Traditionalists and the American founding

A security officer walks by as snow collects around and on the statue of President Thomas Jefferson at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, Saturday, Dec. 19, 2009. (AP/Daylife)

Snow collects on the statue of President Thomas Jefferson at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, Saturday, Dec. 19, 2009. (AP/Daylife)

Many traditionalist Catholics have a negative view of the American founding. Once I thought of it as the American rebellion, though the American Loyalists may have a stronger constitutional case than is commonly believed. There is a discussion of traditionalist Catholics and "anti-Americanism" in the comments to Dr. Fleming's post on the Arizona law on illegal immigrants.
With respect to traditionalists and Dr. John Rao, and George III and the American Revolution, Dr. Fleming writes:

There is a strong tendency even among the best Americans to go off the rails in the search of an absolute set of simple principles that can be used to defend an identity. I admire John Rao a great deal, but he does not understand American history at all, much less our constitutional system. Americanism, of courses, is only a subspecies of theological modernism, which is the eternal quest for the ever-receding horizon of fashionable opinion. Some Protestants want to make of this country a propositional nation with a divine mission; some Catholics damn the whole country, largely because they accept the stupid Evangelical-liberal version of US history. Both sides are not only wrong: They are tedious. Freemasonry did influence the revolution, though, and there is no good excuse for any honest Christian to have joined a secret conspiracy that, at its best, attempted to bypass Christianity and and its worse aimed at its destruction. British masons were generally nice people but they were not Christians, whatever they may have thought they were.

George III was an essentially decent man with an inherited condition that made him first unstable and ultimately quite mad. He was a far more patriotic and honest ruler than any US president of the past 100 years. In my view, supported by considerable evidence, the American Revolution began as a project of conspiratorial Yankees who had been plotting treason for years. They only succeeded when the British government overreacted and created sympathy in the South for the Yankeee traitors. One branch of my family were Tories, not because they liked George III: In fact they did not regard him as legitimate–as indeed, he was not–but they were Scots who had given their word and they fled to Canada. Even some Scottish supporters of the revolution were rabbled and mistreated. (I too belong to a persecuted minority). There were elements of good and bad in the revolution, and it is as naive to claim that it was essentially conservative, as Russell Kirk did, as to insist that it was essentially radical, as leftists and some Catholics do. It was a very mixed bag. There were men of honor both in North and South, but there were also free-thinkers and libertines like Franklin.

If it is true that by their fruits we shall know them, then it should have been clear by 1820 that the Revolution had already gone much too far. Divorces were becoming easy and informal, and the sons of the original Yankee conspirators had made up their minds to enslave the sons of their former Southern comrades in arms. Neither the Almighty nor the Enemy created the United States, indeed, a correct understanding of the republic would prevent us from speaking of this confederation as if it were a unitary nation. In the end, the unitarian libertines beat the trinitarian conservatives, and there is no use crying over spilt milk.

Dr. Fleming responds to a query about book recommendations:

I have very little faith in modern historians who generally seek to impose an interpretation–ideological, economic, racialist, religious– on complex events whose participants have many motives. One wise starting point is a very strange Italian novel written (in a mixture of difficult dialects) by the cousin (Milanese) of a good friend of mine: Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Quer Pasticcacio Brutto de Via Merulana (That Ugly Mess on Via Merulana). In this intellectual crime novel, the detective is notorious for boring his colleagues with his assertion that it is never right to speak of a cause of a crime, but only of causes. I know this book so well because I have tried to read it in Italian–I know some Milanese–but never quite made it through to the end. William Weaver has a careful translation that I just recently discovered, and it is good for the main themes but useless so far as it cannot express the dialects.

Rather than read a book with a big perspective–whether that of Charles Beard or Forrest McDonald–I prefer to read diaries, letters, novels, autobiographies so that even where the writer is lying, he is lying from a perspective his contemporaries would understand. I am far from claiming to be a specialist in colonial American history or the Revolution, which I first studied in college in an excellent class by Phinizy Spalding, though I was bored to tears at the time. You might start with such histories as David Ramsay’s and Henry Adams’, then read Jefferson’s Notes and letters. Clyde Wilson and James Meriwether long ago persuaded me of the importance of Simms’ novels on the revolutionary period as sources. Of recent historians, I have learned the most from David Hackett Fisher and one of Mel Bradford’s favorite books, Colbourne’s The Lamp of Experience. Bradford’s essays collected in A Better Guide Than Reason are excellent and path-breaking. But by all means go and read Cotton Mather for the point of view of an intelligent and decent Yankee who was also quite mad, so far as I can see, or Hawthorne’s magnificent portrayals of the Yankee mind. In general, fiction is a better guide to what people thought than later works of history, both because poets and novelists are deeper thinkers than most historians and because books became popular because they resonated with the popular mind. And then, too, narrative is a primary way of organizing our memories and making them coherent, which is why modern historians, abandoning narrative, have little to teach us. I have gone on far too long. The liberals simply make up their history as they go long; there is much in the republican tradition so long as it is not self-consciously republican. Do not forget to read the pamphlet war over the Constitution, not just the Federalist, which is one side, but the pamphlets on both sides collected in the LOA volumes, Debates on the Constitution. This is just a start, of course, and I am a rank amateur, but my first glimmerings of truth came from family tales of distant ancestors who refused to fight against a king they disliked. Such family stories, collectively, represent an historical memory that only occasionally finds its way into books.