Next, Washington's Crossing, the Declaration of Independence, and Paul Revere.

Find out how these histories have everything to do with the American Civil War.

As the war ends, there is a real sense that history is going to be an important part of sort of stitching the nation back together.

Discover what happened in the 1800s that determined almost everything you know about the 1700s and how it blurred the lines between fact and fiction.

Drive by History starts now.

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Every day thousands of motorists pass by countless history markers and say to themselves, "One of these days I'm going to stop and read that.

One of these days I'm going to find out what happened and why it mattered."

Well, this is that day.

I'm heading to a history marker that talks about a revolutionary era figure who rode through the night proclaiming, "The British are coming."

But there's a twist to this history.

Paul Revere's name is nowhere I'm Ken Moggis and this is Drive By History.

Today's investigation, part of our special series focused on the American Revolution, begins in Mayo Pack, New York, located about 55 miles north of New York City.

Although no battles were fought in Mayo Pack during the American Revolution, the area was strategically important, with colonial troops encamped in almost every direction.

So here's the history marker in the middle of this busy intersection.

It says, "Civil Ludington rode horseback over this road the night of April 26, 1777, to call out Colonel Ludington's regiment to repel British at Danbury, Connecticut."

Now I have to confess, I've never heard of Sybil Ludington, but these events sound very similar to events that took place in Boston, don't they?

I'm off to find out more.

Listen my children and you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.

So wrote Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Not a word about Sybil Ludington.

And that takes me to the Guggenheim Library, housed in this mansion, the former home of Murray and Leota Guggenheim, located on the campus of Monmouth University.

It's where drive-by histories Anthony Bernard is saddling up to the stacks, preparing for another unexpected journey.

Hey, Anthony, how you doing?

Ken, how's it going?

Hey, I just came from a history marker that talks about Sybil Luddington making a night ride to warn of an imminent British advance.

Of course, this is at the time of the American Revolution.

What can you tell me about her?

It's kind of reminiscent of Paul Revere, right?

Well, it's hard to miss.

I mean, what do you got there?

This is the Memory of '76, which is a great piece of scholarship.

It's all about how we remember the Revolution.

So let's start with that Sybil Ludington history.

Okay.

So Sybil Ludington rode 40 miles through the night to summon the militia and let them know that Danbury had been burned and that the British were on the march.

That's quite a feat and a local event that fits into the larger national narrative.

Except here's the rub.

Yeah, it might never have happened.

What?

So what you have to understand Ken is that according to research there are no contemporary Revolutionary War records or first-hand accounts of Sybil Ludington's ride.

So it's not true, we're not remembering it right?

I didn't say that.

But if a young woman did something so daring people would have written about it don't you think?

Well see that's the problem with this history.

If someone would have written her story during the Revolutionary War, it would have put her in danger.

That wouldn't have been a good thing to do to a 16 year old.

So do we know if Sybil Ludington even existed?

Oh absolutely.

She lived a good long life.

She probably even helped the Patriot cause.

But this is such a dramatic story as I think on it.

Riding in the darkness over 40 miles.

I mean it seems like a mix of fact and folklore like we've taken some dramatic license with his history over time.

That's what I think as well.

Yeah.

So we don't hear much about Sybil Ludington because the story of Paul Revere is completely factual.

Is that what you're saying?

No.

There are a lot of problems with the story of Paul Revere.

What kind of problems?

Well first of all there are many people that rode on that fateful April night in 1775.

Well it seems like the thing to do from what you're telling me.

It was.

I mean neighbors would normally warn other neighbors on horseback of an advancing militia.

Also Paul Revere was captured so he never made it to his destination.

Lastly you know that whole the British are coming the British are coming thing he probably didn't say that since we were all British.

So that memory has been distorted over time as well.

Unfortunately this thing happens a lot in history but it seems to happen more with the American Revolution and that's where the next leg of this investigation begins.

To dig deeper, Anthony sends me to Piscataway, New Jersey, to East Jersey Old Town Village, a collection of historic buildings from the Revolutionary Era and beyond.

I'm met by Professor Michael Haddam, the author of The Memory of '76.

