Revolutionary Williamsburg

As a quick look inside what Colonial Williamsburg is doing right now to sharpen our understanding of the American Revolution, I humbly submit for your consideration a summary of a core aspect of the project--Revolutionary Williamsburg--and its component parts.

The Revolutionary Williamsburg endeavor is part of CW’s broader American Revolution web project, which is designed to provide the single most reliable and engaging Internet source on America’s founding conflict. Revolutionary Williamsburg is the dimension of the project that intends to personalize the revolutionary experience by focusing on Williamsburg then and now, whether in situating Williamsburg at the center of a revolutionary web in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world or in using the project as the center of a web that ties together the people who visit and work in the city today.

Revolutionary Williamsburg has two major collaborative components: 6 Degrees of Revolutionary Williamsburg and our five revolutionary themes. 6 Degrees of Revolutionary Williamsburg uses the surfeit of expertise that exists here today to recreate the myriad ties that bound Virginia to the revolutionary world through personal relationships, material goods, popular culture, political thought and other aspects of life in the eighteenth century. It is premised on the conceit that any place, person, or object in Williamsburg is within 6 degrees of separation from any of the major trends, figures, and events that transformed lives on both sides of the Atlantic in the revolutionary period. By plumbing the depths of these connections from the standpoint of our curators, tradespersons, interpreters, historians, and others, we hope to shape a fresh narrative of the American Revolution as a reflection of the experience of those who lived through it.

Our five revolutionary themes are collaborative subprojects intended to bring together experts and scholars across the Foundation to delve into particular facets of revolutionary life, each of which will have its own presence on the public site. They are:

Revolutionary City—This subproject will situate each scene in CW’s live, dramatic program in its historical context by connecting the stories and characters to the actual documents, objects, issues, and people who participated in them, just as visitors to the Historic Area can today.

Revolutionary Faiths—This subproject will examine religion as a crucial, and misunderstood, dimension of eighteenth-century life that provided a foundation for British American culture every bit as important to deistic Anglicans as it was to New Light Presbyterians and New England Congregationalists. It crossed racial, ethnic and gender lines, and infused political thought and behavior on all sides of the constitutional crisis that led to the War for Independence.

Revolutionary Fashion—This subproject examines the ways in which imperial politics was reflected in, and in many ways shaped by, material and popular culture in the revolutionary world (using fashion, therefore, as both a verb and a noun). Currently, Revolutionary Fashion intends to bring CW’s collective expertise to bear on four discrete topics: Clothing/textiles (From the Calico Acts to Hunting Shirts), theater, literature, and ceramics.

Revolutionary Trades—This subproject will explore the ways in which mobilization for war impacted and, in many cases, transformed the ways in which tradespersons produced goods for themselves and for the Patriot armies. It also constructed new social networks and, crucially, created new ties between individuals and the burgeoning states. Revolutionary Trades will take advantage of the current recontruction of the Public Armoury to examine the experience of the trades related to it. We are currently intending to also look at the experience of tailors and shoemakers.

Revolutionary Voices—This subproject gives us the chance, in a variety of multimedia formats, to examine the lives of a variety of individuals and their impact on the revolutionary world through their words, actions, and relationships. While including well-known figures such as Thomas Jefferson and Arthur Lee, we are especially interested in highlighting those of different genders, races, ethnicities, generations, and political persuasions whose voices have not appeared as clearly in the pages of current history but whose contribution to the revolutionary experience was nearly as salient.

"Eating seems to be the predominant passion of a Virginian."

Some time between 1770 and 1774, Rev. Thomas Gwatkin shared with friends in England his unique insight into aspects of colonial life not usually glimpsed in most contemporary correspondence: eating and drinking. Gwatkin, a 30-year-old, English-born Oxonian who was the professor of natural philosophy and mathematics at the College of William & Mary, and a close friend of Jeremy Bentham's, appears to have taken a rather dim view of the especial fondness of Virginians for food and recreational beverages. Perhaps because of Gwatkin's especially critical eye, this selection gives us a rather entertaining peek into one man's transatlantic perception of life in Williamburg on the very eve of the American Revolution.

