Thank You Thomas Paine…and Goodbye: part 1

Sybil Ludington’s ride to rally her father’s militia

I’ll be teaching another Institute for Learning in Retirement class this fall: “Thank You Thomas Paine, and Goodbye.” I’m already feeling time pressure to complete the material. However, the material is relevant to Chapter 64, although out of order.

“The Means of Accomplishing” is my identification of the parts of society a fascist government must control to rule. I understood this need to control information long before the Seven Mountains Mandate (Invading Babylon, 2013) was released. I will return to “The Means of Accomplishing,” but after the ILR class.

To organize “Thank You…and Goodbye” I need full drafts and revisions of the material before I can reduce it to presentation slides. I’ll post these draft efforts here during the process. They will be crude. Material presented here may or may not be presented in the class. That’s the creation process. I hope the information and process will be interesting.

Thank You Thomas Paine, and Goodbye

Why Thomas Paine? Why goodbye? I was an under-motivated high school student. I took World History not American history in college. My exceedingly simplistic understanding of the American Revolution was exactly what the “1776 Report,” “Project 2025,” and “The Seven Mountains Mandate” want Americans to believe. How simplistic? The revolution is typically seen as a single event. It wasn’t.

I never thought about Thomas Paine until I started researching the Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment. Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) was an attack on the public’s demand for individual liberty.¹ This difference may seem subtle, but Burke accepted the Colonies’ war for independence while rejecting the French demand for individual liberty. Paine’s The Rights of Man (1791) was an Enlightenment response to Burke.

One book from 1900 does not explain Paine’s importance to the revolution. That understanding requires context: deeper knowledge about both the Colonial rebellion and the man. What political eddies were happening around Paine when he rallied yoeman support for rebellion? Right there, rebellion is where the comfortable story of the war falters. American Revolution. Revolutionary War. Constitution. They aren’t the same thing. Ken Burns’ documentary “The American Revolution” is beautiful: lovely pictures, helpful maps. It has more detail than fills our typical story. For all that, it is misleading.

The way it misleads matters; it matters a lot. Conservatism is based on the myth of social decay. For Burke society became perfect following the Norman conquest (1066). All of society’s problems, therefore, are the result of failing to enforce the traditions passed to us by our “forefathers.” Protecting that heritage requires controlling political thought and education: “The 1776 Report” excusing slavery and disenfranchising women and people of color because that is what the inspired founders thought right. Our understanding of the nation depends on who controls the history.

Controlling The Narrative

Listen, my children, and you shall hear

Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,

On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five:

Hardly a man is now alive

Who remembers that famous day and year.

He said to his friends, – “If the British march

By land or sea from the town to-night,

Hang a Lantern aloft in the belfry-arch

Of the North-Church-tower, as a signal-light

One if by land, and two is by sea;

On April 26, 1777 Sybil Ludington allegedly rode forty miles at night through a storm to rally the 400 soldiers in her father’s militia. That was nearly twice Paul Revere’s ride. It’s an interesting story. Although there is some confirmation of her ride and the 400 soldiers  did appear on time, the Daughters of the American Revolution do not acknowledge her ride. Sybil’s story emerged in the 1930s. The skepticism appeared in 1956, around the time of the second rise of feminism and corresponding hostility. New York State, however, posted markers of her ride, and the DAR chapter near her home support her story.

What should we make of this story? With a few exceptions the heroic women in the Revolutionary War are gender typical. Deborah Sampson disguised herself as a man and fought. Margaret Corbin and Mary Ludwig Hays took their husbands’ places at cannons (one battle each) after their husbands were injured. Several were spies, other were writers and advocates. The stories we tell of the heroes who won the war are masculine stories. Masculine stories have a legacy: if women didn’t (weren’t allowed to) fight, what right did they have to individual rights?

The simple story is that abuse by King George III forced the colonists to declare their independence. The simplest story is that acting as a whole the colonists rebelled. The nuanced version is that 15-20% were British loyalists, 35-45% were neutrals, and 35-45% were revolutionaries. These estimates of loyalists vary: higher in New York, Pennsylvania, and some Southern colonies. The comfortable story describes a unified movement that led a united people from subjugation to Constitutional freedom. There were three stages in the creation: the American Revolution in place by 1765, The Revolutionary War from 1775-to 1783, and ratifying the Constitution. Founding the new nation spanned more that twenty-two years with different leaders with different agenda at each stage. The most important consequence of that two decade span is to recognize that the Constitution ratified in 1788 was not even imagined when the war ended, let alone a justification for the rebellion. We know this because the Articles of Confederation governed the first government.

Understanding the establishment of the United States depends on separating the three periods. It depends on identifying which groups of people guided each stage. It depends on identifying when each group committed to the rebellion. It depends on identifying how the leaders in the different groups opposed, perhaps betrayed, each other.

That is the story for “Thank You Thomas Paine, And Goodbye.”

 1 See 2.3 The Invention of Modern Liberalism and Conservatism: part 3