News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
It did this old history nerd’s heart good to watch a classroom full of middle schoolers reenacting some of the high points of the American Revolution earlier this month.
I was a Bicentennial child. The spark of my love for history was already burning in my 10-year-old soul by 1975-76, and the Bicentennial observances poured gasoline on the fire. My passion for history has enriched my life in ways I can’t even begin to enumerate. It’s touched everything I am and do. I hope that some of those kids in Deb Riehle’s U.S. History class catch that fire.
Riehle constructed the unit on colonial America and the Revolution so that the students created a character who lived and worked in colonial Boston. The object is to make the history come alive. That’s tremendously important. The history of our founding is so wrapped up in civic pieties that we forget that real people struggled, bled, and died to create the nation in which we live.
It is particularly valuable in these fractious times, when our politics have become so passionate that families and friendships fracture over them, to recognize that we have seen all of this before. From 1765 to 1775, politics in the American colonies were almost too hot to touch. You might even call them toxic. Then, as now, families and communities split in rancor, as some tied their identity to loyalty and responsibility to the Crown, while others aggressively asserted their perceived rights as Englishmen — and then as Americans. Then as now, partisans believed fervently that they had the right of things, and that their adversaries were bent on destruction.
In 1775, rancorous politics erupted into a shooting war — a conflict that in many communities was as much a civil war as it was a contest between colonists and the Empire.
While there were high principles at stake, self-interest was no less a motivator than it is today. And there was plenty of uncivil behavior to go around. Protesters rioted and destroyed property; political opponents were run out of the country or killed. In areas where law and order broke down, gangs of thugs — Patriot or Loyalist — held sway, and nobody’s life or property was safe. The Congress that nobly pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to American independence also behaved with a discouraging level of venality. Their inability to properly support the Continental Army almost led to its disintegration. General George Washington spent as much effort fighting Congress as he did fighting the British.
The founding documents of our nation, which have proved remarkably resilient over more than two centuries, were not holy writ inscribed by the finger of God — they were wrangled over, often with great vitriol, by men who could be as blindly and nastily partisan as any political player today. The slanders and calumnies heaped upon opposition politicians in the early American Republic by a fiercely partisan press would make today’s social media keyboard warriors blush.
In short, things in the founding days of the American Republic were not as different from today as we might think. It is only the patina of time and the crafting of a civil mythology around the founding that has made it seem like a golden age from which we have fallen far.
To recognize the messy and often nasty politics of the founding era is not to denigrate the creation of the Republic — quite the opposite. It is to recognize that — despite being deeply flawed humans, often eaten up with personal ambition, greed, and every other one of the seven deadly sins — the founders built a nation that has weathered many a storm. We have often fallen short of our own principles — but those principles remain a high standard for a polity that protects and promotes life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
That’s all a bit much for a middle schooler to take in — but an introduction like what they got through their studies this fall prepares them for more exploration and a deeper understanding down the line. Here’s hoping that they take that journey.
Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.
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