Jonathan Yardley:
My name is Jonathan Yardley. I'm the book critic of the Washington Post, which is one of the sponsors of the National Book Festival. Copies of tomorrow's issue of Book World are available for free in the Let's Read America Pavilion a few steps away. It's a great pleasure for me to introduce my friend of nearly 30 years standing, David McCullough.Since David is one of those rare people who genuinely does not need an introduction, I would just like to say something about him that you may have forgotten. We now think of David as our unofficial national biographer and national historian. Before he became those things, David was the best writer of descriptive nonfiction about construction whom I have ever read. His books -- The Great Bridge, about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, and The Path Between the Seas, about the construction of the Panama Canal -- are absolute masterpieces. If you haven't read them, you must. Ladies and gentlemen, David McCullough.
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David McCullough:
Thank you. Thank you very much. Goodness me, thank you. Thank you, John. To have a Pulitzer Prize book reviewer who has been writing some of the finest reviews of anyone in this country for -- what is it, 20, 30 years? That's John Yardley, and if you don't read his reviews, you should. They're works of literature unto themselves. And his beautiful wife, Marie Arana, is one of the reasons that we have this great Book Festival; because of her support in the Washington Post. She's the Editor of the Post; terrific magazine, Book World.
I'm so in debt to the Library of Congress for so many reasons. For 40 years I've been using the Library as a source, but also as an inspiration. My first inkling about doing a book and about trying something that I had never done before came because I saw some material, photographic material, in the Library of Congress which led me to write my first book. And I have been helped by, inspired by, set on the right path by the staff; many people on the staff of the Library all these years. I also believe fervently in the public library system we have. I think it's one of the greatest of all our institutions. I'm sure you agree.
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I think that the portals of public libraries are the portals to freedom, to the open mind as well as to the open stacks. And it's so reassuring to tour the country, as I have this summer, and see wonderful new libraries in our major cities, and to hear that library use is up, and to be reminded again and again how fortunate we are in this country. No other country has a public library system such as we have. And if you ever get down about the state of American civilization or the American arts or whatever, just keep one small statistic in mind: we still have more public libraries in this country than there are McDonald's.
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Now, sitting somewhere in this great crowd is my Editor-in-Chief. And I want you to know that she has been a driving force, a great corrector of bad grammar, poor spelling and a constant believer in what I'm trying to do for 50 years; my wife, Rosalie.
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She is Mission Control and Secretary of the Treasury --
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-- and Chair of the Ethics Committee.
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I have traveled all over the country this summer, 26 cities, on the book tour. People say to me, "Why do you do that?" Well, I do it because I love it. I love to meet people who love books and who read what I do, and I love to see what's going on and to hear what's on people's minds, and to just shake their hands and find out what they think of my work. And some of them will say memorable things, like the fellow who leaned over to me and said, "I'll bet you did a lot of research for that book."
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And then there was another man -- this is quite true -- in Atlanta, who came through the line. And he had a copy of my 1776. He said, "I really like this book." He said, "Now, notice how beautiful the jacket is." And he said, "Inside here there are all these wonderful illustrations. They're as good as in an art book." And he paged through them like this; he was showing them to me as if I'd never seen the book before.
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And he said, "Then there's that picture on the back; that's good too."
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He said, "But I just have one question." I thought, "Oh boy, what's it going to be?" He said, "Where'd you get that sport coat?"
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The Revolutionary War era, the 18th century, was more important to who we are and the way we are and what we hold to be our American secular faith than most people realize. And unfortunately, to a very large degree it is portrayed so often almost as though the people who were involved, and particularly the protagonists, were figures in a costume pageant. The clothing at the time, the renditions of Jefferson and Washington and others in the paintings by Gilbert Stuart or Charles Willson Peale lend this sort of theatrical quality to them. We don't see them in photographs, we have no recordings of their voices, we can't see film footage of them.
And in fact, in the case of those who fought in the war we have no on-the-spot drawings by artists' correspondence, such as Winslow Homer who covered the Civil War. So it's almost impossible to reach them as we would reach people in the Civil War or the First World War or others, except for what they wrote in diaries and letters and sometimes orderly books; records of one kind or another, and memoirs or also biographies written after the fact. The newspaper coverage was nothing like you would expect; there were no correspondents covering the war, no reportage coming back to be published in the papers around the country.
