American History Tellers - Revolution | Interview with Author Russell Shorto | 7
Episode Date: August 8, 2018We've come to the end of our series on the American Revolution, but we can't say goodbye without saying hello to Russell Shorto. Russell adapted his book, Revolution Song, for this series on ...American History Tellers.If you were wondering why we chose these six people, what freedom meant for each of them, and why the fight we began then may still be something we're dealing with today, then this episode is for you!Support us by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now.
Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers.
Our history, your story. Next week, we begin a new series on America's national parks.
These 85 million acres across 417 parks and reserves began 146 years years ago on March 1, 1872. That's when President Ulysses
S. Grant signed an act establishing Yellowstone as the nation's first national park.
But the story of these lands and the fights over them is a troubled one. America was still a young
nation and had only just come out of the dark days of the Civil War. It was a time of westward
expansion, industrial growth, and an appetite for commerce that endangered some of the world's most
beautiful landscapes and the animals and native populations that relied on them. But today,
we talk to Russell Shorto, author of the book Revolution Song, A Story of American Freedom.
Russell adapted his book for this American History Teller series.
And for the past six weeks, we've been exploring the period of the American Revolution
from the point of view of six individuals.
General George Washington, Lord George Germain, who ran the war for the British,
Seneca war chief and diplomat Corn Planter,
independent woman and memoirist Margaret Moncrief Coughlin,
freed slave Venturesmith, and populist politician
Abraham Yates. Each lived through the period of the Revolution, but saw it from very different
perspectives. Each of their stories is centered on the fight for freedom, but freedom from what
also differed? We'll talk to Russell about how he chose these six individuals to personify the
period, what freedom meant for each of them, and why the fight we began then might be something we are still fighting today.
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Russell Shorto, thank you for talking to me today about this series and your book.
Thank you very much, Lindsay. It was a lot of fun to work on the series
and nice to talk to you now.
Well, when I heard that we were going to be partnering
with you to do our series on the American Revolution,
which is perhaps the most well-covered portion
of American history ever,
I was excited because it seemed to me
that your book, Revolution Song,
was themed very much in the same way that we pursue topics here on American History Tellers.
So I was wondering if you could talk to me a little bit about what narrative history means to you
and how you chose the revolution and then these six lives individually to tell the story through.
Sure. I do indeed write narrative history,
which I define as narrative to me is storytelling.
And I believe very much that history,
going all the way back to the ancient Greeks,
is truly and ought to be telling stories about the past
so that we can understand it
and so that we can understand ourselves better.
So that's what I try to do.
And it is usually what moves me, motivates me as a writer,
is people in conflict and trying to identify their stories
and the struggle of the individual within the larger landscape of the times.
So when you're talking about the American Revolution,
I mean,
that's as big a landscape as you can get. And I came at it really out of my, really my background is in the 17th century, the century before the revolution, and that's the period of the Dutch Enlightenment, which spawned later the wider European and American
Enlightenment. And that was the moment of the birth of the concept of individual freedom and
how that, and the idea that that mattered to people. And that then over time, over the decades,
built until with the American Revolution, you had the leaders of the
revolution thinking, let's channel that force onto this political struggle of ours. So it wasn't
really just a political struggle. It was all kinds of individual struggles as well. So then I had this
idea, eventually, to write a book about the American Revolution.
And as you say, as you suggest, I was daunted by the zillions of books written about the topic. But my idea was, if you could write from individual perspectives and pick a group, a range of individuals from diverse backgrounds, and weave their stories together, then maybe you'd come up with a book
about the revolution that does not repeat others and that offers something fresh. So that's what
I try to do. So I looked this up just now. In 1776, the 13 American colonies consisted of about
two and a half million people, which is a lot, but really in modern times, extraordinarily small.
But still, out of 2.5 million people, you chose six. How did you choose these six?
