Wow.
So this is my last true confession to you,
my class, and it's a true -- I always give you true
confessions.
I never lie to you, my class, but this is a truly
true confession because the fact of the matter is,
I actually really couldn't figure out how to end the
course.
[laughs] I couldn't figure out what this
last lecture was supposed to be, and I really wondered about it,
agonized over it.
It's the last lecture.
There's all this pressure.
Several of you have e-mailed me and said, "Looking forward
to the last lecture."
[laughs] How can I live up to the
expectation?
So I decided that I would do two things in the lecture,
and the first thing that I'm going to do is talk about the
end of the American Revolution, which is not an easy thing to
do, and I'm not going to be so good as to actually put my
finger on the moment when the Revolution ends,
but I'm at least going to suggest a couple things about
that.
And then at the end you'll see I'm going to come back around
and hopefully magically just tie the whole course together by the
end of the lecture.
You will for sure notice that some of the things I'm talking
about now have references to things I talked about way at the
beginning of the course.
So I'm trying for symmetry -- course symmetry.
And if you think back in the distant ages of time when this
course started I talked on that first --
I think the very first lecture -- I did --
I used a quote from John Adams and I used a quote from Benjamin
Rush.
Those are the quotes that are on the top of the syllabus.
And both of them talk about when the Revolution supposedly
began.
So Adams, writing in 1815, said that he thought the
Revolution began "in the Minds of the People,
and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775,
in the course of fifteen Years before a drop of blood was drawn
at Lexington."
So he says the war, quote, "was no part of the
Revolution."
And then the other quote I read was Rush,
who in 1776 basically agreed that the war and the Revolution
were two different things but then says,
"The American War is over: but this is far from being the
case with the American Revolution."
"We have changed our forms of government,
but it remains to effect a revolution in our principles,
opinions, and manners, so as to accommodate them to
the forms of government we have adopted."
Okay.
So when I quoted those at the very beginning of the course,
I basically was quoting them to kind of shake up your
assumptions about what the American Revolution actually
was.
If the Founders can't even agree, that kind of opens things
broadly for us to really talk about what the Revolution was.
Today I'm mentioning them because I actually do want us to
think a little bit about, if that -- if there's all that
confusion about when it starts, what can we say about when a
Revolution ends?
And there's definitely a hint about how to discuss that
question in both of those quotes,
even though they don't necessarily agree,
because both men in one way or another saw the revolution as
being fundamentally about what Rush called "principles,
opinions and manners" and Adams called a "change
in the minds of the people."
So in a way they're both saying that a real Revolution,
a full revolution, involves some kind of a
fundamental change in principles.
And, as both men suggest, obviously this isn't something
that happens instantly like a declaration of war or a
surrender on a battlefield, that it's a process and it
takes place over years, maybe even over decades.
Now obviously if you think about what a revolution is,
formally speaking, it's a change of forms of
government more than anything else.
So it involves some kind of a large-scale transfer of power
after some kind of a struggle between competing groups.
Right?
So it's a major shift in sovereignty of some kind.
But for the struggle and the instability of the Revolution to
come to a close, obviously there had to be some
kind of a shared agreement about the nature of whatever this new
regime was going to be, about what its ideals were,
about what its shape was going to be.
And without that kind of shared agreement on those kinds of
things, this new regime would really
stay in a state of flux and would be vulnerable to all kinds
of continued dramatic and potentially revolutionary
change.
So in a sense, what I'm saying here is that
revolutions involve both deconstruction and
reconstruction, and that basically it's one
thing to rebel against something,
and it's quite another thing to construct something in its place
that manages to get some kind of general acceptance.
And a revolution can't be said to have ended until both parts
of that equation have been met.
And I think if you think back over the course of the semester,
you can see that during the semester we've looked at both
parts of that equation, in a sense.
We've looked, at the very beginning of the
course when we were getting toward the beginning of the war,
we've seen how Americans generally agreed about what they
protesting against, but the 1770s,
1780s, 1790s revealed they weren't necessarily in agreement
about what they were fighting for;
they didn't necessarily agree about what the most desirable
outcome would be.
And we've watched this over the course of the semester.
We've seen people basically just figuring out what this new
regime is going to be.
So, we looked at the 1770s, we saw how people tried to
create constitutions that would reflect whatever this new regime
was going to be, and we saw how those
constitutions pretty much distrusted centralized power.
