(light dramatic music) - Hello and welcome to a special podcast on the American Revolution.

I'm Will, a recent college graduate, and summer intern at WMHT, Upstate New York's Public Media Station.

Please join me as we explore this pivotal period in American history in companion with Ken Burns's 12-part documentary series, "The American Revolution."

(gentle orchestral music) What do you picture when I say the word "freedom?"

As an American, I can't help but conjure memories of fireworks bursting in air on the 4th of July.

Growing up in New England, my imagination ran wild during Independence Day celebrations.

Everything I saw had a historical flare, the crimson ribbon of a rocket soaring over the harbor, like a ghost of an ancient missile poised for war, beach sailboats imitating shipwrecks in the dark, illuminated on and off and on by the soft glow of artillery.

It seems sort of odd when I think about it.

Like somehow exploding valleys of chemical salts and gunpowder reminded me of my own freedom and the people who fought for it so long ago.

But if you've ever lived in America, it might make more sense than you think.

America is obsessed with freedom, and our obsession with freedom runs deep in our history.

Since the United States founding, we've enjoyed the narrative that America has always stood as a bastion of liberty and equality in a world of tyrannical monarchs and oligarchs.

The story goes, a cadre of enlightened men known as the Founding Fathers with muskets loaded and quill pens scribbling, bamboozled the British red coats into giving up their claim on the American colonies.

Then, from the ashes of war, rose a new republic, where men could freely elect their rulers and exercise their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It's a good story.

If it were entirely true.

You see, there is a contradiction at the heart of it all, that while the Founders fought for the idea that all men deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, they believed governance should remain in the hands of a select few.

Just ask Alexander Hamilton, who, despite his appearance on Broadway, was not quite the man of the people Lin-Manuel Miranda made him out to be.

Before introducing his plan of government at the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Hamilton said to the delegates, "All communities divide themselves into the few and the many.

The first are the rich and well born, the other the mass of the people."

The voice of the people has said to be the voice of God and whoever general this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not a true fact.

The people are turbulent and changing.

They seldom judge or determine right.

Give therefore to the first class a distinct permanent share in the government.

Poor farmers refuted.

Now, I know for many listeners with even a modest understanding of the American Revolution, a lot of this information is not new.

It is pretty well understood that the founders expected the wealthiest and best educated white men to be the governors of their new nation.

But what I rarely hear about in popular media are the voices of those that did oppose the founders' oligarchical tendencies, people living on the margins of early American society, white men without property, free Black people, women, and to some extent, veterans.

Many of these social groups advocated for their civic rights at the same time that the founders saw it fit to exclude them.

I want to tell a few of their stories, or at the very least, help us understand the various nuances of the American revolutionary period.

Now, for simplicity's sake, I'll keep the conversation local to WMHT's listening audience.

So figures and stories will be primarily from New York and New England.

Now, to give a general overview of the class distinction between the Founding Fathers and the rest of America, we'll start at the top of the social hierarchy in New York.

Here was a group of wealthy aristocratic elites.

These were men with extensive land holdings, the Livingstons, the Jays, the Schuylers, the Morrises, and the Rensselaer.

Basically, anybody with a Brooklyn alleyway or town in the capital region named after them.

The majority of them were slave holders, landlords, and immensely wealthier than the general populace.

The laws and political policies they wrote reflected this.

Prior to the revolution, the New York aristocrats enjoyed a near monopoly over local and state politics.

When Alexander Hamilton's father-in-law, Philip Schuyler ran for an assembly position in 1768, his biographer described the campaign as not a question of whom the people were for, but who were the most prominent landed aristocrats going to support.

Many of the New York aristocrats, like Schuyler, assumed their influence would remain dominant in all future elections.

After all, they were the most educated men in the state with the greatest financial stake in ensuring its continued prosperity.

So in 1777 when John Jay, Robert Livingston and Governor Morris gathered in Kingston to draft New York State's new Constitution, they ensured that the elites would stay in power.

The right to vote, for example, extended to any property holding man over the age of 21.

But the property qualifications were substantial.

A man had to possess a freehold value of over 20 pounds, equivalent to about $5,000 today.

On some of the estimates I've seen, to vote in Senate or gubernatorial races, the qualification was set at over 100 pounds.

So when all said and done, out of New York's 170,000 person population, the number of votes in the state's first gubernatorial election was less than 4,000.

