined the Continental Army as a private—immediately forfeited much of the credit he deserved for mobilizing American opinion against British policies in his pamphlet Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania (1768).

In devastating critiques of the Stamp and Townshend Acts, Dickinson crafted one of the first known strategies for nonviolent protest in American history, preferring to call on economic pressure and appeals to the Mother Country’s longstanding care of its faraway offspring (“where is maternal affection”?: he wondered) to bring Britain’s ministers around.

Unlike fellow Pennsylvania delegate Joseph Galloway, who wanted the colonists to be brought more tightly under the British umbrella, Dickinson preferred that the colonists be allowed to administer something more akin to home rule.

Yet his reluctance to accept the inevitability of independence might have resulted from internal divisions within his own extended clan. His in-laws included not just independence firebrands but also loyalists and others whose allegiance could be swayed to and fro—an example in microcosm of the split that Adams saw in the nation at large.

On a committee that the Continental Congress designated to respond to Britain, Dickinson found himself working with a Virginia delegate less inclined to speak up but every bit his equal as a penman: Thomas Jefferson, whose Summary View of the Rights of British America attracted wide notice within his colony and among the other politicians gathered that year in Philadelphia.

The case that the panel would present had assumed greater importance with the outbreak of hostilities at the Battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill. Dickinson read the first draft by Jefferson—and blanched over its fierce statements.

Jefferson read Dickinson’s revisions, nodded—and mostly accepted only his minor suggestions.

Dickinson reviewed Jefferson’s “fair copy,” made a few other suggestions—and, after some more changes, Congress had in its hands a document that slammed the “Legislature of Great-Britain” for being “stimulated by an inordinate Passion for a Power.” (To track the intense revision process behind Declaration of the Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms, see this "Editorial Note" on the "Founders Online" Website.)

At the same time, it pledged to readers that, while committed to defending their lands and freedoms, “we mean not to dissolve that Union which has so long and so happily subsisted between us, and which we sincerely wish to see restored.”

What a difference a year would make. King George III’s high-handed refusal even to consider the “Olive Branch Petition” adopted that same weekend in Philadelphia undermined the warnings of Dickinson, its primary proponent, that the colonies were incurring enormous risks by fighting Britain without a powerful ally or an effective central government.

In the end, the defiance of the Continental Congress brought on the violence and the assault on privilege that concerned Dickinson. But the cause won out and even a conservative reformer like Dickinson accommodated the new order by serving in the governments of Pennsylvania and Delaware. At his death in 1808, Jefferson hailed his onetime "moderate" opponent in the Continental Congress:

"Among the first advocates for the rights of his country when assailed by Great Britain, he continued to the last the orthodox advocate of the true principles of our new government, and his name will be consecrated in history as one of the great worthies of the revolution.”

Quote of the Day (Patriot Mercy Otis Warren, on American Liberty vs. ‘The Arts of Domestic Enemies’)

“The United States of America embrace too large a portion of the globe, to expect their isolated situation will forever secure them from the encroachments of foreign nations, and the attempts of potent Europeans to interrupt their peace. But if the education of youth, both public and private, is attended to, their industrious and economical habits maintained, their moral character and that assemblage of virtues supported, which is necessary for the happiness of individuals and of nations, there is not much danger that they will for a long time be subjugated by the arms of foreigners, or that their republican system will be subverted by the arts of domestic enemies. Yet, probably some distant day will exhibit the extensive continent of America, a portrait analogous to the other quarters of the globe, which have been laid waste by ambition, until misery has spread her sable veil over the inhabitants. But this will not be done, until ignorance, servility and vice, have led them to renounce their ideas of freedom, and reduced them to that grade of baseness which renders them unfit for the enjoyment of that rational liberty which is the natural inheritance of man. The expense of blood and treasure, lavished for the purchase of freedom, should teach Americans to estimate its real worth, nor ever suffer it to be depreciated by the vices of the human mind, which are seldom single.”—American playwright, poet, historian, and patriot Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814), History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution Interspersed with Biographical, Political and Moral Observations (1805)

Happy Independence Day! Remember, as Benjamin Franklin noted, that we have a republic—if we can keep it.

Oh, and while we’re at it—please don’t start with the notion that Mercy Otis Warren was some kind of DEI inclusion in the study of early American history (as some in the current Presidential administration undoubtedly believe). 

