History, Myth, and the Making of America
Benjamin L. Carp. Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010. xv + 311 pp. Maps, illustrations, appendix, notes, further reading, and index. $30.00.
Jill Lepore. The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Public Square Series. x + 207. Foreword, notes, and index. $19.95.
This review first appeared in Reviews in American History. Jun. 2012, Vol. 40 Issue 2, pp. 215-221.
Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America
Benjamin L. Carp
The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History
Jill Lepore
Reviewed by Michael A. McDonnell, University of Sydney
The Boston Tea Party has become ground zero. It was the tipping point in a drawn-out conflict between the American colonists and Parliament in Britain. The Coercive Acts, passed in retaliation for the Tea Party, set the colonies alight. Even in far-off colonies such as Virginia, patriots claimed the cause of Boston was the cause of all America. The Boston Port Act in particular was seen as an actual invasion. Many noted that, from then on, the talk was of nothing but war. Colonists now had a clear choice: they could fight to defend their rights and liberties, or they could succumb to tyranny and enslavement. For most, it was an easy choice to make. In our narratives of the coming of the Revolution, the Tea Party set in motion a chain of events that would lead to the Declaration of Independence and the founding of a new nation.
For a founding story, this narrative makes for soothing reading. Those in favor of liberty put aside their differences in 1774, rallied together, declared themselves patriots, defeated tyranny, and founded a nation. And soothing stories are what many in America today are yearning for, according to Jill Lepore. In her witty, wry, and insightful book, The Whites of Their Eyes, Lepore tacks between this foundational moment and the current obsession with the Revolutionary generation in the form of the modern Tea Party movement. Weaving together stories of John Adams, Mercy Otis Warren, Phillis Wheatley, Crispus Attucks, and the colonial press, Lepore undermines current popular versions of this narrative. In particular, she attacks the founding fables of the far Right that emphasize the Revolution as a seamless and uncomplicated movement of white, Christian conservatives against an intrusive and increasingly despotic government.
Along the way, Lepore considers the nature of history itself and the ways in which it has been used and abused. In particular, she is keen to try to understand the basis of the historical understandings that inform efforts by the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and evangelical Christians to "take back America." Meditating on what is forgotten as much as what is remembered, Lepore talks to modern-day activists, meets with managers of the commercial heritage industry, and grapples with the efforts of the Texas School Board to adopt a social studies curriculum that teaches that the United States was established as a Christian nation. While acknowledging that every generation rewrites its history, especially of the American Revolution, the current far-right version is something altogether different. It is more like a re-enactment than an interpretation. Indeed, she concludes, it is yet another variation on a kind of fundamentalism—an antipluralist, anti-intellectual, and ultimately antihistorical view of the past.
In the third strand of this entertaining work, Lepore also tries to understand the roots of this antihistorical thinking. Between stories of angry colonists at Old South Meeting House and angry Tea Partiers at the Green Dragon Tavern, Lepore weaves tales of earlier efforts to understand, commemorate, and remember the American Revolution. The bulk of these focus on the failed efforts of historians and politicians to provide a compelling and unifying story of the Revolution for the nation's bicentennial celebrations. Amid an explosion of contrary and divisive historical accounts of the Revolution that mirrored the political and social turmoil of the late 1960s and early 1970s, no one could agree on what story a divided nation should tell about its unruly beginnings. Since then, there has been a nostalgic longing for just such a story. And in Lepore's telling, behind the Tea Party's revolution lies what she sympathetically calls a "heartbreaking yearning for an imagined past—a time less troubled by ambiguity, strife, and uncertainty—a yearning for an America that never was" (dust jacket).
Though Lepore's focus is firmly on the Far Right, she does at times hint that this yearning for simpler and more reassuring stories is not confined to the antihistorical fundamentalists in the Tea Party movement. Her earlier chapters especially deal with a more general problem facing histories and historians of the American Revolution. It is here, after all, that history as scholarship—unstable, forever subject to interpretation, revision, new evidence, new vantage points, and new avenues of investigation—runs headlong into history's civic role in providing a source of common identity. The Revolution, it seems, cannot just be one more historical event to analyze. For better or for worse, it is where many Americans turn to understand their origins as a people united under one nation. The creation of an enduring Constitution reinforced that role and provided a tangible and palpable link to that moment. "No history can easily or always bear that weight," Lepore concludes.
Still, we keep trying. And implicit in Lepore's own work is a tentative attempt to provide a kind of counternarrative to the antihistorical story of white, Christian patriots in rebellion against government. Broadening her vignettes to encompass events and people far from Boston Harbor, Lepore embraces the case for the plural and often contradictory origins of the American Revolution. But here she does so with a light touch. More importantly, she provides a timely reminder that historical narratives will often be messy and complicated even while historical thinking must be picky, demanding, and vital. Lepore believes that vitality will only come from continued debate. Ultimately, she clearly takes heart from the feisty rapport of school-age children over the events, meaning, and nature of the American Revolution, even as she juxtaposes these vignettes with accounts of heavy-handed school administrators trying to shut down any debate.
