 Greetings everyone, welcome to the Wilmuth Active Learning Center, Purdue's newest academic building and we believe the nation's frontier outpost in the exciting new pedagogies commonly grouped today under the name Active Learning. From its first hours two weeks ago, the ALC has been filled with students. It has altered the traffic flow on campus. It has become, I think, our new town square, so welcome. And so it is even more fitting than we originally thought that the ALC should house our university's newest and instantly most cherished piece of art, a unique replica of what many have termed the nation's most recognizable painting. For the privilege of hosting this great work, we thank Kate Hutton Tweedy, her family, and the Washington Crossing Foundation. Please join me in expressing our profound gratitude and appreciation. At any time in Purdue's century and a half, this would be a momentous and invaluable addition. But never so much as now, given the characteristics of these times. The illustrious speaker we're gathered to hear has written that historical illiteracy is the new normal. How dismally true that is. The list of basic facts to make today's Americans don't know is too embarrassing and discouraging to repeat. The basic civic concepts and principles of which a majority of Americans, young and old, is ignorant, is equally appalling. Arriving college students, if they've been taught much at all, have often been fed a false and vacuous version of the epic saga that is America. Such knowledge gaps, unaddressed, will render a nation lacking in morale and vulnerable to harmful, even fatal divisions. Accompanying the loss of memory and enabled by it is the frequency with which midgets of today attack giants of the past. The denial or even denigration of greatness is a sure sign of a small mind and small character. But the historically uninformed have no way to detect nonsense when it is peddled to them. At the first meeting of a class I teach, I admonish the students to guard against the now prevalent tendency of presentism. The fallacy through which the values, mores and conventions of the current day are used to judge our predecessors. Students who engage in this arrogant practice can rest assured that a century from now we will be looked on by our successors as hopelessly ignorant and morally backward in ways we cannot now foresee. The truth is that the storyline of America, with all its imperfections past and continuing, is about the steady expansion of human freedom and unprecedented widespread material prosperity. That journey took its longest single step forward in the events evoked by this magnificent painting and in the life work of the man at its center. A final danger of this age is that we may lose sight of a fundamental lesson of all the human past. That government by consent of the governed is not the natural way of the world. That on the contrary, history has almost always belonged to the kings, the warlords, the autocrats, the totalitarians. From the very day when the United States won their freedom, the victors worried about the durability of their breakthrough. They feared that the virtues of republicanism would fade with distance from the sacrifices they had made, that the ease and luxury which they knew awaited the new land would leave their progeny open to the blandishments of demagogues and the return of tyranny. No student of Washington or reader of Joseph Ellis will succumb to these errors. Dr. Ellis has labeled Washington the foundingist father, and that is certainly so. In biblical terms, one can think of this creator as a trinity, the three in one. First, the general who won the opportunity for free institutions to take root in this country. As one learns from Dr. Ellis' most recent work, The Quartet, he was next. The indispensable figure in giving those institutions a sustainable lasting structure by the substitution, one could say, the repeal and replacement, of the unworkable Articles of Confederation with the world's original written constitution. That I would submit, Washington completed the trifecta of nation founding by relinquishing power when he could have ruled for life, thus teaching posterity the ethic of citizen service. I hope you will join me in imagining that decades of Purdue students, as they study and commune under this magnificent canvas, will be reminded of the facts and the characteristics of true greatness, be reminded of the long and hazardous march of the freedoms we too often take for granted, be reminded of the fragility of government of, by, and for the people and the duty of its beneficiaries to be vigilant against the world of so many predators, foreign and domestic. With those students and Purdue University and the society around us are fortunate. They will glance at the painting having already read the works of our honored guest and speaker. His has been a lifetime of extraordinary scholarship, historic in its own right, through which he has informed and enlightened millions of us. We look forward to continuing our study under his tutelage tonight. Please welcome Dr. Joseph Ellis. Thank you, President Daniels, for that gracious introduction. And it's really splendid to be not flying over Indiana, but landing. And my wife and I have come to you from Western New England. We live in Amherst, which some people call the People's Republic of Amherst. But she is a Southerner from Mississippi. I am a Southerner from Virginia, and we're here today as Americans. And I want to talk to you about what that means and why the painting, have you seen, is it up there yet? Put it up. Where is it? Oh, it's right there. Okay. I'm not an art historian. I don't know how to do these things. How this painting helps us think about