Unfortunately, the 1780s revealed that that
first wave of reform wasn't quite right,
that there were some pretty important problems that weren't
solved, that there were some new
problems that seemed to be erupting that maybe hadn't been
anticipated before, and then we've seen the result.
We've watched Continental Army officers sort of vaguely
threatening some kind of coup and saw the mighty power of
George Washington's glasses.
We saw soldiers sticking their bayonets through the windows of
the Pennsylvania state house to demand their pay from the
Confederation Congress.
We saw indebted farmers in Massachusetts joining in protest
to close down the courts, and then of course we saw the
Independent Republic of Vermont and my favorite,
the State of Franklin.
So clearly there was some pretty widespread discontent,
and some of the elite also, as we heard,
were not particularly happy.
Many of them wanted some kind of economic stability.
Some of them were none too pleased about what they saw as
this sort of widespread social instability.
So in one way or another, all of these groups felt that
the promise of the Revolution wasn't really being fulfilled,
and the political system that had been put into place during
the Revolution not only was incapable of dealing with the
problem, but in many ways it was fueling
the problem.
Now of course everything in one way or another added up to lead
to the Constitutional Convention, which we discussed.
And as we discussed in the course, a new Constitution was
by no means a done deal, and in fact there was some
pretty fervent debate over whether or not some individual
states even wanted to participate in the whole
Convention at all.
And we've seen some of what people were scared of in those
debates about whether or not to go to the Convention.
A stronger government or even just a new government might open
the door to things like an established aristocracy,
monarchy, tyrannical centralized power,
the rise of a privileged few over an impoverished many.
So in essence, these people are seeing that
there might be a big change happening,
they don't know what the change is going to be,
and anything seems possible, and all of those things
obviously would represent going back on what the Revolution had
just gone forth for.
So in essence, you see people who had
absolutely no sense of political stability or permanence,
no sense of what was going to come,
no real consensus about the best way to fix things.
Now following the 1780s came a period that obviously we don't
cover in this course.
My other lecture course covers it, and that's the 1790s,
which saw yet another wave of reform and this time it has to
do with the rise of the Federalist party.
And the Federalists in one way or another were largely about
centralizing power even more, and strengthening the national
government even more, and controlling and channeling
the protests and politicking of the populace;
they're not all that comfortable with ongoing popular
politicking.
And here again, in the 1790s with this sort of
counter-wave, you also see more instability,
more of a sense that there's some kind of potentially drastic
change that might be happening just around the corner.
So throughout the 1790s, people have things in their
letters, throwaway lines like:
'If this government lasts another five years,
here's what I think we should do.'
You can almost feel in some of these letters how frightened,
in a sense, some of these people were who were stepping
onto the stage of a new government in this sense of
amazing instability.
I'm going to offer three quotes because it's amazing to me how
similar they are.
They all use the same image.
It's almost like they went into a room and said,
'How shall we describe being scared in 1789?
Oh, I know.'
So James Madison says in 1789, " We are in a wilderness
without a single footstep to guide us."
George Washington in 1790: "I walk on untrodden
ground."
And good old Pennsylvania senator William Maclay,
who offered us that quote way at the beginning of the course,
sitting next to Virginians at dinner and saying that all they
talked about was alcohol and horses.
Maclay says, "The whole world is a
shell, and we tread on hollow ground every step."
Now that's kind of interesting to me,
that all of those quotes are all saying the same thing,
which is basically all of these guys literally are saying,
'Wow.
I'm on this really unstable ground and I have no idea where
I'm supposed to be going or what a safe path is going to be.'
So throughout the 1790s, the Federalists countered their
sense of social disorder by trying to legislate and
administrate their way into order and control.
And the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which I'm sure you
probably studied in high school, are two of the most extreme
examples along those lines.
This brings us to Thomas Jefferson and the presidential
election of 1800.
Now significantly, for the purposes of this class,
Jefferson years later, very modestly called his own
election to the Presidency, quote, "the Revolution of
1800."
Right, not modest at all: 'ah, yes, when I came to power
it was the Revolution of 1800.'
And not only that -- he said it was "as real a revolution
in the principles of our government as that of 1776 was
in its form."
Okay.
