Donald Rumsfeld Was More Right than Wrong About the American Revolution and Its Aftermath

In the July 19 New York Times Cornell historian Mary Beth Norton scathingly rebuked Donald Rumsfeld for comparing unrest in Iraq with unrest in United States at the close of the American Revolution. She sneered at his claim that "roving loyalists" still resisted the new government, and looting and burning roiled the nation. I have long been an admirer of Ms. Norton's work. She is the foremost authority on woman's history in the colonial and Revolutionary era. Her recent revisionist book on the Salem Witch Trials consigns to history's dumpster previous versions of that tragedy. But I disagree with her attempt to paint the Defense Secretary as a complete ignoramus. Although Rumsfeld overstated the case -- he was making an offhand remark, not teaching American History 101-- the American Revolution was a war with a turbulent postscript.

Early in 1783, some six months before the peace treaty was ratified, the officers of the American Army, infuriated by Congress's refusal to honor its promise to give them half pay for life, circulated a series of incendiary appeals throughout their Newburgh, N.Y. winter camp, urging a march on the American capital, Philadelphia, to get their just deserts. Only desperate pleas by George Washington and a hasty compromise by Congress prevented an upheaval that would have unraveled the Revolution.

In June of that same victorious year, Congress fled Philadelphia for the quieter precincts of Princeton, New Jersey, when angry soldiers surrounded Independence Hall and demanded back pay or else. Imagine how contemporary Americans would react, if today's Congress ingloriously retreated before this show of force. Wouldn't most people think the federal government had collapsed?

A year earlier, in 1782, mutinous American troops in South Carolina conspired to seize General Nathanael Greene, commander of the Southern army, and hand him over to the British. The plot was discovered just in time and the ringleader executed. This huggermugger took place a year after the decisive American victory at Yorktown, Virginia, which effectively ended the military side of the struggle.

If we go back to 1780-81, the fourth and fifth years of independence, when one might assume that the American government had won the loyalty of its soldiers and citizens, we find even more unrest. In May 1781, the Pennsylvania brigade, ordered to Virginia to resist a British invasion, mutinied. They had previously mutinied in January but negotiations had resolved that crisis without bloodshed. This time their commander, General Anthony Wayne, hauled the ringleaders out of the ranks, condemned them in a drumhead court-martial, and executed six of them on the spot, with the firing squad standing at point blank range. Blood and brains were scattered over the landscape. Wayne paraded the rest of the brigade past the mutilated corpses and the march to Virginia and the climactic victory at Yorktown began.

Earlier in 1781, the New Jersey brigade also mutinied. George Washington reacted with similar severity. Loyal troops were rushed to the encampment, three ringleaders were seized, tried and condemned to death on the spot. Two were executed by a firing squad, a third pardoned.

In September 1781, on the very eve of Yorktown, loyalist guerilla leader David Fanning and 950 followers descended on Hillsboro, N.C. and captured the state's governor, his council, and two hundred other prisoners, with the loss of only one man wounded. Pursued by 400 American regulars, Fanning turned and routed them in a pitched battle. When a prominent North Carolina rebel publicly condemned Fanning, the guerilla leader killed him and looted and burned his plantation.

In June of 1780, 31 men of the 1st New York Regiment tried to march home without leave from Fort Stanwix in New York's Mohawk Valley. A lieutenant pursued them with a band of Oneida Indians who supported the American cause. They shot 13 of the mutineers dead and captured the rest. It was the only time in the history of the American army that an officer used Indians to kill American soldiers.

American commanders were dealing with an army disillusioned by a government that failed to pay its soldiers or provide them with adequate food and clothing.

By 1786, three years after the treaty of peace, the fecklessness of the federal Congress had increased exponentially. No one had any respect for it. Often the mediocre politicians the states sent to represent them failed to show up and Congress did not have enough delegates to constitute a quorum. Meanwhile, a postwar depression paralyzed the national economy, which had taken a fearful beating from the British blockade during the war. In this atmosphere, angry farmers in western Massachusetts and Connecticut, led by a Revolutionary War veteran named Daniel Shays, launched a poor man's revolution.

Ms. Norton pooh-poohs this upheaval but it was not a minor matter to the Americans of the time. Similar poor vs. rich unrest simmered in the western counties of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas. The feckless federal government could not even muster a company of soldiers to resist Shays's mob, which was dispersed by an army financed by wealthy men in eastern Massachusetts.

No wonder virtually every delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention was convinced the nation was in a state of alarming crisis and imminent dissolution.

