by Jill Lepore
People on the far right often argue that the idea of a “wall of separation” between church and state wasn’t built until the 1830s and 1840s; Tyler was dead by then, but he seems to have thought that wall had been built at the Constitutional Convention. Invoking Islam to argue for religious liberty was an eighteenth-century commonplace, practiced by writers as different as Johnson, Montesquieu, and Voltaire, but Royall Tyler spoke and wrote about religious liberty all his life, from the pulpit, from the bench, and from his writing desk. Nor was Tyler’s life a battle between reason and faith. Early and easily he reconciled his Enlightenment rationalism with his Episcopalian faith. By 1808, when Royall Tyler was chief justice of Vermont’s Supreme Court, he rejected as legally invalid an out-of-state bill of sale for a slave. “Would your honor be pleased to tell us what would be sufficient evidence of my client’s ownership of this man?” the lawyer asked the judge. “Oh certainly,” Tyler answered wryly: a bill of sale “from the Almighty.”
By 1814, Tyler had retired both from the bench and from his law professorship at the University of Vermont. Three years later, he prepared for publication a treatise called The Touchstone; Or a Humble Modest Inquiry into the Nature of Religious Intolerance. Here again he argued, “A State Religion always has, and ever will be intolerant.” That same year, Tyler wrote an essay in which he declared that “all upright ministers—all, of every denomination, . . . will ever condemn a connexion of church and state, as an unhallowed profanation of their character and calling.”63
Toward the end of his life, Tyler began an autobiography. He addressed it to a reader two centuries in the future, in the year 2025: “I cannot but fancy that some profound antiquary of your superexcellent age, while groping among the rubbish of time, may from some kennel of oblivion fish up my poor book.” What, he wondered, would this twenty-first-century historian make of his scrawl? Tyler pictured an historian who smiles at
The sprawling letters, yellow text,
The formal phrase, the bald stiff style . . .
And in the margin gravely notes
A thousand meanings never meant.
Historians, Tyler knew, will always make too much of too little. After all, what if only his left shoe made it down to that superexcellent age, “to be gathered as an invaluable treasure into the museum of the Antiquarian”? Some historians, “after vainly essaying to fit it to the right foot, would gravely declare that the anatomy of their ancestors’ pedestals differed from those of his day.”64 They would think people who lived in the eighteenth century had two left feet.
EPILOGUE
Revering America
The waves that rocked them on the deep
To them their secret told.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Boston,” 1873
On Sunday, April 18, 2010, three days after the Tea Party Express left Boston, George Pataki rode into town. Pataki, the former Republican governor of New York, was thinking about running for president; he was in need of a Founding Father. In Boston’s North End, he positioned himself in front of an equestrian statue of Paul Revere. He was there to launch “Revere America,” a nonprofit “dedicated to advancing common sense public policies rooted in our traditions of freedom and free markets that will once again make America secure and prosperous for generations to come.” Its goal was “to harness and amplify the voices of the American people to give them a greater say in fighting back against the threats to freedom posed by Washington liberals.” At RevereAmerica.org, you could sign a petition “to repeal and replace Obamacare” by clicking on an icon of a quill and inkwell on a piece of parchment. You could also watch a video of Pataki giving his speech to his staffers, a few passersby, and a handful of supporters. Austin Hess was in it. He was wearing his tricornered hat. He was wearing his “Don’t Tread on Me” T-shirt. He was carrying a sign: “Remember in November.”
“We’re standing near where Paul Revere, on this day, two hundred and thirty-five years ago, began a ride,” Pataki said. “He was looking to tell patriotic Americans, ‘Our freedom was in danger.’ We’re here today to tell the people of America that once again our freedom is in danger.”
I wasn’t there, but I’d been there before, often; it’s a place I like to go. Standing there, in front of that statue, Pataki happened to be standing where Jane Mecom’s house once stood: in the 1930s, it was demolished to make room for that memorial to Paul Revere.1
The motto of Revere America was “Respecting Our History. Protecting Our Future.” The Founding Fathers George Pataki wanted Americans to worship fought a Revolution, he believed, for the sake of free markets. That’s not what the Revolution meant to Jane Mecom. In the summer of 1786, when Mecom was living in that house that would one day be demolished to make room for a statue of Paul Revere, she wrote a letter telling her brother that, in Boston, the Fourth of July—the nation’s tenth birthday—was overshadowed by yet another wonderful celebration: the opening of a bridge to Cambridge. She loved the new bridge so much—“it is Really a charming Place”—that she described it for him. “As you Aproach to it it is a Beautiful Sight with a Litle Vildg at the other End the Buldings all New the Prospect on Each Side is Delight full.” The day of Harvard’s commencement, she told him, so many people crossed the river that the toll gatherers took in five hundred dollars. And then, musing on another crop of Harvard graduates, Jane Mecom ventured an opinion, something she didn’t often do, about what it meant to have been deprived of an education, an opinion—a revolutionary opinion—about inequality. She had been reading a book by the Englishman Richard Price. “Dr Price,” she reported, “thinks Thousands of Boyles Clarks and Newtons have Probably been lost to the world, and lived and died in Ignorance and meanness, merely for want of being Placed in favourable Situations, and Injoying Proper Advantages.” Thousands of Isaac Newtons were out there, living and dying in poverty, ignorance, and obscurity. The chances for escape weren’t good. “Very few we know,” she reminded her brother, “is able to beat thro all Impedements and Arive to any Grat Degre of superiority in Understanding.”2
Her brother didn’t need reminding. Every letter his sister wrote to him contained this truth. Benjamin Franklin carried his family in his blood and his sister on his back. He must have thought about this a great deal. He began his autobiography by explaining why he was taking the trouble to write the story of his life: “Having emerg’d from the Poverty & Obscurity in which I was born & bred, to a State of Affluence & some Degree of Reputation in the World, and having gone so far thro’ Life with a considerable Share of Felicity, the conducing Means I made use of, which, the Blessing of God, so well succeeded, my Posterity may like to know, as they may find some of them suitable to their own Situations, & therefore fit to be imitated.”3 He wrote, in other words, to answer the question with which everyone he met must have pestered him: How, for God’s sake, how on earth, Dr. Franklin, pray, tell me, did you, the tenth son of a second-rate chandler, manage to escape from poverty and obscurity?