He's talking serious revolution;
'my rise to power was just as significant as 1776.'
Thank you, Thomas Jefferson.
But you can kind of see that, given what was happening in the
1790s -- in my amazingly quick and
dirty, frighteningly condensed version of the 1790s that I just
gave you -- given what the Federalists
seemed to represent, you could see why Jefferson
would have thought that his rise to the Presidency was some kind
of a return to core principles, or Revolutionary principles.
Now this change of principles wasn't easy,
and actually I think it was the whole intensity of the
experience of that 1800 election that led Jefferson to experience
and describe his election as a revolution that was fought and
won.
His rise to the Presidency came after a seemingly deadlocked tie
vote in the Electoral College that was thrown into the House
of Representatives to decide.
So deadlocked was the election and so extreme were the fears
and expectations on all sides that if the wrong person got the
office, the entire nation would come
crashing to ruin, that two states -- in two
different states -- and in one state I believe the
governor was in on it -- people were stockpiling arms
because they were going to march on Washington and take the
government for Jefferson.
That's amazing.
That's America, in a sense, on the brink of
some sort of civil war -- if the people are marching on
the government to take it for the person who they think should
be President.
Massachusetts Federalist Fisher Ames, at that time,
thought about this and believed that he understood why this was
happening.
And I'll mention here only because it's been a continuing
theme in our course: we've seen lots of crying guys
over the semester.
Washington's really good at reducing people to tears
apparently.
And I have to mention here -- partly because I just really
like Fisher Ames, because he's sort of an
intriguing character who always says quotable things.
But he also -- he was in Congress in the 1790s and the
thing that he's most known for is he made a speech about the
Jay Treaty and everybody started to cry.
So he reduced Congress to tears, which to me is kind of a
terrifying image, Congress crying.
So Fisher Ames, mighty orator,
reducer to tears.
Here's what he says in 1800, when he's looking around and
he's trying to figure out what this all means.
"The fact really is, that ...
there is a want of accordance between our system of government
and the state of our public opinion.
The government is republican; opinion is essentially
democratic....
Either, events will raise public opinion high enough to
support our government, or public opinion will pull
down the government to its own level.
They must equalize."
That's really interesting.
So here, watching what's happening in 1800,
Ames is kind of confirming what Adams and Rush were suggesting
in the quotes that I started out by discussing.
For a revolution to end, forms and public opinion have
to equalize in some way, and before they do,
things remain unstable.
So in a way, what all of these guys are
saying, is that revolutions end when
public opinion conforms with new post-revolutionary forms of
governance, and until that happens,
revolutionary change is still entirely possible.
Once that happens, once the sort of new car smell
has dissipated from a new government and the government
can be taken for granted as kind of the normal state of affairs
and it's endorsed by a majority, then it becomes much harder to
stage some kind of full-scale revolution from outside of the
government.
So in essence, revolutions end when the public
mind declares that they do; it's up to the public.
Now that's a nice, big, broad general discussion
about defining the bounds of the American Revolution,
but what does that really mean?
What are we really saying here and how could we show it?
How do you actually show public opinion changing and eventually
conforming with a new government?
Well, one way that you can begin to do this is to find a
wonderful primary source that includes all kinds of eyewitness
testimony about one person's ideas and how they changed over
time.
So I bring to you today the recorded recollections of George
Robert Twelves Hughes, a New England shoemaker.
I know he's popped up once or twice in one or two of the books
we've read.
And he's popped up once or twice for good reason,
because it's hard -- it's harder to find comments from
people who are not lofty Founders.
It's hard to find recollections and memories and thoughts about
the Revolution in a broad sense from average Americans because,
number one, they don't spend a lot of time often sitting down
and musing on paper, and number two,
their papers don't get saved as often as an elite politician's
papers get saved.
So people always quote George Robert Twelves Hughes because
he's there and he's thoughtful and he actually went back and
talked about his entire life, and his life spans this entire
period.
He was born in 1742.
He dies in 1840, so he lives a really long time.
And he ended up being one of the last surviving veterans of
the Revolution, or at least that people knew
about.
So because of that, in the 1830s,
he was interviewed so that he could talk about his
recollections, things of his life that he saw
as being significant.
So let's look for a minute at what Hughes can show us.
