Help apprehend an ignorant hooligan and earn $1,000

A few days ago, some idiot drove through Battlefield Memorial Park in Savannah, GA and did $25,000 worth of damage to the Soldiers Stone Monument, which commemorates one of the Revolutionary War’s bloodiest engagements.  The Coastal Heritage Society is offering $1,000 for information leading to the arrest of whoever’s responsible, so if you know something and you’d like to pocket a grand, give them a call.

Revolutionary roots and branches

Check out this chart of the American Revolution, with the causes depicted as the roots of a tree, various milestones listed along the trunk, and branches for each year of the war sprouting into smaller limbs for the important battles.

As the writer for Slate notes, it’s a little weird to see Arnold’s treason listed on the trunk alongside the two Continental Congresses, Washington’s assumption of command, and the French alliance.  Arnold’s treachery was a big deal, but consider everything that was happening on southern battlefields that same year.

It’s also interesting to see the adoption of the U.S. flag listed on the trunk.  And take note of what isn’t there—the creation of the navy, for example.  Too bad the chart doesn’t have a publication date.

Neat Rev War exhibit opens in New Jersey this month

It’ll be at the Museum of Early Trades & Crafts in Madison starting Feb. 25, and it’s about the war’s impact on NJ civilians.  Too bad I’m not within driving distance; I’d really like to see it.

The planter and the railsplitter

Cross-posted to the blog of the Abraham Lincoln Institute for the Study of Leadership and Public Policy

Washington and Lincoln usually rank among the more admired presidents, but most people don’t consider them in light of each other.  Presidents’ Day seems like an appropriate occasion to compare and contrast these two men who had little in common except the office and above-average height.

Interestingly, recent years have witnessed renewed historical attention to both Lincoln and Washington as leaders of men.  Doris Kearns Goodwin’s bestseller on Lincoln and his cabinet turned the phrase “team of rivals” into a catchphrase, while John Ferling has argued that Washington was a much more deft political operator than other biographies have indicated.  Both men displayed an ability to handle opposition, but they approached interpersonal conflict in different ways.

Ferling has written that during the Revolutionary War, Washington felt especially vulnerable to criticism.  He was particularly sensitive when he thought critics were comparing him to powerful rivals, as he believed to be the case after the fall of Philadelphia, fearing a plot to oust him from command was in the works among his detractors in both Congress and the army.  Lincoln faced his fair share of criticism, too, but his skin was thicker than Washington’s.  If Lincoln and his rivals never constituted a true “team”—dissensions and divisions plagued the cabinet, and several of its members didn’t last the duration of Lincoln’s first term—he was nevertheless more adept at keeping discordant elements in check than the sensitive Washington.

“Abraham Lincoln, the Martyr, Victorious,” by John Sartain. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (LC-DIG-pga-03258).

The two men also differed in their strengths and weaknesses when it came to the art of persuasion.  Washington wasn’t known for his rhetorical gifts; his most well-regarded work of prose, the Farewell Address, was partly the work of Madison in its first draft form and Hamilton in a later one.  But Washington was physically imposing and formidable, and he knew how to magnify his physical qualities with a little stagecraft.  When he arrived in Philadelphia to attend the Continental Congress, he was decked out in military uniform, prepared to make a striking impression.

And he knew how to play on an audience’s emotions by letting his formidable exterior slip a little, as he did during the unrest in the Continental Army at Newburgh in 1783.  Amid reports that disgruntled officers wanted to use the army to pressure Congress over a lack of pay, Washington addressed the men at a meeting on March 15.  Fumbling over a letter from a member of Congress that he intended to read to them, he donned a pair of glasses, stating, “Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country.”  The officers were deeply moved by this rare show of weakness from a man noted for his vigor and powers of endurance.

