Revisionist History is an American Political Tradition

by Michael D. Hattem

Michael D. Hattem is author of the forthcoming book, Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution from Yale University Press. He received his PhD in History from Yale University and has taught at Knox College and The New School. He is currently Associate Director of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute.

Last week, the White House sponsored a conference on American history at the National Archives. Organized with little advance notice or fanfare, the conference included a few academics and members of conservative think tanks. One of the main targets of the conference was the New York Times’s 1619 Project. Panelists — as well as Vice President Pence and President Trump himself — decried the efforts of those who would “rewrite American history to teach our children that we were founded on the principle of oppression, not freedom.” This rhetoric has been a consistent feature of the culture wars for decades, as conservative media personalities and politicians routinely lament how “revisionist historians” are distorting some previous, fundamentally correct narrative of America’s founding.

But the founding generation themselves actively revised history. Whether it was rethinking the British history that informed their identities as British subjects or, later, refashioning their own colonial histories to better fit with the times, revising history was a crucial part of the American Revolution. It was also a part of the founding generation’s attempts to make the new nation work.

Before the American Revolution, most White British American colonists were proud subjects of Britain and thought of the British past as their history. In particular, they drew on the historical righteousness of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Referring to it as “our Glorious Revolution,” they celebrated how it expanded the authority of Parliament at the expense of the power of the monarch.

However, as Parliament continued to pass unprecedented legislation aimed at consolidating Britain’s control over the colonies in the 1760s, American colonists, including many subsequent Founders, began to see the Glorious Revolution differently. Rather than creating a bulwark against tyranny, many colonists thought that the Glorious Revolution had merely created a situation in which Parliament could act as arbitrarily and tyrannically as any 17th-century monarch. This “revisionist” rewriting of the meaning of the Glorious Revolution by colonists was a fundamental change from how they had long viewed their history. In short, rethinking and rewriting their British past was part of the process that led to independence.

Once the war was over and independence had been won, the new United States had a national history that dated back only a few years to 1776. Many prominent individuals in the 1780s understood that creating a national history for the new republic could help forge a bond between Americans from the various states. Such Founders as George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson understood the value of and need for a new national history and went out of their way to support the efforts of individuals engaged in creating it. For example, Washington allowed William Gordon, who wrote the first history of the Revolution, to stay at his home at Mount Vernon for more than two weeks in the spring of 1784 to copy the general’s wartime correspondence. Meanwhile, Jefferson, Adams and other political and military figures corresponded with individuals in the process of writing histories of the Revolution and the new nation.

The first histories of the new nation after the American Revolution had a political agenda: to help states to overcome their conflicts with one another. Americans had to overcome their own local prejudices, and the nation at large had to overcome its former subjection to Britain. To address these issues, the histories produced in this period reimagined the history of the colonial era by foregrounding the themes of unity and independence. They highlighted sporadic events from the colonial past — such as the New England Confederation of the 1640s and the Siege of Louisbourg in 1741 — that seemed to exhibit these traits. At the same time, they played down other issues — such as conflicts over land and intercolonial trade — that revealed divisions among them. This was especially the case with the issue of slavery. Because slavery contradicted the ideas of independence and unity they wanted to celebrate, these historians largely left it out of their narrative of American history.

Read entire article at Made By History at The Washington Post