She was one of the first public intellectuals in the republic, frequently corresponding (and sometimes jousting) with John Adams—and, through her patriot husband James Warren, deeply familiar with many of the major players in the American Revolution and the foundation of the nation. 

Unable by law and custom of the time to serve either in the military or in politics, she wielded her pen to influence minds.

Her explanation for the rise of the Committees of Correspondence that sprang up throughout the American colonies against British misrule offers lessons in hope for those looking to resistance in a current time of dismay and trial:

“When afterwards all legislative authority was suspended, the courts of justice shut up and the last traits of British government annihilated in the colonies, this new institution became a kind of juridical tribunal. Its injunctions were influential beyond the hopes of its most sanguine friends, and the recommendations of the committees of correspondence had the force of law. Thus, as despotism frequently springs from anarchy, a regular democracy sometimes arises from the severe encroachments of despotism.”

This Day in Architectural History (Pierre L'Enfant, Visionary Capital Planner, Dies Lonely Death)

June 14, 1825— Major Pierre L'Enfant, an architect who designed the capital of the new American republic only to miss out on his chance for credit and compensation, died at age 70 in Prince Georges County, Md., destitute and ignored by the seat of government he had helped conceive.

A trained painter who, like the Marquis de Lafayette, left his native France in a burst of youthful idealism to join the American colonies in their fight for freedom, L'Enfant caught the attention of George Washington with his draftsmanship skills while serving in the Continental Army Corps of Engineers. He not only endured the brutal winter at Valley Forge but suffered a grievous leg wound at the Battle of Savannah and spent six months as a prisoner of war after being captured at the Battle of Charleston.

After the war, L’Enfant worked on the insignia and diploma for the Society of Cincinnati and the design for New York’s Federal Hall. In 1789, even before Congress had formally approved a capital district for the nation, L’Enfant was lobbying Washington with his proposal for creating it.

Only 11 months after obtaining his prestigious architectural commission, L’Enfant was off the project—depending on who you believe, having resigned or been fired. In a way, the manner of his departure doesn’t matter, because, following continual clashes with the three supervisory commissioners of the new federal District of Columbia, he would have been gone in just a matter of time.

Perhaps taking a cue from his adored commander in the war, Washington, L’Enfant had neither requested nor been given a salary for his work in planning the district. But, as the years went by and his income from other projects dwindled, he felt the urgent need to press his claims.

It did not help that when he had left, he had annoyed many with his egotism, his overbearing ways, and his failure to adequately communicate his vision. He had ordered the demolition of a property belonging to a prominent resident; delayed producing a map for the sale of city lots; spoke and wrote English poorly; and, when he walked away from the project in a huff, taken all the plans with him.

For his last 15 years, the unmarried and childless L’Enfant lived as a charity case on the estate of his benefactor, William Dudley Digges. Long before he was buried in an unmarked grave on the plantation, he had haunted key figures in the city he designed through rambling letters and appearances, wearing his blue Continental Army uniform, in which he fruitlessly pressed his case for proper remuneration for his work. (He wanted $95,000 for his architectural services; Congress would go no higher than $3,800.)

The fulfillment of L’Enfant’s vision for the city—and his honor for creating it—did not occur until early in the 20^th century. The centennial celebration of Washington’s founding led the McMillan Commission—a panel of architects and planners appointed by the U.S. Senate—to consider how to beautify a metropolis that had fallen victim to decentralized, private land development.

The commission members sought to adapt L’Enfant’s original scheme in the light of the “City Beautiful” movement coming into being.

At the same time, a parallel movement grew to remember L’Enfant in the fashion he craved during life. His remains were exhumed, transported in in a casket draped with the American flag to the U.S. Capitol (where he became the first foreign-born man to lie in state) before being taken by military escort to Arlington National Cemetery. There he was buried overlooking the city he had created.

Some aspects of L’Enfant’s plan, such as a waterfall flowing down Capitol Hill, never came to fruition. But others eventually were adopted, including:

*the seat of government on Capitol Hill;

*the mall connecting Capitol Hill to what he called “The President’s House” and we call the White House;

* a four-quadrant grid, with north-south and east-west streets crossed by grand diagonal avenues, creating public squares and beautiful buildings in what consisted of hills, forests, marshes and plantations.

