Crispus Attucks, first martyr of the American Revolution (2 of 2)

The concept of a secular and/or patriotic “martyr” is conceptually a little dicey. But people do see certain figures as martyrs in the kind of secular sense that Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. are seen as martyrs.

So I’m not inclined to split hairs over that concept here. Despite the gaps in the available documentation, the specifics of the 1770 Boston Massacre are clear enough to say there were five American colonists killed by British soldiers on that day and that they were then and later seen by American patriots as secular martyrs in the event.

Just a week after the massacre, Paul Revere engraved a story reporting on a funeral procession for four of the five victims: Samuel Gray, Samuel Maverick, James Calwell, and Crispus Attucks. The coffin on the right is for C.A. and he is named in the story. (1) The fifth martyr of the event, Patrick Carr passed away soon afterwards.

As the text in that story notes, their fellow citizens staged a procession for the bodies on their way to the cemetery of “the unhappy Victims who fell in the bloody Massacre of the Monday Evening proceeding.”

Thomas Jefferson also invoked the martyr theme when he wrote in 1787, “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots..." The quote in its original context is followed by a sentence that sounds a bit odd in the context of 2026: (2)

[W]hat country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure. [my emphasis]

Couldn’t he have said “fertilizer” instead of “manure”? :)

Paul Revere also did this engraving of the Boston Massacre later that month, which was titled “The Fruits of Arbitrary Power, or the Bloody Massacre." (3)

The Wikimedia page on the image describes it as a “sensationalized portrayal of the skirmish, later to become known as the ‘Boston Massacre,’ between British soldiers and citizens of Boston on March 5, 1770.” It also notes that the image is “Not entirely an accurate depiction of the event that transpired.”

And it notes Revere’s published version included these verses, likely from him, as part of the pamphlet A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston:

Unhappy BOSTON! see thy Sons deplore,

Thy hallow'd Walks besmear'd with guiltless Gore:

While faithless P--n and his savage Bands,

With murd'rous Rancour stretch their bloody Hands;

Like fierce Barbarians grinning o'er their Prey,

Approve the Carnage, and enjoy the Day.

If scalding drops from Rage from Anguish Wrung

If speechless Sorrows lab'ring for a Tongue,

Or if a weeping World can ought appease

The plaintive Ghosts of Victims such as these;

The Patriot's copious Tears for each are shed,

A glorious Tribute which embalms the Dead

But know, FATE summons to that awful Goal, 

Where JUSTICE strips the Murd'rer of his Soul:

Should venal C--ts the scandal of the Land,

Snatch the relentless Villain from her Hand,

Keen Execrations on this Plate inscrib'd,

Shall reach a JUDGE who never can be brib'd.

The “P—n” in the first verse clearly refers to Captain Thomas Preston, the British commander of the massacre. He was acquitted. Eight other soldiers were tried for murder, of whom six were acquitted and two were convicted of manslaughter. Revere obviously did not take a generous view of the killer – nor should he have!

In a 1918 article for a American historical journal by Lousie Pehlps Kellogg – whose account is notable for its sympathetic description of the British killers – wrote, “Revere was an ardent patriot, and in all probability formed one of the crowd of spectators in King Street Square when the soldiers fired upon the populace. In the Boston Public Library is still preserved a sketch by his hand.” Even though it doesn’t seem that she meant it as a compliment, her description of Revere as “an ardent patriot” was certainly true!

And she does give a detailed account of the effects the image itself conveys. Including the backhanded compliment that the picture has “the charm peculiar to primitive productions.” But she also notes, “The passionate appeal for sympathy for the slain made by these inscriptions indicates the depths of feeling aroused by the massacre.” She also notes that a another Boston engraver, Henry Pelham, accused Revere of having plagiarized his work in the image, a claim to which she seems all too eager to give credence.

She closes by criticizing Revere’s image for being too patriotic: From a trivial encounter between imperial troops and the Boston mob, the incident [the Boston Massacre] arose to a position of international importance.” An outcome she obviously regretted! (4)

Karsten Fitz over a century later called attention to the problem of Crispus Attucks getting shortchanged in images of the massacre. She also examines the Revere engraving, noting that the image was “originally engraved-though most likely not produced - by Paul Revere.” She considers it likely that he took the image from an original engraving by Pelham. (5)

It’s notable in Revere’s color image that there are no dark-skinned individuals on the Patriot side. But Revere himself knew that Attucks was one of the victims, and he was very likely from the available evidence of African and indigenous American descent. The Wikimedia source page notes image is “[n]ot entirely an accurate depiction of the event that transpired.” But it doesn’t elaborate.

Fitz argues unambiguously, “All available textual sources consider Crispus Attucks as the leader of the Boston crowd which harassed the guard of the Custom House on March 5, 1770.”

She notes that John Adams himself in his closing arguments for the British defendants that Attucks was the leader of the protesters, quoting from the following passage:

... this Attucks ... appears to have undertaken to be the hero of the night; and to lead this army with banners, to form them in the first place in Dock square, and march them up to King street with their clubs ... this man with his party cried, do not be afraid of them . . . to have his reinforcement coming down under the command of a stout Molatto fellow, whose very looks was enough to terrify any person, what had not the soldiers then to fear? He had hardiness enough to fall in upon them, and with one hand took hold of a bayonet, and with the other knocked the man down: this was the behaviour of Attucks ... a Carr from Ireland, and an Attucks from Framingham, happening to be here, shall sally out upon their thoughtless enterprizes, at the head of such a rabble of Negroes, &c. as they can collect together. ...

Sidney Kaplan and Emma Nogrady Kaplan make a strong argument for Attucks as the leader of the protest. They write, “At the trial of the king's officers, the fallen Attucks seemed very much alive. The evidence given in court, the newspaper reports, the earliest tradition, all single him out, in praise or blame, as the shaper of the event.” (6)

There is no official register of Martyrs Of The American Revolution. But Phyllis Wheatley, a slave who according to the Kaplans, one of the two “first black poets whose poems were in print at the time of the Revolution, and who they also identify as the first slave and third woman to publish in a book of poems in the US, gave the first-martyr designation to Christopher Steel. Steel had protested against British soldiers in Boson and was executed for the murder of a Tory customs officer the 1769, a year before the Boston Massacre. She eulogized him in one of her poems:

In heaven's eternal court it was decreed
Thou the first martyr for the cause should bleed
To clear the country of the hated brood
He whet his courage for the common good.

