Is there a single high school book in the United States that informs students that the first Thanksgiving in 1621 was a celebration of a land deal? The Wampanoags had given the “English permission to occupy 12,000 acres of land.” But two years later when “the English invited a number of tribes to a feast ‘symbolizing eternal friendship’ … two hundred Indians dropped dead from unknown poison.” (1, 2)
Who knows that George Washington, the wealthiest man in the colonies, seized some 20,000 acres, ten percent of the land that was earmarked for the enlisted men to whom it was promised, men who had fought faithfully under his command? (3)
Is there a high school book in the country that reveals that Samuel Adams and John Hancock, who had boasted that he would personally “face down the [British] Regulars,” fled together in Hancock’s coach, leaving Hancock’s aunt and fiancée to the mercy of the British troops? It was Paul Revere and young John Lowell who saved the day, returning to retrieve the trunk full of important papers that Adams and Hancock had abandoned for the British soldiers to discover.(4)
Is it common knowledge that George Washington and Robert Dinwiddie, colonial Governor of Virginia, triggered the “climactic imperial war for North America” when they “tried to oust the French from the forks of the Ohio” in order to sell Ohio Valley land to English colonists in 1754? (5)
After losing the French and Indian War against the British, the French took revenge, supplying Americans with arms at Saratoga. French soldiers outnumbered Americans at the final decisive victory at Yorktown. Even the uniforms that Americans wore in the revolution were donated by the French. Without the help of the French, Americans could only have fought the revolution defensively. (6)
Are there any high school students who know that Daniel Shays was a true American hero? Daniel Shays was a captain in the Continental Army. He rushed to Lexington when it was under threat; he fought at Bunker Hill; and he took part in the final battle at Saratoga. But after the Revolution, he led a protest movement of farmers when Massachusetts tried to repossess their land. “Hardpressed to pay their debts and taxes, armed farmers shut down the courts and resisted state troopers sent to suppress them.” (7, 8, 9)
John Hancock and Samuel Adams, having expelled the British only to seize power for themselves, sent troops to crush the protests that Shays led. “Boston’s new rulers stamped out protest as fiercely as George III had done.” They sent troops against the farmers. “About a dozen” of its leaders were condemned to death though later pardoned. Shays fled to Vermont and finally ended up in New York. (10)
And is there a single high school student in the United States who knows that the patriots persecuted those who tried to remain neutral in the conflict? Or that the first armed conquest of the patriots was actually the conquest of Pennsylvania where peaceful Quakers resisted the violent movement for independence? (11, 12)
But, in retrospect, perhaps the “conquest of the Quakers” is not so surprising, for the Quakers were radical. They dispensed with social hierarchy and refused “to doff their hats before their rulers as a sign of respect.” They “established parallel men’s and women’s leadership for their meetings.” They were the only religious group that openly challenged “Indian war and African slavery.” They insisted upon “the equality of all persons before God.” (13)
The revolutionary fairy tale presented in American history books is precisely that: a fairy tale – the equivalent of the presents that Santa Claus delivers at Christmas, while the true story of the bills and the costs of those presents is hidden from view. The “overriding goal [of the revolutionaries] was simply power. Democracy [was a later] invention of historians.” (14)
© The right of Carla Toney to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Sources:
Complete source references can be found on pages 147-149 in Multitribal Indians in Search of No Man’s Land: The American Expansion and the Chickamaugans Between Resistance and Migration (v & r unipress, 2023).
1) Tristan Ahtone. “The Dark Historical Roots of Our ‘Thanksgiving: Lest We Forget,’” Rense.com, accessed 10 April 2019, https://rense.com/general45/thanks.htm. There is an alternative account in the New York Times. See Maya Salam, “Everything You Learned About Thanksgiving is Wrong,” New York Times, accessed 21 November 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/us/thanksgiving-myths-fact-check.html.
2) Tommy Orange, There, There (New York: Penguin Random House, 2018), 4.
3) Jennings, Creation of America, 121–23, 276.
4) Ibid., 157.
5) Taylor, American Colonies, 428
6) Jennings, Creation of America, 260–1, 269. France and England had fought continuously since 1066. Their long-term enmity induced the French crown to join the American war against the British in the spring of 1778. For the French the American Revolution was a “sideshow valuable for diverting British resources” as they attacked British targets all over the world. The finances of the French crown “were far from overflowing” and France’s support for the American Revolution “pushed France’s absolute monarchy to the edge of bankruptcy and its own overthrow.” See Jennings, Creation of America, 240, 260–1, 269.
7) Alan Taylor, American Revolutions: a continental history, 1750–1804 (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2016), 33, 368.
8) Jennings, Creation of America, 300.
9) Taylor, Civil War of 1812, 33.
10) Jennings, Creation of America, 300.
11) Ibid., 162.
12) Ibid., 172.
13) Taylor, American Colonies, 265, 351, 358
14) Jennings, Creation of America, 193.