What most galvanized my sense that perspective could never be solitary or monolithic occurred when I was a junior in high school and we were studying the American Revolution--the War of Independence. This originating moment in our history appeared to grow out of a clear-cut ideological struggle, one that brought out the kind of bravery, determination, and resiliency that allows "truth" to triumph over greatly superior forces. Regardless of how the moment is analyzed--was taxation without representation the crucial issue, or was it opportunism on the part of propertied patricians?--the American Revolution has proven to be a crucial shot heard round the world, a watershed for democracy and self-determination.
The teaching question when it comes to such subject matter is how much ambiguity of fact and interpretation should be allowed. Presumably students should believe in the ideals of America, should feel proud of their citizenship, so teachers don't want to keep carping at every fault or imperfection uncovered in historical events. The challenge is how to create in students a sensibility that is critically aware of the contradictions of history, of people's conflicting motives and actions, and yet does not leave them feeling disillusioned and despairing. Nice pluralistic sentiments, but pressing these lessons home is another matter, even when the teacher believes them.
In her most recent book, Human Minds, Margaret Donaldson describes a major developmental change in children that occurs around the age of nine: the "transcendent modes" begin to characterize the child's outlook. Detachment is now possible because the other's perspective can be entertained. The child can begin to be concerned with ideas and people on their own terms, and not merely as an extension of the child's desires or intentions. Well, at 16 I was long past the age of being ready to take in the other's point of view. School, however, tends to ignore genuine debate, especially when the myths of the defining culture risk being contradicted. Tangling with perspective often involves uncovering some profound tension between reason and loyalty. The consequence of seeing it one way rather than another amounts to affirming one's particular group membership. In the case of studying the American Revolution, one might complicate all the issues, show any number of imperfections and mixed motives, but in the end it's always one side pitted against the other. While it's entirely possible to appreciate the point of view of each of the contenders, it's difficult to be an American and not clearly see the "rebel" cause as just. But that's precisely the reversal of experience within which I was so instructively caught.
Our teacher, Mr. Symmes, was open-minded as he sought to have students explore the conflicting reasons--many less than noble--for this armed insurrection against the crown. Freedom, liberty, self-determination, and economic opportunity, however, were significant unifying themes, and this strong American ethos was positively reinforced by my father. He certainly believed in the American dream, having proven that one could be born of immigrant parents who lived in a slum and then rise through education and hard work to the comforts of the middle class.
The year before I was to study the grand event in school, my father bought me a copy of The American Heritage Book of The Revolution--its dust jacket boasting a brilliantly colored painting of American troops triumphantly planting an American flag on a battlefield amid wounded and dying redcoats. I was primed and ready to read about the strategies and sacrifices that made it possible for America to sever its ties with England and launch the course of its own national destiny. In the introduction, however, the acclaimed historian Bruce Catton introduced a small note of caution. The Revolution was, of course, fought by "living, aspiring, struggling people" just like the rest of us, but a "romantic haze has settled down over the whole affair" making it difficult to remember how much the war "was a hard, wearing, bloody, and tragic business--a struggle to the death that we came very close to losing." Like today the people at that time "were often confused, usually divided in sentiments, and now and then rather badly discouraged about the possible outcome of the tremendous task they had undertaken." Indeed, as Catton confessed, there were two discernable sides to this struggle, "no more than a third of the provincials were active patriots, . . . another third were Loyalists, with the remaining third uncommitted" (6). Yet in the end the crucial fact was that enough people "were willing to fight and die for what they believed in to make the dream of independence and freedom come true." Because Catton was rightfully proud to be an American, he was deeply invested in Americans venerating this special moment in their history: "we who look back at them owe them a debt whose size is almost beyond our comprehension" (7).
What followed from this attempt to open the volume in an even handed manner was a stirring rendition of the intricate details of the entire campaign--from the brink of defeat in New York to victory at Yorktown; but decidedly it was a tale told from the perspective of the winning side. Indeed, no longer was there any mention of "loyalists" or the agony of choosing sides; instead, the foreign enemy came into focus and the label quickly turned into those dreaded "tories." History continued to be the story of the victors.
I was perfectly willing to go along with all this; still, another voice kept beckoning from the wings. Also sitting on our shelf at home was another massive volume--well over 800 pages--but this was an historical novel. Facing the title page were these words taken from Jones's History of New York:
In 1821, Chief Justice John Jay said to his nephew William Heathcote DeLancey: "Let me tell you, William: the true history of the American Revolution can never be written." Jay declined to give his reasons, saying, "You must be content to know that the fact is as I have said, and that a great many people in those days were not at all what they seemed, nor what they are generally believed to have been."