Notes:

(1) Photo: Four coffins of men killed in the Boston Massacre. Library of Congress - Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62-45586. <http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3a45777> Originally appeared in The Boston-Gazette, and Daily Journal 03/12/1770. Also included in: Hinderaker, Eric (2017): Boston’s Massacre, 14. Belknap Press: Cambridge & London.

(2) The tree of liberty... (Quotation). Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia. <https://www.monticello.org/encyclopedia/tree-liberty-quotation> (Accessed: 2026-26-06).

(3) Gallery Slideshow File:Boston Massacre high-res.jpg. Wikimedia Commons. <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boston_Massacre_high-res.jpg> (Accessed: 2026-26-06).

(4) Kellogg, Louise Phelps (1918): Paul Revere Print of the Boston Massacre. Wisconsin Magazine of History 1:4, pp. 377-387. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/4630108>

(5) Fitz, Karsten (2005): Commemorating Crispus Attucks-Visual Memory and the Representations of the Boston Massacre. Amerikastudien/American Studies 50:3, 463-484. <htps://www.jstor.org/stable/41158169>

(6) Kaplan, Sidney & Kaplan, Emma Nogrady (1989): The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution, Revised Edition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Crispus Attucks, first martyr of the American Revolution (1)

The Boston Massacre of 1770 is generally considered to be the opening act of the American Revolution. The famous slogan of “no taxation without representation” referred to the facts that Americans shippers and merchants resented the restriction and demands for tax revenue imposed by London on their American colonies.

The Seven Years War of 1756-63 in Europe grew out of the military struggles between King Frederick the Great’s Prussia and the Habsburg Empire ruled from Vienna over the Polish province of Saxony. It wound up expanding in 1740 to a war pitting Britain and Prussia against France and Russia. And it included Britain and France fighting it out over territory in North America, which was known to the American colonists as the French and Indian War. That was the conflict in which Washington gained the military experience he would apply to great effect as head of Continental Army in the American Revolution.

France maintained its Canadian colony and claimed colonial ownership of much of what is now the eastern half of the United States until President Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase of 1803. But the post-1763 period ended the direct challenges of France to the British colonies that became the United States. It also gave a boost to Britain’s imperial plans for its North American subjects. But new successes bring new problems:

The immense acquisitions of the Seven Years War persuaded British statesmen that their bigger empire required more ships and soldiers. These would cost money; and unless the British taxpayer supplied it all, the colonies, which also benefited, should contribute to the cost. Revenue could be extracted from the colonies only through a stronger central administration, at the expense of colonial self-government. As Governor Hutchinson [colonial governor of Massachusetts 1771-1774] wrote in a sentence that lost him his job, 'There must be an abridgement of so-called English Liberties in America.' Furthermore, the Acts of Trade were strengthened to an extent that began to impose real hardships on important colonial interests. [my emphasis] (1)

The Seven Years War also carried a particular significance for the city of Boston. The intensification of military preparations and fighting in that war meant that, as Eric Hinderaker explains:

... the town of Boston and the colony of Massachusetts Bay had been enthusiastic partners. With deeply rooted militia traditions and a strong, assertive sense of Protestant English identity, New Englanders Were especially well prepared to join in the task of fighting Catholic New France. Massachusetts Bay soldiers participated in the military campaigns of the eighteenth century in large numbers, while its merchants supplied the provisions and ships that carried the effort forward. Britain’s victory in the Seven Years’ War validated New Englanders’ confidence in the righteousness of their cause and the efficacy of their institutions. (2)

The beginning of the American Revolution is conventionally taken to be the Boston Massacre of March 5, 1770. Tensions between British soldiers and the citizens of Boston had been growing due to the increased pressure being exerted by the British for revenue and against smuggling by the colonists to evade British regulations. A Boston man name Crispus Attucks became famous as the “first martyr” of the Revolution when he became one of several people killed by British occupying soldiers on March 5 in front of the Boston Customs House. There were no mobile phones in those days, and photography was yet to be invented. So the available evidence from the time is considerably less clear and explicit than, say, the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota earlier this year by masked ICE Gestapo thugs. Presumably the British killers in the Boston Massacre were the same kind of cowardly goons that Good’s and Pretti’s murderers are. Nevertheless, as Eric Hinderaker writes, “the facts of the case and their meaning were examined repeatedly in the months and years following the massacre.” And that included a formal trial of the soldiers for murder.

Captain Thomas Preston was the commander of the soldiers that committed the massacre.

Crispus Attucks likely worked as a sailor and dockworker out of Boston. He is also thought to have had a black father and an indigenous mother and was very likely a fugitive slave. He has often been described as the leader of the protest at which the massacre took place and the first of the five patriots to be killed. (3)

Henry Wilson wrote a three-volume work after the US Civil War, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America. Abolitionists before and during the war referred to the hostile, subversive slavery-based regime and economy in the slave states as the Slave Power. And it was an apt label.

Some of these bore an honorable part in the War of Independence. Crispus Attucks, a colored patriot, was a leader, and the first martyr in the Boston massacre, on the 5th of March, 1770, which so fired the hearts and aroused the patriotism of the people. One of that race mingled his blood with the fallen patriots of the 19th of April, 1775. The sons of Africa fought side by side with their countrymen of the white race at Bunker Hill, where Major Pitcairn, as he stormed the works, fell mortally wounded by the shot of Salem, a black soldier. soldier. Indeed, it is hardly too much to say that some of the most heroic deeds of the War of Independence were performed by black men. (3)

There are some historical ironies surrounding the Boston Massacre. John Adams, who decades later would serve as Washington’s Vice President and then as the second President, defended the British soldiers who were arrested and prosecuted for the massacre. He claimed that he did so because he supported the principle that even the worst villains deserved competent counsel at trial. And his claim to that effect may well have been sincere. On the other hand, as President he later supported and enforced the Alien and Sedition Acts, which in today’s terms we would say was an attempt to turn the new government in an authoritarian direction.