And what did they mean to you? Yeah, and really, it wasn't even six out of two and a half million,
because one of them who I chose is a British figure, so he's not in that. And one is a Native American, which is probably
not included in that total either. I was attracted by the idea of picking people from diverse
backgrounds, including seeing it not just from an American perspective. We always still tend to get
the story of the war from an American perspective. And I wanted to include a British perspective, and I wanted to include a British perspective, and also I thought the Native American presence was important to personify. It was not a scientific method. It was roaming and
groping, and I wanted to pick people who, by definition, I wanted people from different
backgrounds. And that meant, in all likelihood, they would not be people who met up with each
other. And yet I wanted them to connect. I wanted them to cross paths because I really wanted to
write one narrative, one story. So that was a big challenge. Also, they had to be people whose lives
are well-documented because I write nonfiction. The book, Revolution Song, is nonfiction. And
in the series, what we do,
it's basically nonfiction, but then there are these little kind of Imagine You Are vignettes
in there. So that's a little different, but I wanted it all to be nonfiction. So I had to have
people whose lives are well-documented in addition. So slowly, over the course of about two years, who ran the war for England,
the Native American corn planter, slave Venture Smith, and a humble shoemaker who rises to play
important roles in the period.
Almost two years of auditioning characters brought you to these six, and you've written
an entire book on them. And
actually, their stories do intersect a bit, especially in—
Right. That's what I mean. I had to find people—I ultimately wanted to find people who
cross paths in some way or other, so that when you read the book, it really does read like one
narrative instead of, you know, five or six completely separate stories.
Right. In the podcast, a listener might be forgiven for not quite realizing that most
of these characters intersect with each other, especially at the nexus of George Washington.
So that leads me to wonder, how was the process of distilling your book into a podcast,
which is a much more condensed medium, what did you focus on and what did you leave out?
Yeah, it was actually quite a different experience of writing. I had the benefit of having researched
all of them when I sat down to write the podcast series, but I really had to come at it differently.
I did not want to. I couldn't rely on those connections between them so much
because someone might be listening to one.
And the way the series is constructed,
you don't want to assume that they are aware of previous events
and previous episodes.
So each one was really its own strand.
And I wanted to stress also in the podcast what that character represents. So,
with Margaret Moncrief Coughlin, I had more material in there, not just on her, but on
women at the time and women's issues at the time and what they were confronted with. So, I used her in the podcast more as a representative, although she
is very much not representative of women of the period, but as a way to get into the wider story
of women in the 18th century. Margaret is such a fascinating figure, and she wrote this memoir, which just the voice just leaps out of the page
at you. And following her and trying to track her as she, you know, she spends her early years as
part of the, in the colonies and in the middle of the fight of the war. And then she ends up
traveling to England and then eventually to Paris. And following her and tracking, she makes herself a mistress to prominent men. And
this is what I say in the series. This is her way of trying to have independence in a time when
women simply couldn't. Following these people who she attaches herself to, and then the different
life that she has with
each of them. And then she's got a child with this man, and then she's got a child with this man. And
so, she's just moving from one moment to the next, and from one grand party to the next.
And then she's dragging all these kids around, and then she's in a debtor's prison. I mean,
all the details of that life are so rich, and, you know, you could only skim the surface in
creating a, as you say, like a 40-minute episode. And corn planter, I really worked hard to
get, and I worked with the people at a place called Ganondagan, which is a Seneca
Indian museum in upstate New York. And they were really helpful. And I wanted to do, you know,
because that's really an alien culture. And yet I wanted to try to understand it, to get inside it.
And I mean, I was able to go into a longhouse, a Seneca longhouse. And when you're
standing in it, you suddenly get it. You say, this is a whole way of life. Everything makes
sense. Everything is around you, everything related to their civilization. In a book,
you have time to unpack that, to talk about how they would dry out an elk bladder and use that as a canteen when
they were going on their hikes. You know, those really small details. Similarly, Abraham Yates,
he was a shoemaker from Albany, New York. His mother was Dutch, his father was English,
and Albany was still Dutch going back to the previous century when the Dutch colony. And he grew up with Dutch literally as his mother tongue. And when he becomes apprenticed as a wonderful thing, because he makes his accounts when he's
writing out a bill to someone for repairing a pair of shoes or making a pair of shoes.
