The Whites of their Eyes (19 page)

“History is to ascribe the American Revolution to Thomas Paine,” John Adams once complained to Thomas Jefferson.
⁴⁷
It hasn’t exactly worked out that way. At the end of the war, Congress asked Paine to write the history of the Revolution. He declined. Disavowed by his contemporaries, Paine left little behind in his own defense; the bulk of his papers, including notes for an autobiography, were destroyed in a fire. David Ramsay wrote about
Common Sense
admiringly, but his
History
was published before Paine’s
Age of Reason
. (Ramsay, who wrote
The Life of Washington
in 1807, died in 181
7 when he was shot in the back, on the streets of Charleston, by a mad tailor whom he had earlier diagnosed as dangerously insane.)
⁴⁸
Mercy Otis Warren, who felt about Paine the same way Samuel Adams did, relegated the author of
Common Sense
, literally, to a footnote.
⁴⁹
Warren died in Plymouth in 1814. Four years later, Paul Revere died in Boston. His obituary made no mention his ride. Neither had Ramsay or Warren, in their histories. Neither the ride nor Revere was famous until Longfellow wrote his poem in 1860—as a commentary on the coming war—after which Revere became a legend.
⁵⁰
Paine’s fate h
as been weirder. In 1800, a New York Republican Society resolved: “May his
Rights of Man
be handed down to our latest posterity, but may his
Age of Reason
never live to see the rising generation.”
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That’s more or less what’s happened. So wholly has
The Age of Reason
been forgotten
that Paine’s mantle has been claimed not only by Ronald Reagan but also by the Christian Coalition’s Ralph Reed, who has quoted him, and by North Carolina senator Jesse Helms, who in 1992 supported a proposal to erect a Paine monument in Washington, DC. In 1974, Jeremy Rifkin’s Peoples Bicentennial Commission published a manifesto called
Common Sense II: The Case Against Corporate Tyranny
, which, while left, not right, has a lot in common with
Glenn Beck’s Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government
.
⁵²
Thomas Paine, Beck once said on his show, was the Glenn Beck of the American Revolution.
⁵³
Paine’s not rolling over in his grave, though. In 1819, ten years after he was buried, his bones were dug up, and they’ve since been lost.
⁵⁴
All things considered, that might be for the best.

The Founding Fathers, of course, had children. In 1782, John Adams’s daughter became engaged to a twenty-five-year-old p
oet named Royall Tyler, the son of one of Boston’s original Sons of Liberty, an old friend of James Otis’s. Young Tyler was charming and talented. “I am not acquainted with any young Gentleman whose attainments in literature are equal to his,” Abigail Adams wrote to her husband. “I am not looking out for a Poet,” Adams wrote back, testily. The engagement was quietly ended.
⁵⁵
Tyler next tried his hand at playwriting.
The Contrast
, the first professionally produced American play, was performed in New York while delegates to the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia. Overnight, Tyler beca
me a literary celebrity.
The Contrast
is a comedy; George Washington owned two copies of it. Tyler was a wit—the “Rabelais of America,” he was called. But in an age when no one could make a living as a writer (and no one wanted a poet for a son-in-law), he had to earn his keep
as a lawyer. He set up a law practice in Vermont: “If writing for the public is attended with no more profit, I had rather file legal process in my attorney’s office, and endeavor to explain unintelligible law to Green Mountain jurors.”
⁵⁶

Tyler often wished he had chosen the ministry instead of the law, but he was sure that the dissipation of his youth would have been a blot upon the church. What he meant by his depravity is suggested by
The Origin of Evil
, a bawdy poem he published in 1793, about Adam and Eve . . .

As her arm Eve held him hard in,

And toy’d him with her roving hand,

In the middle of Love’s Garden,

She saw the Tree of Knowledge stand.
⁵⁷

Tyler got past this sort of thing, or at least he didn’t publish any more of it. He married in 1794, and he and his wife, Mary, raised eleven children. Mary Tyler, a celebrated midwife, was the author of an immensely popular parenting manual,
The Maternal Physician
. Four of their seven sons became clergymen. In a state where ministers were few and far between, Tyler served as a lay preacher. He often wrote and preached about religious liberty. In a sermon he delivered on Christmas Day in 1793, Tyler offered this prayer: “It is our Blessed Saviour who has caused His day spring of religious
liberty from on high to visit us and that we may now worship every man according to the dictates of his own conscience.”
⁵⁸

Many eighteenth-century men of letters shared Thomas Paine’s views about religion, certainly his anticlericalism, and even his skepticism.
⁵⁹
Very many, like Samuel Adams, most vehemently did not. And, of course, and especially outside the republic of letters, very many Americans, including Mercy Otis Warren, Phillis Wheatley, and Jane Mecom, were
devout Christians. Faith, in the end, was all Jane Mecom had. Paine’s views on religion were radical. But a commitment to religious liberty, religious pluralism, and the separation of church and state was not.

