Around the Island

The Revolution wasn’t just a war: Author Charles Olton to speak

 

JULIE LANE PHOTO Charles Olton of Hay Beach will discuss the cultural revolution that surrounded the War of Independence at the Shelter Island Historical Society on Saturday, March 21.
JULIE LANE PHOTO
Charles Olton of Hay Beach will discuss the cultural revolution that surrounded the War of Independence at the Shelter Island Historical Society on Saturday, March 21.

Most people think they know the story of the American Revolution but historian, author, former academic administrator and raconteur Charles Olton has much to tell you that you likely don’t know.

He’ll be sharing his vision of a revolution that changed dramatically changed the culture, just as the seeds of a republic were being born politically, during a talk at the Shelter Island Historical Society Havens House Barn on Saturday, March 21 at 3 p.m.

While America’s republic was being born, there was “something equally dramatic” taking place in the arts — literature, painting, architecture and music — that played as large a role in what the country was becoming, he said. It’s a story that Mr. Olton of Hay Beach has been telling for many years in lectures, but not until today’s technology could he adequately impart it in a book, “Heroic Vision: A Story of Revolutionary Art and Politics.”

That’s because it took today’s e-book technology to capture the theme. It would have been prohibitively expensive and near-impossible to create a hard copy book that not only described the changes taking place in the arts, but demonstrated them with pictures and music, he said.

The e-book publication enables readers to access those pictures that demonstrate how paintings and architecture began to move from the British influences that founders had brought to America. Thanks to e-book technology, people can hear the music that departed from what had existed prior to 1760 and what was written here that had an impact on the cultural revolution.

The revolution in politics “we’ve known about forever,” Mr. Olton said. But in the fine arts, “something equally dramatic took place.” What’s particularly surprising is there wasn’t communication among those in the arts that would portend any unity of spirit.

The same was true politically with leaders of each of the 13 colonies pulling in separate directions.
Mr. Olton’s story traces the ways in which artists of the day began to develop their own styles that were very much keeping with the attitudes that were developing politically.

Were the politics driving the changes in the arts or were the arts driving the politics?

That’s a good question, Mr. Olton said. In fact, while changes were happening in all venues concurrently, it appears there was little communication among the players.

If there was one uniting theme, it was a general belief among colonists that they wanted to be rid of a monarchy. What would replace it, we now know was a republic, but not a democracy. That’s because the leaders of the 13 colonies had little faith in the average person to make governmental decisions. While they gave the people the ability to “ditch the government” if they didn’t like it, they believed only aristocrats could run the country.

For at least a decade and a half before the war Americans call the Revolution, there was a wholly separate cultural revolution, starting in about 1760, that represented a departure from British influences.
British painting, for example, was a reflection of what the artist’s brain imagined, while Boston-based John Singleton Copley was painting what his eyes saw. Mr. Copley, once influenced by British painter Joshua Reynolds, found a career in very realistic portraits.

It mirrored America’s leaning toward a more reality-based world, Mr. Olton said.

Similarly, “a lot of the music of the time sounds kind of whacky,” he said. It was reflected in the work of a composer named William Billings, whose best- known song was “Chester.”

Mr. Olton quotes from the lyrics:
“Let tyrant shake their iron rod
And slav’ry Clank her galling Chains
We fear them not we trust in God
New England’s God for ever reigns.”

That reference to “New England’s God” was part of the attitude about how colonists were beginning to separate themselves from the Brits, Mr. Olton said.

“We’re different; we have our own God,” Mr. Olton said.

Each of the 13 colonies had its individual relationship with Great Britain. In writings of the time, a spirit of the “hard realities of the world” began to emerge from people like Thomas Payne, Thomas Jefferson and Bostonian Mercy Warren.

Architecture departed from the British influences still alive in Boston to the neo-classical buildings that would later come to dominate Washington D.C.

Politically, those who once revered the monarchy began wondering what it was about a king that made him smart enough to rule.

If there was a flame that lit the cannons of war, it was Britain’s attempt to tax the colonists. Colonists were open to tariffs but not direct taxation.

“They fought a long war and were lucky to win it,” Mr. Olton said about the American battle to win freedom from Great Britain.

But had it been just a period of winning independence, it wouldn’t have the same character as the fuller revolution that included the cultural changes, he said.