If it's a person who was also Dutch, he writes it in Dutch. He says,
een paar schoenen voor je kind, one pair of shoes for your child. And if it's to an Englishman, he'll say, you know, I resold your shoe and you owe me this much.
So that level of minutia, of course, you can't quite get at in the series.
With Margaret and Cornplanter and Venture Smith, we discuss alternative angles on American freedom. And you have often drawn a very strong line from the European and
British Enlightenment to the American Revolution and the concepts and precepts that grew it.
But then in our introduction just now, you mentioned that the Enlightenment goes back
even further than many of us realize into a Dutch Enlightenment.
So I was wondering if you could just take a moment and enlighten us on what you think the Enlightenment movement was,
where it came from, and how did it crystallize in the American Revolution is the place where people first began to kind of fulminate about
individuals and individual rights. The Dutch Republic was a unique place in that it was not,
it was a republic. It wasn't a monarchy at the time. And it, in the 1600s, the Dutch
provinces were fighting a war of independence against Spain, much like later
the American colonies would fight a war of independence against Great Britain. So there
were a lot of parallels there, and out of that period, the Dutch developed this real sense of
the individual and the primacy of the individual. And that in turn, I think, and I've written about it in another book, it comes out of the Dutch battles against water,
because of course it's the low country and they had to protect themselves and control the water.
And out of that came these strong individuals. And maybe the main exponent of the Dutch Enlightenment of the 1600s is the philosopher Spinoza, the Jewish-Dutch philosopher who was born and raised in Amsterdam at the height that the Dutch had developed at that time, and especially
this notion of the primacy of the individual. And right on the heels of Spinoza, as people start to
read his work, which was banned everywhere in Europe, they developed this notion that if the individual is so important,
then doesn't that mean that the only form of government that is legitimate is one in which
every individual has an equal say? Now, that was, you know, practically heresy at the time,
but that built, that idea built, so that over the next decades it builds, and then as the wider enlightenment spreads, this focus on individuals and individual freedom, the American leaders who have their, what was largely an economic struggle against England, seize on this idea.
And they relate it to the idea of taxes, you know, no taxation without
representation. So we as individuals are being held, as they said, we're being treated like
slaves because we aren't represented in Parliament. So that's, in a broad way, how they
took the ideas that had developed more than a century before and applied them to the American
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One of the things I found interesting in the earlier episodes, episode two,
was your description of the British plight under the same circumstances
of loss of rights of taxation of the burden of being an english subject as the americans but
they did not rise up in revolution they just accepted their lot and and with some grumbling
and moved on what was it in in the American character that changed their decisions?
Clearly, it's a very costly thing to start a war.
The taxes may not have been enough to justify that cost.
What happened?
You said in the American character.
I think that's an important part of it.
England, I mean, the English people, they had a very old society and an old system of government.
And it was, to some extent, functioning for them.
They were complaining by the 1760s and 1770s that the English Bill of Rights, which dated to 1689, had never fully applied.
But they were, for example, represented in parliament. So, with the Americans, you have a people who are all the way across the ocean, who have
really a sense of a much newer culture and a great deal more of a sense of freedom. You know, that pioneer instinct was
already a part of the American character. And you put that together with this notion that
this feeling, as Britain imposes the Stamp Act and what were called the coercive duties,
these economic constraints, that leads them to this
breaking point that the people in England never came to.
One of the curious facts of history that I did not know was, and learned through this
series, was George Washington's early military history, and especially did not know that his blunder at the Forks of the Ohio was a real
cause for the French and Indian War. Can you recap how the father of our country turned out to be
also the father of the prior military conflict? Yeah, you're right. That is a remarkable episode, and it's one of the
things that, you know, catapulted him to fame. And it's funny for me to be talking about it here.
