The Book I was Born to Write

From the moment I heard Liberty! would tackle the entire story, from the coronation of George III to the inauguration of George Washington, I sensed this was a book I was born to write. What I liked best was the way Ron Blumer and I agreed to travel on parallel lines without worrying about whether we were completely synchronized at all points. The result has been a sort of jazz duet, with separate riffs on the subject in print and on film, that end up complementing each other.

With over 200 full color illustrations, the book tries to do its share in creating a new look at the Revolution. Probably the quickest way to give you an idea of our approach is to show you the pictures that open the story.

There he is, George III. This was painted by Johann Zoffany in 1774, when George had been ruling for 14 years -- and felt he had mastered the job.

In the film, The Madness of King George, this man was portrayed as a pathetic old dimwit. There was nothing funny or pathetic about George III in 1774. He was formidable. Doesn't he look it in this picture? There's an aggressive heft, a tough self assurance in his posture.

Here was a man who ruled the most powerful nation on earth. He was no figurehead. Out of his annual income of 800,000 pounds a year (the equivalent of $2 billion in today's money) he bought himself a tame Parliament and a yes-man prime minister.

As we know, George dispatched the largest fleet and army England had ever sent abroad to crush the American rebellion. He worked 12 hours a day at his desk, supervising everything down to how much money to pay Indians for rebel scalps.

Not once did His Majesty waver in his conviction that he was right. He thought the American Revolution was an outbreak, not of liberty, but of anarchy. He believed he was defending British liberty.

One of the interesting new things in the book is a comparison of British liberty and American liberty. It is a pretty stark contrast. British liberty was largely rhetorical. In a population of 8 million, only 250,000 men could vote. The city of London, with a population of a million, had eight seats in Parliament, while Cornwall,with barely 100,000 country bumpkins, had forty four. Major cities -- Manchester, Birmingham -- had no representatives at all.

American visitors were appalled by the corruption of British elections. John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, in London studying law in 1754, told his father that the Duke of Newcastle, the prime minister in that year's election, had spent over L1,000,000 pounds to keep himself in power. The opening bid for votes in one so called pocket borough where there were only seven or eight voters, was 200 guineas. Voters were required to swear that they had not been bribed. ``Few people can...refrain from laughing while they take [the oath],'' Dickinson wrote.

No one played this corruption game harder or better than George III. If he had won the war, both British liberty and American liberty might have vanished. Certainly American liberty would have been reduced to about the level of Irish liberty.

Next we take a look at the man who gave the Americans what they needed most: leadership.

Here is the real George Washington, the man who vivifies Liberty! One of the things I'd like to do is persuade Congress to use this painting, instead of the toothless old codger we now have on the dollar bill. This was a six foot four, forty-five-year old warrior, the finest horsemen of his age. A man who loved a good play, a good madeira and an offcolor joke.

Look at that shrewd, tough mouth. Here was a man without illusions. ``Since we cannot have men as we wish them to be, we must take them as they are,'' he said.

In eight years of war, this big Virginian grew from a diffident colonial to a man who could out-think the best European soldiers and politicians.

Probably the least known side of Washington today is his of sophisticated use of intelligence. He was his own CIA director, running dozens of spy rings inside British held New York and Philadelphia. He used invisible ink, codes, double agents, disinformation with a skill that would dazzle the boys and girls in Langley. The book has a separate section -- we call them sidelights -- devoted to the intelligence war.

Washington did more than win the war by devising a successful strategy. He also established a tradition of respect for civilian authority that helped preserve American liberty for the next two hundred years. Many people wanted him to become King George I or a Cromwellian Protector backed by the army's guns. Instead, at the end of the war, he resigned his commission as commander in chief and went home to Mount Vernon.

When George III heard about this resignation, he exclaimed: ``Sir, if he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world!''

At one point, His Majesty thought he was in competition for that title.

Great as he was, Washington could not have won the Revolution without the help of next man you are about to see.

Without Benjamin Franklin, there might never have been a revolution. Instead, there might have been little more than a colonial flareup in Boston, which George III could have extinguished with three or four regiments and a naval squadron. No one in the rest of America gave much of a damn for the hypocritical Yankees, who sang psalms on Sunday and cheated you on Monday.

But when the British included Franklin, the most famous American of his time, in their anti-Americanism, they revealed their underlying contempt for all colonials and their determination to run the empire on their terms. Franklin both personified and accelerated the massive disillusion with England that Americans experienced.

For more than a decade before the war began, Franklin had been the unofficial spokesman for America in England. No one loved the so called ``mother country'' more heartily before the trouble began. No one became more disenchanted with their political corruption and arrogance.

One of the primary illustrations in my book is this painting.

Here we see Franklin being arraigned, insulted and ridiculed by Solicitor General Alexander Wedderburn before the King's Privy Council on January 29, 1774. It was the British establishment's way of punishing him for leaking letters written by Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson, recommending ``some abridgment'' of liberty to get Boston under control.

It would be an exaggeration -- but only a mild one -- to say that this collision started the Revolution. As Franklin left the room, he supposedly took Wedderburn by the arm and said: ``I will make your master a little king for that.'' If he didn't say it, he unquestionably thought it.

