We're Lucky to Have a Country

Ken Burns’ “The American Revolution” makes it quite clear that the birth of this nation followed a long and painful labor. We may think we won the war against the British, but one of my takeaways from the TV series is that what really ended the war for both sides after eight years was sheer exhaustion and the lack of resources to continue. Britain could have carried on the fight to hang on to her colonies but ran out of the necessary patience and the willingness to spend more money.

And not everyone here was a revolutionary. There were many loyalists who steadfastly supported the British side. After all, they weren’t that many generations away from being born in Britain. When the war was over, a sizeable number of them boarded ships and went to the place they preferred to call home.

I learned a few things about George Washington too. He was a good general, winning battles in Boston and at Trenton and Princeton, New Jersey. But he also suffered some humiliating defeats, especially in New York and at Brandywine, Pennsylvania, before achieving final victory with the siege of Yorktown in Virginia. The men he commanded may have been passionate about fighting for their new country at first, but after a while, were more concerned with not getting fed or paid consistently. Washington’s real skill was keeping his army together, in spite of these challenges.

But he wasn’t kind to Native Americans who had sided with the enemy.  He took serious revenge on the Iroquois and ordered his own forces to not only destroy their settlements but dig up all their crops to boot.

Indians fought on both sides during the war, as did Black people. Slavery had been practiced or at least tolerated in the colonies, and Black slaves aligned themselves with whichever side they thought could give them the best deal, including their freedom.

The work of building a real country came after the war ended. Connecting all the parts of that famous Join or Die snake and coming up with the Constitution and then getting all the states to ratify it, was a years-long process. Vermont was a separate country until it joined the Union in 1791. Uprisings by groups of citizens disgruntled for one reason or another were pretty common. The Americans and the British returned to hostilities in 1812. But the nation survived, even past the biggest rock in the road, the Civil War.

These days, though, we seem to be trying out a different kind of country. How is that going for us? If you’re asking me, in spite of all its flaws, I kind of miss the older model.