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Honoring the French-American Alliance

Posted / From Our Collections

In the library of the American Revolution Institute, history surrounds on the shelves. Among the collections are works that help tell the story of the alliance between France and the United States, one of the most important turning points in deciding the Revolution. This partnership, formalized in February 1778 with the Treaty of Alliance, was more than a military arrangement. It was a meeting of political ideals, strategic necessities and mutual hope for reshaping the balance of power in the Atlantic world.

The library holds printed and manuscript material from before the alliance through to the war’s conclusion after the Franco-American victory at Yorktown and the establishment of the Society of the Cincinnati. From its founding in 1783, the Society included French officers who had served in America under Rochambeau, d’Estaing and Lafayette. This bond was deliberate. The Society wasn’t simply a fraternal group for Americans, but a transatlantic order intended to promote and cherish the ideals and national honor for which these individuals had fought.

This summer, we were happy to continue the Society’s tradition of French-American exchange and welcomed a library intern from France to work with collections related to American forces and their French allies’ role in securing independence for the United States. Alice du Gardin, a master’s student at HEC Paris, was in Washington, D.C., for much of June and July and helped library staff process and translate manuscript materials. Among the items Alice helped translate were the journals of Robert Guillaume Dillon. Baron de Dillon served as mestre de camp of the régiment de Lauzun-Hussards and lieutenant-général during the Revolutionary War. He was also an original member of the French Society of the Cincinnati and kept a journal that covers the period from November 1780 through the Siege of Yorktown in October 1781.

Alice du Gardin, 2025 Research Library intern

“In his Journal, Dillon reports his memories about his time in America during the war. Unlike the memories of Rochambeau, this manuscript deals with personal and lived experience. Therefore, it provides us with broader information about what the life of a high-ranking officer could have been during the war—which it is very different from the experience of soldiers, for example.

During his time in America, Dillon didn’t only fight; he also travelled a lot, especially in the Northeast, and encountered many people, including George Washington. That’s why his memoir sometimes sounds more like a travel diary than actual military memories. He also shows a good sense of humor and a taste for Roman-like narration, which can lead us to wonder if some parts of the memories weren’t a bit exaggerated.

Dillon was born in 1750. He was from a military family whose name had been given to a regiment (the Dillon regiment). He entered the army in 1765, aged fifteen, and quickly climbed up the military ladder until he was promoted colonel of the Dillon regiment in 1768.

During the Revolutionary War, he was first sent to the Antilles (he was wounded in Grenada), and then to America. His memories about his time in America are told in his journal.

At the end of the war, he came back to France, just a few years before the French Revolution breaks out. Having chosen to stay loyal to the king, he encountered numerous obstacles in his career. As violence intensified, he was finally arrested and beheaded in 1794.”

-Alice du Gardin, July 2025

 

Selected Extracts and Translations
(see also English translation, Jane L. Bush, 2020.)

At the beginning of the journal, Dillon narrates his encounters with General Washington and Eliza Hamilton:

Journal of Robert Guillaume Dillon, 1780-1781, page 1

After having walked almost one mile, we arrived at the house where the hero of the Revolution, for whom my astonishment and my admiration rose with each moment, was staying. It was around five o’clock and he was still at his dessert; the Marquis de Lafayette (Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, marquis) was at the table with him. We withdrew with discretion when the Marquis, who had without any doubt already been notified that there were French officers at the door, ran after us and, recognizing Mr. de Charlus who was his friend, led us immediately to the dining room and introduced us to the General. Mr. Washington offered his hand to us affectionately; I presented mine with a respectful bow, after which he turned to Mrs. Washington (Martha Washington) to whom he introduced us, as well as to General Howe (Robert Howe) and Colonel Jackson (Henry Jackson) who were dining with him.

Mr. Washington completely fulfilled the impression I had made of him. It seemed that nature was pleased to lavish upon him what she often grants with whimsicality. She bestowed upon him a general effect which seduces accordingly when one gazes upon him; his large personality and his soul are etched in his features. I would have recognized the General among a thousand officers of his army without any trouble. He is one of the most handsome men I have ever seen, but it is a kind of handsomeness that emanates more from his soul than from his outward appearance. His ways are noble and easy, without embarrassment nor affectation. Speaking little, but with strength, his voice is gentle without losing what the Majestic gives to the expressions of a voice, strong and clear. We sat down at the table with him and drank several toasts.

After having dined, we moved to the adjoining room where we stayed until supper-time. I had a fairly long conversation with his Excellency. As it was not for me to ask questions, I let him take the lead. The conversation turned to the country through which I had just travelled; he seemed delighted by the praise I made of it. Mr. de Charlus, who had been to Boston, spoke to him, with admiration, about the places which had inspired him where he had made his first campaign against the British.

He laughed a lot with us about the fear of the English, saying that if they had turned out just two thousand men he would have been obligated to retreat.

Someone came to let us know that supper was served. We passed through to the dining room where several minutes later Mrs. Washington arrived, accompanied by Mrs. Hamilton (Elisabeth “Eliza” Schuyler Hamilton), a young and pretty woman, recently married to Mr. Hamilton (Alexander Hamilton) General Washington’s personal aide-de-camp. The young man is witty and talented, and speaks French admirably. We retired shortly after having dinner.

