A Rapid Stillness
When history seems fast and slow at the same time
This is an installment of “Sestercenntenial Moments,” marking the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution and its memory in our national life. For more on the background of the series, see here.
When I launched “Sestercentennial Moments” on July 4, I made a reasonable supposition that there were plenty of granular incidents in the history of the American Revolution and its legacy in our national life that I could write about. After all, my inspiration from the “Bicentennial Minutes” that ran on CBS television from 1974 to 1976 had daily installments, and my plan was to be less frequent and more thematic than those video essays. I’m not too worried about my plan going forward—the pace of events beginning in 1775 (which for me will mean installments in 2025) look to be fast enough—but the fact is that I find myself in a bit more of a trough here in the summers of 1774/2024 than I expected.
This situation is also a little more paradoxical than I expected. As I re-immersed myself in books from my library and did some additional reading, it was clear that a sense of political instability had been building for a decade by 1774, and that the Boston Tea Party in particular was a far more pivotal event that I fully realized, its reverberations teaching across the ocean as well as down the Atlantic seaboard for months after it happened. Indeed, much of what I’ve already written so far for this series is connected to it in one way or another. A lot of people believed they were living in a fraught moment, and that Something Big was going to happen. The most obvious indication of this was plans across the thirteen colonies to send representatives for a Continental Congress that would meet in Philadelphia in September.
And yet I’ve had difficulty finding evidence of much that was happening in August of 1774. The key figures of the Revolution seem to be on something resembling a summer vacation. Not the ever-industrious John Adams: he was in Maine (then part of Massachusetts) paying his bills with legal work. Thomas Jefferson was at Monticello and George Washington at Mount Vernon, attending to their correspondence the way we attend to our email, though the traffic doesn’t seem particularly notable. I can’t account for the daily activities of young James Madison or Alexander Hamilton in August of 1774. More generally, British North America was an agricultural civilization, and summer was an interlude between planting and the arduousness of the autumn harvest. You get the idea. I’m hardly the last word on the subject, more of an amateur than a professional. But I think it’s reasonable to describe the moment as a lull.
Inevitably, I’ve been comparing this moment from 250 years ago to the summer of 2024, which has been about as politically eventful as any in the last half-century. Yet even here there have been pregnant pauses. It took Joe Biden over three weeks between the time of his disastrous presidential debate with Donald Trump on June 27 and his withdrawal from the race on July 21. The assassination attempt on Trump in between those events on July 13 was dramatic, but its implications were—are—still unclear. There will (probably) be a resolution of sorts on Election Day in November. But that’s still months away in days that will be experienced in implacably 24-hour segments, and then fevered speculation about what comes next.
Of course, that’s always true. Our media is premised on the idea that there is literally never a last word. But here in the summer of 2024, many of us are living with a sensation not unlike that of the summer of 1774, when there are massive political plates shifting under our feet and uncertainty about when and how they will settle. Then and now, a feeling of restlessness, an apprehension of fear, a persistence of hope. And an impatience about time that cannot be hurried.
To the extent we can, let us savor our moments of quietude, just as our ancestors tried, with fitful success, to do.