HISTORY: Revolutionaries: Inventing an American NationBy Jack Rakove Heinemann, 487pp. £20
ARE HISTORICAL ACTORS great because they make history or are they made great by the circumstances in which they lived? Jack Rakove poses this question in his engaging account of the Founding Fathers of the United States. An eminent professor of history at Stanford University, Rakove focuses on the men who led the War of American Independence and established the nation’s political foundations. Not another smoothed-over version of the American national-origins story common in popular accounts, Revolutionaries: Inventing an American Nation presents a narrative that highlights the bumps along the road to the creation of the United States.
The account begins with the Stamp Act of 1763, which sparked the crisis that ultimately led to independence, and concludes with the first presidential administration of George Washington (1789-1793). But the heart of its narrative lies in the 13 years between the outbreak of the Revolutionary War in 1775 and the ratification of the US Constitution in 1788. Rakove explores these pivotal events from the standpoints of its leading historical actors, often shifting perspective to a different figure in his ensemble cast of characters. Some protagonists are widely celebrated today, including the men who would become the nation’s first four presidents: Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. To this list Rakove adds other famous figures, such as Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton. He also gives attention to lesser-known leaders, such as John Dickinson, the Pennsylvanian whose Letters from an American Farmer (1767-1768) fuelled antiparliamentary sentiment but whose reputation suffered when, hoping against hope for reconciliation with Britain, he refused to endorse the American Declaration of Independence.
Rakove also recounts the story of the Laurens family, wealthy members of the South Carolina slave-owning elite. Henry Laurens was imprisoned at the Tower of London after being captured on his way to France. Henry’s noble but foolhardy son, Jack, was an officer who envisioned recruiting slaves to fight for the revolutionary cause in exchange for their freedom. Jack also had a pathological desire to place himself under enemy fire. After one battle, Lafayette wrote of him, “It was not his fault that he was not killed or wounded.”
Rakove offers richly textured and deeply contextualised portraits of all of these figures. In US culture generally, the Founding Fathers are often deified and only their moments of genius are remembered. But Rakove recounts their faults as well: Adams’s vanity and self-righteousness; Jefferson’s profligate spending and romantic utopianism; Hamilton’s insufferable arrogance and peevishness. Most importantly, Rakove places these figures back in their proper historical setting and reveals how the times made the men. If there had been no crisis, then Washington would have remained at his Mount Vernon estate, Adams would have limited his ambitions to those of a Boston lawyer and Hamilton, the illegitimate son of a Scottish merchant in the West Indies, could scarcely have hoped to rise to the upper ranks of New York society. Many American revolutionaries themselves recognised that the extraordinary times in which they lived allowed them to achieve great ambitions. Adams, for instance, rejoiced at having been “sent into life, at a time when the greatest law-givers of antiquity would have wished to have lived”.
Embedding his actors in their historical context allows Rakove to make an important point about the leaders of the American Revolution: they were as “unlikely a group of revolutionaries as one can imagine”. They were not revolutionaries in the sense that they had a self-conscious plan for radical transformation of their society. Rather, they were pushed towards revolution as the result of a protracted dispute over imperial authority that, had it been better managed by British leaders, might not have resulted in American independence. Here, though, Rakove could have reflected further on the extent to which his figures were truly revolutionaries. American leaders certainly were political revolutionaries who established a fully republican government, but, as elites in a society that already lacked an aristocracy, they were anything but social revolutionaries. In addition, unlike other anticolonial revolutions, including the Irish one, the American Revolution did not seek to displace colonial elites. They were the ones who led it. Americans united as colonists aggrieved at their lack of political representation in Britain. But from the perspective of Native Americans (who receive scant attention in Revolutionaries despite their significant role in the Revolutionary War and in political debates of the period), the “revolutionaries” were the colonisers, not the colonised.
Revolutionaries is history of a fairly traditional sort, told from the perspective of great men. It consequently neglects the vital role of popular revolutionary sentiment, among other things. If its perspective on the founding of the United States is partial, it remains valid. While not exactly a page-turner, Revolutionaries is well written, accessible and often witty, as when Rakove quips that Adams “never used a single well-chosen word when six impetuous synonyms would do just as well”. Overall, Rakove’s book is an excellent resource for those looking to learn more about the American Revolution or to those eager to ponder Hamilton’s insight that “those great revolutions which sometimes convulse society . . . serve to bring to light talents and virtues which might otherwise have languished in obscurity or only shot forth a few scattered and wandering rays”.
Daniel Geary is the Mark Pigott lecturer in US History at Trinity College Dublin. He is the author of Radical Ambition: C Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought(University of California Press, 2009)