Paying attention to facts in history is critical for honest history writing. But history in the broader sense is also a source of icons and of reflections of how tradition can inform and inspire contemporaries on topical questions. Eric Hinderaker writes of the evolving image of the Boston Massacre, which “occupies a timeworn niche in the American memory palace” as “a half-forgotten event in a shared patriotic past.” But that also makes it available as a framework for understanding contemporary events.

[N]ew contexts can bring new meanings to the fore. Initially, memories of the Boston Massacre provided a vital spark of outrage in the growing conflict with Great Britain. But at the end of the American Revolution, the usefulness of that function faded. Recollections grew more ambivalent, and the event fell into disfavor in public memory. When memories of the Boston Massacre were revived in the nineteenth century, they came with a surprising new twist: Crispus Attucks, one of the men killed in King Street, was recast as the most important figure in the shootings. A sailor of mixed African American and Wampanoag ancestry, Attucks was taken up by Boston’s African American community in the decades before the Civil War as the first martyr in the struggle for American liberty. This rhetorical move triggered a decades-long dispute in Boston about whether Attucks and the other victims were lawless rioters or a patriot vanguard. Eventually that conflict was settled and the Boston Massacre resolved, once again, into a vague and uncontroversial memory.

In more recent times, the Boston Massacre has been invoked for political purposes when the firepower of the U.S. government has been directed against its citizens. It happened during the Vietnam War; more recently, it has framed discussions of the militarization of policing in the twenty-first century. And as race has become increasingly salient to those discussions, Crispus Attucks has again been invoked, this time as a new kind of symbol of African American citizenship. Identified in the nineteenth century as the first martyr of American independence, in the twenty-first century he has become the first African American victim of unrestrained police brutality. [my emphasis]

Hinderaker describes the available contemporary accounts as often vague and contradictory. But there is no doubt that the massacre of five people occurred, their names were known and published immediately after, and news of the event was popularized in the colonies and in Britain, particularly in a pamphlet issued two weeks after the event, A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston. As the title indicates, it expressed outrage against the British killers. Boston justices of the peace and British officials also collected testimony about the event. The published British versions of the story, true to imperialist practices to this day, accused the uncivilized natives of attacking the soldiers, forcing the poor, put-upon Brits to reluctantly murder them. They protesters were accused of throwing snowballs at the soldiers.

And here’s where democratic sentiments (including the expectation that government officials act within the law), nationalist impulses, and the rapidly developing patriotic sentiments among the colonists turned outrage at murderous official misconduct into a wider sentiment of identity and rebellion. As Hinderaker writes:

Events of the 1770s would show that this small port community, perched on a tiny North Atlantic peninsula, had the power to shape the fortune of the Western world’s greatest empire. Even as [the exact details of] the Boston Massacre remains an enigma, Boston’s massacre – a global event shaped by local sensibilities - rises in sharp relief.

He also describes how the after-effects of the Seven Years War in British policy wound up promoting democratic resentments against the British. And also how some colonists criticized the British by referring to older democratic principles:

When Parliament decided to station a large body of troops in North America following the Seven Years’ War, and political and military leaders subsequently chose to dispatch four regiments to Boston as a peacekeeping force, they were marching onto an unmapped landscape. The shootings in King Street that came to be called a massacre were one result. But they occurred only after seventeen long months of military occupation: a period marked by confusion, outrage, and endemic conflict. The clash between local and imperial authorities derived from Bostonians’ deep attachment to older republican principles, which were incompatible with the eighteenth-century rules under which British officials sought to manage imperial relations. [my emphasis]

In the British world prior to the eighteenth century, the English Magna Carta tradition demanded popular participation in the governments that made their laws, albeit to a very limited degree compared to today’s standards. (King Charles referred to that tradition in his 2026 address to the US Congress). This was very much a part of the notion of the rule of law. Which was not just a concept that laws should exist. It was a concept that for laws to be legitimate, they must be enacted by a government that provided representation for its citizens and that those laws should be applied equally. Democracy and the rule of law are inextricably bound together, really two sides of the same thing.

Those “older republican principles” were given expression in the colonists’ protest of “No Taxation Without Representation.” That slogan was not an earlier equivalent of rightwing libertarians today bitching and moaning about having to pay taxes. It was a demand for democratic representation in the making of the laws applied to the colonies, very much in Magna Carta tradition. They were making that argument as British citizens appealing to a fundamental British political tradition.

It’s both important and interesting to look at the political theories motivating the Revolution and key documents like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution that formalized and institutionalized the democratic ideas and sentiments motivating it. And it was very much part of a democratic awakening and the development of democratic movements. And that is so despite the fact that democracy in 2026 means something much more expansive than it did in 1776. A redwood tree spouting out of the ground early in its life looks very different than it does after a few hundred years of growth.

The reference to democratic sentiments in this context is not an anachronism. The Massachusetts colonial charter, writes Hinderaker, despite imposing a royally-appointed colonial governor, was “more democratic than that of any other royal colony” due to the role of the elected assembly. When people get the idea that the government is there to represent the people and establish stable and fair legal justice, that tends to make them not really open to the idea of foreign troops just being able to gun down protesting citizens just because they feel like it that day. We don’t have to rely on history books to see that. We’ve seen it on the daily news from the US in 2025 and 2026 as citizens resist the depredations of Trump’s ICE Gestapo.

Notes:

(1) Morrison, Samuel Eliot et al (1977): A Concise History of the American Revolution, 62. New York: Oxford University Press.

(2) Hinderaker, Eric (2017): Boston’s Massacre, 1-32. Belknap Press: Cambridge & London.

(3) "Crispus Attucks," by Herschel Levit, mural at the Recorder of Deeds building, built in 1943. 515 D St., NW, Washington, D.C. Library of Congress.

(4) Wilson, Henry (1875): History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, Vol. 1 (4th edition), 18-19. Boston: James R. Osgood and Company.

Slavery and the American Revolution

Historian Sean Wilentz wrote in 2019 about the contradictory political impulses toward slavery involved in the American Revolution. (1) He was addressing a concern that he raises about an argument made as part of the 1619 Project that highlights the history of slavery in North America, which was that an major impulse for the Revolution was to defend slavery against British abolitionism.

