Q & A With Jay Winik

A Conversation with Jay Winik Author of The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800

Q: Where did the idea for this book come from?

A:  In April 1865, I found a subject that managed to combine larger-than-life figures like Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee and profound stakes for the nation, such as the threat of guerrilla war in America.  I realized that the period encapsulated in The Great Upheaval includes an even richer set of gigantic personalities, an even larger set of events - it is ultimately the most significant era in all of human history - and an equally compelling narrative.  It became a natural choice.

Q: Wasn’t this taking a risk?  Nothing like The Great Upheaval has been written before in terms of the scope and ambition of the project, let alone combining continents, characters, and cultures like this.

A: I believe an historian has to challenge himself or herself.  This is the first history to weave together a global narrative of this crucial period.  To do so, I had to comb documents and sources from multiple languages across three continents, in America, France, and Russia, to create an entirely new picture of America’s formative years - both the perils and possibilities. What emerges is ultimately a fresh, new picture of the modern world. 

Q: You set out to break old myths and restore the world as the Founders, Monarchs, and Revolutionaries themselves actually saw it.

A: Yes, it is a myth that only the contemporary world, driven by email, air travel, cell phones, and BlackBerrys, is interconnected. In truth, the world of the 1790s was stitched together in ways that we can scarcely grasp, from Philadelphia to Paris to St. Petersburg and Constantinople.

It is crucial to understand that the great nations of the day - America and France, but also the Russian and Islamic Ottoman Empires - and their leaders, were all intimately tied together and reacted to each other.  This is how the modern world was formed.  The more I researched the book, the more I came to realize that it was vital to bring alive the world that the Founders themselves actually saw.  Doing so completely changes how we understand America’s critical formative years.

Q: The Great Upheaval challenges much of the conventional wisdom about America’s beginnings as a nation.  Would you agree?

A: Absolutely.  Conventional scholarship has long isolated the story of America’s founding decade from the rest of the globe. But this misses a key part of the picture: Our Founding Fathers were all-consumed by events in Europe - from the increasing anarchy and bloodshed of the French Revolution to Russia’s dismemberment of the ancient kingdom of Poland.  In turn, European leaders from France’s Louis XVI and Maximilien Robespierre to Russia’s Catherine the Great anxiously followed developments in America. Catherine would even compare her own Pugachev rebels to the American colonists, while early American rebels panicked George Washington by modeling their own revolts on the French radicals, down to singing French insurrectionary songs and carrying mock guillotines. I sought to restore this lost part of the historical story. 

Q: Is this what you would call the power of the comparative approach?

A: It is. For example, one can’t appreciate America’s fears of foreign invasion in the 1790s or of being swallowed by a predatory European power without seeing them in relation to Napoleon’s armies that were devouring Europe “leaf by leaf"(not to mention reaching deep into the heart of the Middle East), or against the backdrop of Marshal Survorov’s “tidal wave” of Russian armies laying siege to Islam, and literally wiping Poland off the face of the map.  These grim examples underscored to the young Americans the perils of weakness in the face of imperialistic European empires.

Q: Revolutionary France actually sought to foment insurrection in America itself, didn’t it?

A: Yes, during the Washington administration, the French envoy Citizen Genet actually began raising an army on American soil to capture Florida and other territories for France.  This was a profound crisis for the George Washington, who lacked the military power to stand up to France’s revolutionary might. Though an extremely tense time, in the end he deftly diffused the crisis. Then he faced the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania and the western territories, where the rebels actually took their cue from France’s revolutionaries, assembled a force of 8000 people - as many as we had at Yorktown - and threatened to march on the capital. Washington desperately marshaled an army of some 15,000 men to subdue the rebellion, which no less than the American Civil War could have split the country, only this time East-West.

Q: But that was not the end of the crisis with France?

A: After President Washington, the Adams administration was entirely consumed by the threat of France.  Indeed, Adams was engaged in a two-year quasi-war against French ships on the high seas - at one point the situation was so dire that Americans could see hostile French vessels off the coast of Long Island, and even Washington feared that America’s envoys to Paris had been guillotined.  Adams’s own party, the High Federalists, wanted to go the war against France.  Jefferson and Madison, the leaders of the opposition Republicans, wanted to be far more conciliatory. The divisions over this conflict were far deeper than what we see today. 

Q: Jefferson and Madison actually sympathized with the French revolutionaries, didn’t they?

