His Mission Is Sorting Out America’s Messy Revolution

Aristocratic by temperament, but democratic by conviction; instinctually conservative, but intellectually audacious.

The attributes so frequently applied to the American republic’s founders might be used with equal justice to describe the Huntington Library, the understated powerhouse among contemporary Los Angeles’ significant cultural institutions.

So, it seemed almost fated that when the prestigious Library of America went in search of an editor for its new anthology of original historical documents--”The American Revolution: Writings from the War of Independence”--it settled on John Rhodehamel, the Huntington’s Norris Foundation Curator of American History.

After all, Rhodehamel is not only the author of fluent and critically admired scholarly books on George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and the Bill of Rights, but also a curator who, since joining the Huntington in 1986, has mounted exhibitions that have been seen by more than 1 million people. That is not an inconsiderable accomplishment when what is on offer are documents that must be pored over and not images that can be imbibed in the blink of an MTV-conditioned eye.

The exhibitions are the public face of Rhodehamel’s work as the manuscript librarian for the Huntington’s extraordinary archive of American historical documents. In that capacity, he manages acquisitions, conservation, exhibitions and publications and ensures that the American collection remains accessible to qualified scholars.

Rhodehamel also served as the editor of the Library of America’s highly successful 1,200-page collection, “George Washington: Writings,” and the fruits of their latest collaboration are powerful, startling and a subtle but profound challenge to much that we think we know about the founders and their era.

In just 900 pages, Rhodehamel has made room for 120 individual selections by 70 writers. There are the familiar voices of America’s patriotic pantheon, but also those of British officers, diplomats, high tories, conflicted loyalists, witnesses to heroism, folly, mutiny, atrocity and the altogether messy business of making revolution.

Few who have written about the collection, for example, have been able to avoid quoting one British officer’s chilling account of the Battle of Ticonderoga’s aftermath: “The wolves came down in numbers from the mountains to devour the dead, and even some that were in a kind of manner buried, they tore out of the earth; the great stench thro the country being the cause of their coming down.”

There is throughout “The American Revolution” a sense of just how much brutality and high principle intertwined at the republic’s birth. A reader is particularly struck with the bloody-mindedness of the war’s progress in the South, where the many loyalist militias made revolution essentially a civil war. One can read a disgusted tory jurist’s account of the events on Bunker Hill without agreement and yet come away with the sense that his appraisal of the local revolutionary officers’ opportunism and veniality has the ring of truth.

But because Rhodehamel is both a realist about the Revolution’s circumstances and an idealist concerning its legacy of political principle, the sum of all these gritty, chaotic details somehow deepens a reader’s sense of the founders’ accomplishment.

The ‘New Age’ of America

It also leaves one with a sense of how the distance between contemporary Americans and founders involves more than time. One recent afternoon in San Marino, during a conversation in the Huntington’s gardens, the 51-year-old Rhodehamel discussed that and other implications of the anthology. The exchange was prefaced, however, with apologies for any apparent weariness. He and his wife, Johanna, an illustrator of children’s books, are the parents of 1-year-old triplets--Catherine, Jack and Sam.

But “the 18th century is another world” from the one his children inhabit “in a way the 19th century is not,” Rhodehamel explained.

“All of these changes the revolution brought forth essentially created a modern world that had not existed before,” he said. “To take just one example, you had this hierarchical society, where power and privilege ran up and down. That began to break up after the revolution, though the process was not complete until the 19th century. All that--what has been called ‘the essential radicalism’ of the American Revolution--is clear to us now but was utterly obscure to the participants at the time.”

In other words, the revolution’s very success in creating a fundamental break with the past now impedes 21st century readers from fully understanding the minds and sensibilities of intellects and characters formed before 1776. “To understand that aspect of the 18th century,” said Rhodehamel, “requires something that is almost like a spiritual discipline.”

James McPherson, the most eminent of Civil War historians and a sometime collaborator of Rhodehamel’s, concurs. “The people who signed the Declaration of Independence,” he said, “clearly thought of themselves as British people living in the New World. Europe remained their frame of reference. If you read the newspapers of that period, you find that most of the news came from Europe.” It was not until after the so-called Second War of Independence in 1812, according to McPherson, “that Americans faced westward, turning their backs on Europe until the first World War.

“People who came after that break, such as Lincoln, who was born in 1809, have a completely different heritage than the founders. They recognized that they were living in a new age and felt they had to create a distinctly American society.”