what that means. And we happen to be at a moment in our history when that conversation is difficult. And this painting helps us make it possible in a way that, well, you'll see. A picture, so the saying goes, is worth a thousand words. The deeper truth is that pictures don't speak words. They generate thoughts and feelings, some of which defy logic or reason. And then viewers give words to these thoughts and feelings, an iconic or classic portrait or picture like Da Vinci's Mona Lisa somehow manages to generate thoughts and feelings. And then the obligatory words of interpretation across several decades or even centuries. Every generation gets to decide for itself, is she smiling? The picture hanging in this grand room at Purdue University and projected behind me as I speak has become an iconic image. Indeed, some historians believe the most famous and familiar image in American history. More Americans have viewed it, reacted to it, and then put words to their reactions for the last century and a half than any other American painting. Though many art historians have found it aesthetically flawed and several historians have described it as grossly inaccurate, it has somehow managed to defy scholarly opinion to earn a permanent place in the popular imagination. It is the most viewed item in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has currently spent a small fortune, several hundred thousand dollars, to renovate and replace just the frame. It is ubiquitous on the internet and cartoon versions are now available of Donald Trump at the prowl being hurled headlong into the ice. Thereby joining previous satirical descriptions of Richard Nixon crossing the Potomac towards a landing at Watergate, feminists crossing the Rubicon, and multiculturalists rocking the boat. Our intentions this evening are less satirical and more serious. President Dandles has asked me to meditate on the meaning of Washington crossing the Delaware for us today. What thoughts and feelings does it provoke or inspire, and what words do we give to our responses? Obviously, the question before us is not, was Washington smiling? Just as, obviously, this is a picture designed to conjure up deep felt emotions about a dramatic moment in the American Revolution, and that moment somehow captures the essence of American patriotism, or it has, for several generations. The larger and more urgent question, at least as I see it, goes like this. At a time when the American people are deeply divided, when political correctness has reached epidemic levels in our colleges and universities, when political partisanship reigns supreme in Washington, when traditional codes of civility have virtually disappeared in our public discourse, what does American patriotism now mean? What sense of common purpose do these 13 figures in that boat symbolize? What, if anything, can we learn from them? Responsible answers to these questions require us to go back to recover the context of two discrete moments. First, when the picture was conceived and then painted by Immanuel Leutze in 1850, and second, when the scene it depicted occurred, which was on Christmas night, 1776. Our first dentist destination places us within an electromagnetic field of ironies, for we encounter the awkward fact that America's most iconic picture was not painted by an American and was not aimed at an American audience. Immanuel Leutze was a Prussian immigrant to America who returned to his native land in 1841 with a vision. Much like Alexis de Tocqueville a decade earlier, Leutze believed that America was Europe's crystal ball, the place where a more egalitarian and democratic future had made its initial appearance in the world and was destined to sweep Europe and the rest of the world over time. For Leutze, that meant that the American Revolution provided a preview of revolutions destined, he believed, to unite the Germanic principalities into a single German Republic modeled on the United States. It's part of what's called the Revolution of 1848. You might say, Leutze was almost exactly ahead of his time, excuse me, exactly a century ahead of his time in foreseeing the creation of the West German Republic and now, of course, Germany. He painted several large canvases on this theme he had in his head about America as a crystal ball to include three historical studies of Columbus and the discovery of America. But his masterpiece was Washington Crossing the Delaware, which he regarded as an inspirational recovery of the precise moment when what was simply and self-evidently called the cause against all odds snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. Excuse me. Leutze worked on his enormous painting, which was 12 feet by 21 feet, in his study in Dusseldorf for over a year, 1849-50. American tourists and art students at Dusseldorf served as models for the characters in the boat. Some guy walks past him, he says, hey, would you be willing to come in? Even before he finished, all hope for a Germanic revolution along American lines collapsed. All hope for a Germanic revolution, well, excuse me, thereby undermining his original intention for the work. Six months after its completion, a fire in his studio damaged the painting he had just finished. So he quickly painted an exact replica, which is the only one we have. And that's the version shipped over to America in 1851, where it immediately became a sensation. The damaged original, this is a funny story, the damaged original remained on display in the Dusseldorf Museum until 1942, when it was destroyed in a bombing raid by the Royal Air Force. Though late to the game, the British finally stopped Washington from crossing the velo. Fortunately, the Royal Air Force was unavailable on Christmas night 