Founding Myths

by Ray Raphael

  Of the many narratives featuring Native people in the Revolutionary War, which do we choose to tell—and why? Consider these two alternatives:

  (1)In what is now Kentucky, a local militia leader, George Rogers Clark, hatched a scheme to end Indian raids on white settlements: strike the British outposts that supplied the arms. In the summer of 1778 and the winter that followed, Clark led a band of fewer than two hundred frontiersmen down the Ohio River to the Mississippi Valley. This small group of patriots captured three British forts along the Mississippi and Wabash Rivers, placing a wedge between Native people and their British patrons and thereby “winning the West” for the fledgling United States.

  (2)In the summer of 1779, the Continental Congress trained and outfitted some four thousand soldiers to take control of the countryside occupied by four Iroquois nations that had allied themselves with the British. This expedition, under the command of General John Sullivan, was by far the largest campaign conducted by the Continental Army in 1779. It destroyed forty Iroquois towns and a major portion of the food supply for the Iroquois people.

  Textbooks through much of the nineteenth century included the latter story, a major military operation, but ignored Clark and his small band. Sullivan’s purposive destruction of farms, orchards, and towns presented no ethical problem; it was done in “retribution” for the “horrible massacres” and “dreadful atrocities” committed by “bands of ferocious Iroquois,” who had attacked “defenceless mothers, wives, and children” and tortured “prisoners in every way that savage cruelty could devise” in Wyoming Valley (Pennsylvania) and Cherry Valley (New York).14 In a businesslike manner, authors reported that Sullivan, “according to his instructions, proceeded to lay waste their country.”15 After stating that “Sullivan marched to and fro through that beautiful region, laying waste their corn-fields, killing their orchards, and burning their houses,” one author added a descriptive footnote: “The Indians, in the fertile country of the Cayugas and Senecas, had towns and villages regularly laid out. They had framed houses, some of them well finished, painted, and having chimneys. They also had broad and productive fields, and orchards of apple, pear, and peach trees.” Destroying all this was perfectly legitimate because “the atrocities of the Indians had kept the inhabitants of the Wyoming and Mohawk valleys in continued terror.”16

  Toward the end of the nineteenth century, after Indian nations from coast to coast had been defeated, textbooks shifted. Sullivan’s destruction of an obviously civilized society undermined the principal justification for displacing Indians: they were allegedly “savages.” No longer proud of Sullivan, authors dropped him from their rosters, filling his spot with George Rogers Clark. The “Indian massacres” remained, but through narrative sleight of hand, a new hero took the stage:

  In the summer and autumn [of 1778] horrible Indian massacres were committed by bands of ferocious Iroquois led by Tory captains at Wyoming, Pennsylvania, and Cherry Valley, New York; there were also towns attacked and burned to ashes along the coast; but no great battle was fought. In the West, Captain George Rogers Clark of Virginia by his resolute bravery drove the British out of Illinois and later from Indiana, thus securing that immense region to the United States.17

  No matter that Clark’s exploits had nothing to do with Wyoming or Cherry Valleys; his “resolute bravery” served as a narrative counter to those “horrible” massacres. In a survey of twenty-three textbooks published between 1890 and 1955, every single one featured Clark, dubbed the “Washington of the West,” while only three made any mention of Sullivan.18 “Clark’s expedition deserves to be ranked among the world’s great military campaigns,” boasted A History of Our Country for Higher Grades, published in 1923.19

  From a storytelling point of view, Clark’s tale seems preferable to Sullivan’s. Clark can be portrayed as a David, battling against formidable odds, while Sullivan is undeniably a Goliath. Clark’s story appeals precisely because his force was so small. In the traditional telling, Clark and his men braved flooding rivers in the dead of winter to surprise Henry Hamilton, the British commander at Vincennes. The Americans, supposedly outnumbered, yelled and marched back and forth to give the illusion of a much larger army. The ploy worked, and Hamilton surrendered. “Clark belonged to the men of genius who persist in accomplishing tasks which men of judgment pronounce impossible,” stated the popular textbook writer David Saville Muzzey in 1934.20 The authors of a 1942 text pronounced proudly: “The final result of this exploit was to give the Americans the territory that now forms the states of Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin.”21 The story here is that so few—just “a small but effective force of backwoods riflemen”—could accomplish so much. “Clark’s victories opened the way for the march of the American people across the continent,” wrote William Backus Guitteau in 1919.22

  The Sullivan story, by contrast, has little appeal. His expedition conducted a terrorist campaign against a civilian population. Until just recently, textbook writers preferred to stay with the romantic image of valiant frontiersmen while suppressing the genocidal policies of the United States government. All six of the elementary and middle-school texts displayed at the 2002 National Council for Social Studies convention featured Clark, while not one mentioned Sullivan. Five of the seven high-school texts at that time included Clark’s tale, and, again, none said a word about Sullivan’s scorched-earth campaign, sanctioned by the Continental Congress.23

