A New Revisionist History of "America 250" Pt. 1

A Departure from the Dogma of the Left and the Right

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Michael Hoffman

A New Revisionist History of “America 250”

Part One

“Who wants to compute the speed of history? Like all falling bodies, it constantly accelerates.” Wallace Stegner

Conservatives tend to deify the Founders of our nation while Liberals often demonize them. This writer’s view is informed by a Biblical understanding of the depravity of human nature, which brooks no trust in man. All human beings are subject to moral degeneration; to perfidy and breach of trust. Our human nature is inherently vulnerable to idolatry, as our contemporary cult of celebrity indicates. A popular television series with millions of weekly viewers is actually titled, “American Idol.”

We do however, need exemplars when they deserve that laurel. George Washington was a good man who infrequently committed terrible wrongs, including the enslavement of 300 black human beings, and avaricious land speculation.

Among the most egregious of his transgressions was the war he launched on his own people during the farmers’ insurrection in Pennsylvania which has been much glossed over or explained away by authors and professors who have little or no sympathy with the rural white proletariat.

There are of course many actions in Washington’s favor. Judged by the standards of the day, he was more moderate in his dealings with Native Americans than many of his fellow patriots.

Moreover, he was not at Valley Forge to purchase tracts of land or speculate in real estate. He did not risk his life in battle—or at the end of a hangman’s rope in London—for pecuniary motives.

During the Revolution his audacious leadership, outstanding example and virile character, along with those of other Founders, carried our nation through a time of extraordinarily arduous testing, all the way to a victory of unprecedented proportions. For this titanic achievement gratitude is certainly due.

What we do not owe President Washington is blindness to the decay of his rectitude eleven years after the conclusion of the War of Independence; that decay being one of the oldest stories in the history of human nature. “Be on guard for yourselves and for all the flock of which the Holy Spirit has appointed you…savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock. Men will rise up even from your own number and distort the truth…Therefore be on the alert…” (Acts 20: 28-31; italics added).

The Whiskey Insurrection

In the 1790s, shortly after the birth of our nation, thousands of American farmers on the Pennsylvania frontier, many of them Revolutionary War veterans, rose to defend yet again the principles of the Revolution—sovereignty and equal rights before the law, including the rights of the wealth-creating farmers and workers (popularly termed “mechanics”), as opposed to the self-endowed privileges of lawyers, bankers and bureaucrats who produced no wealth other than the parasitic kind, though some furnished necessary services by which labor, in theory anyway, would be protected. The new republic’s wealth was primarily in natural resources—the soil and timber.

The defense of newly won liberties took the form of the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania during which Washington and his Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, behaved tyrannically.

In 1794 the farmers insisted on a radical reaffirmation of the principles of the American Revolution, which they believed did not end with the military victory over the forces of King George III in 1783. By their dedication they numbered themselves as worthy heirs to the Founders who were pledged to destroy plutocracy and class distinctions.

“In Gordon S. Wood’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, published in 1992, he wrote that the colonists were not rebelling just against ‘taxation without representation’ and other…injustices imposed on them from across the Atlantic. Whether they knew it or not, they were also rising up against an age-old worldview in which common people were forever divided from those of noble birth.

“Professor Wood argued that, ironically, the colonists wanted to cut ties with Britain not because they were so different from the English but, in part, because they were so much like them. ‘Liberty, insubordination and unwillingness to truckle to any authority were what distinguished Englishmen from Frenchmen and all the other enslaved and deprived peoples of the world,’ Professor Wood wrote. ‘The English were habitually defiant of authority, and no one at the top of any of the English-speaking world’s many hierarchies ever felt as secure as he would have liked.’