Benjamin L. Carp attacks the problem of the antihistorical thinking of the current Tea Partiers in an altogether different fashion. In his deeply researched and finely crafted Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America, Carp attempts to provide a definitive historical account of the Boston Tea Party, an event that—oddly—has not had its own historian since 1966. Carp begins his account with an illuminating discussion of the global origins of the Tea Party, as Britain struggled to manage its empire in the aftermath of the costly Seven Years' War. Providing a fresh context for events that we thought we knew well, Carp details the machinations and problems of the British East India Company in India and China that led Parliament to its ingenious solution to allow the Company to ship its surpluses to the American colonies at cut-rate prices. Unfortunately, the new policy ran headlong into an imperial firestorm brewing in the colonies over attempts to impose the authority of Parliament over trade and taxes. Though the Tea Act of 1773 made tea cheaper for colonists, it retained a small tax on the imported tea that became the focus for renewed resistance.
Carp then steeps us in a rich cultural history of tea in the British Empire, and he concentrates particularly on its symbolic importance in the colonies and its centrality to social and family ties and bonds in eighteenth-century America. Yet it could divide as much as unite, since colonists argued over its civilizing influence. Some believed it was a social poison, leading to gossip around the tea table, materialism, and degeneracy. More than a few were aware of the intimate connections between tea-drinking and slavery, as the bitter leaves could only be made palatable by the sugar produced by hundreds of thousands of slaves being worked to death on the plantations of the Caribbean. In this relationship, tea also provided colonists with a palpable reminder of the consequences of not standing up to Parliament over the tax: if they failed to assert their rights as Englishmen, it would only be a short time before the naturally grasping hand of tyrannical authority enslaved the colonists too—or brought famine to the land, as in India.
Against these threats, Bostonians took to the streets, penned protests, and ultimately created a movement that would end with the famous dumping of the tea in Boston Harbor on December 16, 1773. Carp infuses these well-known events with a vivid sense of contingency as he recounts the days and hours leading up to what would become known much later as the Tea Party. He also paints a rich picture of the men involved in the movement and the orderly but menacing efficiency with which they went about the business of destroying the tea. These middle chapters of the book represent narrative history at its best. Finally, the real significance of the events of December 16 lay in the reaction of the British government to the event. Colonial opinions were divided about the destruction of property. But when the full extent of the retaliatory measures that came to be known as the Coercive, or Intolerable, Acts came to be known, they dissolved any doubts. Britain and the colonies were at war.
In telling this story in such illuminating detail, Carp fills an important gap in our historical knowledge. And that should be enough. Yet it is inevitable in light of Lepore's warnings and the current political climate that the book will do more than this. Carp himself seems to want to explore the tension between Americans' cherished belief in their rights and traditions of democratic protest and the professions of respect for law and order. On one hand, because it involved no bloodshed, the Tea Party has become "a formative expression of liberty, independence, and civil disobedience, representing the finest human tradition of non-violent resistance to tyranny" (p. 6). On the other hand, the Tea Party is a frightening example of crowd action in the name of nullification. It was certainly seen by many in Britain and even Boston itself as an act of wanton lawlessness. Subsequently, as Carp notes, a wide range of vigilante groups have looked to the Tea Party for inspiration, including the Klu Klux Klan. Today, those who dumped tea into Boston Harbor might be seen as terrorists.
Yet if Lepore emphasizes plurality and contingency, the tenor of Carp's narrative follows a standard story line. Although he illuminates this story line expertly, he reproduces a driving narrative that progresses neatly from the Boston Tea Party to the Founding. Carp doesn't explicitly state this inevitability, but he does not try hard to subvert it and, more generally, allows us to assume it. In doing so, Carp permits Americans to view themselves only as protagonists and concludes: "The Tea Party inspired radical values, wider civic participation, and the promise of building a new nation. . . . [It] stands as a dramatic example of popular sovereignty in action, of the people enacting their wishes in defiance of a government that could no longer claim to represent or control them" (p. 233). And, as the subtitle of the book makes clear, it is Carp's contention that the Tea Party was central in the making of America.
Carp's careful narrative, then, ultimately gives way to a story of the origins of the nation. The actions of the Bostonians become in microcosm the story of the Founding. And it is this progression—this narrative weight—that creates problems. In focusing on a single event and the men involved, the book provides us with only the perspective of the winners. Late and brief chapters, for example, explore the cultural significance of the Indian disguises of the protestors and the shadow of slavery in Boston; but as intriguing as these chapters are, they sit rather uneasily in the book, somewhat outside the compelling narrative that constitutes the main story. Though Carp nods at the uneven gains of African Americans and the disastrous losses of Native Americans in the Revolutionary period, they give way to a greater claim of good: the birth of a nation. To be sure, the cast of characters Carp introduces us to is a wider and more diverse group than endless biographies of a few Founding Fathers would suggest. There are more heroes. But Carp too often substitutes his heroes for "Americans" or "the people." To give just one example, Carp notes the division in Massachusetts that arose because of the destruction of the tea. The rural towns especially were cautious. But he quickly moves from noting dissent to generalizations that "all over Massachusetts, people now believed they shared a responsibility to defend American liberty by preventing the sale of dutied tea" (p. 174).