  All these texts whitewashed the story of George Rogers Clark, who in fact engaged in dubious practices rarely mentioned. Clark tortured and scalped his prisoners. When they captured Indians outside Vincennes, he and his men tomahawked them and threw them in the river. To avenge the “Widows and Fatherless,” he claimed afterward, “Required their Blood from my Hands.”24 Clark, like Sullivan, systematically destroyed Indian food sources, and he allowed his men to plunder Indian graves for burial goods and scalps, but such details did not find their way into the usual telling.25 Instead, Clark has now become a “protector” rather than a “conqueror.” Here is a question posed to wiki.answers: “Who defended the settlers in the western lands?” And the answer: “George Rogers Clark helped protect settlers in the western lands.” In this one question and answer, a war of conquest is turned on its head.26

  WE MEAN TO KEEP IT

  The late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century texts, unabashed, told a bolder tale that was closer to the truth. George Rogers Clark, they proclaimed proudly, was “the conqueror of the Northwest.”27 Authors assumed that Americans—white Americans, that is—had not only the right but also the moral imperative to take over the continent. In 1899 D.H. Montgomery, one of the most popular writers of his time, wrote in his Beginner’s American History:

  General George Rogers Clark . . . did more than anyone else to get the west for us. . . . By Clark’s victory the Americans got possession of the whole western wilderness up to Detroit. When the Revolutionary War came to an end, the British did not want to give us any part of America beyond the thirteen states on the Atlantic coast. But we said, The whole west, clear to the Mississippi, is ours; we fought for it; we took it; we hoisted our flag over its forts, and we mean to keep it. We did keep it. (Italics in the original.)28

  Today, such outright jingoism would seem too crude—but the jingoism persists, even if it is no longer advertised as such. Routinely, current texts follow their chapters on the Revolutionary War with a brief section on “settling the western frontier.” Once Britain ceded the West in the Treaty of Paris, they say, settlers ventured across the mountains to stake their claims. In the Land Ordinance of 1785, Congress ordered that a rectangular grid be superimposed on all newly acquired possessions of the Unite
d States to facilitate the private acquisition of land. Two years later, in what is now called the Northwest Ordinance, it established a procedure by which settlers in the new territories could form new states. Together, the Ordinances of 1785 and 1787 “opened the way for settlement of the Northwest Territory in a stable and orderly manner.”29 These measures are treated as Congress’s crowning achievement during the interval between the Revolution and the drafting of the Constitution. “If you got the impression that the Congress under the Articles of Confederation was a total washout,” writes Joy Hakim, “that isn’t quite true. That Congress did a few things right, and the Northwest Ordinance was one of them.”30

  This storyline looks quite different from an Indian perspective. Just as the Revolution was the largest conflict between whites and Indians in our nation’s history, so was the Ordinance of 1785 the most significant and damaging piece of legislation. It turned open spaces into lines on a map, harnessing the earth so land could be bought and sold. In the Treaty of Paris, signed in 1783, the British had ignored Indian rights to the land by stating that the “boundaries” of the United States extended clear to the Mississippi; now, Americans effectively ignored Indian tenure by providing that all lands be labeled so they could be distributed to Euro-American speculators and farmers.31 This “happy ending” to the Revolution spelled only doom to Native inhabitants.

  Right at this crucial juncture, with their fates being sealed by lauded acts of Congress, Indians have curiously disappeared from the traditional narrative. In thirteen elementary, middle-school, and high-school texts surveyed in 2002, not one discussed the pan-Indian resistance to white expansion in the wake of the Revolutionary War.32 Indian resistance reappeared in later chapters, which described their rearguard struggles for survival in the nineteenth century—but nary a word at the critical moment, our nation’s founding, when Indian claims to their homelands were bypassed and the earth was divided into property that whites could own.

  Very recently, a few textbooks have adopted a more balanced approach, viewing that pivotal time from both white and Indian perspectives. One fifth-grade text, immediately following a discussion of the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, presents a two-page spread, with a timeline, on Indian resistance in the 1790s.33 At a similar point in the narrative, after outlining the two ordinances and the opportunities they offered for settlers and speculators, a high-school text comments, “But freedom and opportunity for Americans came at the expense of the region’s 100,000 Indians, who were expected to give up their lands and relocate elsewhere.”34 A college text adds significant detail:

  Indians knew well that the pressures of war always threatened to deprive them of their homeland. “You are drawing so close to us that we can almost hear the noise of your axes felling our trees,” one Shawnee told the Americans. Another group of Indians concluded in 1784 that the Revolutionary War had been “the greatest blow that could have been dealt us, unless it had been our total destruction.” Thousands fled the raids and counter-raids, while whole villages relocated. Hundreds made their way even beyond the Mississippi, to seek shelter in territory claimed by Spain. The aftershocks and dislocations continued for the next two decades; an entire generation of Native Americans grew up with war as a constant companion.35

  Treating the Revolutionary War as a war of conquest in this manner can be troubling. Former colonists were subjugating other peoples, even as they resisted subjugation by Britain. These contradictory realities, like slave owners fighting a war for freedom, challenge our national narrative. What kind of people are we, anyway?