The American Revolution is a key founding myth of the United States. Interpretations of it vary, of course, both in academic discussions and in popular political understandings of it. From the beginning, there were more conservative adherents and more radical ones. Paul Revere and Thomas Paine could be taken as symbols of those two poles, respectively.

And over time, there have been interpretations made from a range of ideological and partisan viewpoints. On the academic side of the discussion, a lot of the differences are related to how “revolutionary” the American Revolution was, in the sense of how drastically it altered fundamental social and class relations, how much it democratized governance, and what the sources of it were. And the status of slavery is a key issue in those perceptions, as is the question of to what extent the Constitution represented the democratic impulses of the Revolution.

Back in the days when Calvin Coolidge was in the White House, the historian J. Franklin Jameson shook up the dominant academic narrative with a series of lectures published in 1926 as The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement. The conservative consensus regarded the Revolution as basically a war of independence against Britain but not as a social revolution.

Jameson was one of several prominent historians who were emphasizing the Revolution’s social dimension, including Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., Carl Becker, and Charles Beard. Beard depicted the creation of the Constitution as a kind of sleazy backroom deal made by rich men to scam the system to the benefit of their own pocketbooks in his An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of The United States (1913). The stodgy-but-reliable Britannica is a bit more generous in describing it in its article on Beard:

In this book he claimed that the Constitution had been formulated by interest groups whose motivations were just as much personal financial ones as they were political ones. Although American politicians were generally outraged at the implications of material interests embodied in the Constitution by the Founding Fathers, the book was received by academicians as an innovative study on motivational factors among socioeconomic groups. (2)

This was generally taken to be a “left” version and Beard was counted as a Progressive historian. He became one of the founders of the left-leaning New School of Social Research in 1919. But his view of the Constitution and the purposes of the men who had led the Revolution also lent itself to a kind of everybody’s-in-it-for-themselves viewpoint which was more laissez-faire individualist dogma than a left view. And Beard’s turn later in life to what can reasonably be described as a crackpot rightwing isolationist viewpoint that he expressed in President Roosevelt and the Coming of War, 1941 (1948) certainly makes it reasonable to wonder to what extent his view earlier in his career was consistently “left”.

Similar ambiguity can be encountered with ethno-nationalist historical narratives of the American Revolution. They can be rhetorically similar to left perspectives in terms of looking at the dark, undemocratic, inhumane, anti-egalitarian realities of American history. But they can also play into a rightwing narrative which argues, for instance, that white racism is as American as apple pie and it pointless and un-American to challenge it. In fact, for people who are looking to shift their image from very left to very right, that kind of argument is a natural.

Wilentz defines a common historical view in more recent times of the American Revolution that proceeds from this assumption, “The American Revolution may not have overthrown the institution of slavery but its egalitarian principles were at least implicitly antislavery.”

He describes a problem he sees with this comfortable interpretation:

One problem with this familiar view is that it obscures how new, how radical, antislavery politics were during the revolutionary era, and how, for many patriots, American slavery and American freedom were perfectly compatible. I’m referring here not to those slaveholders with troubled consciences like Jefferson and James Madison, Virginians who perceived slavery as an intolerable offense yet who (at least after the 1780s, in Jefferson’s case) lifted not a finger toward ending it - critics of slavery who continued owning, buying, and selling human beings until the day they died. I’m referring instead to stridently proslavery figures like that young South Carolina grandee and signer of the Constitution, Charles Pinckney - a patriot who served as an officer in the revolutionary militia and who, as a delegate at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, asserted “if slavery be wrong, it is justified by the example of all the world.” I am also referring to those white Northerners, as well as most white Southerners, who believed that the Declaration’s egalitarian principles were perfectly sound but that they categorically did not apply to blacks, slave or free. Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney attempted finally to enshrine this racist egalitarianism in American national law in his notorious ruling on the Dred Scott case in 1857.

These proslavery Americans and apologists for slavery and their progeny were no less products of the American founding than the early abolitionists inspired by Woolman and Benezet or the conflicted enlightened Virginians like Jefferson. Plantation slavery grew stupendously in the United States after the Revolution, generating a well-organized slave power that long dominated national politics. Slavery’s defeat was not inevitable. Nor, obviously, did white supremacy die with slavery. Over the century and a half since slavery’s abolition, the racist Americanism of Charles Pinckney and Roger Brooke Taney has survived and flourished in new forms, along with dominating social and political structures that uphold it. Far from vanquished, it has morphed and resurged in ways expected and unexpected, from the bloody overthrow of Reconstruction to the menacing rise of Donald J. Trump. [my emphasis]

But Wilentz also contests an alternative view that the Revolution itself was motivated by the fear of the colonists that Great Britain would abolish slavery. In other words, one of the American Revolution’s central goal, if not the central one, was to preserve slavery. He describes the implication of this view as follows:

The American Revolution, in effect, anticipated the slaveholders’ rebellion eighty-odd years later: the American patriots allegedly declared their independence of Britain in 1776 for the same reason that the Southern states seceded in 1860–1861, to guarantee that slavery would endure. American independence, in this view, was a precursor of Southern secession.

Wilentz continues:

It is worth noting that Jefferson Davis and the rebellious slaveholders also depicted secession as a glorious replay of the American Revolution, although they did not go so far as to claim that the patriots of 1776 fought to protect slavery. Not for the first time, modern critics have concluded that the Confederates were basically correct about American history, whereas Lincoln as well as most abolitionists, above all Frederick Douglass, were wrong—as when Douglass, in his most famous speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?,” excoriated American hypocrisy and white racism but also praised the US Constitution as “a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.”

That dig Wilentz makes about “modern critics” who conclude that the Confederates were basically correct about American history” seems to be mostly casting shade on those like today’s MAGA radicals who operate very much in the spirit of Confederacy, as most dramatically illustrated on January 6, 2021 when Trump sent his violent mob to try to facilitate a coup. But is also makes the point that there were tensions between the emancipatory impulses of the Revolution and considerable amounts of unfreedom, particularly for slaves and for native peoples.

