 Greetings from the National Archives flagship building in Washington, D.C., which sits on the ancestral lands of the Nacotchtank peoples. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's conversation with Joseph Ellis about his new book, The Cause, which takes a fresh look at the events of the American Revolution. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two programs you can view later this month on our YouTube channel. On Tuesday, September 28th at 3 p.m. we'll commemorate the upcoming 100th anniversary of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, where the program presented in partnership with Arlington National Cemetery. Part two of Hear, Rest, and Honored Glory looks at National Archives records related to Arlington National Cemetery and the tomb. And on Wednesday, September 29th at 1 p.m. Andrew O'Shaughnessy will discuss Thomas Jefferson's founding of the University of Virginia, which is the subject of the new book, The Elimitable Freedom of the Human Mind, Thomas Jefferson's Idea of a University. Every July 4th we mark the birth of our country by celebrating the adoption of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The American colonies did not immediately transform into a new nation on that day, however. The struggle for independence began three years earlier and continued for seven more years after the adoption of the Declaration. In the cause, Joseph Ellis guides us through the events between 1773 and 1783 and introduces us to characters both familiar and forgotten. The National Archives is proud to be the permanent home of the Declaration of Independence, and we are just as proud to be the guardians of many other records created during the War for Independence. The records of the Continental Congress show us the day-to-day workings of the Congress. More department correspondents and Treasury Department ledgers document the conduct of the war. Pension applications from veterans reveal the effects of war on a very personal level. And you can read the original words of the leading figures of the Revolution through the Founders Online website, which was made possible through the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. We invite you to make your own discoveries. Joseph Ellis, Professor Emeritus of History at Mount Holyoke College, is the best-selling author of 12 previous books, including American Sphinx, which won the National Book Award, and Founding Brothers, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Joining Professor Ellis in conversation today is Richard Brookheiser, a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute. He is the author of biographies of American Founders, including Alexander Hamilton and George Washington. Now let's hear from Joseph Ellis and Richard Brookheiser. Thank you for joining us today. Okay, Joe, I'll presume the informality. We've known each other for years, but I'm honored and delighted to be here to be talking with you about this wonderful new book. No surprise that it's wonderful. It's informative and it is well written, a delightful and not so common combination. But let me start off with your title. The book is called The Cause, subtitled The American Revolution and it's a discontent, 1773-1783. Why did you choose to call this book The Cause? Thanks, Rick. And again, I'm so pleased to get you as my interrogator here because I think we agree about a lot of stuff, but we disagree in a flightway about other things and it's wonderful to do that. I called it The Cause because that's what they called it, meaning the people at the time, the prominent revolutionaries. The British called it the American Rebellion. Initially, the colonists called it the Common Cause, which was a word referring to their collective commitment to support the Massachusetts people when they were occupied by the British Army in 1774-75. The word American Revolution comes in, the term comes in later at the very end of the war as people start to try to write histories of the war. Whether or not it is a revolution is also an interesting question. And my old mentor at Yale, Edmund Morgan, used to say, you know, nobody knows what a revolution really means, you know, it's such a traumatic experience that no one understands it either at the time of what's happening or thereafter. Well, you must have said that with a wink, of course, but if you listen to political scientists or other historians of revolution, the model is really a Marxist model. It's like the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution and the Chinese Revolution are revolutions. By that standard, the American Revolution is, in Marxist terms, it's the bourgeois revolution, I guess, but they called it the Cause and I stay with that term and use it first because I think it's eye-catching and secondly, it's a kind of canopy under which different groups who don't always agree about the future and what they're doing but can agree at what they're against. They're against British tyranny and they're against the imposition of taxes on them initially and against the occupation of Massachusetts and eventually they're prepared to secede from the British Empire. The second part of the title or the subtitle, which I think you're implicitly asking, is also the American Revolution and its discontents. I guess I got that from Freud and it means that at the end of the war, unlike what Lincoln says at Gettysburg in four score and seven years ago, our father's brought forth to this continent a new nation, they didn't really do that. Lincoln had to say that in 1860 or three but in order to justify the Union's position in the war, but there's