In 1797, Tyler published a novel called
The Algerine Captive
, about a luckless New Englander named Updike Underhill who is sold into slavery among Muslims after Barbary pirates capture the
Sympathy
. He is told that if he converts to Islam, he’ll be freed. He refuses, but agrees to a debate with a mullah. “Our bible was written by men divinely inspired,” Underhill says. “Our alcoran was written by the finger of the Deity himself,” counters the mullah. “Our religion was disseminated in peace; yours was promulgated by the sword,” Underhill insists. “The history of the christian church is a d
etail of bloody massacre,” answers the mullah. The mullah, himself a convert, contends that Underhill, who had inherited his faith, never examined it. “Born in New England, my friend, you are a christian purified by Calvin,” the mullah observes. “Born in the Campania of Rome, you had been a papist. Nursed by the Hindoos, you would have entered the pagoda with reverence, and worshipped the soul of your ancestor in a duck. Educated on the bank of the Wolga the Delai Lama had been your god. In China, you would have worshipped Tien, and perfumed Confucius, as you bowed in adoration of your ancestors.”
⁶⁰

This was fiction founded in fact. In 1783, when the Treaty of Paris ended the war, American seamen lost the protection of Britain’s treaties with the so-called Barbary States: Algiers, Tripoli, Morocco, and Tunisia. Over the next decade, more than seven hundred American sailors were captured and held as slaves in North Africa.
⁶¹
In Tyler’s novel, Underhill holds firm. The mullah, after weeping for a man he can only see
as an infidel, helps him escape. The actual end of Algerine slavery was a little different, and interestingly so. In May of 1797, just three months before
The Algerine Captive
was published, John Adams signed the Treaty of Tripoli, freeing the American captives in North Africa. Its Article 11, an assurance that the United States would never engage in a holy war, declared, in no uncertain terms, that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”
⁶²

People on the far right often argue that the idea of a “wall of separation” between church and state wasn’t built until the 1830s and 1840s; Tyler was dead by then, but he seems to have thought that wall had been built at the Constitutional Convention. Invoking Islam to argue for religious liberty was an eighteenth-century commonplace, practiced by writers as different as Johnson, Montesquieu, and Voltaire, but Royall Tyler spoke and wrote about religious liberty all his life, from the pulpit, from the bench, and from his writing desk. Nor was Tyler’s life a battle between reason a
nd faith. Early and easily he reconciled his Enlightenment rationalism with his Episcopalian faith. By 1808, when Royall Tyler was chief justice of Vermont’s Supreme Court, he rejected as legally invalid an out-of-state bill of sale for a slave. “Would your honor be pleased to tell us what would be sufficient evidence of my client’s ownership of this man?” the lawyer asked the judge. “Oh certainly,” Tyler answered wryly: a bill of sale “from the Almighty.”

By 1814, Tyler had retired both from the bench and from his law professorship at the University of Vermont. Three years later, he prepared for publication a treatise called
The Touchstone; Or a Humble Modest Inquiry into the Nature of Religious Intolerance
. Here again he argued, “A State
Religion always has, and ever will be intolerant.” That same year, Tyler wrote an essay in which he declared that “
all
upright ministers—all, of
every denomination
, . . . will ever condemn a connexion of church and state, as an unhallowed profanation of their character and calling.”
⁶³

Toward the end of his life, Tyler began an autobiography. He addressed it to a reader two centuries in the future, in the year 2025: “I cannot but fancy that some profound antiquary of your superexcellent age, while groping among the rubbish of time, may from some kennel of oblivion fish up my poor book.” What, he wondered, would this twenty-first-century historian make of his scrawl? Tyler pictured an histo
rian who smiles at

The sprawling letters, yellow text,

The formal phrase, the bald stiff style . . .

And in the margin gravely notes

A thousand meanings never meant.

