...And then the wheels came off completely.

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Poet's Coroner

Mr. Peperium

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It’s an occupational hazard of biographers. Either they fall out of sympathy with their subject or, more commonly, they become abjectly enthralled. Some years ago Geoffrey Perrett made the second mistake in his study of Ulysses Grant, claiming not that Grant ranked as one of the most outstanding persons of the 19^th Century, but as that century’s single most outstanding person.

By the last fifty-odd pages of War on the Run, Ross falls into a similar error. It is 1776. Robert Rogers has failed to be reimbursed for his expenses during the late war with the French and Indians—largely through the perfidy of jealous superiors and his own bungled bookkeeping. His plans to discover the Northwest Passage have run aground—first for lack of funds (those jealous superiors again), then from lack of interest as the colonies step every closer to independence. His marriage is over. He has been jailed for debt more than once. In the meantime, Rogers has evaded attempts by Patriots and Loyalists to pin him down on exactly where he stands. Of course, just being a half-pay British officer footloose in America would be bad enough. Applying to the royal governor of New York about land grants as that gentleman conducted business from the safety of one of His Majesty’s warships in New York harbor was even more misguided.

Now Rogers has been hauled in on suspicion of espionage. As he strides into the room where General George Washington awaits him, Ross is on the sidelines giving his play-by-play…long before the action has even started.

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The seeds of mutual distrust lay deep: the coastal elites had never accepted the ever prickly Scots-Irishman, often changing the rules and laws right under Rogers’s feet. Washington was involved in a revolution largely controlled by people of his own background, who justified their assertion of leadership by producing Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Patrick Henry; their class would have come far short of filling an urban high school auditorium. To him the nascent democratic populism that would evolve fully flowered with Andrew Jackson and rail against the self-satisfied landed class was deeply unsettling. Washington, who had a great deal to lose to the rabble of the frontier, adopted, for reasons similar to those of the British officer class, a deep disdain for the unheeled immigrants who did not dream of playing by his rules and hacked out a hard livelihood on the colonies’ brutal fringes. Rogers, by contrast, embodied frontier talent and insight and was less dissmissable and much more frightening than mere muscled axe-wielding oafishness; so far from being one more face in the rabble crowd, he was a man capable of weaving unconstructive frontier individualism into formidable formations, a chilly portent to the saltwater quality who thought that it monopolized higher authority and powers of government.

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Ok, let’s all take a breath.

Better?

Good. Now we can proceed. First, I always get suspicious when encountering a slab of analysis this dense with no visible signs of documentation. Where are the quotes from letters and diary entries supporting these statements? There is too much projection going on here, too much seeing what the author wants to see.

How do we know George Washington feared the rabble? I know he looked down on New England soldiers early on in the war, but the embarrassment of having those sentiments accidentally made public, coupled with witnessing New England grit in the field, cured him (heck, his right hand man throughout the war was Nathanial Greene, son of a solid Yankee ironmonger). The populist tide of Jacksonian Democracy—indeed the tide of democracy in any form—was hardly discernable to the men who, eleven years hence, would meet to draft the Constitution. And besides, any segment of society that can produce a Washington, a Jefferson, a Madison and a Henry (not to mention an Adams and a Hamilton) all in about the same generation have a pretty solid claim to a place at the table of power. At this point in the story (page 431), Rogers’s misfortunes have overcome not just Rogers but Ross, and the biographer can’t help seeing the encounter with Washington as just one more raw deal foisted on a noble if unpolished paragon of the American interior.

If Washington feared Rogers, it wasn’t as a harbinger of future Jacksonian Mobocracy, but as a gifted partisan leader whose talents could do the Patriot cause untold damage then and there, on the battlefield as well as in the press and public opinion. His bold exploits had, after all, helped prop up sagging British moral—and excited sheer terror among the French and Indians—in the long years of Anglo-Colonial defeat before 1759.

To deepen the supposed divide between Washington and Rogers, Ross quotes Andrew Johnson, who called the Commander in Chief an “old English gentleman” (achi-machi, who made Andrew Johnson an authority on colonial history?) But actually, Washington and Rogers had far more in common than Ross admits. Like Rogers, Washington’s formal education was painfully slender, a fact that made him uneasy all his life, especially when around the Jeffersons, Madisons and Adamses of the world. Yes, his comment about the charm of bullets whistling, that Ross makes such fun of in another passage, is a sterling example of the nonchalance and bravado that tidewater gentlemen affected. But it was also an honest expression of Washington’s proven physical courage, courage demonstrated on more than one battlefield before and during the Revolution—and another kinship with the legendary ranger. Both men could have swapped stories about perilous wilderness treks. Like Rogers, Washington was keen to develop the potential of America’s rivers and woodlands. And, like Rogers, Washington wanted to do that without undue damage to Indian culture.

The squire of Mount Vernon was a landed proprietor, true, but quite by accident. Had his half-brother lived, George would have been thrown much more upon his own devices—devices that he had been using to excellent effect for years. Unlike Rogers, Washington took care that his exploits were widely known through the medium of his own writings—soon after those exploits were concluded, not years after the peace was signed. Unlike Rogers, Washington translated his wartime fame into a most advantageous match. And unlike Rogers, Washington kept scrupulous accounts of all his expenditures—hence avoiding debtor’s prison.

I could go on, but you get the idea. Ross is the executive editor of American Heritage magazine. I miss Bruce Catton.