Such a story makes for a compelling and reassuring founding narrative. As good history, it raises too many questions. Did all the colonists really manage to put aside all their differences? What or whose liberty were they talking about? Could the political process really have been so seamless for this one brief moment in time? What are we to make of reports from the lower Northern Neck of Virginia of rioting because reports from Britain led lower-class Americans to worry they would be impressed to fight the British? Or reports from Louisa County in the Piedmont of the patriotic suppression of those whom the local Committee believed were aiming at too much? Carp cannot be faulted for leaving out these wider complexities. But our stories of the colonies (both from the left and right) on the eve of independence are often too simplistic. They do not—cannot—comprehend or encompass the many jarring, clashing, and opposing views, interests, and positions that continued to dominate colonial politics right up to independence. They do not and cannot explain the whole story.
Both Lepore and Carp raise questions throughout their work about the multiple meanings of liberty. In doing so, they invite us to try an experiment and think about writing our histories of the coming of the Revolution without using the term "liberty" at all. Instead, each time the term cropped up, we would have to give a more specific definition of it. Thus, when John Adams wrote that the colonists must defend their liberties, we would write that on this particular occasion, he believed the colonists must defend themselves from the arbitrary search and seizure of personal property by British soldiers. When members of the Philadelphia militia or Landon Carter's neighbors defended liberty, they believed that meant the right to vote or the right to be "independent of the rich men." When William Byrd or Thomas Hutchinson used the term liberty, they implied a set of English liberties that emphasized the rule of law and freedom from mob rule. When Abigail Adams wrote of liberty, she likely had in mind freedom from the tyrannical rule of coverture. When Cato petitioned for his liberty, he meant freedom from enslavement. If we are compelled to define the term liberty each time we use it, we begin to move away from the trap of appropriating the term as used by the "winners" of the Revolution. We could do the same, I think, with the terms "patriot" and "loyalist." It would immediately make for a much more complicated—and intriguing—story.
It is hard to imagine another instance in which historians so often adopt the simplistic labels used by contemporaries. And in this telling, the Revolution quickly becomes a one-sided story of a conflict to gain liberty from British rule. And everyone surely wanted that? Thus true patriots fought a small group of loyalists and the might of the British Empire in the name of liberty. Contributions from the left have only elaborated on this story, noting that all sorts of people "out of doors" contested elite leadership of this movement, even while contributing to it. When discussing the period 1774-76, how often do our textbooks, our students, and we ourselves slip into the language of undifferentiated "colonists" or "Americans" as if there was only one mindset on the eve of independence? We know better than this, so why do we do it? Because in the back of our minds there is also a need to explain the founding of a nation in fairly simple terms. In searching for those terms, we are too often doomed to replicate anodyne accounts manufactured by those who "led" the Revolution. A nation conceived in liberty might make for soothing accounts of a founding moment, but liberty is too elastic a term to let it drive our historical accounts. It is still too elastic a term to let it drive our current politics.
So, perhaps better still, let's take the founding of the nation out of the equation. It is not hard to imagine. At so many different points in the war, the outcome might have been different: as the Carlisle commission took advantage of a people weary of war; if Cornwallis had not, inexplicably, retreated back to Yorktown. Indeed, had the French not entered the war on the American side, most military historians concede that the British would have retained most if not all the colonies. If we could imagine this, then writing a history of the colonies on the eve of independence would become less a matter of explaining how a nation, conceived in liberty, came to be and would be more a matter of understanding the many different interests at play between 1774 and 1776—and how they inadvertently tipped the balance toward a premature declaration of independence.
If we did this, we would strain less to shoehorn so many details into a narrative about a struggle between liberty and tyranny—or between right and wrong. We could embrace the fractiousness of a colonial people who had always been divided—by region, by styles, by color, by creeds, by class, by gender, by politics. We could more safely explore the multiple responses to imperial legislation. We could comprehend an increasingly politicized people who were not always in favor of the or a patriot movement. We could acknowledge many kinds of struggles and divisions within and across the colonies and think more creatively about their effects. Some struggles—as in Philadelphia—may have contributed directly to the coming of independence. Others polarized debate, radicalizing resistance. Further struggles arose when some demanded changes that had never been heard of before. Still other divisions made Patriots of Tories; and Tories of Patriots. And some of these divisions pushed a great many people into a decision to sit it all out. Out of this fractiousness arose just enough of a coalition of very unlike-minded people to support independence—a very fragile independence. For some, it had been an act of desperation. Some wanted liberty from British rule, others wanted liberty from the rule of the wealthy, still others paradoxically supported independence because they feared mad democracy. And because of its fragile nature, it was an independence that almost ended in civil war and defeat, helped create new divisions in the early Republic, and ultimately did come undone a mere four generations later.
Of course, this doesn't make for soothing reading for a public yearning for an uncomplicated imagined past. But it could satisfy a divided nation's need for an appropriate origin story. Politics, then as now, was messy. Why should we think 1774-76 was any different than 1858-60—or 2008-12?