 

Dillon then travels through many American cities and describes many places he visited, including Philadelphia and Baltimore:

Journal of Robert Guillaume Dillon, 1780-1781, page 13

Philadelphia is perfectly beautiful and orderly; all houses there are made of brick. The place where Congress assembles is a really beautiful building. I lodged at the residence of the Spanish Ambassador; the house he occupies would be as beautiful in Paris. Philadelphia is built on the model of the city of London; one is surprised to see the large number of beautiful ships (there are more than 150 vessels docked at the port.) If America wins [the war], Philadelphia, in a hundred years, will be equal, at least, to London or Paris. We were charmingly received by Mr. le Chevalier de la Luzerne (Anne-César, chevalier de la Luzerne), Minister Plenipotentiary of France, and fêted with a number of balls and very pleasant gatherings. The women have almost all adopted French fashions. Several of them surprised me by the taste and the style of their adornment; their shoes impressed me the most. They are, in general, much better heeled than the women in our largest cities. They all dance terribly but, nevertheless, it’s all the rage to dance French contra dances. I noticed that, with their unpretentious look, they are, at the very least, as fashionable as are our ladies. But they limit their intelligence to flirting, gallantry still being in its infancy. One must hope that their marital partners will take charge of their education and that, from here, in ten to twelve years, they will at least be discreet and will start to make themselves understood in the houses of Philadelphia.

After three weeks of my visit, Mr. de Charlus and I decided to travel through Pennsylvania and Maryland until Annapolis which is situated on the other side of the Chesapeake Bay.

[…] [The Chesapeake Bay is] one of the most beautiful bays in the world. It forms a basin of about seven or eight leagues in circumference at the location from where we saw it. The Susquehanna is, after the Potomac, the most beautiful of all the rivers which flow into this bay. While crossing the river, we saw an astonishing number of all kinds of birds, some of which were eagles, who walked very solemnly on the ice floes which were carried along by the river. Twelve miles from there we bedded down in the town of Buck.

The [15th] we arrived in Baltimore, the most commercial and wealthiest town of all those situated on the Chesapeake Bay. We stayed there a day and a half. Its port is likely to have all possible comforts and will certainly be one of the largest on this continent. There are about four thousand souls in the town, and it has only been in the last thirty years that there have been more than twenty houses. We saw nice tobacco shops, etc.; about forty small vessels. The port is defended by a bad fort. We counted upon going to Annapolis but we were assured that all the inhabitants had deserted it and had retreated to the countryside by fear of an attack by Arnold, and someone also told us that the town was much less notable than it used to be but, as it was the county seat of Maryland, all the wealthy people of the province had beautiful homes there where they spent winter and [had] created a pleasant community.

 

About the Library

The research library of the American Revolution Institute houses more than fifty thousand rare books, manuscripts, prints, broadsides, maps and modern reference sources, and is one of the most important resources in the world for advanced study on the Revolution. The library welcomes researchers to use the collections by appointment and supports scholarship by offering several research fellowships each year to graduate students and advanced scholars. To learn more, and make an appointment click here.

Mapping the Revolution with Information Science Graduate Students

Posted / From Our Collections

The library of the American Revolution Institute recently hosted four graduate students as part of the University of Michigan’s School of Information (UMSI) Alternative Spring Break program. The UMSI students spent a week in Washington, D.C., to work with us on a project, “Mapping the Revolution,” that supports cataloging and digitization of historic and rare maps. Beginning in 2025, a selection of the American Revolution Institute’s maps, charts, views and surveys will be featured in American Revolutionary Geographies Online, a new online resource led by the Leventhal Map and Education Center at the Boston Public Library and the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon.

To increase exposure and improve the discoverability of the Society of the Cincinnati’s map collection, UMSI students surveyed additional maps, improved catalog records and completed an inventory of cartographical materials which have not yet been digitized. In this post, we are happy to share discoveries made by the University of Michigan team and to highlight their favorite maps to demonstrate how informational professionals can help support the library’s mission to advance scholarship of the American Revolution.

From left to right, UMSI graduate students Sarah Moore, Erin Mettler, Clare Sahijdak and Latitude Brown

“My favorite map is the Carte du Theatre de la Guerre Dans L’Inde ou se trouvent une parue de la Chine, or ‘Map of the Theatre of War in India where part of China is located.’ This map is extremely detailed and shows a series of 18th-century conflicts in India and the East Indies including the Anglo-French War, the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War and the Second Anglo-Mysore War. While not of the United States, this map shows how the American Revolution was a global event and part of a pattern of conflicts and wars that took place around the world. This 1781 map is a single sheet from a series of maps intended to showcase expanding conflicts that then shaped the French Empire. While working to digitize this map, I was able to learn more about the far-reaching effects of the American Revolution and to think more critically about the impacts that seemingly localized conflicts can have on the broader world and political landscape.” – Erin Mettler

Carte du Theatre de la Guerre Dans L'Inde ou se trouvent une parue de la Chine (cropped)

Detail of Carte du Theatre de la Guerre Dans L’Inde ou se trouvent une parue de la Chine, 1781

“My favorite map isVorstellung einiger Gegenden und Plaetze in Nord-America unter Franzoesisch und Englishce Jurisdiction gehoerig, or ‘Presentation of some areas and places in North America under French and English jurisdiction.’ It was printed in Germany in 1756 and includes views of Canadian cities. It’s not just a map of the land, there’s also a ‘plan for the town of Halifax,’ which reflects a once-held vision for the future of the location. I wondered how the past’s future lives up to today’s reality. This map was also hand-colored, which set it apart from other versions. Many of the maps we looked at dated from the 1700s and were over three hundred years old. I currently work with digital and born-digital material, which is much closer to our current day. Over the week at the American Revolution Institute, I learned that maps are another tool held in libraries that help us to imagine hypothetical time travel. Diaries and journals serve as similar primary sources as they document what people did and discussed. However, maps are not only representations of what was, but also what was hoped some places might become. Maps invite viewers to think not just about the geographical transformations but also cultural and political shifts that occurred since their creation. These maps are also pieces of art and pieces of power; they serve as excerpts of how colonialism shaped our world and its future.” – Latitude Brown