I'm sitting in my home in Cumberland, Maryland, on Washington Street, which was the beginning
of that route that he led. He was the guide for General Braddock's army. They were, this was
the British army in the 1750s. They were going to march, they were going to clear a path through
the forest westward to what they called the Forks of the Ohio, the Ohio River at what is now
Pittsburgh, because that was, the English believed, the colony of Pennsylvania was theirs. The French
had been colonizing in the west, down the Mississippi River, but the French were moving
steadily east, and when they took and occupied and built a fort, Fort Duquesne, at the forks of the
Ohio, the English knew they had to do something. So, General Braddock leads an army, 2,000 men, the largest army ever gathered
in North America, marching from here, basically from my house, westward through the mountains
to clear a path and to kick the French out. that march was this episode where he is sent as a messenger of 35 French and Canadian soldiers, and he sees them kind of sleeping in a ravine at a place called Jumonville Glen, and he has 160 men with him.
And it's unknown exactly whether he gave the order to fire first.
This is one of those historical mysteries about who started it.
But at the end, he and his men basically massacred these Frenchmen.
And the French had been looking for an excuse to openly declare war on England.
And they found it.
Washington gave them the excuse.
Because of that, they declared war.
That was the beginning of what became known as the Seven Years War,
or in the American theater, the French and Indian War. So yeah, Washington caused it.
I wonder if you could briefly describe for us what your research process is, for you and for historians in general. What are the primary sources? What are the secondary sources? When do
you lean on one more than the other? In working on a book, well, yeah,
the primary sources are primary, I called that for a reason. That's what you really want to work with,
the actual letters, documents, diaries from the period. At the same time, you can't trust them.
I mean, you can't exclusively trust them. Just because someone wrote it in a letter in 1750 doesn't mean they were right. And you have to be as familiar as
possible with all of the history that's been written since that period. You have to know
what the current thinking is and what the last generation's thinking was so that you can sort of not naively create a kind of
19th century view, for example, of the American Revolution. So you have to kind of be on top of
the trends and what people have been saying. And, for example, maybe a letter from the 1750s was
thought to be false, but then maybe 10 years ago, somebody discovered a piece of evidence that found that, in fact, that person was right.
So, you know, you do this dance between the primary sources and the secondary sources.
Your book, Revolution Song, is described as making the compelling case that the American Revolution is still being fought
today. How do you mean that? What was the American Revolution about that it is still being fought
today? I think it was really a fight about individual freedom and making a home for
individual freedom. And in the book and in the series, we highlight individuals for that reason.
I focus on a woman and on a slave and on a man of the people, a regular shoemaker,
as well as George Washington, one of the elites, and to see how this plays out with them. And in certain respects,
this promise of freedom was remarkably fulfilled in the revolution and in the Constitution and in
the Bill of Rights. But obviously, with the case of a slave, that wouldn't be fulfilled for decades until the Civil War. And women's rights and then civil rights, you know, so that is what I mean by this.
It's still being fought, that fight over freedom and individual freedom
and making the United States truly a land of individual freedom.
That's still going on.
The American Revolution was by far the most requested period
of history for American history tellers to cover. It's understandable why. It is the quintessential
American story, and it's full of our heroes. We've talked a little bit about your trepidation
in approaching the subject, but I wonder why it was appealing to you at all.
I recall watching a YouTube video of one of your speaking engagements
that it never captivated you previously when you were studying history in school.
So why return to it?
Well, I've learned as you go on in your career, you learn something about yourself and the way you work.
And I tend to want to get at origins.
When I lived in New York, I ended up writing a book about the Dutch founding of New York, a book called The Island at the Center of the World, because I was trying to get at, you know, what makes New York tick?
What are its roots?
