Talkin’ Bout a Revolution

The Long Revolution: Creating a United States After 1776, by Nathan Perl-Rosenthal (Basic Books, 272 pp., $30.00)

On July 4^th, 1834, Democrats gathered in Philadelphia to celebrate two events dear to their hearts. One was the 58^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The other was, as one partisan newspaper account put it, “the triumph of the People over the United States Bank.”

Henry D. Gilpin, orator for the day, had been one of President Andrew Jackson’s appointed directors of the Second Bank of the United States. During his brief tenure, he served Jackson’s campaign, eventually successful, to destroy the Bank. 

Denied reappointment by the Senate, which was controlled by Jackson’s opponents, Gilpin invoked the memory of the American Revolution to rally his party in its “present great struggle.” Defining the nation in a way that excluded the targets of Jackson’s ire, Gilpin described the struggle as “between the country on one side, and the bank and its political allies on the other.” 

Dinner followed, along with the traditional thirteen toasts, ten more for distinguished guests, and more than twenty-five additional “volunteer toasts.” By July 8^th, the organizers had recovered enough to ask Gilpin for a copy of his speech, which they published as a pamphlet. This forgotten address is among the 2,451 speeches that historian Nathaniel Perl-Rosenthal lists in his Fourth of July Orations database. Published between 1777 and 1876, they are the archival heart of The Long Revolution: Creating a United States After 1776.

If his remarks were more nakedly partisan than the average Independence Day speech, Gilpin was nonetheless typical in his understanding of the occasion. He told his audience that they should not merely celebrate the past but “examine the present and look forward to the future.” For Perl-Rosenthal, these words show that speakers in our early independence celebrations offered more than gaseous intervals between celebratory cannon blasts (or shots of liquor). They sought to “inspire action” by “bringing the American Revolution into the present and making their listeners into actors in the revolutionary drama.” For most of the first century after the Declaration, Perl-Rosenthal argues, most speakers presented the Revolution as an “ongoing and still incomplete transformation” that their audiences needed to carry forward. 

Gilpin was also typical in introducing a deeply contestable view, rooted in his day’s political disputes, of how to uphold the legacy of the patriots of 1776. Fourth of July festivals brought Americans together, but they were also “essential” occasions for “debating the present and future of American politics.” In arranging a “Trump rally” for the Fourth this year, our president bucked recent expectations for bipartisan celebration. However, deploying Washington, Jefferson, and company in a partisan manner is an old July 4^th tradition.

Perl-Rosenthal argues that Fourth of July orations changed between 1777 and 1876. In the early republic through the first years of the 1820s, orators “looked abroad with almost obsessive intensity” because America’s “standing on the international stage remained uncertain.” From the end of that period until the dawn of the Civil War, orators, now confident in the nation’s power but increasingly worried about its psychic and political health, “turned their vision of the ongoing American Revolution inward” toward moral or structural reform. More of these orators were now drawn from groups that rarely had July 4^th audiences before. In addition to the white gentlemen of yore, “Black men, women, members of the working classes,” and members of new religious groups, including Latter Day Saints, took their turns to speak up.

In the decade before secession, “mainstream orators” implied that “the Revolution was complete.” But just as the Revolution threatened to recede into the past, taking interesting Fourth of July oratory with it, the war returned the proposition that all men are created equal to the present—compelling Northern orators to distinguish legitimate revolution from Southern rebellion. The resulting “rhetorical fusion of the present and past” in Fourth of July oratory inspired “enthusiastic reassertions of the old belief in the ongoing nature of the American Revolution.” Speakers “again imagined themselves as [revolutionary] actors.” When the war ended, a sense of completion returned for Americans worn out by struggle. The centennial celebrations of 1876, which included a national call to write local histories, symbolized the movement of revolution from “action into memory.”

Tossing aside his historian’s cap, Perl-Rosenthal regrets this movement. “The Revolution is surely in progress in our day,” he thinks, in the sense that its ideals have yet to be fulfilled. Yet the American Revolution’s status in our minds and memories as a completed event means that “even to speak of the American Revolution as an ongoing concern in the twenty-first century can seem unreal”—though Americans living amid “No Kings” protests and old enough to recall the Tea Party movement will find the latter assertion exaggerated.

As one listens to an 1812 Overture that has nothing to do with the War of 1812, or to “Born in the U.S.A.” without registering its doleful lyrics, it is hard not to regret that today’s Fourth of July is “intellectually inert.” Still, to earn the right to this lament, the historian must treat his materials with care. Perl-Rosenthal fails the test. Let three examples suffice.

First, Perl-Rosenthal observes that some orators, even in the early history of Fourth of July orations, rejected American exceptionalism. He claims that Thomas Allen, in his 1803 address before a Pittsfield, MA audience, “denied that the United States was uniquely free.” 

