Talking About Myths, Heroes, And Scoundrels

In this story, and hundreds of others, I found the American Revolution. In Last Refuge, I distinguish between the War for Independence and the American Revolution. The War for Independence was certainly led by the Founding Fathers, but the American Revolution is a wider, more egalitarian and yet unrealized vision of American democracy. It's a vision that intersects with the War of Independence, but ultimately what I call the American Revolution is an entirely different endeavor. Which, please excuse the digression, brings me back to my story. After being educated to become a historian, I realized that all this information I was privy to, none of it was available to the American public. It was ghettoized in academia. And I decided that I didn't want to be one of these historians who writes for other historians. So to make a long story short, I went to Hollywood, pursued a career in television and film, while continuing to keep pace with historical research. Over time I became a storyteller committed to unseating these myths.

Speaking of unseating myths, in the reviews of Last Refuge by the mainstream press, your novel is commonly described as a “revisionist view” of the American Revolution. Which means, of course, your perspective dispenses with the notion of “great men” making history, it offers a very irreverent view of Founding Fathers such as Washington, Franklin, and John Hancock, and it's clearly presenting class antagonisms and class struggle within the revolutionary movement. It's certainly not an entirely new point of view. Historians such as Howard Zinn, Eric Foner, Herbert Aptheker, Ray Raphael, and long ago, Charles Beard have explored this era from an alternative “peoples history.” But in the world of popular culture, Last Refuge is a startling, wild, and fresh debunking of our founding national mythology.

It is very debunking. I was committed to finding a voice within popular entertainment that could give us a different vision and different heroes. One of the reasons the story is told in such a fractured, non-linear way is that I feel you cannot tell this new story in an old way. If ordinary people are telling the story or are the main heroes of the story, the old chronology of American history is going to break down.

Let's talk some about that breakdown. Last Refuge is a work of historical fiction. How much fictional license did you take with the Founding Fathers? Did John Hancock really smash china to soothe his nerves?

Yes he did. I get this kind of question all the time. What I like to think this book does is force us to reassess what we call fact and what we call fiction. As a general rule, I find the weirder it is, the truer it is. The truth of the matter is that while I have fun with the emphasis I place on things like John Hancock smashing china—I don't have any evidence that he did this on a daily basis—I do know that this was a quirk of his personality that other Founding Fathers joked about. It is also true of John Adams. Contrast my perspective on John Adams with that of David McCullough.

Needless to say, we've made some progress because even David McCullough admits the heretofore suppressed detail that after the Boston Massacre, John Adams defended the British soldiers. This has given our historians lots of fodder for debate, but in this discussion none allow what I consider to be the truth. John Adams defended the British soldiers because it was a good thing to do for his reputation. John Adams showed up at the Stamp Act Riots, according to his own diary, not because he was an ardent patriot, but because it was good for his burgeoning reputation, an opportunity to hand out business cards. Defending the Brits would be a great boon to his business because he would be seen as fair-minded. By the way, he was chastised by his cousin, Samuel Adams, for this.

So while McCullough admits this slightly unsavory detail, he doesn't, in my opinion, go the distance. He reveres John Adams too much. I do think, however, that, while Adams was every bit as monarchical as Alexander Hamilton, he had his moments. He had some democratic sentiments coursing through his blood. But I did have enormous fun with the way John Adams was careless, dilettantish, insensitive, was a royalist, and an undemocratic Republican in the extreme. It's an important detail, not just a quirk of character, that John Adams in the first part of the war, even as he was railing for independence, was nursing fantasies of being an American king. That's an important contradiction. This is a man who was very conflicted through his entire career. Now to speak of this side of John Adams, are we trashing our noble Founding Fathers? I say, no, we are altering the terms of historical discussion and refusing to worship an inanimate object. Even John Adams writes that when they write of the American Revolution and they write of us, it will be one continued lie from beginning to end.

So we don't speak of John Adams's advocacy of the 1798 Sedition Act or his fears of taking away property qualifications for voting. We get a comforting mythology that ignores or hides contradictions. But what about the ordinary heroes of your book, the wonderful central characters, John Lawrence and Deborah Simpson? Will you talk some about how you shaped these characters from fact and fiction?

