I was a teenager living in Florida during America’s Bicentennial in 1976 and was aware of only one event that marked the 200th “birthday” of the nation. It was a boat parade, followed by a larger-than-usual fireworks display on the Fourth of July. Of course, everyone dressed in red, white, and blue for the day, and there was no shortage of colorful banners and streamers.
It left me feeling disappointed.
The colonists’ struggle for independence encompassed far more than 4 July 1776, the day Congressional delegates adopted the Declaration of Independence. Furthermore, North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia had played a much greater role in the Revolution than the credit they were given in most history books, as had states such as Florida and Alabama that weren’t considered part of the original thirteen colonies.
The 200th anniversary was a huge deal. As a nation, we’d deserved more from it.
The combat aspect of the 200th anniversary of America’s independence was downplayed by the national Bicentennial committee, due to post-Vietnam reluctance to “celebrate” war. In making that decision, the committee deprived American citizens of a multidimensional look at the nation’s history at a crucial point in time, leaving several generations with the impression that the Fourth of July 1776 was, essentially, what they needed to know about the Revolutionary War.
That’s like expecting one point to adequately represent a plane. The American Revolution was a long war—years in coming and going. Wars aren’t overnight sensations. There’s an escalating history of brutal events before the first explosion of violence. And violence often persists after one side surrenders and “peace” is declared.
Years later, friends living in New England told me that for the Bicentennial, they’d done reenactments of battles and living history demonstrations to correspond with anniversaries of a few milestone events in the North. When I heard that, the disappointment I’d experienced on 4 July 1976 returned. It wasn’t just the knowledge that an extra level had been omitted from activities in the South. It was realizing that if the media had reported on those Northern events, my local paper and TV stations didn’t carry the stories—as if the Revolution hadn’t happened in the South and didn’t matter to us.
In the quarter century between the 200th and 225th anniversaries of the American War of Independence, scholars (mostly in the South) were busy combing battleground sites and collections of primary documentation. By the time the 225th anniversary rolled around, they’d released the news that the southern states had not just been more active in the Revolution; the action there had been crucial to the Continental Army’s domination over Crown strategies. In fact, the state that had seen the most battles was South Carolina, not New York.
I was a fully-participating reenactor by then. Anniversary battle reenactments brought big spectator crowds, and the media did cover the events. But not nearly as much coverage as in the North.
The South’s contribution wasn’t merely about Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown, Virginia. To do as history texts often do and list only the South’s “superstar” battles such as Yorktown, the Siege of Savannah (Georgia), the Battle of the Cowpens (South Carolina), and the Battle of Guilford Courthouse (North Carolina) vastly understates the intensity of combat activity in those colonies and the misery residents endured in what was essentially the nation’s first civil war. Plus it omits non-combative incidents such as the Edenton tea party (North Carolina) that figured in the economics of the time and give us insight into how civilians dealt with the war.
And martial activity in the South during the war highlights a point that history texts often exclude—that the French weren’t the only Europeans helping the Continentals. When you look at the Crown’s uneasy occupation of St. Augustine (Florida) as a military base, and the Siege of Pensacola (Florida) and the Battle of Mobile (Alabama), it’s obvious that Spain was fully in the fray, competently disrupting Britain’s strategy for holding onto her southern colonies.
If you plot all the altercations that happened during the American War of Independence on a map, you immediately see that the North didn’t have the lion’s share of action. Not by a long shot. Battle activity wasn’t even confined to the thirteen colonies and surrounding areas. No, our “Revolutionary War” was actually an international war that affected multiple countries on multiple continents.
Both my Michael Stoddard American Revolution Mystery series and the Mysteries of the American Revolution trilogy take place in the southern theater of the war—a setting overlooked in most fiction and films—and offer the reader a fuller picture of the period in those colonies and adjacent territories.
And now the Semiquincentennial is upon us. Early 250th anniversary events such as the Stamp Act (2015) have already slipped past with little recognition. Shouldn’t we be making more noise for the Semiquincentennial milestones of this world-altering event?
Let’s give ourselves the opportunity to see history from an angle that doesn’t involve tired clichés. Imagine the insights we’d gain. We’d realize that an enemy from 250 years ago often faced the same dilemmas that we’ve recently faced and made the same decisions (sometimes errors) that we make. And we just might wonder: “How different are we, really?”
Suzanne Adair, March 5, 2018
Suzanne Adair is a Florida native who lives in North Carolina. Her mysteries transport readers to the Southern theater of the American Revolution, where she brings historic towns, battles, and people to life. She fuels her creativity with Revolutionary War reenacting and visits to historic sites. When she’s not writing, she enjoys cooking, dancing, and hiking. Recently she was appointed by North Carolina’s Daughters of the American Revolution to a state-wide committee formed by the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources to help share information about and coordinate events of the Semiquincentennial.
Killer Debt, book #4 of her Michael Stoddard American Revolution Mystery series, will be released 9 May 2018 after a crowdfunding campaign during March 2018.