For one thing, you can see in some of the
stories that he told and the way that he tells them some kind of
subtle but actually pretty significant changes in the
public mind that were unleashed by the Revolution.
So for example, one of Hughes's earliest
memories was of having to bring a pair of shoes to John Hancock.
And as he recalled the occasion all these years later,
he was terrified, and he says he's first ushered
into the kitchen where his type of person belongs --
and then Hancock says, 'No, no.
Actually, I'd like to thank this guy personally,' so then
he's ushered into the sitting room, and he mumbles a little
speech.
He didn't quite know what he was supposed to say or how to
say it, and he's really embarrassed,
and then Hancock actually asked him to sit down,
which terrifies him even more.
And then worst of all, Hancock says,
'Let me drink to your health' -- and wants to do the whole
glass-clinking thing, and Hughes said,
'I've never done the glass-clinking thing.
[laughs] I didn't know what I was doing.
We did the glass-clinking thing.'
And then he basically ran away as soon as he could without
being rude.
Now, Hughes's memory of this whole episode,
even all of these years later, shows really sort of colonial
era deference at work.
Right?
This is not someone who's just respectful of John Hancock.
This is someone who's scared of interacting with someone who's
that above him in society.
Now Hughes lived in Boston in the 1760s and 1770s.
This is very handy for us obviously,
because then he offers us eyewitness testimony about other
kinds of sort of floating-in-the-air opinions
that were developing at the time.
So he -- certainly, you can see when he's talking
about his experiences -- shared the feelings of many of his
neighbors in Boston in the 1770s.
In his later years, he remembered how much he
really hated the British soldiers that were occupying
Boston.
He actually remembered that one of them had a pair of shoes made
and then never paid for them, so it's a really specific
I-hate-the-British memory.
He also remembers watching an eighteenth-century mugging in
which a soldier knocked a lady down and stole her bonnet and
stole her muff.
So he remembers ugly-British-soldier moments
from Boston.
And then on March 5, he says that when he heard
noise in the street he ran to see what was happening,
and he saw British soldiers firing on American civilians,
and his response really says something,
because he immediately ran home to arm himself.
He grabbed a cane and he ran back to the uproar,
and when a soldier tried to grab the cane out of his hands,
Hughes insisted that he had a right to carry whatever he
pleased.
Now that's really interesting, because here you see Hughes --
He's defending his fellow Bostonians literally and
physically, and he's clearly -- I suppose
in insisting that he has a right to hold on to that cane --
defending his rights too.
But what you see is that he's taken action almost
instinctively.
It's not like he saw what was happening and said,
'This is a Revolutionary moment.
I must go home and grab my club so that I can say I was there at
the beginning phases of the American Revolution.'
He just sees what's happening in the street,
he's upset, it's his neighbors, it's people from Boston who are
getting shot at, and he instinctively is just
drawn in to what's happening.
So clearly, his sense of involvement in unfolding events
is growing, particularly given that he next took part in the
Boston Tea Party.
Obviously, that's a very deliberate choice to take part
in a protest.
And then he fights as a soldier during the Revolution,
which I guess is the ultimate way in which you show that
you're part of a cause.
And then he went back to being a shoemaker, and then he became
an aged veteran of the Revolution.
Oh -- and one thing I can't help mentioning,
only because whenever I talk about George Robert Twelves
Hughes I always mention this, because I just love the fact
that it exists: He had,
I think -- Well, actually I know,
he had fifteen children.
But what's wonderful about that fact is that his eleventh son
was named Eleven [laughter] and his fifteenth son was named
Fifteen [laughs] and I just love the guy.
George Robert Twelves Hughes has the humor.
I don't know if his sons were really thrilled about being
named Eleven and Fifteen, [laughter]
but I just love the fact that he did that and that we know
that.
That makes me even happier.
Okay.
So what does Hughes show us besides very bizarre naming
habits?
For one thing, his recollections offer a great
example of the ways in which the Revolution inspired average
Americans to become politically active.
He was literally drawn into the action,
first defending his neighbors and his town,
but over time obviously feeling like he was taking part in some
kind of a larger cause.
So in essence, he helps us see how the
Revolution could politicize someone.
And you kind of see this in action.
Obviously, with the Hancock story, you can see what a real
sense of pre-revolutionary deference felt like.