Presentation of some areas and places in North America under French and English jurisdiction, 1756

“My favorite map is the Particular Draughts and Plans of some of the Principal Towns and Harbours belonging to the English, French, and Spaniards in America and West Indies. I enjoyed how it emphasizes the other countries then invested in the Americas. The map depicts thirteen different towns, and it is fascinating to see how these locales differed based on geography and population. Beyond the amazing opportunity to browse rare and historical maps, I researched their accessibility through WorldCat. I counted how many institutions claimed to hold each map and which institutions also had their maps available digitally.  I was happy to find that some maps in the Society of the Cincinnati’s collection have not been digitized by any library in the world. This project is a great opportunity for the Society of the Cincinnati to showcase their significant rare map collection and bring in researchers who study events around the American Revolution. Though the collection focuses on the time of the American Revolution, the maps are from all around the world, because the Revolution affected more nations than the United States and England.” – Sarah Moore

Detail of Particular Draughts and Plans of some of the Principal Towns and Harbours belonging to the English, French, and Spaniards, in America and West Indies, ca. 1747

“One map that I enjoyed working with was called A New Map of the Province of Quebec. This map is from the year 1776 and was pieced together on fabric because the paper has been worn thin from where its previous owner(s) folded it multiple times. I was amazed at how the indexes at the top of the map were stylized to look like additional sheets of paper and how the yellow and teal coastlines were intricately hand colored. This map is truly a work of art. Since I currently work with 20th-century first edition books, I am always fascinated by how the historical objects we study today are things once used in daily life. Working with this map, I was able to have a detailed glimpse into this copy of the map’s physical history, but also how the world was experienced in 1776. Even though we were working to digitize these maps, seeing this map in person at the library has enriched how I understand the period of the American Revolution and how cartographic resources can be described as unique copies in libraries.” – Clare Sahijdak

A section of A New Map of the Province of Quebec, 1776

The American Revolution Institute research library and archives houses more than fifty thousand rare books, manuscripts, prints, broadsides, maps and modern reference sources and is one of the most important resources in the world for advanced study on the revolution. The library welcomes researchers to use the collections by appointment and supports scholarship by offering several research fellowships each year to graduate students and advanced scholars. The work supported by students from the University of Michigan’s School of Information Alternative Spring Break on “Mapping the Revolution” will increase and improve digitization of the map collection. Stay tuned for more updates about collections, posts from research fellows, and more.

Click here to learn more about the American Revolution Institute library and collections.

The Mysterious Hero’s Return

Posted / Material Culture, Revolutionary Characters

Among the most curious treasures in the library of the American Revolution Institute is a monochrome aquatint with etching of a properly dressed gentleman with his left hand gripping the pommel of his sword and his right arm draped around a bare-breasted woman whose arm is curled suggestively around his neck. The legend reads The Hero returned from Boston. The publication line reads “London. Printed for Thos. Hart, as Act directs, 7th Sepr. 1776.” The print is excruciatingly rare. Besides our imprint, there is one in the Yale University Art Gallery.

Our effort to understand the print leads down peculiar byways of the eighteenth-century print business. The name of the publisher, Thomas Hart, is associated with a series of fictitious portraits of American leaders, including George Washington (including one on horseback and one on foot), John Hancock, Israel Putnam, David Wooster, Horatio Gates, Charles Lee, Esek Hopkins, Benedict Arnold, John Sullivan, and John Paul Jones, dated between 1775 and 1779. These prints, all of which are mezzotints, are attributed to publishers Thomas Hart, C. Shepherd, and John Morris.

The Hero returned from Boston is an engraving a bare-breasted woman with her arm curled around the neck of a properly dressed gentleman with a sword.

None of these prints bears any real resemblance to its subject, despite the publishers’ effort to persuade customers that they were authentic likenesses. The print of Hancock, the legend says, was based on a portrait by an artist named Littleford, though no artist named Littleford is otherwise associated with Hancock. The legends on the prints of Washington claims they were based on a portrait “Drawn from the life by Alexr. Campbell of Williamsburgh in Virginia.” Joseph Reed sent one of the prints to Martha Washington. It amused the general, who wrote that the artist, whoever he was, had “made a very formidable figure of the Commander-in-Chief, giving him a sufficient portion of terror in his countenance.” Alas, Washington pointed out, he had never met Mr. Campbell of Williamsburg. No artist of that name is known to have worked in Virginia.

The portraits were mostly fraudulent, turned out quickly to meet public demand for images of the leaders of the American rebellion. All of the prints may, in fact, have been produced for the London market in Augsburg, a German city that was a center of commercial print production. Their style—the markedly heavy features, large eyes, dark shadows, and treatment of details of clothing and accoutrements—is characteristic of Augsburg engravings.

Even more curious, the names of Thomas Hart, C. Shepherd, and John Morris seem to be fictitious as well. With one exception, their names are not associated with any other prints. The only plausible explanation for the use of these fictitious names is that the true publishers wanted to profit by selling images of the American Revolutionaries but preferred not to be closely associated with these products, which were, after all, heroic images of traitors who had taken up arms against the king.

The Hero returned from Boston is the outlier among the odd prints published by the fictitious Thomas Hart. It is the only etching, with aquatint or otherwise, associated with Hart’s name. The Hero returned from Boston is also the only one of the Hart prints in which the subjects are not named. Who is the hero returned from Boston? And who is the woman clinging so provocatively to him?

Since Hart’s name was associated with prints of American rebels we might jump to the conclusion that the hero is George Washington and the scantily clad woman is Martha, welcoming the general home from his victory in the Siege of Boston, and that the print was intended to mock the American rebel chieftain. Entertaining as that solution might be, evidence suggests the leering hero and his bare-breasted companion are another couple.

