Paul Revere and the World He Lived In by Esther Forbes

 

He said to his friend, “If the British march

By land or sea from the town tonight,

Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch

Of the North Church tower as a signal light,--

One, if by land, and two, if by sea;

And I on the opposite shore will be,

Ready to ride and spread the alarm

Through every Middlesex village and farm, 

For the country folk to be up and to arm.”

…..Paul Revere’s Ride by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

His friend was Robert Newman and Paul Revere was in fact not on the opposite shore when Newman climbed the North Church tower to hang the lanterns.  Revere was still in Boston and he had so quickly hastened off to await the signal that he forgot his spurs and some scraps of clothing to muffle the oars as he made his way across the Charles River.  Nor did Revere make it to “every Middlesex village and farm;” he was captured by the British outside of Lexington. 

 Paul Revere---accomplished silversmith, coppersmith and engraver; early industrialist and Yankee innovator; husband to Sara Orne and then Rachel Walker, father of sixteen; Bostonian, Mason and a Son of Liberty---is portrayed admiringly, colorfully and with a devotion to historical accuracy in this wonderful book by Esther Forbes.

Paul Revere began life with a baptismal date of January 1, 1735.  He was named after his father Apollos Rivoire, a French Huguenot immigrant who landed in Boston as a young man and was apprenticed to John Coney a silversmith.  Apollos soon changed his name to something the British colonists could more easily handle and Paul Revere he was. 

Paul Revere, fils, grew up in a typical colonial household, went to North Writing School (a writing school as opposed to a Latin or grammar school which would have prepared him for scholarly life), worked in his father’s shop, briefly went off to fight in the French and Indian Wars and became head of household at age 19 when his father died.  Revere grew to be a man of integrity, common sense, pluck and not a small amount of ingenuity.

Well before his midnight ride Revere, perhaps unlike most of his fellow craftsmen, was included in various patriot clubs of Boston who were debating and fomenting rebellion.  His inclusion was a bit unusual as he was neither intellectual nor a gentleman of the educated class.  Forbes explains: “Paul was admitted to their society because they wished the sympathy of the large artisan class with whom he was immensely popular….” (p 56)  Paul Revere was also a do-er, a man with an even temperament and a steady head. 

His famous midnight ride was one of several such journeys Revere had already made.  His first was in November 1773 preceding the Tea Party when Revere rode to nearby seaports to advise that the British ships laden with their trunks of tea might discharge their cargo.  After the Tea Party Revere made, according to Forbes, four trips to Philadelphia.  She writes: “If one estimates the mileage from Boston to Philadelphia as three hundred and fifty at that time, his rate was about sixty-three miles a day…..”  (p. 206)  Not bad!  Revere made another famous ride when he took the Suffolk Resolves written by his good friend Dr. Joseph Warren to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. (Revere named one of his younger sons after Dr. Warren who died in the Battle of Bunker Hill.)

As we follow Revere’s life, our author brings us along through the Stamp Act rebellion, The Boston Massacre (to which Revere’s contribution was printing the famous engraving that erroneously portrayed what happened), The Boston Tea Party (Revere was most certainly a participant though no records exist), his famous midnight ride and the Battles of Lexington and Concord (Revere never actually fought in either battle).  We follow the First Continental Congress as it convenes in Philadelphia and the second Congress that appoints Washington as Commander of the Continental Army.  We read of Washington’s arrival in Boston after the Battle of Bunker Hill.  Forbes does not fight the Revolution for us but skips ahead as Boston picks up the pieces after it was under siege and plundered by the British.  We catch up with Revere as he returns to post-War life as a Boston citizen. 

Revere’s later life is as action-packed as were his early years.  Revere tries the military life, merchant life and applies for a position as customs director.  But his talents lie elsewhere and it is to his shop that he returns.  He designed a silver roller and began working in iron and bronze.  He schooled himself in bell castings, and, most notably developed a mill for rolling copper sheeting which would line the domes of colonial buildings (including New York’s City Hall) and the underside of ships, most famously the U.S.S. Constitution, ‘Old Ironsides.’ He collaborated with Robert Fulton on copper boilers for steamships. The Paul Revere Heritage Site in Canton, MA is home to his recently-refurbished copper mill. Revere Copper Products Co. in Rome, New York operates today though Revere Ware is no longer made. If you happen to own any Revere Ware pots and pans with the copper bottom, you own a bit of history.

Esther Forbes was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for this book which was published in 1942.  She credits her mother, a historian, with doing much of the research and document-hunting that forms the basis for her book. The book flows easily for all its history; Forbes has been very accurately described as a “novelist who writes like a historian and a historian who writes like a novelist.”  While telling the story of Revere’s life, Forbes intersperses chapters on teeth and tea, dentistry, political clubs, the smallpox scourge in Boston and Revere’s silver work.  She gives profiles and insights into many of the prominent figures of the pre-revolutionary period in Boston. There is a good map of old Boston in the front of the book but not nearly enough supporting maps and pictures, though it is possible that I didn’t have the best edition of Forbes' book.   

