America at 250: A View from Britain, with “The Rest Is History”

0:02Dominic Sandbrook:The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. If I can generalize a little bit for one moment, we Americans are not terribly modest about our place in the world. We think of the United States as not just the mightiest in the military sense or the wealthiest in the economic sense, but in some way the most important, the most central, the city on the hill in the famous historical phrase, the nation that others look up to or should. America rejected monarchy and asserted the right to self-rule during the revolution.

0:42And that was the great shot heard around the world. And everybody supposedly has been playing catch up ever since. That's the prevailing view in a nutshell, the historical cliche. Now, my guests today have a very different view of the matter. Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland are the historians who host The Rest is History, a terrific podcast from the UK. And I wanted to see what America's 250th anniversary looks like from a few thousand miles to the east in Great Britain. So we're going to spend our program today with Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook of The Rest is History. we are always happy to have you on but i we waited for this occasion because i knew you'd have something to say on the occasion of the signing of the declaration of independence in 70 76 and i think it's fair to say that after having listened to you for hours on this subject that your take on it collectively your take on the american revolution and the Declaration of Independence, after a four-part series that I listened to, you had the temerity to suggest that it was not the most important event in the history of civilization.

1:58Tom Holland:It's not even the most important event in the history of America. It's not even the most important revolution that happens in the late 18th century, to be honest. We'll get to that and the French and many more things. But tell me this, let's start with you, Dominic. Why do you have a rather diminished view, I would say, of the American Revolution and the Declaration?

2:19Dominic Sandbrook:I don't think I do have a diminished view. I think, well, first of all, an interesting thing that may be surprising to some American listeners. In Britain, the American Revolution is never really taught. It's not discussed. It doesn't really feature in our collective historical imagination. And Americans often say, ah-ha-ha, that's because you lost. That's not really the case because there's nothing the British like more than a kind of, than a tragic defeat. Actually, it's because it's eclipsed by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. And we only have time, we only have space in our heads for one late 18th century thing, and that is the French Revolution and Nelson and Wellington smiting Napoleon.

2:59Dominic Sandbrook:It's not really towards the American Revolution. It was always called the American War of Independence. So it didn't really feature in my historical imagination, certainly growing up as a great revolutionary moment. I thought of the French Revolution, of course, or the Russian Revolution. but the american revolution just seemed to be and this is somebody you know i i'm not a specialist in um 18th century history at all but it seemed to be a parade of quite boring men uh talking very earnestly about liberty um battles that involve 20 people in a field somewhere and the great vastness of north american continent um you know it's not waterloo it's not borodino or something.

3:42Dominic Sandbrook:So when we came to it, and I think also Tom and I, we've seen all the sort of Ken Burns style, the flag of liberty over Gobblers Creek or whatever it might be, and sort of a slight smirk perhaps playing on our lips in a true red coat manner as we see the Americans congratulate themselves as they go back to their slave inhabited plantations on the great victory of liberty and so on. So I must admit, I very much enjoyed the great furore about the 1619 Project, because as a Brit watching that, it was entertaining to see Americans flagellating themselves and tearing themselves apart about whether they were the good guys after all.

4:21Dominic Sandbrook:And of course, the 1619 Project people said that the British were the heroes in the end. So that was tremendous news for us. Well, the 1619 Project is definitely something I do want to talk about. But before we get there, help us understand what was going on between the colonies and the British in the run-up to the revolution, or at least what we call the revolution. Tom?

4:40Tom Holland:I mean, just to broaden it out on why maybe it doesn't have the saliency in the British imagination that the French Revolution does, and it relates to your question. I think for people in Britain, the American War of Independence, the American Revolution, whatever you want to call it, is part of a broader continuum, which is the English-speaking Atlantic world. And there is a case for saying that the War of Independence is a British civil war. It's another civil war in the line that descends from the civil wars that rent Great Britain and Ireland back in the 17th century. And a lot of the tensions and conflicts that gave rise to the war in the 17th century were exported to the New World.

