Barbara W. Tuchman: The First Salute. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.
Originally published in the Washington Times, October 10, 1988.
Underneath it all—beneath her success as a popular historian, beneath her liberalism à la mode, even beneath her status as a woman who established herself as a scholar before feminism came along to help—Barbara W. Tuchman is rather an old-fashioned woman, and very much an old-fashioned scholar. Sufficiently ‘left’ to steady the tremulous consciences of haut bourgeois philanthropists, never ‘left’ enough to offend at table—with less independence, she might have been Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
One can do worse than to be old-fashioned. Mrs. Tuchman still practices narrative history—not history ‘from below,’ not feminist history, not ‘postmodernist’ history, not any of the inferior sorts of history that forget the plot in search of Significance. Mrs. Tuchman does her research, tells her story, and stops before page 350.
She tells how the United States won the independence declared in July 1776. “The first salute” means the cannon salute received that November by the American ship Andrew Doria as it sailed into harbor at St. Eustatius in the Dutch West Indies, delivering a copy of the Declaration to Governor Johannes de Graaf. His was the first foreign government to recognize American independence, thereby recognizing a new kind of sovereignty, one based upon the consent of the governed. Governor de Graaf himself declared his intellectual if not political independence that day, as The Hague did not officially recognize the new nation.
De Graaf simply followed his own and his island’s interests. “The richest port in the Caribbean,” the St. Eustatius Dutch cared not so much for political liberty as for commerce, and thereby served liberty anyway. Edmund Burke said that the “proprietors” of St. Eustatius “had, in the spirit of commerce, made it an emporium for all the world.” Other Englishmen took a less indulgent line. With understandable sourness, Sir Joseph Yorke, ambassador to the Netherlands, complained that “the Americans would have had to abandon their revolution if they had not been aided by Dutch greed.”
While Dutch trading interests favored the Americans, the oligarchs at The Hague opposed them, ineffectually. The Dutch genius for commerce had no political counterpart; a maze of governmental subdivisions defeated any attempt at forceful action. The spiritedness of the people declined. America’s ambassador there, John Adams, said, “They seem afraid of every thing.” A series of military defeats at British hands (including the loss of St. Eustatius in 1781) eventually caused the dissolution of the Dutch Republic some twenty years later. The American Founders saw how commerce and republican liberty needed each other, and how both needed effective military defense, if they were to endure.
France made the error opposite to the Dutch error: It had republican politics without the spirit of commerce. The French never supplemented their military and political genius with much commercial genius. They were nonetheless rich, owing to their conquests. Tuchman describes the military and financial assistance (motivated no more by the love of liberty than were the Dutch of St. Eustatius) that made the Revolution successful.
Mrs. Tuchman devotes much of the book to accounts of naval and land battles. On these, she is well-informed, and also quite funny. This is not feminist history, but it is feminine history, animated by distaste for masculine combativeness coupled with a perfect contempt for men who fight badly. She deplores military men generally but falls in love with one in particular: the British admiral, Sir George Brydges Rodney, “a man of unforgiving character and vigorous action” who conquered St. Eustatius and plundered it, showing particular hostility toward Jewish residents, whom he robbed and then exiled.
And yet, and yet: Sir George “was frankly beautiful,” with a “youthful appearance and seductive face,” “a strong sensual mouth,” and (the lady is undone, her prose with her) a “stunning head.” Sir George makes Mrs. Tuchman quite the schoolgirl again, and one can only feel relief that she lives at safe remove from this British bad boy.
In moments of less transport, and as the book goes on, Mrs. Tuchman evokes other ages of woman. In her middle-aged moods, she has some catty fun at the expense of barbarities persisting into the Age of Enlightenment—particularly the British Admiralty’s forty-year delay in stocking lime juice aboard ships, after learning that citrus prevents scurvy. Across the centuries, she briskly proposes reforms in ship design and sailor hygiene. That time-tested English attribute, complacency, finds no quiet pub safe from Mrs. Tuchman’s improving ire.
Mellowing in later chapters, she offers readers some grandmotherly aphorisms. Even “the best laid plans,” she advises us, will “disintegrate… if human agency proves deficient.” “Pessimism is a primary source of passivity.” And “revolutions produce other men, not new men.” She frets over Sir George’s gout; they are growing old together.
You know how the story comes out, the Americans winning and all. It’s worth reading, nonetheless, for humor intended and not, and for the substantial work that went into writing it. Mrs. Tuchman remains an honest, professional popularizer of history who does her share of original research, and if you can’t stand her quirks then you just don’t like women enough.
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