Remembering the Revolution: Memory, History, and Nation-Making from Independence to the Civil War

War and Nationhood: Founding Myths and Historical Realities

19 Warandnationhood Founding Myths and Historical Realities = Michael A. McDonnell In his much-anticipated inaugural address in January 2009, President Barack H. Obama invoked the country’s founding moment—the American Revolution—no fewer than four separate times in charting a proposed path through the difficult years to come. Concluding with a call to action, Obama recalled a nation-defining moment during the Revolutionary War: “In the year of America’s birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river,” he began. “The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people: ‘Let it be told to the future world . . . that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive . . . that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet . . . it.’” “America,” Obama concluded, “in the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words.”1 20 MICHAEL A. MCDONNELL In conjuring a memory of the Revolution as a nation-building event, Obama was following a well-worn path. Only four years previously, George W. Bush invoked the Revolution in his inaugural address to shore up support for the so-called War on Terror.2 Obama and Bush knew what buttons to push. Presidents, of course, try to manipulate the emotions of their listeners by appealing to what they imagine their audiences find compelling. And surveys consistently reveal that if Americans remember anything about their past, it is usually something about the American Revolution. The era of the American Revolution has come to provide a rich seam of memorable events that can be mined to invoke, impart, and inspire. Whether it be iconic images or memorable stories of Valley Forge, the Boston Tea Party, the Founding Fathers, Washington’s tearful Farewell Address, or knowledge of the “sacred” texts that lie enshrined under bombproof glass in a vault at the National Archives—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights—most Americans do indeed seem to remember something about their Revolution.3 Central to these memories is an idea of the Revolutionary War as a nation-building event—perhaps the nation-building event. Obama was not the first to link the War for Independence with the creation of a new nation. The most memorable images and tales of the war—including stories, engravings, paintings, legends, myths, and now Hollywood movies—all connect the long and arduous conflict between the thirteen original colonies and Britain with the founding, or birth, of a new nation. And Americans today most often recall tales of a Revolutionary War that privilege unity over division, simple stories of the triumph of good over evil, and memories of a hard-fought victory that ended with the overthrow of a tyrannical monarchy and its replacement with a republican government. As the Valley Forge National Historic Park website notes, sites such as theirs “are tangible links to one of the most defining events in our nation’s history.” Few places “evoke the spirit of patriotism and independence, represent individual and collective sacrifice, or demonstrate the resolve, tenacity and determination of the people of the United States to be free as does Valley Forge.”4 This powerful collective memory of the Revolutionary War as a nation-building event has been reinforced by historical accounts. Most American history textbooks, for example, make this link clear. George Brown Tindall and David Emory Shi in America: A Narrative History begin the second part of their textbook, titled “Building a Nation,” 21 War and Nationhood with the Revolutionary War. The conflict, they argue, “not only secured American independence” but “generated a new sense of nationalism.”5 For Paul Boyer and his colleagues in The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People, the war was the seminal event in the birth of the nation. They begin their section on “The Forge of Nationhood, 1776–1788” with a chapter on the conflict, asserting that well-documented friendships like the one that developed between Virginian George Washington and Henry Knox from Massachusetts became equally commonplace among ordinary men and women during the war. Localism, which was “well entrenched at the start of...