For some additional information on Paul Revere, follow this link to the American Antiquarian Society to read about a 2019-20 exhibit called Reflections on Beyond Midnight: Paul Revere.  The first 28 minutes of Panel 1 with Robert Martello, a professor at Olin College of Engineering, are especially good and cover Revere’s work as a craftsman and inventor during his later life.

Paul Revere died at the age of 83.  He outlived his second wife, Rachel, and was survived by five children and 50 grandchildren.  Let’s hope we continue to have Americans and patriots like this man-of-action, Paul Revere, brought alive in Forbes’ excellent book which I hope you will read.     

Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Bush by Jon Meacham

Whether one casts George Herbert Walker Bush, 41^st President of the United States, as a great Republican or a sell-out to the conservative cause, whether one ascribes to him the ‘wimp factor’ or views him as a public figure who modeled selflessness and service, the author gives enough of a reasonably objective perspective on Mr. Bush that most readers will find this book to their liking.  It is chock full of information on HW’s life, and, with copious quotes from HW’s diaries, plenty of Bush’s own thoughts. 

What a career the man had!  At age eighteen and fresh out of high school, George Bush enlisted in the Navy and earned his pilot wings.  Showing considerable grit, Bush saw action during the war and was shot down in Japanese waters over the island of Chichi Jima.  He parachuted out of his burning plane and was rescued (though the loss of his crew members affected him considerably).  With the end of the war (and already married to Barbara Pierce Bush) he completed his undergraduate degree at Yale in two and a half years.  

He left the East Coast and took his young family to Texas to work his way up in the oil business.  He entered Texas politics in 1966 and served in the U.S. House of Representatives.  He was the UN ambassador under Richard Nixon, chaired the Republican National Committee during the heady Watergate years, served as China envoy and CIA director during the Ford administration, completed two terms as Vice President under Ronald Reagan and went on to the presidency for four years from 1988 to 1992.  HW presided over a family of 5 living children (having lost his oldest daughter to leukemia at the age of 4) and numerous grandchildren.  He lived until the age of 94 and died in 2018 the same year as his wife. 

George H. W. Bush came from wealth and pedigree no question.  On his father’s side, Bush’s ancestors were so long-established in America that one of them, Dr. Samuel Prescott, rode with Paul Revere.  The Bush family was originally from the East Coast but HW’s grandfather, Samuel Prescott Bush, traveled to Columbus, Ohio at the suggestion of a Rockefeller friend to there make his fortune in the manufacturing of railroad parts.  S. P. Bush did well.  Bush’s own father, Prescott Bush, eventually left the manufacturing business and the Midwest and moved East to join the investment firm of Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.  He later pursued a career in Connecticut politics and served as U.S. Senator from that state for eleven years.  

On his mother’s side the Walker family hailed from St. Louis and had a dry goods business.  When George Herbert “Bert” Walker decided to walk out on that, he started an investment firm.  Bert was the father of Dorothy Bush, HW’s mother.  Dorothy’s life was not plain.  She had nannies, a childhood filled with the fine arts, athletics and she attended an East Coast finishing school.  The Walker family summered in Kennebunkport at the now well-known Walker’s Point, a parcel of land that Dorothy’s father and uncle had invested in.  There was also a ‘plantation’ in South Carolina. 

HW grew up in comfortable Greenwich, Connecticut, attended Phillips-Andover and Yale and he had an abundance of the right kind of social and political connections.  The stereotype or cliché that he was an out-of-touch elite, however, is neither accurate nor fair.  Bushes were expected to make their own way in the world and do so with honor, hard work and, by the way, don’t forget to make a valuable contribution to society while you’re at it.  George H.W. Bush lived up to the family standard more than admirably.  

HW was high energy and gregarious.  Both tall and handsome, he was a good athlete, an average scholar, he had a good mind though he was not a great speaker.  He liked people and entertaining.  He was at ease with himself and others.  His childhood nickname of Have-Half was an early indicator of a natural affinity for diplomacy.  He directed his abilities and talents to mesh well with the demands of most everything he did.  His knack for getting along served him particularly well during his years as Reagan’s Vice President in my opinion. George Bush was careful and intentional about serving Reagan while also carving out a position for himself that kept him relevant and in the action. 

