(HOST) During the holidays, commentator Peter Gilbert traveled with his family to Williamsburg, Virginia – back in time, to the days of the American Revolution. What he found surprised him.
(GILBERT) On a recent visit to Colonial Williamsburg, my family and I explored the history of the American Revolution; we heard from men and women in period costumes who spoke as if the Revolution were still underway. What I had not anticipated was how, when we heard those characters of the American Revolution refer “to the war we are in” – how much those references would resonate with us in the twenty-first century. Not only I, but other visitors as well, heard modern echoes in the words of 230 years ago. How odd that walking down eighteenth-century Duke of Gloucester Street would bring the Iraq war to the forefront of ones’ mind.
There’s an irony here: because so many people think that such American history is not relevant today – not engaging or sexy enough – even Colonial Williamsburg, the nation’s largest, wealthiest, and most eminent living history museum, is facing declining ticket sales. It’s trying to attract more visitors with more dramatic presentations and more explicitly relevant content. The irony is that if one were to visit, one would be surprised by just how inherently relevant and thought-provoking the place and the history are.
We heard a British officer, dressed in his red coat, tell a crowd of several hundred visitors that he had not burned all of Richmond, Virginia, but had just destroyed, quote, “the supplies of the insurgents.” Unquote. People murmured at the use of that word that’s so very much on our minds today.
We went to hear Patrick Henry speak for about a half an hour and then answer questions. After he had talked about his longstanding and passionate support for independence, this man, who had declared, “Give me liberty or give me death” was asked by a member of the audience if he could foresee a time when his country might seek to spread democracy abroad, to other people with or without their permission. The audience reacted with an audible murmur of understanding and interest.
In elegant eighteenth-century language, the man playing Patrick Henry said that he hoped America’s war for liberty would inspire other countries, but that he would never give his blessing to America “becoming engaged in foreign entanglements, excepting, of course, when our security is threatened or our national interest directly affected. But,” he concluded, “bring democracy to them against their will, nay! By example – that is the role we should play.”
Later, he observed that the war then underway in 1776 might be called a civil war “an argument within the British family, as it were.” The contemporary ring of asking whether the American Revolution should be called a civil war (which, of course, it was) caused the man sitting behind us to let out a laugh of recognition.
It’s not clear that everyone in the audience agreed with everything Patrick Henry said, but it is clear to me that that audience learned something about the power of the past to make us ask new questions about our present.
Peter Gilbert is executive director of the Vermont Humanities Council.