In this 250th anniversary year of the United States, pianist Lara Downes is traveling the country collecting conversations with scholars, searching for our history through songs. Her first stop is a visit with journalist and historian Jill Lepore.
I've read books and watched Ken Burns documentaries, but my principal education in American history comes from our music. It's my pathway as I search for identity, for lineage and legacy, for community and for an understanding of this vast land, in all its confusing complexities and contradictions.
I've learned that our music is a map of our history. It traces our roots and routes, and marks all the places where our journeys intersect to meet on common ground. It has always, from the beginning, given voice to our tragedies and triumphs, pointing the way forward, accompanying revolution, resistance and resilience, and insisting on the possibility of hope.
As we mark this 250th anniversary year, I'm crisscrossing the country, engaging scholars and historians in conversation to share perspectives on where we've been and where we're going. Together we've been listening to songs that form the soundtrack of these 250 years, hearing the echoes of the past, resonance of the present and vibrations of the future.
My first stop is a 200-year-old barn in Brattleboro, Vt. On a snowy evening at the nonprofit Retreat Farm before a packed audience, I was joined by historian and journalist Jill Lepore, whose latest book is We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution. Together we considered "My Days Have Been So Wondrous Free," a song written in Philadelphia in 1759, and the conditions in our country just before it officially became the United States.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Lara Downes: The Francis Hopkinson song "My Days Have Been So Wondrous Free" is often called the "first song," because it's thought of as the first archived, documented, notated song written on this soil. But of course, so much music existed here long before that — Native American songs and then African American music that's been happening here since 1619. The music — and ideas — really start to mingle right away. Can you talk about the echoes of that?
Jill Lepore: Eighteenth century Atlantic seaboard culture was a crazy mix — probably the most ethnically, racially, linguistically pluralist that the country had ever been, about the same as it is now. Philadelphia was the biggest city: a thriving seaport, loud, bustling, busy, stank of animals — horses and oxen in every corner, pigs running down the streets. Hopkinson would never have thought of himself as an American. Well into the 1770s, no one thought of themselves as Americans. Indigenous people thought of themselves in reference to the peoples and nations that they belonged to in their language groups. So [the population is] very English in many ways, but also quite Dutch, and a lot of Irish, and very German. And the enslaved population of Philadelphia was sizable, but so was the free Black population — because by 1759, when Hopkinson was writing, Quakers had already condemned slavery. So it was a really vibrant culture.
I was having a conversation yesterday about origin and immigration stories, and how the motivator to get on a boat, to go across an ocean to an unknown place, really had to do with upward mobility.
Although, people often think of Benjamin Franklin as the quintessential 18th century figure: He's born in 1706 in Boston, runs away to Philadelphia — well, first to London — dies in 1790. When he retires in 1748, he's made so much money in his printing business and his paper mills that he dedicates the rest of his life to public service and to philanthropy, including ending slavery, and to his service in Congress. But Benjamin Franklin is actually about the only American who climbed from that kind of poverty to that kind of wealth. He wrote all these books — advice to young tradesmen, trying to suggest that the values of industry and thrift in economy would lead you to economic success. But what we think of as a kind of class mobility was almost unheard of in the 18th century. That's why one of the reasons Franklin became such a subject of myth and worship, is because he was so unusual. People are drawn to that, but I think that particular story, that the streets of the United States are paved with gold, is a really a late 19th, early 20th century story.
People brought what they had when they came here. We always bring our songs. I was just at the Legacy Museum in Montgomery last week, immersing myself in the story of how Africans brought their songs with them. It was survival on the passage, to keep up your spirits. It's a lullaby for your baby. I didn't know this, but sometimes they would be unshackled on those boats and forced to sing and dance for exercise to keep them strong. And they were bringing their instruments with them.
I'm just thinking about how much music was suppressed, right? In New York, in the aftermath of an alleged slave conspiracy, which was never proven, there are new laws. No more than three people can go out together at night. If you're enslaved, you cannot ever be seen riding a horse. You're not allowed candles. Just things that just make it impossible to actually be together. Especially at night, which was an important time for mourning in the burial ground, for praying, for engaging in religious rituals and experiences. It is criminalized because that's how you destroy people. So, to think of the music as surviving is just an incredible testament to the vitality and insistence of the human spirit's need for beauty and community.
But I think there's another legacy of that era that we tend to forget. It's not an accident that the world's first modern democracy is born in a part of the world that is one of the last places where human bondage exists. In fact, it is the cries for freedom, and the insistence that enslaved Africans make, and the insistence on sovereignty that Indigenous peoples make again and again. These are people saying to Europeans, by what right do you take our liberty, our land and our lives? And out of that emerges this discourse of rights — that gets us all the way down to the Bill of Rights.
Is this encouraging? [Laughter] Seriously, I really struggle with this. It's so hard for us to wrap our heads around this 250th anniversary moment because when we're forced to think about this founding promise, we haven't achieved it. So is the idea just that we're still in the thick of it?
I think one thing that's important to resist — and I can see how it's tempting — is to follow one's personal political preferences into the hyper-polarized accounts of American history that duel on the public battlefield. On the one hand, you have a story of America that is a story of progress and growth and prosperity and liberty and triumph, where the United States has never done anything wrong. And it has always been a march toward freedom. On the other side of the political aisle, you have a story of American history that is a litany of atrocity — from conquest through enslavement, segregation, incarceration — and the United States has really never done anything right, at home or abroad. Of course, neither of those accounts is true. Both have factual elements within them. I think it's really important to resist the temptation to align yourself with either of those camps. Those are political accounts. Those are ideological accounts. And it's not really a question of choosing one or the other, and it's not even occupying some middle ground. It's a question of understanding the relationship between them and trying to figure out how they got to be so far apart.
I would love to ask you for your thoughts at this moment, looking into the future about the founding promise, those founding ideals. What do you hope for them and for us in the next 250 years?
I've been thinking lately about Benjamin Franklin's sister, Jane. I wrote a biography of her once. She was, like him, born into poverty. He was the youngest son and she the youngest daughter of 17 Franklin children. He lived a life of rags to riches, while she lived the more ordinary 18th century life of rags to rags. And yet, she became completely transformed by the ideals of the revolution and the founding of the United States. She was utterly uneducated. She had 12 children. She supported her family; her husband was in debtor's prison. She read the newspaper and did her best to be a fully informed citizen — an obligation that not all of us take half as seriously as she did under dire conditions.
She writes a letter to her brother later in life, as she's just been reading a revolutionary tract. And she says, "I've been thinking about how unusual it is that you have escaped our childhood of poverty and ignorance. And it makes me think of how in nature it takes 100,000 eggs for one spider or 20,000 acorns for one tree. And I wish that more of us could have those advantages." She was someone who did not. And I think that generosity of spirit around what it is to lift one another up is an ideal of the revolution that we very often forget and we need in this moment.
Tom Huizenga and Vincent Acovino produced the audio version of this story. Tom Huizenga produced the digital version.
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