Tom Shakely

Sons of the American Revolution

  • Honoring the Founders

    Honoring the Founders

    In light of George Washington’s church in Alexandria deciding to remove the plaque honoring him from their pews, and generally opting to displace mention of Washington from their physical history, Brendan Michael Doughtery writes that the next logical social justice cause in America will likely be the social taboo-ification and prohibition on honoring the Founders in public life:

    The desire to see white supremacy toppled in the present will motivate anti-racists to expose its influence throughout American history. And the fact that the Founders gave America its long-lived institutions — its Constitution, its presidency, its courts — will no longer be seen as a reason to retain their monuments, but as the primary reason for tearing them down. …

    Political battle creates archetypal heroes and villains. And once the villainy of the latter is established, why shouldn’t they lose even more ground? …

    Right now, most liberals cannot quite envision the toppling of the Jefferson Memorial on account of Jefferson’s white-supremacist views. It seems so unthinkable that they genuinely don’t allow themselves to contemplate it, much less desire it.

    Generations of mass immigration all but guarantee that the future of our politics will almost certainly be more and more focused on achieving the equitable distribution of economic, institutional, and honorific resources in an ever-more-racially-diverse society, thereby ensuring social peace. Because I believe that human nature cannot be perfected, and that human ambition is very difficult to restrain, I doubt any government or society is capable of creating a distribution of resources that is fair and disinterested and perceived by everyone as such. Yet it is precisely this need to create harmony in an increasingly diverse society that prompted Christ Church to ditch George Washington. They explained in their statement that the plaques “create a distraction in our worship space and may create an obstacle to our identity as a welcoming church and an impediment to our growth and to full community with our neighbors.”

    And so, if white supremacy will be named as the perennial problem of American life going forward, the Founders must eventually fall. …

    Previously, civil-rights activists such as King reconciled white America’s devotion to the nation’s founding and their own ambition to living as equals under the law by casting the Declaration and other artifacts of the Founding as a “promissory note” whose liberties need to be justly extended to all human beings in America. And many today say that we can honor the Founders because, unlike the the Confederates, the principles they enshrined in our Founding documents could be used against the injustice of slavery and white supremacy.

    It is my contention that this way of honoring the Founders will soon begin to seem dishonest to liberals. It will be seen as a concession to a recalcitrant prejudice and a political reality that is rapidly disappearing, the same way civil unions for same-sex couples are now seen.

    It is easy to imagine a writer who grew up reading Ta-Nehisi Coates on “the First White President” looking back at Bouie’s assertion that we have statues to Jefferson on account of his authorship of the Declaration of Independence with a jaundiced eye. That future man of letters will observe that the Declaration’s invocations of liberty and its pretensions of universalism were merely Whig propaganda against a King. He will assert that Jefferson did not actually believe that all men were so endowed by their creator. He will hasten to add that as America achieved the political sovereignty, Jefferson became more convinced of white supremacy, more secure in the view that white liberty could be guaranteed only through black bondage. Many reading this argument will conclude that by raising statues to Jefferson we are crediting him only for his hypocrisy, a privilege only white racists and slavers get in America. They will conclude, in other words, that America has spent centuries sanctifying its foundational hypocrisy. …

    Forget the promissory note, they may say — only right-wingers talk about that any more. We ran away from Washington in the 1770s, and we’ve been running from him and what he created ever since. Everything that has been good for racial peace in this country has involved running away from the Founders. …

    Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps the great themes of American politics will change before that can happen. Perhaps China or some other power will emerge as an empire that threatens our subjugation, and the Founders’ desire for sovereignty, independence, and republicanism will seem relevant and ennobling of American life again. Perhaps unforeseen changes to society and technology will so atomize us that racial divides in politics no longer exist on account of factional cohesion itself becoming impossible.

    But I doubt it. The pieces on the board are where they are, and the logic of the game requires that some of them will fall, even if the players cannot yet anticipate it. All that is required is for the game to continue on its current course.

    When the founders of a nation cannot be honored, the nation’s founding principles—namely, in our case, the constitution—seem likely to be at risk.

    I’m proud to be a life member of the Sons of the American Revolution, proud of my French/German ancestors who fought in the War, and I’m proud of Washington. George Washington should never have been “sanctified,” but he and the founders deserve their place of honor. Washington’s wartime fortitude and foresight as president continue to be models of civic leadership.