This Day in Colonial History (Disgruntled But Divided Patriots Open First Continental Congress)

Sept. 5, 1774—Angered by a deteriorating relationship with the mother country, representatives from 12 of the 13 British colonies in North America convened in the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia, taking a long but still not inevitable step towards the American Revolution.

Georgia, the lone holdout among the colonies, sent no delegates to the Congress because it needed royal troops to defend against attacks by Native Americans—underscoring the vulnerability that partly motivated Parliament’s increasing resort to taxation over the prior decade.

The delegates gathered in Carpenters’ Hall, home of what today remains, 300 years after its establishment, the oldest craft guild in the United States.

The congress came together in solidarity with Boston, which for the last several months had been punished by the administration of British Prime Minister Lord North for the Boston Tea Party protest of taxation without representation. 

The Coercive Acts (called the Intolerable Acts in the colonies) had ignited further protest by closing Boston Harbor until restitution was made for the dumped tea; abrogating the colony’s longtime charter; allowing British officials charged with capital offenses to be tried in England instead; and gave all colonial governors the right to requisition unoccupied buildings to house troops.

Parliament’s crackdown not just on the colonists’ exports but also their attempts at manufacturing led the delegates to debate how to implement a boycott of British goods.

Two days after the congress opened, Rev. Jacob Duché delivered an invocation--beginning a tradition of prayer in Congress that continues to this day. The delegates must have felt the necessity of it continually, because For much of the time before adjourning on October 26, they debated endlessly without moving much business. 

They were hamstrung from the outset because, as the first time the colonies had gathered for common action, no rules existed even for governing the proceedings.

But the divisions among them were not just deep, but multiple, involving splits:

*between large and small colonies;

*among loyalists seeking an accommodation with Britain, radicals like the Adamses of Massachusetts and Richard Henry Lee of Virginia who were concluding that independence was inevitable, and a more cautious group that wanted to see how events transpired;

*among speakers who had operated within the political environments of their own colonies but were unused to cooperating with others outside them.

Pennsylvania conservative Joseph Galloway, attempting to ward off passage of a resolution calling for boycotting British goods, outlined a “Plan of Union” in which any legislation would require approval by both Parliament and an intercolonial assembly.

At first, it appeared that Galloway’s plan would carry. But opinion shifted when the congress received the Suffolk Resolves transported from Massachusetts by Paul Revere. Patriotic leaders, circumventing the royal governor’s recent ban on town meetings, had gathered in Suffolk County and passed a set of resolutions calling on colonists to ignore the Intolerable Acts, elect militia officers, and conduct weekly drills to defend themselves.

Reconsidering their position on Galloway’s plan, the Philadelphia delegates now rejected his belief that Parliament had the inherent right to tax and govern the colonies. Just before it adjourned, the Continental Congress created a Continental Association that called for a ban on all trade between America and Great Britain of all goods, wares or merchandise.

Nobody who has witnessed the self-interested dickering and nitpicking over proposals that has occurred in our Congress should be surprised to hear that something like the same situation obtained 250 years ago in Philadelphia.

While seemingly far-reaching—it involved not just a ban on importing British goods but also African slaves and tax-bearing commodities from elsewhere in the world—even this ended up watered down by individual colonies’ demands (e.g., Virginia received the right to sell its tobacco for one more year, and South Carolina was permitted to ship rice, one of its most important exports, to Britain).

More significant, though, the delegates left the door open for further action. They agreed to wait to see how Britain reacted, and if there was no improvement in Lord North’s dealings with the colonies, to reconvene the following year.

Ultimately, it was Lord North’s stubbornness in treating the colonies like errant children that forced them to band together.

Great Britain’s refusal to compromise led to armed resistance at Lexington and Concord the following April, and the resumption of delegate business at the Second Continental Congress, only this time with a more drastic—though still not irrevocable—task at hand: how to organize armed resistance to the harsh new measures imposed from across the Atlantic without their content.

The First Continental Congress was notable both for who attended and who did not. Among the latter who would serve on the committee assigned to draft the Declaration of Independence nearly two years later: Benjamin Franklin, making a last-ditch attempt for reconciliation between the Crown and the colonies, and Thomas Jefferson, who, though too sick to travel to Philadelphia late in the summer of 1774, managed to complete A Summary View of the Rights of British America, a tract so acclaimed for its eloquence that it would lead him to be chosen to write the Declaration.