The book covered all of Bush’s various careers.  His presidency and two presidential campaigns occupied the bulk of the book I’d say, and for those years the author provided a good brush-up on both recent international and domestic history.  Mr. Meacham included enough information on most topics to either refresh one’s memory or provide enough of an outline to follow along.  Gorbachev, Noriega, Thatcher, Mitterand, Helmut Kohl, Lech Walesa (curiously, absolutely no mention of Pope John Paul II comes to mind) frequently populated the international issues.  On the home front, it was fascinating to read about the early careers of, not only HW, but Gerald Ford, Bob Dole, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.  And remember Gary Hart and Donna Rice?  

The defining issues of the Bush presidency were the end of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent dealings with Russia and the international community, the invasion of Panama, Saddam Hussein and the Gulf War (after which Bush’s popularity ratings skyrocketed) and the domestic budget deficit and taxes which he raised despite his campaign promise to the contrary (after which Bush’s popularity ratings plummeted).  Bush also appointed two justices to the Supreme Court, David Souter and Clarence Thomas, with the confirmation of the latter causing considerable controversy.  

The defining tension of the Bush presidency, and perhaps of the man himself was his tendency toward compromise and conciliation as opposed to a self-promoting leadership style.  Perhaps there was also an element of “doing good” that will most always end in some mushy goal or unintended consequence.  In addition, the perspective Bush had on leadership and the traditional values he espoused were becoming increasingly outdated as the closing decades of the 20^th century unfolded.  

Here is how HW characterizes himself as a leader, referring to Newt Gingrich’s criticism of the Bush compromise on taxes.  HW wrote in his diary that the media had been “hitting me for being kind and gentle, instead of confrontational, juxtaposing my views against Newt’s, my style against Newt’s.  I was elected to govern and to make things happen, and my view is, you can’t do it through confrontation.”  p. 365 

And here is the author’s summation of how Bush viewed political office.  “Bush acknowledged that he was neither wonk nor ideologue.  He saw politics more in terms of consensus than of ideology.  One ran for office—and did what partisanship required to win elections—in order to amass power to serve the larger good.  For Bush, the work of government was less about radical reform than it was about careful stewardship.  P 211

This summation, accurate and fair, is in my opinion the best light in which to evaluate George H.W. Bush as a political figure and President of the United States.  Too firmly steeped in gentlemanly decency and too convinced of the value of practicing modesty, he may have been a President better suited to a less combative and morally divided culture.    

Jon Meacham’s biography of HW is a very readable book though his writing can tend toward the lackluster.  He aims to give “Just the facts, ma’am” though see note below.  Meacham never seems to delight in either his subject or the historical context about which he’s writing.  One could argue that this gives his books greater gravitas, but I find his style to be a little drab.  With this book, Mr. Meacham becomes my champion of Notes.  You will recall that Mr. Bergamini’s 1,200-page, two-volume Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy had virtually a book of Notes, 150 pages.  In this 607-page, single-volume biography, Mr. Meacham has 170 pages of Notes!  There are also plenty of photos organized in two sections. 

I had planned this book as a skimmer, but became so invested in George Herbert Walker Bush and his family with each passing chapter that I was compelled to read every word.  Politics and his presidency aside, who wouldn’t want to be best friends with this extremely talented and principled man who would have a party if you visited him and take you for a fast ride on his speedboat, Fidelity?  I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again.  I certainly know the family well enough now with this book under my belt, and I remain convinced.  If we stay in Texas long enough, I’m going to be hanging out with Laura and “W” at somebody’s ranch someday.  Just you wait and see.  

Note:  In discussing the controversial budget deficit and tax issue, it was pointed out to me that Meacham presented a one-sided view that reflected either the author’s ignorance of or bias against Reagan’s economic policies.  Similarly, Meacham listed as achievements a number of Bush’s actions that were unpopular with conservatives such as the Americans with Disabilities Act.  On foreign policy, the author generally covered Bush in a favorable light.  However, as with Bush’s decision not to go after Saddam Hussein once Kuwait was taken care of, there were often a lot of direct quotes from Bush’s diary so the President explained himself more often than not. 

Living History by Hillary Rodham Clinton

 Hillary Clinton’s book Living History might be better titled, Diary of a Mad First Lady for Hillary Rodham Clinton is certainly that.  She is an intelligent woman who, had she had the presence of mind not to throw her lot in with a charlatan, would have likely done very well on her own.  That she somehow thought her star could rise with Bill’s was her tragic downfall.  

When she and Bill Clinton met during their law school years at Yale, it was clear that he planned to go into politics.  Hillary, through her mentor Marian Wright Edelman, looked to be on track to undertake what Hillary characterizes as her life-long advocacy for children’s rights (to which she later added women’s rights).  She and Bill lived together, traveled together and campaigned for McGovern together. Hillary Rodham was busy with research projects, writing articles and clerking.  She led a voter registration drive in Texas and was a member of the impeachment staff investigating Richard Nixon. She appeared to be making her own way. 