1776, when 2,400 American soldiers rode across the ice-choked Delaware amidst the sleet hail and snow of a classic Nor'easter. About 300 horses and 20 heavy cannons came across on flatbed ferries. Three other regiment-sized attack groups were supposed to join the assault upstream and downstream of Washington's main force, but the combination of ice and river currents blocked their advance. This was really the first offensive operation conducted by the Continental Army since the war officially started, and Washington's tactical plan proved more complicated than the weather conditions and the amateur status of the officer corps permitted. When it both reached the New Jersey side of the river then, Washington was forced to make a mid-battle decision to go forward or turn back, since only a third of the putative attack force had made it across. Not only that, but he was also an hour behind schedule, and because sunrise on that day was due at 4.41 a.m., his attack on the Hessian Regiment at Trenton would now have to happen in daylight, another logistical liability. Prudence dictated caution, and caution dictated withdrawal back to the shores, the safe shores of Pennsylvania. Washington decided instead to risk everything. The fact that the cannon had made it across meant that despite the fewer troops he would enjoy superior firepower at the point of attack, plus the horrid weather probably meant that he would catch the Hessians off guard, since no commander in his right mind would stage an assault in such conditions. The Hessian garrison of 1,500 troops was not surprised, and the claim that they were all drunk or asleep when a Washington attack, which became a fixture in the early histories of the battle, is a total myth. The Hessians, however, were greatly fatigued because they had been kept on round-the-clock alert for several days expecting the attack. They fought bravely and with conspicuous discipline like the veteran professionals they were, but they were outnumbered and outgunned. For the fullest and faraway the best account of the battle, as well as the crossing itself, do read David Hackett Fisher's book, Washington's Crossing, which won the Pulitzer in the year 2004. What about the historical accuracy of White's depiction of the crossing itself? Art historians over the years have enjoyed a field day exposing White's romanticized distortions. The sky is wrong. It was pitch black. The flag is wrong. The stars and stripes was not adopted by the Continental Congress until a year later. Most visually egregious, the boat is wrong. The troops came across on what were called Durham boats, which were built to transport iron up and down the Delaware. They resembled the landing craft used by the Allies at Normandy in World War II. High-sided vessels in which all the passengers were standing up. When an NPR broadcast in 2002, the art historian Ina Jaffe ridiculed both the boats and the size of the iceberg in White's painting, adding for effect that if Washington had been standing at the prow as depicted, he would have been hurled headlong into the freezing water. Three of the passengers in the boat provide murkier versions of distortion. The officer holding the flag just behind Washington, you see him, is supposed to be James Monroe, the future president, who was in fact present at the crossing and subsequently wounded, seriously wounded, almost died in the Battle of Trenton. Monroe's later prominence obviously led Leutze to put him in the picture, even though he actually made the crossing with his own unit in another boat. In my judgment, this falls within the range of artistic license. Then there is the passenger in the mid, in mid-boat, look straight down on the mid-boat, just past the halfway, rolling away in a loose red shirt. You see that person? Several art historians have described this character as an androgynous figure. You decide for yourself. But by my lights, this is a woman. Apparently in the original damaged painting in Düsseldorf, Leutze painted a man and he changed his mind for reasons never explained. There were about 500 women traveling with the Continental Army at that time, mostly wives, nurses, cooks, wash women, and a small band of prostitutes. And there are a few recorded instances of their participation in the fighting during the war, though none on this occasion. I would love to ask Leutze what he was thinking and once again feel disposed to defend his artistic judgment against his more factually fixated scholarly critics. I like that there's a woman in the boat. Finally, there is the African-American rowing away at the front. You see him in the prowl right at Washington's feet. We know that Washington's mulatto slave and man-servant Billy Lee was at his side throughout the war. He was at his side from 1768 to the day he died in 1799. Based on my experience as a biographer of Washington, Billy is the invisible man in the Washington story. Omnipresent in Washington's life until the very end, when he is the only slave that Washington freed outright in his will, the rest of his slaves were freed upon the death of his wife. Actually, she freed him early because they threatened to poison her if she didn't. You can only find Billy glancingly in the written record. It's really frustrating. Once I was so frustrated, I wanted to have Billy front and center in the non-fiction history biography and I couldn't do it and so I started to write a novel about Billy and I got about 150 pages in and I sent it into my editor at Knopp and he said, Joe, as a novelist you're a great historian. That was the end of that. There are, however, well, there are two portraits by John Trumbull where Billy appears at Washington's side. In both of them, he's wearing a turban. You might have