  There is an answer, and we are moving toward it. Americans are and always have been a diverse people with diverse histories, and nothing defines our nation better than that. Increasingly, purveyors of public history embrace this truth, but it presents a new set of challenges. With multiple protagonists and perspectives, what happens to the American narrative? How can any textbook, curriculum, or sweeping historical account capture the full experience of the Revolutionary War, much less the broad range of American history?

  The challenge is great, and it is little wonder we so often retreat. Two of the college textbook authors who showed so forcefully how the Revolutionary War had been “the greatest blow” to Native people sound a different tone when writing for middle-school students. In a section titled “Defending the Frontier,” they tell an old story: “Seeking to defend against attacks on the frontier, Virginia sent George Rogers Clark. . . .”36 The language conveys what the authors do not really intend, that Americans in the West were the innocent ones, not the aggressors. Viewing the rebellious colonies as the afflicted party is a default mode in chronicles of the American Revolution, and such talk will not cease in an instant.

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  STORYBOOK NATION

  Our history texts tell us that colonists became “Americans” by sharing the experience of the Revolutionary War, but this is not altogether correct. Soldiers and civilians, Northerners and Southerners, whites and blacks—these people experienced the war in very different ways, and by the end they seemed less enthusiastic about joining together as Americans than they had been at the outset.1 Our magical beginning was already lost in the past—but this past would soon rebound and take on a life of its own. Rediscovered and reconstituted, it would become a vibrant force in the shaping of a nation. It was not the Revolution itself but the use of its image that created a unified, national experience to be shared by all Americans.

  HARNESSING THE PAST

  To “remember” their Revolution, the people who lived through it first had to learn to forget. “Much about the event called the Revolutionary War had been very painful and was unpleasant to remember,” wrote historian John Shy. “Only the outcome was unqualifiedly pleasant, so memory, as ever, began to play tricks with the event.”2 This did not come about in a day. The past needed time to become a past before it could be selectively recalled in a more positive light and form the basis for national traditions.

  “Let the youth, the hope of his country, grow up amidst annual festivities, commemorative of the events of the war.”

  American Independence, 1859. Anonymous lithograph.

  Despite bad memories of war, all patriotic Americans could share one remembrance of unequivocal joy: the declaring of independence. Other war stories would take years of seasoning before assuming their final form, but the recollection of that special moment was put to work from the start. Every year, Americans could revive their commitment to their nation by celebrating the instant of its inception.

  John Adams, for one, had a very definite notion of how Americans could commemorate their nation’s birth. On July 3, 1776, the day after Congress voted for independence, he wrote to his wife, Abigail:

  The second of July 1776 will be the most memorable epocha in the history of America. I am apt to believe it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forevermore.3

  Adams certainly had the spirit right, but he guessed wrong on the date. He had no way of knowing that the official record would soon be altered to change the timeline of history.

  Like John Adams, other members of Congress entertained notions of a national celebration, so they conjured an event worth celebrating. Americans were primed to celebrate on July 4 rather than July 2 because the broadside of the Declaration, which circulated widely in July 1776, bore the heading “In CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.” The following spring, the committee that printed the official Congressional Journal fabricated an entry for July 4 to reflect this preference. The printed journal, unlike the
original one, included a signed version of the Declaration of Independence in its July 4 entry, while it omitted the crucial entries for July 19 (the day the New York delegation finally gave its assent and Congress ordered that an engrossed copy be “signed by every member of Congress”) and August 2 (the first day anybody other than President John Hancock and Secretary Charles Thomson actually signed the document).4 According to the official but contrived record, the “Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States” was entered into the books fifteen days before it became unanimous, signed even by delegates from New York, who, following their colony’s instructions, had not voted in favor of independence in early July. This clever invention gave Americans the Fourth of July.

  In our nation’s first “photo op,” an engrossed copy of the Declaration of Independence was presented for signing on August 2. Many members of Congress signed on that day, and over the course of the next several months, others who had been absent or were newly elected affixed their signatures as well.5 At least fourteen men who were not even present on July 4, 1776, signed their names to the document that appears in the Congressional Journal for that date. Eight of these—Matthew Thornton of New Hampshire, William Williams of Connecticut, Charles Carroll of Maryland, and Benjamin Rush, George Ross, James Smith, George Clymer, and George Taylor of Pennsylvania—had not yet become delegates. Oliver Wolcott of Connecticut had taken leave of Congress to assume command of his state’s militia, while Lewis Morris and Philip Livingston went home when the British threatened to invade New York. William Hooper of North Carolina, Samuel Chase of Maryland, and George Wythe of Virginia were helping their states constitute new governments. Later, these men would return to sign their names, some not until late that fall. One delegate, Thomas McKean of Delaware, did not sign until after the “official” journal had been doctored the following year.6