not a nation, there are people like Washington, as you know, who believed that during the war it turns out what we're really fighting for is American nationhood but that is minority position at the end of the war and they're a confederation and it looks like at the end of the war we're not going to have the United States as a singular noun only as a plural noun, the United States are and America sort of looks like it wants to become like the EU, it's a collection of confederations or even worse maybe it'll split apart. That's right into a series of separate sections. That looks like that's what's going to happen, it doesn't but in my book ends before we can look forward to that. The second, the related to that discontent is because there is no agreement about a national government that can make domestic and foreign policy for the new American confederation, the two great tragedies of the American founding cannot be directly addressed meaning can we put slavery on the road to extinction, we can't do that if the states are sovereign and we cannot take action to meet some kind of just accommodation with the indigenous peoples of America so that those tragedies are embedded in the cause, how they play out will occur in the next 20 years or so but that that's the reason for the discontents. I could also say that once you start to understand the way in which patriotism starts to recede as early as the spring of the fall of 76 right after the declaration, you're going to be disappointed if you really understand what happens during the course of the war because the Continental Army is not supported and Washington wants to have an army of 60,000 and he could have easily had that demographically we're ready to do 80 or 100,000 could have won the war in a year or two he thinks but we never get that because patriotism recedes to a local level people are interested in what's what's occurring in their town or their hamlet and their range doesn't go beyond that and so if you're looking for a kind of patriotic virtuous American citizenry it's not going to happen and the way that you thought it did and the way we perhaps would have preferred it did. When we when you cover the approximate causes of the revolution and your discussion of that the two that struck me most were literacy and distance. You make the point that Americans were an unusually literate people and you also make the point that we have to keep reminding ourselves that Britain is on one side of the Atlantic Ocean, America's on the other and it takes a long time to get back and forth. Can you elaborate? Yeah, you make me think about it in a new way but yes I intended that there. The literacy thing you know the literacy in New England is 90% it's less than that in the southern states to be sure but what that means is once you get opposition to British rule that the pamphlets which are sort of early-day blogs can be read and understood by ordinary citizens up and down the Atlantic very quickly and and that's what happens if part of the success of the resistance depends upon the development of a coherent argument by the leading thinkers of the time like Dickinson is one of them John Adams is another James Otis is another that that argument takes shape and readers up and down in taverns and up and down the coast get it. Sam Adams is the guy that more than anybody else is a kind of missing link in all this and spreading this from Massachusetts and core committees of correspondence. The distance problem I mean amazingly gets solved in terms of the spread of the word that we are opposing the policies of the British Empire but that it takes six weeks at the least for anything to go from Britain to the United States to the American colonies and sometimes in the winter it takes longer than that and our sense of time is different from theirs. I mean that especially the younger generation that I've taught for the last 40 years you know that the the internet has made people cognitively different from the people back then who took two hours to write a letter but I'm not sure what what the distance issue you want me to focus on is it's going to cause problems throughout the war because Great Britain is not going to know what happened in particular battles until much later and the the powers and it flows the other way as well but and also their their difficulty and slowness of reinforcement. Oh right I mean right you mean yeah I mean and I mean Britain is is the leading military power in the world at the time its army is no better than the Prussian or the French army but when you throw the British Navy into the equation they're the dominant military power in the world and and there are they developed a kind of imperial state that can raise taxes and provide support for its army like no other nation in Europe and certainly the United States but we put it simply their experience in Ireland and Scotland makes them think we can do the same thing there easily dominating conquering and swallowing up both of those small countries. The United States the American colonies are simply too far away and they're just too big distance in the American theater is a huge huge thing and and so one of the conclusions that I reach or I project in early in the book is that conventional wisdom is that it's and it's wisdom that's supported by Washington's testimony towards the end of the war when he says it's a standing miracle I don't know what a sitting miracle would have looked like but a standing miracle that we won the war and it providence was on our side at different times and he's writing this right after Yorktown which really is a lot of providential