My first book was called Gospel Truth, and it was about the search for the historical Jesus.
And that was, I think, because I had been raised Catholic and sort of left it in my teens,
but still wanted to kind of get at what is the, you know, what are the, what can history and
science tell us about the historical Jesus? And I think similarly, you know, I wanted to get my, I wanted to immerse myself for four or five years in the period of the revolution and come to understand this era in which the country was formed and this idea of building a country around individual freedom.
That is, and I think this is kind of the interesting contradiction.
It's a country built on the notion of the primacy of individual rights and freedoms,
but it still wants to be a country, which means a society, which means you have to relinquish some
portion of your individual rights and freedoms to the society so that you can function together.
So I wanted to see that for myself and immerse myself in it and do it by focusing on
a cross-section of individuals. I think probably the pursuit of origins is familiar to us,
almost any of us who are curious about the world. How did this happen? Why?
It's a basic question. But I was wondering why, in your opinion, the historical origins of our
society or our politics, why they remain important. We could just barrel forward. Bill of Rights? Or how much do we interpret it? Or how much do we, to what extent do we say,
you know, that was, that's antique, that's old hat. We have to, we're different people now. We've
got, we're different people now. This is a world of, you know, it's a digital world and it's a
world that they couldn't have comprehended then. So, I mean, I think all of us in our various ways have to wrestle with that.
And you see that sort of from the left wing and right wing approaches to the Constitution,
for example. The one wants to stay literally with the letter of the Constitution and the other
wants to interpret it more to modern times.
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So your book has been out about a year and the American History Teller series is over.
What are you doing next? What are you doing now?
Yeah, I'm working on a book now, which I actually started before the book on the revolution,
which is history, but it's more personal than my other books. It's a book about my grandfather
and my hometown. My grandfather and his brother-in-law ran the mafia in my hometown in sort of the 1950s and 1960s.
And I'm named after him.
His name originally was Shorto, S-C-I-O-T-T-O.
And then they Americanized it to Shorto. So it's a book in which I'm searching for my namesake
and looking at the small-town mafia in Middle America at the time, in the middle of the 20th century.
Oh, that's fascinating. I look forward to reading it.
A small bit of personal coincidence, my grandfather was also a bit of a charlatan.
But you're not going to tell me that Graham was originally Italian.
Oh, no, no. He was very English. But my name
should not be Graham. It was actually Clayton. My grandfather changed it,
probably running away from a certain past. Ah, okay.
Speaking of Englishmen, one viewpoint of the American Revolution that is never given to
Americans in grade school is the British perspective, and I really valued that you included
it, because certainly there was a bunch, a lot of suffering and turmoil in that island and in
those houses of parliament over the revolution. Can you talk to us a little bit about the British
viewpoint of the war and how the different factions might have aligned?
Yeah, as you say, I think we really don't get the British perspective. And we have,
a lot of histories are written giving us this notion that Britain was this aristocratic empire
that wanted to, you know, bring the Americans into, you know, bend the Americans to its will. There was that aspect.
And in writing about George Germain, I mean, he was so wonderful to write. In a way, he was
my favorite of these six to write about because he's such a natural bad guy. You know, he's just,
he's this embodiment of feudalism and of empire. And, you know, he had this aristocratic background and
he was overbearing and he was arrogant and aggressive. But he represents one side of
what was going on in England. At the same time, you know, it was the English who were among the
inventors of these Enlightenment ideas in the 18th century.
And even before that, John Locke, for example, is one of the progenitors of the English Enlightenment,
these ideas about the primacy of the individual.
And so a lot of people in England, including the Whig members of Parliament,
were looking at the Americans and getting these
newspaper reports about them, you know, their declaration of independence and what it was
founded on. And they're saying, wait a second, these are our ideas. They're now using them
against us. And then they were saying, well, actually, they've got a point. We are taxing
without allowing them representation. We are violating these basic rights of theirs.