The man in the print bears a casual resemblance to General Thomas Gage as portrayed by John Singleton Copley in 1768. Gage had commissioned the portrait and when it was complete, sent it home to England. “The Generals Picture was received at home with universal applause,” one of Gage’s aides reported to Copley in 1770, “and Looked on by real good Judges as a Masterly performance. It is placed in one of the Capital Apartments of Lord Gage’s house in Arlington Street.”

John Singleton Copley painted this portrait of General Thomas Gage in 1768.

John Singleton Copley began his portrait of Thomas Gage in the fall of 1768, when the general traveled to Boston to oversee the occupation of the city by British Regulars (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).

We remember Gage as the first British general whose career was wrecked by the American Revolutionary War, which would ruin the careers of William Howe, John Burgoyne, and Henry Clinton, each in turn. Of the principle British commanders in America, only Charles, Lord Cornwallis—humiliated at Yorktown—salvaged his career. A successful governor-general of India, he lies in a monumental tomb overlooking the Ganges and is memorialized in Saint Paul’s Cathedral.

None of the four equaled the rise of Thomas Gage. He came to America as a lieutenant colonel under Gen. Edward Braddock. He distinguished himself in Braddock’s disastrous expedition against Fort Duquesne and thereafter rose through the senior ranks of the army. He was promoted to colonel in 1758. That same year he married Margaret Kemble, the beautiful daughter of a wealthy New Jersey merchant. Gage served in Jeffrey Amherst’s operations against Montreal and was then appointed governor of Montreal. A major general by 1761, Gage became acting commander in chief of British forces in North America in 1763 and officially succeeded Amherst in that role in 1764.

As His Majesty’s commander in chief Gage was responsible for disseminating information and instructions from London, enforcing acts of Parliament, settling disputes between the fractious colonial governments, policing the frontier, managing relations with the Indians, maintaining dozens of forts, defending imperial posts, and coordinating colonial defenses. Gage maintained communications with the governors of every colony in North America and several West Indian islands.

He handled his vast and varied administrative responsibilities with skill, even as relations between Britain and the colonies deteriorated. In 1770 he was promoted to lieutenant general. He was widely admired—a hero, even—on both sides of the Atlantic. Many Americans regarded him as one of their own. He purchased thousands of acres in upstate New York and in what became New Brunswick to leave to his growing family. When Gage went to England on a leave of absence in the spring of 1773, dozens of American leaders, including George Washington, gathered at a party in New York to see him off.

During the year that Gage was in England, American affairs reached a crisis. The Crown sent him back to America not only as commander in chief but also as royal governor of Massachusetts charged with implementing Parliament’s punitive measures against that colony.

Within a year his career unraveled. The military occupation of Boston infuriated the colonists and fueled resistance. Gage’s military force was wholly inadequate to suppress the insurrection. It never controlled more than the ground on which it stood and often not even that much. A force he sent to Concord in April to seize weapons stockpiled by the resistance was mauled by militia. Nine weeks later he lost hundreds more soldiers in an assault on rebel militia on the Charlestown Neck in the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Gage received orders recalling him to London on September 26, turned his command over to General Sir William Howe on October 10, and arrived in London on November 14. The next day he met privately with the king, who showed no inclination to blame Gage for what had happened in America. It was hardly a hero’s return.

The resemblance of the man in The Hero returned from Boston to Copley’s portrait of Thomas Gage is superficial at best, but the resemblance of the woman to Copley’s portrait of Gage’s wife, Margaret Kemble Gage, is striking. The Hero returned from Boston is a commentary about husband and wife.

Copley painted Mrs. Gage in 1771 in a languid pose wear wearing an iridescent Turkish style caftan over a lace trimmed chemise with an embroidered belt at her waist. Pearls and a turban-like swath of drapery adorn her hair. This style, known as turquerie, was the height of fashion for masquerade balls in Europe, but was largely unknown in British America, where women had no opportunity to wear such attire, which was intended to suggest the costumes worn by Turkish women in the Ottoman court. It was a style western Europeans imagined was fashionable in the sultan’s harem, a symbol of Oriental luxury and vice. Most western European turquerie bore only a slight resemblance to Ottoman costume, but it symbolized what western Europeans imagined the Turkish court was like—a mysterious place where powerful men kept women for pleasure and where exceptional women used their physical charms to dominate and control men.

Margaret Kemble Gage, portrayed here by John Singleton Copley, relaxes in faux Turkish garb. Copley traveled to New York to paint the portrait.

John Singleton Copley portrayed Margaret Kemble Gage in exotic attire inspired by the Turkish court (Timken Museum of Art).

Part of the attraction of turquerie was that it was sexually suggestive without being lewd. In Copley’s portrait Mrs. Gage is not wearing a corset and reclines in her loose fitting clothes. Copley called it “beyond Compare the best Lady’s portrait I ever Drew.” Proud of the portrait, the Gages packed it off to London, where it created a mild sensation when it was displayed.

Copley played on the fact that Margaret was known as a touch exotic. She was one quarter English, one quarter Greek, one quarter Dutch, and one quarter French. Her father, Peter Kemble, was the son of an English merchant who traded with Ottoman Empire. Peter was born in Smyrna, a Greek enclave on the Turkish coast. His mother—Margaret’s grandmother—was a Greek woman from the nearby island of Chios. Peter arrived in New York around 1730 and settled in New Jersey, where he quickly established himself as a merchant and became the largest landowner in Morris County. His first wife, Getrude Bayard—Margaret’s mother—made Margaret a cousin to the de Lanceys, van Courtlands and other prominent New York families.

