{"id":7992,"date":"2019-06-05T07:02:28","date_gmt":"2019-06-05T11:02:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7992"},"modified":"2019-07-30T06:59:22","modified_gmt":"2019-07-30T10:59:22","slug":"doing-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7992","title":{"rendered":"Doing Democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Rick Atkinson chose the title of his new book\u2014The British Are Coming<\/a><\/em>\u2014not because those words ever crossed Paul Revere\u2019s lips (Atkinson says he was much more likely to have said \u201cThe regulars are coming!\u201d since pretty much everyone in the Colonies was<\/em> British). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, he chose it because at the outset of hostilities between Britain and its rebellious American colonies, the British were indeed coming, across more than 3000 miles of ocean, and in force, with their huge navy determined to defeat the colonists through seapower.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recently, he gave a lively presentation about his new book at\nWashington Crossing State Park\u2014an appropriate venue, because it\u2019s where General\nWashington crossed the Delaware River with his men in preparation for the\nbattles of Trenton and Princeton. These were the first major battles won by the\ncolonists in the Revolutionary War. And those victories gave the colonists new\nhope, at a time when hope had been \u201call but extinguished\u201d by their losses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Atkinson devoted some time to reflecting on the Founding\nFathers. They weren\u2019t flawless, he said, and in recent years some of their\nflaws\u2014owning slaves, especially\u2014have been emphasized more than their accomplishments.\nWriting in the Declaration of Independence that \u201call men are created equal,\u201d\nthey were certainly making more a statement of aspiration than of fact. Many\ngroups (not only slaves, but Native Americans, women, indigents, and others)\nwere not treated equally under the laws of 1775.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nevertheless, he emphasized, no other country in the world was\ndoing what the Founding Fathers were doing at that time, as they worked to free\nthemselves from Britain and toward achieving a \u201cmore perfect union\u201d among\nvastly different colonies. And so, for nearly two hundred and fifty years, our\nnation\u2019s creation story has remained vivid and compelling to people across\ncontinents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We learn several things by examining those early days, he says: the nation was born bickering; we thought certain truths were self-evident; good leadership was vital; and whatever trials we face today as a country, we\u2019ve been through worse. In November 1776, General Nathanael Greene lost Manhattan\u2019s Fort Washington to the British. After this terrible setback, when he said to his wife \u201cbe of good courage,\u201d he was speaking to us, Atkinson said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When he started researching this book, the author had access\nto a new trove of archival material, including letters and memoranda written by\nGeorge III himself. He has a knack for unearthing the telling incident that illuminates\na bigger story and using a modest amount of statistics in a compelling way. One\nnew (to me) set of statistics he gave showed the difficulties the British\nsoldiers faced. Of the hundreds of ships sent from England to bring provisions\nto its troops, huge numbers were lost. The animals aboard died. The flour and\nsupplies were spoiled. As one example, of 550 Lincolnshire sheep sent, only 40\nsurvived the long voyage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The insight that most startled him as he worked on this\n564-page volume was the strength of the myths the British held about America\nand the war. Certainly not King George, nor any of his ministers, ever set foot\nin this country, where conditions were very different than at home. Our\npopulation was growing at four times England\u2019s rate; two-thirds of white\ncolonial men owned land, while in England only one man in five did; and\ntwo-thirds were literate and could vote, compared to one Englishman in six.\nAnd, because Americans lived in a frontier society, they were heavily armed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The British leaders had an even more dangerous blind spot.\nThey didn\u2019t realize the extent to which Americans, isolated from their mother\ncountry by an entire ocean, had simply become accustomed to governing themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A point Atkinson made several times, including in the\ncontext of the political upheavals we face today, is that \u201cDemocracy is never\ndone. It is always something we must be doing<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If Rick Atkinson is coming to your area<\/a>, don\u2019t miss him! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Painting by William Tylee Ranney:  \u201cGeorge Washington rallying his troops at the Battle of Princeton\u201d; from https:\/\/www.goodfreephotos.com, public domain. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Rick Atkinson chose the title of his new book\u2014The British Are Coming\u2014not because those words ever crossed Paul Revere\u2019s lips (Atkinson says he was much more likely to have said \u201cThe regulars are coming!\u201d since pretty much … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7993,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Doing Democracy - Pulitzer-winner Rick Atkinson's new history of the early days of the American Revolution has lessons for Americans facing today's perils and frustrations.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[62,266,268,104],"tags":[1576,1577],"class_list":["post-7992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-authors","category-history","category-politics","category-the-morgue","tag-rick-atkinson","tag-the-british-are-coming"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vweisfeld.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/Battle-of-Princeton.jpg?fit=631%2C598&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-24U","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7992"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7992\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7995,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7992\/revisions\/7995"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}