4,000 votes!

That's it.

Now, the presence of the war definitely affected voter turnout, but even still, the number is laughable, when considering that freedom to self-governance was a major reason those people were fighting in the first place.

Now, what is rather interesting in New York is that both white and free Black men with enough property were eligible to vote in 1777.

But since the majority of Black men at the time were slaves, they did not make up a significant size of the voting population.

However, when New York State passed laws gradually abolishing slavery in 1799, the number of eligible Black voters increased exponentially.

This got some of the politicians worried, especially members of the more prudent Democratic Republican party who feared Black voters would support the more abolition-minded federalists.

Additional laws emancipating Black children born into slavery led to significant backlash from the Democratic Republicans.

And of course, the moment they gained power, they passed laws making it more difficult for Black men to vote.

Discriminatory voting requirements were put into effect, like making free Black men purchase expensive certificates of freedom to prove their eligibility.

They also increased the property requirements for Black voters, while simultaneously lowering them for white voters.

By 1821, Black suffrage was virtually non-existent in New York state, while slavery would not be abolished until 1827.

Free Black men did not take this sitting down though.

One of the fiercest advocates for the rights of free and enslaved Black people was the American clergyman Lemuel Haynes Lemuel Haynes was born in West Hartford, Connecticut to an unknown father of African descent, and a mother most likely belonged to a prominent white family.

The reason we do not know for sure is that at the age of five months, Lemuel Haynes was given up to be an indentured servant under the care of Deacon David Rose, a blind farmer from Greenville, Massachusetts.

His mother probably gave him away as an attempt to avoid scandal, but we do not know for certain.

In many ways, Haynes was relatively lucky.

The Rose family saw to his education and according to some accounts, treated him like one of their own children.

Nevertheless, life for a free Black person in colonial New England was extremely difficult.

Racial discrimination pervaded every aspect of their lives.

Free Black people were ostracized, and their access to certain professions and economic opportunities was severely limited.

However, this did not stop Haynes from performing his patriotic duty.

He served in the Massachusetts state militia in 1775 and accompanied his fellow militia men in Garrison Fort Ticonderoga, which, for the history buffs out there, means he actually served under General Philip Schuyler.

Haynes stayed in the Army until he fell sick with typhus and returned home 1776.

But during his brief service, he familiarized himself with all that Republican idealism that seemed to be going around, especially the Declaration of Independence.

Haynes liked the sound of the Founding Fathers American Republic.

I mean, who wouldn't?

All men are created equal?

The government requires the consent of the governed?

Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

Sounds amazing!

Except, of course, Haynes believed those rights should extend to Black men as well.

He could immediately spot the Founding Father's hypocrisy in the Declaration of Independence.

And in 1776, wrote a formal response called "Liberty Extended."

In it Haynes criticized the founders for demanding freedom from Britain, while depriving it from half a million Americans.

Now, I encourage everyone listening at home to give "Liberty Extended" a proper read through, but I wanna share with you a short excerpt just to demonstrate the point Haynes was trying to make: "One man may boast a superiority above another in point of Natural privilege; yet if he can produce no convincive arguments in vindication of this preeminence, his hypothesis is to be suspected.

To affirm, that an Englishman has a right to his Liberty, is a truth which has been so clearly evinced, especially of late, that to spend time in illustrating this, would be but superfluous tautology.

But I query, whether Liberty is so contracted a principle as to be confined to any nation under Heaven; nay, I think it not hyperbolical to affirm, that even an African, has equally as good a right to his Liberty in common with Englishmen."

Bars.

Lemuel Haynes never did get a proper response from Congress, but he continued his advocacy for the rest of his life.

In 1785, Haynes became the first Black person to be ordained in the United States and was the minister of a church in central Vermont for over 30 years.

The later years of his life were defined by a ceaseless advocacy for the emancipation of all enslaved people.

He and other abolitionists laid the groundwork for stronger abolitionist movements of the 1830s and '40s.

He died in New York in 1833.

Lemuel Haynws was truly remarkable in defying the adversities of the late revolutionary period.

But I think his story reveals something more insidious about the Founding Fathers.

The founders were not simply men of their time incapable of higher thinking or compassion for those people living on the margins of society.

