Amidst a polyglot of ancestries, including two Generals Schwarzkopf, I learned as a kid that my mother’s forebears included one William Dawes. My ears perked up when I heard his name mentioned in Ken Burns’ marvelous PBS series The American Revolution.
On the night of April 18, 1775, Dawes rode out of British-occupied Boston to deliver a warning to local militias: “The Redcoats are coming.” He escaped from capture on the road between Lexington and Concord, while the Brits nabbed fellow rider Paul Revere. Alas, history has largely forgotten Billy Dawes, mainly because Henry Wadsworth Longfellow penned the poem “Paul Revere’s Ride.” No line of cookware bears Billy’s name. No towns or streets carry the name of Dawes. Revere is lionized by a statue in Paul Revere Mall behind Old North Church in Boston.
In watching Burns’ documentary, however, I felt Dawes was delivering a message to me. Dawes, Revere, and fellow rider Samuel Prescott were pushing back against an occupation army. They had already helped dump a boatload of British East India Company tea into Boston Harbor.
Out of these early skirmishes came roots of a republic which, 250 years later, urgently requires nourishing. The initial skirmishes of the Revolutionary War were fueled by a desire to exercise God-given rights and not be subject to state power. Excesses by the British, such as heavy-handed occupation of Boston, focused and fueled the rebellion.
In classic response to the Brits, we have the Third Amendment to the Bill of Rights: “No soldier shall, in time of peace, be quartered in any house without the consent of the Owner, or in time of war, but in a manner prescribed by law.” Rights that are the bedrock of our republic — assembly, freedom of speech, separation of church and state — grew out of the war profiled by Burns. So, too, the divisions and limitations of powers defined by Thomas Jefferson and embodied in George Washington. Our first president refused to be a king and went home to Mt. Vernon after two terms.
The country’s growth since 1775 has been predicated on growing those rights, broadening their definition and including those once oppressed (notably African and Native Americans) in the American dream. And America has been fueled by immigrants who sought that dream, drawn by words on the Statue of Liberty. We’ve had a president with paternal roots in Kenya, the old-boy bastion of the U.S. Senate, the “world’s greatest deliberative body” now has 21 members, in Eisenhower’s phrase, “of the female persuasion.”
Donald Trump wants to say good-bye to all that. We have a leader less respectful of the citizenry than was George III toward his subjects. All of the guarantees, checks and balances crafted by the Founders are today under assault. Trump is pressing to do to democratic institutions what bulldozers have done to the East Wing of the White House.
Immigration policy is being flipped. People doing society’s grunt work are labeled “illegals” and hunted down, while white “refugees” from South Africa are welcome; Afghans who helped the U.S. in a long war are demonized. The party that gave us Abraham Lincoln is now the white peoples’ party.
The only “right” to be expanded is individual ownership of firearms, notably those crafted to kill people. Gun violence is proliferating, and political violence is on the rise, seemingly blessed on social media by our 47th president.
Ken Burns is not one to airbrush his country’s history. The American Revolution dealt truthfully with the fact that our revered Founders owned fellow human beings and wished to displace natives in lands west of the Appalachians. Burns reveals the choices faced by the enslaved, particularly with the British Empire offering freedom.
Our Founders were men (and supportive women) of perspective and intellect. Today, our capital is the domain of clowns. Gone are the Generals Mattis and Kelly who stood up to our President in his first term. In have come the toadies and flatterers, the Pete Hegseths and Kristi Noems. Taxpayers foot the bill when FBI Director Kash Patel flies home to Las Vegas, and when a SWAT team is assigned to guard his country singer girlfriend.
By contrast, George Washington healed. Many Hessian mercenaries who fought on the other side were allowed to settle in the new nation. But vengeance and retribution take precedent with today’s president, and have become the driving force of his administration.The insurrectionists of January 6 get pardoned while the “Secretary of War” directs an investigation of a Sen. Kelly, a former astronaut who flew 39 combat missions over Vietnam. Sen. Kelly’s act of sedition? Reminding those in uniform of their oath to obey the Constitution, not the leader. We’re seeing the language purged of such words as “diversity” and “inclusion.” History is being rewritten to white-wash past injustice which we must face to form a more perfect union.
While invoking a very, very distant ancestor, I am not suggesting that we mount up, head for the Tacoma detention center crying: “The ICE agents are coming.” Just that we do what Dawes, Revere, and Prescott did. Find the means and skills to effectively resist. Paul Revere used his talents as a silversmith to that end.The actual revolutionary war, begun with the battle at Concord, is one of the most consequential events in human history..
As we approach our country’s 250th birthday, we must not allow celebrations to be hijacked by a president who has sent troops into our cities — just as George III did two and a half centuries ago. Paul Revere, William Dawes, and Samuel Prescott helped create a great country. We don’t need a real estate developer to remake it.
This article also appears in the Cascadia Advocate.
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