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Some books get under our skin, and we credit the author for being such a spellbinding writer. We become a fan, and we want to read every book that author has written and any future books s/he writes. That is what happened to my friend when he read Revolution Song: The Story of American Freedom by Russell Shorto. He was so excited that I agreed to read Shorto’s book. Not long ago I read George Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow so I expected that I would just find Shorto covering familiar ground. But the Chernow book was published in 2011 and Shorto’s book was published in 2018. The latter book is informed by a whole lot of recent political scrutiny. 

Shorto’s history does not just cover the role of George Washington in the American founding. He invites some less well-known Americans into the mix (along with a few Brits and Washington’s great friend, Lafayette, a Frenchman). 

We follow a slave stolen from his native land and brought to America, going by his slave’s name, Venture until he finds his way to freedom, the raison d’etre for the Revolutionary War and a common thread among the characters in Shorto’s book. It is a long time before most African Americans achieve freedom. 

We follow a Native American, member of the Six Nations, Cornplanter, who treats with leaders who are French, British, and American and who temporarily finds his little piece of freedom. 

Margaret Coghlan stands in for all the women whose freedom was ignored in this war for freedom and individual liberty. 

“Margaret Coghlan felt this pull of freedom that was in the air in the eighteenth century, but she realized, too late, that it did not apply to half of the human race. History does not record what became of Coghlan’s children, the poor waifs she dragged around with her as her tragic life wound down, but her ideological descendants span the history of the women’s movement, from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Gloria Steinem, and for that matter includes people like Amelia Earhart, Ellen DeGeneres and every woman who broke a gender barrier.” (p. 506)

Abraham Yates was a conservative who felt that America should be a loose affiliation of states without a strong federal government. He began with almost nothing and had to work very hard to win whatever personal power he could fight his way in society for. He eventually became a lawyer and then a public servant and he had gathered enough clout to be included in the Constitution Convention to rewrite the Articles of Confederation. He had better reasons to back state’s rights than slave owners had but George Washington and his rival Alexander Hamilton favored a strong central government, taxation, and a federal bank. Yates was able to force the inclusion of the Bill of Rights in the US Constitution

Our founders saw the mismatch between promising to honor the belief that “all men are created equal” and the belief of many slave owners that slavery was necessary for the economy and that black men were savages and therefore not equal to white men. No one even considered for a minute the rights of women. They worried that this philosophical lie that lay at the heart of our government would one day destroy the nation. 

“At the outset of the war they had gotten a proper scare when news reached them that hundreds of slaves in Jamaica had attempted an uprising. Even more troubling, the Jamaican slaves had apparently been inspired by the very ideals of freedom that Washington and his fellow rebels proclaimed. The Jamaican rebellion had been crushed, its leaders executed and either burned alive or had their bodies displayed as a public warning. For a man like Washington, the affair underscored the dangerous double-edged nature of the ideology the Americans espoused. Uprisings were a nightmare that all southern slaveholding families lived with. To give weapons to people they had been systematically abusing for generations was beyond his comprehension. Freedom was what Washington was fighting for, but not for them. Not now. It was an irony, an incongruity, a flaw in the American project of bringing true individual liberty into being: he did not deny that. But he couldn’t solve it. He was not a philosopher. (p. 352)

We are still dealing with the aftermath of this founding dilemma, and it seems to be tearing the nation apart even though slavery is no longer legal. Racism, the news shows us, is still alive and well in America to our shame and it may yet end our long flirtation with liberty.

Washington was also conflicted about whether America should have a strong central government or give autonomy to the several states. We are still fighting about which of these governmental designs would offer the most freedom and individual liberty. Washington chose to use his reputation and fame to back a strong central government, but he was not at all sure that it was the correct choice.

“In June, Washington wrote a circular letter “to the army,” but really to the leadership of the state governments. He had spent the entire war enraged at Congress’s mismanagement of finances and the underfunding of the army. There had been a power vacuum in the American government throughout the war; now it threatened to open into a chasm. In the letter, he expressed his happy astonishment that what they had fought for had actually been achieved: that Americans were now “possessed of absolute freedom and Independency.” But he stressed that the structure for maintaining that freedom was lacking. Taking his cues from Madison and Hamilton he suggested that what was needed was “an indissoluble union of states under one Federal Head.” This required that the individual states “suffer Congress” to exercise authority. Without this “everything must rapidly tend to Anarchy and confusion.” (p. 402)

Washington shows his prescience when, as the author reports, he says,

“Sounding much like Yates, Washington said he now saw that periods of turbulence would “gradually incline the minds of men to seek security & repose in the absolute power of an Individual and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation on the ruins of Public Liberty.”

My friend was right. Russell Shorto nonfiction book was a worthwhile addition to books that cover the era of the American Revolution, and it is important because it discusses the challenges we face right now as we decide anew whether to choose freedom, even if it is only relative freedom, over autocratic rule. (Even those unusual characters in Shorto’s book are real people and there were documents telling the stories of their lives, with attributions given in the end notes.) 

[John McHenry’s journal echoes Washington’s statement, “A Republic, if they can keep it.”]