Gangly and awkward, Lincoln could never command a room simply by walking into it, as Washington could.  What he lacked in imposing presence, he made up for with his ability to craft compelling arguments and lyrical prose.  When he spoke at New York’s Cooper Union in 1860, one member of the audience found him “so angular and awkward that I had, for an instant, a feeling of pity for so ungainly a man.”  Eventually, though, the clarity of Lincoln’s ideas and the power of his words overcame the awful first impression and won his audience over. “I forgot his clothes, his personal appearance, and his individual peculiarities,” the eyewitness remembered.  ”Presently, forgetting myself, I was on my feet like the rest, yelling like a wild Indian, cheering this wonderful man.”  At Newburgh, Washington used his physical presence to make up for what his prepared remarks lacked.  At Cooper Union, by contrast, it was only Lincoln’s ability as a public speaker that overcame his ungainly appearance.

“This is our Tahrir Square”

Here’s an article on a young Egyptian revolutionary’s visit to Boston.  ”This is our Tahrir Square,” his host told him at the site of the 1770 massacre.

The whole premise raises some interesting issues about the nature of revolutions and historical memory, but mostly it makes me want to go history tripping in Boston again.

Two MOOCs for American Revolution buffs

UVa and Monticello are launching a massive open online course on Jefferson; Peter Onuf is handling the teaching duties.  The kick-off date is Feb. 17.

William & Mary and Colonial Williamsburg are also setting up a free online course on the Revolution, to be taught by James Whittenburg.

Good news for Princeton preservationists

The Institute for Advanced Study’s plan to build additional faculty housing at the Rev War battlefield has hit a snag.  A state regulatory commission has blocked the proposal because of its proximity to a local stream.

TV personality claims Americans are ignorant about history, then proves her own point

While bemoaning the lack of historical knowledge in the U.S., Andrea Tantaros of Fox News claimed that Americans “don’t even know why some guy in Boston got his head blown off because he tried to secretly raise the tax on tea. Most people don’t know that.”  Asked to comment, historians of the American Revolution responded, “Wait, what?”

Continental Congress document turns up in museum attic

It’s a draft of a letter by Robert Livingston to the people of Great Britain.  Pretty cool!

Confetti

A few items worthy of note as we ring in 2014.

• This list of New Year resolutions for Kentuckians includes a few history-related things to do, including some sites that every citizen of the Bluegrass State should visit.  I’ll add one more assignment for Kentuckians in 2014: If you haven’t already, read either Thomas Clark’s classic history of the state or the more recent volume by Lowell Harrison and James Klotter.
• Speaking of knowing your local history, all you folks in Winston-Salem should get acquainted with your town’s Rev War namesake.
• We’re getting a new statue of Sam Houston here in Tennessee, where he made a name for himself before heading off to Texas.  There’s also a new Civil War Trails marker going up in Maynardville, just down the road from my neck of the woods.
• Zachary Keck argues that Americans’ fondness for revolutions is misplaced, and stems partly from our own revolutionary beginnings.  But he also claims that the American Revolution wasn’t all that revolutionary, because it didn’t upset the status quo.  Keck notes that most revolutions don’t create stable, free societies; real progress is due more to evolution than revolution.  But should we consider the democratization of the nineteenth century to be an effect of the American Revolution or an example of gradual evolution?  Gordon Wood took the long view of the Revolution as a process that turned America away from the hierarchical, colonial past and toward the democratic, egalitarian nineteenth century.  Taken as a discrete event which ended in the 1780s, though, the Revolution seems more limited in scope.  I guess it all depends on your perspective.
• By far the year’s most popular post here at Past in the Present was a 2012 item about an off-color anecdote told by Abraham Lincoln which made its way into Spielberg’s film.
• I’d like to pick a best American history book of 2013, but most of the books I read this year had already been in circulation for a while.  People have been writing history books for a lot longer than I’ve been reading them, so I spend most of my reading time trying to catch up with backlisted titles.  As for the best American history book I read in 2013, I’d probably go with Rachel Klein’s Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760-1808.
•  High point of 2013 for me?  Under any other circumstances, visiting the Freedom Trail, Lexington and Concord would be impossible to top, but…