Peter Kemble was proud of his Greek background. So was his daughter, who was recognized in New York society for her unusual beauty and self-assurance. Through most of Gage’s service as commander in chief he made his headquarters in New York City, where Margaret—attractive, vivacious, outgoing, and well connected—was the perfect wife for an ambitious, rising general. Her husband’s military subordinates referred to her as “the dutchess.” She was a talented hostess and bright conversationalist. The general and his wife were rarely apart.

Margaret returned to America with her husband in 1774, but circumstances had changed. The general made his headquarters in Massachusetts, where she had few acquaintances. As relations between the colonists and the army degenerated some of her husband’s British subordinates found her American birth, self-confident manner, and intimate relationship with their commander had become reasons to distrust her. So did many Massachusetts loyalists, to whom she was an exotic stranger. She was connected to all the best families in New York and navigated among them with skill and grace, but this meant little to the clannish loyalists of eastern Massachusetts. She was not one of them.

Rumors went around that Margaret Gage was sympathetic to the rebellion, despite the fact that her father was a loyalist, her brother was a major in the British army and deputy adjutant general, and her husband was commander in chief of the king’s forces in North America. The displaced governor, Thomas Hutchinson, noted that she had once said to him that “she hoped her husband would never be the instrument of sacrificing the lives of her countrymen,” but her husband probably shared that sentiment. The war was a tragedy for their family as it was for the empire.

The rumors had no foundation, but the idea that the army’s secrets were being betrayed by someone close to the general offered an explanation for what seemed so inexplicable: British soldiers cut down by colonial militia, trapped in Boston by provincials, impotent to suppress a colonial rebellion led by farmers.

With Boston under siege, beset by food shortages and disease and filled with hundreds of wounded soldiers mangled in battle, Gage put Margaret on a ship bound for England in August 1775. The vessel was filled with women, children, and scores of wounded British soldiers. The voyage was miserable. When the ship reached Plymouth, a witness recorded that “a few of the men came on shore, when never hardly were seen such objects! Some without legs, and others without arms; and their cloaths hanging on them like a loose morning gown, so much were they fallen away by sickness and want of proper nourishment … the vessel itself, though very large, was almost intolerable, from the stench arising from the sick and wounded.”

Rumors of veiled disloyalty preceded Margaret Gage to London and were current when she and her husband were reunited in November. The general, his critics implied, was uxorious, a word not much used today, but which Dr. Johnson’s eighteenth-century dictionary defines as “submissively fond of a wife; infected with connubial dotage.” The rumors served to explain how the American rabble had repulsed the flower of the king’s army and trapped it in Boston.

The Hero returned from Boston plays on the theme of Oriental seduction. The woman, who is clearly Margaret Gage, stands up from the upholstered couch on which Copley had placed her. Her belt is discarded and the Turkish caftan has slipped from her shoulder as she wraps herself around the general, taking control, the embodiment of vice and corruption. The reunion of husband and wife reveals Gage’s weakness and explains his failure and the army’s humiliation. “Gage poor wretch is scarcely thought of,” an artillery officer wrote, “he is below contempt.”

For more on Margaret Gage, we recommend Boston historian J.L. Bell’s blog, Boston 1775, which includes a thoughtful examination of the charge that she betrayed her husband’s confidence and passed military secrets to Joseph Warren. J.L. Bell finds the charge implausible. We are indebted to him for identifying an error in an earlier version of this essay.

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The People’s Constitution

Posted / Revolutionary Ideals, The Legacy of the Revolution

The moral sense philiosophy was important to the establishment of popular sovereignty as the foundation of the Constitution proposed by the Federal Convention of 1787, depicted in this print in 1823.

In 1787 Thomas Jefferson was in Paris, wasting his time as ambassador from a government that had so little authority that the French government could safely ignore it.

Many of Jefferson’s American friends, including James Madison, were deeply concerned about violent unrest driven by high taxes and the burden of debts compounded by deflation. In Massachusetts those toxic conditions drove thousands of farmers to take up arms to stop debt collection, leading the state government—inexperienced, insecure, and imperious—to impose order at the point of a bayonet.

Jefferson was not deeply concerned about the unrest in Massachusetts, known then and since as Shays’ Rebellion. He agreed with Madison that the insurgents had committed “absolutely unjustifiable” acts, but he thought “they were founded in ignorance, not in wickedness.” The insurgents did not understand that their distress was the result of economic conditions the government was incapable of addressing.

Although the people were sovereign, Jefferson wrote, they would not always be right. “The people can not be all,” he wrote, “and always, well informed.” In a government in which the people have a just degree of influence a certain amount of what Jefferson called “turbulence” was inevitable. But Jefferson was concerned that the unrest might lead reformers to conclude “that nature has formed man insusceptible of any other government but that of force, a conclusion not founded in truth, nor experience.” A government based on force—including monarchy in all its forms—was inherently unjust. “It is a government of wolves over sheep.”

The people of the world have been governed, for most of history, by wolves. Jefferson had confidence in the capacity of ordinary people to govern themselves.

So did Madison, who spent that summer at the Federal Convention in Philadelphia, shut up through the unforgiving summer heat in the Pennsylvania State House with the windows closed to prevent anyone from eavesdropping. Madison and the other leading delegate, James Wilson of Pennsylvania, were intent on creating a new kind of government—republican in form and spirit, national in scope, and endowed with authority that would enable it to protect the interests of Americans in a world of predatory imperial powers.

Lesser and less thoughtful men might have done what Jefferson feared and imposed an authoritarian government—a government of wolves over sheep—as lesser and less thoughtful leaders have done before and since. The delegates to the Federal Convention, guided by Madison and Wilson, did precisely the opposite. They built their proposed frame of government on the sovereignty of the people.