First off, in the past when ordinary folk are brought into the spotlight of the American Revolution we have seen these characters limited to soldiers who dutifully picked up a gun while the heroic damsel stays home and tends the farm. These common folk have never been accorded a voice that is antithetical to the prevailing mythology. That is to say, the common heroes are really just poorer versions of the gentlemen class. The cause is never questioned. The cause is always and only picking up arms against the Brits. That representation of common folk is a lie.

In fact, the lower classes spoke through a multitude of voices and that's what I tried to represent in the book. Yes, there were died-in- the-wool traditional patriots who wanted King George and his influence thrust from the colonies. That was a very small minority. Most white people looked to the war to free them of the burden of their farms being fenced in and gobbled up by the likes of John Hancock. There were women rioting in Boston in 1764 for a greater voice in their male-dominated households. There were young people that were discontent with the custom, inherited from England and etched into law, that said if you were a poor man and were walking down the street and a richer man approached, you were to step aside and let him pass, even if it meant stepping in the sewer sludge that ran along the sidewalk. On the whole, these and other voices amounted to a vital emancipatory movement. Freedom from Britain wasn't really the point. Freedom from a British way of life, which the Founding Fathers also embodied, was the point. And it was a class issue. Which was why the Yankee rebels were so “mean” to Washington when he met them in his lacquered carriage, so heroic, accepting no salary. The rabble did not see this war as something an aristocrat would be helpful in.

I think in 1770 Boston, roughly 1 percent of the property owners owned 44 percent of the wealth.

Right. At that time, Boston was a virtual Calcutta. There were so many poor people lying in the streets that the local sheriff would walk along with an ox-cart, pile up bodies, and throw them in jail. It was an ugly moment in our history. I think one can make a very good case that if the War for Independence had not happened, we would have had a civil war. The War for Independence diverted and co-opted this energy. Ray Raphael, in A People's History of the American Revolution (New Press), makes the case that the American Revolution actually begins in 1774 with rioting Berkshire tenant farmers closing the Worcester courts because they were sick to death of judges siding with the gentlemen farmers who were insisting that small farmers pay their debts. Given the hostile climate, the courts were shut down from 1774 to 1780. But guess what, in 1780 when the courts resumed, the problems started all over again. Then in 1787 you have Shay's Rebellion, certainly an expression of this discontent, but also only the tip of an iceberg.

This leads us to a different perspective on the Constitution. From the viewpoint of people's history, the Constitution can be seen as a document meant to control these rebellious elements.

You better believe it. Even our sacrosanct Declaration of Independence has a genesis that is not entirely idealistic. France, whose involvement we required, insisted that unless we declared our independence, they would not involve themselves in a civil war. Their monies and weaponry would only be available if we declared an independent nation. And the document is in many areas conservative. It leaves in slavery, of course, and all these poetic abstract phrases like “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” meant little or nothing. Issues of class, gender, and racial equality were not on the Founding Fathers radar.

Let me bring you back to John Lawrence and Deborah Simpson. The book gives us a motley amalgamation of riff-raff rebels, women, blacks, Native Americans, poor farmers, but John and Deborah are the most powerful embodiment of ordinary people being the real movers and shakers of the revolution. Tell us how these characters took shape for you.

To begin with Deborah, she is a composite of two, maybe three characters. I am not clever enough to devise her antics. All of her cloak-and-dagger work was derived from the real activities of Washington's spies. I did not invent any of the deeds, although, of course, Deborah was not involved in all of them. In the 1950s, there was a plethora of books about George Washington's spies. None of those books are currently in print, but I lifted Deborah's antics from those books.

That said, the real Deborah Simpson was a woman who may or may not have seen action at Yorktown, but was an enlisted soldier in the Continental Army. She was the first woman in our history to get a military pension for her service. She, like many women, disguised herself and fought as a male soldier. After the war, when the news got out that she was a woman, she was dishonorably discharged. But she never quit fighting for her pension. She was never seen dressed as a woman again. She paraded about in male soldier garb and traveled around, in a precursor to vaudeville, telling her story of the American Revolution. Eventually, some ten years after the war, and with some intervention by George Washington and Paul Revere, she was rewarded her pension. Through all this period she was married, but some historians insist she was a lesbian.