As ambassador to France, Franklin procured the vital aid that the Americans needed to fight George III. He managed this feat while surrounded by agents of the British secret service -- and a swarm of Americans who did everything in their power to smear his reputation and impugn his integrity.

In all this hugger-mugger, Franklin never lost his sense of humor. Early in 1778, he encountered Edward Gibbon, author of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in a Paris restaurant. Franklin sent one of his entourage over to invite the historian to have a drink with him. Gibbon, a stuffed shirt who voted mindlessly with George III in Parliament, replied that he could have no communication with a rebel against his king. Franklin sent back his man to say he was disappointed. He was eager to supply Gibbon with material for a new book -- The Decline and Fall of the British Empire.

The next two images are something of a departure for a history of the Revolution. First is a man who is both real and a symbol.

James Lafayette was born a Virginia slave named Jim. In 1781, he was loaned to the Marquis de Lafayette by his Virginia owner as a combination valet and groom. The young Frenchman was defending the Old Dominion against a British army so much stronger than his ragged battalions, he moaned they could not even get decently beaten.

Jim proved to be both intelligent and daring. He volunteered to infiltrate the British army's camp pretending to be a runaway. He brought back valuable information that helped trap the British in the small tobacco port of Yorktown -- the victory that won the war.

When peace arrived, a grateful Lafayette persuaded Virginia to free Jim. He took the Marquis's last name and spent the rest of his American life as James Lafayette. To me, his gaze says: I'm somebody who was there. I made my contribution.

As a symbol, James Lafayette bulks surprisingly large. Not many people know that by 1780, when inflation had all but destroyed American currency, and enlistments dwindled to near zero, one out of every six soldiers in Washington's army was black. It was the most integrated army America would field until the Vietnam War.

Christopher Brown, a young black historian who appears on the TV show, points out that the Revolution presents the first example of slaveholders themselves not just questioning slavery's morality, but considering doing something to end the system. Brown calls the Revolution ``a defining moment in the world history of slavery.''

Along with the blacks, the book describes the roles of the Irish, the Jews, the Spanish and the Indians in the Revolution. In many ways these sidelights are the newest aspect of our look at the conflict.

Too many Americans have the impression that the Revolution was fought between two groups of Englishmen. Liberty! tries hard to correct that idea. In 1776, America was already a melting pot. Only 60 percent of the population was English. There were so many Irish in the Pennsylvania Continental Line, it was often called ``the line of Ireland.'' After American currency collapsed, many members of the Continental Congress, such as James Madison, depended on loans from Jewish banker Haym Salomon.

James Lafayette tells us it's everybody's revolution. Almost every American can find some sort of ancestry in it.

The final picture is someone who represents not a minority but a majority in American life -- in the Revolutionary era -- and our own times.

Many of you probably knew this woman's name. It's Abigail Adams. She has become a familiar symbol since feminism seized the high ground in the media and the law courts. But there is more to this woman than the fame she accrued with her letter to John Adams, urging him to ``remember the ladies'' in the new government they were creating in Philadelphia.

Abigail Adams was one of the first Americans to worry about the contradiction between owning slaves and fighting for liberty. She helped launch a veritable crusade to win better education for women. She wrote one of the finest memorial lines of the Revolutionary struggle, mourning the death of the charismatic Dr. Joseph Warren on Bunker Hill. ``When he died, liberty wept.''

As a symbol, Abigail Adams bulks very large. Her letters reveal her to be a wholehearted enthusiast for the Revolution. She was not a passive traveler on the ship of state. She spoke for tens of thousands of other women who felt the same way.

A good deal of the sidelight called ``Life in the Thirteen Colonies.'' explores the role of women in American life of that era. No less than seven of them published newspapers that they had inherited from deceased husbands. A surprising number of others held jobs, ranging from shoemaking to undertaking.

They combined enthusiasm for independence with femininity. Ignoring moralists who decried the practice, they spent a lot of money to preserve the sheen of youth. They bought ``paints'' from China, a lip salve from India. From Greece came ``Jerusalem washballs'' and the ``Bloom of Circassia,'' which supposedly gave the cheeks a rosy hue that defied perspiration.

Maryland's sprightly Molly Tilghman summed up the prevailing feminine opinion when she told her cousin Polly Pearce, ``Wisdom says beauty is a fading flower, but...it attracts more admiration than wit, goodness or anything else in this world.''

These sidelights don't always reveal facts that changed the course of history. But they do something else that may be more important. They tell us that behind the rhetoric and gunfire of 1776 are a galaxy of vivid, fascinating men and women who are not as different from contemporary Americans as their knee breeches and long skirts sometimes suggest.

Ron Blumer and I share a common conviction that it is time to restore the amazing variety of this revolutionary generation to our national consciousness. It is more than a sentimental journey, an exercise in retroactive patriotism. The men and women of 1776 created the nation we inhabit with varying degrees of enthusiasm today. We need to know them as members of our historical family if we hope to understand ourselves.

Maybe we can pull it off. The book has been warmly received by book clubs and booksellers. The first printing is 160,000 copies. I'm sure the television show will win similar enthusiasm.

We're preaching to the converted here, of course. But we thought you'd enjoy this preliminary look at our efforts on behalf of our favorite subject.