https://socialistaction.org/2016/12/17/books-an-ordinary-man-in-revolutionary-times/
Chronicle of an ‘ordinary’ man in revolutionary times
/ 2 days ago
election-1815-by_john_lewis_krimmel
“Election Day at the Statehouse, 1815,” by John Lewis Krimmel.
By CLIFFORD D. CONNER
“Unsinkable Patriot: The Life and Times of Thomas Cave in Revolutionary
America,” by Michael Schreiber, 2016. Available from Amazon, 737 pages,
$25.95.
Thomas who? If Thomas Cave’s name does not ring any bells, it does not
indicate a deficit in your education. He was not an outstanding
historical figure in any sense, and his name was lost to history until
Michael Schreiber recently undertook a prodigious effort to restore it
to our collective human memory. So why would anyone want to read a
lengthy biography of a thoroughly ordinary person named Thomas Cave? I
can think of several good reasons.
One is that even ordinary people often live lives that have their
extraordinary aspects and moments, or at least produce the material for
interesting stories, and Thomas Cave’s was exemplary in that respect.
His is an epic saga of war, battles on the high seas, revolution, the
birth of a new nation, imprisonment and escape from prison, epidemic
disease, love, financial ruin, and triumph. Everything a novelist could
want, with the added bonus that it is, as movie publicity often boasts,
“based on a true story.” The chapters devoted to Cave’s maritime
adventures, for example, are as drama-packed as the sea novels of
Patrick O’Brian.[i]
Another reason is that the very act of rescuing a
forgotten-for-two-centuries life from oblivion can itself make for a
fascinating tale. The subtext of this biography—the author’s sleuthing
in the archives—is a detective story worthy of Agatha Christie.
But the book’s primary virtue stems from the fact that it is not only a
biography—a “life”—but a “life and times.” The times Thomas Cave
witnessed and participated in were among the most transformative periods
in all of human history. It was the era of what some historians have
called the Atlantic Revolution, which combined the American Revolution,
the French Revolution, the liberation of Haiti by a slave uprising, the
Great Rebellion in Ireland, and a powerful radicalization in Great
Britain. As is generally acknowledged, three of these historic
upheavals, the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions, resulted in
irreversible social change that—for better and for worse—created the
world we inhabit today.
wolf-tone
Irish revolutionary leader Wolf Tone found refuge in Philadelphia. He
returned to Ireland and was executed by the British in 1798.
Furthermore, the other two social cataclysms, generally perceived as
unsuccessful revolutions, nonetheless also indelibly affected the
futures of their countries. The divisions in Irish society that were
exacerbated by the 1798 Rebellion have to this day not fully healed. The
resistance of the rebels to British savagery was so courageous that
today, more than 200 years later, Irish nationalists still derive
inspiration from the spirit of 1798. And the lasting relevance of the
deep radicalization in late-18th-century Britain is encapsulated in the
title of E. P. Thompson’s well-known history of the epoch, “The Making
of the English Working Class.”
Schreiber gives attention in several chapters to the activities of Irish
rebels who sought refuge in Philadelphia, and reports on the prejudice
and repression that some of them were subjected to while in exile.
Students of the history of France will find valuable material on that
country and its people throughout the volume. There are two major
sections on France; the first discusses Thomas Cave’s visits to Nantes
and Paris as a seaman, and the second has to do with French visitors and
immigrants in Philadelphia. The latter included acrobat and pastry chef
Etienne Simonet; the balloonist Jean Paul Blanchard; the controversial
French ambassador Edmund-Charles Genet; French doctors, including Jean
Deveze, who treated victims of the 1793 yellow fever epidemic; and
French colonialist refugees fleeing the Haitian Revolution.
Thomas Cave’s very “ordinariness” meant that he was as representative a
participant in the Atlantic Revolution as anyone could possibly have
been. He was born in Ireland to a family of “middling” social status,
emigrated to America as an indentured servant, served in the American
navy during the Revolutionary War, was imprisoned in England for a
number of years, and found his way to France, where Benjamin Franklin
helped him and other revolutionary fighters return to America.
After the Revolution, Cave settled in the capital city of the newborn
United States, Philadelphia; politically supported the democratic
opposition to the conservative Federalist party; defended the
Revolution’s gains as a lifelong militiaman; felt the impact of the
Haitian Revolution as fleeing French colonialists sought refuge in
Philadelphia; and wound up, at the time of the War of 1812, in charge of
Pennsylvania’s main arms depot, the State Magazine.
15-carpenters-hall
Carpenters Hall in Philadelphia, site of the First Continental Congress.
In 1805, Thomas Cave testified in court as a witness on behalf of
blacksmith Patrick Lyon, accused of robbing bank vaults in the building.