    Neither justify his sins. That sort of injustice, and the sins of all human beings, corrode us and make us less than we were meant to be—and we are answerable to God for our sins, and I have no doubt Washington will answer to God for his.

    Neither sainthood, nor absolution, can be granted in the secular square. Good citizenship requires being humble enough to recognize that we will soon enough join the figures of the past that we sanctify and vilify today, and so should be careful about what we say and do in the present.

    We have our constitution. We have our rule of law, free from kings. We have long attempted to govern ourselves by faith and reason, and in doing so we contribute to the health of a society that can be a fitting home to a free people.

    For these reasons, I’ll honor Washington, the founders, and the great men and women of our pluralistic country’s past.

  • • •

    Visiting the Museum of the American Revolution

    Visiting the Museum of the American Revolution

    I visited the Museum of the American Revolution in Old City, Philadelphia on Sunday afternoon for the first time. I’ve been looking forward to the Museum opening since news first broke a few years ago that it was coming. The way that the Museum has transformed what was a dead part of Old City (3rd and Chestnut) into an attractive, civically meaningful space is worth celebrating.

    It was $19 for a ticket, and the entire space feels both traditional and modern, honoring the stories of the American Revolution in an uplifting way.

    That was my impression from the visit: the Museum really tells the stories (plural) of the American Revolution as much as it communicates the meta-narrative of the revolution as a political and world-historical act. This was impressive, and I’m pleased in particular with the way that the story of the Oneida Indians is told, as well as littler moments like the incursion into Quebec and attempt to broaden the war there, along with the stories of prominent women and blacks in the war.

    A disappointment was what felt like a propagandistic treatment of the idea of “liberty” in the American Revolution, one that spoke of liberty in the sense that it is ever expanding and implicitly destined for America to expand around the globe. The sense of the American Revolution as an essentially conservative resolution, and indeed one of the only successful conservative revolutions in history, was not meaningfully communicated. There were some initial panels on the evolution of the idea of “American Liberty” as distinct from “British Liberty” and the historical role played by Britain in protecting rights—but there was not, to my mind, the necessary underscoring that the American Revolution didn’t represent a radical break with the past so much as a conservation of the best aspects and principles of ancient, constitutional self-governance and a fulfillment of Enlightenment-era ideas around the dignity and liberty of free peoples with respect to government. A better name for the Museum might have been the “Museum of the American War of Independence,” as a way to signal that a conservation of rights was sought by means of independence from an empire that had grown hostile to liberty.

    Still, the Museum is an excellent addition to Philadelphia’s historical and educational landscape. It’s a substantial place of learning and appreciation, especially for visitors who have for too long suffered from too much kitsch in Old City and not enough meaningful history.

  • Liberty Bell Shrine

    Liberty Bell Shrine

    I was in Allentown last month, and stepped out of Bell Hall after a good dinner and walked a bit with friends before noticing the “Liberty Bell Shrine” basically next door.

    Because we were solidly into the evening, Liberty Bell Shrine was locked for the night on this stretch of the main stretch of Allentown that doesn’t seem particularly lively after dark—at least not in community-building and confidence-inspiring ways. Still, it was great to run into this place. The historical plaques I snapped tell the story to some degree, and one of them was placed by the Sons of the American Revolution a while ago.

    The Liberty Bell, a symbol of the nascent fight for independence during the American Revolution, was brought to Allentown at some point during the war for safekeeping. I don’t remember the specifics, but I remember the fear was that the British would seize upon it to melt it down for ammunition as much as for the practical purpose of destroying a symbol of colonial rebellion.

    Little chapters of our great, common history.

  • • •

    Lafayette

    From Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker” that paints a portrait of New York from another time:

    If Fort Clinton was heroism, Castle Garden was the glory heroism earned.

    It was at Castle Garden that on August 16, 1824 that, in the words of one historian, ‘it was proved that Republics are not always ungrateful.’ For it was at Castle Garden on that date that Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette (who as a rich young nobleman had defied his king and fought for America) returned to it 67 years old and penniless.

    ‘Many of the spectators doubtless had in mind a galant, boyish figure in the buff and blue of the American Revolution, with powdered hair tied in a cue,’ the historian wrote.