The first-person narrative that followed, Oliver Wiswell by Kenneth Roberts, brought me back to the other half of my roots, for it unwaveringly revealed the complex perspective of those who happened to be on the "wrong" side during the War for Independence. Drawn in emotionally by the injustices and hardships faced by the loyalists at the hands of the rebels, it was time to awaken my Canadian heritage that I had inherited through my mother. And so at last I came to sympathize with what my forbearers must have suffered as they were forced to leave New York and New England and resettle in the Maritime Provinces. That war may have been long over and enmities long forgotten, but it was important to discover a different essence of what once had been, that my forbearers were not tories, but United Empire Loyalists.
Roberts' fiction powerfully imparted this other awareness. True, my consciousness of Canadian ancestry stood waiting below the surface to link up with the story of Oliver Wiswell, but its memory had always been held in measured refrains. There was nothing pugnacious or adversarial about its alternative view of the world, for Canadians, I naively supposed, remain conspicuously unjingoistic--forgive and forget. Let a reserved calm and politeness guide human conduct. More prudent to let peace prevail over discord. Indeed many social commentators have noted the Canadian temperament of quietism. While the U.S. promises "just government," Canada simply offers up "good government." The difference can be fundamental, with an emphasis on mediation and negotiation replacing fractious confrontation. In fact, among relatives on the Canadian side of my family, the main contention I remember being expressed--except for my mother's outrage and disgust at how immigration officials had treated her when our family moved to the States--was an irritation over the fact that the Americans had entered the second World War two whole years after the Canadians and then demanded all the bragging rights. Perhaps this was only the tip of the iceberg in a series of slights and complaints.
During eight years of trials and tribulations, in which he travels through many of the colonies in service of the loyalist cause, Oliver Wiswell tells a complex adventure that spares no idiocy, duplicity, or atrocity on either side of the conflict. War is "a consuming fever: a period of delirium and insanity, of misery, disappointment, discomfort, anxiety, despair, waste, weariness, boredom, brutality, death" (291). This is no romanticized version of the conflict, for each man "forgets, if he ever knew, the principles for which he's fighting, and they seldom enter his mind except when he hears them mouthed by politicians who have never under any circumstances faced enemy bullets and would never endure the daily discomforts of a soldier" (434).
As the fortunes of the loyalists decline, Oliver vents openly to a friend the accumulated anger and bitterness that he feels toward the rebels:
They're the people who boast of being American patriots, and brand you and me as traitors to our country. We're loyal, and so we're traitors. They break their words, dishonor their treaties, make war on women, oppress the weak and helpless, practice the worst sort of political oppression, and so they're patriots! It rips me to pieces inside to see such men take our country from us! (531-32)
Seeing the loyalist perspective expressed repeatedly in reaction to fictionally recreated historical episodes had a cumulative effect on me. I experienced a shift in reality. The rebels' wartime rhetoric of freedom and independence came to have a hollow ring to it--or at least serious doubts came into my mind about conventional patriotism. For this was not just another intellectual exercise of imagining different angles of vision; here I saw that a whole people, to whom I was inevitably connected, had in fact read the events of the American Revolution quite differently than I had been led to suppose.
Every icon of the period could be viewed in a sordid light. I read, for instance, "never has there been a more adroit and unscrupulous government agent than Benjamin Franklin, or a more harmless-seeming one." Franklin "delighted in forging letters, full of barefaced lies and foul hints, that destroyed the character and reputation of anyone antagonistic to the rebel cause" (483). Then there was Lafayette described as a "little boy, Washington's pet." Washington, I learned, turned "to putty" whenever Lafayette asked for anything: "That little French boy's no more fit to be a general and plan a battle than a baby is" (758). Or what a difference to discover that Benedict Arnold was a hero, not a traitor, because he finally saw the light and joined the loyalist cause. Nothing was sacred once I started to read with another lens.
Finally, in 1783, Oliver ends up safely in New Brunswick, Canada. In this last section of the novel, ambiguously entitled "Land of Liberty" (America lost, Canada gained?) our understanding is directed toward peacefully accommodating the results of the war. Oliver's concluding words foreshadow the future: "Perhaps something great will come out of all that agony and all those deaths, all that intolerance and all that cruelty. Perhaps something great will come even to that rabble some day, as well as to us." With hostilities ended, it was time to regain some sense of harmony, to see similarity rather than difference. For despite this alternate perspective on the war, losing gave no one the right to go on clinging to some deep-seated grudge. Reading these events in a new way stirred my sense of identity; it did not evoke any hatred for grievances suffered at the hands of a long distant enemy.
In re-imagining the significance of this incident to my education, I again took Oliver Wiswell off the shelf and discovered the note-card which I had used to organize the oral presentation about the novel that I gave to my junior-year history class. At the top of the card, I'd written: "About revolution, but new/different slant on it." I then sketched an outline of the main events of the story and focused on Oliver's negative perception of war, before concluding with the words "excellent book--would not recommend."
