Considering the Revolution

“Considering the Revolution: The Identities Created by the American Revolutionary War” was the closing public plenary at the May 2022 virtual conference of the National Council on Public History (NCPH). The session, sponsored by the National Park Service (NPS) and NCPH, was the second in a series of five annual scholarly roundtables considering the origins and legacies of the American Revolution, dialogues which will contribute to larger discussions during NPS’s commemorations of the American Revolution’s 250th anniversary about its changing interpretation and its continuing relevance to the American people. These discussions will be used by NPS staff in their interpretive work with the public regardless of their geographic location or primary interpretive focus, by NCPH members as they prepare themselves and their students for the 250th commemorations, and by members of the public as they consider the relevance of the Revolution to their own lives.The American Revolutionary War was a seminal event that created new identities, new borders, and new realities for the British, French, African, and Indigenous inhabitants of North America. While the war was foundational in the formation of what became modern American identity, its repercussions go well beyond the citizens of the new republic. The events of 1776 to 1783 not only divided the continent between American and British interests, they also divided families and communities between “Patriots” who supported the Congressional Army and “Loyalists” who supported the British Crown. The establishment of the US–British (later Canadian) border not only defined the territories of the new United States—without any consideration of Indigenous rights or interests—it also divided the peoples of North America into American citizens or British subjects, while imposing a new settler-colonial construct upon Indigenous nations.Historic sites, such as the Minute Man National Historic Park, Independence Hall National Historic Park, and Valley Forge National Historic Park in the United States, or the Fortifications of Quebec National Historic Site in Canada, play a dual role in historical interpretation of the Revolutionary War. These sites not only commemorate and recount the historical events that occurred during the conflict, but also guide visitors towards a very specific idea of who the individuals participating in them were. Whether it be Valley Forge, which prompts visitors to remember the “sacrifices and perseverance of the Revolutionary War generation and [honor] the power of people to pull together and overcome adversity,” or Quebec City, where visitors learn that the fortifications allowed “the British and the French colonists who were still living there to resist American rebels,” historic sites, as sites of memory, help develop a sense of identity because they are places where the general public can interact with a “collective shared knowledge of the past, on which the group’s sense of unity and individuality is based.”1As Jan Assamann states in “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” cultural memory, such as the commemoration of the events between 1776 and 1783, is “defined through a kind of identificatory determination in a positive (‘we are this’) or in a negative (‘that’s our opposite’) sense.” In other words, the act of building collective memory through commemoration and memorialization helps shape group identities between those who “belong and those who do not” to those specific groups.2 Case in point: in 1784, a group of Loyalists from the Mohawk Valley, part of the 1st battalion of the King’s Royal Regiment of New York and refugees to Montreal, established a small settlement in one of the new “Royal Townships” on the St. Lawrence River. These townships were specifically set aside to the west of the old French colony along the northern shore of the river as replacement lands for those who had lost their properties by fleeing the new republic but who did not want to live under the seigneurial landholding system in Quebec. A 1784 painting by James Peachy immortalized the origins of this meager Loyalist settlement. Peachy, who travelled with the Loyalist refugees up the St. Lawrence River, painted the scene of the first encampment.Two centuries later, in 1984, the city of Cornwall in Ontario, Canada (my hometown), celebrated the bicentennial of its founding in 1784 by those Loyalist refugees. A bicentennial commission organized a year-long commemoration that squarely placed the origins of the community’s modern identity in the initial settlement of those two-hundred-odd soldiers and families. A commissioned academic history of Cornwall, children’s coloring books, a parade, and various promotional materials all reinforced the notion that the Loyalists were the cornerstone of the community and that their “frontier” spirit shaped the last two hundred years of Cornwall’s evolution. Peachy’s painting was used throughout promotional documents and was even included in a mural depicting different moments of the city’s history. As Elinor Kyte Senior states in her history of Cornwall, From Royal Township to Industrial City: Cornwall 1784–1984, the “descendants of the Loyalists” continued to celebrate the Britishness of the first settlers of Cornwall in countless ways—from the name of their hockey team (the “Royals”) to the name of the local military regiment (the Stormont-Dundas-Glengarry Highlanders).3Rarely mentioned in the celebration, although constantly inferred, this city and the identity of its citizens were directly created by the American War of Independence. The city was established as a direct result of the Revolution: from the arrival of Loyalists desiring lands, to the British policies to resettle them, to its description as a “Loyalist” stronghold to this day. As Jocelyn Létourneau of the Université de Laval has pointed out throughout his many works, understanding how history shapes and influences “who we think we are” but also “who will we become” is central tenant of public history; as he writes, “the study of history is decisive in the acquisition of civic consciousness and a conscious identity.”4 My identity (not to mention my career as a public historian) has been shaped by this event, as the telling about it was meant to ingrain in me the idea that I am from a community whose core identity is about being loyal to “King and Country” and definitely not “American.” I view myself as “Canadian” more because of the outcome of this eighteenth-century war than the actual creation of Canada in 1867.The role of “identity” in historical interpretation, as in public discourse, continues to be discussed and debated by historians, political scientists, and philosophers around the world. Building on this argument, the 2022 NCPH plenary session discussed how the Revolutionary War/War of Independence created new identities, reinforced settler-colonialism, and established not one, but two countries, the United States of America and Canada, and further examined how they have evolved and continue to influence current ideas of being “American” and “Canadian.” To flesh out this argument, five practitioners specializing in the lands and peoples at the center of these events were invited to share their perspectives: Rebecca Brannon, associate professor at James Madison University American Loyalists who in the new United States the associate of on the history of the memory of the of history at University who on families who the states during the who public history at University and is on the Loyalist and in American at the Université de who on the who for the British during the American War of plenary was around a series of that into the and of different identities that out of the Revolutionary how these continue to have in the modern day. The first by the did it to be a and a in the and what are the between these two to the for the by of the core The second were the and how did their and to who these Loyalists were and the that them to in the British and the new republic. 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