Meanwhile, like most ordinary people, Thomas Cave married and had
children, and had to find a way to provide for them and himself. He
began during his term of indenture as a semiskilled artisan, developed
his skills first as a miller and later as a brewer, and eventually
transformed himself into a small businessman by opening his own
breweries in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and even New York City. His career
as an entrepreneur, however, was fraught with rapid swings between
success and failure. Just as in earlier life he had survived servitude,
extreme difficulties at sea, and years of harsh imprisonment, he
likewise rose repeatedly from bankruptcies and debtors’ prison to embark
on new commercial ventures. That, combined with his devotion to the
American Revolution, explains the book’s title: “Unsinkable Patriot.”
There are two particular aspects of Michael Schreiber’s writing that
make “Unsinkable Patriot” simultaneously an enjoyable and an educational
reading experience. First is his narrative skill—a gift for storytelling
that elevates a mass of detailed data above its mundane context and
commands a reader’s attention. And second is that he is a historian with
social consciousness and a social conscience, joining the likes of C.L
R. James, William Appleman Williams, Mary Frances Berry, Howard Zinn,
and the aforementioned E. P. Thompson, to name just a few. As such he
does not simply parrot the standard patriotic foundation myths that are
taught to American schoolchildren, but clarifies the deeply
contradictory nature of the Revolution.
pass-over-south-mountains-from-york-to-carlisle
Mountain pass leading into Pennsylvania’s Cumberland Valley, where the
young Thomas Cave served as an indentured servant to a miller.
Thomas Cave paid for his passage from Ireland to the Land of the Free by
agreeing to be unfree for four years as an indentured servant in
Pennsylvania’s Cumberland Valley. “By the time Thomas was brought to the
valley in 1771, almost all of the local Indian peoples,” Schreiber
writes, “had been wiped out by warfare and disease or pushed west.” In
the war against the Indians that had preceded Thomas’s arrival, the
whites’ strategy had shifted early on “from defense to extermination, as
some settlers formed armed death squads.” At the same time, “British
army commanders authorized germ warfare against the Indians, giving them
blankets laden with smallpox.”[ii]
Schreiber illustrates the state of contemporary relations between the
settlers and the natives with an anecdote about a white woman who made
the difficult journey from the Cumberland Valley to Philadelphia
carrying the scalp of a dead Indian: “Money was given for dead Indians
much as it was for the tails of wolves, big cats, and squirrels—all of
which were marked as competitors for the land’s resources.”[iii]
When the American Revolution erupted in 1776, it undeniably represented
a major step forward in the history of human progress, but its moral and
political paradoxes were equally undeniable: “Some of the men who in
years past had participated with … vigilante groups against the Native
American people quickly transformed themselves into ardent
revolutionists and advocates of popular democracy.”[iv]
Some historians have labeled the genocide of the Native Americans, not
unjustly, “the American Holocaust.” But perhaps an even deeper
contradiction was the presence of slavery within an ostensible movement
for universal human liberation. Describing Thomas Cave’s social
environment in the early 1770s, Schreiber writes: “Most of the
Cumberland Valley residents of that era would have thought it
unremarkable that their pastor, who preached ‘the brotherhood of Man,’
would have held another human being in permanent bondage. In fact, most
of the large landowners of the district, the core supporters of the
Presbyterian Church, were slaveholders themselves, and hardly feared the
wrath of hellfire for such actions. Dominance by the white race, they
reasoned, was the natural order of things.”[v]
Even Thomas Cave himself, for one period of his life, was a slaveholder.
After the death of his first wife, Catherine, in 1795, he remarried two
years later. His second wife, Lydia, was the daughter of a large
landholder, and she apparently brought some slaves with her into the
marriage. Although Schreiber has quite a bit to say about the sociology
of slavery in the Revolutionary era, he was unable to unearth much
information about the specific circumstances of the Cave family’s human
property.
Cave’s death in May 1815 neatly coincided with a major watershed in
world history. “Historians frequently focus on 1815 as the year in which
the revolutionary era … was at last reduced to embers,” Schreiber
writes. “The clarion call of egalitarianism, sounded first in the
American Revolution and far more distinctly in the French, was now
muffled. … And so, as America heedlessly raced toward its ‘manifest
destiny,’ slavery was expanded into new cotton-producing territories in
the West, exclusion and terror were redoubled against Black people in
the North, and the Native peoples were uprooted and massacred.”[vi]
By focusing on the life of Thomas Cave, Michael Schreiber has created a
meticulous portrait of the era as seen through the eyes of a
rank-and-file American revolutionary. This is, therefore, an exemplary
“people’s history”—a comprehensive and highly coherent account, from an
essentially working-class perspective, of the American experience from
the 1770s through the War of 1812.
Clifford D. Conner is the author of “A People’s History of Science” and
other studies of history.
[i] The first of twenty in Patrick O’Brian’s “Aubrey-Maturin” series of
sea novels was Master and Commander, which was made into an acclaimed
2003 film.
[ii] Unsinkable Patriot, pp. 57–59.
[iii] Unsinkable Patriot, p. 58.
[iv] Unsinkable Patriot, p. 94.
[v] Unsinkable Patriot, p. 80.
[vi] Unsinkable Patriot, p. 698.
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December 17, 2016 in Books, Marxist Theory & History, Philadelphia.
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