“…For Professor Wood, the men who wrote and signed the Declaration and the Constitution, and those who took the reins of the fledgling government, were towering figures: ‘No generation in American history has ever been so self-conscious about the moral and social values necessary for public leadership.” —David Stout

While I don’t wish to venture too far into the weeds, I believe it will be edifying to furnish an example of what Wood described as the English people’s “unwillingness to truckle.” There are many instances—from the barons and churchmen who put forth Magna Carta to John Lilburne’s stand for the right to remain silent, which inspired the Fifth Amendment to our Bill of Rights. Rajiv Menon recounts an example close to my own heart: the English people’s stalwart struggle for what has come to be known as the right of jury nullification:

“…it was as long ago as 1670 that the independence of the jury was definitively established beyond question. William Penn and William Meade were Quakers. They were prosecuted for preaching to an unlawful assembly. It was a crime in 1670…to have a religious assembly of more than five people outside the auspices of the Church of England. William Penn and William Meade had preached to a group of more than five people on the streets of London. They stood trial at the Old Bailey before a judge and jury, and at the end of the evidence, the judge directed the jury to convict, but the jury refused.

“The judge was furious, and again ordered the jury to convict, stating that they would not be dismissed until they did so. The jury again refused to convict. The judge remanded the entire jury in custody for two days and ordered that they be denied all food and water. As the jurors were being taken from court to prison, William Penn, it is said, shouted out, ‘You are Englishmen, mind your privilege, give not away your right, ‘to which one member of the jury, Edward Bushel, replied, “Nor shall we ever do.’ When the jury returned to court two days later, having not had any food or water for that period, the judge again ordered them to convict. The jury continued to refuse and returned a verdict of not guilty.

“The judge fined the jury for contempt of court and remanded them in custody until the fines were paid. Eight jurors paid their fines, but four refused, and one of those was Edward Bushel, who then petitioned a higher court for the writ of habeas corpus, which, if issued, would result in his immediate release from custody. The higher court issued the writ and Bushel and the three others were released, establishing the right of a jury to return a verdict without fear of punishment from the trial judge.

“This legal challenge by Edward Bushel has come to be known as Bushel’s case and is one of the most celebrated in British legal history. There’s a marble plaque inside the Old Bailey in central London, which reads as follows:

“Near this site, William Penn and William Meade were tried in 1670 for preaching to an unlawful assembly in Grace Church Street. This tablet commemorates the courage and endurance of the jury, Thomas Veer, Edward Bushel, and 10 others who refused to give a verdict against them, although locked up without food for two nights and were fined for their final verdict of not guilty. The case of these jurymen was reviewed on a writ of habeas corpus, and Chief Justice Vaughan delivered the opinion of the court, which established the right of juries to give their verdict according to their convictions.” This is the English people’s contribution to our American heritage.

The farmers of western Pennsylvania were majority lowland Scots and Scots-Irish, nonetheless they saw in the 1776 revolution—which they fought alongside their English-American brethren—a cause worthy of reviving in their time, for their posterity. They believed initially that it would only be a matter of reminding Washington, their revered military commander, of ideals he had forgotten.

Farming, not banking or the lawyer’s craft, was the economic lifeblood among the yeomanry of western Pennsylvania in the last decade of the eighteenth century. On the frontier currency was as rare as hen’s teeth. Money in that time and place took the form of whiskey. Trading their prized “Monongahela Rye” for livestock, wagons, tools, iron, lumber and dry goods, among other necessities of life, was the difference between a farmer-patriarch surviving on the family farm or becoming a landless wage slave. For these sons of toil, the land was their source of wealth, rather than trapping cash in a usury bank or accumulating vast tracts of real estate for speculative purposes.

President Washington and his Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton

President Washington chose Alexander Hamilton as America’s first Secretary of the Treasury. To keep the yeomen in line Hamilton devised a taxing system that favored large distillers over small ones, and land monopolies structured so developers could market large swaths of a frontier which musket-toting American farmers were making safe from the American Indian massacres which were being funded and incited by the British Crown. (These ended with the decisive victory of Major General Anthony Wayne’s regulars [known as ‘the Legion’] and allied Kentucky militia, over Native warriors at the Battle of Fallen Timbers near present-day Toledo, Ohio.

Aspiring land owners among the poor, rural, frontier tenant farmers and laborers who could only afford small parcels of acreage, were being deliberately priced out of the market.

Right wing histories of the early American Republic skate over these facts, when they are mentioned at all. The war of rich whites against their poor Christian kinsmen is rarely noted.

Contempt of the American ruling class in the 1790s for the impecunious whites engaged in the back-breaking tasks of pioneer settlement