Two Cheers for the Nation: An American Revolution for the Revolting United States

Two Cheers for the Nation:An American Revolution for the Revolting United States Jane Kamensky (bio) The year before last, I offered an undergraduate lecture course on the American Revolution. It was the first chance I'd ever had to teach the subject, as well as the first such class Harvard's history department had offered in decades. I was determined to get it right. The students would encounter the best recent scholarship. I chose, as our textbook, Alan Taylor's kaleidoscopic and anti-romantic American Revolutions (2016), so new it was still in galleys when I ordered it. We would reckon with a global imperial war for North America, and with Britain's American War, as well with the war that some of the people in half of Britain's American colonies fought in order to achieve political independence. (That phrase, some of the people in half of the colonies, became a kind of tagline in my lectures.) Students would weigh the costs of the realignment of powers on the North American continent for the indigenous peoples of the Gulf Coast via Kathleen DuVal's marvelous Independence Lost. (2015) I would explain that the Caribbean, not New England, was the navel of Britain's western empire, drawing on the scholarship of Trevor Burnard, Andrew O'Shaughnessy, and an assortment of eighteenth-century pamphlets, some of which survived only in a single copy and had never been digitized, and so remained largely untaught at the undergraduate level.1 They would learn, pace Mark Peterson, that the sainted thirteen colonies were a largely retrospective fiction, and that the notion of the "big five" revolutionary port cities of the American seaboard was a cosmic joke.2 I would reveal that America's "founding fathers"—a phrase coined by Warren G. Harding in 1916—were not Olympians but men of their times, with deep investments in chattel slavery and Indian extermination, among other cants of conquest.3 Throughout the semester, the course treated America's revolution as a civil war whose porous battle lines made for staggering losses, unthinkable atrocities, and uncertain victories. I borrowed from Holger Hoock's Scars of Independence (2017), also still then in galleys, cherry-picking the most chilling parts of that lurid book for lecture: concerted campaigns of rape and trophy [End Page 308] leggings made from human skin. Leaning on the work of Michael McDonnell, we kept in mind the "other three-fifths" of the wartime U.S. population: those Bartleby types, in the soft middle of ideological spectrum, who, when push came to shove, simply preferred not to.4 (So moved was I by the plight of the anti-ideologues that I had written a book about one of these muddlers, the artist John Singleton Copley.5) Because of this war-vs.-founding orientation, I decided that the course would conclude not with the achievement of the U.S. Constitution and George Washington's elevation to the presidency in 1789 but rather in 1783, as the Peace of Paris attempted to paper over a world of blood and bone and debt and ash. I prepped the course through the autumn of 2016, while watching, with one jaundiced eye, the relentless trudge to victory of the candidate who was sure to become America's first female president: a piece of the revolutionary settlement if ever there was one. But it did not turn out that way. The class debuted in January 2017, in the midst of a counter-revolution I had not anticipated and could scarcely understand. I found myself grateful for the chance to retreat to the eighteenth century for part of each week. The course seemed to go well. The students were both gifted and dutiful; they mastered what they were taught. They completed digital projects on sites in the world of the American Revolution, half on places that fell within the future United States and half on places outside those as-yet-unimagined borders. The extra-U.S. exhibits—on Senegal, Bristol, Halifax, Gibraltar, and Kingston—were the stonger by far. For the midterm, we staged a debate on the question of American Independence, using the evidence available in 1776. Those against won handily...

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