Historians Rewrite American History

 No historical writer has ever stated the bare fact that a President of the United States had used in the Civil War an American army against Americans. Instead they busied themselves rewriting American history to make it fit harmoniously with the new direction Abraham Lincoln's revolution was taking the United States. Historians used two concepts to help fashion their postwar version of our history, “America” and “the nation”. “America” already existed before the first appearance on the east coast of  European immigrants. “America” transformed Europeans soon after their arrival on her shores into Americans. The English colonists from England who arrived in 1620 at Plymouth in the Massachusetts Bay Colony were some of the first Americans and the political compact they agreed to on their ship, the Mayflower, before settling on the land was an embryo of democratic concepts that would one day be embodied in the US Constitution that established Washington as the head of “the nation”. American colonists in Massachusetts rebelled in 1695 for independent rule and, assembling an armed force of 1500 men, drove the British governor Andros out of Boston. This was the most important rebellion in “America” in early colonial times against British rule and was clearly, according to historians, the first rumblings of volcanic forces that would one day roar forth in a fiery blast and form “the nation”. Massachusetts’ colonists fired their rifles at the British army at Lexington and Concord in 1775 and killed or wounded nearly 200 British soldiers as they drove the enemy regiments back to the safety of Boston. This allowed historians to again jump on the “America” bandwagon and announce that the Massachusetts men had revolted in “America” to set up an independent government for “the nation”.  The Massachusetts men were American patriots and even before George Washington, a Virginian, came to Cambridge Massachusetts in 1775 to take command of their army, they had begun the American Revolution, the  bold event that showed the world the deep strength seething within the American heart and soul to found “the nation”. Samuel Adams, the firebrand organizer of the New England rebellion, instigated the Boston Tea Party, attended the first and second continental congresses in Philadelphia, signed the Declaration of Independence, helped draft the Articles of Federation and supported the ratification of the Constitution by Massachusetts. Samuel Adams might have been elevated by historians to the level of a national hero like George Washington or Thomas Jefferson if he had not constantly and outspokenly made it clear to his fellow colonists that Massachusetts was his “country” and that he had led the rebellion against Britain in her name. We have records of him referring to Massachusetts as  his “country” as far back as an essay he wrote on liberty and sedition in 1748 at a time when he could not possibly be referring to “the nation”. In another essay in the Boston Gazette in 1771, he writes about “the liberties of our country”. His country, Massachusetts, had put an army in its fields, had issued its own currency, the Pine Tree Shilling, and had fought alone for three months with an army of over 20,000 men against a powerful European nation. Adams left behind too much written evidence that proved that he was not rebelling in the name of “the nation” so historians ignored him as best they could and some even wrote books deriding him as a crank.

Daniel McNeill

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