In the world into which Franklin and his sister were born, very few beat through. Of their father’s seventeen children, Benjamin was the only one. That world was changing. Massachusetts had already abolished slavery. In 1789, Boston, for the first time, mandated the education of girls.4 Franklin’s escape, America’s birth, an age of revolutions, made possible a new world, a world of fewer obstacles. Franklin liked to think of his life as the story of America, and in a way, he was right. He never finished his autobiography. And maybe that’s because he knew that, since he had made his life into an allegory for America, it could have no ending. The Revolution is the story of America because it is a story of beginning.
The day after George Pataki came to Boston was Patriot’s Day, which has been a Massachusetts state holiday since 1969. The nineteenth of April was also the day of the Boston Marathon, and, for a long time, it was the day of the Red Sox home opener. There was also an annual reenactment of the Battle of Lexington and Concord, but it started at dawn, and, in my house, we had never once man
aged to get out of bed fast enough to make it there in time. We shambled, and breakfasted, and then biked from Cambridge to Lexington along the Minuteman Bicycle Path. By the time we got there, the battle was over, but costumed reenactors were still wandering around, waiting for the parade to start. Late but undefeated, we bought, from a street vendor on Massachusetts Avenue, a small arsenal of cheap wooden muskets and, recruiting some other sleepy-headed colonials, waged our own battle on the green. The redcoats, leaning against a stand of trees, gave every appearance of being undaunted by our assault. Bloody lobsterbacks. Then we ate hamburgers and talked about the men who had died on that spot, all those years ago, and what they died for. By then, we had all gotten a little weary of Longfellow—“Listen, my children, and you shall hear”—but once you commit a thing to memory, it gets stuck there:
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.5
We had another musket fight. It got pretty fierce. We ate some ice cream. We biked home, thinking about the night-wind of the past.
What was the Revolution about? What is history for? Who are we? I tried to stop watching, but every story in the news seemed to ask the same questions. On April 23, Arizona governor Jan Brewer signed into law a bill making the failure to carry immigration documents a crime and authorizing police to question anyone who might possibly be an illegal immigrant.6 Five days later, Jeff Perry, a Republican from Cape Cod, introduced an amendment in the Massachusetts legislature to deny public assistance to illegal immigrants. With Palin gone, the Boston Tea Party turned its attention to planning a “Pass the Perry Amendment” rally.7 (Perry had also introduced, in 2009, the Massachusetts Tenth Amendment Resolution. Tenth Amendment resolutions, asserting state sovereignty and opposing the expansion of the federal government, had been introduced in forty states and had passed in four.)8
On April 30, Glenn Beck launched a series called “Founders’ Fridays.” He began with Samuel Adams. He lamented the founders’ fall from greatness: “Our Founding Fathers were once revered in this country as divinely inspired, courageous visionaries. But now, after the past one hundred years of ‘enlightenment,’ we’ve come to realize that they were nothing but old, white, racist, heathens.” He explained his purpose: “In order to restore the country, we have to restore the men who founded it on certain principles to the rightful place in our national psyche.”9 On the next Founders’ Friday, May 7, Beck reported that the ratings were so good during that first show that he was thinking about extending the series. “It seems like America, for some reason or another, is interested now in our Founding Fathers and meeting who they really, truly are.” He introduced his guests, Earl Taylor, president of the National Center for Constitutional Studies, and Andrew Allison, coauthor of The Real George Washington. He urged viewers to read Washington’s own words. “When you read these guys,” Beck said, “it’s alive. It’s like, you know, reading the scriptures. It’s like reading the Bible. It is alive today. And it only comes alive when you need it.”10 Just like Jesus in the Gospels.
