
Tench Coxe was the Forrest Gump of Revolutionary America.
Born in Philadelphia in 1755, he fled the city when it fell to the Patriots, a move that led many to brand him a Loyalist. By 1788, Coxe was a delegate to the Continental Congress and writing pseudonymous pamphlets in support of the Constitution. An ardent Federalist, he became Alexander Hamiltonâs deputy at the Treasury Department and helped ghostwrite his bossâs famous Report on Manufactures.
For good measure, Coxe swung Republican during the Adams administration and became an ardent Jeffersonian before leaving government, earning generational wealth from his investments in coal and timber, and dying in 1824 at the age of 69. Nice.
Despite his colorful and storied career, Coxe is largely forgotten today. Thereâs at least one book about him, but good luck finding a copy: If you search his name on Amazon, it autocorrects to âtrench coatâ and brings you to the clothing section.
I dwell on Coxeâs overwhelming obscurity because thereâs a good chance heâll be the subject of Richard Brookhiserâs next book. Brookhiser, a senior editor at National Review and accomplished historian, has written 10 books on the Founding Fathers, covering everyone from George Washington to Gouverneur Morris. His latest offering, Glorious Lessons: John Trumbull, Painter of the American Revolution, is as engaging and informative as the rest.
But Brookhiserâs choice of subject is curious. Why write about the man who painted George Washington and the Battle of Saratoga? Brookhiser has written about the Founding more than most, but he hasnât completely exhausted the Revolutionary Rolodexâhe could still toss off a book about, say, James Wilson. Nor is he loath to dedicate multiple books to the same subject, having thus far written three volumes on George Washington.
So, why write about the man whose murals adorn the U.S. Capitol rotunda? Perhaps itâs because Richard Brookhiser is ahead of the curve.
He usually is. Brookhiserâs first foray into Revolutionary history, Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington, hit shelves in 1996, the same year Joseph J. Ellis published one of the first popular biographies of a Founding Father, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson. Brookhiser called for a reappraisal of Alexander Hamilton five years before Ron Chernow (and 16 years before Hamilton) and followed David McCulloughâs John Adams just nine months later with Americaâs First Dynasty: The Adamses, 1735-1918.
By 2003, Brookhiserâs writing on the Founding was so well known that H.W. Brands named him alongside Ellis and McCullough as one of the leading progenitors of what Brands called âFounders Chic,â a genre of popular 18th century history based, in Brandsâs words, on a âmisplaced reverence for [the Foundersâ] handiwork.â
Brandsâs attempt to burst the Founders Chic bubble was clearly premature. His essay predated countless entries into the genre, not just the aforementioned Chernow biography and the Hamilton phenomenon, but also McCulloughâs 2005 book 1776 and HBOâs 2008 John Adams miniseries.
But two decades later, Founders Chic may finally be running out of steam. McCullough died in August 2022, and Ellis, like fellow Jefferson biographer Jon Meacham, has shifted his focus from chronicling American history to bolstering Democratic politicians. No one likes the new Ben Franklin miniseries on Apple TV+, and Hamilton has been deemed cringe by progressive tastemakers andâeven worseâGen Z.
Perhaps American interest in the Founding will wax as we approach the Semiquincentennial in 2026, but itâs doubtful. Even in Washington, Republicans seem to have grown tired of invoking the Founders in floor speeches. Without that prompting, Democrats donât spend much time calling them racist.
Going forward, scholars who want to chronicle the American Founding will have to get specific, jettisoning hagiographies of Washington and Hamilton in favor of writing subtle cultural and political histories built around more obscure figures.
Which is why Richard Brookhiser wrote about John Trumbull.
Glorious Lessons is part biography, part study of Trumbullâs work. Brookhiser astutely saves his most detailed descriptions of Trumbullâs paintings for later chapters, which allows him both to stretch his aesthetic muscles and give full freight to the earlier chapters in Trumbullâs lifeâwhich, though light on famous paintings, are heavy on fascinating anecdotes.
Born to an esteemed family in Lebanon, Connecticut, where his father and brother both served as governor, Trumbull fought briefly in the Continental Army before sailing to London in May 1780 to apprentice with the accomplished American expatriate painter Benjamin West. But the Revolution caught up to him in November 1780, when Trumbull was arrested on suspicions of espionage. He was freed, six months later, thanks in part to the efforts of one Edmund Burke.
Burke is hardly the only famous figure with whom Trumbull would come in contact. Even before he became the young republicâs favorite painter, Trumbullâs high-born station and military service led him to rub shoulders with such luminaries as âThomas Jefferson, a young Virginia politician,â and âAbigail Adams, the wife of one of Massachusettsâs delegates to Congress.â
As those descriptions indicate, Brookhiser commits to telling the Revolutionary tale from Trumbullâs perspective, refreshing the well-trod story of the War of Independence. Washingtonâs career is told through descriptions of Trumbullâs paintings. The rise of political factions unfolds as a story of the artist struggling to find patronage. Even the Hamilton-Burr duel gets a new spin, as Trumbull was the last person to record an interaction between the two combatants before that fateful dawn in Weehawken.
Contemporary chroniclers of the Revolution have an obvious advantage over future historians: They were there. And many, like Trumbull, fought in the war and knew some of the leading figures. But unlike Trumbull, most of these chroniclers were writers, and their accounts are shot through with the authorâs politics.
Trumbull was hardly apolitical, and his disdain for all things Jeffersonian is clear throughout Glorious Lessons. But it is nevertheless much harder to make partisan political points on canvas. So, rather than use his firsthand experience to claim the legacy of the Revolution for a certain faction, Trumbull set about making a more ecumenical point.
âThe greatest motive I had ⊠has been my wish of commemorating the great events of our countryâs revolution,â Trumbull wrote Jefferson in 1789, âto preserve and diffuse the memory of the noblest series of actions which have ever presented themselves in the history of man.â
Trumbull echoed that sentiment a year later, in an advertisement for engravings of his Revolutionary portraits.
âNo period of history of man is more interesting than that in which we have lived,â Trumbull wrote. âAmericans have a right to glory in giving to the world an example whose influence is rapidly spreading.â
Trumbull may be known as the âpainter of the Revolution.â But itâs clear from his words that he understood himself to be its historian, one tasked with transmitting Americaâs cultural inheritance to its âpresent and future sons.â
More than two centuries later, Richard Brookhiser has picked up Trumbullâs mantle. The âglorious lessonsâ that fill his books are the same that dot Trumbullâs canvases. Itâs no wonder, then, that Glorious Lessons feels like something coming full circle. Trumbull honored the Revolution by preserving its memory for posterity. Now, Brookhiser has honored Trumbullâs memory by doing the same for him.
Tench Coxe canât be far behind.
Glorious Lessons: John Trumbull, Painter of the American Revolution
by Richard Brookhiser
Yale University Press, 276 pp., $30
Tim Rice is a writer and editor in Washington, D.C.
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