    What they saw was an old civilian in a short-haired brown wig. But when the old civilian stepped onto the Castle Garden landing stage, after a trip up the harbor on which the ship was escorted on a huge flotilla to begin a visit on which he was to receive from the government and citizens of the United States gifts of bonds and land worth almost half a million dollars, the Castle’s cannon roared out a hundred times.

    When the old man walked slowly into Battery Park to the incessant huzzahs of the multitude that packed the waterfront, he walked between the weeping ranks of the Lafayette guards. When he rode up Broadway, men and women on rooftops threw flowers in his path. A month later a tall spar was raised in the center of the Fort, a vast awning of sail cloth was spread across its entire ceiling, the white banner of France was entwined with the Stars and Stripes, trophies of arms glittered from the walls, and when Lafayette appeared at the ball, the gay sets dissolved and the dancers formed a long lane, and as the old man walked along it he saw that each man and woman was wearing a medallion bearing his likeness, the women’s entwined with roses.

    And it was at Castle Clinton that, ten years later, the handful of Lafayette guards still alive drew up in a hollow square in the center of which was a riderless black horse, spurred boots reversed slung across its empty saddle, to hear the funeral oration for their dead hero.

    Lafayette visited every one of America’s 24 states on this visit. I wish Philadelphia would name something prominent in his honor.

  • •

    Pennsylvania in the Revolution

    I became a Life Member of the Sons of the American Revolution earlier this month, and I spent some time searching for historical materials that might shed some light on any ancestor members.

    This led me to Amazon, where I picked up a $14 copy of “The 1955 Year Book of the Pennsylvania Society of the Sons of the American Revolution” in great condition. It includes information on Nicholas Alleman, my ancestor who served as a Private in the Lancaster, Pennsylvania Militia. Nicholas’s daughter, Elizabeth, married Henry Shakely and more than eight generations of the family have grown up in Pennsylvania, with branches settling in Ohio, Oklahoma, Colorado, California, and Texas most recently.

    Anyway, the book contains a good refresher on Pennsylvania’s role in the American Revolution. Excerpting:

    Pennsylvania in the Revolution

    By Lewis E. Theiss, Past Historian, SAR Pennsylvania Society

    Not only was Pennsylvania the geographical keystone in the arch of the American colonies, but she was also the keystone in the revolutionary effort. In many ways she contributed decisively to the progress and success of the war. Actually, the political business of the Revolution was performed almost wholly within the Keystone State.

    Probably no colony contributed more in the military way. Not only were Pennsylvania battles fought in the effort to keep the British out of the Philadelphia harbor, but the struggles at the Brandywine and at Germantown were among the major contests of the entire war. And that at Germantown proved to be a big factor in convincing the soldiers that they really could fight, for at one point they had the British on the run. This battle also awoke foreign military powers to the fact that this new and as yet really undisciplined army was something that would have to be reckoned with. Europe knew little or nothing of an army of volunteers … foreign military men had no faith in volunteers.

    Actually, it was in Pennsylvania that the patriot army really came into being—at Valley Forge. A main contributing factor in the loss of the battle of the Brandywine was the inability of the raw American troops to maneuver rapidly and in complete unison. Attacked in an unexpected quarter, they were simply not able to form another battle line quickly and completely in a new position. But Valley Forge turned this raw aggregation into a disciplined army. Always we have stressed the sufferings at Valley Forge. There is no question about those sufferings—as unnecessary as they were real. Had the regional farmers had one tenth the patriotism that those freezing, starving soldiers at Valley Forge possessed, that camp would have been weighted down with provisions. The food was there—near at hand. What was lacking was the spirit of devotion to the cause. But in the camp itself the situation was the exact opposite. Day after day, relentlessly and endlessly, under the unswerving admonitions of the determined Von Steuben, the American recruits drilled in the cold and the snow. Before spring came, Washington’s men had become an army.

    So far as provisions went, Pennsylvania again proved to be the keystone of the Revolution. Without the supplies that came from Penn’s Woods, the revolution would almost surely have collapsed. …

    [At the battle of Monmouth], the first contest after Valley Forge … after [General Charles] Lee had demoralized the American troops by ordering the leading a retreat, Washington dashed up, ordered Lee from the field, reformed the troops—only displayed troops could have accomplished that—and drove back the British, who were so thoroughly beaten that they stole away in fear in the dead of night.