5:29Tom Holland:So whether it's the the Puritans in Massachusetts or the Quakers in Philadelphia or the Catholics in Maryland, those religious tensions to us are very familiar. And they seem certainly to me, very, very religious. And just as in the 18th century in Britain, those religious tensions kind of blur and fade into what you might call kind of enlightenment dynamics. The same thing seems to be happening in America. And that's why there are lots of people in Britain who are backing the American rebels, just as obviously there are lots of people who are opposing them. And I think that the conflict makes best sense when seen in the Atlantic context, rather than being seen as something that is merely bred of American concerns, because those concerns exist in the broader kind of Anglosphere dimension, I think.

6:27But Tom, what was the nature of the rebels? Some of our listeners will be surprised to hear that, in fact, in New York in particular, this was a stronghold of pro-British sentiment. But there were rebels in the colonies. What was the nature of the early sense of rebellion or was it just a kind of tax dispute? Well, it varies. It varies from colony to colony.

6:52Tom Holland:And the difference in character between, say, Massachusetts and New York and Pennsylvania and Virginia is very, very salient. And it is something that threatens to derail the whole project of, say, issuing a declaration of independence. And the great achievement of the rebels in the war is not just to defeat the British, but to forge a genuine sense that these are United States.

7:20Dominic Sandbrook:just to jump in so david um you were talking about the the wider context so as i would see it the wider context is this um the seven years war is the the moment that kind of changes everything what you call the french and indian war so the british have acquired huge they've they've conquered huge swathes of north america from the french that does a couple of things first of all it removes the threat of the french so from this point onwards the colonists don't need um the protection of the British army as much as they once did. It also left Britain with a crippling debt to pay. So the British budget, you know, British borrowing ballooned during the course of the war.

7:59Dominic Sandbrook:And by the end of the Seven Years' War, Britain is paying about half of its national budget on interest payments alone. So as the British authorities see it, this is the moment when basically they need to sort out that the empire as it were has expanded beyond all imagination the system for for regulating it is very ramshackle and rackety and actually you could argue that the british projects of sorting that out is an enlightenment project that it's a modernizing project the parliament sits there and it says okay we've basically got these 17th century colonies it's all a bit of a mess we're going to sort it out it's mad that they're not paying the same taxes that people pay in britain the stamp tax and documents and so on we should extend you know ah, the British gentry have paid for the cost of this war.

8:43Dominic Sandbrook:They are very heavily taxed by historic standards. We will make the Americans pay. The colonists, we'll ask the colonists to pay a little bit towards their own defense. And I think that's perfectly reasonable and no one could really disagree with that. And so there's that element to it. As Tom, I think, absolutely rightly says, there is an element of it being a successor to the religious conflicts of the 17th century. So conflicts about, you know, the church, parliament, king, and so on, that we associate with Charles I and Oliver Cromwell. There's also, of course, the element that the British basically don't really want the colonists to keep expanding westwards.

9:17Dominic Sandbrook:So in 1763, they said, hold on, you know, this far or no further, because they don't want to provoke expensive conflict with the kind of native tribes. And a lot of the colonists, George Washington is a brilliant example of this. They've got a lot of investment in land speculation and stuff, and they want to keep expanding westwards, and they're annoyed. Dominic, what you're suggesting is that the great imperialists in this picture are not the Brits, but George Washington.

9:43Tom Holland:Well, I think that would be pushing it too far because Britain at this time is also seizing much of India. So there is no question the British are imperial-minded.

9:52Dominic Sandbrook:Right. But the Americans are not anti-imperial freedom fighters. I mean, they want to take the whole continent for themselves.

9:57Tom Holland:I mean, George Washington is the classic example of this. he is hard up he's looking to make land deals um further west and as he sees it kind of the british are saying no to this so i mean washington in the american context is much more of an expansionist colonialist figure than george the third for instance dominic in your in your series you quoted the new yorker's very own adam gopnik who asked the question if the american revolution was in fact a mistake. Right. Yeah. And you get into that.