Hillary says that Bill Clinton was determined to marry her. Yet it was she who trailed him to Fayetteville, AK.  After all she wrote, if the relationship was to succeed someone had to “give ground.” It must not have occurred to her to ask why it wasn’t him. 

Soon after marriage, Bill became Attorney General in Arkansas and Mrs. Clinton became a member of the Rose law firm. Not that she wanted to work for such a prestigious firm. She had always “resisted” private law but now she felt it made sense because Bill’s salary as AG was so paltry. When he became governor it was the same problem.  With a salary of just $35,000 a year she felt the need to “build up a nest egg.”  That’s when Mrs. Clinton began dabbling in commodities and she and Bill invested in Whitewater Estates. 

At page 76, the chapter entitled Little Rock, is when questions about Hillary Clinton’s emotional intelligence really kick in.  Hillary Rodham Clinton seems to have gotten the short end of the stick when it comes to self-awareness and good judgment about herself and others.  In short, Hillary Clinton doesn’t ever seem able to figure anything out.  On the one hand, she tells us she’s sharp as a whip, a self-assured take-charge type.  In the next paragraph she is mystified and aflutter with conflict. As a single woman, she was dedicated to children’s rights advocacy and following her heart to Bill, but she was “utterly confused” about where her life was headed.  As a married woman, she was worried about making ends meet though “we lived in the Governor’s Mansion and had an official expense account.”  When the Clintons got involved with Jim McDougal, they knew he had “reassuring” credentials and a “solid reputation.”(pg. 87) After all, Bill Clinton had known McDougal for ten years.  Later, Hillary just couldn’t understand how she and Bill misjudged him.   

When she became the nation’s First Lady, her troubles multiplied. Right off the bat, President Clinton named his wife chair of the President’s Task Force on National Health Care Reform. Both the issue and Hillary were immediately controversial. Again, Mrs. Clinton seems to have had no idea what lay ahead.   She recounts that, after her appointment, then-governor of New York Mario Cuomo approached her asking what she had done to make her husband so mad. Hillary drew a blank.  What was Cuomo talking about?  Cuomo replied that her husband would “have to be awfully upset about something to put you in charge of such a thankless job.”  The slap in the face didn’t register with Hillary. She barreled ahead. 

Hillary claims she was quite comfortable with the non-traditional role she planned to take as First Lady.  “To me, there was nothing incongruous about my interests and activities.” She liked improving health care just as much as she liked working on table settings (paraphrase)!   In the next sentence she writes, “…through my own inexperience, I contributed to some of the conflicting perceptions about me.”  It took her “awhile to figure out” that not everyone would see things her way.  At one point she complains that the governorship didn’t properly prepare her and Bill for the national stage. (pg. 141) 

In addition to a seeming inability to understand herself and those around her, Mrs. Clinton is always in crisis mode.  She characterizes her life as one muddled dilemma after another. It’s not clear whether this is dramatic posturing on her part or whether it’s an accurate reflection of a woman constantly in conflict.  Hillary isn’t exactly a liar. She’s a dissembler. She prevaricates.  She deceives herself first and seems to think others will follow suit.  

Amidst the fury over her role in health care reform, Hillary describes herself as a First Lady who would lead the way in an “era of changing gender roles.”  She would help accustom people to seeing women occupy positions of power.  Some two years and 120 pages later, however, she depicts herself in the middle of a maelstrom, a good wife trying to support her husband.  She suggests that it was her staff who inspired her to be a pioneering female role model.    

It happened after the crushing mid-term elections that ushered in a Republican Congress.  Hillary went into full crisis-mode behavior.  As she met with her all-female staff (pg. 261), she describes her despair in the face of the election results.  “Fighting back tears, my voice cracking, I poured out apologies.  I was sorry if I had let everyone down and contributed to our losses.  It wouldn’t happen again.”  She was “considering” leaving her political work behind, she was cancelling appearances, she didn’t want to hurt her husband’s administration.  Hillary claims that silence fell over the group.  Then, her loyal posse gave it to her straight.  They brought her out of her stormy crisis and into the sunshine of a new day.  Now she understood. She couldn’t quit.  “Too many other people, especially women, were counting on me.”  Pg. 261 

The book continues with contradictions and elaborations that alternately depict Hillary as confident leader or struggling victim. As the confident leader, it is Hillary who calls Dick Morris to discuss strategy.  It is Hillary who enlightens when normal minds are stumped.  It is Hillary who is forever at Bill’s side being “a helpful partner for him.”  It is “Bill and I” who consider policy.  In an almost delusional passage, Hillary tries to convince us that she was even involved in the Mid-East peace negotiations.  She writes that she often took calls from Leah Rabin and Queen Noor of Jordan when their respective husbands---that is, the Prime Minister of Israel and the King of Jordan---wanted to get information to the President through “informal channels.” (pg.315) Meaning her? Embarrassing. 