things happening but that as I read the situation the Britain could never win the war that is to say they had committed themselves to their own version of a cause but that the size of the American resistance meant that they had to subjugate the entire population and that was never going to be possible there are other reasons why it's going to make it be impossible we can talk about but that instead of saying it was a miracle that we won no no it was for ordained we could have lost it and then we almost do at the end of the war because of the lack of support for the army which almost is dissolved in 1780 but I do think that let's put it this way and I newly arrived world power steps on to the stage for the first time as the dominant power in the world convinced of its omniscience and its invincibility and steps into an unwinnable and an unnecessary quagmire we should understand that as Americans in a way that we've not been able to understand perhaps before well speaking of quagmires one of your most powerful and grimace points and you touch on this in several different places is the deadliness of this war yeah something it's easy for us to lose sight of we don't have Matthew Brady photographs of corpses on battlefields there there was this awful speech that Oliver Wendell Holmes gave to celebrate the centennial of John Marshall joining the Supreme Court 1901 and Holmes says well yes Marshall did fight in the revolution but those were all just skirmishes the Civil War veteran you know whenever I read that I thought yeah but you got just as dead then and a lot of people you know to tell us tell us about the casualty figure yeah the unit Marshall the regiment that he served in had 50 percent casualties and I mean and Rick Atkinson is working on this as his military historian and I think he's got great insights and will develop a great story and become his trilogy on this will become the authoritative thing and and I entered the conversation by saying that then the American Revolution was the second bloodiest war in American history per capita only the Civil War killed more people per capita than the American Revolution or the cause if if you were a prisoner of war 18,000 prisoners were thrown into the ghost ships off in the East River and only 11,000 came out the British were more barbaric as as kick taker as prison in terms of attitude towards prisoners than the Japanese were in World War two they don't like to hear that but it's true casualty rates in many battles were 30% and there's this sort of etiquette we get and I was gonna blame this until I just talked to you before this program I was gonna blame this on Trumbull John Trumbull the artist and now I know I can't do that and that our pictures of war to me you know give it a sort of romantic iconic haze and it was much different than that it was a face-to-face in the end most battles are fought with rifle butts and bayonets and close and you have to maintain discipline while the man next to you is being disemboweled or beheaded to one of the reasons the militia run away because you have to be an experienced soldier to be able to maintain your composure in that kind of battlefield and you also have to be able to load and reload faster they could a regular officer or soldier in the Continental Army can reload four times in a minute there are all muzzle loaders they're all muzzle loaded right and that makes a huge difference because what's happening is that the opposition the British forces coming forward and the musket is only effective effective range is 50 meters it's a hundred meters in terms of distance but effective range is 50 meters and what that means is the more times you can load and reload it makes a huge difference the average militia man can only reload once and so the nature of battle then but in addition to the battlefield per se the uncovered war in the in the countryside mostly because of foraging units on both sides especially in the Southern theater is truly barbaric and it's terrorism that if you're a family living in say New Jersey and the British Army comes through well first of all let's say the American Army comes through and you give them part of your food and stuff and then the British Army comes through a week later and they know that you've supplied to the Americans and therefore they're going and especially if they're a Hessian unit most especially if they're a loyalist unit the loyalists are the worst in terms of their attitude they will have you come out of your house they will have the husband watch as they rape your wife and your your women children then they will hang your husband in front of you and burn the house down that's what's gonna happen the casualty rate in the in those back country conflicts doesn't count in the normal in other words you know all these people get buried in graves that nobody you know that nature takes over quite quickly but it's really brutal there and and you're caught between foraging groups on both sides and you just I mean it's one of the other reasons why you know if you have a farm let's say in North Carolina you don't want the Continental Army to come around because they're gonna take everything you've got and then they have the British or the excuse me that the royalistic troops are gonna come through so the nature of the of the war is much more barbaric than we imagined and and it also lends to meets me to the if you know people say who do you really identify who do you most see as heroes in this war it's the ordinary Continental Army soldier I mean who really sticks it out and never gets a pension or until very late in his life and who are