10:31Dominic Sandbrook:I'd love to hear you on that subject. So here is the question that I think would puzzle me if I were American. And it puzzles me that Americans don't discuss this. It is this. Canada exists, right? And Canada is not a terrible place by any means. Also, Australia exists. Or New Zealand. So when Americans look to Canada, I'm curious about what they think about this country that is still subject to the crown, remained, as it were, loyal in the verticomis to Britain. Well, we know what Donald Trump thinks. Yes. We do know what Donald Trump thinks. But Americans more broadly, I'm curious whether they think that Canada, how that fits into the language of liberty, the discourse that this was a tremendous triumph of freedom against oppression.

11:19Dominic Sandbrook:Because if that is the case, right, then presumably Canada is not truly free. And people in Canada are leading the lives of helots subject to the yoke of the British crown. The yoke of the British crown. And obviously no sane person thinks that, right? So there is an alternative reality. So my question would be, is it possible that events in the late 18th century could have played out differently and the United States might not have ever existed? And British North America might now be united under the overlordship of Mark Carney.

12:02I can absolutely imagine a world in which America and Britain, their common political language remains

12:17Tom Holland:something that unites rather than separates. And one of the ways that this goes off piste in what becomes the war is the fact that the rebel colonists are weaponizing a very specific English language and English vocabulary of liberty. so when um the uh the rebels in say massachusetts are opposing the colonial government they're doing it in the context of what they call english liberties they're looking to england as the source for the ideology that they are then using to turn against british rule john lock and that is John Locke and the, well, yes, so, and it obviously, it expresses itself in various ways with the kind of the key figures in the American Revolution.

13:14So, if you look at Thomas Jefferson, he becomes, I think, pretty anglophobic.

13:22Tom Holland:I would say that he is very hostile, I mean, as hostile and then as dangerous an enemy as the British Empire has ever faced. Thomas Jefferson. Yes, and yet he is passionately devoted to ideals of liberty that he traces back ultimately to the Saxons when they lived in Germany in the Roman period before they kind of crossed to Britain. And he wanted to have on the United States seal, he wanted to have Hengist and Horsa, the primordial ancestors of the Angles and the Saxons when they settle in Britain. And he sees these kind of ancient ideals of liberty as being betrayed by the Hanoverian regime, as he would frame it, in the 18th century.

14:06Tom Holland:And that's kind of one way in which that mutates. But another figure who I think kind of represents a possible way in which Britain and America could have stayed together is Benjamin Franklin, who is at least as British a figure as he is American and who right up to the Boston Tea Party is kind of saying this is a terrible mistake. Can we not have a form of accommodation? I'm speaking with Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, hosts of the podcast The Rest is History. We'll continue in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

14:55Tom Holland:As the day wraps up, get the scoop on what's been happening with Here's the Scoop, a new podcast from NBC News with me, your host, Gassman Vasugian. We'll take a deep dive into the day's top stories with NBC News' trusted journalists. It's a fresh take that's sharp, thoughtful, and it's informative, bringing you closer to the headlines and conversations that are shaping our world. From the front page to the zeitgeist, here's The Scoop from NBC News. Listen daily wherever you get your podcasts.

15:27This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I'm speaking today with Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, who together host The Rest is History, one of my favorite podcasts and one of the most popular things in the world, at least in English. Sandbrook was on the history faculty at Oxford University, and he's written a number of books on modern British and American history. Holland wrote about the classical world, and he's translated works from the Latin and ancient Greek. But on The Rest is History, they cover just about anything. A Roman Emperor one week, The Rolling Stones the next, a series on Hitler, and then the Samurai period in Japan.

16:04That's the way it goes on their podcast. But the relevant thing for our conversation today, our subject is a four-part series that they produced on the American Revolution. So I'll continue my conversation now with Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. Well, let's take on a very big subject in this, and that's the element of slavery. there were many slaveholders who considered themselves or would be considered in the rearview mirror as revolutionary. How to grapple with this? How do you grapple with that?

