Patriots or Tories?
The foot soldiers of the American Revolution fought to free themselves from an unelected monarch. Donald Trump’s Loyalists seek to coronate one.
“By the rude bridge that arched the flood
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard tound the world.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1837
That shot still echoes around the world, but not the way the violent extremists who stormed the Capitol on January 6 think it does.
Donald Trump’s followers call themselves patriots, heirs to Emerson’s embattled farmers. In fact, they more closely resemble the Revolution’s Loyalists, or Tories, the third or so of the colonial American population that sought to maintain the power of an unelected king.
On the surface, those Massachusetts farmers with their muskets would appear to have much in common with the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. Most of them were from lower rungs of the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s rural socioeconomic and educational ladders. Many of them had firearms, though their muskets couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn and took forever to reload.
They were white Anglo-Saxons and conservative Christians, though not the American Taliban that some of their forebears in Salem Village had been. Still, they were quick to excommunicate those who violated the Ten Commandments, in at least one case the Ninth, which seems relevant now: “Thou shalt not bear false witness.”
It’s not clear how literate or well-read they were. Some spelled their surnames different ways at different times, and if you asked them what they thought of John Locke, they might think you were asking about a locksmith in Concord. As for Rousseau, didn’t their fathers fight against his French troops at Quebec 16 years earlier?
Little is known of the political philosophy of these rank-and-file militiamen. They were not Jefferson or Franklin or their neighbors John Hancock and John Adams. Much or most of what we know of them is from landowning deeds, marital records and their moldering tombstones.
I do not claim to be an historian, though I cling to ancient syntax. No Michael Beschloss nor Jon Meacham, who have advised President Biden, and certainly no Gordon Wood, David McCollough or Bernard Bailyn.
However, during a recent visit to that rude bridge I was reminded that I do, however, know something about those farmers who assembled on Lexington Green and at the North Bridge in Concord on that April day in 1775. That thanks to a 279-page family history compiled in 1925 by Arthur Stuart Walcott, who in those prehistoric pre-Internet days spent 20 years researching it.
By his account, six of the men who answered the Lexington alarm were members of my family, fellow descendants of Capt. Jonathan Walcott of Salem. In all, 22 fought in the Revolution, though only one was an officer.
Let’s halt the whining: My family’s early arrival lend my words and thoughts no greater weight, and possibly less, than the average American History major or, more to the point, a recent arrival from Afghanistan or El Salvador who’s studying for the citizenship exam.
What struck me walking across that rude bridge, though, was how much my forebears superficially resembled Donald Trump’s most extreme foot soldiers — and how much their cause differed from the MAGA movement’s.
Like Trump’s extremist legions, there was nothing remarkable about them except how unremarkable they were — yeoman farmers trying to scratch a living from the brief Massachusetts Bay growing season, wheelwrights and carpenters ignored and disparaged by the emerging, Harvard-educated upper crust of Boston society.
When they enlisted after the British marched to Lexington, it often was just a few days, occasionally months, before they returned to the plow for the planting season.
As in all wars, all gave some and some gave all. Elijah Walcott was killed at Bunker Hill, and Christopher died in the Battle of Bennington. Benjamin was taken prisoner at Hubbardton, Vermont; Ada lost part of an arm somewhere. On July 22, 1776, Jesse “was in Capt. Houghton’s company, which ran away from the Hessians at Kips Bay, N.Y..” (In 1778, however, Jesse was back in service, though probably not in any recognizable uniform, in the campaign to retake Newport, RI with the aid of the French fleet.)
By today’s standards, so often applied retroactively, they were no models of moral virtue. One more prosperous one in Boston owned five slaves, and many of the militiamen’s fathers and grandfathers had fought in more than one war against the indigenous tribes whose lands they took. Much like some of today’s Magamen, few Massachusetts Christians in those days were known for their tolerance toward people of different races or religions, which included their indigenous neighbors, Catholics, Quakers and sometimes even Episcopalians, whom some considered nearer to the English Crown than to God. They were a quarrelsome lot not known for their tolerance even toward their neighbors in the next pew.
Nevertheless, they joined forces to fight one of, if not the, most powerful armies in the world. They took up arms to free themselves from an unelected monarch, not to reinstall an aspiring “perfect physical specimen” who seeks to overturn the kind of free and fair election they fought to establish.
The constitutional republic that their leaders established divided power among three branches of government and populist and elite houses of the Congress, rather than demanding fealty to one person from all branches, federal, state and local.
So would yesterday’s patriots be today’s Trump loyalists? It’s impossible to know, of course, and it’s hard to believe that all of them would march in step.
However, it’s easy to think that most would not follow the defeated ex-president, if only for one simple reason: They were quick to excommunicate anyone who batted less than 1.000 on the Ten Commandments, let alone someone whose batting average is no better than .300 and maybe just .200.