unappreciated I really I really think that they need to be rediscovered and they were they were a better discipline than these loyalist units you're describing yes well they were that they were under orders not to first of all don't take all the food let them have food for the winter if you you know if you take their food in and give them a certificate now the certificate is worthless because the American kind of I mean the American Treasury is bank I mean the Continental Congress is bankrupt and it's rising in debt 20 million 20 thousand 30 thousand 40 thousand 50 thousand but anyway they give them a certificate which essentially is what their way of trying to pay them for this the British don't do that and the the well I don't know where I'm headed with this but I think that the Continental Army's treatment of people caught between is not as nearly as barbaric because as Washington insists they are the people were trying to defend and any soldier that takes goods from a farmer and is reported gets a hundred lashes and any person to kill somebody else is executed I mean he's not afraid to do that either Washington is you you spend a lot of time and emotional energy on Valley Forge that is something you know people have heard of people who only casually know about the about this period they have heard of Valley Forge and there's an idea that it was bad but but you really you really go into it and and also its effects on the people who who served through it and survived it why do you think that was so important you're right I I mean I I'm I do you ever read that the straight she is eminent Victorians quotes from it oh yeah yeah it's the greatest first sentence in in biography is his first sentence the history of the Victorian era will never be written we know too much about it and but what he does is dive deeply into specific moments and I'm doing that in most of my work and in this particular book when I think there's a there's a body of material that is rich and that exposes at a somewhat deeper level what's really going on in that fits Valley Forge because it's it's created evidence for us that we that we wouldn't have otherwise and the title of that chapter is the few and that it's the moment in the war when it's pretty clear that the Continental Congress and the American people at the local level are not going to support the Continental Army that in fact the fact that it's suffering is a source of assurance to a lot of Americans they don't want to have a standing army they don't want to have this kind of in that any institution that embodies a national ethos and so the suffering at Valley Forge is quite real and 12,000 people go go in about two thousand three thousand die from mostly from exposure and and malnutrition one of the first casualties the guy called the Jethro who's an African-American soldier and about Valley Forge about 10% of the troops are African-American and and that's where the officer Corps begins to develop a sense of their their identity as the soul of the cause the soul of the revolution we're not going to be supported we have to stick it out it's us it takes the form of the the organization that are the Cincinnati at the end of the war which then gets demonized but as an American aristocracy and elite now it's not a British aristocracy it's not based on money it's based on virtue it's based on sacrifices based on resilience it's based on commitment and they concede with themselves from that point forward as that center that will never never yield and I think that that's the reason I emphasize it so much and and you pointed out that three of the great nationalists of the early republic there it's you know Washington Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall right right Marshall is one of your guys you've written about him wonderfully and and nobody can under that kind of fully appreciate Marshall and Marshall is called Silver Heels at Valley Forge because he's a he's an athlete and he's a got this high jumper and he's got he's in this Virginia rifle company that's that's an elite company it suffers heavy casualties throughout the war but that one of the things that comes out of Valley Forge is their understanding this is Washington Hamilton and Marshall that we need to become a nation that the meaning of the cause initially was simply independence but in the course of the war we've come to understand that we cannot depend on virtue at the local level that we need to become a nation that makes national policy economic power economic policy and foreign policy as a single unit because otherwise we're just going to fall apart and and it it's no accident that half the people who are delegates to the Continental Constitutional Convention excuse me half of our officers in the Continental Army and they're all the veterans of Valley Forge and so the vision they see of a truly continental America as a single nation those are nurtured and begin to take birth at a place like Valley Forge and Marshall says that my Marshall you know in his biography of Washington says that and he's multi-volume biography of Washington and Marshall is often not listed in the group of prominent founders because he's so young at the time of the revolution itself but I think he belongs on the list and and nobody is as important as he is by the time you get to the early 19th century as secretary as first chief as no as chief justice so I salute you for having recognized him and I started to want to write about him then I knew you or so I stopped but I didn't think you had enough material to recover his whole personality the papers of Marshall as I read them are all