seen those, but Lloyd so would have known the Trumbull portraits. That's the one thing we know, but whether he was depicting Billy in crossing is unclear. The African-American figure is also wearing the distinctive uniform and headgear of a seaman in John Glover's Marblehead Regiment, which is the group that rode him across. Without the Glover Regiment, this doesn't happen. In an earlier retreat across the East River in the Manhattan Campaign, which is the American Continental Army's version of Dunkirk, and we need to make a motion picture about this and they need my book to be the one that they use. The Glover people are the ones that make that happen too. Wherever Glover is, things turn out okay. Wherever he's not, we're in deep trouble. Anyway, Billy's wearing one of those uniforms. It's a special uniform. Billy's customary role during battles was to stay with Washington's three horses, so he probably came across that night on the ferry and isn't in that picture. But Leutzu, who was an ardent abolitionist, wanted a black presence in the picture. Okay. All these factual flaws contribute to the condescending conclusion that Leutzu's masterpiece is a highly romanticized and fictionalized work done seven decades after the effect in a distant European location by a German artist with a revolutionary agenda that in fact had died before the paint had dried. This is a wholly plausible perspective that we can and should salute as it goes past, but let it go past. I urge you for that, because as a card-carrying American historian with some shred of credibility as a student of the founding era, I believe that Leutzu's painting is historically correct in its larger message about that dramatic moment. And second, its more mythical message, which has always been the seminal source of its enduring significance, remains relevant and speaks quite directly to our current condition. On the first score, historically, you need to know the political and military context in December of 1776 to appreciate the full meaning of the scene Leutzu has captured so dramatically. No less than Tom Payne, author of Common Sense, came out with a new series called The Crisis at just this moment. The first line of The Crisis is the line all journalists throughout their American history have wanted to have been able to write and very few of them have managed. These are the times that try men's souls, and they really were. If you think we have a crisis now, this is nothing compared to what they were facing. The American Revolution was on the verge of collapse. This was a final fling, a roll of the dice. More specifically, the Continental Army had just experienced a series of costly and humiliating defeats on Long Island and Manhattan. They should have been annihilated. If General Howe and Admiral Howe had decided to do that, they could have done it. They decided not to do it. The patriotic presumption that ordinary farmers and artisans fighting for what they devoutly believed could defeat a professional army of veterans had been exposed as a grand illusion. The British High Command believed that the spirit of the Continental Army had been broken. The American Revolution had been killed, they didn't call it the American Rebellion, what they called it, had been killed in the cradle. And all that was left amounted to little more than a mopping up campaign. Washington's army, which numbered 30,000 in August, was now down to less than 10,000. And that would dwindle to 2,000 on January 1st when most of the enlistments were up. Even more significantly, the War for Hearts and Minds was being lost. And that was the crucial part of the war. The Long Island on Long Island recruits were signing up for the British Army in droves. In New Jersey, 3,000 colonists signed the pledge repudiating American independence to include one signer of the declaration itself. Continental currency had become worthless pieces of paper, not worth the continental, as European bankers anticipated an imminent British victory. All the Indian tribes of the Six Nations, except for the Unites, had gone over to the British side and were now raiding American settlements on the frontier with impunity, including out here. Request by the Continental Congress for money and men fell on death years as each state legislature was stepping back from the larger conflict to protect its own population. Will invest in militia, not the Continental Army. Militias stay within the borders of the state. I could go on, but you get the point. The movement for American independence was on the verge of extinction. As Washington himself put it, the cause would probably expire over the winter unless we are able to strike some stroke. The sense of drama and desperation that lights it captured on campus was utterly accurate. This was the portentous moment when the fate of the American revolution hovered on the edge of the abyss. From this pivotal point, American history was poised to flow forward one way or another. Regardless of the rather rarefied source of the inspiration, Lloyd's historical instincts were impeccable. The larger and more mythical meaning of Washington crossing the Delaware is based on the knowledge that all viewers of the painting, like us now, possessed. But Washington and the passengers in the boat did not. Namely, they would make it across. They would win victory at Trenton. The American revolution would succeed. The first nation-sized republic in modern history would become the fountainhead for a global movement based on liberal principles, popular sovereignty, the rule of law, human rights, and free markets. And that political model would vanquish the European monarchies in the 19th century and then the totalitarian threats posed by Germany and Japan