As the victim, Mrs. Clinton devotes a considerable number of pages to defending herself and her husband against the scandals and accusations that hounded them during Clinton’s eight years in office. In fact, other than welfare reform and a few scattered chapters on foreign policy, the Clinton years seem nothing but scandal---Vince Foster, Travelgate, Whitewater, her commodities trading, the McDougals.  She aggressively lambasts her adversaries and covers for herself and Bill.  She casts herself as victim of the political right wing and as loyal advisor and soulmate to the man she loves.  Can you imagine?  And we haven’t even gotten to Monica Lewinsky. 

Up until page 439, the chapter entitled ‘Soldiering On,’ Hillary Clinton explains away every other instance of her husband’s serial sexual exploitation and degradation of women.  Monica Lewinsky is the affair she finally couldn’t re-write.  Once again, Mrs. Clinton can’t understand how it all happened. She is in crisis.  When Bill finally told the truth, she was “gulping for air...crying and yelling….”  She couldn’t believe “he would do anything to endanger our marriage and our family.” (Huge eye roll.)   In the end, she says she stood by him because he was the President and, as President, he had done nothing wrong.  

The book rollercoasters on.  In one bizarre chapter, ‘Conversations with Eleanor,’ she describes her mystical, reverential connection to Eleanor Roosevelt.  In similar fashion in another chapter, she recounts an afternoon spent with Jackie Kennedy in Jackie’s NYC apartment.  With the sycophantic adulation of an outsider courting the in-crowd, Hillary portrays herself and Jackie as kindred spirits whose souls meshed into a perfect friendship.  It’s pathetic really. 

There are a few chapters that read more normally such as those that cover her travels to Central Europe, Africa and South Asia; the content is fairly interesting.  Her final chapters are devoted to her rancor about the 2000 election that Gore lost and her campaign for senator of New York.  Regarding the former, she lays out a no-holds-barred aggressive attack on the courts and the Republicans.  Regarding the latter, it’s mostly self-congratulatory fluff about everyone wanting her to run for the Senate.  

Hillary Rodham Clinton is a tragic figure.  Her decision to marry Bill Clinton led to one failure after another, and, in the end, to a demise that even she didn’t deserve.  One has to feel for her. After the humiliations she suffered as First Lady, she scrambled and scraped only to get a dreary stint as a senator. Then she lost a presidential nomination to a younger black man who outdid her in both arrogance and posturing. Obediently accepting it all, she settled for fourth fiddle as his Secretary of State but only as the final springboard that would certainly garner her the well-deserved gold ring of the presidency.  Alas.  She lost out again, this time to a smart-aleck white guy who treated her as badly as her husband always had. 

Hillary Rodham Clinton is a humiliated wife, an alternately exploited and dismissed political appendage to her deviously self-absorbed and emotionally shallow husband.  She is a remnant discarded by the Democrat Party and the feminist movement whose mascot she briefly was. For better or for worse, she has written about all of it in this book. 

Patriots, The Men Who Started the American Revolution by A.J.Langguth

This book is a natural follow-up to one’s high school American history lessons that may have been mostly highlights in the first place, but might also be largely forgotten in the second. As the author wrote in his acknowledgements, he intended his book for the reader who “knew that Washington had crossed the Delaware but didn’t know why; that Benedict Arnold had betrayed his country, but didn’t know how.”  Exactly.  

This book is thematically similar to Langguth’s book on the war of 1812 in his use of topics, as opposed to a chronology of events, to tell the story of the beginnings of the American Revolution.  The approach works well. 

A closer-up look at familiar firebrands like Samuel Adams, James Otis, Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry and John Hancock shows them to be lesser lights when it comes to intellect and brain power and more accurately seen as dreamers and instigators; they are a collection of rather self-serving and unappealing individuals on closer reading.  They were all much as John Adams described Thomas Paine.  They, like Paine, had… “a better hand in pulling down than building.” (p. 340)  I conjecture that the work of building up was done by the likes of Adams (John), Jefferson, Washington, Madison and Hamilton.   

On the British side, King George III and some of the British appointments like Hutchinson and Bernard come across as neither so vile nor so tyrannical.  Even the British generals Howe, Burgoyne and Clinton are more bureaucratic than they are cutthroat.    