He specializes in the narratives of the American Revolution, examining what we've chosen to carry forward and why.

We're here because this colonial village did not exist in colonial times.

Rather, it was created later, made up of structures that once stood elsewhere.

Structures that were handpicked for preservation and moved to this site where they tell a collective story of our nation's past.

As I'm about to find out, that process of picking and choosing what to preserve isn't unique to East Jersey Old Town Village.

It's central to the way we remember the American Revolution itself.

Michael, your book is called The Memory of '76.

I'm curious why the memory and how does that differ from actual history?

Well, the history of 1776 is in some sense everything that happened.

Yeah.

It's also what historians have written about the past, but the memory is about how we as a society remember and it's also looks at how our memories of the Revolution have changed over the course of the last 250 years because our popular memory of the Revolution is always shaped by the present circumstances.

Right.

What a fascinating concept, and one that doesn't get all that much attention, but it's very much at play, particularly in this context.

Let's go back to the midnight ride of Paul Revere for a moment.

It's a really good example of how our popular memory works, right?

Some stories are remembered, some aren't.

Paul Revere was not the only rider that night, but he is the one that is most remembered.

And that is in down in no small part to the Longfellow poem, Paul Revere's Ride, which, you know, is published at the very end of 1859, very early 1860, right on the cusp of the Civil War.

And Longfellow is writing after the raid at Harpers Ferry.

And he's telling the story of Paul Revere almost as an allegory for the current circumstances that the nation was finding itself in.

In other words, what you learned about Paul Revere in school has everything to do with the Civil War.

And it's far from the only aspect of the American Revolution that evolved.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

As a nation, we started to edit the history of the American Revolution almost from the minute the war ended.

The first histories of the revolution are written in the 1780s and in the 1790s.

And the purpose there is to create a narrative that is going to bring this new nation together, right?

And so they create a narrative that is triumphal, that is unifying, and that focuses on a few elite heroes, right?

George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, these are the most celebrated figures in these early narrative.

That might seem obvious.

When you think of the American Revolution, I'm sure you think of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.

However, the early emphasis on Washington and Franklin created a focus.

It pointed the history in a specific direction.

These first historians, they set the narrative for the memory of the revolution that would really take hold in the 19th century.

The American Revolution was many things, but it was not simple.

The war was bloody and brutal, both sides engaged in practices that were far from honorable.

Not every moment was a proud moment.

The Great Man narrative, as it's sometimes called, the stories of people like Washington and Franklin helped the nation feel better about the war.

Today, you admire the Continental Army soldiers, you see them as brave fighters who sacrificed much to win independence.

Immediately after the war, the general public viewed the Continental soldiers a little differently.

People in the 18th century did not look kindly on the Continental Army.

They were the people who, you know, had no connections to communities or families.

That's why they could join the Continental Army.

What you might not know is men who did not own land, younger sons and servants enlisted because the pay and opportunities presented by the Continental Army offered a chance to improve their circumstances.

As historian James Kirby Martin noted, "The men who made the long-term commitment were often, and I'm quoting, 'the folks who didn't have another alternative.'"

Now maybe they believed in freedom and liberty too, but the former reason mattered just as much as the latter.

As I think you can understand, the public didn't feel good about that or these soldiers.

As we come up on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 1826, we start to see something new, which is the Continental Army veterans start to come into the popular memory of the Revolution in a way that they never had before.

Americans realized the revolutionary generation was dying off.

And, as is so often the case, time had healed at least some of the wounds of war.

And it's in 1819 that we get the first Pension Act for Continental Army veterans.

And that really popularized them in the political culture, in the popular culture.

As a nation, we decided that veterans of the Continental Army deserved respect and that they should be recognized for their service.

The memory had evolved.

And they start to be treated as local celebrities all across the country.

And then what really cements their place is when Lafayette comes to visit in 1824, he goes all over the country, and at every stop he gives pride of place to Connell Army veterans in the proceedings.

And so they get that much more acclaim from the public and they become local celebrities in these years around the Jubilee.

Or elevating the common man.

Yeah, absolutely.