I won’t go further into the controversy in this post. But the cynical perspective implied in Beard’s approach is inadequate to understanding the real historical of democratic and liberal ideals and practices. And any interpretation of the American Revolution that fits with Jefferson Davis’ or John Calhoun’s view of its values and meaning should not be lightly accepted.

I’ll close by noting that a central factual-historical argument that Wilentz makes is to emphasize how rapidly antislavery ideas emerged in a particular time-frame, relying on the eminent historian of slavery David Brion Davis:

Suddenly, in the late 1740s and early 1750s, Western culture reached a turning point, producing what the great modern scholar of slavery and the antislavery movement David Brion Davis called “an almost explosive consciousness of man’s freedom to shape the world in accordance with his own will and reason.” The causes of this moral revolution were manifold and remain much debated, but need not detain us here; what is important is that it brought, in Davis’s words, “a heightened concern for discovering laws and principles that would enable human society to be something more than an endless contest of greed and power.” That concern made slavery appear for the first time - to the un-enslaved - as a barbaric offense to God, reason, and natural rights. [my emphasis]

And Wilentz adds, “Between 1767 and 1775, a wave of antislavery petitions, sermons, pamphlets, and private missives swelled across the colonies, from New England as far south as Virginia - a political outburst unprecedented in the Atlantic world.”

Notes:

(1) Wilentz, Sean (2019): American Slavery and ‘the Relentless Unforeseen’. NYR Daily <https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/11/19/american-slavery-and-the-relentless-unforeseen/>(Accessed: 2019-28-12).

(2) Britannica Editors (2026): Charles A. Beard. Encyclopedia Britannica, 11/23/2025. <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-A-Beard> (Accessed 2026-24-06).

Heather Cox Richardson on the far-right slogan that the US is a-republic-not-a-democracy

The historian Heather Cox Richardson has been doing a series of YouTube and Facebook videos on various American history topics. In this one, she takes Utah Sen. Mike Lee’s recent revival of the old John Birch Society, pro-segregationist propaganda slogan that America is a-republic-not-a-democracy and uses it to tell an hour-long story of the development of popular democracy in the US. A Freewheeling Birthday Chat 10/09/2020:

It’s not easy to tell a story that extends from the 18th century to today that actually pays attention to nuance and substantive issues, including the role of slavery, Indian policy, and the politics of inequality. But she pulls it off. She even manages to put some meaningful comments about Mussolini into the mix.

Trigger Warning: For anyone who thinks the only Patriotically Correct version of American history is some variation on, “Yee-haw! U-S-A! U-S-A!”, this clip will probably put you into a panicky search for a “safe space” in the first ten minutes. Don’t stress yourself out.

And, yes, the United States was understood at the time of its founding as a radical democracy in the world of the 1770s. France got into the act a decade or so later. Napoleon spread it to large parts of Europe, though not always in the most pleasant of ways. The people of Haiti also quickly picked up on the radical demands of the French and American Revolution. Even though no one I’ve ever heard of at that time held a concept of democracy, human rights, or the rule of law as it exists today in, for example, the democratic standards of the European Union. (Which still has its share of rough edges!) Tom Paine is the closest one who comes to mind for me.

Speaking of the American Revolution, here's a recent scholarly article on Alexander Hamilton and slavery: “As Odious and Immoral A Thing”: Alexander Hamilton’s Hidden History as an Enslaver (2020). Spoiler: he didn't have mainstream 2020 views on slavery.

Hamilton is enjoying a pop-culture standing as kind of a early "woke" Founder icon, not least because of the successful Hamilton musical. And that's fine. He was an important Founder. Including being the chief founder of the Federalist Party. People also found reason to quote him over the last couple of years on the meaning of the impeachment power in the Constitution. Hopefully those positive vibes around his image will make even more people interested to learn more about his real history.

Henry Steele Commager's 1965 criticism of the Vietnam War and the deeply problematic assumptions behind US involvement

The 1965 anti-Vietnam War speech by Henry Steele Commager on which I've previously commented has some perceptive criticisms of some fundamental problems with the prevailing post-Second World War adopted by US foreign policy makers and widely marketed to the voting public. These arguments became much more widespread and familiar as the Vietnam War dragged on. (The text quoted here is from "Debate on Vietnam Policy, Alvin Friedman & Henry Steele Commager Amherst College, December 3, 1965," The Massachusetts Review 7:2; Spring 1966)

Even if we take the most jaundiced view of the sources of American foreign policy since 1945, or adopt a standpoint of fundamental criticism like Noam Chomsky, for instance, the Vietnam War did mark an important turning point in American public attitudes toward war. The US continued to operate on much the same assumptions that Commager was critizing in 1965, although Nixon's two-China policy and the later formal recognition of the People's Republic represented a major adjustment in that the US adopted a more practical stance toward the existence of China.

What hawkish politicians on "both sides of the aisle" but especially Republicans called "the Vietnam syndrome" did have a large effect on constraining policymakers from direct military interventions in other countries from the early seventies until the Gulf War of 1991. It didn't do away with the imperialist orientation of US policy. The military dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, and Brazil were viewed favorably by the US, though Carter's human rights policy did reflect some real concern about political repression there. Chile and Argentina in particular became test cases for the "neoliberal" austerity economics that came to dominate much of the world in the 1980s and after, with the 2008 crash putting a huge crack in the consensus around it.

The significance of the anti-colonial movements after 1945 and well into the 1970s don't necessarily receive as much attention as it should these days. But Commager's speech reflects how central they were in practice in world politics at that time. Formal, official colonialism now survives only in spots, like Britain's control of Gibralter and the Malvinas/Falkland Islands. But with China moving quickly to be the leading economic power in the world, it would be easy to forget to what extent Commager's comments on the rise of what we tend to call the developing nations these days represented a sharp criticism of prevaling attitudes.

His speech was a criticism of American Exceptionalism with particular focus on how the Vietnam War illustrated its disastrous effects. Commager was articulating a left-liberal anti-imperialist criticism, not an Old Right isolationist one. Old Right isolationism, the foreign policy outlook of Trump's America First ideology, is actually a virulently nationalistic and imperialist attitude relying on a crude and authoritarian version of American Exceptionalism. (To what extent the chaos in the Trump foreign policy represents incompetence rather than the weaknesses of the America Firster position isn't something on which this post focuses.)