in the 20th. Finally, with the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the 20th century, the United States would become the undisputed and wholly triumphant world power. This is a picture then that could have been entitled not just birth of a nation, but birth of the nation. In the 19th century, the name given to this more mythical meaning was manifest destiny. Leutze actually painted another epic-sized portrait of this vision, entitled Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Sway, 1862. Can you see that? Which the original currently hangs in the U.S. Capitol. Look up to the right there, and I think I see East Lafayette somewhere off on the horizon. Now historically, not just mythically, Westward expansion could never have happened if the War for Independence had failed. Indeed, the Treaty of Paris in 1783 transferred the entire British Empire south of Canada and east of the Mississippi to the emerging American Republic. Independence was the great prize, but an empire was something we hadn't even thought about. Washington himself insisted that while independence was the great principle in the war, here I'm saying this again, the land to the west, Indiana included, was the great prize. While the Mississippi was the initial western border, there was always a vague and unspoken assumption that all borders short of the Pacific were temporary. As the very term Continental Army, Continental Congress seemed to suggest, though these more expansive definitions obviously were dependent on the Louisiana Purchase, 1803, and then the war with Mexico in 1846. This is simultaneously a triumphant and tragic story. While Lloyds emphasizes the former, we cannot avoid giving equal attention to the latter. Most tragically, Indian removal under Andrew Jackson and the genocide and slow motion across the continent. A recent book by Robert Kaplan, which I recommend to you, it's just out, called Earning the Rockies. Anybody seen, it's a great title, Earning the Rockies, has framed the moral dilemma nicely as he puts it, the American narrative is morally irresolvable because the society that saved humanity in the 20th century was also a society built on enormous crimes, slavery, and the extinction of the native inhabitants. Kaplan's mention of the society that saved humanity in the great wars of the 20th century is obviously a reference to America's role in vanquishing Hitler's Germany and then Soviet-style communism. The name often applied to this 20th century version of the original Lloyds's vision is American exceptionalism, a term that turns out to be more elusive and multi-dimensional than manifest destiny. In its quasi-religious variation, it suggests that the United States enjoys some providential place in the mind of God, who is predisposed to protect women, children, and the United States of America. You have to read this evangelical meeting into the painting that looks at painting since he did not depict the ice and war of the Delaware parting in Moses-like fashion as the boats were going across. It is true, however, that Washington himself frequently used the term providential to describe several moments in the war, Christmas night in 1776 among them, when events could have easily gone the other way if some higher power had not put his or her finger on the scales of history. But Washington never used the word God. Another more messianic version of American exceptionalism suggests the United States has faded to carry its national values to all the nations of the world and that so doing so is our distinctive historical mission. Woodrow Wilson provided the classic formulation of this doctrine in 1917 when he justified American entry into World War I with the words to make the world safe for democracy. John Kennedy echoed the Wilsonian message in his inaugural address in 1961 when he declared that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe in order to assure the survival and success of liberty. The crusading version of the crusading spirit of this version of the vision is still alive in some circles though for Wilson's generation it died in the trenches of the war to end all wars and for Kennedy's generation among some at least it died in the rice paddies of Vietnam. Washington you need to know never used the word American exceptionalism but argued quite forcefully in the farewell address that precisely because the conditions responsible for American success were truly unique they could not easily be transferred to other nations. He was thinking of France at the time correctly predicting that the French Revolution would become a bloodbath that ended with the dictatorship of Napoleon. One can only speculate what he would say about bringing democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan. His first reaction of course you you know people always say professor else what would Washington do about Iraq and I would I would say I say he's busy being dead. Second he doesn't know where Iraq is it didn't exist but if you really press me and you get into this time machine stuff I think he'd say how did we become the British I don't like that role okay. The final variation on the exceptional theme does not require you to believe in divine intervention and does not urge you to go abroad. This is what John Quinchen the United States does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. George Kennan loved to quote that. The two main spokesmen for this vision which I also believe is what Leutze most had in mind in that painting behind me are both Republican presidents. See I know where I'm talking here okay. Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan. Lincoln's words uttered at Gettysburg to justify his defense of the union that the North was fighting to preserve whether this nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure and Reagan's words uttered on multiple occasions that shining city on a hill. In effect this Reagan Lincoln version of exceptionalism claims that the core values of the American Revolution the ones that we win declared to the world by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence then institutionalized in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights embody the fullest and finest articulation of the political principles towards which western civilization has been headed for the past 2000 years. They might very well be improved upon by at some point in the future by another nation but thus far no other nation has done it. These principles cannot by definition be imposed on other nations and peoples who must discover them on their own because the principles make consensus not coercion a principal priority. Brandishing them in flamboyant fashion is unnecessary and even counterproductive since self-evident truths again by definition need not be shouted so only diminishes their luster. So we gather together in this citadel of learning within the American heartland all looking at this iconic picture of the American spirit and where are our thoughts and our feelings and what words do we find ourselves uttering to express them. As a biographer of washing in the words courage self-confidence bottomless conviction come to mind though as a historian I need to remind you that once this existential threat of 76 passed there were five long years of war remaining a roller coaster ride for Washington and and continued to threaten the very survival of the continental army and the revolution itself. So resilience comes to mind in history and life I believe perhaps one of the most underappreciated virtues imaginable resilience. As a fellow citizen living through a deeply divisive and partisan moment in our nation's history what do I see well this is where you get to ask me questions and I will answer as honestly as I possibly can I see a diverse cross-section of human beings all gathered in the same boat rowing together at this moment they are not men or women they are not blacks or whites they are not new englanders or westerners they are Americans and they all assume that their common future lies ahead of them on the New Jersey shore not behind them in America there's no such thing as let's make America great again again's in the past though the winds of the moment are in their faces they all fervently believe that the winds of history are at their backs and the looming events are about to confirm that they are right the dawn is about to break and as someone once said it is always morning in America and I think it still is thank you very much we have time for just a few let's just say three questions because we do have a very important chore to perform together and some great help to do it but since the Dr Ellis was willing are there three questions in the audience it's got to be others one yes sir oh what do I think about the Confederate statue I'm a southern boy my wife's from Mississippi um I've thought about the Jefferson issue a little bit more I've written about that that I don't think we should tear down the Jefferson memorial and or take his face off Mount Rushmore I do think there's a new panel that needs to be put in the Jefferson memorial that makes clear that he believed that blacks were permanently inferior which he did I think that the Confederate monuments each place is different I think that they're educational opportunities I don't think that tearing them down serves any purpose um I think leaving them up and having them having it clear what they represent does what they there's five or six generations of southern whites that have grown up believing that the civil war was a war for states rights and there even most American history textbooks for 20th century offered different editions one in the north and one in the south civil war was about slavery it was that's what they were fighting for they knew that um and coming to terms with that is part of our education eliminating them is not going to eliminate the history history is never going to change so I'm one in class I'm really a opponent of political correctness and um I had students at Williams that would say you know professor Ellis we can't talk about slavery get out then that's what we're going to do and I think we need the monuments afford us that opportunity think of them in the same way that we think of the vietnam war memorial or the holocaust museum yes sir you mean they didn't make it across middle middle of the 19th century we would have been in the british commonwealth the brits would have been really smart to figure this out before we had the war all they the biggest blunder in the history of british statecraft all they all we wanted was to be able to control our own domestic policy right that's what the british commonwealth allows they discover it themselves we had been like austria or canada but it's interesting we wouldn't have created the institutions now associated with american democracy because the constitution wouldn't exist it took a crisis to get us through that it also raises what would have happened on slavery britain ended slavery in 1831 but they ended it easily in the colonies because there weren't any slaves back in england i don't think they would have ended it because of the alliance between the cotton kingdom and britain so i don't know it's got going back and playing the tape and how it would change i think eventually pain was right an island cannot rule a continent oh wait a minute they got this man right here yes sir do you hear that question yeah um uh what about martin's