    Nothing contributed more toward the success of the war than the creation of the Rifle Corps. The idea was Washington’s. Congress backed him up by creating eight companies of riflemen. Few persons today grasp the significance of this step. The rifle was utterly unknown in New England and but little seen in New York. Minute men and militia at Lexington and Bunker Hill were armed entirely with muskets and fowling pieces. The rifle was a Pennsylvania development, an improvement on the cumbersome, almost-useless rifle brought into the Keystone State by German immigrants. Pennsylvania gunsmiths developed and improved it, until it became the finest weapon in existence. It carried a bullet with unerring accuracy. It did effective execution at twice the range of a musket. … We should never forget that it was Timothy Murphy, who, at the express command of Col. Morgan and on the suggestion of Benedict Arnold, shot British General Frazier out of his saddle and turned the tide of battle at Saratoga—the battle that brought us recognition and added help from France. …

    From the the rich grain fields of the Lancaster, Lebanon, and Cumberland Valleys and the frontier farms along the Susquehanna, food came pouring in to the army. Even distant Wyoming, that was destined for such a horrible end, sent thousands of bushels of wheat to the army. From every little frontier clearing additional bushels of grain came pouring in, and the army was feed.

    In Carlisle, in the Cumberland Valley, the patriots created an armory, where guns large and small, ammunition, and other equipment could be stored in supposed safety. Here Hessian prisoners erected barracks that is used to this day. Thither Pennsylvania furnaces and iron works sent materials they had fashioned for the army.

    Again disaster came close. After Burgoyne surrendered at Saratoga, the British lacked sufficient military forces to press the war effectively. What did they do? They offered the Indians generous sums for scalps, and turned the Six Nations loose against the colonists at Wyoming, to commit the most horrible massacre in our history. Butler, the Tory leader at that massacre, reported that his Indians took 227 scalps at Wyoming. Many additional persons lost their lives, unrecorded and unnoticed, when women and children fled through the awful swamps toward distant Easton, many of them dying of hunger or exhaustion… A few days later the West Branch of the Susquehanna was in the same state, when other Indian invaders swept down that branch of the Susquehanna and drove out the last white defender.

    This was bad enough. Seemingly the situation couldn’t be worse. But it was. Just to the eastward lay the grain fields already mentioned. Now there was nothing to prevent another Indian incursion, which could now sweep on down the Susquehanna and devastate these grain fields in the Cumberland, the Lebanon, and even the Lancaster valleys. There were no settlers left to stop them. Had that occurred, what would have happened to the Revolution? Probably it would have collapsed, starved to death.

    But now America had some disciplined troops. And from distant points they came surging into the stricken Susquehanna lands … carrying the war into the enemy’s own country…

    There is more—much more—that could be said about the part that Pennsylvania played in the Revolution. These things merely are highlights, but from beginning to end, the folks in Penn’s Woods—despite the great number of Tories among them—did put their shoulders to the wheel, did step into the breach, and did labor unceasingly to win the war. Truly we do well to call this Commonwealth the Keystone State. It was just that.

  • Symbolism

    I wrote last July about joining the Sons of the American Revolution a few years ago. The Sons of the American Revolution, headquartered in Louisville, are peers of the more recognized Daughters of the American Revolution, headquartered in Washington, DC.

    One of the things that has strengthened my commitment to the SAR has been learning about both the layers of meaning within the organization, and the earnest efforts of so many as fellows in an patriotic, historical, and educational fraternity. Sharing a bit of the historical meaning of the SAR’s insignia:

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    The SAR insignia consists of a Maltese cross surrounded by a garland, with a relief of George Washington in a center circle.

    The cross’s vertical bar represents the commandment “You Shall Love Your God”; the horizontal bar represents the commandment “You Shall Love Your Neighbor as Yourself.” The four limbs are a reminder of the four cardinal virtues (Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Courage); its eight points represent eight spiritual injunctions:

    1. To have spiritual contentment
    2. To live without malice
    3. To weep over your sins
    4. To humble yourself at insults
    5. To love justice
    6. To be merciful
    7. To be sincere and open-hearted
    8. To suffer persecution

    Surrounding the relief of Washington in the center are the words “Libertas et Patria,” (Liberty and Country) a reminder of the United States Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution.

    Duane L. C. M. Galles has written more extensively on the SAR insignia’s creation, noting the significant influence of French revolutionary assistance.