legalists are mostly legalistic stuff in his opinions okay but the man himself and you know the way he took care of his wife Polly and I mean he is an interesting human being and and you do get at him if you don't that you know we're all prisoners of how much evidence as biographers you know the person provides I just think there's a ton more that we'll never know about and you get this as close as we can but I think he you know he's well I love the guy it's like it's like that song by the weaver so what a time what a terrible time at belly oh yeah yeah now you you know a lot of the people that you discuss are people that anyone would expect to find in a book on this period but a lot of them aren't one of them it's not not he's not obscure exactly but but I feel he's he's often he's easy to overlook as Nathaniel Green and you so tell us about Nathaniel Green I mean you you highlight him very early in the story and you follow him throughout and why is he worth your attention and our attention I agree with you that he is and he hasn't I mean there are cities throughout the Carolina is in Georgia named after him and so he's got memory in that sense that Daniel Green is probably the most brilliant tactician among all the officers in the Continental Army and his campaign in in the South and from 1779 to 81 is generally regarded by military story this is most tactically and and even strategically brilliant campaign he is the man Washington says if I go down if Washington goes down he is the man to succeed me he's the man who offers realistic advice at certain moments that were crucial like to what extent should we should we retreat up Manhattan and get out of this this trap this archipelago and Washington won't do it until Green secretly gathers the officers together and has conference that tells him you got to do it there are other moments where his advice is also extraordinarily prescient you read his letters he understands what kind of war he's fighting and in his campaigns in the South he says you know we just fought at Gullford courthouse we lost and we'll go on and keep losing until and we'll lose our way to victory I mean he understands the nature of the guerrilla war or the semi-guerrilla war that he's fighting and finally he's married to one of the more fascinating characters in the whole period whose name is Katie Green and Katie is she is an interesting woman in her own right and she's regarded as the angel of Valley Forge because she visits all the lodges and she's got on her sort of evening gowns walking through the snow in Valley Forge she's she's more comfortable with men than when women women tend not to like her because she's super beautiful he's a gorgeous and she's she's a bit of a flirt and after the war Green dies of Sunstroke in 1785 I think and if he had lived he would have become a figure of the same stature as Madison or Hamilton I think more like Hamilton but he doesn't she inherits a plantation down in outside of Savannah and she has four children and she gets she calls rights to Eli but she writes to President of Yale and and says can you send a tutor down and the guy that they send is Eli Whitney and Eli Whitney invents the cotton gin on her plantation with her standing beside it and she actually has a role in that and eventually eventually she doesn't make any money on it because nobody does because they the connect can't get the patent clear but but a fascinating woman and and so the greens in Daniel and Katie Green are people who we ought to know more about and and especially if you're a southerner you know in the Carolinas and Georgia he's the these the here because I'm going on a little too long with us but in 1780 and 81 when the Southern Theater becomes the Southern strategy if you will of the British Army develops there is this movement in Europe among the major powers there's a doctrine called UT postie daphtas or postieditis which means that when you end a war whoever controls the territory should have you you keep what you hold what you have at the moment and there is a concern it turns out to be a myth it doesn't happen but that if the war ends and this and the British are still occupying Georgia and the Carolinas and even Virginia then we're gonna lose all of that and so he assures that doesn't happen and that does green and and he basically at the end of his campaign the British occupy Charleston and Havana and that's it they control none of the countryside anyway if you're in the south you could be speaking with a British accent right now if it were for the value of break instead you speak with one of those southern accents but Katie Green is one of the techniques you use in this book is at the end of each chapter you have a vignette about a person that you want to highlight Katie Green is one of them I'm gonna ask you about about two of your vignettes Harry Washington and William Lee tell us and they go together of sorts you have I think I like that question because it allows me to talk about this Harry Washington is a Mount Vernon slave purchased by Washington in 1768 as a young man he's from the the entities anyway and Harry in August of 1776 flees Mount Vernon to join the Ethiopian regiment run by Governor Dunmore who ships are out on the Chesapeake and so he can get to it via the Potomac most of the slaves who go to the Ethiopian regiment a majority over 50% die of smallpox he doesn't because Washington has inoculated all his slaves but he stays in the British army and eventually is evacuated out of New York at the end of the war and goes to Nova Scotia and Marys sets up a new family but after ten years joins a group of a thousand