From a Revolutionary History to a History of Revolution: David Ramsay and the American Revolution

Abstract

From 1785 1815 David Ramsay, a Maryland-born, Princeton-educated, Philadelphia-trained physician living in South Carolina, was one of the most prolific chroniclers of the American Revolution. He wrote three histories of the American struggle for independence and, at the time of his death, had almost completed a fourth. The South Carolinian's ambition in writing was craft a new identity for the people of the United States: one that was rooted in a common past that could pave the way for a republican future. The evolution of Ramsay's histories provides a valuable insight into the changing relationship between the Revolution and the nation it created. Although his goal did not change from the first the fourth histories, the specifics of his account and the place he accorded the new nation's struggle for independence in it certainly did. In his early histories Ramsay portrayed the Revolution as a catalyst for a larger process of social, political, and moral improvement that would create a new nation, but by his last he saw it as a vindication of a pre-existing set of values and beliefs that defined what it meant be an American.1 The evolution of Ramsay's interpretation of reflected a larger process of social and political change in the years following independence in which many in the new nation sought contain the radical impulses of the American Revolution. If the Revolution began at the moment in which politicized Americans took the streets in defense of their rights and liberties, that tradition was considered problematic from the start, and conservative critics steadily stepped up their efforts reign it in following independence. The Continental Congress slowly turned its back on crowds of women seeking control the price of food in the name of sound republican principles. The Whiskey Rebellion convinced ardent Federalists and Jeffersonians alike of the dangers of too much popular agitation in the name of liberty. Even the triumph of Thomas Jefferson over John Adams in the election of 1800 did not reverse this trend. As Alan Taylor has pointed out, the Jeffersonians championed an active citizenry involved in the political life of the nation, but they sought confine those impulses within the electoral process and direct popular political energy supporting existing political and economic institutions. Although Americans may not have abandoned the promise of a new, more democratic political order that many had identified with the Revolution, by the early nineteenth century they had made every effort regularize politics in a way that preserved rather than challenged the status quo.2 The evolution of history-writing in the early republic offers a vital starting point for understanding the changing attitudes that Americans had toward their revolution and its implications for present and future generations. Eighteenth-century Americans believed that provided a valuable guide that could, if studied closely, offer effective solutions the nation's myriad problems. As one writer in the Universal Asylum observed, history ought, in a peculiar manner, be the study of every one, who would attain a liberal education as it offered readers two sorts of examples, the one be imitated, and the other be avoided. The problem of creating a nation in the wake of the Revolution made even more important. As Gordon Wood has noted, the economic, social, and political turmoil of the years following independence had convinced the people of the United States that to be an American could not be a matter of blood; it had be a matter of common belief and behavior. And the source of that common belief and behavior was the American Revolution: it was the Revolution, and only the Revolution, that made them one people. In this context, how Americans understood the of the colonies, the struggle for independence, and the subsequent efforts establish a viable republican government took on tremendous significance. …