Among those who did attend the Congress: two future military leaders, George Washington, commander of the Continental Army, and, from New Hampshire, John Sullivan, the son of Irish Catholic immigrants, who became a brigadier general in the army.

One name that stuck out for me, from New Jersey, sounded awfully familiar, and that indeed turned out to be the case: Stephen Crane, great-great grandfather of the great American novelist famous for The Red Badge of Courage.

Quote of the Day (Bernard Bailyn, on the Realism and Innovations of Revolutionary War Leaders)

“It is difficult to convey the energy and imagination that went into the constitutional creations of the Revolutionary generation— the freshness of the Revolutionary leaders' minds, their capacity to re-imagine the political world. Yet these were not intellectuals devoted to ideas as such; they were not scholars engaged in the systematic study of political and constitutional thought, or philosophers debating the details of formal discourses. They were intelligent, well-educated provincials—merchants, planters, lawyers, and politicians—coping with the manifest problems of public authority that faced them, referring back for guidance to their own experience and the traditions they knew, rejecting some ideas and institutions and modifying others to suit their needs, and propelled into new ways of thinking and new forms of public organization not by the desire for innovation but by logical necessity, by the attraction of the possibilities they could see, and by the sheer momentum of their efforts. The result, in these provincial states and in the American nation, was a new configuration of public authority and a new set of constitutional procedures which in a short period of years resonated throughout the Atlantic world.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian Bernard Bailyn (1922-2020), “Atlantic Dimensions,” in To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders (2003)

The image accompanying this post, Declaration of Independence, was painted in 1819 by American artist John Trumbull. 

Quote of the Day (Thomas Paine, on How a Nation’s Character ‘Is Much Easier Kept Than Recovered’)

“Let but a nation conceive rightly of its character, and it will be chastely just in protecting it. None ever began with a fairer than America, and none can be under a greater obligation to preserve it….

“With the blessings of peace, independence, and an universal commerce, the states, individually and collectively, will have leisure and opportunity to regulate and establish their domestic concerns, and to put it beyond the power of calumny to throw the least reflection on their honor. Character is much easier kept than recovered, and that man, if any such there be, who, from sinister views, or littleness of soul, lends unseen his hand to injure it, contrives a wound it will never be in his power to heal.”— English-born American patriot and pamphleteer Thomas Paine (1737-1809), “The Crisis XIII” (“The Last Crisis”), originally printed in The Pennsylvania Packet, Apr. 19, 1783 reprinted in The American Crisis and in Thomas Paine: Collected Writings, edited by Eric Foner (Library of America edition, 1995)

Notice that date when this piece was first read by Americans? You would say, correctly, that it was 240 years ago today.

But it was also exactly eight years after shots rang out at Lexington and Concord, plunging the 13 British colonies into a war for independence—a conflict that gave rise to one country dedicated to liberty and that, Thomas Paine assured readers, would inspire the world.

Paine started his essay by quoting the first and best remembered line in the entire series on “The American Crisis” he wrote during the American Revolution, as if closing a circle: “These are the times that try men’s souls.”

With a treaty now being negotiated with England to end the hard years of fighting, you can almost see him catching his breath as he lauds what “the blessings of peace, independence, and an universal commerce” would bring his adopted country.

But the sense of ease is short-lived, and the great pamphleteer couldn’t help but warn about the danger to the new nation’s character posed by someone, as yet unknown, who might injure it “from sinister views, or littleness of soul.” That character, so dearly won, can never be retrieved if lost.

For years, it appeared that America, though sometimes mistreating people who came under their sway, would survive the twin temptations of anarchy and autocracy that haunted Paine and other leaders of the revolutionary generation--sailing past the disputed election of 1800, the Civil War, and the Great Depression.

Now, in my gloomiest moments, I worry that Paine’s warning has recently gone unheeded. The insurrection of January 6, 2021 rent America’s reputation as a stable, durable example of a democratic republic where transfers of power were accomplished without violence.

Not only does the figure responsible for that event have (in Paine’s phrase) no “power to heal” the divisions he unleashed, but he shows not the least inclination to want to do so—and, in fact, has promised “retribution” towards those who upheld this nation’s honor by opposing his electoral schemes.