black loyalists who are being discriminated against in Nova Scotia by the white loyalists and they go to Sierra Leone and eventually in Sierra Leone he helps lead an insurrection against British domination claiming this is wonderful that the British are taxing them without their consent and and he's he's not executed but he's banished and he ends up living the rest of his life in an African tribe about 10 miles from the Sierra Leone to prison where he was originally sent to be as the on the Middle Passage here's a black man who interpret who's who sees the British army as his way of declaring his own independence and liberty and that's a totally you don't have to read the Declaration of Independence to Harry or other slaves for them to know they want to be free on the other side is Billy Lee Billy Lee is Washington's manserv and he serves with Washington throughout the war he probably saves his life at least once maybe twice at the end of the at the end of Washington's life in his will he's the only slave that Washington frees outright the rest of them will be freed on Martha's death I think Billy's probably the most recognized African American in in the American colonies or in the American states because he's Washington's everybody knows Billy and I'd say a belly for tell you Billy how you doing and all this kind of in some sense I call him like the invisible man of the of the American Revolution but you've got two African Americans making different choices and that accurately reflects I don't say this in the book I wish I did approximately the same number of African Americans served in the British Army as served in the Continental Army eight to ten thousand they couldn't serve in combat units in the British Army they did support things and that many of them became servants of officers in the American Army they did serve in combat units in fact by the end of the war the elite combat unit in the Continental Army is the Rhode Island regiment which is three quarters African American and they're the one they send against Street Out number two or during the battle in during Yorktown the Continental Army is integrated fully and it's the last time that's going to happen until the Korean War and and and so anyway the two profiles allow me to feature the fact that African Americans can make different choices at this moment as to what constitutes their future and Billy and Harry embodied that and I think there's going to be a new profile of senior portrait it's a very well done portrait as I've seen it up that Mount Vernon in the the building that is devoted to the African American experience fairly soon and it's a gorgeous portrait and his story deserves to be told and I think they can tell it the tour a million tourists a year go through Mount Vernon and I think Harry's story needs to be told the the service of of African Americans in his army was something Washington at first resisted right but he changes over the course of right I think that yeah you remember I mean you've done this research yourself that it that the Boston siege you only needs told he should have African American troops he said now that's you know and the Virginia troops are that he's that are coming in are saying we don't want these guys with us but then he's told that if you don't bring them into the Continental Army some of them might go over to the British Army and so he changed his mind about that but during the war the war is an educational experience for George Washington on the race issue part of the war he's like a typical Virginia planner and he thinks of African American slaves as property as sheep or cattle he's never been through the north and in that sense just geographically it's an educational experience but he's watching these black troops perform for him in a brilliant way he's got Billy with him every day and then he's got a group of advisors that include Hamilton Lafayette and John Lawrence all of whom are telling him throughout the war from the beginning that they that this war must become a war to end slavery it might we can't do it right away but we must set that as a principle John Lawrence is the most outspoken on it and Lawrence gets killed in a meaningless skirmish at the very end of the war before it's actually officially over outside of Savannah he too like green if he had lived would have become a significant figure he was Hamilton's closest friend but throughout this war Washington is listening to people tell him that he's got to recognize that ending slavery is part of the overall meaning of the cause and the question is how you do it and so I think that's that's how he comes out of the war but he's going to disappoint you because he's not going to take leadership on this and but whenever Lafayette or Lawrence writes him and or talks to him and we got the records of it he always agrees with you know he says oh I understand what you're saying I you know let's do that but then he never does anything but he's he's he's unwilling until the end of his life right I mean and he's late to the game but he does he's the only one of the prominent Virginia planners well the others I mean who are become prominent political figures among the founders to actually free his slaves and he's the only one who doesn't die bankrupt the rest of them that's the irony if you ended slavery in Virginia you'd be better off if Virginia moved towards Pennsylvania as an economy for we it would have been better off but Jefferson dies bankrupt Madison dies bankrupt Monroe dies bankrupt Patrick Henry dies bankrupt all of them there's a famous essay by Richard Hofstetter the parent on American text I mean