And by and large we would have to conclude we don't know what they looked like. But we do know what they looked like in part because of deserter notices. When men deserted from the ranks, when they went home or they went over, defected, went over to the other side, notices would be published in the papers or end up at a store, country stores. And they were very descriptive because they hoped to find these people. And what comes through in those descriptions is a realization of how different from all of us they looked. Very few who fought with Washington and marched with Washington in 1776 wore uniforms; even the officers rarely had full uniforms. Washington himself had a magnificent uniform because he felt that that was part of his role as a leader; to look like the leader, to look like the general.
But the men in the ranks were wearing everything imaginable, and they were not supplied with replacements for what they wore. So as the year wore on their clothing became tattered, mended, dirty, eventually in rags, or worse than rags. And the times themselves, the era in which they lived, was so much harder than we understand. Life for someone in the 18th century, even in peacetime, was very difficult by our standards, very uncomfortable; filled with danger, threats of disease, filled with the possible accidents and physical destruction that could come from work.
People were beat up by life more than we are in our time. There were no orthodontists, no dentists, no cosmetic surgeons, to say the least, so that someone with a severe childhood injury like Nathaniel Green would walk for the rest of his life with a limp, coming from an accident that in our time would be readily corrected. John Trumble, the great painter whose works hang in the Capitol; "The Signing of the Declaration of Independence," the magnificent painting of one of the most important scenes in our history, when Washington returned command of the army back to the Congress, returned his power to the Congress, something no conquering general had ever done after the end of the Revolutionary War -- John Trumble only had the use of one eye, again because of a childhood injury.
Henry Knox had part of one hand blown off in a hunting accident as a young man, and on and on. People were missing teeth, they had a cast in their eye or they had a way of holding their head on their shoulder because of something that had happened to them. Life was dangerous, difficult, and people were resilient, tough and strong to a degree that is something we too seldom forget. We in our time, we are softies by contrast. It's hard for us to imagine what it would be like to have sweeping epidemic dysentery or smallpox or typhus or typhoid sweep through our town or community or city and take the lives of hundreds of people all around us, but it happened. And of course, when the war came on the suffering and the tragedy and the grief, the sorrow, can't be measured with any statistics. Abigail Adams said, "Future generations who will reap the blessings will have little idea, can little imagine what we have suffered in their behalf." And she was right.
The war was the longest in our history except for the Vietnam War; eight and a half years. It was also very bloody proportionate to the population; 25,000 Americans were killed. Now, to us, to we who have lived with the brutal statistics of the 20th and 21st centuries of war casualties and suffering worldwide, 25,000 doesn't sound like a great deal. But 25,000 was one percent of a population of 2,500,000, and if we were to fight a revolutionary war today with our population, that would mean that over 3 million would be killed. So in their time it was a horrible war, and it was extremely costly to the people who stayed home and had to make do without their husbands, to work the farm or to be the breadwinner for a family. Now, I'd like to just read you a little bit of some of these deserter notices. They're very colorful. They're very picturesque.
In a way they are describing people who are immediately identifiable in a way that we are not used to; very much like the characters in Dickens, say. One George Reynolds [ spelled phonetically ] of Rhode Island, for example, was 5 feet 9-and-a-half inches tall, age 17, and carried his head on his right shoulder. Thomas Williams was an immigrant, "an old country man," it says in quotes. That means he was from the Old Country; he wasn't an old man from the country. He was from probably Ireland or Wales or somewhere of that kind. He spoke good English, but had a film in his left eye. David Relf [ spelled phonetically ], a saucy fellow, was wearing a white coat, jacket and breeches and ruffled shirt when last seen; deserted from Colonel Brewster's regiment in Captain Harvey's company, said a notice in the Essex, Connecticut Gazette.
One Simian Smith [ spelled phonetically ] of Greenfield, a joiner by trade, a thin, spare fellow about 5 feet 4 inches high, had on a blue coat and a black vest, a metal button on his hat, black long hair, black eyes, his voice in the hermaphrodite fashion; the masculine rather predominant. Likewise, Mathias Smith [ spelled phonetically ], a small, smart fellow, a saddler by trade, grey headed, has a younger look in his face and is apt to say, "I swear, I swear," and between his words will spit smart; had on a green coat and an old red coat. He's wearing two coats, you see; one's red and one's green. He is a right gamester, although he wears something of a sober look.
Likewise, John Daiby [ spelled phonetically ], a long, hump shouldered fellow, a shoe maker by trade, drawls his words, and for comfortable says, "comfable." He had on a green coat, thick leather breeches, slim legs, lost some of his four teeth. These men who are largely anonymous were the ones who went and did the hard marching and fighting and marching and fighting again and again, month after month, and who made the words, the noble ideals of the Declaration of Independence more than just a declaration, more than just words on paper.
