Made In America - Bill Bryson [22]
If Henry did engage in a little nervous back-pedalling, we should not be altogether surprised. He was the junior member of the house; he had taken his seat only nine days earlier. His brave and eloquent challenge to monarchy appears to have been invented from whole cloth forty-one years later, seventeen years after Henry died, by a priggish biographer named William Wirt, who had never met, seen or heard him. Thomas Jefferson, who was there, made no comment about the accuracy or otherwise of Wirt’s account of events on that day, but he did freely offer the opinion that Wirt’s effort was ‘a poor book, written in bad taste, and gives an imperfect idea of Patrick Henry’. Nor, while we are at it, is there any evidence that Henry ever uttered the other famous remark attributed to him: ‘I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death.’ Indeed, there is no evidence that Henry ever said anything of substance or found space in his head for a single original thought. He was a country bumpkin, unread, poorly educated and famously indolent. His turn of phrase was comically provincial and frequently ungrammatical. He did, it is true, have certain oratorical powers, but these appeared to owe more to a gift for hypnotic sonorosity than to any command of thought or language. His style of speech was a kind of verbal sleight of hand that, in the words of one contemporary, ‘baffled all description’. Jefferson once bemusedly recalled: ‘When he had spoken in opposition to my opinion, had produced a great effect, and I myself been highly delighted and moved, I have asked myself when it ceased; “What the Devil has he said,” and could never answer the enquiry.‘5
Even those events that did unquestionably take place have often been distorted by history to show the colonials in a more favourable light. The classic example is the Boston Massacre, or the ‘Bloody Massacre Perpetrated in King Street, Boston’, as it was provocatively called in Paul Revere’s famous engraving. Revere’s rendition shows the British Redcoats, or lobsterbacks as they were more dismissively known, taking careful aim in broad daylight at a small, startled gathering of colonials, as if blithely executing midday shoppers. It wasn’t quite like that. Five colonials did lose their lives in the incident, but it happened at night, amid great confusion, and after considerable provocation in which twenty British soldiers were repeatedly taunted, jostled, pelted with stones and other missiles and generally menaced by a drunken, ugly and very much larger mob. By the standards of the day, the British troops were eminently justified in replying with fire. John Adams, at any rate, had no hesitation in defending the soldiers in court (and securing the acquittal of all but two; the convicted pair had their thumbs branded, a light punishment indeed in a murder trial). It was his more hotheaded cousin, Sam Adams, who with the help of Paul Revere’s artwork turned the incident into effective propaganda and popularized the expression Boston Massacre.
For almost a century afterwards, Paul Revere was known in America, in so far as he was known at all, not for his midnight ride but as the maker of that engraving. It wasn’t until Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote his romanticized and hugely inaccurate*11 poem ‘Paul Revere’s Ride’ (from Tales of a Wayside Inn) in 1863 that Revere became known as anything other than an engraver and silversmith.
Perhaps the most singular instance of historical manipulation is that concerning Betsy Ross and the creation