John Lawrence is actually less of a composite. I put him into the war a little earlier than the real John Laurens. But the character is based very much on fact. He is a man who was loyal to George Washington, became one of Washington's chief aides-de-camp, and after the war found reason to kill himself. John Laurens intrigued me because he represents a mystery. No one has figured out why it is that after the Continental victory at Yorktown, after becoming one of George Washington's chief aide-de-camps, why did John Laurens kill himself? What I intuit, based on his diaries, is that John Laurens was struggling with this tremendous gap between the rhetoric of independence and the actual realities of struggle and inequality.

He also took action in that regard. He appealed to his father, who was one of the Founding Fathers present at the Constitutional Convention, to free the family's slaves and allow them to fight as black soldiers. This exclusion of blacks and Native Americans bothered him to the extent that he freed his own slaves and led, in Rhode Island, black soldiers into battle. After Yorktown, he also tried to secure freedom for all slaves in the South in exchange for military service. But with the exception of Washington, who did support him in this, none of the Founding Fathers wanted anything to do with this idea. So after falling into ill repute, he returned to the fringes of the Continental Army in the swamps of Charleston, and in battle, rode directly into the British line of fire. So once again, there is license of emphasis, but not license of fact.

The book ends with a 1788 letter of Washington's that implies, even more than 200 years ago, we were veering away from our noble ideals. Following John Lawrence's death, it's a strong reminder of an American Revolution not yet realized.

That's exactly right. Beyond debunking the mythology of the Founding Fathers, we are seeking to reclaim them and our history with all the contradictions. In doing that I think we can see the nascent principles, ideals, and aspirations of a broader and more genuine American Revolution. Progressives and the left need cultural mythologies that support our views. These mythologies and that spirit are rooted in the people and that's what was turning the colonies upside down. So from my point view, and from the point of view of the book, any story that excludes this voice of the people is unpatriotic. And if we as a culture cannot hear and sustain the truth about these men we call the Founding Fathers, then we don't deserve to call ourselves a democracy.

You've just completed a book tour and Last Refuge has been out for awhile. How is this “new mythology” being received by the press, academics, and readers?

As a result of telling this story in a popular way, a couple of things happened. The academic community has been slow to pick up on the book and take it seriously because it isn't scholarship. On the other hand, because I'm presenting myself as a popular storyteller, I'm not marginalized in the world of academia. This makes the book, as someone from National Review described it on MSNBC, “dangerous entertainment.” That reaction wouldn't be there if I were writing for a group of historians. Check out Amazon.Com and you'll also find a very volatile and opposing reaction to the book. Also the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, the Boston Globe, and other influential members of the mainstream press have avoided reviewing the book. I think this is what happens when you go directly to the public with a story that confronts our founding myths.

On the road, however, on a 23-city tour, I have been met with unbridled enthusiasm. Everywhere, even in the South, people understand the implications of the book. Readers have the sense that this book is telling the truth and our conventional, official history is not telling the truth. I had one woman drive 100 miles to see me...she came up to me with tears in her eyes and said, “Thank you, young man, for writing this book, you have done us a great service.” I had a UPS guy show up at a signing and buy six copies. He said he was going to send three to Imus because he said, “He has to hear what you've got to say.” This kind of passion for the book was typical. I think its sold between 30,000 and 40,000, which is very good for this kind of book. The establishment press hasn't touched it, but it has received many positive reviews. Unfortunately most of these positive reviews pass over the politics of the book and dwell on the humor or describe the book as a “caper.” But the people I talk to get it and I think the momentum and visibility of Last Refuge is coming from word-of-mouth.

The politics of Last Refuge present a definite marketing problem. For all its entertainment value, it is a book that challenges us to bring another vision, another American Revolution into reality. It appeals to radical instincts.

Yes, and thank you. The relevance of this book is where the danger is. The fact that it can connect with people's lives is where the danger is.                            Z

Sandy Carter has been a regular contributor to Z since 1988.