Benjamin Franklin is one of the most elusive characters of all. He is in his 60s as the colonies begin their quest for independence.  He is neither the firebrand that I thought he was nor is he particularly in the forefront of the movement for independence.  He is in Europe during most of the pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary period and operates behind the scenes. For my taste, John Adams stands out from the crowd as a surprising model of prudence and statesmanship and he is easily the most level-headed of the patriots.   Adams was not showy or particularly impressive in any way.  He wasn’t a great orator, he wasn’t a great writer and he was not a physically commanding presence.  Yet he unceasingly read the big picture with insight and clarity. His lack of stage personality may be what gave him the ability to be so consistently honest and balanced.    

The Revolutionary War endured until 1781 with the British surrender at Yorktown. It took until 1783 to establish the terms for peace. If Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence is the document that served as the colonies’ formal declaration of war (and there is no other that I remember reading about), then many of the familiar events associated with the American Revolution occurred either prior to the actual beginning of the war or within its first year! 

Thus, the Stamp Act and associated rioting 1765, the Boston Massacre 1770, the Boston Tea Party 1773, the convenings of the Continental Congresses 1774 and 1775, the battles of Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill, all 1775, the establishment of a continental army with George Washington at its command 1775, even Washington’s first bloodless victory in Boston (March of 1776) all preceded Jefferson’s penning of the Declaration.   

What followed that same year were the American defeats in the battles in New York (Brooklyn and Kips’ Bay, the retreat to Harlem Heights and then White Plains for the Americans), then Washington’s retreat to New Jersey and Pennsylvania from which point he made his Christmas Day crossing of the ice-packed Delaware River to stage his successful attack on the Hessian soldiers in Trenton.  December of 1776 ushered in the battle of Princeton prior to which Washington made his impassioned plea to his soldiers to give him six weeks more service to the cause. They did and the colonies were triumphant at Princeton.  The year of 1776 was just completed!  

I have copious notes on the battles that followed as well as other aspects of the war.  I confess to having skipped over three chapters in this lengthy book.  They were chapters on the battles of Bunker Hill, Saratoga and Yorktown.  My ability to process and digest the strategies and particulars of battles seems to be shamefully limited whether through a lack of brain power on my part or disinterest I’m not sure.  Probably both.  After a point, I just want to know who and when and was it a win or a loss. 

I recommend this book.   The depth and breadth of this subject in which all Americans should be well-versed requires more reading on the subject.  A good follow-up will be Angels in the Whirlwind by Benson Bobrick.

 

1812, The War That Forged A Nation by Walter R. Borneman and Union 1812, The Americans Who Fought the Second War of Independence by A.J. Langguth

The War of 1812 is not generally considered an important war except notice the subtitles of these two books.  The significantly insignificant War of 1812 both solidified the gains of the Revolutionary War and unified a young nation!  It also gave us our national anthem, many national heroes and such memorable phrases as Don’t Give Up the Ship! Tippecanoe and Tyler, too! and We have met the enemy and they are ours!  Any student of American history benefits tremendously by knowing the origins and outcome of this war. As for knowing all the battles, I must admit that my head spun as one after another was fought, usually botched and lost or, less often, won in an unexpected show of strength, by the Americans.    

A portent of the war was the skirmish between the American Chesapeake vs. the British Leopard fought in 1807 off the coast of Virginia when the British attempted to board the Chesapeake to search for British deserters.  When the captain of the Chesapeake defied the British, they pounded his ship and carried off four sailors, three of whom were actually Americans!  The captain of the Chesapeake, Barron, surrendered, to his later humiliation, but the incident alerted Americans to the real and present danger of the British impressing American soldiers.  

The origins of the war, then, were British impressment of sailors, British trade restrictions, the fact of the British continuing to occupy forts along the Canadian border which they were supposed to have vacated per the 1783 Treaty of Paris and, lastly,  Indian attacks fomented by both British and French against the Americans.  President James Madison declared war June 18, 1812 with the approval of Congress.

The outcome of the war was worked out in Ghent, Belgium.  The Treaty of Ghent was signed on Christmas Eve of 1814, with the Battle of New Orleans on the brink of being fought.  The terms of the Treaty were underwhelming.  Each side resumed control of the territories occupied before the war.  No terms were set on impressment, one of the major causes of the war!  All Indian lands were to be restored to their various tribes. 

The war was fought on various fronts.  I found it easiest to think in terms of five fronts but this was a simplification solely for my convenience. First, in the Northwest Theater, the Battle of Tippecanoe fought in 1811 in the Northwest Territory was a precursor to the War of 1812.  William Henry Harrison, former governor of the Indiana Territory and later the president of the nation for one month, was in command.  It was a win for the Americans in the sense that they put an end to Shawnee Chief Tecumseh’s attempts to form an Indian nation.  At the same time, the battle aroused such antipathy towards Americans on the part of the Indians that Tecumseh and his tribes became allies of the British once war was declared just seven months later.   