That’s not quite what the speech says. Perl-Rosenthal is right that Reverend Allen, immortalized by Washington Irving as “a belligerent parson, full of fight,” said that “the Rights of Man are the same” in every country.” But that hardly means that Allen considered the United States a typical country. Perl-Rosenthal is wrong to leave out the words that immediately follow the snippet he quotes. In every country, the “Rights of Man are the same, and ought equally to be respected. But [such] is not the fact.” Allen was arguing that while rights are not defined by borders, the United States was special in the way it respected those rights. 

In truth, Allen was a textbook American exceptionalist who thought Americans “blest with the happiest form of Government that the World hath ever seen” and “born to inherit the most extensive tract of country that any Nation can boast.” He saw us as under such “strong obligations to transmit these high privileges to future times” that “posterity will imprecate curses on our heads” if we fail. 

Second, Perl-Rosenthal finds that when orators turned inward, they divided into two camps. One camp, whose speakers “belonged to the white property-holding classes,” viewed “social conflicts primarily as a threat to the unity of the nation.” They tended to think that “individual choices and behaviors rather than economic and social” caused “conflicts in American society” and to prescribe a revolution at the level of the individual soul. Their “individualistic struggle” often was “explicitly Christian.” The other camp, whose orators were often outsiders, “viewed the trouble with the nation as collective, not individual” and embraced social conflict. 

This distinction is facile. To bolster his claim about the individualism of the first group, Perl-Rosenthal says that Peleg Chandler, speaking in Boston in 1844, rejected “any kind of collective behavior or action.” That isn’t true. Chandler, a member of Boston’s legislature, warned against associations that (he claimed) absorb the individual completely. Yet he favored “principles of association which directly strengthen personal character” and associations that seek “the improvement of the individual members or the mutual restraint and reform of each other.” 

Because political parties pose only a limited threat to individuality and help overcome indifference to important matters, Chandler was much softer on them than many of the abolitionists Perl-Rosenthal places in the second camp, such as William Lloyd Garrison—who rejected party politics altogether. For Chandler, those who “from good motives, engage in political organizations of this sort are really entitled to great credit.” 

Third, and most egregiously, Perl-Rosenthal argues that some orators considered the American experiment complete in a negative sense: it had failed. “American political leaders,” he reports, “regularly predicted, as one Fourth of July orator did in 1818, that the Republic would ‘soon be destroyed.’” That speaker, a lawyer named Austin Denny, uttered those words in Worcester. However, Perl-Rosenthal quotes only part of his statement: “Europe was filled with predictions [our government] would soon be destroyed.” He omits the words Denny utters soon after: “our form of government has been upheld.” Denny was making the opposite point to the one Perl-Rosenthal claims.

Similarly, Perl-Rosenthal quotes black abolitionist Samuel May to the effect that “[t]he great experiment begun by our fathers in 1776 is a failure.” May, says Perl-Rosenthal, “closed the door on continuity with the revolutionary past.” He leaves out the context of the snippet, in which May attributed the view that the experiment has failed to others. “Already you may hear it murmured,” May observed, “that the great experiment begun by our fathers in 1776 is a failure.” But May trusted in God that the principles “for which they fought and endured so much, will be saved; though it may be so as by the fires of Revolution.” He identified himself and his comrades as “champions of the Declaration,” and promised to continue the struggle in much the same way that Perl-Rosenthal describes elsewhere.

Such errors and omissions are significant enough to cast doubt on Perl-Rosenthal’s work as a whole. 

Still, readers who review some of the 2,451 speeches on which he grounds his interpretation will find at least some of Perl-Rosenthal’s views vindicated. Even if Perl-Rosenthal lacks evidence that Fourth of July orations declared the American experiment a failure, many did balance patriotic rhetoric with warnings of our fragility. Here is Henry D. Gilpin again, referring to the Roman Republic, the free spirit of its founders, and the danger of forgetting a good beginning: “It was not until the remembrance of these things had passed away, that the spirit of the republic was gone and the liberties of its citizens were overthrown.” These words, fitly spoken to a republic in its youth, are still more fit for a republic that may already have gone to seed.

Whatever its defects, Perl-Rosenthal’s book points to a trove of documents that together offer guidance for an uneasy semiquincentennial. Americans, despite our reputation for optimism, have rarely been far from the thought of decline—or from each other’s throats. But in the Revolution, we have often found not only partisan ammunition, but also national resolve and material for reflection. If, as Perl-Rosenthal says, Independence Day orators “borrowed from the long tradition of American jeremiads,” it was also customary to end on a hopeful note.