It's the beginning of a process of starting to include people in the popular memory of the Revolution beyond just a few elites.

As we move further into the first half of the 19th century, the memory of the Revolution evolved further as well.

As we already said, the Civil War, specifically the 1859 abolitionist raid at Harper's Ferry, shaped what you know about Paul Revere.

However, by then, abolition had been influencing the narrative of the American Revolution for quite some time.

It's the abolitionist movement that really creates the modern memory of the Declaration of Independence.

Before the 1830s, the Declaration of Independence signifies independence, it signifies union, but it's not really celebrated for its preamble the way that it is now.

And it's the abolitionists who first do that.

In fact, as relations between North and South grew ever more tense, the memory of the Revolution started to divide along similar lines.

For the abolitionists, the Declaration is the defining document of the American Revolution.

For many Southerners, that's not the case.

They see the Constitution as the defining document of the Revolution.

They dismiss the Declaration.

At issue was the phrase, "All men are created equal."

The North believed the Founding Fathers were asserting a philosophical idea.

The South believed the Founders never intended that kind of gravitas.

So in a very real sense, the abolitionists are hoping that the Declaration will save the nation from slavery, while Southerners hope that the Constitution will save slavery from the Declaration.

Wow.

Two versions of this history were taking shape, one in the north, one in the south.

But as the war ends, there is a real sense that history is going to be an important part of sort of stitching the nation back together after the Civil War.

And that sets the stage for arguably the single biggest catalyst that shaped the memory of the American Revolution.

An event that not only made history, it defined history.

The nation's 100th birthday.

The conversation continues inside.

You know, the Centennial Exhibition, the Centennial Era generally has a significant impact on how we remember the Revolution.

The Centennial Exhibition, sometimes called the Centennial Exposition, was a massive World's Fair.

It took place in Philadelphia and attracted 10 million visitors.

It was largely intended to showcase the nation's advances, with Americans looking forward, excited by the promise of becoming a great world power.

However, when people take a long hard look at the future, they tend to take a long hard look at the past, too.

And the centennial, like every anniversary, spurred the creation of, you know, of interest in the history of the revolution and the memory of the revolution, and also in the writing of them, the depictions of the history of the revolution.

At the same time, trauma from the Civil War continued to linger.

Despite ending over a decade earlier, the wounds were still raw.

There is a real sense that history is going to be an important part of sort of stitching the nation back together.

In order to do that, to stitch the nation back together, history had to tread carefully.

Some events from the American Revolution were very similar to the Civil War.

Those stories might not heal, in fact, they might aggravate.

As a result, they were downplayed.

That included the contributions of enslaved people, the mob uprisings, which were far greater than the singular Boston Tea Party, and especially the neighbor against neighbor, brother against brother aspect of the revolution.

Instead, the organizers intentionally pulled forward other themes.

One in particular seemed to resonate very well.

The great man narrative, the heroic, triumphal narrative is very resilient.

It's at this time that the history of the American Revolution, as you know it today, really coalesced.

Although there were other narratives, Michael Haddam tells me that by 1876, the work of historian George Bancroft emerged as the defining account.

For Bancroft, the history of the nation and of the Revolution specifically is a triumphal story.

It's a story of the progression of new world democracy out of the old world monarchy, right?

And that's the narrative that he tells.

And he writes those histories specifically with the goal of trying to bring the country back together after, you know, this catastrophic and traumatic event.

So our common goal is stronger than what's tearing us apart.

I mean, that's what he hoped.

Reinforcing that narrative, at the Centennial Exhibition, you not only heard stories of triumph, you could see them too in lithographs and prints.

So Currier and Ives is creating prints that are mementos at the time of the exposition.

What how what effect did that have?

Those those prints are important because they're, they're visual expressions of the memory of the revolution.

But promoting a very positive narrative.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

They totally reinforce this, the triumphal narrative, the great man narrative of the revolution, the heroic narrative, they absolutely reinforced that.

Images produced by Currier and Ives included Washington taking command of the American army, the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown, and the Minutemen of the Revolution.

Those prints, and others like them, helped stories make their way from the library to the living room and into the American psyche.

