“I hear all the notes, but I hear no music,” is the old piano teacher’s complaint. There has to be music. History at best has to be literature or it will go to dust.
The work of history—writing history, teaching history—calls for mind and heart. Empathy is essential. The late J. H. Plumb, the eminent British historian, said that what is needed is more “heart-wise” historians.
What happened? And why? Who were those people? What was it like to have been alive then, in their shoes, in their skins? Of what were they afraid? What didn’t they know?
Studying his face in the mirror, John Adams decided, “I am but an ordinary man. The times alone have destined me to fame.” He was fishing. He was anything but ordinary and it is not possible to understand what happened in that tumultuous, protean time without knowing and understanding him and the others.
There are, of course, great sweeping tides in history—plague, famine, financial panic, the calamities of nature and war. Yet time and again, more often than not history turns on individual personality, or character.
I am presently at work on a book about the Revolution, with the focus on Washington and the army in the year 1776, which in the last months was the nadir of the fortunes of the United States of America, when the army was down to little more than three thousand men. By December, by all signs, the war was over, and we had lost. Fortunately Washington did not see it that way. Had it not been for Washington and his little ragtag army, the Declaration of Independence and all it promised would have truly been “a skiff made of paper.”
There are no paintings or sketches of the soldiers done at the time. Most that we have are by Trumbull, himself a veteran of the war, but his were all painted afterward.
It’s in the surviving diaries, journals, letters, pension files, in descriptions posted for deserters that those in the ranks begin to emerge as flesh-and-blood individual men caught up in something far bigger than they knew.
There was Jabez Fitch, for example, a Connecticut farmer with eight children, who liked soldiering and kept a diary describing the war as he saw it day by day. There was young John Greenwood, a fifer boy, who at age sixteen walked all alone 150 miles from Maine to Boston to join up with Washington’s army. And Mathias Smith, a deserter, who was described as: “a small smart fellow, a saddler by trade, grey headed, has a younger look in his face, is apt to say, ‘I swear, I swear!’ And between his words will spit smart; had on a green coat, and an old red greatcoat; he is a right gamester, although he wears something of a sober look.”
“Greece,” wrote Edith Hamilton, “never lost sight of the individual.” And neither should we, ever.
They were hungry, starving some of them, and without warm clothes as winter set in. Not all were patriots. Not all were heroes. Not all came home. But they were once as alive as you and I.
“Posterity who are to reap the blessings,” wrote Abigail Adams, “will scarcely be able to conceive the hardships and sufferings of their ancestors.”
HISTORY IS—or should be—a lesson in appreciation. History helps us keep a sense of proportion.
History teaches that there is no such thing as a self-made man or woman, that we are all shaped by the influences of others, including so many we’ve never seen because they are back there in history.
History teaches that nothing happens in isolation, or without cause and effect, and that nothing ever had to happen as it did.
History teaches tolerance, and the value of common sense, and as Voltaire (and who knows how many others) observed, common sense is anything but common.
History is about high achievement, glorious works of art, music, architecture, literature, philosophy, science and medicine—not just politics and the military—as the best of politicians and generals have readily attested. History is about leadership, and the power of ideas. History is about change, because the world has never not been changing, indeed because life itself is change.
History is the course of human events. And it must therefore be, if truthful, about failure, injustice, struggle, suffering, disappointment, and the humdrum. History demonstrates often in brutal fashion the evils of enforced ignorance and demagoguery. History is a source of strength, a constant reminder of the courage of others in times more trying and painful than our own. As Churchill reminded us, “We have not journeyed all this way . . . because we are made of sugar candy.”
History is filled with voices that reach out and lift the spirits, sometimes from the distance of centuries.
Is it possible to imagine not learning from the wisest, most thoughtful people who shaped the world, or to fail to take heart from manifest courage?
Is life not infinitely more interesting and enjoyable when one can stand in a great historic place, or walk historic ground, and know something of what happened there and in whose footsteps you walk?
For a free, self-governing people, something more than a vague familiarity with history is essential, if we are to hold on to and sustain our freedom.
But I don’t think history should ever be made to seem like some musty, unpleasant pill that has to be swallowed solely for our civic good. History, let us agree, can be an immense source of pleasure. For almost anyone with the normal human allotment of curiosity and an interest in people, it is a field day.
Why would anyone wish to be provincial in time, any more than being tied down to one place through life, when the whole reach of the human drama is there to experience in some of the greatest books ever written.
I guess if I had to boil it down to a few words, I would say history is a larger way of looking at life.
ONE OF OUR innumerable advantages as a nation and a society is that we have such a specific moment of origin as the year 1776. And that we know who the Founders were—indeed we know an immense amount about an immense number of those at all levels who in that revolutionary time brought the United States of America and the reality of freedom into being.
But while it is essential to remember them as individual mortal beings no more perfect than are we, and that they themselves knew this better than anyone, it is also essential to understand that they knew their own great achievements to be imperfect and incomplete.
The American experiment was from its start an unfulfilled promise. There was much work to be done. There were glaring flaws to correct, unfinished business to attend to, improvements and necessary adjustments to devise in order to keep pace with the onrush of growth and change and expanding opportunities.
Those brave, high-minded people of earlier times gave us stars to steer by—a government of laws not of men, equal justice before the law, the importance of the individual, the ideal of equality, freedom of religion, freedom of thought and expression, and the love of learning.
From them, in our own dangerous and promising present, we can take heart. As Edith Hamilton said of the Greeks, we can “catch sight of values that are stable because they are the hard-won possessions of humanity.”
Blessed we are. And duty bound, to continue the great cause of freedom, in their spirit and in their memory and for those who are to carry on next in their turn.
There is still much work to be done, still much to learn.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. . . .
On we go.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 568