In the Northeast there were two sea battles of consequence, the first being the U.S.S. Constitution (Old Ironsides) vs. the British Guerriere.  This battle was fought in the early months of the war and was an American victory.  The other battle was in July 1813 when Captain James Lawrence, commanding the Chesapeake took on the British Shannon. Lawrence, though fatally wounded, gave out his famous admonition, Don’t give up the ship!  Fight her till she sinks!  The Americans lost but Lawrence’s words served as an American rallying cry in subsequent battles of this war.

To the north was the Canadian Theater which I lumped together with the Northern Frontier including control of the Great Lakes and the area around Lake Champlain. The string of battles fought here was seemingly endless. The descriptions of battle strategy and troop location were beyond my grasp such that I had to take notes (not included here) to follow who went where and when. They were the battles of Detroit, York, Lake Erie and Fort Niagara to name a few.  Some noteworthies of this theater who come to mind were Oliver Perry, Winfield Scott and Zebulon Pike. 

The mid-Atlantic or Chesapeake Theater includes the Battle of Bladensburg, the vengeful burning of the White House and the bombarding of Fort McHenry outside of Baltimore, this last being the only time the Americans emerged at all victorious in this theater. I must add that it was gratifying to at last understand exactly why Francis Scott Key (or Frank Key as one author kept calling him) was sitting on a ship in the harbor and continually checking for the flag amid the rockets’ red glare!  Dolly Madison gets a cameo appearance here for saving George Washington’s portrait from peril when the Brits set fire to the White House.  She was whisked from the scene by carriage just in the nick of time.

The campaign to the South was basically the Battle of New Orleans, the crowning American victory that gave General Andrew Jackson his entrée to the national stage. This included the Battle of Horseshoe Bend (seemed to be mostly a case of fightin’ injuns) where Sam Houston and Andrew Jackson first met up.  Then Jackson and his Tennessee militia fought with gusto to defeat the arrogant British.  The date of the battle is January 8, 1815, some two weeks after peace had been declared in Ghent.  

The War of 1812 is not a topic I would re-visit though it has nothing to do with these books. There is something about the war that makes it a tedious subject.  Perhaps it has to do with a lot of action packed into a relatively short period of time, two years, and over a considerable geographic area including land, lakes, harbors and sea. 

These two books can be read in tandem and make a nice complement one to the other.  The Borneman book takes the chronological approach to telling history and gives us the events as they occur whereas the Langutth book uses more of a story-telling approach which gives an account of the war through the individuals who took center stage in the drama.

 

 

 

The Birth of America by William R. Polk

This book begins with some good information on the culture, languages and customs of the East Coast American Indian groups already here in North America as the modern age began.  This served as good basis for moving on to the age of exploration and discovery in the 15^th and 16^th centuries as French, Spanish and British explorers arrived on the eastern shores of the New World.

The author covers Ponce de Leon (1513 in La Florida), Panfilo Narvaez (1528 in Tampa Bay), Pedro Menendez de Aviles in 1565 in St. Augustine and Cabeza de Vaca (who traversed North America after the dissolution of Narvaez’s expedition).  We have Hernando de Soto, first in Peru, then up the Mississippi.  There is LaSalle, Verrazano (he sailed for France) who epxlored from North Carolina up to Massachusetts in 1524, Champlain, Cartier and Sir Francis Drake who was basically an English pirate!  (Note: The Portuguese heyday of exploration with its routes to India (Vasco da Gama in 1497) and the circumnavigation of the globe (Ferdinand Magellan in 1519) did not touch the northern continent of the New World.  Pedro Alvares Cabral came to the  southern continent when in 1500 he discovered Brazil.)

 The author has chapters on the perils of sailing the Atlantic, the slave and sugar trades and the French explorers and the fur trade.  He devotes a substantial chapter to the empires of West Africa that fed the slave trade and were the origins of blacks in America.  These were the Dahomey, the Congolese, the Akan and the Mali empires.  The author explores the Europe that gave rise to the New World and then focuses for the remainder of the book on the development of commerce, crops, industry, governance and rebellion in the colonies.

This was a good book for brushing up on your high school American history and gaining a more in-depth understanding of the topics that receive often superficial treatment in the textbooks.  For example, everyone knows that the colonists opposed the Stamp Act.  But what actually happened in 1765 in Boston when the British attempted to introduce the act was not the grassroots groundswell of discontent that is usually described.  Rather, the violence that was stirred up over this act was the work of a “trained mob,” with the players behind the scenes being Boston’s Samuel Adams and James Otis.  The author describes these two as taking the role of “Robespierre in the later French Revolution, inflaming the public and brushing aside the moderates.”   Adams is referred to as an “agitator,” “a shadowy figure” who “was no stranger to violence.”  The rioting in Boston over the Stamp Act was basically a terrorist act carried out by thuggish gangs from the North and South ends of Boston under the direction of the “shadowy” Adams.  Ignominious beginnings for the birth of  freedom in America!