When we celebrate the 4th of July, we celebrate the great openings, passages of the Declaration of Independence. We celebrate that all men are created equal; life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. None of that would have been possible without the men who marched with Washington through 1776 and beyond. And don't picture them as all heroes; they weren't. Hundreds deserted, thousands deserted as time went on. Thousands more went home when their enlistments were up; they only enlisted for a year. And when the time came to go home, there was nothing to stop them. And many of them just marched away. When Washington was in retreat across New Jersey and his army was down to rags, and many of the men were without shoes and winter was coming on, and the British were coming on fast behind them in a force beyond anything that Washington could even imagine, with soldiers who were well trained, well shod with good clothes, good equipment -- when that was going on, at one point in December the enlistments for 2,000 men came up, and 2,000 men marched away, went home with no shame.
Washington's army was down to 3,000 men; that's all that were left. So in effect, quite literally we owe what we have and who we are and all that we hold sacred to about 3,000 men who would not quit. And that was because, in part, they were led by a man who would not quit. George Washington was not a great intellectual like Jefferson or Adams or Hamilton. He wasn't a brilliant speaker like his fellow Virginian Patrick Henry. What George Washington was, was a leader. He was a man of phenomenal courage; physical and moral courage. He was a man who could spot great talent in other people and give them a chance. And two of the best men he picked, he picked within about two weeks after first meeting them: Nathaniel Green and Henry Knox. And he picked them despite the fact that they were New Englanders, and he disliked New Englanders ardently.
He thought they were the best he had, and they were the best he had. Those two men, Green and Knox, with Washington were the only general officers who stayed the entire length of the war; who did not leave, who would not quit. Washington also had the capacity to understand how our system works; that he was not the boss, the Congress was the boss, and he was serving at the will of Congress, at the pleasure of Congress. And one of the best things that the Congress of the United States ever did was to pick Washington as the Commander-in-Chief.
Now, keep in mind, please -- they did not pick him because he was a great general. Washington had never commanded an army in his life in battle before taking command in Cambridge, in the summer of '75. And when he took command, he was all of 43. Don't picture these leaders as elder statesmen of the kind we see in the Gilbert Stuart paintings. They were young men. Washington was 43, Adams was 40, Hancock was 39. Jefferson was all of 33 when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. This was a young man's revolution, a young man's cause. And Washington, being a member of Congress, was known by the others in Congress. And they picked him because of his character; they knew the man, and they knew they could trust him. And when the war was over and Washington did return the command to the Congress, he did something that had never been done before. When George III was told that Washington might do this, George III said, "If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world."
He stood back from power, as he had promised to do in the beginning. But the real story, it seems to me, is with those men in rags who marched with him. When his army finally got to the Delaware River and crossed the Delaware River at night, trying to put the river between them and the oncoming British army, they were men who were utterly exhausted. Most of them were sick. They were all hungry. They were cold. They had no winter clothing. Many of them had their feet wrapped in rags because they had no shoes.
And the stories of men leaving bloody footprints in the snow from their bare feet are not mythical. That's the truth. That's what it was. They crossed the river. And the next morning a militia unit from Philadelphia that had come up to relieve them, to help them, included Charles Willson Peale, the painter who was at that time a young officer with the militia unit. And he said he'd never seen such miserable human beings in his life, these poor, ragged soldiers who had been fighting again and again and losing again and again to the British. And he was walking among them and he saw one man who was all but naked except for a "blanket coat," as they were called, who was so dirty, so filthy, his hair down over his shoulders, that he couldn't tell whether he was a black or white or who he was. And his face was all covered with sores.
And Peale wrote in his diary that he'd never seen a more wretched human being in all of his life. And then a few minutes later he realized that the man was his own brother. In a way they are all our own brothers, and we as their descendants, if you will, are forever in their debt. We must never forget them. We must never not recognize how much we owe to them. And among the things that we must do is know about them, learn about them, tell our children about them; encourage our children and our grandchildren to read about them, and to know what they went through.
These were not characters in a costume pageant. They were human beings as real and as alive as we are, and all that they did for our country is also of course part of what is stirring much of the world. Rosalie and I have just come back from Hungary, from Budapest, and the Hungarians are about to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. And they were very interested to hear about the revolution of 1776, because they consider that, too, part of what is their heritage as well as ours. Thank you very much.
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