That “art of the steal” also resulted in a powerful global media company afraid to push back against the falsehoods he peddled about the Presidential election of 2020.

Until the settlement with Dominion Voting Systems announced late yesterday afternoon, Fox News seemed ready to risk a trial that could have cost it $1.6 billion—not to mention an adverse ruling that would have trimmed the libel protections long enjoyed by them and other media organizations.

Look at that “blessings of peace” paragraph again. Paine understood that national character could exist as strongly as individual character—that the two were, in fact, inextricably connected.

Nearly a decade later, in The Rights of Man, Paine identified more concretely than before the type of person who could despoil the national character—someone who, already rich, could further profit from his position in the government:

“When extraordinary power and extraordinary pay are allotted to any individual in a government, he becomes the center, round which every kind of corruption generates and forms. Give to any man a million a year, and add thereto the power of creating and disposing of places, at the expense of a country, and the liberties of that country are no longer secure. What is called the splendour of a throne is no other than the corruption of the state.”

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Edmund Burke, on the Religious Dissenting Spirit Behind the American Revolution)

“Religion, always a principle of energy, in this new people is no way worn out or impaired; and their mode of professing it is also one main cause of this free spirit. The people are Protestants; and of that kind which is the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion. This is a persuasion not only favourable to liberty, but built upon it. I do not think, Sir, that the reason of this averseness in the dissenting churches, from all that looks like absolute government, is so much to be sought in their religious tenets, as in their history. Every one knows that the Roman Catholic religion is at least coeval with most of the governments where it prevails; that it has generally gone hand in hand with them, and received great favour and every kind of support from authority. The Church of England too was formed from her cradle under the nursing care of regular government. But the dissenting interests have sprung up in direct opposition to all the ordinary powers of the world; and could justify that opposition only on a strong claim to natural liberty. Their very existence depended on the powerful and unremitted assertion of that claim. All Protestantism, even the most cold and passive, is a sort of dissent. But the religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principle of resistance; it is the dissidence of dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion. This religion, under a variety of denominations agreeing in nothing but in the communion of the spirit of liberty, is predominant in most of the northern provinces; where the Church of England, notwithstanding its legal rights, is in reality no more than a sort of private sect, not composing most probably the tenth of the people. The colonists left England when this spirit was high, and in the emigrants was the highest of all; and even that stream of foreigners, which has been constantly flowing into these colonies, has, for the greatest part, been composed of dissenters from the establishments of their several countries, and have brought with them a temper and character far from alien to that of the people with whom they mixed.”—Anglo-Irish statesman and father of conservatism Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies, delivered March 22, 1775

The separation of church and state was one of the most tangled subjects in contemporary debates about government—a fact underscored by the explosion of commentary from both the left and right, much of it unhelpful, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade.

It would be a stretch to say, as many on the right would have it, that America was founded as an explicitly “Christian nation.”

But habits of mind formed in Americans’ religious practice—principally, those related to resistance to “all implicit submission of mind and opinion”—lay at the heart of American colonists’ increasing alienation from England, and those instincts would make it impossible for the Mother Country to continue to impose punitive legislation on the colonists, warned Edmund Burke.

One month before British troops clashed with the Americans at Lexington and Concord, this father of modern conservatism cautioned the House of Commons about the futility of coercion. A key part of his argument against force was the temperament of the colonists in their environment. British North America, he noted, was disproportionately composed of "dissenters from the establishments of their several countries."

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Andy Griffith Show,’ As Andy Tells What Led to ‘The Shot Heard Round the World’)

Sheriff Andy Taylor [played by Andy Griffith]: [explaining the founding of America to Opie and three other schoolboys] “Well, one time a long time ago, this country was a part o' England, and we wasn't gettin' along with 'em too good. Fact, we was thinkin' about breakin' away and startin' our own country, but the king over there in England, he says, ‘You do that and I'm gonna send my redcoats.’ They was British soldiers and he's a gonna send 'em here to whup us.”

Deputy Barney Fife [played by Don Knotts]: “Of all the nerve!” —The Andy Griffith Show, Season 3, Episode 23, “Andy Discovers America,” original air date Mar. 4, 1963, teleplay by John Whedon, directed by Bob Sweeney

On this day in 1775, the Battles of Lexington and Concord took place—the commencement of continual hostilities between royal forces and their rebellious American colonists, what we know as the American Revolution.

