The Great American Epic; D. Keeler

True, the Revolution included a lot of people wearing powdered wigs and knee breeches, and sitting around on spindly furniture. But is this a fatal flaw? Is the late 18th century simply too far away for our imagination? The answer, I suspect, is that the Civil War has two things going for it that the Revolution can't match. For one thing, there are the characters. Washington may be admirable, but he never want ed to be lovable, and in that, as in most things, he Mr. Keeler is a lawyer who lives in Menlo Park, Cali fornia. succeeded. The rest of the popular/leaders fought only locally, and none carried through the entire war in the way Grant, Lee, and Joe Johnson did. On the British side there were some interesting characters-Tarleton was a dashing rogue, "Gen tleman Johnny" Burgoyne was able to recover across the supper table most of what he had lost in the field, and Cornwallis had an interesting career, though unfortunately not in America-but our history has never paid much attention to them, and certainly never painted them as courtly gentlemen fighting for a lost and noble cause.

Probably more important is the Lost Cause. The Revolutionary generation saw the world in the dispassionate light of Enlightenment reason, but the Civil War came at the height of Victorian sentimentality and acquired an emotional charge that has stayed with it ever since. There was, fur ther, the practical necessity of romanticizing the Civil War and granting nobility to the defeated, in order to heal the nation's wounds. In contrast, by the end of the Revolution the most deter mined loyalists had been exiled or had chosen to emigrate, and there was no such need of national reconciliation. Another problem with the American Revolu tion lies in its definition. Was the war the Revolu tion? John Adams wrote that the Revolution was over in 1775,that the war wasn't a part of it. By this he meant that the revolution in the minds of the people rejecting the legitimacy of British rule had already occurred, and the fighting was simply to ratify that change. After 1775,a British victory was 456 THE FREEMAN • DECEMBER 1991 Saratoga: The Second Battle of Freeman's Farm, October 7, 1777. Burgoyne's army was defeated, thus dash ing British hopes for a quick end to the war.

impossible: a military victory would have only delayed realization of the change in political phi losophy that already had taken place. This change came to a head at the end of the French and Indian War, when the British Parlia ment decided to tax the colonists for the military protection they were receiving from the mother country, and imposed, in 1765, the famous Stamp Tax.This tax, on its face not unreasonable, became the catalyst of long-standing complaints against both the substance and form of British rule. In the decade that followed, these complaints, expressed in the prevailing philosophical language of the nat ural rights of man, led through a series of con frontations to a complete rejection of British rule. Thus, when Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, he wasn't seeking to convince an uncertain nation, but was, as he claimed, merely setting out the widely held political beliefs of the colonists.

The American Revolution, properly under stood, was therefore an intellectual revolution that took place over a period of some 10 years in public debate and private discussions, in the hearts and minds of the colonists. A people were moved to reject a familiar and long-respected authority and hazard their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor on the hope of a new nation based upon self government and the God-given and inalienable right of the individual to life, liberty, and the pur suit of happiness. And they pulled it off, creating a nation and form of government that has inspired the hopes of people throughout the world ever since. D The Chinese Won't Forget by Sheila Melvin M y decision to return to China for a jour ney that would take me from the wild jungle border with Burma to the wind swept plains of Inner Mongolia in the summer and autumn of 1990was not an easy one.