Among the issues Rhodehamel believes contemporary readers will find surprising are the large number of accounts of aborted negotiations between the British and their revolutionary opponents. As a scholar, even he found the evidence of failed diplomacy more extensive than he had expected. He also cites the disappointment and bafflement of the British at the colonials’ refusal to negotiate seriously for a settlement. Rhodehamel quotes the particular irritation of Ambrose Serle, an aide to the British commander Lord Howe, who dismissed Washington as a “paltry little colonel of militia” after one diplomatic initiative foundered over the rebels’ prickly sense of protocol.

But, as inclusive as Rhodehamel’s selections are, he remains disappointed on one fundamental omission. Despite the fact that thousands of African Americans served in the colonial forces, “I couldn’t find a single document that contained a first-person account of their service by one of the African American soldiers.”

The Right Man for the Job

To Max Rudin, the Library of America’s publisher, Rhodehamel and the revolution were a natural fit. “Aside from his obvious intellectual gifts, he has an unmatched familiarity with the material and an heroic appetite for hard work,” Rudin explained. “Anyone else would have taken years to assemble this collection.”

Rhodehamel, in fact, took only two, much of the time devoted to refining the scope of his undertaking. “What the library originally had in mind,” he explained, “was war correspondence on the order of what was produced during Vietnam or World War II. I told them that it didn’t exist, though private letters sometimes were reprinted in newspapers of the Revolutionary era. Instead, I told them we could do personal accounts and capture the same immediacy that is so compelling in contemporary war journalism.”

What emerged has won both critical and popular approval. And, as measured by sales, “The American Revolution” is the library’s most successful book this year, outselling collections by Henry David Thoreau and Edith Wharton. In part, Rudin suspects, that is because readers have found its contents as “fascinating and surprising” as he did.

By the mid-19th century, Rudin pointed out, a distinctive American language with a recognizable public voice had emerged. It was a national language shaped not only by nearly universal exposure to the cadences of Shakespeare and the King James Bible, but also by its dissemination through increasingly sophisticated mass media--newspapers, weekly magazines and journals. Through such media, fluent spokesmen of the emerging national language--Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain, for example--exerted a powerful and widely imitated influence.

By contrast, Rudin said, the people whose accounts Rhodehamel has collected “were not sure where their writing fit into the big social picture of their era, because there was no big picture for anyone to see. Therefore, individual experience looms larger in their work, and they felt free to describe it in highly individual terms.”

Take, for example, Abigail Adams’ plea to her husband, John, that any new national legal code adequately protect women. Written from their home in Braintree, Mass., on March 31, 1776, the celebrated “Remember the Ladies” letter begins with a recitation of the future first lady’s reservations about the character of Massachusetts’ Virginia allies--not least because the “Gentery Lords” were slaveholders.

“I am willing to allow the Colony great merrit for having produced a Washington but . . . I have sometimes been ready to think that the passion for Liberty cannot be Eaquelly Strong in the Breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow Creatures of theirs.”

A recitation of Boston’s travails under British occupation and her relief at the advent of spring follows. It is an elegant and endearingly personal preamble to Adams’ real purpose: When a new code of laws is drafted, “I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. . . .

“That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend.”

It is a passage that combines for contemporary readers a sense of the familiar and an intuition of a life lived in what is today utterly foreign territory. That sense of surprise embedded in the familiar is something both Rhodehamel and Rudin count among the pleasures of encountering Revolutionary material in its original forms.

What the Founders Had to Face

To Rhodehamel, currently at work on a biography of Washington, one of the things to be rediscovered in the contemporaneous accounts of the Revolution is “the palpable sense of contingency: They really were making it up as they went along.

“We Americans,” he said, “are completely blinded by how things turned out for the founders. We’ve been setting off rockets every Fourth of July since as if what transpired then was somehow inevitable. But the men who prosecuted the Revolution really didn’t know whether any of it would work. Many suspected very strongly that it wouldn’t--and said so.”

Rudin thinks contemporary readers are just as likely to be surprised by what is absent from these accounts of the Revolution.

“If you are at all familiar with Civil War literature,” he said, “you are bound to be struck by what’s not there in the Revolutionary writing. These writers--whatever their station--have no sense of religious mission and no sense of religious reflection about their own experience. There are frequent references to liberty, honor and self-defense, but not that sense of religious mission and the language to support it that you find later in American writing. You definitely find the language of republicanism, but not the sort of public piety you find in contemporary accounts of the Civil War or--for that matter--of World War II.

“Whatever people today may want to believe,” Rudin said, “they just weren’t very religious--at least not in the sense that we understand it.”