 

 

Comments

[Crackie]

The ink spilled by Mr. Ross in the tedious passage you have quoted reminded me of the ink referenced by Orwell:
"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink."—George Orwell

[Old Dominion Tory]

Gobsmacked. Just utterly gobsmacked. Such overreaching. Such wretched analysis.
Has Mr. Ross ever heard of something called the New England town meeting? Does he have a grasp of the nature of much of the debate regarding the Constitution's ratification? Has he ever spent time reading Mercy Otis Warren?
The fact of the matter is that, in so many ways, American political culture already was strongly democratic before the Revolution. The wartime constitutions of many states were quite democratic in nature, and, as the moving of many state capitals from Tidewater to the Fall Line (e.g., in Virginia and New York) demonstrated, there already was competition between "the saltwater quality" (and what an odd term) and inland citizens.
Ross is selective about who he mentions as the embodiment of the men who led the Revolution--i.e., "Washington, Madison, Jefferson, and Patrick Henry (of that last choice, I'll say more below). He has to be, of course, because, if he cast his net wider, he would have had to run the ol' blue pencil through that meandering bit of "analysis."

Alexander Hamilton, for example, was, as Adams so famously put it, "the bastard son of a Scotch pedlar." His rise to high station was due to his brilliance, his hard work, and, yes, his charm. Since he grew up in Braintree, John Adams *might* be termed "saltwater quality," but "saltwater farm quality" would be closer to the mark. Put another way, Adams came from a prominent family, but he was no grandee.
Declaring Patrick Henry some sort of Tidewater aristocrat is laughable on its face. First, he knew something about immigrants, as his father had emirgrated from Scotland. He was born in Hanover County (about five miles from Richmond) and was elected to the House of Burgesses from Louisa County, which borders Jefferson's Albemarle. Later, he lived in the area now known as "The Southside," and he was heavily invested and deeply interested in western lands.
Politically, Henry was an ardent opponent of the Established Church and, later, a fiery critic of the Constitution--on the grounds that it was too aristocratic and the Presidency could evolve into a monarchical institution.
It's enough to make you question the entire book--not just this strained bit of writing.

[Robbo]

Well done, Mr. P.

I'm reminded of the fact that the surrender document Washington signed at Ft. Necessity in 1754 included an admission that Washington had murdered Jumonville during his May attack on that French scout and his party. Washington signed the document even though it was in French and he didn't speak or read the language. I understand this caused him a considerable amount of embarrassment later on.

And if it's a case of Washington and his fellow landed toffs vs. the many-headed, what price Alexander Hamilton? Maybe not a frontiersman, but certainly a self-made Scot.

Fortunately, I'm sure that like me, when you feel Catton withdrawal, you are able to reach across to your permanent collection to get a fix.

[MCNS]

I will defer to you gentlemen on the fine points of historical analysis here. But I do like "saltwater quality"! And "mere muscled axe-wielding oafishness," ain't bad, either.

[Old Dominion Tory]

Irish Elk: In this context, in the service of making a howler of a point, both phrases come off as just plain overwrought. Where the heck was his editor?

[Mr. P]

This is where I wish we all lived within what a friend of mine used to call "weaving distance". What he meant was that you needed to live close enough to your friends so you could enjoy an evening of talking about things like this and drinking and then you could just tack gently from left and right and eventually find your front door.

Insincerity really is, I think, at the root of this effusion. Ross was just phoning it in, trying to make much of little. By this time in the story Rogers is a man whose time has come and gone--and no amount of verbiage about his thinking "continentally" and "imperially" (his Northwest Passage gambit) hides the fact that he was looking for the big score--as were other Founders, but just with land deals closer to home.

Great point about the New England town meeting. I was thinking about that in context of the "Jacksonian Democracy" comment--mine as well as Ross's. Because in reality the founders even in 1776 were shy of the people in the raw, in unadulterated democratic form. Not as much as later, when the high hopes and spirit of sacrifice that suffused the year 1776 degenerated into the profit taking hoarding of 1778. Indeed, Washington did look down on the lesser sorts, though the war certainly taught him to respect their mettle. And Henry was an odd addition to the usual roster of top Founders.

As far as painting Washington as the established, lofty aristocrat, read John Ferling's Setting the World Ablaze, his comparative study of Washington, Jefferson and Adams--all men, according to Ferling (and I agree) who felt as condescended to by London as Rogers felt condescended to by Philadelphia and New York, and whose appetite for rebellion was fueled, deep down and essentially, by their desire to distinguish themselves--and the gnawing realization that that was impossible if the remained mere "colonials".

Hamilton, yes, Hamilton. He comes up from nothing and ends up branded as an elitist. He fights for eight years against the British and is accused of being a Monarchist (yeah, I know, that one was largely his fault--he thought he could actually speak his mind candidly in what he saw as a brain-storming session). But he certainly was one of the "saltwater taffy" or whatever Ross calls him--yet he traveled farther up the social scale that Rogers ever dreamed.

There is so much more; you all brought up great facets of the subject. This is why I haven't really been able to leave this era in my reading for going on seven years now. Though I did just start Christopher Hibbert's Cavaliers and Roundheads--and what do I find? Parliament and the King locking horns over taxes.

[Old Dominion Tory]

There's a new book on the English Civil War that a historian friend of mine recommends, "The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I" by John Adamson. Published in 2009, it received rave reviews in the UK.

[Old Dominion Tory]

As to Ross, it seems that, in the end, he couldn't bear to leave Rogers as he truly was: as a talented soldier, whose better days were well past him and whose choices and personality consigned him to the sidelines of this great new conflict and the greater story, that of the United States, that was about to open.
So, he had to make him something Important. So, he tried to transform him into a proto-Jacksonian figure, the herald of the Democracy that would topple the Aristocracy, the harbinger of What Was to Come.
In the end, he failed in that task, and, in doing so, brought his entire book and his status as a historian into question.