  • Sons of Liberty

    Sons of the American Revolution continues to improve its Louisville, KY headquarters. I haven’t visited yet, but I intend to visit. They just installed their “Sons of Liberty 1775” Minuteman statue outside their newly renovated headquarters:

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    The 800-pound, 8-foot high bronze statue of the Minuteman holding a musket rests upon 19,000 pounds of quarried Kentucky limestone, material specifically requested by the artist James Muir.

    Muir, of Sedona, Ariz., an Indianapolis native who has completed more than 60 life-sized monuments on display across the country and abroad, intends for the Minuteman figure to reflect duty, honor, courage, justice and truth.

    This symbolic bronze statue was a gift to the national organization in 2009 from the Philadelphia Continental Chapter of the patriot organization at a reported cost of $50,000. The statue depicts a young Revolutionary War-era soldier standing ready with one foot elevated slightly on a rock.

    The nonprofit patriot group is a kindred organization of the Daughters of the American Revolution. It has about 28,000 members, all men who can trace their ancestry to the Revolutionary War era. The organization was founded in 1889 and has had its national headquarters in Louisville since 1979.

  • American experimentation

    On the way from State College to Philadelphia yesterday I read David McCullough’s Jefferson Lecture, The Course of Human Events. It’s a short and accessible ~30 pages; worth reading if you’re unacquainted with McCullough as an historian or if you’re just interested in a refreshed perspective on the Revolutionary era:

    “One of our innumerable advantages as a nation and a society is that we have such a specific moment of origin as the year 1776. And that we know who the Founders were—indeed we know an immense amount about an immense number of those at all levels who in that revolutionary time brought the United States of America and the reality of freedom into being.

    But while it is essential to remember them as individual mortal beings no more perfect than are we, and that they themselves knew this better than anyone, it is also essential to understand that they knew their own great achievements to be imperfect and incomplete.

    The American experiment was from its start an unfulfilled promise. There was much work to be done. There were glaring flaws to correct, unfinished business to attend to, improvements and necessary adjustments to devise in order to keep pace with the onrush of growth and change and expanding opportunities.”

    This speaks to the reflexive and frankly stupid complaining I hear too often of the founders as “a bunch of old white men” and as complex and imperfect creators of a nation that itself is complex and imperfect. As McCullough illustrates, America has always been a work in progress and the founders understood that work to be the work of every generation.

    To assault their memory as tainted by the flaws of their character and the imperfections of their statecraft is an assault that is, in time, applicable to every generation in every culture.

  • •

    Independence

    Independence

    Bruce Shakely, my great uncle, turns 92 this month. It’s hard to believe it’s already been two years since I headed out to Western Pennsylvania to celebrate his 90th birthday with him in what became a national family reunion. It was during that visit that my grandfather’s cousin’s daughter and I connected and she provided me with the genealogical records that I needed to join the Sons of the American Revolution:

    The SAR is a historical, educational, and patriotic non-profit, United States 501(c)3, corporation that seeks to maintain and extend: the institutions of American freedom, an appreciation for true patriotism, a respect for our national symbols, the value of American citizenship, the unifying force of e pluribus unum that has created, from the people of many nations, one nation and one people.

    We do this by perpetuating the stories of patriotism, courage, sacrifice, tragedy, and triumph of the men who achieved the independence of the American people in the belief that these stories are universal ones of man’s eternal struggle against tyranny, relevant to all time, and will inspire and strengthen each succeeding generation as it too is called upon to defend our freedoms on the battlefield and in our public institutions.

    SAR has roughly 30,000 national members. This pales in comparison to the Daughters of the American Revolution that have more like 300,000 members. I don’t know whether that means SAR has historically done a poor job of recruitment, whether DAR has done better, or whether one gender tends to be more or less interested in membership.

    It is fascinating to be a member, and receive the regular news mailings from the national, state, and local chapter. I feel a bit more connected both to my Revolutionary-era ancestors and my family, and also to Pennsylvania and Philadelphia. A small example is Washington Square in Philadelphia, where a small memorial to Washington stands with a little altar and perpetual flame. This was placed there in part through SAR efforts in the 1950s.

    Having the SAR connection is helpful for me to think about the sort of things that might be done in the future based on the past. I’m glad I joined and hope it can become a wider family tradition.