At the heart of their plan was a bicameral legislature consisting of a larger lower house and a smaller upper house—later the convention would decide to call them the House of Representatives and the Senate—that would have the power to tax, regulate commerce, impose tariffs, coin money, and make laws governing all matters not delegated to the states. Members of the lower house would be elected by the people in direct proportion to the population, each member representing an equal number of citizens.

This proposal, which gave substance to the abstract principle of popular sovereignty, was extraordinary. It has since become commonplace, but at the end of the eighteenth century no national legislature had ever been constituted in this way. The British House of Commons, in which members were elected to represent constituencies that varied in size from a few people to thousands and in which many thousands of people went unrepresented, was archaic by comparison.

A government that aims at the public good must begin by finding out the people’s numbers. Hard as it may now be to imagine, eighteenth-century governments did not know with any degree of certainty how many people they governed or where they lived. To the extent they felt any need to know, they relied on estimates and guesswork. To elect a national legislature based on population required counting every American and repeating the process periodically to keep representation in balance with a growing and moving population. The effort to do so reflects the confidence of the Enlightenment in the potential of governments based on rational principles to serve their people rather than subjugate them and the faith of the Enlightenment in the fundamental equality of people.

Many of the delegates had misgivings about what Madison and Wilson proposed, because many of the problems of the moment seemed to flow from what they regarded as the errors of popularly elected state legislatures. “The people,” Roger Sherman said, “should have as little to do as may be about the government” because “they want information and are constantly liable to be misled.” Vesting the people with sovereign power, skeptical delegates believed, was the problem.

Madison and Wilson argued that vesting the people with sovereign power was the solution. While acknowledging that democratically elected state legislatures were acting unwisely, they held the real problem was that no government possessed sufficient authority to address the nation’s ills.

Madison credited James Wilson with making the strongest case “for drawing the most numerous branch of the Legislature immediately from the people. He was for raising the federal pyramid to a considerable altitude, and for that reason wished to give it as broad a basis as possible. “No government,” Wilson said, “could long subsist without the confidence of the people. In a republican Government this confidence was peculiarly essential.” Confidence would come, Wilson contended, from a legislature that was “the most exact transcript of the whole Society.”

We look on their work today with the detachment that comes from knowing how the story came out. They managed to draft a constitution that became what is now the world’s oldest continuously functioning written frame of government. We live with its peculiarities and its compromises and imperfections while giving insufficient attention to the magnitude of their achievement and the living ideal on which it is ultimately based—the source of their conviction that the people, though they might not always be well informed, would ultimately choose well.

Madison and Wilson, along with the absent Jefferson, were trained in the moral philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment. They were convinced by the writings of Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and other Scottish thinkers that people possess a natural moral sense that guides them and allows them to make judgements quickly and intuitively, without close study or the application of acquired learning.

In the summer of 1787, Jefferson explained the moral sense in a letter to his nephew Peter Carr, a student at the College of William and Mary, advising him to skip lectures on moral philosophy:

I think it lost time to attend lectures in this branch. He who made us would have been a pitiful bungler if he had made the rules of our moral conduct a matter of science. For one man of science, there are thousands who are not. What would have become of them? Man was destined for society. His morality therefore was to be formed to this object. He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong merely relative to this. This sense is as much a part of his nature as the sense of hearing, seeing, feeling; it is the true foundation of morality . . . The moral sense, or conscience, is as much a part of man as his leg or arm. It is given to all human beings in a stronger or weaker degree, as force of members is given them in a greater or less degree. It may be strengthened by exercise, as may any particular limb of the body. This sense is submitted indeed in some degree to the guidance of reason; but it is a small stock which is required for this: even a less one than what we call Common sense. State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.

This optimistic view of the capacity of ordinary people to make good moral and ethical judgements is the most important justification of popular sovereignty—the defining ideal of the Federal Constitution—and remains the ultimate foundation of American democracy.

The practical implementation of a theory of popular sovereignty on a national scale was so new that it baffled many of the delegate who gathered in Philadelphia for the Federal Convention. Their anxieties obscured their ability to imagine the future of democratic government. None approached that future with as much confidence as James Wilson, who imagined, he said, “the influence which the Government we are to form will have, not only on our people and their multiplied posterity, but on the whole Globe.” He was, Wilson admitted, “lost in the magnitude of the object.”

The future of the Constitution depends on the people, who should remember Jefferson’s admonition that the moral sense needs to be exercised. Above all things,” Jefferson concluded,

lose no occasion of exercising your dispositions to be grateful, to be generous, to be charitable, to be humane, to be true, just, firm, orderly, courageous etc. Consider every act of this kind as an exercise which will strengthen your moral faculties, and increase your worth.

No better advice can be offered to people determined to preserve their freedom.

 

Above: George Washington presides over the Federal Convention in this engraving from A History of the United States of America, by Charles Goodrich, a pioneering American history textbook published in 1823.

To learn more about the moral sense philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, explore Francis Hutcheson’s An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue in Liberty Fund’s Online Library of Liberty. The Inquiry introduced Hutcheson’s ideas about the moral sense and established his reputation as a philosopher. James Madison, James Wilson, and Thomas Jefferson were all familiar with Hutcheson’s work and drew their ideas about the moral sense from it.

We encourage all our visitors to read Why the American Revolution Matters, our basic statement about the importance of the American Revolution. It outlines what every American should understand about the central event in American history. It will take you less than five minutes to read—and a few seconds to send the link to your friends, family, and colleagues so they can read it, too.