One of the things that those prints do is they spread the memory of the Revolution beyond the East Coast, out to the Midwest, out to the West.

And that's important because Americans in those regions don't have the geographic connection or proximity to the places of the revolution that we do here on the East Coast.

As a result, these are the stories that took hold all across the nation from sea to shining sea.

The history, which at its core is the history as documented by George Bancroft, is the history we know today.

And a lot of times, you know, when you get into the 20th century, when people think of the traditional triumphal narrative of the revolution or of American history, what they're really referencing is Bancroft, whether they know it or not.

As we continue our walk around East Jersey Old Town Village, we come across an old schoolhouse.

It made me think about how we've taught the revolution across the generations in the classroom.

What students are taught in school is really important, right?

The narratives that we learn in school as children get embedded in us in a way that they don't when we learn them later.

- Michael Haddam tells me by the early 20th century, the public all but refused to allow schools to teach accounts of the revolution that were even modestly unflattering.

- One of the textbooks just pointed out the historical fact that Continental Army soldiers were given a bonus to sign up and that was seen as sort of impugning the integrity of the soldiers.

They were supposed to have fought for liberty and for freedom, not for a signing of borders.

The desire to create such a virtuous depiction of the nation's past had become so great, it actually resulted in another Revolutionary War battle, the so-called "History Textbook Wars of the 1920s."

And so there was a huge controversy in New York City in 1920 over these changes to the to textbooks.

It prompted a whole commission that reviewed all the textbooks and issued recommendations for changes.

Treason to American Tradition, a series of articles published in the Chicago Tribune, fueled the flames of this controversy.

These high-profile articles criticized texts that depicted our founding fathers as flawed or having conflicting interests.

There's also histories coming out that challenge the idea that the revolution was even necessary, that the colonists were not treated badly by Britain.

The public didn't want to hear it.

Neither did lawmakers.

In one ruling, a 1922 New York City school commission determined the text was truthful, but inappropriate for students.

For our purposes, you can step back and see.

People were resisting complex narratives.

Instead preferring stories of heroes and triumph.

Why the memory?

As the investigation draws to a close, I find myself fascinated by what I've uncovered.

Our view of the American Revolution, what most of us believe happened in and around 1776, was actually shaped by other history, the Civil War in particular.

For this special episode on the American Revolution, I've asked historian Michelle Craig-McDonald, one of our nation's great authorities on the era, to help me tie it all together.

We meet in Philadelphia, at the Museum of the American Revolution.

- So there's the American Revolution as the events took place in the 1770s and in the 1780s.

And then there is the American Revolution as it is remembered and celebrated and reinterpreted throughout the 19th century and throughout the 20th and now into the 21st century.

Interesting.

Those are equally valid histories.

What's important to remember, though, is that what history is constructed is framed by the questions that we think are important.

And what historians are interested in learning about changes over time.

And so our understanding of the American Revolution and our ways of studying it also change over time.

- So you're saying we're looking at it through our own eyes.

- It is very much, every time now we are creating a history of the American Revolution, it is both a combination of what we can know historically, what evidence is available, and what interests us and what questions we are asking of that evidence.

So let's talk about the issue of revisionism.

In many cases, this is dispelling long-held beliefs that people have really bought into.

It can be an emotional thing.

How do you find a balance with that?

How much do you correct, and how much do you say, "Well, part of it's true"?

It is a balancing act.

When you think about it, revisionism is sometimes misunderstood as erasing the history we knew before in favor of something else.

It's not tearing down, it's building out.

It's recognizing that the American Revolution was led by more than just a handful of men.

It's recognizing that the impact of the Revolution was more than just a political idea.

It's creating space for the everyday man and woman to participate, to contribute to the revolutionary cause and our historical understanding of it.

See you next time.

Have you driven past a history marker and said to yourself, "I should tell Drive-By History about that"?

Well, drop us a line.

You can reach us through our website, which is drivebyhistory.org, or through our Facebook page.

Who knows?

Your history marker could end up being our next investigation.

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And the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.

We explore, cultivate, and champion the public humanities in order to strengthen New Jersey's diverse community.

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