Now of course, the Revolution didn't just
stamp out deference, but a politicized public was a
public that understood that it had rights and that it could
demand them.
And eventually, the American people would not
show that kind of fear and trembling before a member of the
supposed elite, so basically,
eventually the American public would find their voice.
And this idea that the public had a voice and had a right to
express it is the sort of general changing of public
opinion that would ultimately connect to the nation's new form
of government.
So basically, you see the sort of beginning
of a chain reaction that might actually lead to the end of the
Revolution.
You can see patterns unfolding that represent pretty major
changes over a long stretch of time.
Now obviously, it's not just average American
citizens who are being shaped by the Revolution.
The elite were profoundly affected by it as well.
And for one obvious thing -- suddenly,
they were presented with this opportunity to create and shape
a new government for a new nation,
and they knew that this was a pretty rare opportunity.
So even as they're doing it, they know that this is not
something that happens very often.
Just listen to how John Adams discussed what he felt like was
the change that he experienced over the course of his life.
And this is in one of the letters --
I mentioned this at the beginning of the course --
these great letters they write to each other in their old age.
So here, writing to Jefferson, Adams says,
"When I was young, the Summum Bonum--
or the sort of ultimate height--in Massachusetts,
was to be worth ten thousand pounds Sterling,
ride in a Chariot--a carriage, be Colonel of a Regiment of
Militia and hold a seat in His Majesty's Council.
No Mans Imagination aspired to any thing higher beneath the
Skies."
So Adams is thinking back, and he's here basically
suggesting that the Revolution and its aftermath expanded the
horizons of an entire generation.
Now, he's talking about the elite, but you could expand this
to include the American citizenry as well,
because in a variety of ways the Revolution shook things up,
and in doing so it expanded people's horizons.
Now I use the word "citizenry"
-- and I did that really
deliberately, because all Americans did not
have their horizons expanded during the Revolutionary war,
and this is something clearly we talked about in class and
we've talked about in sections that's linked to some of the
discussions that we've been having about how radical the
Revolution was or wasn't.
So the elite, like everyone else,
were profoundly affected by the Revolution,
but of course they're not the people who get to decide the
fate of the Revolution.
It's the American public who gets to make that decision.
It's their opinions of the new government that are going to
either make or break the government and the Revolution.
And during the period covered by this course we've seen the
beginnings of a long period during which public opinion
would continue to change, sometimes really dramatically,
concerning just what this new government and this new nation
was supposed to be.
Now, I'm not going to end by continuing here to talk about
the end of the Revolution, because it isn't just the
events of the Revolution that mattered,
even when they're ending.
It's actually how we remember them that matters,
because the way that we remember history obviously
really determines its meaning and its impact.
So basically, history -- and how we
understand our history -- can have a profound effect on the
here and now.
In a way, this is what Jefferson referred to -- I think
a couple lectures back -- I've talked about the dead hand of
the past; Jefferson wanting to -- every
nineteen years, 'let's make a new
constitution.'
That's kind of linked to that Jeffersonian idea of the dead
hand of the past -- and since history could have
that impact on the present, depending on how you understand
it.
And that dead hand of the past can be a pretty heavy hand.
At this point, basically I need -- I need to
tell you an anecdote.
I actually do need to tell you an anecdote.
As I was writing the lecture this morning,
I was writing about the dead hand of the past,
and I guess whenever I use that phrase,
I think of this one particular letter I found --
which actually is relevant, so I'm not being completely
random.
It does have something to do with the dead hand of the past
and history.
It actually also has nothing to do with the American Revolution,
but it really shows you how the past can have an enormous weight
on the present.
And it's also just an amazing little piece of paper that I
found.
And it has to do with this letter that I found when I was
rummaging through the Adams family correspondence,
which is indeed what it's called: the Adams family.
So the John Adams family correspondence -- and I found
this letter from John Quincy Adams.
I wasn't looking for it, but I found this letter.
And he was overseas when his father was running for President
and he -- clearly he really wants to know if his father won.
And it takes a long time for news to make it across the
ocean, so what I found was first one
letter in which he's writing, 'Do you know what happened in
the election?'
And then I found a lot of them.
He's writing to people and writing to people saying,
'Do you know?
Do you know?
Has my father won the election?
Who's won the election?
What's happened in the election?'
So, I can't help it.