Commager described five assumptions of US Cold War foreign policy that had clearly shown them to be problematic by 1965.

The first of these assumptions was that the world was divided between two great powers or power complexes, the Russian and the American, the slave and the free, and that we and we alone were responsible for the free world. Actually, within a few years, we confronted a world of five or six great power complexes: China, and India, and Western Europe as well as Russia, and possibly others such as Japan, the British Commonwealth, the Latin American, the African, and the Arab worlds. No one nation is, or can be, responsible for the protection of freedom in such a world.

But that was also to a large extent the assumption after 1989 and the so-called End of History. Both neoconservatives and liberal interventionists viewed the US as the hyperpower, the "indispensable nation" that was uniquely qualified to give political and economic directions to the rest of the world and morally obligated to do so. This wasn't simply a cynical propaganda justification for an imperial policy. Ideologies do matter, because they affect the way people interpret events in the world. But the more crudely cynical power motives and old-fashioned greed inevitably pushed the US to show that the Indespensable Nation didn't consider itself bound by the rules it expected lesser nations to follow, shown most dramatically by the Iraq War.

Second, we assumed that Communism was monolithic, fixed, and unchanging; that it was not a political system, or even a social or economic system, but a moral (or immoral) system, and that there was no compromise with it, for you do not compromise with sin except to strike it down. We assumed, too, that Communism was inherently aggressive and expansionist and we have continued to assert this in the face of a good deal of evidence to the contrary. [my emphasis]

The intermixture of ideology, base motives, and typical great-power self-aggrandizement was present then, too. But the particularly dogmatic version of anti-Communism dominant in the US at the time was especially well-suited to drown out more practical considerations.

Third we assumed that there was only one China, that headed by Chiang Kai-shek which ended up in Taiwan, and we are still stuck with that assumption. We insisted that Communist China was not the real China, that it was on the contrary a usurper and an evil force, and was not therefore to be recognized. [my emphasis]

This was the most dramatic case in which imminently practical realities were excluded from actual policymaking due to crackpot ideology. It's particularly striking that even in 1965, official government policy still relied on a concept of a unified and aggressive Soviet-Chinese bloc. In fact, the Chinese and Soviet governments were already having significant differences and disagreements in the mid-1950s, disagreements which had become public in 1960 and became increasingl virulent thereafter. (See the 2015 book Shadow Cold War: The Sino- Soviet Competition for the Third World by Jeremy Friedman.)

One of the effects of McCarthyism in the 1950s had been to basically drive a lot of the most qualified China experts out of the State Department. Because anyone with actual knowledge and expertise in the area had at one time or another made a factual observation or policy recommendation not consistent with simplistic anti-Communist assumptions. The Trump Administration was not the first time that militant ignorance gained undue influence in American foreign policy.

[Fourth] Because in 1945 we were the most powerful nation on the globe we assumed that our power was and would continue to be limitless, and that we could impose our will upon the rest of the world. We knew that we were virtuous and our will righteous and we were not therefore worried about the moral implications of this kind of arrogance, though history teaches that there is something corrupting in assumptions of this kind. [my emphasis]

Whatever measure of moderation of this dominant attitude that came into play in the 1970s and 1980s was largely swept away with the End of History in 1989. Remember when Shrub Bush declared that the war against terrorism aimed at the end of evil? David Frum, one of his speechwriters and now a prominent Nevertrumper, co-authored a book with the neoconservative Richard Perle, who his admirers referred to as the "Prince of Darkness", An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror (2003), a prime example of the fanaticism and arrogance that led to the Iraq War. (Note: Sixteen years later, we still seem to be quite far removed from ending Evil.)

Fifth, because we meant well, because the American way of life was part of freedom and progress, and was even identified with the cosmic system, we assumed that those who opposed us were either misguided or wicked or both, and many of us still cherish this assumption, though no longer with the confidence with which we entertained it in the past.

Today's Republican Party has made Christian Right fundamentalism so integral a part of its ideology that that identification "with the cosmic system" applies even more strongly to the Republican Party today than it did to either party in 1965. Although secularizing trends have continued and outside the Republican Party religious pluralism is a more rubust sentiment today.

Commager added what he saw as a fundamental miscalculation in relation to the anti-colonial liberation movements and the aspirations of new nations that had emerged from colonialism:

Along with these misguided assumptions, we made a great miscalculation of a negative character. We failed to understand the nature of what is doubtless the greatest revolution of modern times, the greatest and most far-reaching since the shift in the center of gravity from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the revolt of Asia and Africa against the West, the emergence into modernity of two-thirds of the peoples of the globe. ... We allowed ourselves to be maneuvered into the position that Britain had occupied throughout much of the 19th century and France in the 20th - that of the stalwart defender of the status quo, of the West, and of the white peoples, as over against the underprivileged, the black and yellow and brown peoples of the world. [my emphasis]

And he pointed out how the preference for stability along with anti-Communist ideology led to a thoroughly unpragmatic phobia against revolutions everywhere (although that bias for stability didn't hold the US back from counter-revolutionary regime change operations):

Once again, too, we are failing to recognize and cooperate with revolution - revolution in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia and elsewhere; that is one reason we have lost the support and confidence of the spokesmen of these peoples. Here as elsewhere on the globe - Cuba, Santo Domingo, Brazil, Guatemala, we have maneuvered ourselves into the position of being the enemy of change and of what the peoples of these countries think is freedom. In the eyes of Asians we are the protagonist of the West against the East, of white people against yellow and brown people, of power against the weak people who are always the victims of power. [my emphasis]

The social character of the various revolutions he mentions tvaried greatly, from a Communist-led revolution in Vietnam to a liberal democratic reform government in Guatemala. He was calling here for a more realistic and less militarized approach to countries in the world system of nations who might be annoying to the US government, as in accepting military support from Communist China or development aid from the Soviet Union, or to particular lobbies in America like United Fruit Company with Guatemala.

In testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1967, Commager stated his perspective this way (Changing American Attitudes Toward Foreign Policy 02/20/1967):

What I am suggesting is that, we need to cultivate patience, tolerance, the long view, and even sympathy with the new nationa of the globe, even if their emergence onto the crowded stage of history is turbulent and dangerous. We would do well to recover something of Jefferson's penpective on the French Revolution - which horrilied most Wstern peoples just as communism does today. It was, he said, "the agonizing spasms of infuriated man, seeking through blood and slaughter his long lost liberties." "Long-lost liberties" is, to be sure, not the phrase we instictively apply to either the Russian or the Chinese revolutions, for they did not, alas, enjoy liberty in their historical past, but that they are seeking to throw off what they assume to be tyranny and exploitation - in the case of the Soviet, a homegrown brand of tyranny; in the case of China, foreign and achieve independence and progress in their way, is, I think, beyond dispute. [my emphasis]

Commager there wasn't advocating indifference to human rights abuses. He was arguing for a pragmatic and less militarized foreign policy in place of one by ideology, arrogance, and ignorance.

Henry Steele Commager and immanent critique of American actions

Need I add that every great American leader, from Washington and Jefferson to Lincoln to Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, acknowledged a responsibility of our membership in the great community of civilization? That responsibility can best be fulfilled by drawing on our own experience and invoking our own authority to solve national problems and applying the lessons of that experience to the challenges of the future.

That quote is from the historian Henry Steele Commager (1902–1998) from his 1993 book, Commager on Tocqueville.

Commager was one of the best known Amerian historians during his career. And his writing on current issues was a big influence on my political thinking when I was an undergraduate. I've had a lot of other influences since then, too.

But I've been reading some of Commager's work recently in the process of trying to inform myself better about the history of US dealings with native peoples in North America. And it has reminded me of what impressed me about his approach.

Commager was a liberal Democratic thinker and activist with an anti-imperialist inclination and a focus on intellectual history. In the early years of the Cold War, he was a more convential "Cold War liberal," a term which once carried a similar polemic edge to what "corporate Democrat" has today. But by the 1960s, he became a sharp critic of the Vietnam War.

In December 1965, the year that President Lyndon Johnson put American troops in a much ore expansive and direct role for US troops in Vietnam on the side of South Vietnam against North Vietnam, Commager opened his presentation in a debate over the war with:

Speaking of one of the greatest of crises Abraham Lincoln said, just over a century ago:

"If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it. We are now far into the fifth year since a policy was initiated with the avowed object in confidence of putting an end to the slavery agitation"- let us substitute: to the Vietnamese crisis. "Under the operation of that policy the agitation has not only not ceased but has constantly augmented." (Speech, Springfield, 1858) [text from "Debate on Vietnam Policy, Alvin Friedman & Henry Steele Commager" Massachusetts Review 7:2 {Spring, 1966}]

This is something that Commager did well that I still appreciate. He invoked iconic American historical figures to make policy and political points about the preseent, while still taking the original context seriously.

And that's a big reason that I'm still reluctant to embrace the sort of casual revisionism that we see quite a bit now on the left and center-left that writes off a large part of the American democratic tradition as hopelessly tainted by the shortcomings of democracy in earlier times. In 2019, Abraham Lincoln still mostly gets a pass because of his status as the Great Liberator in the Civil War. (Just to be clear, I'm a big Lincoln fan myself.)

I'm very much in favor of a critical approach to history. And obviously our collective view of historical events and actors changes over time as the ways we see the world develop and become more informed. I think it's safe to say that in 100 years or so, people will look back at all of us who are of voting age in 2019 and criticize us for our collective irresponsibility on the climate crisis. Because it is appalling. And at least a lot of people right now also recognize it's appalling.

If we have a nuclear war, we can only hope there will still be surviving members of humanity around to trash us for our mind-boggling irresponsibility on nuclear arms proliferation.

But as long as there are still people around to think about history, it's important to be cautious about "anachronism," which is applying current standards to past events without taking adequate recognition of what standards people in those previous times were applying to themselves and each other and the actual conditions in which they were acting. The Britain of 1215-1225 when the Magna Carta was established was seriously backwards compared to the American colonies of 1776. But the Magna Carta played a large role in how the American revolutionaries understood their own rights in real time and served as an effective part of the revolutionary ideology of 1776 and the following years. (We're talking about a tradition that in 1776 was 550 years old!)

And that was despite the fact that King John, his sucessor Henry III, and the British nobles in the early 13th century would have regarded it as absurd to even consider something like the US Bill of Rights. But the historical path to the Bill of Rights nevertheless passed through the Magna Carta and events that led to its establishment. Anyone who regards liberal democratic freedoms as important can't condemn the Magna Carta as hopelessly backwards and reactionary because it didn't comport with cutting-edge democratic standards of 2019. Or of 1776.

Commager's respect for the Jeffersonian tradition and Enlightenment reason didn't prevent him from passing highly critical judgments on bad decisions and mistaken assumptions of the present and much more recent past. His criticism would become even sharper as the war wet on. But he was pretty sweeping in his criticisms of the Vietnam War in 1965:

The consequences of our Vietnamese involvement to our moral standards are already painfully familiar. It means deception; it means putting out arguments and claims which we do not ourselves believe; it means lying to the American people; it means that we are losing our friends throughout the globe; it means we are coarsening our own moral fiber, getting hardened to bombing innocent people and destroying the country on pretexts that will not stand examination. It means ever sharper divisions in our own society, and the upsurge of the forces of intolerance and militarism. It means a pervasive indulgence in that sin which may well be the unpardonable sin of the New Testament, the sin of supposing that we are a special people, exempt from those rules of morality which apply to all others. [my emphasis]

Commager was not indulging in Biblical hermeneutics here. But he was making a forceful point against American Exceptionalism. And there was probably some Niebuhrian theological influence there, too.

And he was adapt at judging American assumptions about other countries by the standards Americans applied to their own actions:

Does Russia have a vital interest in Cuba because Castro is an outpost of Communism? When Russia attempted to display that [in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962], we prepared for war .... Surely if we have a vital interest in distant Vietnam we must concede Russia a vital interest in Iran, Irak, and Hungary •••. And even more obviously, if we have a vital interest in Vietnam what are we to say to China's interest: is it something less than vital? ...