If you share our concern about ensuring that all Americans understand and appreciate the constructive achievements of the American Revolution, we invite you to join our movement. Sign up for news and notices from the American Revolution Institute. It costs nothing to express your commitment to thoughtful, responsible, balanced, non-partisan history education.

Richard Henry Lee: Gentleman Revolutionary

Posted / Revolutionary Characters

The American Revolution was a peculiar sort of revolution, and not least because it was led by men we find it hard to imagine as revolutionaries. George Washington, George Mason, and John Hancock were respected and wealthy members of the gentry. They had everything to lose and apparently little to gain from revolution. They were certainly nothing like the revolutionary leaders of the last century. As a consequence we tend to underestimate the revolutionary implications of their ideas and the revolutionary consequences of their actions. We conclude that there was nothing very revolutionary about their revolution and look elsewhere for the fundamental transforming events of American history—to the Civil War, the Great Depression, and the civil rights movement.

Perhaps it is a testament to the overwhelming impact of their revolution that we can scarcely imagine what the country was like before it, and conclude erroneously that their revolution was simply a colonial rebellion that shifted political power from London to America, trading one group of political grandees for another.

No conclusion could be more wrong. The American Revolution swept away the social hierarchies of the old order. It transferred sovereignty to the people at large, launching an era of increasingly democratic politics. It accelerated the economic transformation of the former colonies and led to the creation of a continental nation unlike any the world had seen.

Few Americans embodied the unique revolutionary character of the period more completely than Richard Henry Lee. He was a member of one of Virginia’s first families. The Lee name was synonymous with wealth, land ownership, and influence. Like his forebears, he dedicated much of his life to public service.

Unlike them, he became one of the most determined radicals of his time-—a leader of the opposition to British taxation and intrusive regulation and an early and important advocate of American independence and republican government. Lee looked for independence to reshape Virginia society—to make Virginians more self-sufficient and virtuous. Yet, like most of the patriot leaders of his generation, he did not anticipate the unintended consequences of his revolution.

Lee was born at Stratford Hall in Westmoreland County on Jan. 20, 1732—just four weeks before George Washington was born a few miles away. Like Washington, he was a younger son and did not stand to inherit the great plantation where he was born. After education in England, he built his own plantation house, Chantilly, on land he acquired from his brother.

Younger son or not, he was still a Lee, and an heir to one of Virginia’s great family traditions. Groping for a way to explain the distinctive culture of the Northern Neck, a Loyalist minister traced it to the attributes of the leading gentry families, “the Fitzhughs, the Randolphs, Washingtons, Carys, Grimeses, or Thorntons” whose “character both of body and mind may be traced through many generations: as for instance, every Fitzhugh has bad eyes, every Thornton hears badly, Carters are proud and imperious, and Taliaferros mean and avaricious, and Fowkeses cruel.”

“Lees,” he added, “talk well.”

Richard Henry Lee entered the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1758, and was immediately recognized as the most talented speaker in that body. But he was, despite his name and family connections, something of an outsider.

The House was dominated by a political faction associated with the Randolphs and their network of clients and kin. House Speaker John Robinson was a part of this group. He was also the colony’s treasurer. Shortly after taking his seat, the young Lee demanded an investigation of Robinson’s management of the treasury. It was soon found that Robinson had loaned large sums to prominent families associated with his faction. Lee’s Northern Neck neighbors applauded him as a reformer, but the Robinson-Randolph faction never forgave him.

Lee reminded many of his contemporaries of a character from Roman history, or, as one remarked, “one of Plutarch’s men.” He was tall and spare, with a long nose-—a Roman profile—and reddish-brown hair. His manners were stiff and formal and he seemed to always be striking a pose. Even his private letters read as if he intended them for publication. But the stiffness did not diminish the admiration that others had for him. Quite the contrary—he seemed the ideal eighteenth-century gentleman. “If elegance had been personified,” a contemporary wrote, “the person of Lee would have been chosen.”

But he was unlike other gentry leaders. He owned a plantation, but expressed no interest in agricultural innovations of the sort that relieved the routine boredom of farming for Washington and Jefferson. Nor did he use the pose of gentleman-farmer, as Washington did, to cloak his public life in the garb of a reluctant (and therefore deserving) hero called from the plow.

Lee called politics the “science of fraud,” yet he never had any real profession other than politics. In addition to his oratorical skills, he excelled in cloakroom maneuvering, what eighteenth-century politicians referred to as “composing the business” or working “out of doors.” He angled constantly for higher and better-paid offices. He was, in fact, one of Virginia’s first professional politicians, at a time when few Virginians would have recognized politics as an occupation.

A patrician master of the conventions of gentry politics, Lee was adept at mobilizing popular sentiment as well. But he was not a populist leader or a democrat in the modern sense. He expected the republic he worked to create would embrace the leadership of gentlemen like himself. Yet his radical politics tended to undermine gentry leadership and helped usher in a new and unexpected era of popular democratic politicians.

The American Revolution brought to the fore a new kind of popular radicalism, most closely associated with the insurgent organization forged by Boston’s Samuel Adams, who employed an array of weapons that later became a standard repertoire of urban revolutionaries—street theater, surgical rioting, show trials, strategically leaked documents, staged debates, and managed news.

Richard Henry Lee was a part of Adams’ network, and employed the same sort of tactics against the Stamp Act in the 1760s. In September 1765 he dressed his slaves up in “Wilkes costume” and marched them to Montross for a staged ceremony in which the stamp collector was hanged in effigy. Lee himself played the role of the condemned man, and read the “confession” of the accused before the dummy representing the collector was strung up.