Now I'm following the trail, because I have to find the
letter where he finds out.
Right?
And you would assume -- I assumed --
that when I found that letter, he would say something like,
'Oh, this is a great day for America' or --
I don't know -- something, something lofty and
visionesque, sort of looking out -- ahh --
sort of John Quincy Adamsesque.
So finally I find the letter, and I'm going to paraphrase it
with my own bad paraphrasing here, but the point will be
true.
He basically says, 'Oh, God.
I'll never live up to this.'
[laughter] It is like -- the first thing
he thinks is: now I'm going to have to be
President too.
[laughter/laughs] That was amazing to me.
I really felt for John Quincy Adams.
You suddenly got a quick flash of what it felt like to be an
Adams, [laughs]
or particularly -- the Adams family had a habit of picking
one Adams per generation and then dumping all of their
expectations on that one Adams.
Clearly, John Quincy Adams is this generation's guy,
so it certainly gives you a sense of -- I want to say dead
hand of the past; I guess it's the live hand of
the past, because it's his father, this poor guy.
Anything his father does he's clearly like:
'oh, damn, [laughs]
now I have to be President to' [laughs]
-- which is amazing,
but concrete -- a concrete example of what I'm talking
about here.
And it certainly shows how the next generation beyond the
Founding generation really felt like they had to live up to the
achievements of what had gone before them.
Now, as far as the people who had gone before them,
as far as the Fathers are concerned,
they knew that they were becoming history,
and so they thought about the making of history and the
writing of history a lot.
To me, the most concrete example of people becoming
history is something that happened to poor Thomas
Jefferson in his old age.
I wonder if any of you have ever seen a life mask.
You know there's death masks and life masks.
Death masks are obvious, but there do exist life masks
as well.
So again, in Jefferson's old age, someone went to Monticello
and they wanted to make a life mask of him.
I don't know who this guy was, but he wasn't good at his job,
so whatever he did he did it wrong.
And his daughter later said she came into the room to see the
guy with a hammer and chisel trying to chip the plaster like:
'oh, my God, I killed him.'
[laughs] The plaster hardened and they
couldn't get it off [laughter] so Jefferson's basically
thinking, this is so bad; [laughs] this is really bad.
He really was terrified that that was the end for him.
He literally almost became history.
He was history.
He was gone.
[laughter] Luckily, they got the plaster
off and he survived.
But aside from the fact that he almost melted into plaster,
obviously that whole cohort of people had really strong
feelings about the story of the Revolution,
about how that story should be told,
and they were not in love with the whole idea that the Founding
period is some kind of golden age of patriotic perfection.
They did not see the Revolution as some kind of divine strike of
providence; they did not see themselves as
demigods.
And here I'm going to turn to John Adams,
which always makes me happy -- who did a really good job in his
old age of answering letters from strangers who wanted to
know: 'Tell us about the Revolution.
What really happened?'
And in answering, he did a great job of basically
popping bubbles of myths.
He basically said over and over again in one way or another,
'You know, the Revolution wasn't some kind of golden,
wonderful moment.'
Now, like the other Founders -- He actually lived to be ninety,
so unfortunately he had a lot of these letters.
I think Jefferson -- I think -- I was about to say Jefferson,
I think got more, which obviously would make
Adams really mad.
Like: 'even now [laughter/laughs]
they're thinking about him more than me' --
but I think all of these guys were getting these letters from
people, basically in one way or another
saying, 'Tell us.
What was it really like?
What was it like?
What happened you signed the Declaration?
What happened?
What was it really like?'
Jefferson in particular was driven crazy.
Jefferson doesn't normally emote on paper in a deep kind of
sincere, he's-not-thinking-hard way.
You always get a sense he's thinking really carefully about
how he expresses himself, but when he's writing to Adams
in their old age, he really sort of vents about
this whole strangers-writin g-letters-and-as
king-about-history thing.
So he says -- he complains: "From sunrise to one or
two o'clock, and often from dinner to dark,
I am drudging at the writing table.
And all this to answer letters into which neither interest nor
inclination on my part enters; and often from persons whose
names I have never before heard."
And in this letter, Jefferson estimates that in
1822 he got 1,267 of these letters from people -- just
strangers: 'tell us about the Declaration.'
He called it "the burthen"
of his life.