The strength of this book was the way in which the author examined pre-Revolutionary America.  He organized 150 years of history into thematic topics and then explored those topics in some depth. The chapters on the Indians and slavery were particularly helpful in dispelling a lot of erroneous stereotypes and over-simplifications often associated with these two groups.  I took copious notes on most of the chapters.

Spoken from the Heart by Laura Bush

In her autobiographical memoir, Spoken from the Heart, Laura Bush shows herself to be a very smart, well-adjusted and normal person.  These qualities are what certainly must have led her to being such a gracious and confident public persona on the international stage.  

The first chapters of the book are, truly, spoken from the heart. With a lot of feeling and insight about herself and her parents, she writes about growing up in dusty Midland, Texas, an only child who longed for brothers and sisters.  As a baby boomer growing up on the “other side of the 60s,” the cultural milieu of her early life is really part of history.  It was good reading.  After college, she lived on her own while teaching in Houston and pursuing a degree in library science.  When she and George Bush were introduced by mutual friends, it seems to have been a relationship meant to be.  Throughout the book and without being maudlin or overly personal, she refers to the solid respect and devotion she and the president have for one another. 

After the first 150 pages of this (400-plus page) book, Mrs. Bush’s writing often reads a lot like the standard apologetics books so predictable with public servants.  It is here that the reading does become tedious at times. By age 49 she was the First Lady of Texas and six years later she was First Lady of the United States.  More than half the book is devoted to her life as a public person.  The terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the Afghan and Iraq Wars dominated the Bush presidency.  On these issues as well as Katrina, other areas of foreign policy and domestic issues, Mrs. Bush invariably and glibly supports and praises the decisions the President made.  

Still, she sprinkles in color and opinion along the way as she continues to discuss life with her daughters, her in-laws (“Bar” and “Gampy”), campaigning and entertaining.   She writes with genuine interest and concern about her work in Afghanistan, Burma, Africa and here at home with book campaigns and teenage gangs.  I believe that George and Laura Bush do nothing without first deciding if it is the virtuous thing to do.  Despite a noblesse oblige that may underpin their actions, they are sincere, honest and consistent in their beliefs.  They are not afraid to get their hands dirty and will do whatever it takes to get a job done.  

One exception to the consistency and sincerity of Mrs. Bush’s beliefs concerns abortion. She addresses the topic in this book but fudges it in my opinion.  She remains unclear on exactly what she does believe and blames the press for labeling her pro-abortion.  It is difficult to understand why Laura Bush appears to adopt the typical feminist stance on abortion when her thinking in other areas is so clear.  In the early years of their marriage, she and then-citizen George Bush were about to adopt a child, having difficulty conceiving on their own.  How do you justify abortion while simultaneously understanding first-hand the fragility and tenuousness of life.  

Despite her fuzziness on what I guess was the difficult topic of abortion, Mrs. Bush doesn’t typically shy away from the unpleasant.  She made repeated references to the smug, relentless sniping of the mainstream media during her husband’s presidency and discussed how she handled it.  She devoted quite a few pages to the tension and uncertainty provoked by Al Gore and the Democrats in the 2000 election.  (Reading between the lines, I’d say the Bush camp saw the Democrats’ behavior as petty and self-serving.)  Amidst the discussion, however, she stays cool and doesn’t ever give anybody the real tongue-lashing they deserve.   Even when writing about how the elitist press condescendingly treated her as a know-nothing from Texas, she remains above-board.   

The pace that she and W maintained during his presidency can be described in a word, whirlwind.  Perhaps this is true of any presidency and of every First Lady, but I kind of doubt it.  Laura Bush threw herself into a great number of projects and followed a travel and entertainment schedule that might have scared off a lesser individual (or a more self-absorbed or self-promoting first lady, a few come to mind).  She visited 75 countries, hosted more than 1,500 dinners and events, restored 5 and refurbished 25 rooms in the White House, attended summits and symposiums and panels.  And all this is not to mention her extensive work with Burmese refugees, AIDS patients in Africa (a country she traversed 5 times) and extensive work in Afghanistan (three visits) with women and children.  

Having visited the George W. Bush Presidential Library at SMU and following as I do the programs at the Bush Center, my allegiance to and interest in the Bush family waxes and wanes.   They are clearly dedicated to making a difference in the world and continue with projects they started during the Bush presidency.  Yet, their antipathy towards Donald Trump and his presidency bespoke a decided lack of vision I thought.  In addition, their moderated approach is ineffective in these turbulent times.  Nonetheless, this informative book has put my interest back in the waxing category.  Read it!