[As the author of a book on the contested history of American patriotism, every day of 2025 feels strikingly relevant. So for this year’s July 4th series, I wanted to share & expand on excerpts from that book that feature models of critical patriotism from across our history, leading up to a weekend request for further conversations!]
On a
Revolutionary poem that models multiple patriotic perspectives.
First, the
book excerpt: “[Annis Boudinot] Stockton’s Mid-Atlantic
Writing Circle colleague Hannah
Griffitts (1727– 1817), a Philadelphia Quaker who contributed dozens of
poems to her cousin Milcah
Martha Moore’s voluminous commonplace book, linked feminism to incipient
revolutionary patriotism even more clearly in her 1768 poem “The Female Patriots.”
Griffitts opens with a complaint about the lack of patriotic activism from her
community’s men, who, “supinely asleep, & deprived of their Sight/Are
stripped of their Freedom, and robbed of their Right.” She then argues for the
need for her titular female patriots to take up that cause: “If the Sons (so
degenerate) the Blessing despise,/Let the Daughters of Liberty, nobly arise.”
She admits that in traditional political terms “we’ve no Voice,” but makes the
case for the boycotting of English goods as a key way these female patriots can
nonetheless take action: “As American Patriots, our Taste we deny”; and so “rather
than Freedom, we’ll part with our Tea.” And she ends by highlighting the
broader revolutionary effects of not only such boycotts, but also her own poem
and writing: “a motive more worthy our patriot Pen,/Thus acting—we point out
their Duty to Men.” By expressing and enacting their female patriotism, then,
Griffitts and her peers likewise offer a feminist critical patriotic
perspective on the frustrating, counter-productive absence of women from these
public debates.”
That last
point is without doubt my favorite thing about Griffitts’s unique and engaging
poem. I’ve written a good bit, in
this space and elsewhere, about
Abigail
Adams’s request to her husband John that he and his fellow Framers “Remember
the Ladies,” lest those ladies “foment a Rebellion” of their own. I like Adams’s
letter a lot, and especially love that idea of a potential further revolution
from American women (something I focus on a good bit in the section of my book
from which the above excerpt is drawn). But in truth, Adams kept her
perspective more or less private, and so it’s really published, public writers from
the period like Griffitts, Annis Stockton, and others (including one of my
favorite Americans, Judith
Sargent Murray) who modeled female patriotism in both their words and deeds.
One of the most important effects of broadening our definition of American
patriotism—perhaps my book’s most central goal—is that it can allow us to better
remember impressive and inspiring figures, texts, communities, and events beyond
the familiar refrains, and I don’t think that’s more true of any American
moment than these Revolutionary women writers.
Griffitts’s
poem also models a second form of American patriotism from my book’s four
categories: active patriotism. I define active patriotism as service and
sacrifice in order to push the nation closer to its ideals, and I don’t know of
any single line that sums up that concept better than Griffitts’s “rather than
Freedom, we’ll part with our tea.” I know the line, like the poem overall, is a
bit tongue-in-cheek (and delightfully so); but at the same time, there’s no
doubt that giving up comforts is one of the more challenging sacrifices we can
make, especially during difficult times when we need those comforts more than
ever. I’ve been inspired by many such collective sacrifices during this fraught
first half of 2025, illustrated nicely by the
Target boycott (in which my wife and I took part) among many others. This
form of active patriotism can be easily overlooked but is one of the most
genuinely collective things we can do as a community, and one potently modeled
by Hannah Griffitts’s “The Female Patriots.”
Next
patriotic model tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Models of patriotism you’d share?