And then at one point in this letter --
and this is where I felt like he really hit Jeffersonian
bottom -- he's whining and whining and
he's going on, 'I hate this.
I hate this.
Will they stop?'
Probably Adams was thinking, 'send some to me;
[laughter] I have something to say.'
But finally at this point in the letter, Jefferson just
writes: "Is this life?"
[laughter] I just thought -- that's so
weirdly modern.
That's like something we have probably all said at one point:
Is this life?
Please stop writing me the letters.
His life actually got worse on this front.
You got to -- You're feeling bad for the Founders here.
People didn't just deluge him with random letters.
Strangers made pilgrimages to Monticello.
It became like a tourist attraction and he was still
living in it.
And so strangers would come and just swarm around Monticello,
peering in the windows [laughter], like:
'oops, I broke the glass' --
[laughter] like trampling the garden.
[laughter] He got so overwhelmed by this
that he basically after a while left Monticello and lived in one
of his other homes for a while, like: 'I just can't take it.
[laughs] I'm abandoning my house to the
strangers; I'm going to go live in my
other house for a little while.'
And that's why, actually those of you who have
been to Monticello and you've seen his little sanctuary --
There's a little area that's really his and he has sort of
all his books and his bed and it --
really there are doors that can lock it off to everything,
which is really there for a real reason,
because that was -- that literally was his sanctuary.
That was like: the swarms are outside,
lock, lock, lock, lock, like, you're not coming
in.
So, I think it wasn't fun being a Founder basically.
I think that's what Jefferson is showing us here.
But whether or not they were happy old Founders,
the Founding types who were answering these letters were
really trying to shape the telling of the history of the
Revolution.
And different Founders I'm sure had different messages,
and some were probably happier than others or more optimistic
than others.
I think James Madison was optimistic to the end.
Adams, as I said before, spent a lot of time sort of
punching holes in myths about the Revolution,
that already were circulating in the 18-teens and the 1820s.
So over and over and over again, he told people that there
had not been some kind of unanimous patriotic,
glorious moment, as it seemed to have been,
looking from the distance of time.
So in response to one letter, he insisted that the Revolution
was not a big wave of unanimous patriotism.
As he put it, "Every measure of Congress
from 1774 to 1787 inclusively, was disputed with acrimony,
and decided by as small majorities as any question is
decided these days" --
actually saying, 'It's not we were like,
yes, independence!'
He's saying, 'Sometimes it's one or two
votes that we decided this, and it goes out into history
and all that people know is we voted yes and it seems
unanimous, and it really wasn't.'
Even iconic revolutionary moments, he thought,
should not be viewed as the sort of glorious moments of
triumph.
He -- In one letter, he recalled what he was
thinking as he watched people, his fellow congressmen,
sign the Declaration of Independence.
And he said, "I could not see their
hearts, ...
but, as far as I could penetrate the intricate foldings
of their Souls, I then believed,
and have not since altered my Opinion,
that there were several who signed with regret,
and several others, with many doubts and much
lukewarmness."
So he's saying, 'Okay.
Even while they're signing the Declaration, I don't think some
of these people actually really wanted to be signing it at all.
And some of them, I think, kind of wished they
were somewhere else not signing it' --
which is not the image that's floating around at this point
about what the Revolution was.
So people were disagreeing, he's saying,
back in the Revolutionary era.
They caved to the majority.
They weren't sure about what they were doing.
They didn't even like what they were doing sometimes,
and their decisions weren't always good.
He of course had something to say about that as well,
so he said in a different letter, "I say we do not
make more mistakes now than we did in 1774,
5,6, 7,8, 9."
He's clearly making a point here.
When I was copying this I was like: how many more years?
"80,81, 82,83."
I get your point.
[laughs] We made a lot of mistakes
through the whole Revolution, he's saying.
"It was patched and piebald ...
then, as it is now, ...
and ever will be, world without end."
Nor were battlefields any more sacrosanct.
As Adams put it, "We blundered at
Lexington, at Bunker's Hill....
Where, indeed, did we not blunder except
Saratoga and Yorktown, where our Tryumphs redeemed all
former disgraces?"
So Adams is insisting, much of the time:
we weren't all that great.
We made mistakes back then.
We didn't always entirely believe what we were doing.
It wasn't that different from how it is now.
The Revolution was not some golden age of perfection.