More, to assume that a request for military aid even from an independent South Vietnam would somehow justify our intervention there requires us to concede that a request for military aid from an independent Cuba justifies the intervention of the Soviet in that island. That was not what we thought in 1962. [my emphasis]

Commager was very good at making an immanent critque of American actions within the context of American history and democratic ideals.

Another strange left (?) look at the American Revolution

The left-leaning website Truthdig provides an example of a view of early American history that sadly seems to have become prominent in left and Democratic Party left-center narratives, although professional historians don't tend to be this simplistic: Dan O'Sullivan, Winston Churchill's Perverse Place in the American Imagination 10/15/2018:

One of the only nice things to ever result from America’s propensity for insane, seemingly pointless acts of defiance is that we wriggled free from the grasp of the British royal family. This glorious emancipation from the Commonwealth is perhaps more an aesthetic than a substantive concern. The American Revolution is surely the only revolt against British colonial rule in which the rebelling force comes across in any world history textbook as far more unreasonable and churlish than the redcoats ranged against them. And having gone to war to avoid paying taxes for the defense of their own nation, it is our founding fathers who are stained by the great shame of slaveholding, while the British were emancipating those black soldiers who joined them. [my emphasis]

Yes, conservatives use Churchill, often along with bad "Munich" analogies, as stock symbolism, particularly when arguing for new wars. That not exactly news, but it's always good to revisit the phenomenon.

But let's think about this. The American Revolution and War of Independence from Britain was "unreasonable and churlish." What, the American revolutionaries were, uh, uncivil? Shame on them!

And the American colonies were fighting for slavery while the British were devout Abolitionists? Okay. Wait, unitl they became independent, they were slaveholding British colonies, right? So, what happened? Paul Revere made his legendary ride and King George III suddently decided, boy hidee, we should abolish slavery?

It seems like for a lot of the American left and center-left, the American Revolution has faded far enough into history that it's gotten easier than it was not so long ago to just make up stuff or apply frivolous interpretations without catching too much flak for it. Although, as I said, this doesn't apply to actual historical scholarship.

Speaking of real history, yes, the British did offer freedom to slaves that would defect to the British side and become cannon fodder in fighting the Continental Army. They also recruited Indian tribes to fight against the rebel colonies. But it wasn't because they had repented of having slavery in their colonies, or of making money off the slave trade, or of having conquered Indian lands on both sides of the Appalachians and in Canada, with the usual results for native populations. These were practical, "realist" measures to defeat the rebels so that Britain could expand the presence of slaveowning colonies by conquering more Indian land using colonies they controlled. This isn't some exotic reading of the history of the American Revolution. It's a straightforward reading of the actual events.

Can we pause for just a moment to reflect that it's generally recognized that the first martyr in the run-up to the American Revolution was the escaped black slave and sailor Crispu Attucks, who fell in the Boston Massacre of 1770? And he wasn't a passive by-stander, he was actively protesting against oppressive British policies.

Yes, in 2018 we are very aware that the political community in both the British homeland and its American colonies in 1776 was effectively restricted to property-owning white men in a monarchical system in which the king was much more than a ceremonial head of state.

And in the world of 1776, the American Revolution was understood as a radical step forward for the cause of democracy, republican (non-monarchical) government, and what we later came to call anti-colonial national liberation movements. When the then-obscure (to Americans) leader Nguyen Sinh Cung - who became better known as Ho Chi Minh - borrowed from the text of the Declaration of Independence in his own post-World War II declaration of the independence of Vietnam from colonial rule in 1945, it wasn't because he assumed that the world would understand it as a declaration for chattel slavery and stealing land from native peoples. (Ho Chi Minh and his Viet Minh forces were American allies at the time.)

I guess it hadn't dawned on people in 1945 that the War of Independence in the 18th century was over "more an aesthetic than a substantive concern."

The cover story for the current (13.10.2018) issue of the German weekly Der Spiegel is on the European revolutions of 1848, 1819, and 1989, with 1968 tossed into the mix just because. The story features photos of mutinous German sailors in Kiel in 1918 demonstrating against the Emperor and for a republic; a dramatic painting of Berlin democrats fighting Prussian troops at barricades on the street surrounded by burning buildings in 1848; and, a huge crowd in Leipzig marching against the East German government in 1989. Plus, the famous Emanuel Leutze painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware to ambush German mercenaries fighting for the British.

Why? Because the (somewhat shaky) theme of the piece by Kirk Kurbjuweit ("Wir Zahmen") is to question why those German revolutions was only partially successful. I say "somewhat shaky" because we could say the 1848 revolution was straightforwardly defeated, but the ones in 1918 and 1989 wound up with the governments being completely replaced.

By contrast, "Hardly any revolution was so successful as the American one." (All translations mine.) Kurbjuweit lists four advantages of the revolutionary cause in 1776-83. First, "They were neither timid nor tame." ("Sie waren weder zaghaft noch zahm.") They were ready to confront their enemy, in other words. And, as a second advantage, they had a "will to freedom." You don't go up against the mightiest army in the world without wanting something important.

On the third advantage, he quotes Hannah Arendt - whose name shows up a lot these days in discussion of authoritarian governments - saying, "The men [sic] of the [American] Revolution absolutely did not feel bound by tradition." That also means they didn't frame their arguments for a democratic republic in terms of how to make an improved British monarchy and empire. Today's Democratic Party really needs to take a hint from that!

The fourth advantage was George Washington himself. He was very effective as a political and military leader during the Revolutionary War. And as the only likely candidate for an American king, Washington supported republican government and made a point of stepping down as President after two terms.

Those points are all valid ones. And they constitute reasonable evaluations of the American Revolution. The reason that it failed to produce a model democracy by the standards of the United States of 2018, or one that could meet the admissions criteria of today's European Union, is the same basic reason why the German revolutions Kurbjuweit writes about were less than 100% successful. They were all made by human beings, and human being tend to have serious flaws. The flaws just look a little different in 2018 than they did in 1776.

I'm hopeful that someday, Skynet and the androids will do a better job.