How we form America's history

Pulitzer Prize winner Barbara Tuchman (1912-1989) is a name bound to appear on any list of 10 best American historians. With profound scholarship and colorful style, she wrote about history from medieval to modern times, and interestingly, she did so without having studied history in any university.

The First Salute (Alfred A. Knopf, 1988) is her account of the American Revolution from the time of the Declaration of Independence to the surrender of British General Cornwallis at Yorktown near the mouth of Chesapeake Bay – roughly 1776 to 1782. There are innumerable such books, but few others approach the subject primarily from the naval point of view, illuminating how the navies of the war had more to do with America’s success than almost any other element.

The “first salute” itself, in November 1776, was actually a cannon salute to the American ship Andrew Doria, fired by the Dutch governor of St. Eustatius (a Caribbean island), the first acknowledgement by any European entity that America was a sovereign state. From that time forward, the Caribbean islands were a central shipping and trading point for supplying the Revolution particularly with gunpowder, and thus became a focus of American, French, Dutch and British maneuvering as each tried to control these sources.

Tuchman takes several fascinating side trips in her narrative of these years. One is to explain how the Dutch came to be a sea power and played a significant, though often overlooked, part in the American Revolution. (The Dutch Empire eventually folded because the numerous tiny Dutch states refused to agree that a functioning central government was as important as a strong economy). Other side trips delve into various personalities such as that of Admiral Sir George Rodney, the British fleet commander toward the end of the war; Admiral Francois de Grasse, the French fleet commander; Sir Henry Clinton, final commander-in-chief of British forces in America, and more.

Yet another side trip explains how much assistance America received from France beyond the better-known Lafayette story. In fact, in his continuous efforts to frustrate the British, Louis XVI nearly beggared the French treasury, causing hardship and rebellion in France, thus ironically contributing to the French Revolution, the end of Louis’ own monarchy, and the beginnings of French democracy.

Tuchman also delves into the innumerable strategic mistakes the British made, primarily because of arrogance and ignorance.

Americans tend to romanticize and mythologize the American citizenry of Revolutionary time, but Tuchman sorts through just how confused and often unheroic those citizens actually were. For instance, the British invaders fully expected to be met with waves of Loyalist militia assistance, but most Loyalist promises fizzled, and Loyalists who did see action conducted vicious destruction of their neighbors’ property and lives in localized and often rogue raids, hurting the British cause by creating further hatred in American minds.

And even the organized American armies weren’t necessarily as heroic as we’d like to think. They were at times willfully ignorant and reluctant to fight, attitudes which they demonstrated by mass desertion. Sometimes, it was only because of George Washington’s unshakeable belief in the American cause that the armies were successful at all.

If we’re interested in history as “what really happened” backed by meticulous research, rather than history as a handy source of cherry-picked anecdotes for contemporary political or educational purposes, Tuchman’s writing is the kind of history we should be reading … and teaching. If we instead pursue only the myths, we’re just perpetuating false images and thus disrespecting those true heroes and heroic actions which did, warts and all, eventually form history’s all-time greatest vision for liberty and justice.

Ron Rude,

Plains