And Adams summed all of this up in a letter that I like,
because in some way -- I don't know --
it seems a little more direct than some of these other
letters, and I suppose -- well,
you'll hear the way he phrases it.
He wrote this letter in 1811, and he said to this one
correspondent -- who said, 'I revere the Fathers.
I want to be like them.
Ahhh.'
-- all the things he's getting in all of these letters.
And he says, "I ought not to object to
your reverence for your fathers....
But, to tell you a very great secret,
as far as I am capable of comparing the merit of different
periods, I have no reason to believe we
were better than you are."
He was being really straightforward about this.
Now, all of those quotes of course are from the sort of
lofty Adams, the far-seeing Adams, the sage Adams.
They're not from the Adams I was just referring to a few
minutes ago, which is the I-don't-get-any-respect John
Adams, and he's there too.
Both of those things are there at the same time,
which also tells you something.
When you read the correspondence of his old age,
he's sort of veering back and forth between:
I am a lofty Founder.
Why won't anyone recognize me as a lofty Founder?
I am a lofty Founder.
Please, someone recognize me.
He has all these letters where he's like: 'no one will ever
make a monument to me, John Adams' [laughter]
-- like: so, so sorry.
But my point here is that, to Adams and to many others,
you're not supposed to look at history at this sort of golden,
perfect moment that's drastically different,
in that sense, from everything since.
In a sense, to these people, worshipping the founding era,
or worshipping the American Revolution, as a golden age
actually did more harm than good.
The Revolution had been all about beginnings,
about beginning traditions and patterns of governance,
about beginning new constitutions,
but these beginnings were actually supposed to go
someplace.
They were supposed to lead to something that actually would
survive and be shaped by future generations.
So I think to this whole generation,
this idea of sort of worshipping the Founding era as
a golden age made it seem as though the time for that kind of
work had ended -- as though there was a glorious,
wonderful creative moment when things could really be done,
and now that time is gone.
And you could see that in Adams' letters too --
that he says often about the future: 'Well,
maybe it'll be a brighter page or maybe it'll be a darker page.
I don't know.
It's up to you.'
But he assumes -- obviously -- that what they've been doing
isn't some dead-end moment at which who knows what'll happen
next.
He actually assumes they started something that in one
way or another they assume is going to continue.
So clearly, the time for that kind of creative political work
hadn't ended whenever the random date is that we decide the
American Revolution ended, and in a sense it hasn't ended.
As the Founding generation well knew, American citizens are
always responsible for their government.
They control its destiny.
Right?
They decide when revolutions start.
They decide when revolutions stop.
They control the destiny of the aftereffect of revolutions.
So I guess in a sense -- And this is where I was really
struggling this morning.
I was like: what would be the ultimate message I give to you?
It's so hard when you teach courses on the Founding period
because everything you say has weird resonance in the present
-- as I'm kind of saying here --
and I don't want to have weird resonance in the present
[laughs].
I just want to sort of give something to you guys.
So related to what I'm saying here,
maybe the ultimate message, the sort of ground-level
message of this course is: your opinions matter and your
actions out there in the world politically and otherwise are
going to matter too.
That's in essence what these Founders are saying,
when they're saying, 'Don't treat us like demigods,
like we're some lofty population that will never come
again.
We set something in motion and the whole point of the thing
that we set in motion is that you're supposed to make it run.'
Right? It's actually about you.
We may be memorable guys.
I might want to be a more memorable guy than I am,
but it's all about you; it's all about you.'
That's what's supposed to keep it running in the end.
Okay.
I want to first of all thank you for laughing at my jokes all
semester.
[laughter] Obviously, one of my favorite
things to do is to tell stories, and lecture courses are moments
where you're completely my hostage and I get to --
Sometimes as I'm writing a lecture,
as today, I'm like: oh, this isn't related but I'll
find a way to rope it in to the lecture so then I can give it to
you.
So, I have greatly enjoyed myself this semester.
You've been wonderfully receptive.
You asked -- When I went to sections you asked wonderful
questions.
You engaged with the material.
After lectures you guys kept coming up to me and asking good
questions, which was impressive and doesn't always happen in a
lecture course.
So I want to thank you because it makes me really happy if you
guys are really engaged with what I'm talking about here.
So, thank you very much.
[applause]