every everybody reads this essay and I've always disliked it because it it it's too constricted I mean Hofstetter talks about paranoia in American politics and these days you can certainly understand what that is but he begins it he says well it really begins with populist money cracks in the 1890s right and you know I thought this is this is bonkers I mean this is it's alive and well during the the period you were writing about and you talk about it boss the American call them the true wigs those are those are your name for them that's what they call themselves but yeah I mean the American essential American argument that drives the movement towards independence is that the British are plotting there is a real serious plot going on to enslave us the British on the other side think there is a plot going on on the American side to eventually declare independence and that and the two sides reinforce the others conspiratorial mentality there's some truth to each side yes the the British are attempting to reconfigure their control over the American colleagues they're not attempting to make the American slaves they're attempting to make the Americans colonists that is second-rate British citizens perhaps but colonists but there's some truth to it because once you surrender control of that of all those issues to parliament you have no say on what they're going to do and then when they start sending troops into Boston and they start bombarding Falmouth which is now Portland and and they begin to hire Hessian troops and they begin to enlist Iroquois confederation to and they pay by the scalp and send steel-bladed scalping knives it sort of reinforces the notion there's a plot going on and but it is if you will paranoia it's a conspiratorial theory on both sides that read that and at some point Edmund Burke who's you know brilliant art order and he's opposed to this American this British policy throughout this period as is William Pitt he's and he sort of faces this and he says you know both sides have have created a conspiratorial mentality he doesn't say that but can read it a point of view that can't concede any legitimacy to the other side and somebody's got to give and and and he thinks it should be the British and but of course that's not gonna happen now a lot of revolutions well particularly since since as you you could say that the cause inaugured an era of revolution worldwide and a lot of them have ended with dictatorships of one kind or another ours did not end with a military dictatorship which is common way for a dictator to arise he has control of the force control the violence and then he imposes himself and it didn't happen here why not two words George Washington and Washington was an aficionado of exits and his exit from power in Annapolis when he surrenders his commission and quite earlier at new a little earlier at Mubert when he refuses to lead a treat what he calls a treasonable move by the Continental Army to do essentially take over the government Jefferson writes I wish I had it right in front of me Jefferson's president in Annapolis when Washington surrenders his commission and says no most revolutions end up into dictatorships and he's thinking of Rome and Greece mostly and and he's think or he's thinking of tests he's thinking of Cromwell as well as Caesar and the one there's one reason one man the character of one man and it's most historians on the face of it would say you can never attribute such significance to a single person in this case you really do have to and and George the third upon learning that Washington had surrendered his commission and not taken the crown as he called it said if he does this you will be the greatest man in the world and for that moment he had done it and he was and if you think into the future that's not what Napoleon is going to do that's not what Lenin and Stalin are going to do that's not what Mao's going to do that's not what Castro is going to do that's not what a host of African presidents are going to do so it's distinctive he's going to do the same thing as president walk away from power he could have stayed president until he died but he wasn't it and no president this is down the road no president in American history did not want to be president more than George Washington and he genuinely doesn't want the power he genuinely want that's that's very well said say that again slowly people need to hear that that Washington you know it wasn't a big decision on what he really didn't want to be a dictator he wanted to be back at Mount Vernon under his vine and fig trees and he said in other words that the power wasn't a great temptation for him and and he expected anyone who served in it at the highest level of office in the government to be capable of the same kind to act on the basis of the public interest even when it meant he wouldn't be reelected that you didn't you couldn't value your own career above the interest of the public at large and he also by the end thinks when he retires from the office of president it's time for you know I think when he when he writes the farewell address the dominant reaction of most Americans at the time is oh my god he's leaving us it's like daddy's leaving and and the children have to take over but as a personality Washington is a person who is got self-control over those eyes those those ambitions to the way that's almost superhuman and and we're just lucky we had him and the Brits know this I mean the Brits the British press at the end of the war write all these tributes to George Washington it's interesting I mean they think of him as you know even though he's the person