Johnny Tremain and Today's Tea Party

Jill Lepore had a nice piece in the New York Times last week about “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,” a poem published 150 years ago on the date South Carolina’s secession from the Union. Like many leading New Englanders of his day, Longfellow was an abolitionist, and Lepore writes:

“Paul Revere’s Ride” is less a poem about the Revolutionary War than about the impending Civil War — and about the conflict over slavery that caused it. That meaning, though, has been almost entirely forgotten.

I showed the article to my eight-year old daughter Zelda because we are currently reading Johnny Tremain. As with Longfellow, Esther Forbes wrote her book about the American Revolution with a message about conflict of her day. Johnny must set aside his personal preoccupations to take up a weapon, as millions of young men were doing when Forbes was writing in 1943.

Reading the book for the first time since my mother read it to me when I was Zelda’s age (during the height of the Vietnam war), I am struck by the complexity of the work. On the one hand there is a dour New England Protestant ethic of industry and self-sacrifice driving the narrative; on the other, Forbes clearly recognizes the toll that such doctrinal demands took upon those on the fringes of colonial society. At eight I was obsessed with the military history of the American Revolutionary, a fact my mother, who was active in the antiwar movement in Madison, tolerated, and even abetted with her purchases of books and toy soldiers, but I’m sure did not entirely approve of. I am also struck at my sense of sorrow and waste—that I certainly didn’t feel when I was eight—as the two heroes, Johnny and Rab, are casting their own bullets and preparing cartridges, in the last days before the first shots are fired on Lexington Green, a sense that is particularly acute because I know this time how the book will end.

Of course, just as Longfellow and Forbes were using historical events as allegories the affairs of their times, Lepore chooses the anniversary of the Longfellow’s poem to write an argument against the revisionist Secessionmania that is gripping many in the South and against the know-nothing bigotry against Muslims that is current among many of those who claim to be acting in the spirit of the original Boston Tea Party.