As the United States marks the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding, many Americans are reflecting on the revolution’s legacy by visiting historical exhibitions, attending regional fairs, and watching battle reenactments. Some, however, are wondering how everything might have been different by exploring the possibility of the revolution’s failure.
In recent months, journalists, bloggers, and other writers have explored whether George Washington’s forces might have lost key early battles – from the Battle of Long Island to the Battle of Trenton – hypothesizing that these untimely defeats might have suffocated the revolution in its cradle.
Others have gone further and examined the long-term consequences for the political and economic development of North America, hypothesizing that the lands of the never-to-be United States would have ruled by a “Duke of Virginia” who would have economically plundered the colonies, halted their westward expansion, and prevented the unification of the continent, thereby enabling multiple countries to take root there.
These speculative exercises are unsurprising given the surging popularity of counterfactual history in American life. Yet it is worth noting that wondering “what if?” about the revolution dates back to the revolution itself.
As I show in my forthcoming book, Predicting the Past: Counterfactual History from Antiquity to the Present,many patriots in the early days of the revolution wondered whether the conflict with Britain could have been avoided. Thomas Jefferson himself inserted a counterfactual clause in his first draft of the Declaration of Independence (later deleted) that read: “we might have been a free and great people together” before adding that “a communication of…freedom it seems is below [Britain’s]…dignity.”
Thomas Paine made a similar observation in his essay series, The American Crisis (1777), when he admonished the British that if they had merely “studied true greatness of heart” and shown greater respect for the colonies’ traditional liberties, “you might have humored [America]…without any risk to your reputation; and America, intoxicated by the grant, would have slumbered in her fetters.”
After the patriots’ victory in the Revolutionary War, American writers explored the nightmare of its potential failure. Writing about the Battle of Long Island in the summer of 1776, when Washington miraculously withdrew his troops under the cover of fog, the patriot historian William Gordon declared in 1788 that “had it not been for the providential shifting of the wind…half the army…must inevitably have fallen into the enemy’s hand [and]…sustained considerable losses.” In 1804, Mercy Warren went further and speculated that a “defeat” in the battle “might have been fatal to the independence of America.”
Others expressed the nightmare of a world without George Washington. In his Life of George Washington(1800), Parson Weems explored the possibility that Washington might have been killed in a duel as a young officer in 1754, while in the summer of 1776, the army surgeon and eventual Massachusetts governor William Eustis contemplated the possibility that an assassination plot hatched against Washington by the American soldier Thomas Hickey might have succeeded, speculating that it “would have given the enemy possession of [New York]…city with little loss” and “every General Officer…[would]…have been assassinated.”
Had any of these possibilities come to pass, many agreed that the nation would have experienced untold suffering. In his eulogy for George Washington in 1800, the Massachusetts politician Charles Pinckney Sumner invited Americans to use their “imaginations” and “think…of the untold distresses that…would have been your portion had not your toils for freedom been crowned with success….You might have…reposed in the tranquil despair of subjugated India…or been blest with the liberty under which…bleeding Ireland now groans.”
Fast forward to more recent decades, and Americans have continued to explore similar nightmares. In his play, Washington Shall Hang (1976), Robert Wallace Russell portrayed Washington being captured, tried for treason, and sentenced to death by the British, who proceed to make the American colonies “another Ireland for the King’s friends to pillage.” More recently, Robert Conroy’s 2014 novel, Liberty: 1784, The Second War for Independence, depicted the revolution’s failure, leading the defeated rebels to revive their democratic experiment in the vicinity of present-day Chicago.
In exploring the possibility of revolution’s defeat, Americans have confirmed familiar patterns of counterfactual thought. They have especially displayed the desire to express gratitude for the present by exploring nightmares that never happened. Overall, most Americans who have examined the revolution’s failure have sought to validate history as it actually transpired.
Yet, some dissenting Americans have depicted the revolution’s defeat as a desirable outcome. In the spring of 1975, one year before the Bicentennial, a full-page advertisement paid for by a “Committee for Reunion with England” called the revolution a “grievous mistake,” claiming that if had never happened, “slavery [would have been] abolished…two score and sixteen years before the Emancipation Proclamation,” adding that “there would have been no civil war, no Reconstruction Period, [and] no Ku Klux Klan.”
Several decades later, Harry Turtledove and Richard Dreyfuss’s novel, The Two Georges (1996), offered a similar assessment, depicting the revolution’s failure as having the positive consequence of giving rise to a British-led North American Union (NAU) that abolishes slavery without a civil war, thereby enabling the citizenry to live in racial harmony.
Like counterfactual nightmares, these fantasies reveal how present-day concerns shape how Americans speculate about the past. The fantasies discussed above were produced in periods of national tension – the first right after the Watergate crisis, the second following the Los Angeles riots – and illustrate how present-day disillusionment can find expression in fantasies of what might have been.
Given how deeply divided Americans are in the present, one might expect to see more counterfactual debate today about the legacy of 1776. Yet given the recent political crackdown on contrarian and revisionist interpretations of U.S. history, skeptics may be holding their tongues during the current semiquincentennial hoopla.
But this does not mean that Americans will refrain from wondering “what if” about their history, going forward. As historians are coming to recognize, counterfactual history has not only been with us ever since the invention of historical writing, but is especially in demand when societies debate contentious historical legacies.
As Americans continue to ask how the nation’s past has brought us to the present moment, we should expect to see our share of fantasies and nightmares about how everything might have been different.
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