view of the militia at the battle of brooklyn heights and then manhattan washington commanded a little over 30 000 troops 15 000 were a militia they ran away with the first shot and that shaped washington's view of militia for most of the rest of the war he didn't trust militia he wrote pretty he wrote about this in a in a very clear way that you would like to believe the people fighting for their for their home country and one principle blah blah blah that's silly that's not that's not you know people that's not that's an inadequate way of understanding human motivation um so he had a negative view of militia throughout the war it's one of the reasons he he was in favor of some sort of standing army after the war when he was president what i would say about militia that goes that different here is the the big thing that the british could never do was subdue the entire population it's an impossible mission i mean it it's even more difficult than us in afghanistan right now it's impossible the reason it was impossible is because militia controlled the countryside um we saw that in the vietnam war with the vietnam and the militia on a state-by-state basis colony by colony and state-by-state basis made it impossible for people to declare an allegiance to great britain and live they would come kill you and so militia performed an extraordinarily important role in the war in winning hearts and minds or preventing hearts and minds from going um but as traditional troops they were ineffective there was in the literature of the scholarship if you want to call it in the early 19th century as the generation is dying the myth of the minute man and they went you know if if you were new england the militia came through in a big way the battle of saratoga and they came through at conquered and and lexington okay that's true in new england but elsewhere not so at all in the myth of the militia is a myth the war was won by the regulars the people that signed up for the duration that stayed the course and they were sent away with nothing no pensions nothing i mean it's a disgrace to what happened and washington was very very upset about that which is one of the reasons he was such in favor of the creation of a federal government that was responsible for national policy he saw you know he came from came to that question with that memory of sending those people off back to their homes totally impoverished the ones who won the war they won the war i just can't end on that bad a note but but it's um so we'll take one quickie there was one back there i saw yes sir whatever i make it quick sir how did he deal with religious differences under the articles of confederation different states assume different postures virginia is the only state under the pressure from jefferson and madison to pass up the principle of religious freedom there can be no state-sponsored religion that passed in virginia in 1786 it's one of the things that jefferson put on his tombstone when you get to the constitutional convention the united states is the first nation-sized republic declare as a principle religious freedom it had been assumed up until then from the time of Aristotle to the late 18th century that some shared religious convictions were essential to provide the glue that tied people together and if you didn't have that that it would dissolve we said that's not necessary and that the interaction of different sects s e c ts would be a positive kind of energy so we're the first nation to have the principle of separation of church and state though lingering in each of the states up until about 1819 1820 is some form of preference for one denomination or another the last one to go is you think my state massachusetts 1820 did away with congregationalism but that what's unique about the american founding among i mean it's one of the truly unique things the belief in the separation of church and state i was teaching this course with federal judges down at uva a couple years ago during the middle of the iraq war and one of the federal judges you know was giving me a hard time so i tried to to lay it on him and um and um so i said all right judge i won't tell you his name i said you've just been appointed head of the entire government of iraq what's the first thing you do he said read him jefferson on separation of church and state i said bingo thank you very much there's no way to top that but we do have one dramatic moment of our own to to enjoy together and we have recruited an all-star cast to help us do so to pull the cord and unveil the painting for the rest of its life at i hope very very long tenure at purdue please greet the following um is julia weeder who is the great granddaughter of ann hawks hutton and leon john h hutton leon hutton was a student and an athlete at purdue university many years ago julia is here with us majoring in biochemistry with a concentration in prevet med minoring in classical studies and pursuing a certificate in the dean's scholar program julia please also miss kaley man a senior in history from garratt indiana kaley is president of phile for theta history honor society chapter at purdue double majoring in history and anthropology pursuing a certificate in medical humanities and finally midshipman mason dennis a student leader in nrotc from newburg indiana majoring in aviation technology in minoring in naval science julia kaley and midshipman dennis please do the honors i want to thank everyone for coming i know that many of you are thinking what i'm thinking of only all those who will enjoy this room and marvel at that painting could have heard the lecture we just heard from america's eminent most eminent living historian thank you dr ellis thank you all for coming good evening