A few months later, he used his militia to harass an uncooperative merchant, Archibald Richie of Leedstown, who vowed to use the hated tax stamps. Working with Richard Parker and Samuel Washington (the future general’s younger brother), Lee orchestrated a march on Ritchie’s home, where the mob forced the merchant to renounce the Stamp Act.

Lee made his first appearance on the national stage as a radical. In the First Continental Congress, he was allied with Patrick Henry, Virginia’s most vocal firebrand, and was far in the lead of more conservative Virginia delegates, including Peyton Randolph and Benjamin Harrison.

Men like Randolph and Harrison were not the sort to engage in back room maneuvers. But Lee was in his element. He was tied by marriage to some of the leading Philadelphia families and had cultivated contacts in New England. His speaking ability—which led more than one congressman to refer to him as the “American Cicero”—made him a major force in debate. But behind the scenes, he was even more effective in persuading his reluctant colleagues to break with Britain.

Working closely with John Adams, Lee introduced the resolutions that led to American independence. He made three different motions. We tend to remember only the first: “That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be totally dissolved.”

This was bold language, simple and forthright. In time, Americans came to regard it as a prologue to the Declaration of Independence, the political backdrop for Thomas Jefferson’s eloquence. But we have it backward. The Declaration was an explanation of the measure Lee proposed. John Adams understood this when he predicted that Americans would henceforth celebrate July 2—the day Lee’s resolutions were adopted—as the anniversary of American Independence.

The other resolutions Lee offered were nearly as important: “That it is expedient forthwith to take the most effectual measures for forming foreign alliances,” and “That a plan of confederation be prepared and transmitted to the respective colonies for their consideration and approbation.”

Lee was astute enough to recognize that the chance of securing military aid from France was the real selling point for the resolution on independence, that it was the only practical way to sell congressional moderates on the idea. His efforts to establish a lasting confederation between the independent states, embodied in the Articles of Confederation, helped build the foundation for a continental republic.

Unlike some of the other congressmen, Lee relied on his small congressional salary for a living. Payment was irregular and he was often in financial distress. For a few weeks in 1777, he lived mainly on wild pigeons, which were sold for a few cents per dozen, though he commented that they “afforded but a scanty fare.”

Lee’s revolutionary ideas were not limited to independence, foreign alliances, and a continental confederation. He expressed support for the idea of allowing women who owned property to vote, opposed secret legislative sessions, and demanded a bill of rights be attached to the Federal Constitution. These were, for him, natural consequences of the revolutionary commitment to equality.

Lee’s commitment to the principle of equality was in conflict with his dependence on enslaved people. He saw that the logic of the Revolution underscored the injustice of slavery. African-Americans, he wrote, were “fellow creatures created as ourselves, and equally entitled to liberty and freedom by the great law of nature.” Moreover, they would eventually be driven to rebellion when they “observed their masters possessed of a liberty denied to them.” Yet through most of his adult life, he realized much of his income from renting his slaves to other planters. As a member of the House of Burgesses, he advocated taxing new imports of slaves and other restrictions on the slave trade, but this may have been as much to drive up the price of his own slaves as it was a humanitarian effort. Lee recognized the inconsistency of it all, but in the end he could see no other way: “I do not see how I could in justice to my family refuse any advantages that might arise from the selling of them.”

Richard Henry Lee was a radical revolutionary without being a democrat. He believed in popular sovereignty but he was certain that the people would be best served by deferring to gentlemen like himself. In 1788 he was elected to the U.S. Senate, where he championed a resolution to endow federal officials with aristocratic-sounding titles. It was an effort to defend the tradition of deferential politics and gentry rule that he believed was essential for the survival of republican government.

The House of Representatives rejected the idea. A revolutionary republic established on the foundation of popular sovereignty ultimately had little use for titles or patrician leaders. The Revolution Richard Henry Lee did so much to foment and to lead ended by discarding the leadership of gentlemen revolutionaries like him in favor of a new kind of democratic politician, often common in background and lacking the classical education and aspirations that distinguished Lee and his peers. The Northern Neck of Virginia never produced another American Cicero.

Lee did not live to see the Virginia that his revolution produced. In ill health, he resigned from the Senate in 1792. He died at Chantilly, his home in Westmoreland County, in 1794. The democratic culture that flowed from Lee’s revolution ensured that there would never be another leader like him.

That revolution also accelerated the process that turned the Northern Neck, one of the most important and distinctive regions in eighteenth-century British America, into an economic and political backwater. The fortunes of the great planter families continued to fade as agriculture productivity declined and capital was drawn away from the Chesapeake region toward the new states and territories to the west and into new commercial enterprises.

By the early decades of the nineteenth century, the distinctive plantation culture of the Northern Neck was gone, and with it the gentry that had produced leaders like Lee. Stratford Hall’s ceilings were falling in, its fields uncultivated. A traveler found nothing left of Chantilly but a crumbling chimney. “Lee is gone, his house is in the dust, his garden a wild.”

 

Above: Charles Willson Peale painted this portrait of Lee in profile around 1794, emphasizing the classical features that led contemporaries to compare Lee to a senator of the Roman Republic (National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.).

Learn about the Lees of Virginia at Stratford Hall, Richard Henry Lee’s magnificently preserved birthplace in Westmoreland County.

We encourage all our visitors to read Why the American Revolution Matters, our basic statement about the importance of the American Revolution. It outlines what every American should understand about the central event in American history. It will take you less than five minutes to read—and a few seconds to send the link to your friends, family, and colleagues so they can read it, too.

If you share our concern about ensuring that all Americans understand and appreciate the constructive achievements of the American Revolution, we invite you to join our movement. Sign up for news and notices from the American Revolution Institute. It costs nothing to express your commitment to thoughtful, responsible, balanced, non-partisan history education.