That same day, and also on Fox News, Bill O’Reilly interviewed Sarah Palin. “Why do you think America is a Christian nation?” O’Reilly asked. “Nobody has to believe me,” Palin said. “You can just go to our Founding Fathers’ early documents and see how they crafted a Declaration of Independence and a Constitution that allows that Judeo-Christian belief to be the foundation of our lives.” O’Reilly, playing devil’s advocate, suggested that some people might say that the United States had changed, “and now we’re a much more secular nation than we were back in 1776.” Palin called that kind of thinking “an attempt to revisit and rewrite history.” She wanted to “go back to what our founders and our founding documents meant. They’re quite clear that we would create law based on the God of the Bible and the Ten Commandments.”11 Take back Washington. Take back America. Take back the past.
I thought about Langston Hughes:
O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet.12
On May 11, the executive board of the nine-thousand-member Organization of American Historians passed a resolution urging the Texas School Board to reconsider its proposed amendments to the state’s social studies curriculum and instead “adopt a history curriculum that reflects the understanding of history developed by the historians and history teachers of Texas.”13 Similar statements were issued by, among other organizations, the National Council for History Education.14 These resolutions, though, were hardly likely to exert an influence, given the views board members held about the historical profession. The day the Organization of American Historians released that statement, the governor of Arizona signed into law a bill prohibiting the state’s public schools from offering courses in ethnic studies. The new bill was targeted at a Mexican American studies program in the Tucson school district that, according to the Associated Press, was believed by the state’s head of public education to teach “Latino students that they are oppressed by white people.”15
When the Texas School Board convened on May 18, its meeting opened with remarks by Cynthia Dunbar, a Republican member of the board with a degree from Pat Robertson’s Regent University School of Law and who was, at the time, a visiting professor of law at Liberty University, an evangelical school in Virginia. Dunbar prayed,
I believe that no one can read the history of our country without realizing that the Good Book and the Spirit of the Savior have, from the beginning, been our guiding geniuses. Whether we look to the first Charter of Virginia, or the Charter of New England, or the Charter of Massachusetts Bay, or the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, the same objective is present—a Christian land, governed by Christian principles. I believe the entire Bill of Rights came into being because of the knowledge our forefathers had of the Bible, and their belief in it: freedom of belief, of expression, of assembly, of petition; the dignity of the individual; the sanctity of the home; equal justice under law; and the reservations of powers to the people. I like to believe we are living today in the spirit of the Christian religion. I like also to believe that as long as we do so, no great harm can come to our country. All this I pray, in the name of my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.16
Why bother fighting over school prayer when you can teach evangelical Christianity in history class? For Dunbar, who leapt from the New Testament to the New World and then collapsed the nearly two centuries separating Virginia’s royal charter and the Bill of Rights, as if James I were the same man as James Madison, history was religion.
All week, while public hearings were held in Austin about the set of history standards known as Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (or TEKS), the Tea Party was in the news. On Tuesday, Rand Paul, Ron Paul’s son, won a Kentucky primary for a U.S. Senate seat, running as a member of the Tea Party. When the Texas School Board met in Austin on Wednesday, the Texas NAACP held a protest rally outside, called “Don’t White-Out Our History.” Inside, Benjamin Jealous, national president of the NAACP, said, “We wake up every morning, and try to push our country forward, not trying to keep it from running backwards. And this, my mom, reading through these TEKS with me, a very well-educated woman, says, ‘This is taking us in a direction toward the way I was taught in the 1940s.’ ”17 That night, on MSNBC, Rand Paul talked about his reservations about the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Rachel Maddow asked him, “Do you think that a private business has the right to say we don’t serve black people?” Paul hemmed and hawed.18
The Texas School Board was scheduled to vote on Friday. That morning, I went to a public school in my neighborhood to visit a third-grade classroom, where the kids, including one of mine, were studying the Revolution.
Jocelyn Marshall handed out folders to each of six groups of kids.
> “Lexington and Concord, can you come up and get your stuff? I got you guys maps.”
After they grabbed their folders, the kids gathered around their desks, sitting in chairs whose feet were covered with tennis balls, to hush the sound of scraping.
“Boston Massacre, right here.” Three boys came up.
“Can I also have, Battle of Bunker Hill? Battle of Bunker Hill!”
“And remember, Boston Tea Party,” Marshall shouted out the door, “I’m letting you work in the hallway, but please don’t make me regret it.”
The kids were using a textbook called Massachusetts: Our Home. Marshall had also brought in a whole library of books. They’d been researching, mining sources, and now they were writing scripts for a video they were going to be making, a television newscast. Each group was supposed to have at least one news anchor, field reporter, and eyewitness.
Julie, Charlotte, and Fiona were Taxation without Representation, and they were way ahead of everyone else. They’d finished their script, days before, and were already rehearsing.
JULIE: Hello I’m Julie and this is Colonial Times Today. We are here to tell you about Massachusetts in the 1760s. Here is Charlotte to tell you more about taxation without representation.
CHARLOTTE: Thank you, Julie. Here in Massachusetts we’re experiencing strong emotion about the taxes issued from England. People are being taxed on sugar, molasses, stamps, glass, and even tea. (Turning to Fiona.) This is Fiona, with her strong opinion. Now tell us Fiona, do you think the king is taxing you unfairly?