The reason not to recommend? Perhaps already I was divided on how far a person's perspective might be shifted if they weren't somewhat predisposed, for there at the end of the card I had repeated the initial note to myself: "(different slant on Rev.)" Somehow I realized the advantages of cautiously obscuring my presence as outsider in order not to risk displaying myself too far apart--would anyone else in the class really understand that an historical perspective might be this radically different? And also correct? It seemed too much to ask others to imagine my alternative foreign identity as actually being connected to this sacred moment in our past. There, the "we" was once again in place, and I could return these newly charged feelings back into the safe confines of my mind.
But this knowledge could never really be erased. A very specific loyalist story has survived in my family's papers and a ceremonial sword that I have now inherited provides a most tangible link to this alternative perspective. The sword originally belonged to a Captain Thomas Spragg, my great-great-great-great grandfather, who had served in the French and Indian War. In 1783, at age 53, Thomas Spragg (Sprague) was forced to flee Hempstead, Long Island and re-settle his family in New Brunswick, Canada. One letter in particular describes this event:
[He] was found among the leading Loyalists at the time of the revolution--holding a commission in the local forces--coming from Long Island. He survived the battles, and when the revolutionists were victorious, returned to his homestead, where he hoped he would be permitted to carry on quietly under the new form of government.
The Americans apparently would not overlook his loyalist activities, and marked him down as deserving the worst they were handing out. It was autumn, and the gathering of the corn. The Captain was in his barn storing the corn, while his men gathering it from the adjoining field, carried it in large baskets on their head, to dump it at their master's feet in the barn. When one of the men brought in his basket, he reported a body of American soldiers converging on the place, in fact with his load he had passed safely through their lines. The Captain knew of course the soldiers' purpose--his capture. The workman suggested that the Capt. exchange clothes with him, turn the basket upside-down, which was the custom, and walk back to the field, which now lay back of the lines, and perhaps escape. The exchange was quickly made, the basket turned over the Captain's head, and he walked quietly out, passed through the lines, and reached the woods. How he had done so, they did not know, nor where to look for him they did not know, and the workmen were loyally silent. The property was seized, and the family became the charges of the government. So far as the Captain was concerned, all was lost.
Our ancestor safely reached the coast, managed to get passage on a vessel and in time reached Saint John, what was then Nova Scotia, Canada. When in Saint John, he made application for compensation, for his loyalty and his losses for the same. So came the Spragg Grant. He took canoe and alone found his way to his new property. It is said, that on reaching his grant, he erected a bark-lean-to, and as night settled on him, he lay down under his bark roofing. It was then raining, and he said, "At Last I am again on my own property, under the flag of my King, and at peace." And he said, "I went off peacefully to sleep."
Banishment, escape, adventure, resiliency, solitude, triumph--what additional male stories, now long since lost, chronicled the other names I've found inserted on the family tree: Morrell, Clarke, Slipp, VanWart, Merritt, Peters, Ryson, Corey, Tilley, Haines, Birdsell, Davis, Lamoreaux, Mercereau, Southard, Gritman, Carman, Harding, Crawford, Case, Drake, Marsters, O'Dell, Gillis, McDonald. Constantly, I read this refrain of separation: "The family was divided during the American Revolution with the majority favoring the Republic; others fought for the Crown and were banished at the close of hostilities." And I see a pattern of persecution and flight being indicated in these records: The Morrell (Morel) family were supposedly "descendants of Huguenots who had to flee France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and went to England;" a Dr. John Clarke (Clark) was arrested for religious fanaticism and ideas, "severely beaten with many lashes, blood streaming from the wounds, then imprisoned and threatened with the gallows," before finally being banished from Boston to Rhode Island.
Belief, loyalty, perspective--all must be negotiated if our other selves are to gain a voice and become part of the alternative narratives of history. Democracy allows for, and then celebrates, unofficial origins--national, ethnic, institutional, personal. People can exist outside the master narrative. Conceding but not surrendering to all the gaps and conflicts that emerge in our quest for origins, we learn to exploit the possibilities of pluralism. The ultimate promise in our democracy is that alternate routes of arrival will hold no special advantage for any group or individual.
Reading Roberts' work of fiction touched me deeply as it allowed my hidden ancestry to reach up and proclaim me as "other." Having experienced this shock of awareness, I could hardly turn around--when fully inscribed as insider--and exclude any other. Even in high school at that time I was suddenly able to look around and see groups of students who were being treated differently from me, who were being excluded from my privileged academic program for reasons other than intelligence--how did they feel?
Who could have imagined the salutary effect this rebellion against the crown would have on my understanding the importance of being able to navigate the perilous shoals of truth and perspective. It was not just an intellectual lesson; my feelings had been deeply engaged through this reading experience with a text no one would claim as "great" literature. How did revealing my response risk labeling me as a foreigner? Was I learning less about the Revolution than I was about what it means to be on the outside of the lesson?