"I observed . . . that the natives of Virginia eat greater quantities of animal food than the Inhabitants of Britain. A short account of their manner of living may afford you some entertainment. Their breakfast, like that of the English consists of tea Coffee and Chocolate; and bread or toast and butter, or small Cakes made of flower and butter which are served to Table hot, and are called hoe Cakes from being baked upon a hoe heated for that purpose. They have also harshed meat and homony, Cold beef, and hams upon the table at the same time, and you may as frequently hear a Lady desiring to be helped to a part of one of these dishes as a cup of tea. Their tables at dinner are crowded with a profusion of meat: And the same kind is dressed three or four different ways. The rivers afford them fish in great Abundance: and their Swamps and forests furnish them ducks teale blue-wing, hares, Squirrells, partridges and a great variety of other kinds of fowl. Eating seems to be the predominant passion of a Virginian. To dine upon a single dish is considered as one of the greatest hardships. You can be contented with one joint of meat is a reproach frequently thrown into the teeth of an Englishman. Even one of the fair Sex would be considered as Gluttons in England. Indeed, I am inclined to believe more disorders in this Country arise from too much eating than any other cause whatsoever. In the Afternoon tea and Coffee is generally drank, but with bread or toast and butter. As Supper you rarely see any made dishes. Harshed and Cold meat, roasted fowls, fish of different kinds, tarts and sweetmeats fill up the table. After the cloth is taken away both at dinner and supper; Madeira and punch or toddy is placed upon the table. The first toasts which are given by the Master of the family, are the King; the Queen and the royal family; the Governour and Virginia; a good price for Tobacco. After this, the Company be in a humour to drink, the ladies retire, and the Gentlemen give every man his Lady; then a round of friend[s] succeeds; and afterwards each of the Company gives a Sentiment; then the Gentleman of the house drinks to all the friends of his Company and at last concludes with drinking a good Afternoon or good Evening according to the time of day."
[William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. IX (1952), pp. 81, 83-84]

Reflections on the D.A.R.lings: Historical memory, American-style

When it comes to historical memory--American-style--it doesn't get better, or weirder, than those nineteenth-century creatures of social exclusion, the DAR, the Colonial Dames, etc. In the midst of a society being transformed by waves of non-English immigration (waves that began long before many of the founders of these organization ever cared to admit), groups like the DAR and the reconstituted Society of the Cincinnati shot up like wildflowers in an effort to take possession of Early American history, at least of a sort. To me, it's important to keep in mind that just as such ancestral veneration shifted into top gear, many of these same Victorians took ownership of history into their hands and out of ours (quite literally) in another way: By editing beyond recognition or outright destroying reams of historical correspondence and other records that didn't fit their image of the past or, more to the point, the reflection they wanted to see of themselves in it.

But where, really, do most of us fit in such constructs? My grandmother's family on my father's side, the Taylors, for example, arrived in Maryland in 1662. Over the next 308 years they managed to move all of 60 miles, from Calvert County to Baltimore, where I was born (which must set some sort of record for historical inertia). They participated in all the big events--the Revolution, the War of 1812 (my great-great-great-grandfather was at Fort McHenry on that fateful night in 1814), the Civil War--and managed to be on the "right" side in each of them, which would make me a member of any number of groups if I chose to identify myself in such a way. On the other hand, my grandfather's father, Walter Stoermer, a German lad with a young half-French wife, didn't arrive in Baltimore from Darmstadt until around 1900. So am I a mere arriviste mongrel or a true American blue-blood with an exceptional claim to ownership of the most salient aspects of American history and, consequently, American character?

The truth, of course, is both, because that multiplicity--both personal and social--is at the heart of whatever there is that is "American" about our history and character, even if historians haven't yet quite worked out what those things really are (I blame the Victorians).

This post was inspired by one of the most clever persons I know, whose work into her own family history has revealed much the same sort of patchwork of identities, from the Mayflower in 1620 to migration from Italy to America during World War II, and who sent me the poem below, from a 1936 New Yorker, which I think captures the sense of things quite nicely (but she has a happy felicity for that).


The D.A.R.lings
Chatter like starlings
Telling their ancestors' names

While grimly aloof
With looks of reproof

Sit the Colonial Dames.
And The Cincinnati
All merry and chatty
Dangle their badges and pendants

But haughty and proud
Disdaining the crowd
Brood the Mayflower Descendants.


~ Arthur Guiterman, The New Yorker, 1936