By Allan Appel
This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History
By Beverly Gage
Simon & Schuster
Beverly Gage took a cue from George Washington and hit the road to discover America.
President Washington took the first Great American Road trip in the early 1790s to help unify the still fractious fledgling country and to discover just who this “We the People” actually were. Gage, a Yale historian who won the Pulitzer Prize for her biography of J. Edgar Hoover, hit the road, over 2023 and 2024, to check in on how different parts of the country grapple with our history. The result is her entertaining This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History, an ideal glove compartment companion as we motor towards the July 4th high point of our 250th anniversary year.
Gage found that we are as polarized today as we were at the beginning of the nation’s history, albeit over different matters.
As Gage points out in her first chapter, “The Great Experiment”: The votes for ratification had been terrifyingly close. When Washington took the oath of office, two states – Rhode Island and North Carolina –still had not approved the document. Was he their president or not? For that matter what was the presidency? No one had ever done it before.
Washington traveled in a carriage pulled by four to six horses including servants and likely slaves in a retinue of wagons behind. Gage’s steed was her not always reliable Subaru, accompanied at times by her teenage son Nick and her husband-soon-to-be John.
Washington took three separate trips over 1790 and 1791 – to the South, the mid-Atlantic colonies, and to the New England states, including Rhode Island, which had not yet even ratified the Constitution. So, Gage asks in her inimitable way: Was he really its president, yet?
To cover the larger contemporary U.S., Gage took 13 separate motor jaunts to both important and lesser known historic places, selectively zig-zagging across the whole of America to tell our stressful national story.
“Despite all the dust and mud and wretched road cuisine, he came away heartened about the country he had been chosen to lead,” Gage writes of Washington’s journey.
Gage came away from her travels feeling the same way, without turning away from the ugly chapters of the nation’s history.
Nearly every place Gage traveled — including Mount Vernon and Monticello, colonial Williamsburg and the Lone Star State’s Alamo Plaza — she encounters reminders that the “great American experiment” as it was termed by the founding generation, was established on the inevitably combustible mixture of liberty and slavery.
Most travel guides give you highlights of places and recommendations of where to eat and drink, what to buy and where to stay. Gage thankfully does not. She does seem to have an interest in skewering museum and historical site merch and swag.
The richness of this book lies in the relaxed, often wry, and deeply informed voice of your travel companion, who happens to be a profoundly read and nuanced historian. Riding along with Gage in these pages is like sitting in the kitchen with an expert chef, except the dish you are concocting is the casserole of our history.
The default mindset of the historian is to de-mythologize. In This Land, Gage takes us to the general site of the Revolutionary War’s Battle of Brandywine in 1777, now a parking lot not far from where Gage grew up. You learn that the Battle of Yorktown, down in Virginia, if viewed objectively, was really far more a victory of the French army and navy rather than of Washington’s forces. You learn Betsy Ross likely never stitched that beautiful American flag, but that’s OK: No need to change the name of our Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School to reflect greater historical accuracy.
Gage peppers her narrative with candid dips into her own biography and first childhood encounters with history:
When I was growing up [outside of Philadelphia], I also made dutiful visits to the Betsy Ross House, an old tavern converted into a historic site by an 1890s entrepreneur. Today the museum admits there isn’t definitive evidence that Ross, a local upholsterer, actually stitched the first American flag there (or anywhere) – though she certainly did stitch many stars-and-stripes flags on contract with the U.S. government. According to one display, the idea of Ross as a national icon emerged not during the Revolution but in the 20th centurywhen concerns over “American patriotism” amid “heavy immigration, social change, and economic upheaval” led to an outpouring of Betsy Ross-themed kitsch.
Gage’s thumbnail description of the life of Ona Judge, the enslaved girl who at ten had become Martha Washington’s personal servant at Mount Vernon and then, at 22, escaped the presidential house, is particularly moving. When the capital was in Philadelphia, local anti-slavery law declared that an enslaved person would be automatically free after six months’ residence.
Gage writes of how Washington dealt with the law:
He got around it by forcing Judge and the other Mount Vernon transplants to leave the state each time the six-month deadline drew near. Astute observers recognized what was happening: The president of the grand new republic of liberty was conspiring to evade the law in order to keep human beings enslaved. Often they went back to Mount Vernon. Sometimes they just decamped for New Jersey.
As the president’s second term drew to a close, and plans were being made to return to Virginia, Judge knew she had to make a move. She had tasted freedom. She had seen free Blacks and the possibility of a new life, both in Philadelphia, and now in New York, where the capital had been relocated. So Gage writes:
On May 21, 1796, while the president and his wife were eating dinner, she [Judge] walked out the door and never came back. By the time the Washingtons returned to Virginia, she was living and working in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, as a free woman, though Washington never reconciled himself to that fact.
The de-mythologizing continues in Gage’s Chapter 4, “Gone to Texas.” Davy Crockett appears in that chapter. I grew up mad for Davy Crockett and practically slept every night of my late boyhood with a Disneyland-procured raggedy coonskin cap. Who knew that the real U.S. Rep. David Crockett was voted out of the Congress after his first term largely because he was among the very few who fiercely opposed President Andrew Jackson’s racist Indian Removal Act? Here’s how Gage puts it:
Just as he left office, a New York theater launched The Lion of the West, a play featuring the backwoods character Nimrod Wildfire, loosely based on Crockett. The show and the accompanying hoopla, more than anything he had done in Washington, turned Crockett into a national celebrity — the forerunner of the coon-skin-wearing, bear-hunting 1950s Disney character.
That was something maturely to be proud of about Davy: his defense of Native Americans.
Gage continues to take us on a tour of Alamo Plaza. We learn that Davy, though he returned to Congress briefly, remained unloved because of his continuing criticism of Jackson. Davy lost the next election and then famously declared to his Tennessee constituents, “You may all go to hell and I will go to Texas.”
The problem was that Texas belonged to Mexico and Mexico had abolished slavery in 1829. The “Texian” defenders of the Alamo, whom Davy joined including the many Anglo settlers, therefore were dying for a potential future Texas independence based, alas, yet again, on an uncompromising defense of slavery.
Is that what my Davy died for?
Gage is perhaps at her most impatient at the abuses of history that continue to go on and, lately, accelerate.
For example, when the new African American History Memorial joined others at the Texas state capitol in 2012, Gage writes:
The new memorials include detailed histories of slavery and emancipation, discrimination and community resilience, all rendered on text-heavy plaques beneath sculptures as celebratory as anything inside the Capitol. But neither one does much to challenge the state’s founding myths.
In the book’s epilogue, Gage returns more alive to the local history around her in New Haven, the street names, the bike paths by her house that were once the Farmington Canal. At the same time she notes the Trump administration’s efforts to suppress rather than illuminate history.
She concludes saying she found plenty of hope for America at the historic sites she visited, under great strain but still kicking. “Even at the places where we go to confront the most wrenching, unjust, and difficult parts of the American past, there’s a quiet hope that next time we’ll do it better.”
She understands that some people might not want to celebrate at all given the state of things today. Some might want to think of Washington not as a symbol of unity, but as someone who relentlessly tracked down his runaway slaves.
“That’d be a shame,” Gage write, “since most of us do have to live in this country and might as well figure out which parts of it are worth cheering for.”