The ideal way to learn about the day when, as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “the embattled farmer stood/And fired the shot heard ‘round the world,” is to visit the bridge itself where the volleys were exchanged, which I was lucky enough to visit, as I recounted in this post from a dozen years ago. 

Not quite as involving is to explore in detail the poems the poems that made these fateful encounters part of American legend: Emerson’s “Concord Hymn” and, for the events preceding this, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride.” A couple of bestselling novels from yesterday—Howard Fast’s April Morning and John Jakes’ The Bastard—might, if you’re lucky, still be found in public libraries or book/remainder sales.

But for as long as I remember, most people learn about this and other major points in American history from a school textbook—or, as one of my college professors once termed it, “a cultural menace to our society.” These are often committee-reviewed, leeched of personality and drama, but filled with what kids hate the most: dates.

That’s why Andy Taylor has come to the rescue.

As I discussed in a prior post, The Andy Griffith Show has become for me in the last few years a gentle cleansing agent for all the toxins in American news and souls. And the episode where today’s quote comes from is a special favorite of mine, for the following reasons:

*Griffith plays a brilliant straight man to Don Knotts, as the sheriff, to test whether history really was Barney’s favorite subject, asks his deputy what the Emancipation Proclamation was (not a bad question to ask at the time of its centennial, amid rising civil-rights activism—or in our own time, come to think of it);

*It kicks off the relationship between between the Sheriff of Mayberry and Opie’s teacher, Miss Crump, as Andy, with his sunbeam smile, changes her from antagonistic to—well, more friendly; and

*It piques interest in American history in an unusual way, as Andy has Opie and his pals—previously uninterested in history, much to Miss Crump's dismay—hanging on his every word as he relates what happened at the outbreak of the American Revolution. He does it without any dates (the closest thing: “a long time ago,” which, in his Southern twang, is the equivalent of “once upon a time” for boys), but with a good deal more content than Jeff Spicoli expressed about the Declaration of Independence in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (i.e., Jefferson called for “some cool rules ourselves, pronto”)

This, folks, is why Southerners are such excellent storytellers.

This Day in Revolutionary War History (Arnold Raid on Richmond Rattles Jefferson)

Jan. 5, 1781—Facing only token opposition, Royal troops in Virginia under their notorious new commander, Benedict Arnold, plundered and destroyed at will public buildings and private residences in Richmond, the recently designated capital of the commonwealth.

The attack was so unexpected that few troops were available to stand in the way of the traitor who, for all his double-dealing, continued to display the energy and skill that had once made him so valuable to the Continental Army.

Having no clue until too late as to Arnold’s ultimate destination, Governor Thomas Jefferson (pictured) tried in vain to instigate a military counter-offensive and maintain civil authority in the small community he had done so much to bring into being as the new seat of government in Virginia, leading to charges of incompetence and even cowardice that dogged him for the rest of his life.

Arnold's raid—as well as the larger five-month campaign he conducted in the interior—also had consequences for Jefferson’s personal life. To avoid capture by the English, he sent his wife Martha and young children packing for Tuckahoe, the plantation where he had spent much of his childhood. That journey through the wilderness in the deepest heart of the winter led to his five-week-old daughter Lucy catching a cold that worsened until she died in mid-April.

Forty years ago, in a college seminar on the American Presidency, our professor was fond of pointing out that for many Presidents, their prior experiences as governor foreshadowed how they would act in the White House. How, then, should we view Jefferson’s performance as an executive?

Unlike fellow Virginian George Washington, the “Sage of Monticello” had no experience of physical combat. Unlikely as it might seem, he had even less appetite for political combat. He left after two terms as both governor and President exhausted from the struggle, with the braying of his enemies ringing in his ears.

It is true that the powers of the Virginia governor were weak, requiring consensus by an eight-man Council of State. It is also true that any occupant of the office would be handicapped by the inability to raise funds at that time.

On the positive side, Jefferson had enough popularity to win a second term, and enough foresight to have drawn up, four years before, enabling legislation to move the commonwealth’s capital away from Williamsburg—easily accessible to invading troops attacking with a navy—to a more defensible interior location in Richmond. Moreover, he took care to move arms and necessary papers to safety.

