Michael D. Hattem's "The Memory of '76"

Michael D. Hattem is a historian of early America and author of Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution. He is the associate director of the Yale–New Haven Teachers Institute.

Hattem applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Memory of '76: The Revolution in American History, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Memory of '76 is part of the introduction to Part III, which explores attempts to nationalize the memory of the Revolution after the Civil War. I don't know if the page reveals "the quality of the whole" book, but it actually does address a critical turning point in the story of the book. On this page, I describe how popular understandings of the Declaration of Independence, particularly the idea of "liberty" that it promised, underwent a dramatic shift in the half century after the Civil War. In part because of the end of slavery and the context of the Gilded Age, the liberty of the Declaration increasingly came to be seen as "individual liberty" rather than liberty as a feature of the society as a whole (as had been more common before the Civil War). Defined in no small part by freedom from government, any attempts to achieve equality came to be seen by some Americans as infringements of the individual liberty guaranteed in the Declaration of Independence.

I also cannot say whether reading page 99 will give readers a good or poor idea of the book. It does cover a crucial thread that runs throughout the book and is important for understanding the origins of the modern conservative memory of the Revolution that came about in the early years of the Cold War. But it also not representative of the book as a whole because much of the rest of it is more narrative-driven than this specific section.

The points made on page 99 setup my reinterpretation of the significance of the Gettysburg Address on the following page. There, I argue against Garry Wills's claim that the Gettysburg Address created a "concept of a single people dedicated to a proposition" that fundamentally changed the nation. Instead, I argue that by highlighting liberty and equality as the two fundamental principles of the Declaration and the Revolution as a whole, Lincoln actually helped lay the foundation for the conflicts over the meaning of the Revolution in the twentieth century. In the years after the Civil War, those two principles, which Lincoln thought were mutually reinforcing, would come to be seen by many Americans as antagonistic and irreconcilable.

Visit Michael D. Hattem's website.

The Page 99 Test: Past and Prologue.

--Marshal Zeringue