16:40Tom Holland:Well, I think, I mean, one of the differences between, say, the Irish War of Independence and the American War of Independence is that in the Irish War of Independence, the rebels are looking to draw on ideas and myths and slogans that come from specifically Irish history rather than British history. Whereas in the American War of Independence, all the slogans are coming from British language, British vocabulary. Ironically. Ironically. And in that mythology, in that vocabulary, the words like liberty and freedom are fundamental. and you know it is English liberties that are being defended against the redcoats in Massachusetts when the war kind of goes hot and this the British also have massive slave holdings in the Caribbean and it is a growing problem I think that for the slaveholders that this is rubbing up against all kinds of ideological concerns and anxieties within the metropolis within britain and the notion that there is no there can be no slavery in britain that a slave who steps foot on british soil by as a result of that becomes free is starting to bed down and you have um those historically um salient ideals of political liberty blurring with religious concerns about it which are deriving from quakers from um evangelicals so you have a political and you have a religious project that is starting to look at the institution of slavery and to question it very very radically and this is happening in exactly the decades where the the revolution is brewing in the united states and i think that that sets up a kind of massive massive accusation of hypocrisy that enemies of the revolution can aim at the revolutionaries in america british critics of whom, again, Samuel Johnson is the most famous.

18:40Tom Holland:And he has, what is it? How is it that it is the drivers of Negro from whom we hear the loudest yelps for liberty? Right. And there was a piece in The New Yorker not long ago by the historian Jill Lepore in which he was describing the drafting, the group editing process of the Declaration of Independence. And if you've ever written a piece or a book, you know that editing by group is always ends in sadness. And Jefferson himself was struggling in various drafts with the inclusion or not of the slavery question. He wanted it gone, didn't he? Yeah. I mean, he wanted slavery gone. He absolutely was passionately committed to it.

19:23Tom Holland:And he was furious when those passages then got written out. But, you know, when he dies, he does not even do what Washington did and try and free most of his slaves.

19:35Dominic Sandbrook:yeah it's a complicated picture so washington's a good example um you know washington has slaves uh washington at valley forge when he's holed up there with his army it's at that point when rhode island are struggling to fulfill its recruitment quota um becomes the first state or colony to buy the freedom of uh african americans in order to recruit them and to meet its total and to send them to the Continental Army. And Washington, even though he's a slave owner, even though that cuts against the philosophy of slavery, he accepts it. And it's interesting that it's in 1778, it's after black men have joined the Continental Army in large numbers, that he writes to his steward back at Mount Vernon, he says, we should stop selling slaves against their consent.

20:29Dominic Sandbrook:And there's a note in a letter to his steward where he mentions the enslaved people at Mount Vernon in passing, and he says, I wish we could kind of get clear of this whole business. One point we should clarify is that, and something that you make clear, is the 13 colonies that rebelled were not actually the British Empire's prized possession. No, no. I mean, that's so, that amazes people when we say that. what what was just for just for clarity what what was the prize possession the caribbean the caribbean because that's where the wealth was coming from i mean sugar yeah so that's why the french entry into the war is such a game-changing moment because when the french joined the war in a big way when french ships appear and there's for the first 4 000 frenchmen come ashore that is a game changer precisely because for the british the priorities have completely changed so from this point onwards for the british it's like right let's protect we need to protect those colonies in the caribbean because the health of our economy the strength of the country depends on the on the sugar islands of the caribbean we can lose rhode island or delaware i mean who cares about them but keeping jamaica is all important and so that from london that is the perspective and so funnily enough when you go to 1783 the treaty of paris for the british sure they're annoyed that they have lost the 13 colonies of the you know the the north american seaboard But they think to themselves, you know what?