Historians, Tyler knew, will always make too much of too little. After all, what if only his left shoe made it down to that superexcellent age, “to be gathered as an invaluable treasure into the museum of the Antiquarian”? Some historians, “after vainly essaying to fit it to the right foot, would gravely declare that the anatomy of their ancestors’ pedestals differed from those of his day.”
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They would think people who lived in the eighteenth century had two left feet.

The waves that rocked them on the deep
To them their secret told.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Boston,” 1873

On Sunday, April 18, 2010, three days after the Tea Party Express left Boston, George Pataki rode into town. Pataki, the former Republican governor of New York, was thinking about running for president; he was in need of a Founding Father. In Boston’s North End, he positioned himself in front of an equestrian statue of Paul Revere. He was there to launch “Revere America,” a nonprofit “dedicated to advancing common sense public policies rooted in our traditions of freedom and free markets that will once again make America secure and prosperous for generations to come.” Its goal was “to harnes
s and amplify the voices of the American people to give them a greater say in fighting back against the threats to freedom posed by Washington liberals.” At RevereAmerica.org, you could sign a petition “to repeal and replace Obamacare” by clicking on an icon of a quill and inkwell on a piece of parchment. You could also watch a video of Pataki giving his speech to his staffers, a few passersby, and a handful of supporters. Austin Hess was in it. He was wearing his tricornered hat. He was wearing his “Don’t Tread on Me” T-shirt. He was carrying a sign: “Remember in November.”

“We’re standing near where Paul Revere, on this day, two hundred and thirty-five years ago, began a ride,” Pataki said. “He was looking to tell patriotic Americans, ‘Our freedom was in danger.’ We’re here today to tell the people of America that once again our freedom is in danger.”

I wasn’t there, but I’d been there before, often; it’s a place I like to go. Standing there, in front of that statue, Pataki happened to be standing where Jane Mecom’s house once stood: in the 1930s, it was demolished to make room for that memorial to Paul Revere.
¹

The motto of Revere America was “Respecting Our History. Protecting Our Future.” The Founding Fathers George Pataki wanted Americans to worship fought a Revolution, he believed, for the sake of free markets. That’s not what the Revolution meant to Jane Mecom. In the summer of 1786, when Mecom was living in that house that would one day be demolished to make room for a statue of Paul Revere, she wrote a letter telling her brother that, in Boston, the Fourth of July—the nation’s tenth birthday—was overshadowed by yet another wonderful celebration: the opening of a bridge to Ca
mbridge. She loved the new bridge so much—“it is Really a charming Place”—that she described it for him. “As you Aproach to it it is a Beautiful Sight with a Litle Vildg at the other End the Buldings all New the Prospect on Each Side is Delight full.” The day of Harvard’s commencement, she told him, so many people crossed the river that the toll gatherers took in five hundred dollars. And then, musing on another crop of Harvard graduates, Jane Mecom ventured an opinion, something she didn’t often do, about what it meant to have been deprived of an education, an opinion—a revolutionary opinion—about inequa
lity. She had been reading a book by the Englishman Richard Price. “Dr Price,” she reported,
“thinks Thousands of Boyles Clarks and Newtons have Probably been lost to the world, and lived and died in Ignorance and meanness, merely for want of being Placed in favourable Situations, and Injoying Proper Advantages.” Thousands of Isaac Newtons were out there, living and dying in poverty, ignorance, and obscurity. The chances for escape weren’t good. “Very few we know,” she reminded her brother, “is able to beat thro all Impedements and Arive to any Grat Degre of superiority in Understanding.”
²

Her brother didn’t need reminding. Every letter his sister wrote to him contained this truth. Benjamin Franklin carried his family in his blood and his sister on his back. He must have thought about this a great deal. He began his autobiography by explaining why he was taking the trouble to write the story of his life: “Having emerg’d from the Poverty & Obscurity in which I was born & bred, to a State of Affluence & some Degree of Reputation in the World, and having gone so far thro’ Life with a considerable Share of Felicity, the conducing Means I made use of, which, the Blessing of God,
so well succeeded, my Posterity may like to know, as they may find some of them suitable to their own Situations, & therefore fit to be imitated.”
³
He wrote, in other words, to answer the question with which everyone he met must have pestered him: How, for God’s sake, how on earth, Dr. Franklin, pray, tell me, did you, the tenth son of a second-rate chandler, manage to escape from poverty and obscurity?