It seems a little odd that the cover of “Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom,” the newest book by narrative historian Russell Shorto, uses a print of the 1851 painting “Washington Crosses the Delaware” by German-American artist Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze. It’s a highly romanticized image of the prelude to the famous surprise attack the Continental Army launched against Hessian mercenary troops in Trenton, New Jersey in December 1776.
I say that because “Revolution Song” is anything but a conventional history of the birth of the nation. Rather, it’s made up of portraits of six people who lived in the Revolutionary era and whose individual histories add up to what Shorto calls “a nonfiction story.”
Shorto, a senior scholar at the New Netherland Institute in Albany, New York, a research center that studies early Dutch settlement in America, won wide acclaim in 2004 for his bestselling “The Island at the Center of the World,” a history of New York City’s origins as the Dutch city of New Amsterdam.
As he did with that book, Shorto looks at the Revolutionary era through a prismatic lens, weaving together the stories of the six people he profiles to give an overall impression of how the varying definitions of “freedom” came into play between American colonists, Native Americans, and Great Britain in the mid-to-late 18th century.
Those issues continue to reverberate today, he says: The country’s ongoing racial problems can be traced back to the widespread use of slavery in colonial times, just as arguments over the government’s reach mirror the debate in the 1780s about federal versus state power.
As Shorto writes in a preface: “The six voices sing different parts, revealing, perhaps, that we are still connected to them, that the issues that animated the people who took part in the founding of the American nation are alive in us, that we are still fighting the Revolution.”
At the center of “Revolution Song” is George Washington, an important but more nuanced figure than the steely-eyed commander who stands astride a wooden boat in Leutze’s painting. Washington, Shorto writes, was indeed a respected and inspirational leader of men (if less than a great military tactician) and a logical choice as the first president of the infant nation. But he was also prey to self-doubt, vanity and economic self-interest (he kept hundreds of slaves on his Virginia farm, despite admitting slavery was incompatible with the ideals the revolution espoused).
Shorto also profiles Lord George Germain, the architect of Britain’s strategy to defeat the American rebels, whose near-feudal view of society was at odds with the growing belief in individual freedom that animated not just the American colonists but many people in England at that time, including members of Parliament.
But Shorto’s book really shines in his portraits of four lesser-known figures: the Seneca leader Kayéthwahkeh, known to the Americans and British as Cornplanter; Venture Smith, a free black man in Connecticut who in his boyhood had been brought from Africa as a slave; Abraham Yates, a New York shoemaker who overcame his humble birth to become a lawyer, colonial legislator and fierce advocate of the common man; and Margaret Moncrieffe Coghlan, the spirited and beautiful daughter of a British officer in America who defied society’s expectation that women bend to the will of men.
Smith, Coghlan and Cornplanter are perhaps the most apt symbols of the contradictions that were at the heart of the American Revolution, whose lofty pronouncements included no provisions for ending slavery, giving women equality or recognizing any place for Native Americans in the new nation.
“Liberty was an inalienable right for all people,” Shorto writes. “But economic considerations crimped the [American] leaders’ moral beings … [they] extravagantly failed their own challenge.”
Be that as it may, “Revolution Song” still captures the drama and turmoil of the era in a compelling, episodic narrative that touches on seminal events such as the Boston Tea Party, the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the French entry into the war on the American side. In its personal portraits, it unfolds at times like a novel, with unexpected twists and turns.
Coghlan, for instance, was 14 years old when, separated from her father, she ended up behind American lines during the Battle of New York in the summer of 1776. Temporarily left in the care of some of the American commanders, she raised the ire of them, including Washington, when at a formal dinner she offered a toast to General William Howe, the British Army commander.
Washington decided to let the remark slide — with the proviso that the teenager offer a toast to either him or American General Israel Putnam when she was reunited with British forces (she did just that, to Howe’s laughter).
Some months later, Coghlan was forced by her father into an arranged marriage with a British officer who abused her; she escaped from him in Britain and set off to try and find the kind of individual liberty the American Revolution celebrated. The reality, though, was that to survive, she had to remake herself as the mistress of various high-profile men; her father disowned her.
In 1793, on the verge of being sent to debtors’ prison in England, Coghlan published a tell-all memoir that caused a fair stir — but which failed to ease her financial problems.
Abraham Yates would also cross paths with Washington during the Battle of New York, when he served as a congressional representative from New York state; a special delegation had moved from Albany to the village of Harlem, on the north end of Manhattan island, to be closer to American forces and gauge the battle’s progress. Washington and Yates exchanged numerous letters during the fighting, including plans to evacuate citizens from the city as British troops moved closer to capturing it.
Shorto sketches a sometimes humorous portrait of Yates as a cranky opponent of landed wealth, whether British or American. He was an avid supporter of the revolution and of Washington; yet after independence was secured, he fiercely opposed the efforts of Washington and other U.S. leaders like Alexander Hamilton to craft a stronger federal government, convinced it would destroy individual liberty just as British rule had.
Meanwhile, Cornplanter, the Seneca leader, emerges as a thoughtful man — and at times a ferocious warrior — who tries to navigate the tricky waters of the British-American conflict. The Seneca were one of the six tribes of the Iroquois, the Indian confederacy in New York state whose support both sides tried to woo during the war.
Despite Cornplanter’s plea to his fellow natives for neutrality, the Iroquois sided with the British and attacked American frontier settlements; American forces, under Washington’s orders, responded by destroying many native villages and food supplies.
After the war, Cornplanter met twice with then-President Washington (the Seneca had named him “Town Destroyer”) to try and gain permanent protection for Seneca land. Washington was sufficiently impressed by him, Shorto writes, to pledge some degree of that, and Cornplanter even adopted some white ways, such as building a sawmill on tribal land to sell lumber to whites. But the story, like others involving whites and Native Americans, ultimately did not end well for the natives.
In the end, perhaps the most extraordinary tale from “Revolution Song” is that of Venture Smith (Shorto traveled to Ghana with some of his descendants to trace his roots). It’s also a good reminder that slavery in Colonial America was not confined to the Southern states.
Born Broteer Furro in West Africa, Smith was taken as a boy to New England in the 1730s. Living first on Fisher’s Island in Long Island Sound, he would soon grow into a valued slave, known for his great strength and hard work. But he also had an unshakable resolve to win his freedom one day.
Sold to a family in Connecticut, he saved money from side jobs, like chopping wood, that he was allowed to do for other whites and eventually purchased his freedom. He would later buy the freedom of his wife and two children from the same owner, become a successful land owner and farmer himself and the central figure of a community of free blacks in Haddam, Connecticut along the lower Connecticut River.
As an elderly man, somewhat embittered by family problems and being cheated in business by certain whites, Smith dictated a memoir in which he left no doubt what he considered his greatest achievement. If the American Revolution largely passed him by, a personal revolution did not: “My freedom,” he said, “is a privilege which nothing else can equal.”
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.
Russell Shorto will read from his new book on April 14 at 7 p.m. in Haddam, Connecticut in an event cosponsored by the Haddam and East Haddam historical societies and the First Church Cemetery Association-Venture Smith Day. The reading takes place at the Haddam Fire House #1.
Russell Shorto’s website is russellshorto.com.