21:55Dominic Sandbrook:It could have been a lot worse. We could have lost India. We could have lost the Caribbean. We'll take it. Let me ask you this. There was a big, you know, history war hubbub in the United States not so long ago when the New York Times published its 1619 Project, which began in, I think it was 2019. And it focused on slavery as integral to American history in the period that we're discussing. What is your sense, Tom, of what the 1619 project got right, what was important about it, and maybe where it fell short?

22:27Tom Holland:I mean, I think that it is right that the project of establishing a viable colonial project in North America and in the Caribbean for the British was dependent on forced labor. There was no way in which it could really be viable without that. And the British came up with, you know, it's initially the English, but then in due course, the British. They are always looking around for sources of labour. So to begin with, it's usually transported people from Britain. So lots in the civil wars of the mid 17th century, Scots are transported there. Irish are transported there. but because there has been a massive infrastructure of exporting slaves from africa to the spanish new world largely being done by the portuguese that exists that is um a framework of exploitation that is ready to be used and the english have begun trying to muscle in on this very early on so um the some of the earliest voyages that francis drake the great kind of maritime hero of the reign of elizabeth the first that he does is he goes on a slaving expedition i think that so by the um by the early 18th century the fact that not just america not north america but the the caribbean as well is dependent on slavery is becoming a vast moral and economic crisis for people across that British Atlantic world.

24:12Tom Holland:And the opposition to it is being bred by the scale of horror that the growing industrialization of the British Empire in the 18th century is generating. I think one of the things that people now might get wrong is the idea that the British Empire is dependent on slavery. I think it's the other way around. I think it is the fact that Britain is industrializing that makes the exploitation of slavery brutal and unspeakable to a degree that had not previously been witnessed. It is hideous. So there's a passage in the Marquis de Sade, I think it's Juliet, where he is writing with immense approval of all the horrors and tortures and violence that ancient empires had inflicted.

25:02Tom Holland:and he says that none of our modern states can compare with the persians or the romans for their cruelties the only exception i will make are the english colonists in the caribbean and the atlantic seaboard of north america amazing they they know the horrors and he lists the horrors in kind of great detail and i think that that you can see um so there's a kind of representative figure who is a quaker from essex in england called benjamin lay who goes to the caribbean and witnesses the horrors there and is so appalled that he has a kind of religious conversion and he then goes to america to philadelphia because he's hoping that you know this is the great city of the quakers it's city of brotherly love surely there'll be no slaves there and he discovers slavery and is appalled by it and he becomes the first kind of activist really.

25:57Tom Holland:He does all these stunts where he goes to the Quaker meeting house and he pulls out a Bible and he's put purple juice in it and he stabs it with a sword and all this purple juice comes out looking like blood. And he retires to a cave and leads this incredibly effective campaign against slavery, which ends up shaming the Quakers into effectively becoming abolitionists. And this in turn is an influence on Benjamin Franklin. And I think it's one of the most admirable things about Franklin and about the American Revolution is that lots of the founding fathers are prepared to wrestle with these issues.

26:34Tom Holland:It's not like we have just discovered them ourselves. They do wrestle with them and they come to different solutions, perhaps. But Franklin is an example of someone who, by the end of his life, the final months of his life, he is devoted to opposing slavery. This man who had thought to run an advert in the British press requesting the return of a slave and he he presents a petition to congress saying please get rid of this it's terrible um and in his final piece of published writing he pretends to be uh a muslim advisor in the barbary states and he says it would be ridiculous for us to free these christian slaves these christian slaves would be helpless without their servitude you know they wouldn't possibly survive.

27:18Tom Holland:And he's parodying the language that he himself had earlier used to justify slavery. So I think that the degree of self-flagellation about the founding of America, the sense that slavery is the original sin, that slavery had accompanied the making of America, I think that is true. I don't think without that it would have been possible to generate the colonies and give it the prosperity that it did. At the same time, the horrors that are consequent on this do generate the process of abolitionism that today has come to be taken for granted across the world. I think it is important to try and think yourselves back into the shoes of people for whom the notion that slavery was an institutional wrong would have been unthinkable.