Most Americans nowadays like to think that they have the American Revolution pretty well figured out. Conventional wisdom starts the saga in 1763 when Britain, saddled with debt at the close of the Seven Years' War, levied new taxes that prompted her American colonists to resist, and then to reject, imperial rule. Having declared independence and defeated the British, American patriots then drafted the constitution that remains the law of the land to this day. With George Washington's inauguration as president in 1789, the story has a happy ending and the curtain comes down. This time-honored script renders the road from colonies to nation clear, smooth, and straight, with familiar landmarks along the way, from Boston's Massacre and Tea Party through Lexington and Concord, then on to Bunker Hill and Yorktown before reaching its destination: Philadelphia in 1787, where the Founders invented a government worthy of America's greatness. Those Founders are equally familiar. Washington and Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and James Madison, Sam and John Adams, Patrick Henry and Alexander Hamilton: in the popular mind this band of worthies, more marble monuments than mere mortals, guides America towards its grand destiny with a sure and steady hand. "[F]or the vast majority of contemporary Americans," writes historian Joseph Ellis, the birth of this nation is shrouded by "a golden haze or halo."(1)
So easy, so tame, so much "a land of foregone conclusions" does America's Revolution appear that we tend to honor and ignore it rather than study it. In 1976, the 200th birthday of the Declaration of Independence, "every sidewalk survey show[ed] the great majority of Americans unwilling to sign [the] Declaration if it [was] presented to them without its identifying label." During the Constitution's bicentennial eleven years later, American ignorance of the nation’s other