But Jefferson lacked the personal charisma of predecessor Patrick Henry, Washington’s hard-won recognition of the many ways that things could go wrong in a military campaign—or the willingness to exercise the authority of his office up to its constitutional limits. Thus, he did not receive word until late that Arnold was pressing inland from the coast; did not notify Washington in time that Continental troops were needed to repel the invaders; did not guess correctly that Arnold would press towards Richmond rather than Petersburg; and did not call out the militia in time to defend the capital.

(In the case of the militia, Jefferson—suspicious of the threat posed by a standing army to republican government—remained, even three decades later, deeply naïve about the ability of poorly trained soldiers, signed up for limited service, to carry out significant military duties. His belief that Canada could be captured as a result of “a mere matter of marching” turned out to be spectacularly wrong, and the burning of Washington under his successor, James Madison, echoed his own experiences with Richmond.)

Unable to capture Jefferson himself, the redcoats took some of his slaves from the governor’s residence in Richmond. They then proceeded to Portsmouth, establishing there a base from which they could continue to launch raids in the countryside.

With Jefferson’s second term drawing to a close in early summer and no successor in sight, the English reached the Monticello, the mountain estate that he thought would be safe from English deprivation. Again he was wrong, forcing him to gallop away so hurriedly that some mistook it for cowardice.

Following an embarrassing inquiry into his conduct of the defense of Richmond, the legislature adopted a resolution praising his “ability, rectitude and integrity.” But critics began to complain about his lack of decisiveness in directing the campaign—notably Major General Baron von Steuben, who had won Washington’s gratitude and trust for intensively training Continental troops. Steuben was indignant that Jefferson had not used his office to order militiamen or even slaves to construct a fort at Hood’s Point.

Just a few weeks before his death in 1826, Jefferson had been willing to sit down with a son of onetime critic Henry Lee to provide documents justifying his role in the Richmond campaign. But the former President was too exhausted by what proved to be his death struggle to respond at the necessary length.

This Day in Constitutional History (Birth of John Jay, Conservative Revolutionary)

Dec. 12, 1745— John Jay, who came late to the cause of American independence but then assured its security by negotiating its key early treaties, advocating for a strong central government, and serving as the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, was born in New York City.

The son of a New York aristocrat of Huguenot descent and successful lawyer in his own right, Jay exerted significant influence in the Continental Congress and in the period between the end of the American Revolution and the establishment of the federal government. But he was not in Philadelphia for the two early events that marked the founding of the nation: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

That factor meant that his birthday would not be celebrated by schoolchildren or that he would become the subject of a musical, in the way that Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and Hamilton have entered the inner circle of best-remembered Americans of the Revolutionary period.

For instance, before I started researching this post, what I knew about Jay could be boiled down to a few bullet points:

*his years of birth and date;

*his education at King’s College (later Columbia University, where a residence hall is named after him);

*his service as governor of New York State;

*his short stint as the first Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court;

*his negotiation of an extremely controversial treaty with Great Britain named after him.

In my opinion, few Patriots were held in higher regard among their peers—or have been as neglected by the general public today—as Jay. He deserves far better than this, though, and I hope with this post to raise consciousness, at least among my readers, of his achievements.

A Scottish visitor to the United States, Henrietta Liston, described him in this way at the height of his career in 1796: “his appearance is rather singular; in dress and manners strikingly like a Quaker; –His eye penetrating, his conversation sensible and intelligent.” That was the same impression he made on those he encountered in the law, government and diplomacy.

As a member of the Continental Congress, Jay had helped create the “Olive Branch Petition,” a last-ditch attempt at reconciliation with England. But with independence declared, he cast his lot irrevocably with the Patriots. He was held in such high regard by other delegates at the Congress that he was chosen to lead it in 1778.

The four figures carved into Mount Rushmore were meant, according to sculptor Gutzon Borglum, to commemorate “the founding, growth, preservation, and development to the United States of America.” But if a non-President could be added to the group, Jay would deserve serious consideration.

His triumph in negotiating the 1783 Treaty of Paris ending the Revolutionary War lay not merely in securing American independence, but also the country’s right to all the territory east of the Mississippi, south of Canada and north of Florida. That immediately made the new nation geographically larger—richer in resources—than Britain, France and Spain.