A: Yes, this was an issue that deeply split the Founding Fathers. Jefferson and also Madison believed that the success of democracy the world over hinged on the triumph of the revolutionaries in France.  Yet as the Terror ravaged France and the guillotine worked overtime, Washington and Adams were revolted at the bloodshed, particularly the beheading of Louis XVI, who had done so much to help America in its struggle for independence.

Q: What was the greatest accomplishment of the era?

A: I think it would have to be the survival of America with its ideas and ideals intact.  Revolutionary France started out with the noblest of intentions, but then descended into bloodshed and barbarism, and ushered in a savage global conflict; for their part, Russia and the rest of the world’s monarchies became reactionary.  While it was touch and go, only America, a small, minor country on the periphery of the world, fighting desperately for its existence, managed to weather the cruel upheavals of this age. The result was what would become the first fully functioning democracy.

Q: What were some of the greatest surprises that you encountered in your research?

A: For starters, how precarious America’s existence was in that first decade.  Second, viewed on the world stage, America’s founders look entirely different. We get a completely new take on George Washington by seeing him not merely in comparison to Adams, Hamilton and Jefferson, but his reigning peers like a dispirited Louis XVI, or such giants as a charismatic but aggressive Catherine the Great, or an increasingly dictatorial Napoleon.  Similarly, men like Jefferson, Hamilton and Adams are splendidly arrayed in comparison to their contemporaries, such as Prince Potemkin, Danton, Sultan Selim III, and Robespierre. 

Q: It’s an unbelievable cast of characters, isn’t it?

A: It really is.  When one adds an equally unbelievable secondary cast of characters, like Voltaire, Lafayette, Thaddeus Kosciusko, John Paul Jones, Tom Paine, and the list goes on, we see that this was the most important, idealistic, and daring generation in history, all fighting desperately for the ideals they believed in, whether divinely inspired autocracy or man-made democracy, whether constitutional republicanism or Allah’s law. 

Q: Did anyone leap out at you as the most important figure in the age?

A: Catherine the Great was the most charismatic; you’d want to be seated next to her at a dinner party. Napoleon is, of course, one-of-a-kind in sheer audacity and drive.  Marie Antoinette is quite tragic.  In the end, though, George Washington proves to be the master spirit of the age, although his peers didn’t quite see him that way. But he stuck to his principles and securely guided the young America through a tumultuous era.

Q: The history of this age is usually an all mens club.  Why did you break the mold and include Catherine the Great?

A: Catherine absolutely deserves to be in the same pantheon of leaders.  History has often overlooked her, but I felt it was imperative to give center stage to this powerful and fascinating female leader.  For some 30 years she dominated the global arena, even playing a decisive role in America’s Revolution and independence.  She befriended the immortal French philosophes like Voltaire, began the path of modern Holy War against Islam while seeking to crush the French Revolution, and after decades of enlightenment, unleashed modern authoritarianism.  But at the same time she was incredibly charming, brilliant, vital, and complex.  She emerged as one of my favorite characters in the book.

Q: You document the first great holy war between the Islamic world and the west, don’t you?  The similarities seem eerie.

A: Catherine actually sought to destroy the Islamic empire centered in what is today’s Istanbul; later, Napoleon sought to subjugate the Muslims in the Middle East, with much the same ghastly results that we see today.  Indeed, these early savage clashes between Christianity and Islam laid the seeds for the global discord today, from the battles in Iraq to the rebellion in Chechnya.  Understanding this powerful but sobering story will help us better comprehend the world’s current turmoil. 

Q: The Great Upheaval as a whole seems to have profound echoes for our own time.

A: To grasp the 1790s is to understand the tides that have swept the globe and battered nations, large and small, ever since. America, France, and Russia from 1787 to 1800 are most assuredly of their time-but their history gives us profound insights for the modern world as well. 

Q: Your April 1865 was read and studied by President Bush and his administration, as well as President Bill Clinton and top Democratic leaders for lessons after 9-11, particularly about guerrilla war. What are the lessons from your new book today?

A: There are multiple insights about when or when not to take risks, how to lead at a time of crisis, how to remain true to America’s founding ideals, even past blunders in dealing with the Muslim world. But preeminent would be that we can’t figure out where we’re going if we don’t fully understand where we came from.  Leaders and nations ignore this at their peril.