If men like Haynes were fully capable of understanding the extent of slavery's horribleness, then so were the founders.

Now, I do not mean to generalize the founders' view on slavery.

Men like John Adams and Benjamin Franklin were fierce opponents of slavery.

But even they supported prudence, a gradual emancipation rather than immediate abolition.

For the founders, the most important issue was creating a functional and secure government, despite its inherent sins.

It's important to remember there are some nuances here.

Opting for the gradual emancipation of slavery instead of immediate abolition probably preserved the United States.

Jump forward 85 years to the Civil War, and that moment nearly tore the nation into pieces and wrecked the entire project.

Could the founding generation have sustained that?

Probably not.

Some may argue though, if removing one of the most evil institutions in world history would cause your entire nation to collapse, maybe it was not that great insecure nation to begin with?

I don't know.

Talking about the United States lack of security helps me transition to the next guy I'd like to discuss: Daniel Shays and Shays' Rebellion.

Today, Shays' rebellion is often remembered as a strange footnote in American history, where at best, the answer to a bar trivia question about what crisis precipitated the convening of the constitutional convention.

But I think we should remember Shays' rebellion, because it demonstrates very well that the rich and wellborn classes Hamilton was advocating for could be just as turbulent, indecisive, and incompetent as any man of the people.

After the end of the war, wealthy Bostonian merchants found themselves in a predicament.

Their businesses relied heavily on liberally extended lines of credit from British manufacturers overseas.

But as a result of the war, those lines of credit dried up.

The Bostonian merchants quickly realized they need to come up with some hard currency fast to pay off all their debts.

So they passed the demand for real money from the coastal cities to distributors inland, and those distributors that passed it to rural farmers in Western Massachusetts, who had no money to spare.

But this did not stop creditors from taking these farmers to court and suing them for the money they owed.

Since the farmers had very little money to hand over, the creditors requisition their lands instead.

The Massachusetts governor James Boden, a wealthy Bostonian, only exacerbated the situation when he decided to call for the immediate collection of all debts, along with the repayment of all delinquent taxes that had accumulated, while those very same farmers fought and died during the American Revolutionary War.

Boden himself was too ill to serve in the conflict.

One of these farmers, the governor so ardently demanded taxes from, was Daniel Shays, a farmhand who had seen action in Lexington, in Concord, at Bunker Hill and in Saratoga.

He returned home in 1780 after being wounded and received nothing in financial compensation for his five years of service, meaning he abandoned his livelihood to earn those same merchants in Boston their right to govern independently.

When the demand for hard currency reached Shays and the other yeoman farmers in 1782, they first tried a democratic path to resolve the issue of their debts.

They requested the state issue more paper currency, thus increasing inflation and diminishing the amount they owed.

The Bostonians and government, of course, shut this proposal down, and the farmers faced with the impossible decision of losing their livelihoods or going into open revolt, decided to take up arms.

Many of the farmers prevented local courts from executing the property seizures.

The leaders of the Massachusetts state legislature decided stern measures needed to be taken against the insurgent farmers.

American founding Father Samuel Adams responded to the conflict by saying, and I quote, "In monarchy the crime of treason may admit of being pardoned or lightly punished, but the man who dares rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death."

I hesitate to say Adams is being hypocritical here, as I do think this is consistent with his political beliefs.

But at the same time, he's talking about penniless soldiers.

Men who fought hard during the revolution and knew at the end of it they would not receive a prominent political position.

It's a bad look, Sam.

So in the winter of 1786-1787, the wealthy Bostonian merchants among the Massachusetts state legislature raised a private militia to stomp out the rebellion, 'cause apparently they had enough money to raise militia but not pay their debts.

The revolt itself lasted for months, but when the farmers engaged in skirmishes with the better trained and better armed militia forces, they were outmatched.

The farmers gave up the fight in February, 1787.

Daniel Shays was taken captive and set to be hanged.

But John Hancock was sympathetic to him and even granted Shays a small pension after pardoning him.

But for the rest of his life, the insurgent leader faced immense public criticism.

The Massachusetts press labeled Shays as a demagogue, and for the most part, that's been his legacy ever since.

And his reasons for leading the uprising faded into obscurity.

Shays died impoverished in New York in the year 1825.

For all the founding fathers fears that the people would elect a demagogue if given the chance, Shays' rebellion helped prove that over accommodating the interests of wealthy, educated businessmen could just as easily lead to popular revolt.