And Jay did this under challenging circumstances. The other American treaty diplomats were not there at first to join him (Henry Laurens had been captured at sea by the British, John Adams was negotiating a loan with the Dutch, and Franklin came down with a bad case of gout), and Congress had instructed him to do nothing without involving America’s French ally. But Jay succeeded in making Spain (France’s other ally) and Britain, go along with his non-negotiable demand for the area east of the Mississippi.

The best compressed depiction I know of for Jay comes from historian Joseph J. Ellis’ The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789, which praised his “massive probity” and “persistent geniality.” Even a crankier appraisal, in Forrest McDonald’s The Formation of the American Republic, 1776-1790, before calling him (with little to no substantiation) “pompous and pathetically vain,” also referred to him as “a brilliant and almost pathologically honest New York aristocrat, [and] a dedicated nationalist.”

Jay’s well-known nationalism led to him being frozen out of the New York delegation at the Constitutional Convention by Gov. George Clinton, the closest figure at that time to what we consider a political boss. But he could not be taken out of the fight for long.

Sickness prevented Jay from writing more than five of the eventual 85 essays in the key pro-Constitution documents, The Federalist Papers, but—as the politician who had spent the longest time in the public eye and the senior member of the trio—he was more crucial in lending prestige to the early stages of the ratification struggle than the younger contributors to the project, James Madison and Hamilton. He and Hamilton then proved shrewd in delaying New York’s vote until a positive vote by Virginia persuaded delegates at New York’s convention in Poughkeepsie that they should not be isolated from the new nation.

With ratification secured, George Washington offered Jay any position he wanted in the new government. The former Chief Justice of New York’s Supreme Court took the similar position at the national level.

Due to circumstances largely beyond Jay’s control, that choice proved frustrating. During Jay’s five years on the court, he and the associate justices ruled on only four cases. Not only were justices expected to “ride circuit”—i.e., hold hearings twice a year in one of three judicial districts—but some (e.g., James Wilson) missed attendance because of land speculations and the resulting need to avoid debt collectors.

The issues that Jay faced in his quarter-century career continue, in one way or another, to figure in American political dialogue:

*A strong, united federal government. Jay’s anxiety in watching the young nation flounder under the Articles of Confederation led him to press for a stronger form of government, in what eventually became the Constitution. He warned, in Federalist No. 3, against the nation fracturing into “three or four independent and probably discordant republics or confederacies.” He looked to the trans-Allegheny territory just won at the negotiating table as a means of binding the nation together further through commerce. When he lost his first race for governor of New York in 1792 because of questionable vote counting, he urged his supporters to accept the results with grace. All of this stands in marked contrast to the current post-election atmosphere in which Presidential vote counts are endlessly litigated and Rush Limbaugh has talked loosely about secession.

*The proper government response to health emergencies. As New York Governor, Jay faced a stark challenge during the yellow fever epidemics of the mid-1790s. In a blog post in March of this year, Robb Haberman, associate editor of The Papers of John Jay, analyzed how Jay transitioned state health policy from private philanthropy to government action, through measures instituting a quarantine and better sanitation.

*Race relations. Jay had inherited slaves from his father, but by the mid-1780s he had publicly turned against the practice, becoming the first president of the New York Manumission Society. As governor of the state, he finally won passage, after five tries, in 1799 of a law calling for emancipation in the state to take effect in 20 years.

*Congressional opposition to treaties negotiated by Presidential envoys. The Iranian nuclear deal, concluded by Barack Obama and abandoned by Donald Trump, does not come remotely close to engendering the same level of controversy as the Jay Treaty. Jay accepted Washington’s request to negotiate with Great Britain reluctantly, and only because he believed it would be the only way to avert war only a decade after the American Revolution had ended. The outcome of the negotiations— requiring Britain to stop “impressing” or capturing sailors, but granting “most favored nation” status as trading partners—formed one of the wedge issues spurring the rise of Thomas Jefferson’s more Gallic-oriented faction, the Democratic-Republican Party.

As he left office in 1801, John Adams appointed Jay to return as Chief Justice. But Jay declined, citing his poor health and the lack of the “the energy, weight, and dignity” needed to support the court. That opened the door for John Marshall to take the post.

Jay lived another 28 years, but was deeply saddened that shortly after his retirement from public life he lost his beloved wife Sarah. Yet now he was content to enjoy, untrammeled, private life as a gentleman farmer.