Even after a new more powerful federal government began functioning in 1789, with George Washington as its president, there were serious challenges to its authority. In 1794 the farmers of western Pennsylvania rebelled against a tax on whiskey, assaulted federal officials, and talked about setting up an independent government. Washington personally took charge of a swiftly raised army that crushed the rebels with a minimum of bloodshed. On the frontier, Indians financed and armed by the British in Canada routed an American army in 1791 and spread havoc among western settlers until they were decisively defeated by another army led by the redoubtable Anthony Wayne in 1794.

All in all, Secretary Rumsfeld's description of a restless, violent Revolutionary era America is not as farfetched as Mary Beth Norton maintains. Revolutionary situations tend to spawn such disorder in any time or place, especially when people sense a government is malfunctioning or defunct, as in Iraq.

Let me add that I share Ms. Norton's dislike of Donald Rumsfeld; he tends to be arrogant and needlessly flippant. But the secretary's personal failings should not deter us from supporting the strategy that America is pursuing in Iraq. In essence, it seeks to confront the enemy in his bailiwick, rather than wait passively for him to attack us on our soil. This "forward" strategy won the Cold War. It is basic to our war on terrorism. If we abandon the initiative and allow the hostile remnant of a discredited regime to intimidate us in Iraq, we are on the road to disaster.

Response by Mary Beth Norton

I stand by my op ed essay. The original draft did contain a sentence (removed for space reasons by the Times editors) about how Shays's Rebellion frightened the nation's leaders into drafting and then supporting the Constitution. I do not dispute Tom Fleming's "facts"--although I would point out that both Secretary Rumsfeld's remarks and therefore my essay explicitly referred to events during the postwar era (that is, post-1783). By contrast, most of Fleming's examples of chaos come from the period before independence was won, as he himself admits. Thus they are at least partly irrelevant to the case I was making, although of course people in the 1780s would have remembered those incidents. Further, he does not defend Mr. Rumsfeld's own "historical" examples, because they are in fact indefensible. "Roving loyalists" opposing the new government? (There were none, and in my doctoral dissertation in 1969 I explored precisely why there were none.) A postwar crime wave of theft and looting? Both are chimerical.

I would also point out that Secretary Rumsfeld did not make a single "offhand remark" about this analogy, as Fleming suggests. Instead, repeatedly and in a number of different settings (including his regular press briefings), starting in late May in a meeting with the Blackstone group, he developed his thesis at considerable length. Indeed, one reporter--George Edmonson of Cox News Service--observed in a story datelined Washington, July 2, that "As Donald Rumsfeld began to expound recently on the situation in Iraq, he seemed to change from defense secretary to history teacher." As I said in the op ed essay, as someone who has written and taught about this period for more than three decades, I felt compelled to comment on the validity of the "history lesson" Mr. Rumsfeld was offering.

As I observed in the essay, my point was not that the Confederation government was "perfect or even adequate." Tom Fleming is right that the national government was something of a mess. But I will insert here another sentence from my original draft excised for space reasons by the Times editors: "It's important not to overlook the great accomplishment of the Confederation government--the organization of the United States's first empire, its so-called Northwest Territory (now the states of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin), which established the principle under which later territories entered the union on an equal basis with earlier states." A completely non-functioning government (of the kind Fleming describes) could not have adopted such a far-reaching measure, one the nation continued to follow for many years thereafter.

The point of my essay was that the analogy does not work at its most fundamental level, and nothing in Fleming's response convinces me otherwise. Indeed, he does not even address my basic argument.

To repeat: Iraq lost. The revolutionary states won. Does Tom Fleming really think that makes no difference to the postwar era? If so, he should argue that point.

There was no American nation before the Revolution; the war created the nation. The states continued to function (though not always well) throughout the wartime and postwar periods. Iraq's highly centralized, existing national regime has now collapsed. There were no local or regional authorities in Iraq that continue to function. That makes no difference in the postwar era? I'd like Tom Fleming to tell me why.

The U.S. in 1783 had a long tradition of civil society. Under Saddam, civil society in Iraq has been ruthlessly suppressed for decades. Again: is Tom Fleming seriously contending that that makes no difference in the postwar era?

I rest my case, but cannot resist adding one more observation. The response to the op ed piece has been extraordinarily positive. I have been amazed, in fact, that I have had close to 80 email messages or phone calls about it, a number from other historians of the era. Of all those people, just one previously offered even a minor criticism. That doesn't mean my friend Tom Fleming has to agree with me, of course. But many others--at least those who have gone to the trouble of contacting me--seem to do so.