who's defeated him and he is the embodiment of a kind of military hero who transcends traditional definitions of ambition mm-hmm now another historian older older historian recently died Robert Middlecough and he wrote a book on this period which he called the glorious cause was a glorious gosh I know Bob Middlecough and I didn't even know he passed he must and I'm sorry about that it was if you look at it from afar and if you look at it from our distance but if you were in it glorious isn't the word you do what's the right word it difficult it's not it's it helped me here Richard and what you you said you said in your book that the Continental Soldiers who you mentioned earlier in this conversation that they endured yeah yeah that resilience is the highest virtue it's and they endured and and the suffering that occurs within the cause for the agents of the cause the sacrifices again I hope you've you you challenged my interpretation of Trumbull when you write your book about Trumbull but it's not glorious it's harsh it's it's difficult it's it's an enormous challenge to individual it's it's anyway it's it is glorious in terms of its its consequences though it's tragic because even though the underlying values of the cause clearly unequivocally makes slavery and Abba is in a horror the values of the cause are anti-slavery without question and all the major people Washington all the major southern planners who own slaves say just that what's his name the great Virginia orator Patrick Henry is most candid he said I know it's immoral I know I'm wrong I know that slavery is a violation of the values to which we were claimed to be fighting for but I just can't do without it I can't live my own life without it and but he says this to a Quaker did that but you got me I can't I can't make any moral argument for what I'm doing and but tragic in the sense that the promise itself cannot be fulfilled in any of their lifetimes and that the opportunity and I think there was an opportunity the great Yale historian of slavery he's also passed fairly recently David Brian Davis had coined a phrase I wonder if you agree with me I think it's very it's an awkward phrase but it's a revealing phrase that the the what's how does he put it the perishability of revolutionary time that if you were born into the cause and lived it you carried a certain set of values about human equality in your soul and you would fought and dot or watch people around you die and you had made such that you believed in this and you knew this meant slavery had to end but that as that as that fire became an ember and as the ember died down as you get into the 17 late 80s and 90s then the spirit of the cause is waning and it's and essentially it's overwhelmed by the problem what you do with free blacks once they're free because it can be no consensus on that and but that this there was in one of the ways I've tried to put it to myself is is slavery a Shakespearean tragedy or a Greek tragedy if it's a Greek tragedy it means it's embedded sick volvic park park us it's tis the will of the gods if it's a Shakespearean tragedy it means that human agency and leadership could have had history go in another direction I think it's a Shakespearean tragedy but that the overwhelming values of the cause are emancipation and that's the reason why Lincoln you know says in the Gettysburg address four score and 70 years ago in front of her today they concede the liberty and dedicated to that's the that's the speech where Lincoln says the civil war is about ending slavery not just about the union that's the reason why Martin Luther King when he steps on to the Lincoln the steps of the Lincoln Memorial says I come to collect on a proprietary what is it promissory promissory thank you note written by Thomas Jefferson so for those people that want to call the founders the deadest whitest males in American history and destroy the Lincoln Memorial or destroy the Jefferson or watch out for what you're doing well and Lincoln said another speech that our Republican robe is soiled and trapped in the dust let us turn and wash it white in the spirit of the revolution in the spirit if not in this in my research I came across a sermon given by a Methodist minister in 1779 in which he says a house divided against itself cannot stand I said that's where Lincoln got it from you know and is it the Cooper Union address I'm not sure where it is but it gets but that they recognize that slavery is a divisive issue that can and and they've got a problem because as I said earlier the government that exists at the end of the war isn't doesn't have the power to end slavery but and then down the road this will cause problems with some of our listeners but I will say in any way the problem isn't the founding of the leaders the problem is democracy because the vast majority of the white citizenry of the United States in this in the late 18th century cannot accept african-americans as equals I would say 80 to 90 percent that's the real problem and it's true in the north as well as in the south and uh and in fact again I hope you agree with me on this rich but um democracy throughout most of the founding era is an epithet you accuse somebody of being a democrat um it means mob rule it means the democracy is like swoonish and it's and a republican a republic res public things of the public public things the public is different from the people the public and so we have a theme for a lot of in future american history and it justifies your subtitle the american revolution and it's discontent thank you joseph allis this was this was great as always thank you my pleasure