Chaise rebellion was a big reason the United States opted for a centralized government that could keep in check the more radical elements within each state.

The states themselves would always be more beholden to the interest of commoners or mismanagement by individual leaders, while strong federal government would ensure the wealthy and educated men like themselves had influenced over all aspects of the American political system.

Now, this did cause a huge split in the founder's ideology between those that believed in more democratic state governments, known as Democratic Republicans, and those who supported a stronger federal government, i.e.

the Federalists.

Both parties, however, were still dominated by the interests of wealthier aristocratic white men.

So diversity of thought did not always translate to diverse political bodies.

It also goes without saying that the founders did not do a great job of taking care of their veterans after the Revolutionary War.

Many veterans did not receive their promised pensions until 1818 or 1820, and even then, the pensions were limited to those living in poverty.

So if you were a 20-year-old soldier who fought in the battle of Saratoga in 1777, you may not have received a pension until you were in your '60s.

You're the widow of a soldier, and you would not be eligible until the passing of the Pension Act in 1836, a full 55 years after the end of the war.

Women in general got the short end of the stick when it came to the American Revolution.

The debate for women's rights at this time was almost non-existent in higher politics.

American women did not have the right to vote in any election, and were more or less stripped of their autonomy upon marriage.

The laws surrounding women's property rights in the United States were initially adopted from the traditions of British common law, which placed severe restrictions on women's ability to own or obtain property.

Married women could not own property, enter contracts, or control their own finances individually from their husbands.

Some states adopted more progressive approaches to women's property rights, but even these measures were severely limited in scale.

1771 New York State passed a law requiring a wife's consent if her husband chose to sell the property they inherited from her side of the family.

But it would not be until 1839 in Mississippi, that women could hold property in their own names.

This is not to say women did not have any political or social influence of the 18th century.

Far from it.

The author and poet, Phillis Wheatley, who despite being an enslaved person, was one of the best known writers in early 18th century America.

She helped catalyst the anti-slavery movement through artistic and intellectual talents and was well regarded by many of the founders.

Many prominent wives of the Founding Fathers, such as Abigail Adams, advocated for women's education and emphasized the importance of women's role in upholding the nation's civic principles.

Adams also encouraged the burgeoning protofeminist movement that came after the publishing of Judith Sargent Murray's "On the Equality of the Sexes," which posed the idea that men and women were intellectually equal.

By the end of the American revolutionary period, the issue of women's rights was only just entering the political sphere, but the battle for equality would be part of a much slower war of attrition.

In New York State, women would not be granted the right to vote until 1917.

Now, we're nearing the end of our podcast.

So before I go, I should say that critiquing all of the founders in a big general sweep tends to leave a lot of nuance on the table.

These men were not demi-gods capable of building whatever government they desired.

There were compromises, feuds, and nation-tearing agreements during every point of the Revolution.

While the first draft of the Constitution left a lot to be desired in terms of liberty and equality, the late added Bill of Rights is really a masterpiece of political policy.

But that does not change the fact that the Founding Fathers proclaimed that all men are created equal, while simultaneously designing a system that would keep power concentrated in the hands of men like themselves, the wealthy, the educated, the well-born.

But here's what makes the other story so powerful.

They proved that the ideals the founders proclaimed weren't just empty words.

People like Lemuel Haynes heard their speeches on liberty and equality and said, "Yes, we believe in that too, but we want it for everyone, not just a select few."

Haynes didn't just critique the Declaration of Independence.

He held it to its own standard.

Daniel Shays didn't just rebel against the idea of republican government.

He rebelled against a government that had forgotten the very people who fought to create it.

These people weren't radicals trying to tear down the American experiment.

They were people trying to make it live up to its own promises.

The arguments of Lemuel Haynes in 1776 and the rest of his life echoed through the abolitionist movement all the way to the Civil War.

The grievances Daniel Shays and the other farmers raised about veterans compensation and unfair taxation would resurface again and again in American politics.

The proto-feminist ideas circulating in the revolutionary period planted seeds that would grow into the women's suffrage movement.

Americans are obsessed with freedom, but I think you have to be, if you want to stay free.

Thank you again for listening and remember to support WMHT at www.wmht.org.

(bright orchestral music) (bright music)