So there was a large contingent within England and within the British system of government
that was essentially on the side of the Americans. And I think that's a really interesting
part, which in the book and to some extent in the episode on Germain, I tried to get that across so
that you can feel that tension that was going
on in England over not just the war, but over these issues of rights.
And on the other side of the Atlantic, one of our most familiar figures, George Washington,
he is included in your book, but you included him because perhaps you were more fascinated
with him than you imagined.
You know, he was the last of these six people I chose, believe it or not.
He's the most famous figure from the period, probably the most famous American of all time.
And maybe because of that, I just didn't see it.
It just never really crossed my mind.
And I'll tell you how long ago I started working on this project.
I thought originally I would probably have one founding father figure represented. really crossed my mind. And I'll tell you how long ago I started working on this project.
I thought originally I would probably have one founding father figure represented. And I remember for a while I was going to make it Hamilton, thinking at the time,
Hamilton doesn't get enough attention. So it was before the whole Hamilton extravaganza.
But eventually I settled on Washington. And, you know, he is kind of famously
enigmatic. He's hard to read. He has, in all these descriptions, he's got this kind of,
he's this poker face, this frosty reserve. So I was kind of like, okay, I think I'll pick
Washington, but I don't know how I'm going to feel about this. But I found him really intriguing. The more I got into the primary documents, especially his letters, and, you know, the
internet being this marvel that it is, everywhere I was when I was working on the book, if I
was on an airplane, if I was at, you know, wherever I was, you can just pull up his letters
from that month or that year and pour through them.
And as you do,
you begin to feel you get this guy. You know, I really kind of felt that I got him. And to me,
the key to his personality was in his childhood, the formative event when he's 11 years old,
his father dies. And his parents were opposites. His father was this really ambitious member of the minor
gentry in Virginia who had all these dreams, and he wanted to, you know, prosper and move up in
society. And his mother was kind of a backcountry, illiterate woman. And so, when his father dies,
suddenly he's got to be with his mother on the farm helping to take care of his younger siblings
all of his dreams about going to england to be educated and be a gentleman are dashed but what
he does then is decide that he is going to invent a persona of a gentleman for himself so he really
you see him taking up like a manual of etiquette, learning how to behave like a gentleman,
finding a fencing instructor, learning how to fence. So he like creates this persona for himself.
And you can see this kid doing that. And then as he moves through each phase of his life,
when he was appointed commander of the Continental Army, he'd never been a general,
but he reads books. He literally read books on how to run an
army. And then, of course, when he's named president, nobody had been president before,
so he has to invent this whole other thing. So it was, I think, this really interesting and very
appropriate personality for the first American for this new country that he had to continually invent himself.
Well, Russell, thank you so much for talking to me today.
Thank you, Lindsay. It's been fun.
Russell Shorto is the author of Revolution Song, a story of American freedom.
We based this six-part series on the American Revolution on that book,
available now online and in bookstores.
Russell is also the author of Amsterdam, a history of the world's most liberal city,
and The Island at the Center of the World, the epic story of Dutch Manhattan
and the founding colony that shaped America.
He spoke with me today by phone from his home in Maryland.
Please tune in next week as we begin our newest series on American history tellers,
National Parks.
Yosemite Valley is an unreal and staggeringly beautiful place.
Granite cliffs speckled with snow disappear into the clouds.
Pine trees blanket the valley floor.
Off in the distance, a rainbow appears in the mist, rising off of a waterfall, pouring onto rocks a thousand feet below.
For the Awanichi tribe, it's home.
For naturalists and outdoorsmen, it's paradise.
But for James Hutchings, it's business.
If you like American History Tellers,
you can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now
by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.
Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music.
And before
you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey.
American History Tellers is hosted, sound designed, and edited by me,
Lindsey Graham for Airship. Produced by Jenny Lauer and George Lavender.
Our executive producer is Marshall Louis, created by Hernan Lopez for Wondery.
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